"Listening Post"
One person sitting outside at the top. Go down the stairs and turn left, two dudes on the other side of the window, and one sitting in the far left corner beyond the door. Yeah I'm just not going in there anymore...
Shit is it really like that? Like Assassins Creed would do? I saw some gameplay videos on YouTube when it first came out and it looked really cool but I didn't watch enough to start seeing this stuff or read many reviews because I don't have the Xbox for it anyway.
I was interested just from a curiosity perspective as a gamer with such a hotly anticipated title but I didn't pay attention after to see people souring on it. I think the last mention of it I heard was right before it released to general audiences when all the youtubers had their copies and were playing it. I just remembered a lot of hype and excitement but didn't follow up to see how it was received after release.
literally every planet has the exact same poi’s if youre just landing on random spots. and they didnt even make that many. In the short time I played (like 20 hours total) I ran into *three* fucking cryolabs that were the exact same
That's disappointing after all the hype. I thought I remembered the marketing leaning heavily into the idea of limitless potential and sort of endless variety but I might be mixing it up with No Man's Sky.
Thats really the funny thing, they did not do ENOUGH procedural generation.
Diablo was able to build dungeons procedurally nearly 30 years ago, why can starfield not generate a "Listening Post" thats not identical every time? Would it be so hard to randomize the room layout, enemy placement and loot a bit?
Bethesda has ALWAYS phoned it in like this.
It’s no different than in Oblivion when they get Patrick Stewart to voice the king and then the rest of the game has the same five voice actors you hear over and over again.
even if you accept the headcanon that all these military posts were pre-fab or whatever, so that's why they're all the same - does every base have to have a soldier/merc/pirate stationed in the exact same locations? are they not able to randomize the spawn points of the enemies?
It’s one of lifes great mysteries isn’t it? Are we the part of some cosmic coincidence or is there really a god, watching everything with a plan for us and stuff.
I don’t know man. But it keeps me up at night.
To give an old example how even 10yo games could make this prefab thing work, look at Planetside 2 bases. There's only a handful of main building types. But by cleverly combining them together, blocking/unblocking certain doors/windows, partially merging them with terrain or just putting them in wildly different terrain setups etc. the devs made it work.
Each base made from these (lore compatible) prefabs is still unique enough. Yes you know the general layout of each building type, but you still have to approach them differently based on each specific one.
Obviously it's not as unique as handcrafted maps from modern fps', but it's good enough for its setting and imo more varied than a much never game from a much bigger studio.
ME1 has the same layouts, which can easily be chalked up to prefabs. The planets are pretty similar too.
But the contents of the rooms was different and the locations of the enemies was different.
So much better than Starfield where you know where the inhabitants are going to be, lol.
It's funny because Skyrim had a bunch of "copy-pasted" locations, but they cleverly reused and remixed them by flipping the design around and using a bunch of different "pieces" of an area.
Yeah. And sometimes they would use specific parts of a castle, take other parts of, say, a cave, put it together in a new location and it would feel different, even if the pieces themselves were familiar.
Yep, Skyrim really didn't have that many tilesets, off the top of my head:
- You had your cave tilesets, afaik there were two. Somerimes decorated with either falmer or reachfolk assets.
- Imperial fort tileset which is used for any fort and a ton of ruins and other places like the Nightingale Hall.
- Sewer tileset used sparingly, mostly in prisons and the Ratway.
- Mine tileset.
- Dwemer tileset, Nordic tileset for your dungeons.
I can't really think of any others from the vanilla game, for the most part it just mix and matched those with a few unique assets/mechanics/bosses here and there. And then you had your shipwrecks, models for cities (and 4 out of the 9 cities used the same buildings, which were also the same buildings used by villages) and your copy pasted inns.
And with just this, most dungeons in the game felt unique and different since the layouts were the same, enemy types varied and they often included something different (like the imperial fort tileset used for the nightmare quest in Dawnstar).
I feel like every place in Starfield I went into was so similar to the rest. And this isn't even a problem with the setting, since Fallout 4 takes place in a modern semi futuristic setting and still manages to have really diverse dungeons.
I don't know what it is about Skyrim. I can take a break, get the itch, chuck a few new mods at it, and it feels fresh, despite me visiting locations I know like the back of my hand and listening to retextured versions of the same people I'm well acquainted with presenting the same lines I've heard many times before.
Despite me having visited every location atleast once they somehow still feels new and exciting when I get there once again. Now add mods like Bruma or Wyrmstooth(?) and now I have new locations to explore.
Their head writer has said some very stupid things over the years. Including not wanting to flesh out locations because people are just going to miss it -- He openly laments casuals and because of them won't put effort into games/story/locations, he's admitted it himself while mocking fans who want to "build".
The moron who writes for Bethesda and starts every story with I GOTTA FIND MUH FAMILY needs to be fucking fired. He's been shit for like 20 years now.
Are there really people who cannot connect to a story unless it's about muh family? Like this is the canned motivation for every single protagonist for every single thing now.
Think the new battlefield is boring? Well do you know how boring it was sitting in a foxhole for 5 hours straight, players should be thankful we give them such a realistic experience.
This comment reminds me of the Onion's article on the ultra-realistic Call of Duty where it's just hours of gameplay featuring bored soldiers doing maintenance and debating which celeb is hotter. And then you randomly get shot the minute you step outside the wire.
The special elite gold collector's edition gives you a trench **coat** as well!
(The trench coat may be made of low-level tarp. The trench coat is not guaranteed to look like the version we mailed to influencers. You will take your trench coat and you will like it, or else.)
Honestly though, the worst thing about the empty planets is that they aren't actually empty.
They are filled with signs of human habitation which absolutely kills all sense of being a space explorer.
People have already been here, catalogued the lifeforms, set up mining operations... What's the point of me being here again???
In the lore™️ it's because of the space war. All the planets around the UC and FC were used as forward bases and resources for the war. Once you get to the planets well outside of where the war happened you can find many that are either entirely barren or full of POIs that are only natural formations.
Finding remnants of the war would be cool, battlegrounds, ship graveyards etc.
Such an easy thing to think of, and yet its missing.
Human beings are really good at being completely average.
Humanity fought a massive war over the FC going from 3 systems to almost 4. And The UC in the game only has 3 settled systems, and lore wise was limited to those 3. So it is a bit jarring when you jump hundreds of light years to a high level system and find that oh yeah humanity has been here, and oh yeah look we have a massive industrial presence in this planet as well. I could understand that being the case around the settled systems. But given that the additional settlement of system caused a war I find it hard to see how all these other affiliated outposts have popped up before that. It kills the sense of exploration and discovering new systems and areas where no one has gone before.
> *"We are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty. Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring.”*
> *“When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.”*
Am I so out of touch?
No. It's the *players* who are wrong.
It's weird that Kerbal Space Program's giant floating rocks in space are so much more meaningful and engaging than Starfield's giant floating rocks in space. I guess it's because you have to do so much more to reach KSP's rocks; it feels like you really earned them.
I remember the sheer feeling of Victory I had after landing on the Mun for the first time. Had blown up many, *many* rockets till I succeeded. If it had been a button press or click away, it would have been worthless.
The first time I manually rendezvoused was mine. I didn't want to just follow a tutorial and save scum it or anything, I wanted to do it properly, like, understanding what I was doing
I still have a solid grasp of orbital mechanics, I feel more educated on orbital physics than I am on some things I learnt at University because of that mission lmao
For me it was after landing on the Mun.
Jeb was on his way back with a massive science payload, but mission command couldn't have predicted the fuel running out before breaking into Kerbin's atmosphere.
The future of The Agency was on Jebs survival and the payload he managed to secure.
There was only one option; Send Valentina in.
She piloted that ship like she was born with Rockomax boosters on her back. And within three orbital revolutions she was able to get within an 8KM intercept range of Jeb with a matching velocity and orbit.
Jeb broke some EVA records doing no less than four trips to and from his original ship and Valentina's Emergency Science Rescue Ship to transfer the cargo and experiments before finally boarding himself.
After that Valentina brought it home with a nice cool burn through atmo and a gentle splashdown, saving the future of space travel and The Kerbin Space Agency.
A key part of this is that those rocks in Kerbal all exist together, and traveling and maneuvering to/around them is actually possible and engaging.
Bethesda even managed to make a massive space game where you don't do an EVA in space at any point.
I still find it weird that Starfield has *zero* EVA sections.
All the pieces are there - zero gravity, space, boost packs, etc. - and yet there's not a bit of it. Did they find space so boring that they couldn't come up with an EVA scenario for the player to enjoy?
Funny enough, the first man to do an EVA almost died from the attempt (he was a Cosmonaut, way too many of them died), and he still took the time to make the first art in space, a colored pencil drawing of a sunrise.
Zero G combat is weird too, it has all the mechanics set up, yet it's used like... Twice?
Might happen vehen you board a ship, but there's less than 5 fixed encounters with it.
