It feels like when Fallout 3, 4 and Skyrim came out you couldn't escape people posting about them for weeks, especially with Skyrim. Now the most I've seen are complaints about how disappointing Starfield was.
Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days? On the other hand, I do feel like there was a lot more enthusiasm for other games like Elden Ring, and sometimes you get an Among Us that just completely take over the Internet.
I drank that game with a boba straw, I'm giving it some time after my first playthrough and cannot wait to dive back in.
I’ve played nearly a hundred hours of it for some reason and it’s incredibly mid. Every cool concept ends in a huge disappointment.
When you find out that monster terrorist attacks were happening because the Space Liberals kept Space Hitler alive in the basement, the options are to quietly tell the same Space Liberals what happened and they quietly dispose of Space Hitler or lie to them and keep Space Hitler alive. No option to go to the media or one of the other factions and be like “Yo they have Space Hitler alive in the basement and he’s responsible for this.”
When 200+ year old generation ship shows up at a now-existing resort planet, the options are buy them a hyperdrive, put them into indentured servitude, or kill everyone on board. If you try to kill the resort CEO and be like “they can have your house” you can’t because he’s set as essential and can’t be killed.
Pretty much every cool concept has an ending this disappointing. And that’s if you can get the thing to run at a playable framerate and without crashing. Low settings get me 45fps and look worse than Skyrim on medium, on a PC that can run Skyrim at ultra above 60. My PC is in no way the best, but there is absolutely no reason this game should run as poorly as it does with how mediocre it looks.
The only part I actually like is the core “shooting dudes” gameplay. The guns feel nice. Headshotting the not very smart AI as they pop around a corner feels good. If I could just have an infinite dungeon to shoot dudes in that’d be pretty fun.
Games really need to get past the be nice to all or a complete fascist scumbag binary when it comes to "moral" choices. Seems like this game took a step in the wrong direction toward be a shitlib or be a fascist
IIRC even Outer Worlds which was pretty lib lets you kill the capitalist aristocracy?
Writing in games as a whole have gotten way better. Bethesda is like the worst and largest offender at this for sure
When you find out that monster terrorist attacks were happening because the Space Liberals kept Space Hitler alive in the basement, the options are to quietly tell the same Space Liberals what happened and they quietly dispose of Space Hitler or lie to them and keep Space Hitler alive. No option to go to the media or one of the other factions and be like “Yo they have Space Hitler alive in the basement and he’s responsible for this.”
When 200+ year old generation ship shows up at a now-existing resort planet, the options are buy them a hyperdrive, put them into indentured servitude, or kill everyone on board. If you try to kill the resort CEO and be like “they can have your house” you can’t because he’s set as essential and can’t be killed.
DO NOT QUESTION THE POWER STRUCTURES
THE POWERS THAT BE ARE INFALLIBLE AND ETERNAL, THEY MAY NOT BE UNDERMINED
DO NOT FOR ONE SECOND CONSIDER FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE, CHANGE IS IMPOSSIBLE, THE SYSTEM MUST STAY THE SAME
Yeah, the writing is the most frustrating shitlib pabulum. The shooting mechanics are pretty good, and I actually kinda like the space combat. And I’m not usually a
GRAPHICS kinda guy, but the graphics suck for what the game is. I felt like I was in Fallout 4.I finally got around to playing Cyberpunk right before it (speaking of broken shitlib games) and I was disappointed by the graphics and character design and customization of Starfield comparing the two.
Honestly I wish the game had just ripped the character models from Fallout 4. Like sure they are still ugly but they're at least interesting to look at whereas the Starfield NPC faces just look like unsettling unfinished clay sculptures
And I’m not usually a GRAPHICS kinda guy, but the graphics suck for what the game is.
Yeah same here, and if it didn’t run like shit I probably wouldn’t complain about the graphics. But if my GPU is screaming the whole time I’m playing I’d hope it looks nice.
