<Reads all the other comments>
Ok, but apart from that, it’s okay, right?
Seriously - what is a good space exploration/trading game that doesn’t require a huge learning curve? (I’m not a fan of flying stuff and too much trading is boring, but I do like exploring)
I second No Man’s Sky.
But if you want something a lot more serious, a proper simulator, but also requires time to learn (for when you get bored of the simplicity of No Man’s Sky), maybe give X4 a shot.
Have you tried No Man’s Sky or Elite Dangerous?
Where do they land on your scale?
I bought NMS when it was released, and hated it. Ok, it’s legendary as something that was released before it was ready and that undoubtedly spoiled it for me - endless running and nothing to do, and I’m sure it’s better now.
Elite Dangerous was quite fun for a while, but I got frustrated with the flying aspect quite a bit and after several deaths I gave up. I’m old enough to remember the first Elite, which was even more unforgiving.
E:D has a pretty steep curve, there’s a ton of external information that needs to be absorbed to get the most out of the game, and then once you get into it, you discover that “it’s lightyears wide, and one inch deep”. That said, I gotta hand it to the devs who are constantly trying to keep it interesting. I earned my carrier, thought “and then…?” and that was kinda it. Might give NMS a try just for something different.
Ok, but apart from that, it’s okay, right?
No. Not by a long shot. You’re better off playing Fallout 4.
what is a good space exploration/trading game that doesn’t require a huge learning curve?
Freelancer. It’s old (2003), but it’s still effectively the Explore/Trade/Fight space sim that every other game gets compared to. I’ll note that it’s focus is on getting good combat ships and flying around, exploration exists but is the least developed aspect, I’d say. Gotta get it thru the high seas, tho.
Evochron Legacy is an indie game that might scratch your itch, it also lets you fly into planets’ atmospheres and it accounts for the friction, so while you can fly fast, doing so will damage your ship. I don’t think its learning curve is too steep, but it can take some time to get used to. Try the demo before buying it, as one negative review suggests
Lastly, check out Underspace’s demo. Still in Early Access, but seems promising.
Freelancer sounds interesting - I started searching and landed on the Amazon page for it, which told me " You last purchased this item on 29 Apr 2005". I have no recollection of the thing, but then I have played a lot of games. Still, worth a revisit - I’ll take a look. Thanks.
It was bound to happen, modders can’t fix a soulless game. There’s no interesting characters, factions, or world setting to grab anyone’s interest.
I thought modders would have abandoned it sooner though.
Modders could fix that, but why bother making it a mod when you could just make a whole new game from scratch for just a little more work?
It was incredibly mid. For something Bethesda hyped for over half a decade they sure made a bland game. Throwing aside all of the incredibly dated gameplay, you hit the nail on the head. It was boring
You can tell every faction was decided by a corporate committee inside Bethesda and Microsoft. They couldn’t be too risky, couldn’t come close to possibly offending one person or risk having slightly fewer gamers. That results in a boring as hell game. Everyone was too goddamn nice in the game. No one ever got mad at you. You could punch someone in the face and the response would be “hey, that’s not nice” and then they would continue on. Hold on there don’t want to possibly scare off a potential customer by having a realistic situation there.
My biggest issues were that the world building felt so lazy, in that every faction essentially boiled down to Space America in various aspects. You got the Space American Liberal Authoritarian State, you got the Space American Cowboys, the Space American Technocrats, and the Space American Religious Fundamentalists. I found all of these factions kinda repugnant for one reason or another, and uninspired to boot, and so I never felt a pull to experience the world on a deeper level once I had gotten tired of the regular gameplay.
i’m kind of grateful for starfield actually. Feels like I can see bethesda as it actually is, even though it was obvious even before. Its so easy to just not care about anything they do. They can release next elderscrolls all they want, its all dead to me. Even if they manage to make it decent i still dont want to even look at it. Its going to cost 80€ or something like that most likely, so that is so much money saved for something more worthwhile too.
Meanwhile a Bethesda game like Fallout 3 had its fair share of flaws, but gave you plenty of opportunity to decide if you wanted to be the good guy or not. Blow up a town? Kill off all residents of Tenpenny Tower, or whack all the ghouls that want to take up residence? Why not all of them? You decide!
It also wasn’t afraid of locking players out of quests if they behaved like an asshole. I liked that, why would somebody try to work with you after you just gave them the proverbial finger?
