I love Starfield, not as much as I love Skyrim or even Morrowind, but I really love it.
I am at 160ish hours and have seen only a small amount of the quests and barely touched the base or ship building part. There is so much in the game and with the innovative spin on new game plus I am able to build my own narrative again and again. I can play the perfect angle in one NG+ and a devil in another, I can be the freedom loving Ranger in the next, a mad loner who only interacts with others as much as needed to finish his perfect planetary base, or a starship fanatic who wants to collect and/or build the best ships.
You don’t have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can’t really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.
Starfields quests are fun, yes they are all separate from each other but that is in my eyes a good thing in this case as it allows to play the game as you like.
All the quests are like basic Lego blocks, you can connect them together in any way you want but they don’t change each other but that’s not needed as I have my own narrative and stories in my mind for this run or character.
Sure, games like Baldurs Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2.0 have better storytelling, better NPCs, but they are at the same time extremely limited and narrow experiences, sure you have side quests and all but once played the game that’s mostly it.
Starfields freedoms come with limits like the loading screens sure, but that is a price I am willing to pay for having a sandbox like universe to explore and roleplay in.
As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that’s where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
But as a end note: What have the Starfield developers consumed when they created the utterly bad and boring temple “puzzles”. In Todd’s name WHY???
You clearly haven’t played baldur’s gate and shouldn’t make comparisons based on your limited experience with it.
I have played and completed it, very recently, and I stand to my words. BG3 has a great story and it was fun to play once. But it is not a game I will play again, at least not for years. BG3 is like a good movie, impressive and great story telling but after I seen it once it is done and will go on the shelf.
That’s where Starfield differs, in BG3 I command great written characters through adventures, in Starfield I play more or less an avatar of myself but on a Spaceship. And that is something I come back to again and again, just like I go back to Skyrim, Morrowind or Fallout for years now.
Maybe you have Not realized just how much your choices affect the “linear Story” and how much permutation there is in follow up quests or alternate pathways through the same quest. I guess thats the beauty of it. Most of the quests an Narrative fit into each other so neat One might suspect this way was the only possible way, just because of how good it is presented.
Yes, but that still is like reading the same book but with a few pages changed. I am still only moving characters through a stage play, not roleplaying.
I can’t have a completely changed or different way to play the game or be myself/anything in the world of the game.
Both games are great but they can’t really be compared, not much more as you could compare a high budget musical with a high budget improv theatre play. Sure both are plays on a theatre stage (or RPG in case of the games) but beside that they don’t have really much in common.
But maybe it is just to complicated for me to fully express or explain what I mean as I am not a native speaker and I am therefore limited in my words and formulations.
Your love for the game is valid but criticisms of the game are also valid. The biggest flaw starfield has is the massive amount of gameworld it provides. In skyrim, CP2077, BG3, Morrowind, Zelda, and whatever else you want to think of, you can pick a direction and go.
In nearly every case, the game is designed to take you somewhere, give you something, reward you for straying off the main path. In Starfield, both space and planet side, youre likely to run into a whole lot of nothing. Which is realistically fine, the universe is already a vast amount of nothing, but in game design that makes for a boring and lackluster RPG and that is the biggest problem SF has. That doesnt take away from the players like you who want this experience though, but thats kind of why Space Sim games are a niche experience.
As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that’s where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
You should seriously, seriously go play BG3.
You don’t have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can’t really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.
Seriously, BG3. (Between Dark Urge, custom character choices, etc, go.)
What you are trying to say is that Starfield is a sandbox RPG, while BG3 is a Linear Story RPG.
Both are fun in their own ways. You just vibe more with the sandbox aspect.
I bet you also enjoy Minecraft for the same reasons.
Yeah, I like Minecraft 🤣
I am at 160ish hours and have seen only a small amount of the quests
So you’ve just been having fun with the most basic of systems that are not much different from all previous games, while barely having touched the things most people are complaining about? The mechanics and stability are pretty good. It’s the bland stories within the uninspired quests that are a major source of disappointment.
And to say only a Bethesda RPG does while BG3 doesn’t have the kinds of roleplaying you’re describing tells me you haven’t actually played BG3. Or any actually good RPG for that matter.
The problem is how disjointed everything is. Skyrim and Fallout, I can literally walk across the entire map. I can run into a random plot, some fun environmental storytelling, anything really - there’s no sense of discovery for a game so vast as Starfield. Everything is a known quantity which is why you can fast travel to and from basically every area.