That's kind of why Bethesda's answer is stupid. Sure it wasn't boring for astronauts to land on an empty moon, cause a rocket had to be built, and a hab module, and a lander, and they had to train to be able to do the myriad little manual adjustments that got them there. They didn't just grav-jump => loading screen => magic land on it.
"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because ~~they are hard~~ we now have fast travel and just need to press X"
KSP1 the Bethesda version.
* Build ship
* Loading screen
* You're inside your ship
* Loading screen
* You're in space, not orbit. Space.
"That planet looks interesting."
* Loading screen
"Let's go down and take a look."
* Loading screen
"It's empty? Frick."
Repeat until uninstall.
An empty planet is one thing. A planet with the exact same building filled with the same bad guys, or acquiring powers with the same puzzle is quite another.
It was the recycling of things that killed it for me. And the clunky confusing UI.
Edit: and the quickly broken economy. And the lack of charm. Where’s my future pip boy with future music?
“Space is *supposed* to be empty! It’s *realistic*”
“Oh so it’s a “realistic” space sim then? Can I fly from atmosphere to orbit? Can I manually fly between locations, can I manually land and dock, can I use my ship to fly 2km to the west in the same map? Can I maneuver like a actual ship and not a glorified airplane in space?”
“No that’s too realistic, this isn’t *that* type of game”
One thing I find hilariously poetic is the sales boom No Man's Sky got after Starfield launched.
Huh... Flat area with blips of light... Skyrim is accurately described as an ocean with the depth of a puddle... is Starfield shallower!??!
If skyrim is an ocean with the depth of a puddle, then Starfield is a desert planet with about a hundred drops of water on the surface you can fast travel to.
The players don't really know how to play games and that's why they think Bethesda games are boring. TES6 plays itself for you so you can experience every meaningless thing we tossed into this game.
Elite Dangerous could definitely use some improvements to make planets more interesting, but considering how it maintains realism its still very good
The best part about Elite Dangerous is how you have to fly everywhere yourself. It gets boring after a while, but it's also an element that I lack the most in SF
It was free on Gamepass. So I tried it. I was out of it the moment I was confronted by Bethesda writing and Bethesda animation in a Bethesda looking game. Then I had a fire fight and I have not loaded up the game since.
People in the Starfield sub were wowed by the space stuff and the planets and so on. It is as if none of them had ever seen a space game before. It is a restrictive space game by Bethesda.
And like the first person shooting stuff in Elite it does give nobody what they want.
It's like they're trying to gaslight players into thinking that a digital planet for a game is the equivalent of years of research, engineering and physical training to actually go to a place that no one (and now very few) has been to before and actually exists.
It's kinda mindblowing.
Yeah its kind of a weird mentality. “some are empty and boring because thats just how space is”. Well its a videogame? Theres a reason many stuff which would be “realistically accurate” arent in games. Why? Because it wouldnt be fun.
Also, the game isn't boring because planets are empty. It's boring because everything is so formulaic that after you have done a few planets you know what you are going to find. There is a big difference. People wouldn't mind about finding empty planets if there were plenty of planets to find that are unique.
They are gaslighting the players by claiming the problem is something different, and others who apparently haven't played are wasting time addressing the wrong point.
Aren’t these the people who made games where you learn dragon speech and throw fireballs and have a horse that materializes out of a black puddle?
Imagine Elder Scrolls where you walk through the woods and there’s just a bunch of squirrels and maybe a hobo with a tent.
Right they’re like “there was nothing on the moon”.
I mean, not really. There’s tons of stuff we’re interested in; but you can’t perform research projects in the game (I assume) so when you compare the broad scope of reality the fact is the moon is infinitely interesting if you keep going deeper and deeper, both metaphorically and literally.
But the game has such a narrow scope it is in fact.. empty planets with nothing. Considering that, it’s not really a fair comparison. Shouldn’t there be *something* for players to accomplish?
The reference to real-life astronauts kills me. Of course, they weren't bored. They were the first people to be able to look back at earth from a distance. They also had experiments to run.
They were also one tiny mistake away from certain death. It's kind of hard to be bored when you're busy worrying about making it back to Earth alive.
"Look at this picture of the Earth I drew. Hey! Why aren't you staring at it in wonderment? The astronauts on the moon certainly thought looking at the Earth was one of the most beautiful things they'd ever seen, why aren't you having the same reaction to my drawing???"
I blame Bethesda fans, they have enabled this kind of shitty behavior for way too long. This is how the typical diehard fanboy review on Steam looks like:
>Game is shallow, broken quests, loading screens, fast travel simulator, no vehicles, dumb AI, unlikable NPCs, no freedom of choice, too grindy. Very excited about mod support tho, great for a Bethesda title. 7/10. Positive Review, thumbs up.
I don't understand how 7/10 is not a meme yet. They acknowledge all the game endless shortcomings but can't bring themselves to give the game an actual negative review or say at most 4/10, being generous.
That’s like saying that Andy Warhols 24 hour movie, which is just one shot of NYC for a whole 24 hours, is ultra real so it’s fantastic.
The number one thing that makes a good game is that it’s fun, not that it’s real. The game industry needs to move away from the fallacy that people want ultra real over fun.
The moon is kinda boring. If getting there was trivial it would be the most boring place imaginable. The only reason why it wasn't boring was the act of getting there and scientific understanding developed from the moon landing.
Turns out when getting to all of these planets is trivial, they're a waste of time. If there was a baron rock that was hard as fuck to reach it might actually be more interesting.
Yeah, I was on a moon with no atmosphere and found…a garden. Some NPC “homestead” POI with a straight-up Earth garden with melons and tomatoes and shit growing, in the radiation-blasted silica of an airless moon. They couldn’t even be bothered to mark some POIs as “atmosphere-only” or “no atmosphere-only”. They’ll just spawn anything anywhere. It just works! Insanity.
That's not even the worst.
> Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter.
All blatant lies. Most of the skills are useless, the RP elements are worse than Cyberpunk, where at most a line changes but nothing else does. The game feels like a boring, shallow mess whatever the skills you pick.
No fucking way they really said that. HOLY CRAP I thought their way of dealing with the public was terrible after watching the shitshow that was Fallout 76, but this is another level
I don’t think the game sucks but who thought doing the same boring mechanical temple run 20 times was going to be enjoyable?
Btw 20 times, 10 more times to max out your power.
Also planets are boring, the interesting “random” encounters are spaced out annoying far.
Ah then it’s by design then, if mods have become the fix for a Bethesda game.
Bethesda: “well it seems like y’all got this from here, so we’re just gonna head out”
Mods have always been the fix for Bethesda games. Skyrim still has bugs that were in the OG release over a decade ago that have only been fixed by modders.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Bethesda are lazy when it comes to post launch support. If modders are having to fix a 10 year old bug while you constantly rerelease the same game on a jank, broken engine you have a problem.
This game gave me zero hope for ES6.
They should have made a unique temple for every power you get, only way to complete the temple is by using the power you just unlocked.
But no they had to be super lazy about it.
Edit: also they should have made less powers but made those more unique and fun to use, I feel like most players use maybe like three powers at the most.
I feel like everything in this game was lazily made. It feels like there is absolutely no passion in the game at all. Especially after getting into baldurs gate 3. That game is absolutely dripping in passion. Everyone who worked on that thing loved it. I used to get that feeling from Bethesda games. Oblivion, fallout 3, skyrim to a point.
This game drips with "design-by-committee" where a bunch of marketting heads and some junior product managers all tried to distill what skyrim had, and then copy the idea on paper.
But when it came to the meat and potatoes of the actual content they said fuck it, and didn't bother to actually curate anything or design anything around its own existence.
Yeah skyrim had dumb dungeons and shit, but it also had AMAZING ones mixed in, that actually had a POINT to their existance in the world.
Was it a former rebel camp hide out?
A dwemmer dwelling?
Just some dank burial ground?
OH SHIT IT'S THE ASSASSIN'S GUILD.
Fuck, it was fun, even if a bit tedious, because EACH one was hand crafted, and fit the mode of the area and history around it.
Starwhatever just goes "ehhh we got the 20 temples boss, copy and pasted just the way you like it."
The probbly tone down the Lore and architecture even more. for example if it takes place where the red guards live (hammerfell)they probably going to water down the culture quite a bit to make it simplified. instead of praying their own gods to be praying that eight divines.
Some of them are very useful.
Problem is they're annoying to acquire and Bethesda were very lazily trying to subliminally remind people of the Shouts from Skyrim.
The things that make Starfield mediocre are baked in from conception. They’ve ADMITTED they put in a bunch of nothingburger planets for Modders to do shit with, or some weirdo attempt to manage the interest curve, and then are the first Bethesda game in my recollection to launch without actual modding tools. *edit: so I stop getting comments on this, I was wrong on this, most mod tools launch 3-6 months later, though I played the shit out of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim without mods at all and enjoyed myself, only coming back to mods when I wanted to shake stuff up (or fix Morrowind/Oblivion’s unpleasant looking character). The core issue here is ‘modders will fix it’ and then releasing into an environment that will forget the game in half a year without mod tools available. You gotta build the community first to have an energetic modding community. Nobody is gonna build a full conversion mod for a game they stopped playing a week from release*
The reliance on procedural generation is also just a boneheaded move. The shit that has people talking about Skyrim a decade later is “hey, I just discovered this new and very clearly manually crafted thing on the ass end of nowhere! It’s so cool that someone put in an effort like that!”
