Bethesda is such a garbage company. No idea why people buy these half assed games
Because we all loved morrowind…
¯\(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 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 😆
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.
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.
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.
Lol it’s such a tremendously boring game with dated gameplay. Bless your little heart if you enjoy it, but it’s a bland, middling game at best and flat out bad in many ways.
I hope they do a proper sequel that doesn’t suck. Skyrim in space would be cool if they actually deliver that.
If the base game has to be made better with mods then you’ve failed as a game designer.
<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)
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.
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?
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.
I bought it on confidence when it released. That was the last time I ever did this. I played 25 very boring hours and uninstalled it. It’s very difficult to figure out how you can fail so spectacularly with such a budget, such a long development time, and such a carte blanche with making a new universe from scratch
The thing for me is that it’s a game about a guild of explorers, and the game is all fast travel. The bits you do “explore” were soulless.
As other people have complained, it’s a space exploration game without the space nor the exploration
Exactly. What made Morrowind’s sauce was discovering all these places on foot
God how did they fuck that up? Who thought I’d want to fast travel there? Sure sometimes, but honestly I’d love it if it showed how many minutes to destination and then you started jumping.
You’re in the pilots chair, you see 10 minutes to the other side of the galaxy where your mission is. You hesitate because that’s far, but 2 minutes away is your home base anyway so might as well swing through and drop off some stuff, make sure the pumps and extractors are working. 6 minutes past that is that side quest you’ve been putting off, I guess we can do that too. You hit the jump button, stars whizz past. You go talk with your crew, get caught up on conversations. You jump back in the chair when the 20 second warning goes off. You jump out and arrive, but there is a weird signal on a nearby planet in this system…
Now THAT’s the game i wanted. Altering one mechanic right there completely changes the entire style of the game. I will forever be annoyed that everything in the game is instant fast travel. Sure have a button there to skip if people want to, but personally I prefer to lay back and fully immerse myself
It could have been so good and the game genuinely has some cool environments but for the most part there is just nothing to do. I’ve stumbled on some cool places like the Mantis hideout and stuff but the game is so repetitive and 98% of the planets are devoid of life.
And they wanted it that way. They were like well that’s what it’s really like! Which like yeah great, but that’s terribly boring for a game.
Another game like that was Mass Effect 1, where they had the undiscovered worlds, but even those were more entertaining. They gave you a mako, and each planet had at least one faction with at least some backstory to it so it wasn’t a complete waste. Starfield is like, nothing. I encounter the exact same building structure and camps multiple times on my single playthrough. Absolutely uninspired
Yep! When I saw that Todd said that I was kind of dumbfounded. I get that that’s how space is but like, that shits boring. They really could have had something special but they severely missed the mark.
They changed the recipe. Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4, Oblivion, and Morrowind all had something in common: handcrafted environments densely packed with points of interest.
Starfield used procedurally generated content. It generates abandoned mines and outposts from a tileset and then drops you in the literal desert between them.
And some of them are duplicates ! I discovered THREE identical locations just roaming about ! the same dungeon layout ! but different loot. Can you believe that shit
That’s not the only issue it has. They could’ve made procedural generation work, with having a combination of hand crafted and procedural environments. But it doesn’t seem like they have the skill to pull it off.
Issues this game has, and probably one of the major reasons why it’s so dead feeling, is how the world doesn’t react to you.
Tell me, what happens in Skyrim or Oblivion if you walk around town with your sword drawn?
What happens if you start randomly casting spells where the guards can see you?
What if you managed to get a certain artefact, wear a certain kind of armour, or work on upgrading a certain skill tree?
See what I mean? See what’s missing?
The dead, empty, open world tiles only compounds this. And how everything feels even more limiting because of how the game is strictly chopped up with loading screens.
Very true. So long as your shots don’t hit anybody, or your powers affect anybody, you can show them off all the time on the big cities and nobody gives a fuck. Using the whirlwind Sprint shout on Skyrim makes everyone around comment and a guard desperately asking you to stop.
