this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Starfield sure is popular to hate on
I mostly hate on it because it completely botched a genre / gameplay type that I enjoy a lot (sci fi exploration and survival) and turned it into a loading screen simulator that couldn’t feel less interesting if it tried.
I got the game for free and couldn’t even be bothered to finish the intro. Just a wholly bland, uninteresting setting that at no point manages to make me feel like I am exploring space, or having fun. By far the "best" made aspect is space combat, and that’s only moderately fun either.
I got it for free with my cpu, spent three hours trying to get it to work on Linux and then, finally achieving that, spent two hours in game and just got bored. The Bethesda veneer is fully on display here and it's hard to not feel like Neo at the end of The Matrix when he sees the underlying design behind everything. You just realize it's the same game all over again with a different skin, with no evolution in mechanics, UI, or technology.
I specifically recall getting to the major city hub and walking past a mission board and just thinking "well fuck that" and walking right past it. That is shit lazy design. Side quest emergence should be organic, not a shopping list. I spent twenty minutes trying to travel to a moon that was very much visible to me before realizing I'm not actually able to and have to fast travel. That was an unbelievably frustrating experience and is inexcusable given how long Space Engine, Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky, Star Citizen (at least partially) and others have existed.
The writing in the tutorial and Constellation intro fell very flat for me, and the hook was very very weak. The turnaround from "you're a nobody" to "you're a galactically important person" gave me whiplash and the Constellation group felt unrealistically eager to bring a stranger on board (except, of course, for token Mr. Tropey McGrumpypants). It felt less like a story and more like a shoehorn.
I mean, Bethesda writing has always been pretty bare bones and pedestrian, so I guess it's not that surprising, but it is still disappointing and jarring.
Oh and the companion robot was easily the most annoying companion I've ever had in a video game. I put it down after those two in game hours over a month ago and have had no compulsion to revisit it whatsoever.
I feel like Bethesda, from top to bottom, has a lot of introspection to do. Sadly, from this news, it doesn't sound likely to happen.
Bethesda. Bethesda never changes. This is a company that is well known for releasing extremely buggy games and letting the modders fix them for free so it really doesn't come as a surprise that their public response to valid criticism of their half-assed writing and development would basically be "you just don't understand our genius".
Bethesda never claimed starfield would be a survival game.
Yeah... The only genre they ever claimed it would be is a Bethesda-style open world game. Which it definitely is. People who expected the next NMS or Elite Dangerous were setting themselves up to be disappointed.
It barely even did that right. What makes Bethesda games work is that they're such an a dense amount of content on a map, but because they partitioned this out through different points in space, it just felt like it was floating around everywhere.
It's such a joke how disconnected everything is.
Jemison is at least three separate zones, Neon is cut in half, and this is in an age where we have city-scale games that have absolutely no loading screens during traversal - Cyberpunk and Spider-Man to name a few. That's like a New Vegas-era problem from a decade ago, where we had to cut Freeside in half. Made sense then, unacceptable now.
Everything is behind a loading screen, usually triggered by fast travel.
They hyped it up as being as expansive as NMS. It's not that we set ourselves up it's that we bought into the marketing.
Starfield is a Bethesda style open world game like the Transmorphers movies are transformers style movies. It's in the style yes, but it's nothing compared to the original.
I'm honestly impressed that Bethesda managed to Asylum-knockoff their own games.
While the game does have a lot of loading screens, I think the disappointment mostly comes from people having wrong expectations.
The people complaining mostly seem to be people that expected a game that feels like an open galaxy Star Wars game. Starfield is not that. Starfield is more like a 2009 Space Odyssey game. It leans farther into "realistic" space games like Elite Dangerous and less into "fantasy" space like Star Wars. For example, planets in real life are mostly just lifeless barren rocks, as Elite and Starfield both depict. Actually, there is more to explore in Starfield than Elite due to the procedural cave systems and outposts on planets being more plentiful in Starfield. Elite feels bigger because there are other players playing with you, and both politics and economy change in realtime in response to collective player actions. Not so in Starfield. Elite is also very good at hiding its loading screens so that, for the most part, they do not interrupt gameplay like they do in Starfield. In actuality, Starfield is a bigger game than Elite. Not in that there are more planets or anything, but that there is more to explore. More NPCs to interact with in a meaningful way. Because Elite was built as a space sim and not an RPG, this is by design.
Starfield itself is quite good. The end user experience suffers due to loading screen fatigue and players expecting planets to not be barren lifeless rocks like they would be in reality. This is where I believe the problem lies.
Regarding the lifelessness argument: one of my favorite and most played games ever is space engineers, which is essentially a Minecraft like sci fi sandbox in a largely procedurally generated map.
The game has no concept of npcs in the expected sense, the only real pve component are randomly spawned hostile vessels. There are no cities or inhabited planets, no actual story. Actual planets and moons are maybe a dozen overall, everything else is procedurally generated asteroids. The physics are only a rough approximation to real life.
And still, the game has hooked me for literally thousands of hours, simply because I can actually do shit. Once you are loaded into a map there isn’t a single loading screen to deal with. Piloting your ship is wholly your responsibility and you do it from start to orbit to wherever you want to go. And you can actually go anywhere you want, no railroading or handholding period. You are fully in control at all times.
Even just taking off in a random direction in space is fun: What might happen? Find a resource rich asteroid and make a mining station? Encounter a pirate fleet and get into a firefight? Accidentally slam my fuel tank into an asteroid, causing me to lose my fuel? Do I freeze to death in space or do I chance into an asteroid with more?
It lacks almost everything starfield has, on paper, but is still miles ahead as a game about exploring space.
As a realism enthusiast that is obsessed with simulations, there's one question that needs to be asked of every game regardless of how realistic and ambitious it aspires to be: "Is it fun?"
If it's not fun, then it's not worth playing.
It's making it so easy.