this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 117 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This entire thread is hilarious. I've been paying for therapy like a sucker, I didn't know you could get infinite amounts of free psychoanalysis just by suggesting that Starfield is somewhat underwhelming.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

I see. So how does that make you feel?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The amount of gaslighting I've seen gamers do to themselves over this game has been wild. "Is it me? Maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I just don't like games anymore?"

They'd rather do that than admit that a Bethesda game kinda sucks. And if you say it's not good, people will come after you. The super Bethesda defenders keep claiming the game is getting review bombed, but from what I've seen it's the other way around. If you say something negative about it, people will jump on your case. I've seen so many streamers and YouTubers try and cover their asses when trying to speak critically about this game to keep the Todd brigade from forming a mob in their comment sections.

It's been such a wild game release.

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah, it's pretty underhwelming. There's a lot of people who claim Starfield is a "great Bethesda game" but "people hyped it up too much." In my opinion, it's a terrible Bethesda game. The best thing those games do right is you can set off in a direction and along the way, find a world full of little things. Landmarks, unique little stories, side quests, and even just interesting items to grab. Starfield dropped all of this in favor of incredibly generic proc gen planets that have the same couple of outposts you'll see on every planet. Like THE SAME. The interiors are THE SAME. Every safe, dead body, message log is THE SAME.

It lacks the one thing that brought me back to Bethesda games despite all their flaws.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (6 children)

God, I couldn't put my finger on why I didn't like it. I was just so bored, even with the exploration which I normally love. All of the fun parts of FO4 and Skyrim are missing. Just walking around and enjoying the world is completely missing, replaced by a pretty shitty space travel mechanic.

Fast travel to space, then fast travel to another planet. Fast travel to the surface and bunny hop to an objective through a boring city/space station/whatever. Fast travel back to your ship and do it all over again. I never made it far in the story because I couldn't be bothered to give a damn. The characters were completely uninteresting at best. oh average they were mildly annoying.

Let me take off from the planets surface and fly in to space a few times before you lock me in to fast traveling. Let me fly from space and scream in to the atmosphere, shooting over the surface looking for a safe place to land, and navigate my way in to the city. Maybe 90% of the surface is uninteresting, that's fine. But let me at least have some fun learning that.

They made every safe choice, and lost the sense of adventure. Because adventures aren't supposed to be safe.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Aside from the writing, ship combat, and the voice acting, if you'd told me Starfield was a fan mod for Fallout 4 I would have believed you.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I thought I was going crazy. "haven't I been here before ??" I couldn't believe they actually copied and pasted entire areas several times over

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago (18 children)

Lost interest in a few hours I was sad.
Great potential, horrible interface, wonky mechanics

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Same. The interface looks kinda cool, but the UX is awful, and the story is boring. The biggest reason it doesn’t capture you IMO is you just jump around from place to place instantaneously right from the start and there’s no obvious reason to just go exploring somewhere. In Skyrim you’re literally on foot and the world slowly expands around you and you become interested in it.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

In Skyrim you’re literally on foot and the world slowly expands around you and you become interested in it.

Yeah, and exploration wisey I prefer Oblivion even more. Skyrim feels smaller and less varied, and horses and other fast-travel options are cheaper and easier available.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I got to hear a talk from a level designer who worked on Skyrim at Bethesda who had since left the company, and we needled them with some questions about Starfield and it was interesting at the time but even more interesting in the hindsight of now playing the game.

We kind of intuited through some of their answers that it sounded like they felt that with Skyrim, individual level designers and programmers and people had way more freedom to put stuff into the game; many of the more memorable side quests and interactions were never remotely planned to be in there but were just threwn together by a couple people who stayed overnight recording voices and programming in these quests and interactions and stuff, and it sounded like they did not think that was was the case with Starfield and it was a much more rigid and controlled dev environment, which would explain why so much of the stuff feels like it's randomly generated stuff you've already seen instead of coming across these weird handcrafted things.

They also talked a lot about open world level design in general and talked about how good open world level design is often inspired by Disney world, where they pay super close attention to sightlines where ever you are to make sure there's always (ideally multiple) interesting things to see and explore. You shouldn't need a waypoint or hud marker ideally, you should just walk out of one thing, look around and go "hey that looks neat let me go see what's over there", discover something magical, walk out and repeat. That kind of feeling made sense and resonated with me at the time and made me think of the new Zelda games and some of the better open world games I've played, but now in the context of Starfield, it feels like the loading screens between planets pretty fundamentally broke that cycle, and disrupted that feeling of exploration that Skyrim gave you.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Same. After visiting 3 random planets and entering the exact same bases with the exact same enemies... Except they were like random level from 3-48. Not that it weirdly mattered much. Already felt godlike.

AAA gets worse every year, and I'm gamer for over 4 decades... I was so glad I didn't bought the crapfest

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's not Bethesda's greatest game but it's not a terrible game in general. I definitely think companies need to stop over hyping their games as some groundbreaking game of the decade only to release a generic RPG.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I definitely think companies need to stop over hyping their games as some groundbreaking game of the decade only to release a generic RPG.

Not really possible when your average gamer will overhype literally anything even without any marketing available. People are just stupid.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

But capitalism demands that games are overhyped. That hype will inevitably lead to more sales, and to that end it genuinely doesn't matter if the game itself lives up to it.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Can we really be honest with ourselves for a second. It's not the greatest game ever and it's not the worst game ever. It can just be a game that some people like and others don't.

I personally like it, but I can %100 see why others might not. It doesn't need to be deeper than that really.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

I'm like 90% certain they planned on a method to travel between systems without jumping or fast traveling.