Even the smaller side quests are like this. I was especially pissed at the "Help the space police" event where you visit the space FBI to recover a police asset and there's no option to steal or destroy it. The quest just plays straight and I decided to just never turn it in because anything else is too disappointing.
Then there's the fucking random arrest into police informant shit which just fucking sucks.
random arrest into police informant
you can eventually kill the cops without consequence which was the only part of the game I liked
I think the Bethesda cycle has gone a lot faster this time around with people more or less turning on it within a month releasing long more thought out reviews than the first wave of day 1 stuff. BG3 coming out and astounding everyone immediately prior also happened to just make it the easiest thing to compare it to and unfortunately for Starfield, BG3 is a fucking masterpiece. Starfield has some interesting ideas and some interesting stuff in it, but it's just so hampered by poor design choices and a lifeless world that it didn't hit it for people.
In the probably dozen videos discussing it about a month after release, it's almost universally compared to BG3, nobody thinks about Elden Ring to compare it to, and I feel like it's for Starfield's benefit in that regard. Elden Ring did a substantially better more interesting world to explore than anything Bethesda's released in years. On top of that, this is probably Bethesda's weakest world, people that were pretty into the Bethesda formula find Starfield more difficult to really click with because the worlds are barren and there's so much homogenous slop. The other day I was looking at the steam front page and wasn't particularly surprised to see Starfield at like the 15th top selling game on steam at the time with BG3 sitting at the top still. Starfield was losing to Skyrim in sales according to steam's front page.
Bethesda burned through pretty much all the nostalgia and good will at this point, FO76, premium mods, the lackluster FO4 after New Vegas. That weird elder scrolls mobile game they released that everyone seems to have forgotten about. The gajillion re-releases of Skyrim. These other titles had the benefit of long franchise power and fans being established from the better titles and finding parts they could enjoy or how the lore has been expanded. Recently I watched some Fallout lore videos and they've certainly taken it places with the tabletop and 76 additions. Like they've just fully embraced adding lovecraftian ancient ones to the universe with the tabletop more or less confirming that there's an ancient God behind the church of Atom. There's also stuff about the mothman cult secretly being a front for worshipping some other tentacled creature. People are going to dig through this stuff much more because they basically write the stories after Bethesda throws shit around. In my time playing Starfield, I found the clean corpo UC and the space cowboys of the FC. There were references to a war between them that had since ended and that was about it. I looked around a bit for more lore but found basically nothing.
My time in Starfield ended up being mostly momentum after forcing myself to see it through for a few hours which at that point I kept going for inertia and time sunk. I wanted only a few things. To fly a cool spaceship, to build a cool base, and to shoot cool guns. None of that happened. I didn't give a shit about the main plot and immediately ditched it the first chance I could.
With the spaceship part I did a bunch of side content looking to make money to finance a cool ship only to realize I needed to stat dump into piloting to get the best parts, which took a few hours of grinding to get to because level gates suck and destroying 30 ships takes a long fucking time. I had made a few others in the meantime and realized just how bland it really was. I was expecting a honeycomb style ship when I made my first wide ship, but the game just arbitrarily decides where doors will be placed, so have fun with that connecting hallway being a dead end and your ship snaking you around for a while. Eventually grabbed a mod that gave me all the ship parts at a single vendor and built the best ship I could and by then I couldn't stand the remnants of the lego-style connections standing out with the ship being unsleek and looking patched together at best.
Building a base and guns I didn't even get to start. I spent at least 20 hours grinding for resources and fighting against the game's inventory system trying to build up some mining outposts to get me the raw resources to then build a base. But I was also trying to do gun modding which ate all my resources. Resources weigh an ungodly amount and even after patching in a mod that would remove the weight while I carried them and cheating my carry weight up like 4x, I still spent ages in the inventory menu trying to balance stuff while never having the right stuff because there are so many resources to juggle that get siphoned up by everything. After a while I was literally just playing to get these parts and I just never opened it again preferring to just open stellaris and play with gigastructural engineering.