Far better than ‘oh golly, you just told me that I’m not a nice person. Well, that’s not very neighbourly of you, but I’ll pay you my life-long savings if you hop over to the next hub and return my package that I conveniently know is collecting dust over there, but can’t be bothered to fetch myself’.
In Fallout 3 you can kill the entire BoS faction (minus the essential NPCs, that go unconscious), wait a day, and they’ll be your best pal again.
In Starfield there is the exact same morality system, with lawmen who will attack you if you are evil and some random faction that will attack you because “we hate goody two shoes”, but you are shoehorned into being Jesus at the end of the game with the same issue of the ‘good’ faction having to mandatorily become non hostile to make the final quest work.
The way people feel about Starfield is the way I feel about every Bethesda game since Morrowind.
Yeah, FO3 wasn’t perfect, but at least it had its darker edges. Feel like a slaver? Sure, no problem, you can enslave random wastelanders and sell them for profit. Screw over BoS? Broken Steel let you do that, RIP Citadel. The Pitt gave an antagonist with a motive which turned out to be a bit more nuanced than it initially seemed. You could roleplay a fat-shaming, racist PoS if you wanted to, instead of presenting only safe options.
Hehe. So, I’ve got 243 hours into Starfield. Level 45.
For me, the game is side quests, killing bad guys all over the place, and taking over as many ships as I can.
I’ve completely ignored the main mission. Haven’t really done any crafting other than upgrading weapons. I started a base and forgot where its at.
The companions are all horrid. I hang out with the robot guy. He’s got good guns.
I use Heller’s Cutter, Arc Welder, and Auto-Rivet. Nothing else. Seemed fitting for a miner. And people burn real good.
I mostly don’t use ship storage except for uncommon stuff. I go through the ridiculous torment of tossing all my junk on the ground in a hold of my ship. Silly fun.
I don’t do a lot of space combat. I’ve got a stack of Class C ships whenever I get around to optimizing them. At some point that will be a new piece of the game that I’ll play.I may never pursue the main mission. Looks kinda dumb. Can’t tell you exactly what I’ve found fun in this game where I’ve opted out of most of the game. But … every now and then I quicksave and just start burning down all the civilians. A lot of em won’t die. But I keep trying. And then I load my save, because I want to be able to land there again.
I may never pursue the main mission. Looks kinda dumb.
It very much is, and the ‘ending’ was enough for me to drop the game and uninstall it same day. I barely made it to the end, and goddamn was it not worth it.
I don’t really want any magic powers or some final culmination. If I’ve used the (100 cells!) on my cutter, you get to meet my welder, and if you’re out of reach, eat some rivets. I’m not playing some bad guy, but almost the entire game for me is bloodshed, up close, and hardcore. Ya fuk the main mission.
Bethesda is such a garbage company. No idea why people buy these half assed games
I never really understood that. Everyone hyped up skyrim so hard and when i played it it was… Meh? It was all grey and jank that apparently is enjoyable for some people.
I really liked new vegas and when fallout 4 came out, i never watched a trailer or anything, but i was sick on release day, so on that day, i watched the release trailer and thought why not. I was truly shocked how god damn ugly the game was and how shallow and broken it was.
People had high hopes for starfield and i thought i was taking crazy pills. It’s just the same thing again but somehow even worse. I think i just don’t get it.
Because we all loved morrowind…
I certainly did. That good will got me buying their games up through Fallout 4 which finally crushed it. Didn’t even look at Starfield.
I bought it on pre-release on steam and refunded it right before go live.
Love how try before you buy works now. Charge me for early access to play a couple days early? Well shucks… guess I get a free trial period.
By the end of the weekend I was disillusioned. No meaningful exploration in a space game is insane.
The problems of Starfield, the ones that prevent it from being great even if only through modding, are engine-level problems. Those can’t be fixed without remaking the entire game from scratch in a new engine, and nobody wants to do that.
Maybe in a couple decades we’ll get Starfield Remastered made in UE9.
Not really an engine problem, but Bethesda not caring to make the setting even remotely believable and making the mechanical parts feel isolated and meaningless is what hurts the game the most.
Exploring and collecting materials almost serves a purpose, as you need them to craft/upgrade armor and weapons, or to create stuff around your base, but you can just buy the stuff you need off vendors, which makes both the exploration and the point of having a base pointless. Crafting is almost something you might care about, but you can buy pretty much anything you need off vendors (heal kits, drugs) or get them as drops. None of the crafting targets the ship or its parts, for whatever reason.