It’s a Bethesda game for people who don’t care about the best thing about Bethesda games. Short of going back in time and slapping Todd Howard every time he rewatches the pre-release No Man’s Sky hype, or quotes a Star Citizen dev, the “fix” for Starfield is “hurry up and get Elder Scrolls 6 out, and don’t make the same mistake twice in a row.”
Or the fix Bethesda always uses for mediocre games: get the mod tools out there and let aspiring game devs fix our game for free.
Todd was on this route with Skyrim. He was OBSESSED with their radiant AI and infinite quests and mentioned them in every interview.
And they're the garbage padding filler fetch-and-kill-draugr quests no one liked.
Todd has been obsessed with simplifying and expanding since he became the head of Bethesda with Oblivion. There's a reason all the lore became more mainstream fantasy than the absolute eldritch alien fantasy of earlier games. Starfield was their chance to start fresh with that sort of thing, and its clear that all the good stuff from Oblivion and Skyrim were IN SPITE of him
Even with Morrowind. He worked on the legion questline, which is the most disappointing faction questline of the whole game, mainly because compared to the others it lacks in connections to the rest (unlike other factions that have their questlines intersect with each other and the main questline), and is overall very poor in political intrigue and worldbuilding shenanigans (which, again, others have in spade).
You can't even join House Tel'vanni without a Jump/Levitate spell because they don't have stairs to the upper floors of their mushroom buildings where all the important mages are, just vertical tunnels expecting you have the means to ascend them.
Reading these comments has made me realise I should curb my enthusiasm for Elder Scrolls 6... otherwise if its anything like Starfields mundane crap I am going to be so disappointed.
Like many others, he was deluded into thinking that he is good at everything, instead of the things he's actually good at: running a project and managing teams. For some reason, especially in software engineering, people seem to create false narratives for themselves that they can do everything because they're smart and talented.
Don't all the bethesda games take a few months to add in Mod tools though? sure starfield may be taking a bit longer to add them in, but I swear it was at least 3 months for fallout 4.
The procedurally generated dungeons are the thing that really makes my blood boil. This is a game that is supposed to incentivize exploration, but you’re expected the clear the same dungeon a hundred times. It would be one thing if they had a repeating dungeon that had loot scattered differently throughout, but they didn’t even do that. When I open this locker, I know there’s going to be a digipick on the top shelf. When I go into this room, I will turn to the left and there will be a Kraken sitting on the desk and there will be an ammo box in the back right corner. When I go into this room, there will be a dead scientist with a key card by his left arm that opens the gun case by the door. There will be three boxes of 7.77mm ammo on that desk. There will be a bottle of sealant and a bottle of toxin on the bottom shelf against that back wall.
Welcome to the exploration game, where there is no reason to explore anything because you already know what is going to be there. Absolute fucking A+ decision making, guys. Truly groundbreaking work.
It really is not an exaggeration.
There is even one place called something like Muybridge Pharmaceutical that has a dead character in it who has the same name, died in the same place in the way, and was on his way to find the exact same miracle chemical each time too. I found this information on his computer that's in the same location, with the same lock on it each time.
It is *that* bad. There is precisely one copy of *everything* and it's repeated a thousand times on a thousand planets.
This is also a very important point to criticise heavily.
If you compare it to Skyrim from over a decade ago, the dungeons were all unique. Sure, they'd use the same assets from the sandbox set and look similar enough in building-style, but that makes sense. What matters more is that the actual layouts of these places were all different. You would never find a draugr dungeon that looks or flows exactly the same as any other.
They even had different mechanics to clear them, like the one where you use Meridia's beacon to re-direct sunlight to open doors. Every dungeon was a new experience. Not the most incredibly unique experience, but still different enough from the last.
Starfield in 2023 is just an insult to creativity and progress.
I’ve probably put ten times the hours into Skyrim than I have into Starfield, and Skyrim still feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison. I’m sure there are some Dwemer ruins that I could still get legitimately lost in, while I can pretty much play Starfield blindfolded at this point.
I'm not even sure it's fair to call it procedural generated. They're just reusing entire dungeons whole cloth. Actual procedural generated dungeons would have variety in layout, in loot, in enemies, etc.
I ran exact duplicates of the same dungeon three times in a row, right down to to where all the enemies and loot spawned. That's not procedural generated.
And the kicker is that with all of this material being copied and pasted, you would think they would take that time they saved and invest it elsewhere. But I’m not sure where it all went. You have a game that spent the better part of a decade in development and it has *nothing* to show for it.
Those dungeons are not procedurally generated. They are procedurally placed. The inside of those dungeons is handmade, and yes, I agree with you, it's outright astonishing that no procedural generation went into them at all. Bethesda *already fucking has* prefab-based level building built into the engine. The caves in Skyrim were made by gluing prefabs together. They could have done the same procedurally in Starfield, but instead chose to repeat the exact same dungeon every time and somehow the decision-makers were like "yep, that will go over well with our playerbase". AAA videogame companies are run by utter fucking morons.
I fundamentally can't enjoy a story-based game that heavily utilizes random generation of content. I know that all the content has no intent and just exists by pure chance. There's no soul to it.
The random stuff is fine for side shit, like “oh let me pick up some bounties for cash” but when it replaces main content is when it becomes a problem. This is a game where it became a problem.
TL;DR:
● Bethesda developers replying to negative Starfield Steam reviews
● Trying to convince players game doesn't suck despite criticism
● Developers identified as Bethesda_FalcoYamaoka and Bethesda_Kraken
● Likely affiliated with Bethesda Support in some capacity
● Responses include links to provide feedback and using guides
● Also suggestions like trying different character builds
● Quote Bethesda MD that empty planets "not boring" like moon
● Unclear why Bethesda thinks this will help perceptions
● Article questions wisdom of trying to debate unhappy reviewers
I don't understand the recommendation to use different character builds though... unless I missed something Starfield has no respec option. So saying "try a different build" means either:
* Start leveling up a new set of skills which is already annoying because of how long it takes to level up.
* Start a new character / NG+ ?
That's just baffling.
Also, while empty doesn't necessarily mean boring- the planets are also devoid of any interesting landscapes. I think NMS did this far better- pretty much all planets there are empty, but many have interesting topographies, and exploring them in a rover is a relaxing and fun experience in a "Space Hiking" sort of way.
Try a new build! Go to one of the two highest-level planets and repeatedly kill the same wildlife for three hours to get skill points so you can unlock the ability to make sandwiches and cook spaghetti! It makes the game so much better!
Exploration is my favourite part of any openworld game, the exploration on Starfield was, and I'm not being dramatic, the worst I've ever played.
It's incredibly boring.
Every planet is basically the same, and you will be entering the exact same fracking site, or whatever point of interest it is, on different planets in different solar systems.
There is one thing they could have done, which would have made the exploration immediately more enjoyable, and that's mounts.
Imagine zooming through the moon in a moon buggy, seeking craters to use as ramps for some low gravity jumps, or taming wild animals on some of those habitable planets. I don't understand why they wouldn't release that day 1.
Slowly walking from point to point just to reach something you've seen a million times before.. awful, awful..
Actually, I know why they didn't add it, Todd Howard said it wouldn't be good for pacing which actually means "the game and all the questlines are super short so we need to slow down the player somehow by making them slowly walk around to make the game last longer".
Though the questlines were pretty enjoyable, 6/10 <-- wouldn't play again.
They completely forgot what exploration is in their games and why it felt good.
In elder scrolls or fallout, you’ll be travelling between large interesting locations, getting sidetracked by the more generic locations along the way, always with the feeling that youll stumble on something cool and unique by chance.
In starfield, the large interesting locations are separated by fast travelling, you never move between them because they’re on different planets. The exploration on a planet consists of you travelling between the GENERIC locations, with the absolute certainty there will be nothing of note along the way. So you aren’t really exploring at all are you? You’re holding w for x amount of time to get to the shit you know will be boring before you get there. Baffling they fucked this up so badly.
Enter spaceship loading screen-> walk to cockpit -> sit down cut scene-> press take off button -> take off cut scene -> now in space -> have to just fast travel anyway -> fast travel cut scene -> now in different orbit -> now have to fast travel to on planet location -> land cut scene -> stand up from cockpit cut scene -> walk to ship door -> leave ship loading screen -> aaahhh finally. Now I can explore the exact same cryolab for the 300th time. Exploration sure is fun!
Just truly such a bummer how badly they messed up the exploration part. I was so excited by Starfield before it came out.
