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I’m loving starfield and I’ll agree with this. It’s a mid eighties score kind of game. If it’s what you want it’s amazing, but the people calling it game of the century and whatnot are buying their own hype.
On the other hand, it’s likely to have serious staying power as an all time classic game, Bethesda is great at that and there’s a ton of room for people to use it as an incredible mod canvas. I don’t think that should affect launch reviews though.
I think this is it. I enjoy making fun of the NPCs in starfield but mostly when I’m playing I don’t notice them at all. I do have a few very pretty screenshots of the game. It’s not perfect by any stretch but the scope is impressive and most of it really is pretty good
I don’t think Bethesda has ever sold based on graphics no matter how much they want to pretend it. Morrowind and oblivion both looked under par when they came out as well.
I’m not a fan of Bethesda’s reliance on mods to do basic shit, like fix a broken UI and inventory management system, by honestly I also think this argument is overused. People pay for these games because they want to mod the shit out of them, it’s like ninety percent of the appeal. Nobody is forcing modders to work on them, either. That argument can only stretch so far. For comparison, No Man’s Sky is actively hostile to modding, and as a result I probably won’t be going back to it despite loving it. They’re not going to add the kind of content I want, they’re likely never going to, and they’re not letting anyone else do it either. I wish they’d allow free volunteers to finish off some of their 75%-of-the-way-to-greatness features.
With starfield, I’m excited for the mods, and the game is far from flawless goodness knows, but I’ve had a friggin good time and definitely got my money’s worth on vanilla. Now I look forward to spicing it as I like.
It’s perfectly reasonable to wait. Games only gonna get better.
I’d try not to read too much into the internet fuss. It’s a better release than Bethesda’s usual in most regards. I wound up sinking almost the entire weekend into it, haven’t done that in ages. The games really fun. That said, it is only going to get better with time.
I don’t mind the mechanic of the double unlock. I do think a lot of the unlocks themselves are phoned in. Was just ranting about how bad the “install 15 unique ship parts” one is with a friend, like why not something kind of interesting instead of such a grindy one? “Make a ship with only one engine and a top speed of 150” eg.
imo the main problem isn’t that there are a lot of things, it’s a major lack of information about game systems really. The game gives you a boostpack and tells you it’ll help, but doesn’t bother to pop up and tell you you’ll need a point in boosters if you want to use it. It shows you how to target enemy engines but doesn’t tell you you’ll need a point in targeting if you want to do it yourself. It’s an obvious, silly miss. I don’t mind that these things need points, but it’s annoying that it doesn’t tell you, especially when they have a place in the game where they easily could.
Lots of places really. Outside the tutorial sections of the main quest, why not have my boost packs say like “basic boost pack - function locked unless you have Boosters 1”
There’s a solid complaint IGN made that I think is completely true, that starfield has too many of its most fun systems that don’t unlock until you unlock the appropriate skill, and nothing in the game even tells you to do that. Disabling and boarding starships is a big one, or using boost packs; modifying weapons and armour too. Depending on how you ran your 12 hours you might be missing some of those.
Performance is a big one too. There are already some good looking performance mods on nexus iirc
One of the weirdest bits there is that they have a fairly interesting and robust system of learning alien languages, but then quest gives always give quests in your native language so there’s no reward for learning the alien stuff at all.
And of course all the quests are basic fetch quests, because there is nothing in the game resembling a dungeon or combat arena, and no real enemies you can fight (alien bugs or sentinels, wee)
I posted a shorter version of this elsewhere in here but I’ve thought more and want to expand.
Disclaimer: I really like both no man’s sky and starfield. Gonna be down on both of them but I’ve got hundreds of hours in NMS and I expect to have hundreds more in SF, they are both good games, I have no regrets about buying either of them.
That said, I’ve realized that starfield is actually making me low-key kind of angry at NMS, for all the potential it wasted. It’s showing just how little extra depth NMS could have used (could still use) to be great. There are really only a couple fairly minor ways that starfield is better, and yet for me and I think a lot of people they spell the difference between “fun sandbox” and “awesome game”. Starfield is so shallow on all of these that despite being the first game to really deliver on the promise of an open world space RPG sandbox, it’s like a wish-dot-com version of what nms could be.
