Ha you got me with that last panel
I don’t get it.
People wanted another Bethesda game.
They got what they wanted.
I said in 2008, after playing the first Fallout game by Bethesda instead of Black Isle: “Only Bethesda could manage to make a post apocalyptic prostitute boring.”
They’ve always been boring, they’ve always had ugly character models, and the writing has always been bad. You get what you paid for. A Bethesda game.
They’ve always been boring
Strongly disagreed. Pre-Oblivion their games were great. Hoping for a return to engrossing stories taking place in a rich, expansive universe was not entirely unreasonable.
I’d recommend you go back and read some critical reviews of Arena and Daggerfall. The complaints are exactly the same: the graphics engine is out of date, the characters are lifeless, the writing is just okay, the story is shallow, etc. Bethesda has scaled back the RPG mechanics since Morrowind, for sure, but their games ultimately have the same Bethesda DNA, for better or worse. For what it’s worth, I’m enjoying Starfield at launch much more than Fallout 4 even now, updated, expanded and modded.
My friend, I don’t need to go read the video game history about Daggerfall: I wrote some of it. :)
And I stand by my statement. That game was the height of storytelling that came out of Bethesda in a bunch of small but important ways, although Morrowind is not far behind, in a somewhat different fashion. And there is a definite shift in the series from the moment Ted Peterson left the team. Patently, not a shift I am personally very fond of, but to each her own.
I can’t remember all that well, I was a child at the time, lol. I go back to Morrowind once in a while, and I do find the writing to be more immersive, as opposed to the more recent games where it’s a series of linear, ham-fisted novellas. So far, Starfield seems much improved over Fallout 4 or Skyrim in that regard, but I’m not all that far in.
Morrowind was their best, but I would say 21 years on, it’s really tough to be like “Yeah, this time they’ll get back to their roots.” No, it’s time to move on. All the people who made those games what they were have retired, moved on, or died.
Surely there’s an element there of rose tinted glasses? All of us were 21 years younger. There were less games coming out and they were harder to get for many of us.
You didn’t need to work so damn much to keep your head above water, or were below working age altogether. It was a lot easier to find the time to really immerse yourself in the lore and it required a lot of reading both in-game and out.
It was also all new to us, truly novel experiences with every leap in gameplay, graphics or mechanics being applied to brains that weren’t completely immune to dopamine and over-stimulated constantly.
I played Ultima VII so much that my friends and I would quote the game to eachother at school…we were fully immersed in it and it was bloody huge for its day.
To be honest I barely even try with these type of games anymore. I know it isn’t going to satisfy me. I tend to enjoy mastering movement mechanics and skill based competitive games. Sure, they also release the same game every year repackaged, but there’s usually enough of a tweak to movement mechanics and gun physics that it’s a challenge to get gud again and I get a real kick out of genuine competition.
I played Starfield for several hours on the weekend and I do my best not to judge too harshly given what I’ve said above but I feel as though there will never be a game ever again that grabs me enough to make that genre worth paying the money. It’s me that’s changed moreso than the lore being watered down. “Damn you, Avatar!”
I grew up with Skyrim and mod it religiously - that’s where my nostalgia comes from. And even I’ll say that Morrowind completely blows it out of the water on nearly every front.
Skyrim’s a lot more accessible, and I love it for that, but that’s about it.
Well, I’d argue that Daggerfall was their best game, story-wise, but Daggerfall is even older. And that’s the point, isn’t it? More time passed between Skyrim and Starfield than between Daggerfall and Oblivion. A lot can change in so many years, and I do believe that hoping for something new was not entirely unreasonable.
Then again, the keyword there is entirely, isn’t it. I personally didn’t expect very much from Starfield, and, also personally, I can’t say I fully understand the amount of hype surrounding it.
They could have given us something old, or something new, but they didn’t. Just the same shit as last time, wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle.
I think the fundamental problem is that people had different expectations for a game set in space, both because Bethesda stoked them (all of that talk of having the idea decades ago / first new franchise in however many years / Microsoft bought the company just to get it as an exclusive / etc) and because after No Man’s Sky people kind of expected that with their budget / resources they would manage to fix that game’s problems and create something richer + more seamless.