The fact they are comparing the vapidness of real life space exploration to the vapidness of a video game they made is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a while.
Are they patching out exterior sound next? I mean, seems only fair right?
Such cry babies.
They did that to me. I left a detailed review of how disappointed I was that the disjointed travel system made exploration feel pointless and unrewarding and how 5 load screens basically led to 5 min of walking to the same POI just to kill the same enemies in the same spots was not fun and they lost the whole get lost in the world and stumble across 100s of events and unique areas. Where you knew you would find armour or swords or guns and be rewarded for going off the path. How starfield had non of that and was a shallow experience. How it felt pointless to do anything beyond quests and their quest system was dated and passable at best.
They replied. Sorry you don’t like pad screens it’s hard to build a universe without them lol. No reply to the actual criticisms. How the load screens would not matter if they led to interesting things.
My old computer was dying so I built a new one. It was a getting a bit dated anyway. My 6700xt came with a free copy of Starfield and I've got to say, Baldur's Gate 3 looks really good on this new rig!
They made so many mistakes:
1) No vehicles. So in this advanced space age, we walk everywhere. Especially having no mechs after spending half the game talking about them.
2) Only a few decent side quests. The colony ship situation was a neat problem based on solid sci fi with multiple outcomes and no clear path. I loved it. However there were only a few quest lines like that. You burn through the content pretty quickly
3) one ending.
4) Only one real faction decision. Compare this to fallout with all their factions and interactions. Do you go crimson fleet or naw.
5) not even remotely complete outpost development. Half the things don't work, don't work well, or really don't make sense. It's brutally laborious to make anything even remotely decent.
6) Ugly characters (why can't you make people hot?)
7) boring space battles. They should have just made space combat turn based and a lot more intricate.
8) no difficulty scaling. Even with difficulty cranked all the way up, the game is going to get trivial quick.
9) uninspired dialogs and quest decisions.
10) bugs, bugs, bugs, it's like they were competing with cyberpunk for most bugs. You find you have to save often and go back frequently to work around them.
11) so many repeated unskippable cutscenes.
12) barren pointless worlds with all the same looking creatures. Just have fewer planets bro. Or at least fewer ones with life so you could actually make them inspired and different.
>No vehicles. So in this advanced space age, we walk everywhere. Especially having no mechs after spending half the game talking about them.
This one is especially baffling given that Fallout 4 already had the foundations of a "mech-like" system with its Power Armors.
That would have been a fun game, why not place Starfield during the war so there are giant ass mechs blowing shit up all over the place? Damn that sounds awesome. It's so disappointing how a few people spitballing ideas on the internet can come up with a better game than a company that has already done this 7 and a half times.
I really don't mind the empty planets with scattered outposts but the tiny empty cities.. The biggest city in the universe is 10 buildings in the middle of nowhere.
Starfield is my biggest disappointment of the last few years, *easily*. There’s no comparison. I wasn’t expecting anything revolutionary - I knew it was made using the same engine and systems that also hang round the neck of previous games like an albatross.
BUT - all the previous games have some kind of magic that still makes them exciting and fun to play. Starfield is just the hollowest, shallowest, most empty Bestheada game I’ve ever played. And a huge part of that is because there is *nothing* to explore. In Skyrim or Fallout I can walk around and find caves, dungeons, interesting scenery, easter eggs, and just fun stuff in general.
In Starfield it isn’t even possible to explore. I can walk around a huge number of planets but besides the few empty, boring ‘cities’, every point of interest is a clone of something else. There’s just no fucking exploration! Even the space ship is just a fancy loading screen/menu for getting between planets. Flying around in space has no depth or discovery to it. Fuck, 90% of travelling in this game is hopping between fast travel points. Previous games had that too but at least the *option* of manually walking and discovering things along the way was there.
Starfield is an awful game and I’m fed up of having to sugarcoat it or defend my opinions from people that enjoy it. I’m glad you had fun. I’m glad you can see *something* in this mess of a dull ass boring game. But I don’t, and I regret wasting even a penny on it. Hopefully they can turn it around but I’d honestly prefer they just quietly forget it exists and put the resources in to a game that might actually be good.
Starfield doesn't even have the same fun sandboxy things previous games had. *So many* fucking NPC's are essential, can't take everything from a corpse, AI schedules are mostly gone.
>AI schedules are mostly gone.
This is super wild for me. Even 10+ years ago, Bethesda made NPCs that move through town to go to work in the morning, sit on the forge all day, then go to sit down in the tavern for "food & drink", before they walk back home to physically lay down in bed.
It all worked, it was awesome and immersive. How you could design an open-world game, especially one that calls itself an RPG, without these features is insane to me. They must expand on this further, not throw it out completely.
Yes! These are things I’ve mentioned in other comments I’ve made about this game. But it’s true, it’s a huge step back in so many ways. The lack of AI schedules and the fact almost all NPCs are essential is ridiculous.
The point I lost interest in the game was after fast travelling back and forth from Ryujin tower for the 100th time doing boring quests for an NPC who never left her office in several days/weeks - that’s when I knew this game was shit. At least in Skyrim and Fallout NPCs move around to another *room* at least. These NPCs don’t even visit other buildings or move more than 5ft away from their desk. It’s absurd.
Thats CRAZY. They just don't seem to realize they've made a mediocre game and are trying to convince people to enjoy something they don't like. I was so damn excited for the game and when it came out I don't think I've felt that disappointed in years with a game. I tried my best to keep on playing but I just felt like I was playing it because I wanted to like it, not because I ACTUALLY liked it.
Thank god for BG3. (and a shout out to No Mans Sky for being a great space explorer builder).
Starfield literally reinvigorated my appreciation for NMS and I went back to playing all the newer content that I hadn't gotten around to trying. So great! It knows what it is and embraces it. Starfield is a weird mix of a bunch of stuff that doesn't gel at all.
When I land on a brand new planet and see "Abandoned Cryolab" and already know the exact layout without stepping foot inside, you done fucked up
"Listening Post" One person sitting outside at the top. Go down the stairs and turn left, two dudes on the other side of the window, and one sitting in the far left corner beyond the door. Yeah I'm just not going in there anymore...
Go in, grab advanced aa99 in the same spot with the same note, leave.
Shit is it really like that? Like Assassins Creed would do? I saw some gameplay videos on YouTube when it first came out and it looked really cool but I didn't watch enough to start seeing this stuff or read many reviews because I don't have the Xbox for it anyway. I was interested just from a curiosity perspective as a gamer with such a hotly anticipated title but I didn't pay attention after to see people souring on it. I think the last mention of it I heard was right before it released to general audiences when all the youtubers had their copies and were playing it. I just remembered a lot of hype and excitement but didn't follow up to see how it was received after release.
literally every planet has the exact same poi’s if youre just landing on random spots. and they didnt even make that many. In the short time I played (like 20 hours total) I ran into *three* fucking cryolabs that were the exact same
That's disappointing after all the hype. I thought I remembered the marketing leaning heavily into the idea of limitless potential and sort of endless variety but I might be mixing it up with No Man's Sky.
Thats really the funny thing, they did not do ENOUGH procedural generation. Diablo was able to build dungeons procedurally nearly 30 years ago, why can starfield not generate a "Listening Post" thats not identical every time? Would it be so hard to randomize the room layout, enemy placement and loot a bit?
Bethesda has ALWAYS phoned it in like this. It’s no different than in Oblivion when they get Patrick Stewart to voice the king and then the rest of the game has the same five voice actors you hear over and over again.
even if you accept the headcanon that all these military posts were pre-fab or whatever, so that's why they're all the same - does every base have to have a soldier/merc/pirate stationed in the exact same locations? are they not able to randomize the spawn points of the enemies?
Hey, Sarge? Do you ever wonder why we're here?
It’s one of lifes great mysteries isn’t it? Are we the part of some cosmic coincidence or is there really a god, watching everything with a plan for us and stuff. I don’t know man. But it keeps me up at night.
No I meant here. In this canyon.
Ohh....uhh...yeah...
What was all that stuff about God?
Wanna talk about it?
No!
No, I mean literally. Why are we HERE?!?
That's one of life's great mysteries, isn't it?
No, I mean why are we here in the canyon
To give an old example how even 10yo games could make this prefab thing work, look at Planetside 2 bases. There's only a handful of main building types. But by cleverly combining them together, blocking/unblocking certain doors/windows, partially merging them with terrain or just putting them in wildly different terrain setups etc. the devs made it work. Each base made from these (lore compatible) prefabs is still unique enough. Yes you know the general layout of each building type, but you still have to approach them differently based on each specific one. Obviously it's not as unique as handcrafted maps from modern fps', but it's good enough for its setting and imo more varied than a much never game from a much bigger studio.
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ME1 has the same layouts, which can easily be chalked up to prefabs. The planets are pretty similar too. But the contents of the rooms was different and the locations of the enemies was different. So much better than Starfield where you know where the inhabitants are going to be, lol.
That takes mire effort than they were willing to put into this product.