If the game was just Dungeon -> Vendor -> Dungeon loop, it’d be much, much better rated and less hated. The lack of variety is felt very early on anyway, it’s not like cutting the bullshit would make it worse to endure.
Also, considering how nearly everyone using UE besides Epic themselves seem to do a really shitty job, including Bethesda with Oblivion Remaster, I’d expect that SF remaster to be even worse than the original 😆
My main gripe with the universe of starfield is that it works on fallout logic, as in, everyone acts as if telephones and cameras don’t exist, despite being 300 years in our fucking future without any tech loss.
That “don’t you guys have phones?” Blizzard meme is ironically spot on here. They don’t. Communication only happens face to face while out of a ship.
The other thing is how a lot of the game runs on “nobody cares”. Alien ship showing up on orbit? Nobody cares. Another alien ship showing up and attacking you? Nobody saw it, nobody cares. Alien space magic? Nobody cares. Alien space magic being used to wreak havoc in a big city? Not a word on it, instant amnesia after the attack.
It actually makes sense in Fallout since it’s post-apocalyptic. Yes, the apocalypse happened hundreds of years earlier, but most people still live in squalor while only a privileged few have high tech stuff. Starfield, though? The “apocalypse” took like 50 years to happen and everyone escaped Earth. There’s no excuse for widespread telecommunication to not exist.
If the base game has to be made better with mods then you’ve failed as a game designer.
¯\(ツ)/¯ non-FOSS software shouldn’t expect volunteers
Fans patching the Bethesda games is as at least as old as Daggerfall, if not earlier. Daggerfall didn’t have Helseth and Barenziah as Dark Elves until fans fixed it. Pickpocketing in Morrowind is broken unless you use the code patch. The Oblivion leveling problem punishes you for playing the game.
Like every guide for every Bethesda game is going to start with download this unofficial patch, and the unofficial patches for the DLC, and this installer. They’ve relied on fans and treated the community like it’s an FOSS community, without realizing that without good product, the volunteers won’t come.
Yes, but that shouldn’t be the norm, or an expectation, of the developer. “Oh, we don’t need to worry about the game, the fans will just mod it and it’ll bring us lots of money!”
The base game is fine. Once. Its just fine. Once.
When you beat the game and go thru The Unity to a whole ass different dimension and not one single detail is different in any way. That’s what kills the drive to go onward. Because the game was fine. Once.
The whole story is predicated on a multiverse that effectively doesn’t exist. Except on 1 sidequest for Barrett.
Reading your comment, I’ve just learned more about the story that nearly 250 hrs of gameplay got me. So the end is hokey, huh? Big surprise. I hate Sarah.
You want a fan fucking tastic game that you can put 250 hours in and never regret a minute of it?
The Yakuza franchise. Start wirh Yakuza 0. Play them all. You will laugh. You will cry. You will get so irrationally angry at pixels you’ll want to actually murder them. You’ll fall in love. And cry some more. Your heart will break many times. And nothing will ever be the same.
Ever had a game or movie or book leave you in stunned silence? You spend the next week thinking about it? That’s the Yakuza franchise. It’s silly and stupid and hilarious and it’ll tear your damn heart out when you least expect it.
I picked up Yakuza 0 on a whim in 2020 and absolutely loved it. I subsequently played every main game in the series back to back (including Judgment!) and have eagerly gotten the games at launch even though I very rarely buy games at full price. They’re just that good. Even the goofy Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii connected to the main story in surprising ways. <spoiler>spoiler!<spoiler>
My friend, your heartfelt recommendation is appreciated and will be ignored because I’m not into Asian mystique.
For my part, I I recommend that you revisit the DOOM series. Of course you want a modern zdoom egine to play the early ones. Do not overlook Sigil and the other John Romero wads, which are legit extensions to the story. Proceed to DOOM 3 and discover BFG Edition, which includes an entirely new campaign called The Lost Patrol. After that play DOOM 2016. Stop there. There has never been a better video game made since. You can give up gaming now.
The problems with Starfield aren’t so much the bugs as they are fundamental, often dated, design issues. Here’s a sort of Let’s Play from a podcast I follow with one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy. Around the 10m mark, you can start to see where this sandbox should have accounted for this kind of play. If you can’t simultaneously do that while making a galaxy with 1000 planets, then you should probably scope down until you can. Starfield is not a terrible game, but Bethesda needs to evolve.