In retrospect, if they’d simply sold it as “Skyrim in Space,” admitted to the limitations up front - same underlying engine, limited amount of variety to procedurally-generated content, loading screens instead of seamless takeoff/landing, etc - and not pretended that it was something new, the response would have probably been much more uniformly positive.
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Everyone recalls, but they also recall Hello Games spending the next several years fixing the game and fleshing out to be closer to their original vision, which is what they were selling to people: their vision. They should have been selling the game, not the vision, but they took their fuckup on the chin and risked a lot. There was no gaurantee they would appease gamers and they essentially had no income except for continued sales of No Mans Sky.
Also NMS was Hello Games’ first real big game ever, so you can give them a little slack for having no idea what they’re doing.
Bethesda is a 30+ year old juggernaut who waits for modders to fix their games and has been re-releasing their last successful game for a full decade now.
Hello Games made NMS better because they felt bad. Bethesda made Skyrim better to re-release it and get more money.
Also, Hello Games is just 26 people and Bethesda is 420 people and owned by Microsoft.
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I think the difference here is Hello Games took a big risk taking 2-3 years to fix it while asking for nothing more in exchange. What they did is basically unheard of because its hard to pay people without known future income.
Do you think Bethesda will take 2-3 years to “fix” this? I don’t.
Bethesda is 420 people
So what you’re saying is that they smoke a lot of weed? Would explain a few things tbh 🤔
after No Man’s Sky people kind of expected that with their budget / resources they would manage to fix that game’s problems and create something richer + more seamless
That was basically what I hoped for. NMS type game, but with Skyrim/ fallout level modding, stories, quests and deeper meaning to it.
And with better procgen. They have the manpower and expertise to do that.
I haven’t bought the game yet, waiting to see the initial responses. Now… I’ll probably pick it up on sale sometime, when bugs are fixed and there’s solid mods.
I mean, it is extremely polished. I have encountered a total of 2 bugs over my entire playtime. By this time in fallout 4 I lost track of the number of bugs I saw, things jittering atound, people’s faces acting wonky, nome of that here.
Honestly I still think waiting to buy a Bethesda game is smart if you aren’t a huge fan or something. Skyrim was pretty crap at launch and all the praise it gets now is mostly referring to Skyrim well after launch when patches and mods turned it into something good.
I played Skyrim at launch and it was great.
Mods added another level to the game but I can happily play the game without.
I think you’re on the right track, but I think it’s also because recent games did better with similar ideas. People shat all over Mass Effect Andromeda, but it hid loading screens behind interplanetary and FTL travel that was actually visualized. In my brain, I know they’re cutscenes to cover for loading data, but it’s enough to take you out of it being a “game” and allowing you to suspend your disbelief. It’s hard to suspend disbelief when there’s a loading screen constantly in front of you.
Yeah, but you can do the same thing in Star Field, just takes a bit of learning. You get the exact same cut scenes for loading even, ala Mass Effect. The reality is the game offers fast travel, as essentially jumping 5 times and loading and seeing the cut scenes is the same thing as just loading to the end.
This game feels more like a test, do you actually want to explore, or do you want to hop point to point for the quest. You can do either. It just seems to offer fast travel as the first option, but you can take the slow way around too
I just want Spacerim tho
Closest I can get you is “Spacerimming: An Anal Odyssey”, will that do?
No but I’ll hold on to that for now thanks
Skyrim mods to the rescue?
But they kind of already did say most of that stuff.
They said long before the game came out that there was no seamless takeoff/landing. They said they upgraded their Creation Engine for Starfield, AFAIK they never said it was entirely new.
Either way, I like it. Its fun.
Either way, I like it. Its fun.
And that’s great! I think we’re mostly talking about the people who are whinging about it. People who are enjoying it, let em enjoy it.
The only people I have seen complaining about it are here on Lemmy. Which honestly, the more time I spend here, I almost feel like its more negative than Reddit was. Maybe its the low population, maybe its bot astroturfing, I dont know. But its really unfortunate this place has really gone downhill.
Top front page post on reddit right now is complaining that people are misrepresenting why people are disappointed with the game. Basically, arguing that the game is disappointing and that people should be accepting critiques of it.
This is the third post on the front page of reddit. Lots of people are complaining.