My favorite part of FO4 was the basebuilding paired with Sim Settlements. I dumped a few hundred hours on that alone. The gameplay loop was fun, I'd go out and with a mod that removed junk weight, would pick locations clean to then build homes for people.
The big complaints I've seen with Starfield are that it's a dead feeling world, the NPCs are boring, the NPCs are super rude, the essential tag is abused, they even just have certain NPCs unable to even get damaged by the player. Like why can't I even hurt the jackass in Neon that's murdering people in the name of profit? Why is the board of the resort planet essential where I have to either enslave or drive off a colony ship that left Earth hundreds of years prior. Other complaints are about the abysmal story making itself meaningless in the process.
There were interesting ideas but Bethesda is a fundamentally unambitious uncreative company at this point. The power system they lifted from FTL is interesting, but in the middle of a fight you're really not going to fiddle much with it. The shipbuilding is close to being good but is limited. Basebuilding is a step back from FO4. Carry limits are more obnoxious than ever. NPC animations are back to Oblivion. James Stephanie Sterling commented that they liked the one character that was meant to be annoying because they had character that the rest of the cast did not. The animations are in the uncanny valley for me and they all seem to love puckering their lips when they talk.
NASApunk is also just a boring aesthetic
Sounds like some shitty Bethesda monkey's paw attempt at No Man's Sky, which, unlike your average Bethesda game, was thoroughly un-fucked by its development studio over the course of the past several years since initial lauch.
Hello Games is also a significantly smaller dev team with a smaller budget so it's almost sad that a full giant AAA dev team can't make what an indie studio has been chipping away at for like 7 years to make it actually good.
Last I read Microsoft outsourced most of the development of Halo 5 to contractors who were told they’d become full employees but it never came to fruition. If this is an industry trend, then I can see how half of the budget is inefficiently spent on trying to catch people up to speed before firing them and getting a new guy.
They always say, art is best when there is no creative continuity.
The big complaints I've seen with Stellaris are that it's a dead feeling world,
delete this right now
Fallout 4 basebuilding is a pain in the ass, Valheim does it 100x times better
The base building in Valheim is so satisfying, at least until a troll wielding a whole-ass tree comes a knocking at your door. The quality of base building may have something to do with Valheim being a good game and Fallout 4 being hot trash though, possibly…
Valheim is a 1 Gb install procedurally generated empty space with zero story. Yet they did basebuilding right.
The trick is to use console commands. Perfect control over position and angle without any restrictions. Takes more time, but once you're used to it it's relatively fast
I don't wanna use console commands ffs.
I can't put a wall straignt respect to some environment thing, like the ruined house foundations of Santuary hills, the base is beautifully clean, but you can't put a wall nor floor parallel respect to it
Good post, just to clarify
The big complaints I've seen with Stellaris
You mean Starfield here? It doesn't make too much sense if not
Just got to the colony ship mission and closed the game after realizing those were my only two options
It's the quest that made me finally just stop reopening it out of habit because I was just so disgusted.
destroying 30 ships takes a long fucking time
The ships you blow up in the Vanguard flight sim count against this total ;)
I never found the flight sim while playing so I did it by just grinding shit out.
The 12 hours tutorial might be off-putting for people who aren't Bethesda pay piggies
Also, this might just be me but the game just looks so incredibly bland and drab, no flair or personality whatsoever
Yeah. Nasapunk is an incredibly generic aesthetic. The factions are all different flavors of liberal so there's nothing really interesting about them. The constant loading screens break up the exploration people loved in Skyrim and previous games. There's a dearth of hand-crafted stuff to find. It's all very bland, generic, and stripped down from prior games. Really embarassing, but Cash Rules Everything Around Me.