All these other functions built into the game are superficial and/or incomplete at best. Ship building is basically pointless, as you can carry a massive crew in a tiny freighter, regardless of crew capacity or passenger capacity of your vessel. Modding weapons is more or less the same as it was in Fallout 4. The environments that are available to explore are all dead with fuck all, and all the tunnels and mines are filled with the same bullet-sponge spacer enemies. You would think with smaller, chunked zones we’d have some very detailed environments that make use of the fact that they are relatively small spaces, but instead everything is truncated with a loading screen and entirely lacking in depth.
Bethesda games starting from fallout 3 felt empty as fuck.
I’ve lost a bit of respect for Bethesda. It’s become clear to me that with Starfield they made many very shallow systems in hopes that modders step in and expand on those systems.
I’m hoping this is because the engine is in its last legs and they’ll do a better job once Elder Scrolls VI comes around. (Won’t be buying that on launch tho)
deleted by creator
Jankfield’s poor technical and creative debt have come full circle.
Played my full version demo before purchasing. Was bored on day one. None of this surprises me.
I read a reviewer that said “It’s a beautiful game about space exploration that has no space exploration” and they were completely right. It’s just fallout in space. Who thought Quick Travel the game would be compelling space exploration
I didn’t think the lack of space exploration would bother me so much.
But after playing the Pirate quest and just fast traveling over and over, my immersion broke and realized how little I’m really traveling.
But it’s not Fallout in Space. I can travel from one edge of the map to the other in Fallout or Skyrim and stumble upon a pitched battle or a cultist ritual or a lost dog or a juicy plot hook. In Starfield I can travel from one interstitial area to the next interstitial area to listen to a bland NPC tell me to go to the next interstitial area.
It’s okay. I look forward to mods. Right now it’s like somebody reskinned Super Mario Bros from the NES with a generative image AI trained on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day and Mass Effect 1 stills.
Everything is way better and more detailed in Cyberpunk.
It feels like everybody is so generic in Starfield. They don’t feel like they have personalities.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Cyberpunk and you’ll be dealing with an entirely new set of gangs with their own slang and their own backgrounds and their own heritage.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Starfield and you’ll either find nothing or an entrance to another procgen cave with the same spacers as everywhere else.
That’s what I found really interesting about Cyberpunk 2077.
It took me a long time before I even started using fast travel in that game. I actually enjoyed walking through the city. Even on later replays and when I’d finished almost all the side quests.
Far from perfect game even after all the bug fixes, and kinda empty after the end game, but I can’t help thinking it illustrates how Bethesda’s been left behind in many ways. It’ll be interesting to see what the next GTA’s like. If they manage to make a more immersive world to explore.
I just wish CP2077’s driving was better, I find it impossible to drive the good cars.
Much better after the bug fixes, but still far from perfect. Agreed.
I stuck to bikes which were fun to drive around.
Absolutely. I stopped playing it because it just wasn’t fun, 2.0 is much better. Bikes are way more usable, but I’d love to be able to hoon the cars like a GTA game.
Edit: Ok, I figured it out. You can’t hammer the gas all the time. The driving works more like an actual car than a GTA game. So if you drive more like Forza, you can actually hoon the cars. Bikes are more tolerant to full throttle. Controllers having a variable input for the throttle allow you to control throttle like a gas pedal. So higher acceleration cars become drivable with less throttle and hammering gas produces a “realistic” ice rink feel, as desired. I still prefer Jackie’s bike despite this understanding.
I gave up on Starfield to try Cyberpunk again with the new fixes and I’m now probably 150 hours in and I think I’ve only fast travelled once? Maybe three or four times if you count the mid mission moments where you’re riding in a car with someone.
It’s kind of wild that Neon had to be split in half by a loading screen, but you can go from one end of Night City to the other with none, and Night City is way more detailed, and quite frankly probably has more unique geometry to load and render than Neon + entire surrounding planet.
The reason for that is because, yet again, for the three hundred thousandth fucking time, Bethesda is using, still, a modified creation engine.
There is an argument to be made that Half-Life: Alyx runs on a “modified Quake engine”. At no point was the engine completely rewritten, though it went through several major evolutions and presumably none of Carmack’s original Quake code still survives… probably.
What matters is that Valve made several major overhauls over the years and is well aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of its engine and taylors its games to them. I mean, you couldn’t run Elite Dangerous on Source 2, but nobody asked. Seemingly, nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of multiplayer (hence Fallout 76), and nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of half the shit that Starfield would have to provide for exploration to be compelling in the way that it is in Skyrim.
No way, Super Mario Bros. has much more fun gameplay.