Yo, your old.reddit link is now redirecting to reddit.com. Did those dirty bastards remove old.reddit?
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The setting lowered my expectations. Modern sci-fi has this weird obsession with being sterile and boring. Compared to the magical fantasy of Elder Scrolls and the zany retro-futurism of Fallout, it was guaranteed to be boring.
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I think we were all expecting them to rebuild the engine sometime between fallout 4 and now instead of just duct tapping a flashlight (new lighting system) to it.
It’s such a bad engine the Phil Spencer came out and said every QA tester at Microsoft is working on Starfield:
is that because Microsoft doesn’t have QA anymore?
Consumer Windows is just an endless Early Access release now.
The Creation Engine itself is just Gamebryo with a flashlight duct taped to it. IMO the engine is a huge part of what makes Bethesda games so fascinatingly unique.
The engine should be rebuilt from the ground up though. It’s full of problems and it’s fundamentally dated, for example one of the most obvious things a new version of the engine should include is making the world completely seamless - no more loading instances, no more loading screens entering interiors, etc etc. But all the other problems with the engine need addressing. And they can do a huge amount to make it better for the mod scene if they rebuild.
Continually slapping more and more fixes on this engine fundamentally ignores the fact it is impossible for it to get around several issues it has at its core without a rewrite.
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This engine is already great for modding, but I suppose it can always be better. Do you know any technical details about why the worlds can’t be made seamless? There were open cities mods for Oblivion & Skyrim, so it seems like it’s probably technically possible. Seems like that may be more of a compromise related to memory allocation on consoles.
I dunno, I don’t expect Bethesda to write a new engine from scratch, no one does that. They made New Atlantis seamless to an extent I haven’t seen in previous Bethesda games, so as long as they keep making incremental improvements, I’ll be satisfied.
Do you know any technical details about why the worlds can’t be made seamless?
I don’t know the technical details but I know that when you attempt to add new map area to any existing map (for example the overworld) the physics engine does not engage for those spaces. You have to create new map areas for anything new.
There are also hardcoded limits to the number of entities that can be loaded in-engine at any one time. When you go over the alotted number of NPCs for example it starts spawning them in the sky, this causes the infamous flying horse bug everyone has seen in modded Skyrim when they’ve added too many new NPCs to zones. I think newer games have had some bandaids slapped on the engine to increase this but it’s still there.
Open Cities works because the cell already exists, so they just took everything in the city zone and moved it into the existing world cell, which is identical in size. So there’s no problem with this causing issues. This can’t be done for a lot of buildings (to create interior/exterior) because of various issues such as NPCs not knowing where their house is unless it’s a defined place you go through a loading screen on, so taking houses and slapping them into open world would completely break scripting for their daily routines, same for every building in the game. Some of them are tardis design too, bigger on the inside than the actual building is on the outside.
Well a lotta games are “in development”, doesn’t mean that they get developed in that time.
I’m fine with their writing and their overall gameplay. It’s just that they managed to make space feel boring and tiny. All those little areas in-between the loading screens really don’t feel like a vast space opera at all.
Also I wish they would just invest into some new game mechanics. Proc gen planets look great and exploring them could have been so much fun 🥲
Yeah one of the best parts of the game, the planets look great. There’s just not much to do on them.
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Not always, n’wah
Skyrim is literally one of their worst-written games and only has a saving grace of a wide open world that is interesting to explore.
Personal opinion, Morrowind was still boring, but had the best writing, best style, and required the most from the player. Morrowind was peak Bethesda and that was over 20 years ago.
🔥Hot take🔥
Eta: emojis, for that hot take
I don’t know why people pretend they actually enjoyed sitting there deciphering all the text/journals/notes/etc. to get directions and navigate the world and enjoyed it. Waypoints were added for a reason. Morrowind has some of the most ridiculous rose-tinted glasses working for it I’ve ever seen in gaming lol
Morrowind is a role-playing game, and in this role, you needed to be able to do things like research the world you’re in to figure out what to do, not have a rando who has a big fancy exclamation point above him telling you exactly where to go with a waypoint. It’s just different ways to approach the game. One is functionally role-playing within the world you exist in, and the other is “Fuck all this, I just want to play a game, I don’t want to think hard.”