The concept of "moral choices" (to use the term games studios usually use) in games has been so underdeveloped for so long. I think the limiting factor comes directly from the people writing the scenarios.
Besides just lib cultural hegemony and capitalist realism, i think the writing is either too informed by other games that it limits the imagination of the kind of choices that tgeir could be, or their idea of good writing is PRRESTIGE-ified to where only to most cynical choices are "good" and "adult."
Either way the writing is stuck in an very adolescent place. Either a dearth of understanding of things outside games, or a fixation on what is "adult" and "serious."
I think writing in games overall has gotten better, but theres generally still some limitations, especially when it comes to "choice"
"goody two shoes unscratched liberal" or "edgelord scratched liberal"
The Bethesda Moral Binary(tm pending). Its in a lot of games, but Bethesda in particular is so bad about that being the entirety of the moral world. Or you can be "neutral" and block yourself out of basically doing anything in the game lol.
I think NASA aesthetic can be super cool if well executed but Bethesda hasn't been able to pull off a world's vibes since Morrowind
Apparently Todd called it "Skyrim in space" before launch, so
a) people are waiting for modders to fix all the issues, or
b) people finally got tired of the shallowest storylines ever, which leads to
c) people are waiting for modders to add stories worth playing
the problem is how will they get the modders enthusiastic enough to leave fallout 4 or skyrim 8 anniversery special edition. those games it seemed like everyone played for a while, they're still on meme templates and shit. if a big modding community doesn't organically crop up, the game is never going to get fixed, it's never going to be worth playing, and the monetization of those mods they for sure put in the accounting sheets will never materialize. fuckers suffering from success on the free labor of fans forget how to make a good product
Honestly I hope the game stays shit and modders don’t fix it. I get doing things out of passion - whether with or without donations/compensation - is the point of modding, but the industry, and especially Bethesda, has taking advantage of people’s good will. Free labor is one thing, but free labor due to negligence is bullshit.
man you can really tell that bethsoft was coasting off the fumes of the quality worldbuilding of TES and Fallout
the moment they had to make their own setting they made the most uninspired shit ever
tbf Elder Scrolls is their own setting too. tbef, it is also the most uninspired shit ever
Has to be my favorite fictional setting by far - the worldbuilding isn’t just the “muh deep lore” shit but actually incredibly fascinating religious cosmology and philosophy. The 36 Lessons of Vivec, the Sword Meetings of Cyrus, the concept art…
This is all almost entirely separate from what is actually represented in game though. They can’t help themselves but make generic western fantasy fetch quest sandboxes.
It does but all the amazing worldbuilding is an illusion caused by character statements and books in-game that expound on interesting lore. Most of it is never actually relevant, never appears in game, or when it does appear in game, it is changed radically to be more mundane and not at all how it was described (Cyrodiil). I think the only cool lore that actually paid off was when they foreshadowed all the Dragonborn business in Skyrim in a few ways including Mankar Camoran seemingly being a Dragonborn due to be able to wear the amulet and describing "speaking fire" or something in one of his books
I think a lot of the original world building was done by people who no longer work there, so still coasting
Pretty much everyone of the original crew that built the world dipped by the end of Morrowind. In one of those ungodly 8+ hour retrospectives I watched I remember them sorta dissecting quests in Morrowind in terms of who wrote them and in doing so you could sorta see the proto-modern Bethesda emerge from Todd's design choices.
still got some of that morrowind era sauce, so it not as bad as it could be
Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days?
I haven't seen a shortage of BG3 memes, so I'm going to assume this is a Skills Issue on behalf of Bethesda Studios.
its fallout 4 but with a worse story, bland art direction, and even less character
also its wild that they didnt think of making vehicles like rovers and stuff to ride around planets on in their nasa punk setting. no, you gotta run for an hour to get anywhere because your oxygen depletes (that is, until you become a space wizard and get the oxygen replenishment spell, and cast it 24/7 as a necessity)
I've seen people raise the point that you'd realize planets are procedurally generated trash way too fast if you had a horse, uh a rover
The most damning indictment of Starfield is just putting it against Skyrim, which I personally think is pretty trash and is only saved by community modding, and Starfield doesn't even held up, it's actually sad
A couple of buddies of mine play it and every time they tell me or show me something about it I'm just like....alright. I think it's just an incredibly mid game.