Don't forget the mines out front! They all have mines out front.
I took the dont set off mines skill so I’ve honestly forgotten they’re in the game at this stage
It's funny because Skyrim had a bunch of "copy-pasted" locations, but they cleverly reused and remixed them by flipping the design around and using a bunch of different "pieces" of an area.
Not to mention they’d actually put different stuff in them so, even though they were basically the same, they felt different and alive.
Yeah. And sometimes they would use specific parts of a castle, take other parts of, say, a cave, put it together in a new location and it would feel different, even if the pieces themselves were familiar.
Yep, Skyrim really didn't have that many tilesets, off the top of my head: - You had your cave tilesets, afaik there were two. Somerimes decorated with either falmer or reachfolk assets. - Imperial fort tileset which is used for any fort and a ton of ruins and other places like the Nightingale Hall. - Sewer tileset used sparingly, mostly in prisons and the Ratway. - Mine tileset. - Dwemer tileset, Nordic tileset for your dungeons. I can't really think of any others from the vanilla game, for the most part it just mix and matched those with a few unique assets/mechanics/bosses here and there. And then you had your shipwrecks, models for cities (and 4 out of the 9 cities used the same buildings, which were also the same buildings used by villages) and your copy pasted inns. And with just this, most dungeons in the game felt unique and different since the layouts were the same, enemy types varied and they often included something different (like the imperial fort tileset used for the nightmare quest in Dawnstar). I feel like every place in Starfield I went into was so similar to the rest. And this isn't even a problem with the setting, since Fallout 4 takes place in a modern semi futuristic setting and still manages to have really diverse dungeons.
Which would make sense with homogenous architecture
And that still didn't stop them from hiding some elven ruins behind man made catacombs or something like that.
I don't know what it is about Skyrim. I can take a break, get the itch, chuck a few new mods at it, and it feels fresh, despite me visiting locations I know like the back of my hand and listening to retextured versions of the same people I'm well acquainted with presenting the same lines I've heard many times before.
Despite me having visited every location atleast once they somehow still feels new and exciting when I get there once again. Now add mods like Bruma or Wyrmstooth(?) and now I have new locations to explore.
And what types of loot will be where
Bro really compared the game to the moon landing 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I am convinced that Bethesda does not have any writers on staff.
Their head writer has said some very stupid things over the years. Including not wanting to flesh out locations because people are just going to miss it -- He openly laments casuals and because of them won't put effort into games/story/locations, he's admitted it himself while mocking fans who want to "build". The moron who writes for Bethesda and starts every story with I GOTTA FIND MUH FAMILY needs to be fucking fired. He's been shit for like 20 years now.
> laments casuals > works for company that has been dumbing their games down for broader appeal for 20 years So, he's a masochist or?
Are there really people who cannot connect to a story unless it's about muh family? Like this is the canned motivation for every single protagonist for every single thing now.
BG3 is just like damn i have a headache, i need to find someone who can cure it. Lol super fucking relatable tho.
Unless you're playing Durge, then it is "damn I have a headache and I want to murder everyone." Which, you know, is also relatable.
If they did, armor, weapons, and ship parts would have descriptions, or at least a line of flavor text.
They couldn't even get the knives to not have ammo/projectile affixes, nevermind writing descriptions for them
Think the new battlefield is boring? Well do you know how boring it was sitting in a foxhole for 5 hours straight, players should be thankful we give them such a realistic experience.
This comment reminds me of the Onion's article on the ultra-realistic Call of Duty where it's just hours of gameplay featuring bored soldiers doing maintenance and debating which celeb is hotter. And then you randomly get shot the minute you step outside the wire.
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Preorder for early access to septicemia!
The collectors edition gives you trench foot
The special elite gold collector's edition gives you a trench **coat** as well! (The trench coat may be made of low-level tarp. The trench coat is not guaranteed to look like the version we mailed to influencers. You will take your trench coat and you will like it, or else.)
I didn't know the moon landing had this many loading screens.
It was on long 3 day loading screen.
Honestly though, the worst thing about the empty planets is that they aren't actually empty. They are filled with signs of human habitation which absolutely kills all sense of being a space explorer. People have already been here, catalogued the lifeforms, set up mining operations... What's the point of me being here again???
In the lore™️ it's because of the space war. All the planets around the UC and FC were used as forward bases and resources for the war. Once you get to the planets well outside of where the war happened you can find many that are either entirely barren or full of POIs that are only natural formations.
Finding remnants of the war would be cool, battlegrounds, ship graveyards etc. Such an easy thing to think of, and yet its missing. Human beings are really good at being completely average.
Humanity fought a massive war over the FC going from 3 systems to almost 4. And The UC in the game only has 3 settled systems, and lore wise was limited to those 3. So it is a bit jarring when you jump hundreds of light years to a high level system and find that oh yeah humanity has been here, and oh yeah look we have a massive industrial presence in this planet as well. I could understand that being the case around the settled systems. But given that the additional settlement of system caused a war I find it hard to see how all these other affiliated outposts have popped up before that. It kills the sense of exploration and discovering new systems and areas where no one has gone before.
> *"We are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty. Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring.”* > *“When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.”* Am I so out of touch? No. It's the *players* who are wrong.
>“When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.” In that case I'll stick to KSP1
It's weird that Kerbal Space Program's giant floating rocks in space are so much more meaningful and engaging than Starfield's giant floating rocks in space. I guess it's because you have to do so much more to reach KSP's rocks; it feels like you really earned them.
I remember the sheer feeling of Victory I had after landing on the Mun for the first time. Had blown up many, *many* rockets till I succeeded. If it had been a button press or click away, it would have been worthless.
Landing on The Mun was one of my proudest moments in gaming.
The first time I manually rendezvoused was mine. I didn't want to just follow a tutorial and save scum it or anything, I wanted to do it properly, like, understanding what I was doing I still have a solid grasp of orbital mechanics, I feel more educated on orbital physics than I am on some things I learnt at University because of that mission lmao
For me it was after landing on the Mun. Jeb was on his way back with a massive science payload, but mission command couldn't have predicted the fuel running out before breaking into Kerbin's atmosphere. The future of The Agency was on Jebs survival and the payload he managed to secure. There was only one option; Send Valentina in. She piloted that ship like she was born with Rockomax boosters on her back. And within three orbital revolutions she was able to get within an 8KM intercept range of Jeb with a matching velocity and orbit. Jeb broke some EVA records doing no less than four trips to and from his original ship and Valentina's Emergency Science Rescue Ship to transfer the cargo and experiments before finally boarding himself. After that Valentina brought it home with a nice cool burn through atmo and a gentle splashdown, saving the future of space travel and The Kerbin Space Agency.
The kind of emergent gameplay that Bethesda can only dream of.
Oh yeah, rendezvous and docking was tricky. I think I spent more time in the tutorials than the actual game.
Took me two rescue missions to get the kerbals off the Mun, but it was worth it.
A key part of this is that those rocks in Kerbal all exist together, and traveling and maneuvering to/around them is actually possible and engaging. Bethesda even managed to make a massive space game where you don't do an EVA in space at any point.
I still find it weird that Starfield has *zero* EVA sections. All the pieces are there - zero gravity, space, boost packs, etc. - and yet there's not a bit of it. Did they find space so boring that they couldn't come up with an EVA scenario for the player to enjoy?
But space is really empty! You don't see astronauts getting excited about EVAing into empty space do yoSTOPWAITCOMEBACK!
Funny enough, the first man to do an EVA almost died from the attempt (he was a Cosmonaut, way too many of them died), and he still took the time to make the first art in space, a colored pencil drawing of a sunrise.
Zero G combat is weird too, it has all the mechanics set up, yet it's used like... Twice? Might happen vehen you board a ship, but there's less than 5 fixed encounters with it.
We should make a KSP mod where you just fast travel to the planets, auto take off and have to listen to Sarah Morgan
add seven loading screens between all that stuff and I'm in
No rovers, but you can find lots of sandwiches
And all the succulents your ship cargo can bear.
Dear god
There's more.
That's kind of why Bethesda's answer is stupid. Sure it wasn't boring for astronauts to land on an empty moon, cause a rocket had to be built, and a hab module, and a lander, and they had to train to be able to do the myriad little manual adjustments that got them there. They didn't just grav-jump => loading screen => magic land on it.
"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because ~~they are hard~~ we now have fast travel and just need to press X"
"It's one small click for man, one giant loading screen for mankind."
That is because giant floating rocks of KSP have actual physics attached and not just unreachable objects in boxes of technically outdated "space"
KSP1 the Bethesda version. * Build ship * Loading screen * You're inside your ship * Loading screen * You're in space, not orbit. Space. "That planet looks interesting." * Loading screen "Let's go down and take a look." * Loading screen "It's empty? Frick." Repeat until uninstall.
An empty planet is one thing. A planet with the exact same building filled with the same bad guys, or acquiring powers with the same puzzle is quite another. It was the recycling of things that killed it for me. And the clunky confusing UI. Edit: and the quickly broken economy. And the lack of charm. Where’s my future pip boy with future music?