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The roles played are different.
Really. You’re gonna pull the people like different things argument after telling this person that they’re just pretending to enjoy Morrowind? That’s some next level hypocrisy right there.
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I don’t think the dude was insinuating that they thought people were “brain-dead” because they enjoyed Skyrim more than Morrowind - it’s literally just the way the games are.
Like you said yourself, waypoints were added for a reason. Morrowind can be pretty bullshit at times with directions, and the game does straight-up lie to you a few times, but you also can’t deny that Skyrim is literally telling you to go that arrow on your compass for every single quest. One’s not better than the other, but with Morrowind, you do get the sense of being on an adventure since you have to figure stuff out and encounter weird people on the way, whereas with Skyrim it’s waaaaay easier to get into because you can legitimately turn your brain off and let it relax a bit.
One’s not better than the other,
No, but one is genuinely “role-playing” while another is… not.
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I don’t know why people pretend they actually enjoyed sitting there deciphering all the text/journals/notes/etc. to get directions and navigate the world and enjoyed it.
This was you saying the way you don’t like is wrong.
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I played Morrowind after playing Skyrim and I found it much better.
It’s much less accessible, but the writing is actually good and it has the best ‘R’ in RPG of any game I have ever played. The character progression is amazing and there are so many fun ways to build a character.
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Can’t have rose-tinted glasses if you’re currently playing it as OpenMW.
Starfield at launch is more compelling than Fallout 4 or Skyrim, but falls short of Morrowind. It’s in the mix somewhere alongside Oblivion and Fallout 3, IMO.
As an enjoyer of both Oblivion and Morrowind I’m going to say that I think it’s more likely that the people at Bethesda who were key at making their past games good have either been promoted beyond their positions of expertise or simply left for greener pastures. Bethesda hasn’t always been trash, and people are quick to forget transgressions from nearly a decade ago (yes! It’s been that long!)
It’s been 21 years since Morrowind, and 17 years since Oblivion. Been longer than a decade. Two in Morrowind’s case. I would put Morrowind down as “peak Bethesda,” and their games have been slowly turning to crap since. I agree, I think they lost a lot of key players who worked for them, and they’ve never been able to regain their footing.
21 years since Morrowind
🫠
Thanks Todd Howard 🙏
“He can’t keep getting away with it!!”
My wife, a couple friends, and I have all put a ton of hours into this game and absolutely love it. I put several hours into the shipbuilder alone. Every hand built sidequest I run into feels like a TNG episode. And I love the kinda Becky Chambers / Star Trek-style utopia with mystery and drama theme they’ve got.
This is the most Bethesda game they’ve ever made, for better of worse. It doesn’t hand hold you. There are plenty of times where I’ve looked at my quest log, found nothing i could do except the main quest, and then decided just to jump to a random system - only to get pulled into some crazy new adventure for a couple hours. You’re supposed to be an explorer, if you put even the smallest effort into exploring, you will be rewarded.
A lot of people complaining were never going to like this game or any Bethesda game and I don’t know what to do with those people. The amount of constant negativity on the internet makes me really appreciate stories like TNG and writers like Becky Chambers and Cory Doctorow, because they’re so positive and affirming and optimistic and when they criticise, they also offer solutions. And this game really scratches that itch for me.
And after almost 40 years of life dealing with the constsnt cycle of negativity and hatred and anger and frustration and drama, on the internet, a global scale, and in my own life…I’m just tired. I can’t play games with “edgy dark stories” anymore. I can’t go back to New Vegas because its bummer after bummer. And i know a lot of people thrive on that “scortched earth” bullshit but I just can’t anymore.
I just…wanna sit down and play a game. And maybe one where everything is okay for once. And this is that game for me.
Am I the only one who noticed the gun animations are just the fallout 4 ones? Like the pistols use exactly the same animations. I know because I played hundreds of hours of 4.
I mean, you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel: if 4 achieved realistic-feeling energy weapon animations, why fix what isn’t broken? Third folksy saying.
Yeah, Elden Ring for example has tons of DS3 animations. It’s just more sensible to use the existing ones rather than completely remaking the same thing.
Yes but we need to go vertically, not horizontally.