The story is bad, the ship’s weapons selection is terrible, the outposts are almost useless, the temples are ridiculous, the powers are mostly unnecessary and soooo mmmaaannnyyy loading screens….
It’s Skyrim with a coat of lead paint.
It’s been clear for over a decade that the Creation Engine (let’s be honest it’s still Gamebryo) has run its course. It is not a viable option for a modern game anymore. It has architectural limitations that simply prevent a modern gaming experience.
There have been so many Creation Engine apologists since Oblivion trying to justify its continued existence through multiple new Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, always trying to say that it’s fine. Starfield was the chance to prove that the limitations aren’t actually architectural and that it could be used for a modern game. Clearly that’s not the case. Taking just about any other modern open world RPG to directly compare, Starfield feels like crap in comparison. Hell, even the launch version of Cyberpunk felt better than Starfield does now.
It’s been clear for over a decade that the Creation Engine (let’s be honest it’s still Gamebryo) has run its course. It is not a viable option for a modern game anymore. It has architectural limitations that simply prevent a modern gaming experience.
And yet, I’m having a blast with Oblivion Remastered. The problem with Starfield is that the writing sucks and the game loops aren’t fun. Because of these things it’s an unforgivable bore. Oblivion proves you’ll trudge back and forth and deal with all the copied and pasted caves in the world if the story is engaging and the gameplay loop is fun. The dated engine has little to do with Starfield’s problems.
The graphics aren’t the problem. The Creation Engine is not just graphics, it handles everything about how the game works. How the AI works and responds to events, how NPCs handle tasks even when not actively interacting with the player, etc. Graphics is only one part of a game, and that’s not the source of the issues.
Oblivion Remastered still uses the Gamebryo engine from Oblivion for everything with one exception, Unreal now handles the graphics. That’s why the game is nearly identical to the original in every way except graphics, it is.
But really you could make a fantastic game with the engine they had and starfield could have been good if it had great writing and great characters and quests. If people loved it and had some gripes about technical limitations that would be one thing. It’s an okay game with technical limitations, that makes it a bad game.
The other person literally said Oblivion is good despite the engine being 80% gamebryo. Don’t write like AI and ignore context. The stuff that is really bad in Starfield is the design philosophy of autogenerated content. This is entirely different from the engine choice.
No it’s exactly the same, you just notice it more because of the different context of a limited fantasy realm versus open stellar exploration.
Oblivion and Skyrim also have a bunch of procedurally generated content. But it is more easily ignored, because these are dungeons and caves and not numerous planets where you are walking for upwards of 15 minutes or more across open terrain to visit the same dozen locations. And having dozens of loading screens to stitch each small segment together.
Starfield as a concept doesn’t work with the engine, because the engine is incapable of adequately creating an open environment at that level. If it could, they would have given it to us instead of Skyrim in space. We got Skyrim in space because that’s the limit of the engine. Bethesda’s insistence of continuing to use it, and claiming that it’s not an issue, despite the clear deficiencies in the released product, is a slap in the face to every player. It’s the definition of “You’ll take what we give you, and like it”.
It works in TES because x, y, z and not in Starfield because x, y, z.
Starfield doesn’t work with [Skyrim engine]
It’s Skyrim in space
Which is it? I’m confused.
“Starfield is my dream game.”
-Todd Howard“The game is perfect, upgrade your ghetto ass computer.” -Todd Howard
All of your criticisms are spot on. The only thing is disagree with is the story. I thought it was alright. Some of the side quests were great, but there weren’t a lot of those.
I really enjoyed the ship building, but it was extremely limited and unbalanced.
I will say the loading screens didn’t bother me, though.
The only thing is disagree with is the story. I thought it was alright.
It was barely alright up until the end and you basically do a NewGame+ in the most boring and lazy way possible; go through this gateway to a ‘new dimension’ that’s exactly the same as this one. About the time I saw that I immediately quit and uninstalled. I couldn’t care less if there is a better story after you NG+ it however many more times, I couldn’t stand playing through that game again.
The ship building is convoluted, difficult to establish where the doors/passageways will be. My beef is with the guns selection. We have several classes of guns but they all get mixed up in the menu.
I thought the story was weak as hell, to say the least.
Have you played No Man’s Sky? That’s how you have a good transition between space and land. Having loading screens when entering a big building doesn’t bother me. But the bugs in having or not doors and being or not in a place without atmosphere, does.
I love NMS, and I think it’s a better game than Starfield overall. But they’re extremely different.