For me it’s not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.
Every planet has at least 10 bases filled with pirates or mercenaries.
Empyrion is a way better game about space exploration and i’d never consider it for a GOTY award.
A lot of those physics-y space games like Empyrion and Space Engineers are a way more fun way of interacting with custom ships and space than Starfield is, for sure.
It’s just so bland and formulaic. Against deep RPGs like BG3, it just pales in comparison.
The funny thing is, I think the fact that the RPG mechanics are finally better than the last game developed by Bethesda, instead of worse, highlights just how mediocre Bethesda games are.
I still think once mods and DLCs come out in full force it will be remembered more positively.
Agreed. Twas the only thing I thought while playing. This would be better with mods. Which is a sad state because I spent real money on a mod sandbox without the mods.
Yep, I had below Fallout 4 expectations and actually ended up enjoying it more, as I highly value the RPG aspects. It’s still a completely mediocre RPG, but it has a huge sandbox and a ton of potential.
The difference between a Ubisoft game and a Bethesda game is that Bethesda employees still enjoy coming to work.
Sure. I think big budget gaming needs to die, and games need more dev time for less work and higher pay, with worse graphical fidelity and better art styles.
If Bethesda games are so mediocre, why are they so popular among players who love to put hundreds of hours into them? I can’t imagine them all playing total conversion mods.
It’s become such a custom to poop on Bethesda for making “shallow”, “uninteresting” games that still everybody talks about. As if there weren’t enough real flaws in their games to give them heat for.
Because mediocrity and popularity go hand in hand, it’s the profit motive at work. Being largely inoffensive and generally palatable is profitable.
That’s not the definition of mediocrity. Trying to appeal to a bigger audience doesn’t make a game mediocre in the same way not every niche game has the potential of being a masterpiece just by not being that much likeable.
Some games are popular and good.
What’s good and what’s popular do not necessarily align. Removing “complicated” features for the sake of mass appeal makes the game worse, but more profitable, much of the time.
Also not true. Complexity alone doesn’t make a good game / movie / book / piece of art. And lack thereof doesn’t make anything worse.
Why is it that when many people like a thing because that thing appeals to masses, it’s automatically categorised as lower quality?
Nobody seriously claimed Starfield to be the game of all games. It’s good. It’s fine. It’s not perfect. So what?
The Best RPG list is basically Baldur’s Gate 3, and four more games to make it look like it has competition. It doesn’t.
I still think TotK is a better game overall than BG3.
For me it came pretty close between the two but eventually BG3 came out on top. Totk was great but after 200+ hours I was done with Totk. I currently have almost 200 hours in BG3 and I feel like there’s still so much more to play. I also feel like most of my issues with BG3 (like the poor performance in act 3 and some questlines breaking) are things Larian will fix while the issues with Totk (no rebinds, not being able to infuse weapons from inventory, menus in general, almost everything related to the sage powers) are unlikely to get fixed.
I played 25hrs of Starfield out of which 20 felt the exact same
Completely agree, TotK could really use some serious QoL improvements.
And maybe a less brutally aged console to play it on.
Yuzu is all you need!
deleted by creator
I will admit to carrying most Koroks for several minutes rather than trying to make another vehicle out of bits that aren’t all there.
I can’t help but think they wanted me to be a bit more elaborate than just gluing the poor little guy to a horse harness.
BG3 certainly needed a few extra months to bake. There’s still a bit where you can get trapped in a conversation with Mol in Act 1 because as soon as you come out of the cutscene, you’re instantly in range of her to start the dialogue again.
Apparently they released early to beat Starfield, which is hilarious because I’ve seen few games so shat on this year.
Just an FYI in case you’re still playing. There is a feature of you keep playing that lets you build things without the source objects being there, and spending a bit of the ore you get. This trivialises all the korok things by just sticking them to a hoverbike haha
Yeah, I discovered that quite late on.
I do think ability unlock quests should be highlighted in this sort of game. I didn’t even go and get the master sword for ages, because I thought that quest was the end of the game (and indeed when I went to the quest I thought was the end, went deep down into the actual end game area by mistake, and only got deterred by a giant enemy I couldn’t kill).
BG3 was a buggy mess and the story has much to be desired. They should have kept the Chris Avellone writing.
Depends entirely on how much you care about story and characters.
I guess, but that’s not the kind of game that TotK is. The star of BG3 is the characters, where the star of TotK is the world.
Right, and whether one game is “better” than the other depends on which thing a person likes more.
Yes, which is why I started my comment with “I still think”…
You think BG3 is better. This is fine.
