This is some of the most honest feedback about Starfield. It’s not bad. It’s just horribly dated.
It’s a standard Bethesda game, and it’s great for a Bethesda game. But Bethesda hasn’t updated anything in years, over a decade even. Characters are flat, storylines are fun but not engaging, it’s just… fine.
If this had come out in 2014-2016 as a successor to Skyrim it’d be one of the best games, I firmly believe that. But it didn’t, they took their time building it, which is good, but now we have games like the Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, RDR2, even ME3 came out after Skyrim. The format for story propelled RPGs has changed, and the bar has been raised.
Again I don’t want to be one of the “Oh bethesda bad boooo” people because honestly, I’m still having a ton of fun in Starfield. It’s just that for a brand new game… it’s really showing it’s age.
Idk I find starfeild could even be a downgrade in some way, no ai habits like shop keepers must be on a meth bindge as they never leave they’re stores, the openish world is gone, in one lengthy mission I’d see 5/6 loading screens, usually when going from planet to planet then into the city then to do the objective then repeat in reverse.
i don’t understand how they could ship the game with more than 1 featureless gray rock planet, the interesting environments is the bread and butter of bethesda games and the one thing you’ve been able to rely on enjoying even if you find everything else to be garbage!
If this had come out in 2014-2016 as a successor to Skyrim it’d be one of the best games,
LOL nah, it’d be shat on like FO4 was. Maybe not as heavily, because it didn’t opt for voicing the protagonist, but sure as hell wouldn’t be called “one of the best games”.
My son complains about this but I’m glad they didn’t give the protag.
it’d be shat on like FO4 was.
FO4 printed insane money and won countless awards. It did fine lol
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I don’t play Bethesda RPGs for the set pieces.
I don’t care that Cyberpunk’s NPCs are programmed to walk to a specific place, stand in a specific way and say a specific thing at a specific time.
Cyberpunk’s main quest claims you have a few weeks to live just when the game really opens up to you, so thematically you are discouraged from pursuing side content, but it doesn’t really matter since except for a few quests most are very generic and most of their “story” is delivered through a call anyway. Great storytelling right there.
The NPCs in Cyberpunk are braindead, and when the game came out the set pieces didn’t work half the time.
I really rather Bethesda spend their time improving the parts of the games people who like their games want them to improve, instead of focusing on stuff their competitors are doing.
In other words, you’ve got maybe a couple hours in Cyberpunk.
What? Dude the best part of the game is the opening 5hrs. It’s all downhill after that.
36 according to Steam. Sorry I don’t have more than a full day and a half to give a game before I give up on it to play something I enjoy.
It’s too bad you didn’t like the narrative structure with the calls in CP2077. That one ending uses them (or I guess you could call them voicemails, considering) to devastating effect. One of the most harrowing sequences I’ve seen in a game. It might have even saved a couple of lives.
I’ve played the game and looked up all the endings but I only personally did the >!Nomad/Panam!< ending. What calls are you referring to?
It’s the
ending spoiler
suicide ending.
All of them have calls during the credits, this one just hits very different.
Ahh gotcha! I’ve never played or watched that ending so I didn’t know that happened. Makes sense though
I really don’t understand your reasoning. They use mocap and actors and spend so much time recording these scenes, then you don’t play them and then say you prefer Bethesda npcs? Mocap scenes and npc AI is so wildly different things. Ai That doesn’t even react when you shoot them? That can’t stealth? That clip into environment while looking at you like you are a ghost? I really try hard to understand your take here
They can spend an eternity on them and I still wouldn’t care about those scenes, it’s just not what I look for in a game.
for me, Horizon Zero Dawn was the real “wow, open-world storytelling can be that good and not classic Bethesda nonsense” moment
Idk, maybe it’s just that I’m comparing too much of the Witcher 3, but the story and importantly sidequests in Horizon Zero Dawn are mediocore at best for where I’m at atm. I’d concur it’s better than Bethesda though.
