Games

Do you like doing the exact same thing over and over on a thousand different planets?

Like go through the exact same building layout with the exact same decorations and exact same enemies several times over, but one time on a procedurally generated desert moon and another time on an ice planet?

Do you really like floating through glowing sparks in zero gravity in the most boring mini game since Pong? Would you like to play that mini game over 200 times to fully upgrade your character?

Have you ever felt like characters have too much emotion and soul in their animations and portrayal over the past few years of games? Want to go back to an era where they feel like they've been cut from cardboard and might as well be voiced by AI?

Do you love loading screens so much that within a brief bit of travel to drop off something in a game that's mostly fetch quests you see a loading screen a half dozen times and mostly 'travel' through menus? And don't worry - if you want more immersion and avoid jumping into menus you can still do that, and instead of six loading screens you'll get about a dozen!

Do you feel like games these days have too much variety in equipment and weapons? Want only a handful of weapon types to choose from, most of which are terrible and several of which are completely unviable? Do you want core gameplay mechanics gated behind skill point assignment to artificially pad leveling up?

If all these features seem like they deliver the game you've always dreamed of playing in 2023, then Starfield, the next-gen Bethesda game in development for a decade, might just be the game for you.

Well, it's a roleplaying game where your choices don't matter, a dungeon delver where 90% of them are procedurally generated with nearly identical enemies, and an exploration game with very little to find.

Idk, I think it's not the best game, but I also think it suffers a bit from "it's not perfect and we hyped the hell out of it so because it's only good that means it's horrible."

Like I will absolutely admit it's not the best game, but I enjoy it. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Because this is the first time since Morrowind that Todd's team has had to rely on their own world building, and all the talent that created things like the elder Scrolls lore are long gone. I could go on about game mechanics, but in my opinion this is where most of the problems originate.

It's a good, but flawed game. I got really into it for a month and developed a love/hate relationship with it, but overall enjoyed that time.

That's as somebody who loves sci-fi and got really into building my ship. I was pretty much the target audience so I may have been more willing to immerse myself in it than others would care for.

Also, it was super refreshing to me playing a game where my companions are all in their 30s with a lot of history. It feels quite mature in that sense. Which I guess is why the main story really disappointed me when you get an antagonist who feels like a 12-year old who just discovered the Wikipedia page for Nihilism, but hey ho.

It's just not that captivating. I put it down for Diablo 4, and planned to start back up after I was done with that. But I just have no desire to play it. To me it feels to slow/shallow. Even though it's the type of game that is normally right up my alley.

As someone who will upfront admit to not having played it, my impression of friends and online personalities alike is that if you really liked fallout 4, it’s sorta like an alright reskin with some obvious changes for space.

The people aren’t all crotchety assholes like fallout, and you’re obviously in space.

Gunplay clearly isn’t the focus, the story’s acceptable but not gonna blow your socks off, so it does kinda beg the question of what exactly it’s supposed to do better than any other game. BG3 has the RPG lovers captivated, bethesda’s gunplay has never been a huge draw, and the space exploration is severely limited and not a big upgrade from skyrim dungeon style of “huge open world” of all the same crap.

There's two sides to it.

1 is that it was heralded as being this massive intricate space game with a near endless things to do.

2 is that it was heralded as being the first of Version 2 of Bethesdas game engine.

1 turned out to be a play with words as while there is quite a bit to do in the game, barely any of it is captivating as it's even less deep than most things you do in Skyrim and FO4, but it's kinda true as the game creates an NG+ loop where your gameworld resets whenever you do the main quest (which you can do in a rather short time) which results in a virtually infinite things to do, as you get to redo the same content over and over and over.

The NG+ loop also makes it so that no matter what you do in the game feels like it's an utter waste of time. As you will reset it after finishing the main quest and don't have the ability to go back to universes you've already interacted with.

2 turned out to be utter bullshit as the engine has all the same bugs it has had since Morrowind, no new features to speak of (some say the ability to load more planets and generating those small landing areas is new, but you could load DLC maps in their engine going back as far as Morrowind and the procedural generation of the landing areas is very barebones and done better in ARGP and other games going back 25 years) and the engine only has a couple graphics features tacked on that FO4 didn't have yet.

And I mean tacked on, the new graphics capabilities aren't really integrated in the engine, just tacked onto it with ductape and superglue from external APIs.

What their version 2 of the engine needed was an actual ground up rework of the graphics pipeline to integrate natively all the crap they tacked onto it since Morrowind.

This while the new version of the engine also reduced a ton of modding features that made all their previous games so great, to be extremely watered down and some ultimately useless, meaning that it'll take even more time for mod authors to bypass Bethesdas programming to integrate features the old games already had.

Added, it took all of a week for a modder to add XeSS, DLSS and FSR into Starfield, which should've been part of the game out of the box.

And it took Bethesda 2+ months to integrate these same features themselves.

I mean, if you're that worried about the "echo chamber" go buy it, and see.

Wait a year, but it for steepl discount. You'll enjoy it but its extremely repetitive. I saw this after about 10 hours

It's fine. Solid 8/10. Once modding community gets the creation kit it'll be better. I personally feel starfield was more interesting the first 50 hours than skyrim was. Skyrim has a little bit more lore and depth but starfield is solid. It just promises so much. Skyrim is like fleshed out sears, starfield is like a strip mall with infrastructure for more, but empty.

I put 250 hours into starfield. I won't go play new game plus until creation kits comes. I had to play with some UI fixes, crafting changes, and a dozen or so mods that made starfield more my style of game, but that made it fun for me.

Out of the box. Eh. It's fine. But what the community can do is why I bought it. And people need to quit saying "the modders fix the game for the lazy developers!". That's not the case. Bethesda came out with a game that is OK as is, but it's because Bethesda always had a strong modding community that Bethesda embraced that makes the game better, and will be better when we get creation kit.

I'd play it if I could, but it crashes every time I try to launch it (game pass on PC). It might be that my computer just isn't good enough, I think I have the exact same specs as the minimum.

Starfield is a bad game because people want it to be a bad game. I read a negative Steam review that complained about the estimated 150 hours of the story were too short. One hundred and fifty hours. In the same amount of time you probably can complete Cyberpunk and The Witcher back to back.

Of course Starfield is far from being a perfect game. But some players' expectations can't be distinguished from entitlement anymore. To quote a movie title, they want "everything, everywhere, all at once". And yes, then Starfield must be bad.

I on the other hand really do enjoy it.