No. I've not seen anyone even really talk about it, except to shit-talk it. I've seen people comparing it unfavorably to Cyberpunk 2077, and you know what? Yeah. CP2077 has a ton of issues but it looks good and the combat is actually fun and exciting. Starfield looks like crap. Not just technically, the visual design is incredibly bland, and there's literally nothing about the boring, empty setting they've created that is compelling or even original. They steal the inciting incident from Mass Effect and make it more boring. They undercut themselves everywhere by not allowing you to get into a ship, take off, and fly to another planet and land on it.
It's just so fucking bland and I've seen nobody have anything good to say on it.
Holy shit it is mass effect LMAO. The ending is just No Man's Sky.
I think less people were interested in it in the first place. Bethesda squandered a ton of goodwill with the shameless cash-grabbing in Fallout 76, and the new IP looked incredibly tepid.
Starfield is soulless. The term is cliched so sorry about that. But it feels like the writers, the quest designers etc. could not be arsed to do their job well which is cool. I support workers collecting free paychecks. But the game is nowhere near as good as it was hyped. The only saving grace is that mod support is coming next year which could be interesting.
Tldr: starfield is a shit game
The only saving grace is that mod support is coming next year which could be interesting.
Next year ? Bethesda released a game without day-one mod support ? are they stupid ?
Yeah, for a Beth game one would think that they'd want mod support in before they even had the main questline done
Yes. There are currently 4405 mods at nexus, meaning people were utterly starved for a new Bethesda game, but since tools are not out, barely maybe 50 of those mods are interesting or helpful and rest of them are just reskins, resounds or something like that.
I am serioulsy astounded, how a company sitting on such mountain of resources and incredibly popular IP's do nothing (SKYRIM WAS FUCKING 12 YEARS AGO!) or fuck it up into quick buck multi gAmErS (F76) and finally ignore their greatest and last saving grace that are mods (and i don't even think Starfield is a bad game, but yeah it is kinda uninspired).
(SKYRIM WAS FUCKING 12 YEARS AGO!)
Hey, you're not being entirely fair. Yes Skyrim was released 12 years ago, but Bethesda hasn't been doing nothing with the IP since then.
You're forgetting that they released Skyrim 10 years ago, and then they released Skyrim 7 years ago, and then they released Skyrim and Skyrim 6 years ago, and just 2 years ago they also released Skyrim, and just last year they released Skyrim.
and just last year they released Skyrim.
Oh yeah how i could forgot update that didn't changed anything in game but broke almost every single mod out there, including 250GB i had installed. It was so bad that instead of tackling that modders developed a downgrade compatibility patch for the game.
Yeah but the public liked Skyrim for what it was at launch (at least it had some charm), and it really took off with mod support
counter: the "soullessness" (or let's be more specific, the adherence to formula, the creative safety, the rote blandness) of AAA titles isn't because the people making them don't care, but because the AAA mode of video game production places very tight constraints on that production so that even department leads can't impose their vision through writing, gameplay design, world and character design, or anything else without jeopardizing the funding of the entire project before release, which is only perceived as a risk by publishing execs, even if it's a development team with proven success. The problem isn't even design-by-committee so much as design-by-fear.
I was thinking it was a self-censorship kind of thing where only the most milquetoast liberals land the job but this is likely too.
Seems like standard Microsoft operating procedure at this point. I'm pretty sure Halo Infinite took like a year to have all the features and tools Halo games used to have at launch
You can only coast off the goodwill generated by Morrowind for so long.