He3 was supposed to be collected for jumping. However, if you run out near a planet that doesn't have any, it would be very difficult to get anywhere. It would also mean one of the very first things any user would have to do is set up an outpost for he3 or buy a lot of it from vendors.

If there was a way to travel between planets and systems, even if it took a few minutes, new users could at least play around wherever they are and eventually set up an outpost to speed up the process. Maybe it would only be reasonable for planet-to-planet within the same system, but you would be able to find he3 somehow.

Also, the whole thing with jumping to a new system. If your travel path includes another system that you haven't visited yet, you have to stop there first. It doesn't make much sense from a gameplay perspective unless they planned on having users actually travel it.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I find the hype of something is inversely proportional to the quality of the end product. If some game company put 7 years into a game and their marketing was, "could be alright, see how you like it". I'd be all over that shit like white on rice.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (18 children)

This is how I thought everyone felt about Cyberpunk 2077, but even on launch it was a pretty sweet Bethesda-game by CDPR.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The entire time I was playing Starfield I was thinking "man, Cyberpunk 2077 was a really good open world RPG after all."

Nothing quite like juxtaposition to make something shine.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Accurate. But props to Bethesda for not including Denuvo so I didn't have to feel cheated by paying for it.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

They dont ivlude denuvo because it wouls effectively make modding harder, in particular, script extenders

People can say all they want about how dated the creation engine is, but its inclusion is the reason why modeing is significantly easier and the executable isnt riddled with drm

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I intentially skipped all that hype on Starfield because I don't trust Bethesda, and it's starting to look like I was right.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Just like i said when it was announced

Bethesda is a shitty game dev studio.. lol

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I never watched any trailer because i assumed that's what the game will be like. But after watching some gameplay, it's somehow worse. Some things look really good, it has these trailer moments. But some textures for example are straight up 480p. A part of me thought that they learned from fallout 4 or fallout 76, but that's not how you print money, right?
The fact alone that the UI is laughably bad, is just one thing, but the loading times, in a game where you spend so much time opening and closing your inventory shouldn't be accepted, ESPECIALLY since a modder fixed their UI on day one. But SOMEHOW there are people out there defending that bullshit. If i would care for Bethesda games and spending ours collecting space trash, i'd be livid. Their next game i 6 years will still be just a bit better looking than skyrim.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

At first, I thought the quality seemed "meh" because it was released so close after the masterpiece that was Baldur's Gate 3. Everyone had high expectations and that's a hard game to follow, I believed.

After removing myself from Baldur's Gate 3, I discovered that I was wrong. Starfield still a "meh" game when taken on its own.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My personal biggest disappointment is the repeating point of interest. Yesterday I was on two planets and both had, even on the same planet itself, three times the same mine shaft, twice the same outpost, twice the same hole in the ground, with even mobs and ore placed on the same spots.

Seriously, this should never happen under any circumstances. It was the first time in the game I kind of felt the negative grow. While I still enjoy the rest.

That said, it's also true that the game is average in many aspects, which is enough to be enjoyable for me but not others.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Will Skyrim remain as Bethesda's greatest triumph? Find out in the next episode of Elder Ball Z: "Skyrim is the greatest after all"

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[–] starman2112 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

240 times. It took me two minutes to finish the "minigame" last time I did it. That's 8 hours of grinding to max out every skill. Not 8 hours of fun gameplay and visually interesting dragon fights and dungeon crawls, 8 hours (that's eight hours) of flying from one shiny spot to the next. Eight. 8. Hours. Of slow-ass zero G floating.

Last time I booted the game up, I fast traveled to my ship, took off, and heard Sarah say she has something for me. Something about that same line played for the millionth time absolutely killed my motivation to play, and I haven't started the game up in like a week. The romance system is too much too fast. I went from "flirting" with Sarah to married in like 4 hours. We've known each other for all of one in-game month. Maybe I'm just a broken person, but the way we talk sounds so disingenuously infatuated.

I think about the concept of playing, and it sounds fun in theory, but realistically what am I gonna get done in the next 8 hours? I'll talk to people that I don't care about to move through a story that I'm fundamentally disinterested in because I know that >!in order to max out the dragon shou–I mean, Starborn powers, I'll need to jump through and abandon alternate universes like Rick Sanchez but not as an ironic critique of internet nihilism. Hours and hours and hours wasted on >!timelines I don't care about just to get to the end game where I... have strong powers and a good ship, and can't connect with any of the characters because they'll be the tenth iteration of the same ones that I could never convince myself to care about before.!<

Maybe in a year or two after the game has been updated, I'll check it out again. Maybe I can shut my brain off for a minute and pretend I'm not >!grinding through universes!< if it doesn't take me eight hours to max out all the powers. Or maybe I'll just play BG3 when it comes to Xbox and forget that Starfield ever existed in the first place

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (13 children)

The fact BG3 came out just before Starfield made me dislike the game even more than I probably would have I think. I went from playing probably the best RPG ever to Starfield, which doesn't even try to make you think you're playing any role except the chosen one. The fact that you join Constellation and almost instantly become not just a full member, but the person who everyone else takes orders from is rediculous.

The story sucks, the gameplay is bland, and there are so many friction points that constantly make you think about the fact you're playing a game. It's honestly sad. I love sci-fi so I was reasonably excited for the game, even knowing it'd be a modern Bethesda game, and it still let me down. The sci-fi concepts in the game aren't even done well.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

Anon is not wrong.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (10 children)

this is why I never buy Bethesda at release. Let the modders come, and perhaps Bethy will fix some shit themselves, you never know... give it six months or a year and you'll always have a better experience, and often cheaper and with more dlcs.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I suppose the money you're spending on marketing is money you're not spending on the game

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Meanwhile, BG3 launches and shows what a proper RPG is capable of.

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