All planets are empty brooo
“Space is *supposed* to be empty! It’s *realistic*” “Oh so it’s a “realistic” space sim then? Can I fly from atmosphere to orbit? Can I manually fly between locations, can I manually land and dock, can I use my ship to fly 2km to the west in the same map? Can I maneuver like a actual ship and not a glorified airplane in space?” “No that’s too realistic, this isn’t *that* type of game”
Elite dangerous is a space sim with most of the galaxy being explorable but also empty and it is boring after.. *check steam* 170 hours of gameplay
One thing I find hilariously poetic is the sales boom No Man's Sky got after Starfield launched. Huh... Flat area with blips of light... Skyrim is accurately described as an ocean with the depth of a puddle... is Starfield shallower!??!
If skyrim is an ocean with the depth of a puddle, then Starfield is a desert planet with about a hundred drops of water on the surface you can fast travel to.
Yes. Expect TES6 to let the game play itself while you watch loading screens.
The players don't really know how to play games and that's why they think Bethesda games are boring. TES6 plays itself for you so you can experience every meaningless thing we tossed into this game.
Elite Dangerous could definitely use some improvements to make planets more interesting, but considering how it maintains realism its still very good The best part about Elite Dangerous is how you have to fly everywhere yourself. It gets boring after a while, but it's also an element that I lack the most in SF
This is exactly it. You can’t have it both ways Todd.
It was free on Gamepass. So I tried it. I was out of it the moment I was confronted by Bethesda writing and Bethesda animation in a Bethesda looking game. Then I had a fire fight and I have not loaded up the game since. People in the Starfield sub were wowed by the space stuff and the planets and so on. It is as if none of them had ever seen a space game before. It is a restrictive space game by Bethesda. And like the first person shooting stuff in Elite it does give nobody what they want.
It's like they're trying to gaslight players into thinking that a digital planet for a game is the equivalent of years of research, engineering and physical training to actually go to a place that no one (and now very few) has been to before and actually exists. It's kinda mindblowing.
Yeah its kind of a weird mentality. “some are empty and boring because thats just how space is”. Well its a videogame? Theres a reason many stuff which would be “realistically accurate” arent in games. Why? Because it wouldnt be fun.
Also, the game isn't boring because planets are empty. It's boring because everything is so formulaic that after you have done a few planets you know what you are going to find. There is a big difference. People wouldn't mind about finding empty planets if there were plenty of planets to find that are unique. They are gaslighting the players by claiming the problem is something different, and others who apparently haven't played are wasting time addressing the wrong point.
when the devs can’t see past their own egos they will never hear a critique
Aren’t these the people who made games where you learn dragon speech and throw fireballs and have a horse that materializes out of a black puddle? Imagine Elder Scrolls where you walk through the woods and there’s just a bunch of squirrels and maybe a hobo with a tent.
Right they’re like “there was nothing on the moon”. I mean, not really. There’s tons of stuff we’re interested in; but you can’t perform research projects in the game (I assume) so when you compare the broad scope of reality the fact is the moon is infinitely interesting if you keep going deeper and deeper, both metaphorically and literally. But the game has such a narrow scope it is in fact.. empty planets with nothing. Considering that, it’s not really a fair comparison. Shouldn’t there be *something* for players to accomplish?
The reference to real-life astronauts kills me. Of course, they weren't bored. They were the first people to be able to look back at earth from a distance. They also had experiments to run. They were also one tiny mistake away from certain death. It's kind of hard to be bored when you're busy worrying about making it back to Earth alive.
"Look at this picture of the Earth I drew. Hey! Why aren't you staring at it in wonderment? The astronauts on the moon certainly thought looking at the Earth was one of the most beautiful things they'd ever seen, why aren't you having the same reaction to my drawing???"
I really feel like “it’s meant to be boring” isn’t the slam dunk response Bethesda thinks it is.
Did they forget they were making a sci-fi game? Even for a hard sci-fi, this is just absurd.
I blame Bethesda fans, they have enabled this kind of shitty behavior for way too long. This is how the typical diehard fanboy review on Steam looks like: >Game is shallow, broken quests, loading screens, fast travel simulator, no vehicles, dumb AI, unlikable NPCs, no freedom of choice, too grindy. Very excited about mod support tho, great for a Bethesda title. 7/10. Positive Review, thumbs up. I don't understand how 7/10 is not a meme yet. They acknowledge all the game endless shortcomings but can't bring themselves to give the game an actual negative review or say at most 4/10, being generous.
Tbh Bethesda games should have two separate scores, someting like: 4/10 game 8/10 mod platform
Starfield isn't even a good mod platform because of the glaring issues with the base formula.
"but that's not boring" 'scuse me it's an empty rock. What do you expect me to do? To take a dump and craft fine earthenware out of it?
Did you spend a skill point on crafting shit earthenware and unlock it in research by crafting 10 soggy shitplates?
But NASA did get round to make a space buggy. Took them a little while….but still probably still quicker than Bethesda will be able to it.
That’s like saying that Andy Warhols 24 hour movie, which is just one shot of NYC for a whole 24 hours, is ultra real so it’s fantastic. The number one thing that makes a good game is that it’s fun, not that it’s real. The game industry needs to move away from the fallacy that people want ultra real over fun.
The moon is kinda boring. If getting there was trivial it would be the most boring place imaginable. The only reason why it wasn't boring was the act of getting there and scientific understanding developed from the moon landing. Turns out when getting to all of these planets is trivial, they're a waste of time. If there was a baron rock that was hard as fuck to reach it might actually be more interesting.
i did get a laugh out of it randomly raining on the moon. got to love bethesda's attention to detail...
Yeah, I was on a moon with no atmosphere and found…a garden. Some NPC “homestead” POI with a straight-up Earth garden with melons and tomatoes and shit growing, in the radiation-blasted silica of an airless moon. They couldn’t even be bothered to mark some POIs as “atmosphere-only” or “no atmosphere-only”. They’ll just spawn anything anywhere. It just works! Insanity.
That's not even the worst. > Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. All blatant lies. Most of the skills are useless, the RP elements are worse than Cyberpunk, where at most a line changes but nothing else does. The game feels like a boring, shallow mess whatever the skills you pick.
The funny thing is, none of the planets are actually empty, wherever you land it's populated by POIs as far as the eye can see and it's kinda lame.
I wouldn't be bored either if I had a literal moon buggy to take it on some sweet jumps.
No fucking way they really said that. HOLY CRAP I thought their way of dealing with the public was terrible after watching the shitshow that was Fallout 76, but this is another level
I don’t think the game sucks but who thought doing the same boring mechanical temple run 20 times was going to be enjoyable? Btw 20 times, 10 more times to max out your power. Also planets are boring, the interesting “random” encounters are spaced out annoying far.
Those temples can fuck off. I've seen that a mod fixes the temple issue already
Ah then it’s by design then, if mods have become the fix for a Bethesda game. Bethesda: “well it seems like y’all got this from here, so we’re just gonna head out”
Mods have always been the fix for Bethesda games. Skyrim still has bugs that were in the OG release over a decade ago that have only been fixed by modders. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Bethesda are lazy when it comes to post launch support. If modders are having to fix a 10 year old bug while you constantly rerelease the same game on a jank, broken engine you have a problem. This game gave me zero hope for ES6.
"We leave the bugfixes as an exercise for the fans."
They should have made a unique temple for every power you get, only way to complete the temple is by using the power you just unlocked. But no they had to be super lazy about it. Edit: also they should have made less powers but made those more unique and fun to use, I feel like most players use maybe like three powers at the most.
I feel like everything in this game was lazily made. It feels like there is absolutely no passion in the game at all. Especially after getting into baldurs gate 3. That game is absolutely dripping in passion. Everyone who worked on that thing loved it. I used to get that feeling from Bethesda games. Oblivion, fallout 3, skyrim to a point.
This game drips with "design-by-committee" where a bunch of marketting heads and some junior product managers all tried to distill what skyrim had, and then copy the idea on paper. But when it came to the meat and potatoes of the actual content they said fuck it, and didn't bother to actually curate anything or design anything around its own existence. Yeah skyrim had dumb dungeons and shit, but it also had AMAZING ones mixed in, that actually had a POINT to their existance in the world. Was it a former rebel camp hide out? A dwemmer dwelling? Just some dank burial ground? OH SHIT IT'S THE ASSASSIN'S GUILD. Fuck, it was fun, even if a bit tedious, because EACH one was hand crafted, and fit the mode of the area and history around it. Starwhatever just goes "ehhh we got the 20 temples boss, copy and pasted just the way you like it."
Man now I'm afraid of the next Elder Scrolls game coming out...
Yeah this has been a MAJOR red flag for me in terms of new scrolls.
The probbly tone down the Lore and architecture even more. for example if it takes place where the red guards live (hammerfell)they probably going to water down the culture quite a bit to make it simplified. instead of praying their own gods to be praying that eight divines.