They’re both 10/10.
I actually didn’t say whether I liked one or the other better. I’d probably pick TotK overall because it has more replayability (without having to start everything over), but if I’m in the mood for a story game, BG3 is the obvious choice.
Feel like this games gonna get the NMS treatment and be relatively playable maybe 3 years down the line…
As it stands the game has some merits (tons of planets, dungeons are compelling enough while you’re still seeing new ones) but it feels like the size of the world really caused the world design overall to suffer.
I honestly don’t think so. NMS sky started from a rock solid space exploration engine, but that was basically it, and has then layered on most of the other parts of a space sim on top since then, but most of Starfield’s biggest issues seem to be because their game engine can’t handle the scales needed for seamless space exploration.
So at this point Starfield devs have spent a ton of time and effort building a space sim game on an engine not suited for it, and that means that every cut scene and animation and scripted event is built around this engine, making it really time consuming just to bug test, let alone fix any problems that arise from changing or upgrading that engine, let alone designing the old missions and stuff to work with more continuous travel.
I have more faith that 5 years from now NMS will be fleshed out into a really rich and full story driven game, then that Starfield will have fixed it’s fundamental exploration / loading screen problems.
stuff to work with more continuous travel.
I bet you would be surprised if you were to find out that it is possible already. In space one can already move from one planet to another, only thing that is missing is the loading of new space “map” on demand. And more importantly move from one planet to another and then dock with spacestation. As shown by https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/3541.
And on planets the landing zones aren’t placed in a vacuum, topological details like mountains are visible from adjacent zones. As shown by https://youtu.be/Fy0eG7MFSTM?si=ZwaE3OzmEf9IxbwZ&t=841 by 2kliksphilip.
Now you might ask the very obvious question: why isn’t this correctly implemented to allow seamless travel in both space and on planets in vanilla Starfield? We may know only after someone does full introspection what happened during development but my speculative guess is that Xbox Series S which is much weaker than X is the primary reason for all this segmentation in all aspects of Starfield.
Traversal is technically possible yes, but it’s not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn’t capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you’re not at at the moment.
And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world’s like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.
Given that this game also chose to procedurally spawn the same bases over and over again, I think their issues are firmly routed in their development process, not hardware limitations.
Traversal is technically possible yes, but it’s not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn’t capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you’re not at at the moment.
Speeds that the above mentioned mod adds. Until CK is added the debate of switching of one space map to another seamlessly is useless, since the current implementation is missing the hook to load the next map whilst the same hook is implemented between ship take off and space (even when player is not at the helm). Yeah, but New Atlantis is much bigger and allows the player to boost pack from the MAST top floor to another skyscrapers roof and then get down to commercial level and trade stuff without any load screens, at least on PC.
And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world’s like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.
Expect of course if there were dev stories related to it sprinkling out periodically, latest being from Baldurs Gate 3 devs: https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-dev-shows-off-the-level-of-optimization-achieved-for-the-xbox-series-s-port-which-bodes-well-for-future-pc-updates/
It’s worth noting that out of all the platforms that Larian has developed its masterpiece for, the Xbox Series S is probably the most restrictive. This is because it only has 8GB of high-bandwidth memory, to store the game while running and use as VRAM (the remaining 2GB gets used for system functions).
The graphs start at the beginning of September, with the game using just over 5.2GB for general game RAM and around 3.5GB for VRAM. By November, though, Larian had shaved this down to 4.7GB and 2.3GB respectively. The RAM reduction is a pretty decent 10% drop but the reduction in VRAM usage is a massive 34%.
Other devs have stated these: https://www.gamesradar.com/xbox-series-s-could-bottleneck-some-next-gen-games-developers-suggest/
Gneitling pointed to the “almost non-existent” RAM increase from current-gen systems to Xbox Series S as a major pain point. Also “it always scaled on PC” is nonsense. Every AAA game in the past decade or so has their assets made once so they run on min spec. Increasing sample counts a bit here and there for high settings isn’t what you could truly have done with more power. Min spec matters.
The article has many such remarks from other devs as well. So why couldn’t the segmentation of Starfield be because of Xbox Series S? Keep in mind the latter article is now roughly three years old.
Because Larian specifically struggles with local co-op, not with loading new sections of the map.
As I’ve said, Cyberpunk runs perfectly fine on the S while loading in more geometry faster on the fly, and it’s far from alone in that. Starfield’s limitations are clearly a result of Bethesda’s ancient engine and not hardware limitations since other devs using different engines can accomplish what they failed at on the same hardware.