Yeah, it all went down hill when that one guy high on shrooms all the time left the company. I forget his name, but I'm sure some other morrowind fan knows who I'm talking about
Michael Kirkbride? Writer/designer/lore guy for Morrowind (and pretty much everything interesting in the elder scrolls that we never actually see in the other games). Though afaik he wasn’t always on some shit as the rumor goes, I think he just got really into incredibly esoteric religious writing
Pretty sure it's Kirkbride. The guy I'm thinking about has done extensive writing about his interpretation of the lore after leaving Bethesda.
That's kirkbride, and yeah, he famously said that the only substances he needed for the Sermons were whiskey and cigarettes. He was just high on his comparative religion degree (aka irl deep lore)
Respect. Honestly makes sense why I'd mistake a comparative religion degree with tyriptamine psychedelics. Fun fact: In the tale of Moses, he went up to the mountains and burnt a bush and saw shit before making the commandments. The mountain widely agreed upon to be the mountains have acacia bushes, which contain DMT. A lot of our earliest accounts of religion often have pharmacological explainations because of DMT. So if you go hard enough on religion, it'll sound like you're on shrooms 🤷♀️
BGS used to have a few weirdos at the office ((Kirkbride included) who made things messy and interesting. Another one was lead concept artist Adam Adamowicz. He did all the art for Fallout 3 and like 75% of it for Skyrim (this is coming from an AMA with another BGS artist who was there at the time).
Adam died of lung cancer in 2012.
Bethesda's games' look and feel and writing have been nosediving. Everything feels more focus-grouped and hermetically-sealed and clean and horrifically uninteresting.
All that being said, I think I have like 60 hours in Starfield and while it is indeed boring as shit, it's boring in a very BGS-type of way only BGS can do, and in a weird way I actually like it and plan on finishing the game. I can't describe it, I think I'm just an uncurable Bethesda stan.
Fallout and Skyrim had the benefit of being part of a much beloved franchise. Among Us didn't really take off until two years after release because kids were playing it during lockdown. Elden Ring got major hype for being a collaboration between the creators of some of the biggest franchises in TV and video games in the 2010s.
Starfield certainly has the benefit of being the new thing from a well-known studio. However, it's also a "new" IP from a studio that isn't known for making their own IP and is known for crummy writing on the IP they own. Not to mention that there's just...so many more video games these days.
None of this is to say I think Starfield is any good. I haven't played it, but I have seen others play it and it looks real boring. Being the next big thing just wasn't in the cards.
I've also not seen anyone that can give me an elevator pitch for the game. It looks exactly like any other bland Sci-Fi Game (tm).
Mass Effect is a space opera where humans are the newcomers to the greater galaxy and are trying to carve a niche.
No Man's Sky is about infinite exploration on an infinite number of worlds, and the joy of discovery.
Outer Worlds is what if Fallout New Vegas was in space, and corporations literally owned entire worlds.
Meanwhile Starfield has nothing like this. It's just Space Game.
It didn't help that 2023 is the best year for games since 1998. It's tough to slog through the early hours of Starfield when you've already got two or three recent S-rank games to play instead
I pay basically no attention to Video Games as just a consumer like I used to, what's good this year aside from BG3?
Oh man... Tears of the Kingdom, Armored Core 6, Phantom Liberty (and the Cyberpunk 2.0 patch), Pikmin 4, Sea of Stars, Hi-Fi Rush, Street Fighter 6, a bunch of great remakes (Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4, Dead Space). Spider-Man 2 just came out, and Super Mario Wonder is this week.
Final Fantasy XVI was this year too. Diablo IV will be good in a year or so. Sorry for leaving off your favorite game, dear reader, I still love you
I don't think Blizzard has the chops anymore to make Diablo IV good in the future
Baldur's Gate 3 makes 2023 an incredible year just by itself. Can't wait to get my Switch so I can play Super Mario Bros Wonder and Super Mario RPG as well