First, combat. Nms has all right space combat, nothing great but acceptable, but there’s no excusing its ground combat. There’s effectively one enemy, they’re not really designed to be fought most of the time, and they’re almost never involved in battles of any meaning. The combat overhaul added some mechanics but didn’t solve the problem… in a way it’s worse now because fighting seems like it could be interesting. How come when I find a trading post it’s never a ruin overrun by pirates, with scattered notes from the lost inhabitants, written in their native language so that if I can speak it I can read their sad story? Why don’t I ever find a detail of gek security bots defending the inner chambers of a crashed frigate? Why can’t I have a shootout with the crew of a frigate on board its procedurally generated interior?
That leads into the issue that there’s no story at all. People complain about the main quest of SF, but nms has one of the flimsiest, poorest written central plots of any game I’ve ever seen. That would be okay, but there are also no side quests. You can’t stumble upon an abandoned mine, or have a spacer randomly ask you to help break a blockade of their home system. There are a tiny number of very shallow fetch quests, but nothing with even a hint of effort in the writing.
I get a bit annoyed at starfield for systems not interacting. Like, i have a house, but I can’t build outpost buildings around it, eg. However, NMS takes that to extremes with how outpost building, village building, and frigate building all seem like they’re actively hostile to each other, as if coming from different games. IIRC even some of the outpost components won’t properly snap together if they’re from different ‘styles’ of outpost, although I may be misremembering.
Add to that that there’s also not a lot of gear collecting mechanics, minimal ways to display loot, minimal character customisation, and so on, and it’s just… sigh. Everything nms does feels like it falls just short of being amazing, but they get bored right before completing the last step to bring it all home and then they go work on another system that they’ll get 3/4 through and then abandon. I wish it had mods.
Meanwhile, starfield doesn’t do any individually thing particularly well either, but unlike NMS, it feels like I can do stuff with what I make. I can build a ship… and then take it smuggling! Or fight pirates! I can have NPCs on board and they’ll chat with each other while I’m flying around, and help run the ship! They’re not all well written, but they’re actually written, and do more than just stand around saying one line back at me. It’s frustrating, because honestly, taken on its own, starfield isn’t particularly remarkable (see how bland space travel is eg) but there’s nothing out there that’s actually gone the very obvious extra mile of “okay we have beautiful worlds to explore, what if now we put some things to do on them”
Se for me has exactly the same issue as NMS. No story, no person-to-person combat, no side quests. Just an empty world you’re expected to populate yourself I guess. Starfield definitely doesn’t do that as well, it isn’t as much a Minecraft style sandbox. If nms or se had quests and story, I might not like starfield this much… but they don’t, and there really isn’t another space sim that also provides a decent shooter and rpg while having a nice open world.
No, I mean when you the player want to sell your items you have to put them up for sale on the black market and wait for buyers, and there’s a simple demand algorithm that determines what kind of price you’ll get and how long it will take.if you’ve flooded the market with cheap guns, you don’t get much for them.
Not so much for these games, but this conversation had me thinking about alternate mechanics for loot sales in the open source game I work on, and I think one solution is to have any loot of any value use more of a pawn shop/consignment mechanic. Rather than selling guns individually maybe you can put your crate of used weaponry up for sale on the black market, and then you have to wait for a buyer. Might take a long time depending on how much they’re worth.
I wouldn’t shape any of your decision to playor not play on this particular detail. It really has little to no impact on the game whatsoever. There are a lot of really interesting worlds to explore, it’s really not worth the amount of discussion lately.
Not saying this means “this is the game for you”. Just that this one facet shouldn’t enter into your assessment at all, in my opinion.