NMS was purpose-built to be a space game.
Starfield was built on an ancient engine that’s always been for ground-based games.
It’s such a huge sunk cost fallacy that keeps Bethesda using the same dogshit engine. “We’ve used it for years!” Yeah but it’s been fucking garbage for years too.
I’m sorry but Bethesda doesn’t deserve three years to make a game work. They should make it work on launch and delay it until it’s worth launching. They have billions of dollars and ownership from a major tech conglomerate. It’s entirely unacceptable for them to release an unfinished product.
Games are never finished now with the internet. The whole industry has agreed to say “fuck it, we’ll fix it in post” for basically every single project.
Yeah Bethesda doesn’t get the same amount of leeway that a small dev that was clearly way in over their heads gets
They’d have to rip out and replace the entire plot, which I don’t think they would do
The sad part is that Microsoft pulled the original 2022 release to fix a lot of the bugs.
So really the updates have to be pretty impactful.
I’m still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!
I’m still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!
This is sarcasm, right?
I played it and really liked it. I did everything I could do with my first playthrough. I started ng+ but just couldn’t continue. A bunch of cool systems in theory but just not enough substance. The copy and paste assets gave me fatigue. It scratched that Bethesda game but I am a bit disappointed. I really wonder why it took so long. It sorta feels like a bunch of reused elements from fallout. Like did they scrap a bunch? I’ve seen many more in depth games from smaller studies lately. On a side note I started playing Cyberpunk with new dlc afterwards and damn I really like that game
It’s real nova, choom.
I have not played it. I love scifi and open world games, but the trailers never spoke to me.
The universe looked so generic. I know Bethesda tried to force the label of “NASApunk” (whatever that means) but it just ended up with the same aesthetic of all those DeviantArt pages where people draw angular, scalloped metal scifi greeble over modern pictures. I didn’t feel any kind of vision coming out and grabbing me.
That’s aside from all the optimization and technical issues that I hear are bad even by Bethesda standards.
I’m a huge Bethesda fan and I absolutely love everything bethesda.
I can unfortunately say that many people will not be impressed with this showing. Outside of a few key characters, most NPCs are forgettable. Most quest designs are basic, and some are outright stupid - like some stranger just giving you the keys to unlock everything.
Skyrim has so much storytelling and “oh wow” moments.
You might find 5-6 of them in the 100+ hours you play. Not to say that won’t change in the future.
I watched part one of a play through. The moment I heard United colonies and Freestar Collective. I knew it was going to be the most generic space setting possible.
I enjoyed it for about 70h, then i got sick of all the loading.
I just need properly updated skyrim. Better graphics, similar amount of loading screens, better npc’s, better mechanics but the same old fantasy setting.
Oh and all the mods, something about sculpting my own vuloptuous barbie doll character to turn into the ultimate killing machine.
I enjoyed it for 3-5 minutes and then it crashed before hitting a save point.
What I don’t understand is why it even has loading screens. Surely it would be possible for them to level stream that stuff, after all the actual handcrafted environments are not that big, The rest of the planet is procedurally generated.
Partly the engine.
Consoles. I blame most of starfields issues on Microsoft and the need to have it work on garbage Xbox. I just wish we could get a game like this without having to cripple the shit out of it so it will work on some shit hardware console… But I get it, most people don’t have a PC that can play most games if they even have a PC at all…
I’m not bitter, you’re bitter! :P
Given the cost of GPUs nowadays I don’t blame them. It used to be reasonable…
Bloody hell. I don’t even think i have that many hours in most of the games i consider my favourites
I finished the story and did some sight seeing and tried to build an outpost to make fat stacks but somehow i couldn’t find the right location after 4 hours of searching and that’s when i ditched the game.
Yeah, it isn’t the best game, so it doesn’t belong between the nominations.
Also because so many amazing games came out this year.
But that doesn’t make it a bad game though. Had plenty of fun with it.
What’s the point in making a game “as stable as possible”,
when it’s not even fun?
Aren’t you just polishing shit at that point?It is more stable than their other releases, but that’s a very low bar.
I’d never call it stable without that very important context.
Plus, it doesn’t pass that bar by more than a few inches.
Yeah. It’s a good game. That’s all. Pretty formulaic and not Bethesda’s finest work. Good, but nothing award worthy.
Both spider man 2, re4, and tears of the kingdom are just as formulaic if not more, yet there they are. And SM Wonders is somehow super innovative, just because it is not the exact same formula of all marios but the exact same formula “a little bit harder”
