Starfield has "something big going on behind the scenes"
Starfield has "something big going on behind the scenes"
My initial response is prob as sarcastic as the others but a thought just occurred to me.
Skyrim, v1. The og release, before all the mods and bug fixes.
Undoubtedly still a better game than Star field. But was it the Skyrim we revere today? Will Starfield be transformed into something fun over the next decade?
What am I on about. Almost certainly not lol.
Skyrim was fun which is why its endured. Starfield is unfortunately fundamentally a bit boring and feels dated - they didn’t learn from the RPGs that came after Skyrim and moved things forward (Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 spring to mind).
I doubt it’ll be fixed. Its not like No Man’s Sky -the developers only game and their number one priority. I think well get the usual small DLCs and Bethesda moves on to its next big project.
I hope they learn from Starfield and make the next elder scrolls something special.
To me it actually felt like a regression.
One of my favorite things in skyrim/oblivion/fallout 4 was environmental storytelling, and this just has none.
Other than being super broken, it’s still the same game at its core, minus the DLC content and the graphical updates (and the paid mod store).
I think the only non-MMO that was completely transformed over time with patches I can think of is No Man’s Sky
How about they make the game fun?
I am replaying Skyrim at the moment. When you start the game after being cut loose after Helgen, you have a quest that nudges you towards Whiterun. The typical path usually goes Helgen - > Riverwood - > Whiterun. Between any of these three steps, you can veer off the track and find some cool stuff to do. Just near Helgen, there’s a fortress near the Cyrodiil Border, Embershard Mine, random bandit encampments, and if you are brave enough at level 1, Bleak Falls Barrow. You can play all of this without ever having to pause the game.
Starfield has none of that. When you land on a new planet, all of the caves are the same. There’s no environmental storytelling, and in order to fast travel, you must stop the flow of the game.
The side quests definitely were also lacking. Like, I know there’s only about 4 archetypes of quests (fetch, escort, kill and checkpoint) that you can really do, but you make them interesting with the story and reasons for doing the thing. Starfield really just made a majority of quests “go get this mcguffin because we need mcguffins,” with nothing really cool or interesting about it.
DF was 100% designed around telling a story using RNG. Game is like a mad lib. Starfield didn’t go that far (most games don’t). I actually do not ever expect AAA games with procedural generation to do more than just give you endless repetition over randomness that generate compelling and unique “stories” the way DF or RimWorld do.
“Just hit them randomly until the door opens!”
I don’t know if they wanted to be funny or if even the designers themselves just employed the puzzle because it doesn’t need logic to be defeated if you just keep mashing buttons at random. lol
Strange. I have more playtime in starfield than Skyrim. And the thing that draws me in is the story.
It’s like it got most things right that Outer Worlds got wrong.
Yall are getting downvoted, but I think it’s great that you have a game you like.
100%. I get baffled that Starfield gets so much hate, but then some of my favorite games aren’t very popular (Book of Hours anyone? lol)
I can even see the perspective of this being a better Outer Worlds
Yeah. Outer world was in reality the polar opposite of Starfield. A game that was excessively theme-driven but had lackluster “everything else” to go with it. A little (less than Outer Worlds used) bit of tongue-in-cheek “Spacer’s Choice” could have worked like Vault Boy does in Fallout, and I wish Starfield had done something like that. But on story and gameplay alone, Starfield destroys Outer Worlds.
I think people like myself are just upset that we didn’t get scifi skyrim
This is the funny part. If I had to describe why I love Starfield to someone who had been living under a rock and hadn’t ever heard of it, I’d say “because it’s like Skyrim in space”. In so many ways, if I’m being honest.
The thing is, the biggest critique people have against Starfield isn’t all the crazy bugs (we remember those from Skyrim) or the really tropey shit, or anything in between. It’s that they don’t find Starfield “fun” in this hard-to-place sort of way. Perhaps that’s you? If so, maybe you can see how someone would feel about Starfield if, for some reason, it clicked as fun from the start.
Now, I have some complaints about Starfield. But most of them have to do with things that Skyrim didn’t even try (the shipbuilder, which I hear has improved of late) or the lategame (which means I got my fun out of it).
Also, I’ve learned not to take downvotes too badly most of the time. Everyone has opinions, and just because I reserve downvote for the rare “this person is an absolute idiot” doesn’t mean other people do :)
Yeah I’d say it was an issue of not “clicking” at first, but I think I defined it a bit more before I dropped my first playthrough. For me, the primary appeal of a Bethesda RPG is that “take off in a direction, you’ll find a story” feel. Starfield kinda has it, but they broke it up with weird design choices. The insanely frequent, lengthy cutscenes cut into the continuous flow. Having to travel at all between planets broke up the action and flow. The choice to use procedural generation was odd and really took away from the more intentional feel of prior Bethesda games, and really cut away some of the quality and quantity of environmental storytelling.
That’s my very surface level opinions from what I remember. It’s been a minute since I played it at release.
For me, the primary appeal of a Bethesda RPG is that “take off in a direction, you’ll find a story” feel
I don’t entirely disagree.
The insanely frequent, lengthy cutscenes cut into the continuous flow
You mean the ship going into warp or landing loading screen? There aren’t really a ton of cutscenes. If I had to give a tedious downside, it would be the “power minigame” but at least it ends with a violent encounter with a strongish enemy 9 times out of 10
The choice to use procedural generation was odd and really took away from the more intentional feel of prior Bethesda games
See, THIS might be where my age plays me. My first Bethesda game was called “Arena”, and it was all procedural. My second Bethesda game was “Daggerfall” and it was ABSURDLY huge procedural. I’ve never seen some procedural elements as a downside to extend the plot (and in fact, Skyrim’s radiant quest system is procedure), as long as there was sufficient hand-made content.
Now here’s the thing. By all reports (both self-reports that can be questioned, but also people who dug into game files), Starfield has more handmade content than Skyrim. It’s just that the thousand planets above and beyond that were procedural. I LIKE that balance. A lot. It solves the “Morrowind problem” (Morrowind was slammed at first because the world was SO much smaller than Daggerfall’s) for me. But I can see how other people who dive into into the procedural content might step back and say “boy this game is so reptitious”. Sometimes our gameplay loops define our enjoyment. I know I hated Persona 2 for years for the dumbest reason ever - I got addicted to the casino minigame and lost track of the story, then found the casino game too tedious and I had no desire to play the game anymore.