The Witcher 3, to me, made Bethesda games feel dated. The structure of the game is nearly identical, but when you arrive at your quest, it never plays out entirely straight forward, much like the Witcher source material. Cyberpunk does follow along those same lines, even if it never quite hit the highs that Witcher 3 did.
HZD is very Ubisofty, but done right, as in it’s not littered to the brink with pointless collectibles and can actually be completed. It’s way more action than role-play or story focussed but that’s not a bad thing in itself. I think of it more like Tomb Raider, and for that kind of game HZD has plenty and very good storytelling.
I couldn’t really get into Witcher 3. It was more the combat than the story but the story didn’t interest me much either…
Yeah, I fell off it after about two hours.
Unless things change drastically for their RPG division, I’ll repeat what I’ve said since oblivion. Bethesda makes great modding platforms, the content within the game is a loose theme that modders can play with.
Yes the new Fallouts are just TES in the Apocalypse.
Yes starfield is little more than TES in space.
I buy Bethesda games for mod potential.
If they said no mods to all future games I wouldn’t buy another one. I don’t play ESO and I have never touched fallout 76 for this reason.
I mean ESO isn’t a bethesda game, it’s made by zenimax.
And from what i remember it’s actually pretty decent for what it is, it definitely looks nice and iirc while it has microtransactions to catch the whales, it isn’t an absolute twat about it and there at least was a membership system that was/is quite reasonable.
I can agree, cyberpunk has a much gritter mature and well thought out world were as Bethesda titles demand cognitive dissonance
It’s the most “mid” game I’ve ever played.
Also, it is not an RPG.
There isn’t such a thing as modern RPGs, not mainstream anyway
Even with an extremely narrow definition, that’s a bold thing to say in the wake of Baldur’s Gate 3.
I wouldn’t say baldurs gate is mainstream, at least not in the same way as cyberpunk or Bethesdas games
It’s in the top ten most played games on Steam and had sold at least 5 million; even that number is two months old and doesn’t include PlayStation. If I were to wager a guess, which you can often extrapolate from the number of reviews on Steam, it’s much closer to 10 million, which is how many copies a typical Assassin’s Creed or FIFA game will sell. Baldur’s Gate 3 is mainstream.
Starfield is the first and only Bethesda game I haven’t really liked. It’s got all the same gameplay elements, but it’s lacking the world building and interesting stories. The lore is bland as fuck, barely scratches the surface of what you’d want to know, and none of the stories really lean into actually telling you about the world in a fun way, opting instead to give big blocks of dialogue that are nothing but history and exposition. Where is the environmental story-telling they’ve always had? Is the blandness of the world simply a matter of it being new and young and not having nearly as much history as Elder Scrolls and Fallout to build on? Have they simply lost their touch? Believe me, I have tried to like this game. I am a huge fan of space stuff and Bethesda games, but it just doesn’t have that certain something that makes their games actually fun.
It’s really strange. The area under the main NC city was pretty good. It had character. Locations felt like they belonged and not just stuck there because they needed something there. It tells you a story about the people who live there. It’s literally the only place in the game that does this that I’ve seen. I don’t understand how so much went wrong with Starfield.
Hint: the previous games weren’t exactly amazing at this either. Worse, in many areas. It’s quite rose tinted from nostalgia
Regardless of the quality of the writing, they certainly had more interesting ideas in their lore and settings that added something to the experience. That’s what Starfield is lacking.
Starfield made Starfield feel ancient by being entirely unoptimised.
No, it’s Bethesda that makes Starfield seem ancient.
I think it is just a new modern game so therefore hyperbole demands it much be either the best thing ever or trash. A lot of people said RDR2 was “dated” design as well. I think they both have strengths, same with Cyberpunk. I think only BG3 is a step forward for RPG storytelling, Cyberpunk, Starfield, Red Dead all have issues, but they allow the player to get immersived in their worlds and at the end of the day that’s all that matters.
