Yeah you put it really well.

I generally feel the same way about all Bethesda games. I’ll return after some DLC and Mods have been released.

There is some pretty cringe writing and stylistic choices this time around. Space cowboys and Freestar were conceptualized by a child and the PG pirate brigade are embarassing.

There are some bones for a pretty great empire building mod though. Can’t wait to see a sim-settlements type mod for Starfield.

I started liberty by accident trying to level up a bit. Figured i would take my leave and come back later only for the dlc to fail because the thing chrashed and person was not saved

You’re enjoying Cyberpunk, but Starfield was bland to you? Night City is sparse and empty as hell.

As an aside, the corpo storyline in Starfield is miles ahead of the corpo sroryline in Cyberpunk.

Agreed, at first I wasn’t excited about it but as the quests opened up I was in. I’m on the “new game+” right now and seeing what else I can mess up lol.

My quests tend to end in a lot of shooting innocents… I don’t know why that keeps happening. It can’t be anything I’m doing…

Sadly I’ll never get to enjoy it, I’m not gonna buy an Xbox just to play it. Really really stupid that we’re still doing exclusive games in 2023. I’m a PlayStation user literally wanting to give Bethesda my money, but they don’t want it.

Sorry, to clarify, after you mention NMS, all those funs/positives were about Starfield again, right?

Same, I pirated it to give it a try, put in a few dozen hours to make sure I’m not missing anything but left pretty disappointed tbh. It has a strong interesting opening but the more you try to get into the nitty gritty details, the more shallow and flawed the game becomes until you’re just doing chores for the sake of it. Some people find enjoyment in these chores but it ain’t me, maybe in a few years it becomes better. I got phantom liberty instead and am having a blast there instead

Verbatim my opinion. There’s nothing enjoyable here folks unless you like turning off your brain, fast travelling to planets and 100% search missions.

It’s been out longer and has improved over time. I’d wait until Starfield has been out for about the same length of time, see if things even out or continue to trend down.

What needs improvement in Starfield, though, isn’t likely to actually be improved. Can’t even think of a time where a game’s story was re-written over time to be better.

And poof, just like that the criticism has been invalidated! Great job!

Its more than that. Its bland. Fucking Skyrim had more going for it than neon. Tavern wenches shows more skin than Neon Workers. People actually bleed in skyrim. Drugs even, I think skooma has better writing tham Aurora.

SF is just corporate.

Honestly, seeing this AAA game play like a shit-tier shovelware game on my pretty fucking robust Linux gaming PC makes me kinda fine with Star Citizen taking its sweet time now.

My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don’t do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.

They haven’t done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they’ve added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they’re adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building… the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.

The problem for me is, it’s not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you’re free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.

I believe it amplifies some of the worst aspects of their games. If I think back to what I liked about Oblivion, it was a world that felt lived in. Objects had purpose, characters had homes, content was discovered. It relied a lot on procedural content, but it felt like there was a strong level of cohesion between the procedural elements and mechanics. The disparate aspects of the game fed into one another. With Starfield, you get this huge increase in scope, but each individual part feels kind of empty and boring and clunky and slow.

Here’s a contrasting example:

In Oblivion, imagine if you wanted to steal something from a vendor. You have to wait for night, you have to pick the lock, items have actual value, you have to stealth in case they catch you, you know if they can see you, there are other things to do in the city in the meantime, and during all this you might find something unexpected along the way that completely tangents you off into a different direction. All these elements come together to create interesting player stories, and none if it needs to be tied to any guided narrative.

In Starfield, all of these elements fall apart. The scope of the game means you’re constantly fast travelling from location to location. No single location has too much going on, and half the time what is there is sending you back out to space anyway, so you never really feel much connection to any physical place. The relative value of items is totally skewed because of the scale of ship related expenses compared to anything else, so what’s the value of stealing a cool rock? It’s also very difficult to tell relative weapon/item quality at a glance. I know that a steel sword is better than an iron sword; I have no clue why a Reflective Terrablazer is better than a Targeted Blurgun - and the default weapons usually don’t matter anyway because I would much rather have cool modifiers. The stealth and lockpick mechanics are both behind skill tree unlocks, so you’re far less likely to engage with those mechanics in the first place. The shops are all open 24/7 (I think? honestly don’t even know) so the day/night cycle seems irrelevant, so sneaking in to the shop is a no go, and I feel pretty limited in lockpicks and don’t really know where to reliably buy than a few at a time. And you never, ever, find anything surprising or compelling, and if you did it would be reduced to a quest checkbox.