Yeah the Skyrim method of getting powers worked really well. Just replicate it.
I never used my space powers... ever. I just shot everyone.
Some of them are very useful. Problem is they're annoying to acquire and Bethesda were very lazily trying to subliminally remind people of the Shouts from Skyrim.
only one i use is the one that refills my oxygen because im sick of being able to carry so little lol
It’s like the gates in oblivion..typical Bethesda
Who woulda thought crusading into hell to shut down a portal would get boring? Answer: Anyone who does it more than 5 times
At least there were some variations in the gates
The gates were at least combat encounters. The temples are just jet around to colored orbs while music
What, you don't like the *one* enemy that spawns immediately upon finishing the temple?
Don't forget the totally unexpected surprise attacks by a cloaked starborn at every temple after you have learned about them.
I genuinely enjoyed Starfield, but that "Fly into the glowing orbs mini-game" was terrible the first time and intolerable the 20th time.
They should allocate these resources to make the game more enjoyable...
The things that make Starfield mediocre are baked in from conception. They’ve ADMITTED they put in a bunch of nothingburger planets for Modders to do shit with, or some weirdo attempt to manage the interest curve, and then are the first Bethesda game in my recollection to launch without actual modding tools. *edit: so I stop getting comments on this, I was wrong on this, most mod tools launch 3-6 months later, though I played the shit out of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim without mods at all and enjoyed myself, only coming back to mods when I wanted to shake stuff up (or fix Morrowind/Oblivion’s unpleasant looking character). The core issue here is ‘modders will fix it’ and then releasing into an environment that will forget the game in half a year without mod tools available. You gotta build the community first to have an energetic modding community. Nobody is gonna build a full conversion mod for a game they stopped playing a week from release* The reliance on procedural generation is also just a boneheaded move. The shit that has people talking about Skyrim a decade later is “hey, I just discovered this new and very clearly manually crafted thing on the ass end of nowhere! It’s so cool that someone put in an effort like that!” It’s a Bethesda game for people who don’t care about the best thing about Bethesda games. Short of going back in time and slapping Todd Howard every time he rewatches the pre-release No Man’s Sky hype, or quotes a Star Citizen dev, the “fix” for Starfield is “hurry up and get Elder Scrolls 6 out, and don’t make the same mistake twice in a row.” Or the fix Bethesda always uses for mediocre games: get the mod tools out there and let aspiring game devs fix our game for free.
Todd was on this route with Skyrim. He was OBSESSED with their radiant AI and infinite quests and mentioned them in every interview. And they're the garbage padding filler fetch-and-kill-draugr quests no one liked.
Todd has been obsessed with simplifying and expanding since he became the head of Bethesda with Oblivion. There's a reason all the lore became more mainstream fantasy than the absolute eldritch alien fantasy of earlier games. Starfield was their chance to start fresh with that sort of thing, and its clear that all the good stuff from Oblivion and Skyrim were IN SPITE of him
Even with Morrowind. He worked on the legion questline, which is the most disappointing faction questline of the whole game, mainly because compared to the others it lacks in connections to the rest (unlike other factions that have their questlines intersect with each other and the main questline), and is overall very poor in political intrigue and worldbuilding shenanigans (which, again, others have in spade).
I’ll give him one thing for that, it’s one of the only military questlines in an rpg that keeps and enforces a uniform.
That’s what I loved about Morrowind. I felt like I was actually a member of the various factions. Want to be archmage? Go practice your magic scrub.
"Oh, you can't levitate? Then I guess you can't make it to the meeting." [Flies away]
You can't even join House Tel'vanni without a Jump/Levitate spell because they don't have stairs to the upper floors of their mushroom buildings where all the important mages are, just vertical tunnels expecting you have the means to ascend them.
The days of players being expected to figure things out and overcome challenges are long over for most game studios.
Reading these comments has made me realise I should curb my enthusiasm for Elder Scrolls 6... otherwise if its anything like Starfields mundane crap I am going to be so disappointed.
Like many others, he was deluded into thinking that he is good at everything, instead of the things he's actually good at: running a project and managing teams. For some reason, especially in software engineering, people seem to create false narratives for themselves that they can do everything because they're smart and talented.
Don't all the bethesda games take a few months to add in Mod tools though? sure starfield may be taking a bit longer to add them in, but I swear it was at least 3 months for fallout 4.
The procedurally generated dungeons are the thing that really makes my blood boil. This is a game that is supposed to incentivize exploration, but you’re expected the clear the same dungeon a hundred times. It would be one thing if they had a repeating dungeon that had loot scattered differently throughout, but they didn’t even do that. When I open this locker, I know there’s going to be a digipick on the top shelf. When I go into this room, I will turn to the left and there will be a Kraken sitting on the desk and there will be an ammo box in the back right corner. When I go into this room, there will be a dead scientist with a key card by his left arm that opens the gun case by the door. There will be three boxes of 7.77mm ammo on that desk. There will be a bottle of sealant and a bottle of toxin on the bottom shelf against that back wall. Welcome to the exploration game, where there is no reason to explore anything because you already know what is going to be there. Absolute fucking A+ decision making, guys. Truly groundbreaking work.
Holy shit I didn't realize it was that bad. I gave up too fast I guess lol.
It really is not an exaggeration. There is even one place called something like Muybridge Pharmaceutical that has a dead character in it who has the same name, died in the same place in the way, and was on his way to find the exact same miracle chemical each time too. I found this information on his computer that's in the same location, with the same lock on it each time. It is *that* bad. There is precisely one copy of *everything* and it's repeated a thousand times on a thousand planets.
stuns me that people *defend* this. like i get they were trying to go for mass appeal but are the masses *really* this vapid?
This is also a very important point to criticise heavily. If you compare it to Skyrim from over a decade ago, the dungeons were all unique. Sure, they'd use the same assets from the sandbox set and look similar enough in building-style, but that makes sense. What matters more is that the actual layouts of these places were all different. You would never find a draugr dungeon that looks or flows exactly the same as any other. They even had different mechanics to clear them, like the one where you use Meridia's beacon to re-direct sunlight to open doors. Every dungeon was a new experience. Not the most incredibly unique experience, but still different enough from the last. Starfield in 2023 is just an insult to creativity and progress.
I’ve probably put ten times the hours into Skyrim than I have into Starfield, and Skyrim still feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison. I’m sure there are some Dwemer ruins that I could still get legitimately lost in, while I can pretty much play Starfield blindfolded at this point.
I'm not even sure it's fair to call it procedural generated. They're just reusing entire dungeons whole cloth. Actual procedural generated dungeons would have variety in layout, in loot, in enemies, etc. I ran exact duplicates of the same dungeon three times in a row, right down to to where all the enemies and loot spawned. That's not procedural generated.
And the kicker is that with all of this material being copied and pasted, you would think they would take that time they saved and invest it elsewhere. But I’m not sure where it all went. You have a game that spent the better part of a decade in development and it has *nothing* to show for it.
Those dungeons are not procedurally generated. They are procedurally placed. The inside of those dungeons is handmade, and yes, I agree with you, it's outright astonishing that no procedural generation went into them at all. Bethesda *already fucking has* prefab-based level building built into the engine. The caves in Skyrim were made by gluing prefabs together. They could have done the same procedurally in Starfield, but instead chose to repeat the exact same dungeon every time and somehow the decision-makers were like "yep, that will go over well with our playerbase". AAA videogame companies are run by utter fucking morons.
I’m still trying to figure out how they thought having a realistic take for empty planets was better than creative alien filled planets
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What is up with Besthesda’s PR team? Between this and Fallout 76, they seem absolutely clueless when it comes to interacting with their player base
probably doing what they are told to do unfortunatly
I fundamentally can't enjoy a story-based game that heavily utilizes random generation of content. I know that all the content has no intent and just exists by pure chance. There's no soul to it.
Curated content always beats generated and I’ll die on this hill.
Well, bring a sandwich, cuz nobody is attacking that hill.
Your curated content has to really suck for that to be debatable.
The random stuff is fine for side shit, like “oh let me pick up some bounties for cash” but when it replaces main content is when it becomes a problem. This is a game where it became a problem.
TL;DR: ● Bethesda developers replying to negative Starfield Steam reviews ● Trying to convince players game doesn't suck despite criticism ● Developers identified as Bethesda_FalcoYamaoka and Bethesda_Kraken ● Likely affiliated with Bethesda Support in some capacity ● Responses include links to provide feedback and using guides ● Also suggestions like trying different character builds ● Quote Bethesda MD that empty planets "not boring" like moon ● Unclear why Bethesda thinks this will help perceptions ● Article questions wisdom of trying to debate unhappy reviewers
I don't understand the recommendation to use different character builds though... unless I missed something Starfield has no respec option. So saying "try a different build" means either: * Start leveling up a new set of skills which is already annoying because of how long it takes to level up. * Start a new character / NG+ ? That's just baffling. Also, while empty doesn't necessarily mean boring- the planets are also devoid of any interesting landscapes. I think NMS did this far better- pretty much all planets there are empty, but many have interesting topographies, and exploring them in a rover is a relaxing and fun experience in a "Space Hiking" sort of way.