I kind of think it does apply to modern graphics and game design in the same way. A fast paced action shooter still needs moments where you catch your breath, it’s never just an endless constant flood of enemies. A visually beautiful game still has bits that aren’t particularly interesting or you’d get an overdose of visual information and wouldn’t be able to identify what was important.
Similarly, starfield has a lot of small barren moons that don’t have a lot of resources. They are boring compared to the green worlds (there are tons of these too though, which every repeat of this thread has glossed over), but they still have stuff going for them. I spent my evening last night exploring a smuggler base that I randomly fell into while looking for a place to put an aluminum mine on a barren moon. The night before it was a (very cool) mission on an abandoned mining platform.
However, in the process of going to and from these sites, I definitely felt like I was travelling across a barren, dusty moon. That helped the feel. Both those quests had storylines that were inherently tied to the fact that the setting was a barren, dusty moon, rather than a teeming, thriving planet.
Bottom line, I think this one over-shared article says nothing of importance. If you go to one of these ‘boring’ moons there’s lots to do, just not ‘explore and identify the planetary life’ kind of stuff. you can tell at a glance which planets are more likely to have settlements and things from space, and there’s more of them than any one person can explore, so it really doesn’t matter that there are also a bunch that aren’t like that.
Has anyone here ever thought “I would like this game more if it had encumbrance in it”?
Yes, I totally have. In fact even in starfield, I found pretty quickly that I was wishing the game would arbitrarily restrict my ammunition and medpack supplies, because the combat was more fun when I could run out of shots and healing in the early game. It’s not even the kind of thing I can easily do as a challenge myself because it’s so easy to pick them up and go “over”. I legit think starfield’s encumbrance system would be much better if it was more restrictive, so that I had to carefully choose my equipment and things, than the current “I can carry so much that gameplay is not meaningfully restricted, but not nearly enough to collect and sell all the loot I find”.
I posted upstream about the problem with encumbrance in this style of game. It’s not that encumbrance is inherently bad, but that most of the time in crpgs, it just seems to be ‘there’, it’s not in the service of any part of the gameplay.
I agree, I don’t mind much of how they handle encumbrance itself except for the constant nagging from my companion. Personally, I just don’t think they interrogated the concepts of encumbrance at all - which isn’t surprising of course, bethesda design seems to have so many sacred cows it may as well be a holy dairy.
A UI fix to do that for you was modded in almost instantly, I’ll be installing that one tonight I think. The vanilla game is much better than I expected but I’m finding it too easy if I cheat in infinite personal storage, and too much of a cognitive burden to constantly weigh every loot item in my mind.
I don’t agree with that dichotomy in a game like this. Certainly in the deeply simulationist roguelike I stan (cataclysm dark days ahead plug), that’s appropriate, but this game is fundamentally silly and arcade style so I don’t think the trouble has anything to do with realism. The solution I’d have personally in something like this is to eg. allow you to carry up to 6 weapons, 1 of each wearable type of item, and a certain amount of aid items in your “active” inventory, and then have everything else you loot automatically go to your ship inventory which is huge or infinite, but restricted in how you can access it (personally I’d still have ship inventories be finite, but enormous). Let perks increase your number of slots in a particular category, rather than increasing carry weight. Have resources and ‘notes’ go to the ship automatically as well, since it doesn’t really have any impact on the game to be carrying these on your person. Plus, I’d do what modders have been doing for a while and make decorative junk items have no value or weight. Let me pick up as many blenders as I want, I’m just going to use them to decorate my juice bar and play house, who frigging cares.
I’d also remove vendor credit caps, but make the amount of cash you get from loot pretty trivial compared to what you get from missions, so it’s just not that appealing to sell 15 cheap machineguns. And while I’m wishlisting, I’d love to be able to set up an auto-sell filter, eg. ‘sell non-unique weapons below a particular dps’
My issue with it in Starfield (and any game in its genre) is that the game seems to be confused about how it feels about encumbrance. Am I supposed to be looting everything I see? If not, then why is it the major income source, why are so many random objects worth selling and taking? If so, why do merchants have such low credit stores? Am I supposed to be collecting cool stuff to display? If not, then why all the display objects? If so, why have my companions constantly nag me about bringing junk? Why make ship storage so low? Or, am I supposed to be carefully considering what I want to bring as loot? If so, why is there so much of it and why isn’t there some way to quickly see what’s worth taking? Am I supposed to spend an hour after each combat carefully weighing what to take home?