Rule of thumb. Wait until you see top ten mod lists for Bethesda games and is at least on sale.
I’m waiting for the Moddinglinked (Viva New Vegas and Midnight Ride) guide before I starts torrenting it
i have gamepass unrelated to this game, i’m probably going to try it out if the dlss mod can be installed on the gamepass version (which looks like it can be). if the game sucks, i’m happy, nothing kills excitement better than actually experiencing the thing and getting disappointed, so i can finally evict this game from my head. and if the game doesn’t suck, i’m also happy because all these years later i finally get to play star citizen, i just apparently had to wait for bethesda to make it.
Well… MxR just dropped an immersive mod list.
Impossible. There is no time to have created a list of mods. Unless the list is just BetterHUD and a few options for Reshade
I hear the word immersive in his voice now
Kinda reminded me of Hogwarts Legacy, except it was a great game.
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Starfield doesn’t unlock in many countries until September 5.
Everyone fucking relax
Had me in the first 2/3, ngl
That’s how these jokes work. Gj
I’m not surprised. I haven’t seen vids or played Starfield, but just judging by how Fallout 4 and Skyrim play, I was gonna expect the game to get old and boring really quick between the bland gameplay and milquetoast writing of those two games.
Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Morrowind were probably their last good games, with Morrowind being Bethesda at their absolute best imo.
I’m quite sure you’re in the minority judging Skyrim as boring.
Probably. I haven’t played any of the DLCs, but I just can’t get into Skyrim nowadays because I get quickly bored of it all. The only time I managed to complete all of the quests and the main quest was back at release, but now whenever I play it feels like a slog to go through a painfully bland world and setting. I usually give up after a few hours of playtime, and now I just haven’t played in years.
Meanwhile, I was around 30-40 hours into my latest Morrowind playthrough before BG3 dropped, and was putting a fair whack of time into Battlespire, so maybe I’m finally becoming old lol.
It depends, I think as unmoded would many say it is boring. The whole game is kinda of a meme even tho it wasn’t supposed to be. like killing a chicken and hell breaks loose, and how sweet rolls are an addiction to all the guards, how they keep saying the same thing and seem to live the same life. All of them could just have been one person (or two because there are female guards too). Some npcs are a bit interesting the first few times but it gets old quick.
I have played skyrim a lot but it is heavily moded. Every new playthrough do I throw in new quests and places, try a different mix of combat mods and Ai mods to make my enemies actually enemies and not just obstacles, everything to make it less monotone. I tried to play it again last month but my motivation just fell and I never felt like playing again.
I mean I’m gonna have to agree with the guy though. Skyrim was all but earth shattering… In 2011. Have you tried playing it recently? It feels old and repetitive. There is obviously still some fun to be had and some memorable bits but on the whole it’s just outdated plain and simple.
I think the vast majority of enjoyment people derive from it is nostalgia driven which I can totally respect, but that only lasts for like 4-5 hours once a year tops. I feel like a new player who never touched it in the golden years would likely get bored fast
No, I haven’t played it recently. I also don’t play Pacman anymore but it still is one of the cornerstones of computer games and a great game. Yes, Skyrim may be bland compared to modern RPGs but so are the others @Poggervania listed.
I’m not denying it’s impact on modern gaming, I’m just saying it’s old. Like it certainly deserves a spot in the gaming hall of fame but it doesn’t really stack up against more modern RPGs. Technology is moving forward and so should games, yet Bethesda is so stuck on Skyrim they have refused to innovate for a comically long time
You say that, but you also have younger people who play Bethesda’s older games like Morrowind and Daggerfall to this day and are able to enjoy them in their own right.
It’s hard to put into words because another poster was right - there’s still some sort of draw to not just Skyrim, but their games in general. It might be nostalgia, it might be the atmosphere, no idea - but when you play the games, it’s just so… blah. Like it’s so close to being good, but they just miss the mark in some capacity.