Their overall premises differ a lot, but it’s very easy to see that a lot of the “exploration” in SF tried to copy NMS, but did so in the worst way possible.
Scanning plants and wildlife? Turn on scan mode and find those. Only in Starfield, you have to do it several times to complete, because FUN!
Points of interest dotting the planet surface? Sure! Just make sure they have zero connection to anything in both games!
Space exploration? Just a random dice roll when you enter a planet orbi, clearly better than using an item to search for a random POI in space!
It’s not that it’s outdated, oblivion does this sort of thing. It’s that starfield just isn’t good, and the older titles are better
It can be both. It was impressive when Oblivion had 7 different interlocking systems but none of them were particularly good, but these days, I think we expect at least one or two of them to be significantly better.
one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy
Abby and Vinny from Giant Bomb Beastcast
I am a huge BGS and “game cinema” fan, and Starfield felt so… boring. Both the first bit I played before I dropped it, and YT videos to see what I was missing.
For lack of another explanation, its like all those fun side quests and nooks individual writers went crazy making lost their spark. Even ME Andromeda had more compelling bits.
So I can see modders shying away. Why put all that work into something one has no desire to replay, especially with the alternatives we have these days.
This video manages to say everything there is to say about the game in under two minutes 😅
You would have to basically make a whole game and rewrite characters and quests to make it better. But that’s a lot of work for modders especially when they’re not that interested in the game to start with.
People still care about Starfield in 2025? I thought everyone went back to Skyrim a year ago.
The game isn’t good, but reading how bad it is is a certain entertainment to me, not gonna lie.
Funny thing is that I decided to pirate it around February 2024, after seeing how much people were hating it. “It can’t be that bad, can it?” - my low expectations were disappointed by reality
Ooooo shhhh you didn’t go to the seas for it, I sold you my old copy at a discounted rate. Nothing more to see here big corporations.
I really like it, I’ve got over 1000 hours in it i know its got its problems and I understand why people don’t like it, but none of the things it does wrong are that big of a deal to me and I have fun running around doing little quests. It scratches an itch for me so I keep returning to it. Of course I want tons of support for the game, but if nobody made anything more for it I’d probably still put another 1000hrs in.
Yes. I enjoy the game. I wasn’t expecting Star Wars, and therefore I was not disappointed. I got a Bethesda style take on Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen, without an always online multiplayer requirement or getting a game still in the alpha stages of development for the last 10 years.
While there are certain elements that I don’t like, they are small issues that mods can easily fix. I cannot do that with Elite or Star Citizen. And unfortunately, this genre of games is incredibly tiny. Like, basically the only other option I haven’t mentioned is EVE Online. No thanks.
I like how you got downvoted for liking it.
Here is a dilemma: If you like getting downvoted for liking something, then do you upvote your own comment or do you downvote it?
Practically I believe up\downvotes are public, so you can’t. Otherwise you look like you’re just a troll if you’re downvoting your own comment.
Your own comments are upvoted automatically, so every new comment starts with 1 point. You can remove your own upvote from your comment, so that it starts at 0 instead.
Yeah, but people can see if you downvote your own comment, right?
Removing an upvote is not the same thing as downvoting
Average Lemmy moment, honestly.
I started playing it again after going back to Elite Dangerous. I’m on an expedition in Elite Dangerous so there is no one around. I’m back in Starfield to try and remember where I left off.
That’s how projects go. But I bet it happens faster when enthusiasm for a game has the curve this title did.
The fundamental concept and theme of the game is trash. It literally makes everything you do meaningless, it inevitably leads to you becoming the jaded villain. It would be better if they had an end where you destroyed the universe shifting thing and were locked in one.
I never played it, but believed the reviews that stated that there was basically no real metaplot, and there was a mini game involving floating through stars when you found an alien artifact that you couldn’t skip after the first time.
Oh, and no real aliens.
WTF Bethesda?
There was alien life but not sentient.
The real problem was the size of everything and the lack of anything meaningful to do.
You’re correct, there was alien life, but… this is a SciFi game with alien artifacts. Not even a shred of contact with intelligent alien life?
Like I stated, I never played it, but your latter statement was echoed by multiple sources, so I believe you.
But the aliens were humans who came before/after you because humans made a thing that made them destroy the universe so everything is stuck in a time loop where humans have to… Stop other humans from fielding too many stars or else they figure out how to loop the star field again.
Ok.
I played through the main quest. I didn’t really enjoy any of it.