It’s entirely unclear what they want. If they want looting to be less of a game loop, junk items should have no sell value and missions should be more of a reward, and item value/kg should be easy to assess. We should be quickly able to discard valueless items from inventory. Otoh if they want looting to be a bigger part of the game, I should be able to readily carry and sell my loot and doing so shouldn’t make me so rich it breaks the economy.
It’s one of my main complaints, not so much about starfield, but pretty much anything in this genre. It feels like they can’t tell if they want me to loot everything or not, the design is fundamentally at odds with itself.
Rt critic scores are, imo, one of the best rating scales. Think of it as a percentage chance a fairly average movie watcher is going to like this movie. It’s not saying “this movie is 75% good”. It’s 3/4 reviewers felt it was worth watching, and does not comment on if they thought it was amazing or just okay. Marvel stuff tends to score high because mostly, despite not being some peak cinema, it provides an entertaining experience that earns a passing grade from most people. Movies that are more niche tend to get a lower score but that doesn’t mean they’re bad, just more niche.
I like this because it’s easy to understand what it means with a little research. Most game scores don’t do that and I find it annoying
As you can see in the other replies, I don’t think that’s what people mean at all.
I haven’t had a single serious bug in thirty odd hours so far. I, and others here, aren’t saying it’s a good game “despite it all”, we’re saying it’s a good game on its own, but if you were looking for something that is in a different style than Bethesda makes, you’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s a simplistic mass appeal looter shooter rpg in space. It’s a good one of those. It’s also subject to all the expected limitations of a game like this, that’s all. It’s not going to be something it’s not. If you expected to pay for a good one of the kind of looter shooter RPGs we expect from this company, it is what you paid for.
Seriously? On the very slim chance you’re actually just this clueless about polite communication,
Did they pay you to write this? Are you forcing yourself to enjoy the game because you paid so much? Or am I insane?
It’s not the third line of that that people object to, it’s what is implied by the entire statement. We assume you don’t consider yourself insane, because that’s obviously hyperbole, which means you do seem to think that anyone who disagrees with you is either a shill or stuck in a sunk cost fallacy.
Consider the alternate phrasing of that entire statement, eg. “I’m just not seeing it. Am I insane or something?” And then the rest of your post. Nobody would be nearly so irritated with you in that context.
You’re misunderstanding. At this point “Bethesda game” is its own subgenre, and many complaints about this game are complaints about the subgenre itself. If you don’t like being the Big Special Hero, you won’t like this game. If you want the game to have rich, detailed combat that stays challenging throughout, it probably won’t be this one either
If you want a huge world with lots of curious little things to explore and more side quests than you can do in a lifetime, built on a backbone of a kind of flimsy story (imo not a terrible one this time) that you are mostly gonna skip out on to go do dungeon hops and loot accumulation, then you’re probably golden with this. And by now, most of us should know what we’re paying for, I think. As long as you expect and want what they consistently make, this game delivers very well
On top of that, the combat and general mechanics are just far better than the usual Bethesda offerings this time around. It’s fun to fight in zero g. It’s an absolute blast to disable an enemy ship and then board it. The side quests are legit quite fun and exciting, with NPCs I’ve found I really enjoy and want to see again.
As long as you expect a game that is like Bethesda makes, it’s a very nice and fun one that delivers more than I had expected from them by a long shot. If you expected a deep, hardcore indie gem, you’re going to be disappointed and also you’re maybe kind of a silly person. It’s a mass produced game for a large audience, that’s the stick by which to measure it.
A new engine would just have to have a new mod API. Plenty of engines have mod APIs. Nothing’s really stopping them, but they really love driving creation engine onward for some reason.