Using Morrowind as an example because of how much I like the game, the environment, the atmosphere, and the writing are really well done - but god fucking dammit, I have to game the system in order to maximize my attributes on level up so I don’t die to RNGesus. As a mage, I don’t want to level up Long Blade or Heavy Armor - but I kind of have to because I need more carry weight from Strength and the HP gain from Endurance is not retroactive, so I have to get that to 100 as soon as I can so I don’t die to a sneeze. In Skyrim, they made leaps and bounds in the general combat - which is great, but holy fuck who gives a shit about the world when it effectively goes on pause for you and everybody is as wooden as the trees surrounding them? Fallout 4 is actually a really good gameplay loop and settlements are fun, but I’m not even playing a character - I can say “yes” in three different ways or “not right now” to pretty much every dialogue option and quest, and everybody is “quirky” in the way the cast of The Office is “quirky” it feels like. The writing really misses the mark 90% of the time.
I think it’s that, at least for me personally, is what makes them boring but still have that draw.
yeah i never thought super mario bros was a good game, maybe in the 80s it was but its just boring and repetive today
I mean, recently I played skyrim for the first time and it was far from boring
I can get the sentiment about the combat being uninspired and a bit bland, and things being formulaic but… There is still something that draws me in. I really have no words for what it is, but somehow these games suck me in despite their problems and “boring” mechanics.
I’d say Starfield is in a lot of ways a return to form. So far, none of the actual quests I got from NPCs were as simple as “Go there and kill bandits”, like the majority of quests in Fallout 4. Those proc-gen quests have been relegated to Mission Boards for various factions (and there’s also more variety of them. Beyond killing, you have smuggling missions, cargo transport, passenger transport, surveying and some other stuff). Most of the quests I’ve done so far have also been very interesting, I’ve talked my way out of multiple confrontations/bossfight and I’ve robbed a valuable trophy and bank credentials from a luxury cruise ship with not a single shot fired, just using my cunning, persuasion and a little bit of blackmail and bribery. I keep thinking that I am going to get those “please kill those raiders” quests, like when I got a distress call from somebody having trouble with spacers (this games version of generic raiders or bandits), but instead I had to repair communication satellites and negotiate a mutual defense pact with the settlers of that system. Like, I’m 50+ hours in (yes, genuinely) and the game keeps surprising me with new and interesting content. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of the content available.
Sure, you can’t completely fuck everything up and go murder everyone in the game like in BG3 or FNV or something, but it is actually a really solid RPG. The writing isn’t as deep, philosophical and politically charged as New Vegas, but it’s good. Way better than Fallout 4s main story (and better than Fallout 3s main story, which secretly sucks.) I actually had some interesting conversations in the game and chuckled quite a few times at some of the responses I could choose. My background and traits actually do come up in conversation, even had one of my traits help me win a persuasion minigame (which is actually quite interesting in this as well). Skills like Persuasion, Intimidation and Bribery actually matter and allow you to finish quests in different ways. I get a little bit angry everytime somebody calls it Fallout 4 in space, because unlike Fallout 4 Starfield is actually a roleplaying game, even if it doesn’t live up to the heights of Baldurs Gate 3. If you’re gonna call it anything in space, Oblivion would probably be the most apt comparison.
…not 100% clear on the point of this comic…
I didn’t play starfield but watched around 2 hours of gameplay. The story was kinda nonsense, the gameplay I can respect but I know it wouldn’t be for me. Like everyone says it’s fallout in space, but it seems like it takes itself much more serious
With how many call backs, jokes and references I’ve seen in the main plot: it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Half of the jokes have been directly related to the lack of dialogue options and having a silent protagonist.
I wish it took itself more serious. It’s tongue in cheek non stop but the jokes rarely land.
Fully agree. Lots of jokes; they’re not very funny, tho. IDK… Maybe it will get more interesting the further I get. I still wanna check out Neon (the cyberpunk city) and do deep space exploration (can’t even get out there yet). I’ve been to a museum ran by the Starship Troopers faction that gives a ton of exposition on the lore and it was a chore to stay awake through all that.
Damn starfield is bad? With its premise being Another basic america glass towers neolib united federation in space, while also made by bethesda? Who could have known.
agreed lol
I does indeed start out slow, but it gets better after a certain point in the main quest. It’s a fairly standard Bethesda open world game, so just don’t be expecting something more and you should enjoy it. One thing I’ve appreciated as a hoarder is that your run speed doesn’t decrease even when you’re hugely encumbered, your stamina (oxygen) just goes down as if you were sprinting.