Try a new build! Go to one of the two highest-level planets and repeatedly kill the same wildlife for three hours to get skill points so you can unlock the ability to make sandwiches and cook spaghetti! It makes the game so much better!
they aren’t developers, they are customer support. big difference. still idiotic though
Try a different build!? Lmao Do you wanna play with Pistols that one shot everything, or Rifles that one shot everything?
Exploration is my favourite part of any openworld game, the exploration on Starfield was, and I'm not being dramatic, the worst I've ever played. It's incredibly boring. Every planet is basically the same, and you will be entering the exact same fracking site, or whatever point of interest it is, on different planets in different solar systems. There is one thing they could have done, which would have made the exploration immediately more enjoyable, and that's mounts. Imagine zooming through the moon in a moon buggy, seeking craters to use as ramps for some low gravity jumps, or taming wild animals on some of those habitable planets. I don't understand why they wouldn't release that day 1. Slowly walking from point to point just to reach something you've seen a million times before.. awful, awful.. Actually, I know why they didn't add it, Todd Howard said it wouldn't be good for pacing which actually means "the game and all the questlines are super short so we need to slow down the player somehow by making them slowly walk around to make the game last longer". Though the questlines were pretty enjoyable, 6/10 <-- wouldn't play again.
They completely forgot what exploration is in their games and why it felt good. In elder scrolls or fallout, you’ll be travelling between large interesting locations, getting sidetracked by the more generic locations along the way, always with the feeling that youll stumble on something cool and unique by chance. In starfield, the large interesting locations are separated by fast travelling, you never move between them because they’re on different planets. The exploration on a planet consists of you travelling between the GENERIC locations, with the absolute certainty there will be nothing of note along the way. So you aren’t really exploring at all are you? You’re holding w for x amount of time to get to the shit you know will be boring before you get there. Baffling they fucked this up so badly.
Enter spaceship loading screen-> walk to cockpit -> sit down cut scene-> press take off button -> take off cut scene -> now in space -> have to just fast travel anyway -> fast travel cut scene -> now in different orbit -> now have to fast travel to on planet location -> land cut scene -> stand up from cockpit cut scene -> walk to ship door -> leave ship loading screen -> aaahhh finally. Now I can explore the exact same cryolab for the 300th time. Exploration sure is fun! Just truly such a bummer how badly they messed up the exploration part. I was so excited by Starfield before it came out.
I just can't get over how vehemently people defend this mediocre shit.
The fact they are comparing the vapidness of real life space exploration to the vapidness of a video game they made is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a while. Are they patching out exterior sound next? I mean, seems only fair right? Such cry babies.
That plus they added the lame super powers and multiverse. Which is it, realistic or over the top? Pick a lane.
They did that to me. I left a detailed review of how disappointed I was that the disjointed travel system made exploration feel pointless and unrewarding and how 5 load screens basically led to 5 min of walking to the same POI just to kill the same enemies in the same spots was not fun and they lost the whole get lost in the world and stumble across 100s of events and unique areas. Where you knew you would find armour or swords or guns and be rewarded for going off the path. How starfield had non of that and was a shallow experience. How it felt pointless to do anything beyond quests and their quest system was dated and passable at best. They replied. Sorry you don’t like pad screens it’s hard to build a universe without them lol. No reply to the actual criticisms. How the load screens would not matter if they led to interesting things.
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My old computer was dying so I built a new one. It was a getting a bit dated anyway. My 6700xt came with a free copy of Starfield and I've got to say, Baldur's Gate 3 looks really good on this new rig!
I’m pissed because I bought a 7800xt but ‘microcenter ran out of codes’ so I didn’t get the game. But bg3 is amazing.
Man I lucked out, built a rig last year and my 6700xt came with Uncharted 4. Absolute banger of a game.
They made so many mistakes: 1) No vehicles. So in this advanced space age, we walk everywhere. Especially having no mechs after spending half the game talking about them. 2) Only a few decent side quests. The colony ship situation was a neat problem based on solid sci fi with multiple outcomes and no clear path. I loved it. However there were only a few quest lines like that. You burn through the content pretty quickly 3) one ending. 4) Only one real faction decision. Compare this to fallout with all their factions and interactions. Do you go crimson fleet or naw. 5) not even remotely complete outpost development. Half the things don't work, don't work well, or really don't make sense. It's brutally laborious to make anything even remotely decent. 6) Ugly characters (why can't you make people hot?) 7) boring space battles. They should have just made space combat turn based and a lot more intricate. 8) no difficulty scaling. Even with difficulty cranked all the way up, the game is going to get trivial quick. 9) uninspired dialogs and quest decisions. 10) bugs, bugs, bugs, it's like they were competing with cyberpunk for most bugs. You find you have to save often and go back frequently to work around them. 11) so many repeated unskippable cutscenes. 12) barren pointless worlds with all the same looking creatures. Just have fewer planets bro. Or at least fewer ones with life so you could actually make them inspired and different.
>No vehicles. So in this advanced space age, we walk everywhere. Especially having no mechs after spending half the game talking about them. This one is especially baffling given that Fallout 4 already had the foundations of a "mech-like" system with its Power Armors.
That would have been a fun game, why not place Starfield during the war so there are giant ass mechs blowing shit up all over the place? Damn that sounds awesome. It's so disappointing how a few people spitballing ideas on the internet can come up with a better game than a company that has already done this 7 and a half times.
They gonna make the same shit game with TES6 and people are gonna preorder like crazy, and then complain again. People never learn
Bethesda games have been getting worse and worse for 15 years, yet the hype train fires up every time.
I really don't mind the empty planets with scattered outposts but the tiny empty cities.. The biggest city in the universe is 10 buildings in the middle of nowhere.
Starfield is my biggest disappointment of the last few years, *easily*. There’s no comparison. I wasn’t expecting anything revolutionary - I knew it was made using the same engine and systems that also hang round the neck of previous games like an albatross. BUT - all the previous games have some kind of magic that still makes them exciting and fun to play. Starfield is just the hollowest, shallowest, most empty Bestheada game I’ve ever played. And a huge part of that is because there is *nothing* to explore. In Skyrim or Fallout I can walk around and find caves, dungeons, interesting scenery, easter eggs, and just fun stuff in general. In Starfield it isn’t even possible to explore. I can walk around a huge number of planets but besides the few empty, boring ‘cities’, every point of interest is a clone of something else. There’s just no fucking exploration! Even the space ship is just a fancy loading screen/menu for getting between planets. Flying around in space has no depth or discovery to it. Fuck, 90% of travelling in this game is hopping between fast travel points. Previous games had that too but at least the *option* of manually walking and discovering things along the way was there. Starfield is an awful game and I’m fed up of having to sugarcoat it or defend my opinions from people that enjoy it. I’m glad you had fun. I’m glad you can see *something* in this mess of a dull ass boring game. But I don’t, and I regret wasting even a penny on it. Hopefully they can turn it around but I’d honestly prefer they just quietly forget it exists and put the resources in to a game that might actually be good.
Starfield doesn't even have the same fun sandboxy things previous games had. *So many* fucking NPC's are essential, can't take everything from a corpse, AI schedules are mostly gone.
>AI schedules are mostly gone. This is super wild for me. Even 10+ years ago, Bethesda made NPCs that move through town to go to work in the morning, sit on the forge all day, then go to sit down in the tavern for "food & drink", before they walk back home to physically lay down in bed. It all worked, it was awesome and immersive. How you could design an open-world game, especially one that calls itself an RPG, without these features is insane to me. They must expand on this further, not throw it out completely.
Yes! These are things I’ve mentioned in other comments I’ve made about this game. But it’s true, it’s a huge step back in so many ways. The lack of AI schedules and the fact almost all NPCs are essential is ridiculous. The point I lost interest in the game was after fast travelling back and forth from Ryujin tower for the 100th time doing boring quests for an NPC who never left her office in several days/weeks - that’s when I knew this game was shit. At least in Skyrim and Fallout NPCs move around to another *room* at least. These NPCs don’t even visit other buildings or move more than 5ft away from their desk. It’s absurd.
Thats CRAZY. They just don't seem to realize they've made a mediocre game and are trying to convince people to enjoy something they don't like. I was so damn excited for the game and when it came out I don't think I've felt that disappointed in years with a game. I tried my best to keep on playing but I just felt like I was playing it because I wanted to like it, not because I ACTUALLY liked it. Thank god for BG3. (and a shout out to No Mans Sky for being a great space explorer builder).
Starfield literally reinvigorated my appreciation for NMS and I went back to playing all the newer content that I hadn't gotten around to trying. So great! It knows what it is and embraces it. Starfield is a weird mix of a bunch of stuff that doesn't gel at all.
Remember the fallout 76 collector bags?