Which is just frustrating because there’s some real improvements in mays of their usual systems elsewhere in the game. The I think the persuasion mechanics are a real step up from previous games and I’m amazed the system hasn’t been ported into Skyrim. They got flight mechanics to actually work in the Creation engine. Zero-G and low gravity works great. Gunplay and combat is even more improved over Fallout 4 (though it’s an incremental improvement over the revolutionary leap made with Fallout 4).
Imo, Starfield is mainly lacking in only a few (though critical) things. They need more than 4 fleshed-out companions, and have them for different factions; there’s a couple of NPC’s that I expected to become companions. Since they insistend on having procedurally generated content, they needed to add way more pieces to their tilesets and, more importantly, have an algorithm to stitch things together and have some actual variety. As it is right now, you get the same exact facilities copy-pasted as whole spaces with no variation. And they needed to not force you into the main storyline, or at least pull a Fallout: New Vegas and have multiple paths through the main storyline.
There’s a lot of good bones to be had in Starfield, which just makes the cock-ups more disappointing since they’ll lead to those imprpvements being abandoned
IDK, I still think about how the dufuses added recoil to laser guns in FO4. And the fact that land mines and similar traps change every time a save is loaded is super dumb because it’s just like “OH DID WIDDLE BABY GET BLOWN DA FUQ UP? LET ME FIX IT FOR YOU (Removes the landmines)”.
I enjoyed the combat in FO3 more.
And still Star Flight did the same thing and was a all time great game, oh and it fit on two 360k floppies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Starfield would be fine if there was a way to get from place to place without constant reloads. This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
The thing is, we already have games like No Man’s Sky which do this very well. Starfield may have been better received if it came out 15 years ago, but against modern space games, it just sucks.
That’s ignoring anything else wrong with the game, of course, and there is plenty. But I could get over a lot if it didn’t feel like I was playing a menu instead of flying a spaceship at every change of scenery.
But I could get over a lot if it didn’t feel like I was playing a menu instead of flying a spaceship at every change of scenery.
I stopped playing mid-loading screen. My awareness just snapped into place, and I realized that the last 30 minutes of “gameplay” was effectively:
- bland fetch quest dialogue
- walk through corridor - board ship
- loading screen
- space (menu)
- loading screen
- Space over different planet (menu)
- loading screen
- landing pad - walk through corridor
- bland fetch quest dialogue
- GoTo step 2
This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
Old engine isn’t always bad. It is if you do like Todd and just slap more and more plugins and technology on top and call it a new engine, instead of fixing underlying issues or rewriting/updating old parts.
Which is why Starfield NPCs walk onto tables and become owls when the camera zooms into conversations, etc: It is the same code that is used in Skyrim and partly Oblivion. And Todd Howard doesn’t want devs doing silly things like fixing twenty year old code, he wants new and bigger.
Freelancer would have been fresher in memory 15 years ago, and that’s one that had seamless intra-system travel. Gameplay in Freelancer even flowed better than NMS for getting from orbit to orbit and having encounters or discoveries along the way. It just didn’t have the on-foot gameplay. I had the same problem with loading screens in Everspace 2. Killed the flow. Whoever tries to do this again is going to have to make sure transitions are minimal.
And that’s what I don’t get about Starfield, conceptually. With this project scope, you’re not competing well with NMS for ship-to-foot or orbit-to-surface transition, you’re not doing better than Freelancer–a 20+ year old game–for all the in-space stuff, and the procgen hamstrings you with all the “Bethesda magic” their worlds are known for. It’s like someone said “let’s do Daggerfall in space” and went rigid top-down design with it, retrofitting whatever they could along the way to make a functional game around the procgen.
I maintain that if they didn’t bother with the space thing, or abstracted it more to a “blip on a screen” type of topdown play like in mass effect, it would be a better game. They could have spent that time on the shooter gameplay loop not being shit.
i don’t even know how you could meaningfully mod Starfield. the game is rotten to the core, you would be better off making your own space rpg
Maybe they should just stay in their lane and keeping making Elder Scrolls and Fallouts…I’d be down with that.