So to summarize: I don’t know who I’m stealing from, I don’t know why I would care to steal anything, it’s not obvious how stealthy anyway I am unless I skill into it, it’s not worth using my lockpicks, I’ll never be caught, and their door is always open. There’s zero motivation to actually engage with the world in a way that makes it feel alive. But it’s critical to note: all those systems are still there! You can do all this stuff in the game! But because of how things are structured, even though the game on a fundamental level is extremely similar, the way you interact with it is totally removed from the kind of emergent fun that makes exploring those worlds so fun. It’s just a smooth path of monotony to the next thing. The systems often amount to less than the sum of their parts.

Now I’ll admit, some of this could be on me. Maybe I’ve changed. It’s possible. But man, I tried. Hey, what’s that cool cave on this planet? I’ll go check it out! Oh uhh, it’s nothing? There’s… a dead crab and a box with some old glue? Okay I guess?

It doesn’t have the same impact from the world design or story telling. It’s generic. It’s boring. It’s bland. The game play is exactly the same, but the motivation to give a shit about anything is gone because nothing about the world is very interesting aside from the aesthetics.

Shit, man, even the books in the game are just excerpts from real books. Like… humans haven’t written anything new in the 200 something years since Earth’s exodus? Cmon.

I don’t think it’s a bad game at all. But the Bethesda formula is definitely showing its age and the muted tone and presentation of Starfield, compared to Elder Scrolls and Fallout, accentuates this. I have like a dozen other games vying for my attention and a huge backlog of other titles, and I’ve been struggling to find motivation to play Starfield as a result. If I’d paid CDN$90 for the privilege I’d probably feel more strongly about it either way.

More progress than “better at being a Bethesda game than Fo4”.

I was a die hard Bethesda fan prior to 76 and they need to do better than par to earn my favor back. They scorned me and my wallet isn’t going to forget that any time soon.

Their biggest, most consistent fault isn’t bugs orjank, it’s the stale as fuck writing. They desperately need the hand the reigns to some new talent in that area.

It feels like they’ve been incapable of writing a compelling narrative with interesting characters for decades now.

I did actually enjoy starfield (it wasn’t amazing or anything, but I don’t regret my purchase), but I have to say, I hate this argument.

For one thing, being a Bethesda game doesn’t just immediately grant a pass for being bad in all the ways Bethesda games are generally always bad (bugs, bad facial animations, outdated mechanics, etc). Each game should be judged for how good of a game it is, not how good a " Bethesda game" it is.

Secondly, and more importantly, the fact is that this time around is especially bad simply because all the typical “Bethesda” issues are just starting to become more and more egregious as time goes on. The fact is that if you handed me this game and told me that it was a heavily modded copy of FO4 I’d 100% believe you. Nothing in this game really shows a meaningful step forward either in tech or gameplay from what we’ve seen before. The only real “new” thing is ship to ship combat, which is frankly very lackluster.

As for what people expected? Better. That’s pretty much the long and the short of it. They expected it to feel less clunky than FO4, they expected space travel mechanics that weren’t just glorified fast travel menus, and new gameplay that doesn’t just feel like the same shit Bethesda has been doing since Morrowind.

That being said, the worldbuilding is phenomenal, as is typical of Bethesda, and at least for me, that’s where most of the fun came in, just wandering around and doing side quests to explore more of the world. But once you’ve more or less explored the world, there’s not much left to draw you in. The gameplay itself certainly hasn’t been fun enough to make me seriously consider a newgame+ any time soon.

Skyrim was one of my favorite games for several years.

I tried watching my husband play Starfield but I kept zoning out, using my phone, or getting up to do something else. I’d rather do laundry. Starfield is boring A.F to watch, and I have zero interest in playing it

New Vegas uses Bethesda’s Fallout 3 engine, but it was made by Obsidian. It’s not the most representative of what Bethesda does (well, except the part where it’s very buggy, I guess. That part mostly comes with the engine).

By cut scenes you mean loading screens, right? Right!?