I have major regret for buying this game. Games like this should have a 20 hour refund window instead of 2. It took me 2 hours to realize it wasn’t possible to get the game to not run like garbage.
Well if the companies refuse to give you a demo to try, maybe you should pirate it to try and then purchase it.
Another option is becoming a patient gamer and just waiting for the game to get better (if it does) a year or two down the line and then buy it at a discount.
In the last few years there aren’t many games I didnt regret buying early.
I usually do pirate and then buy (if worthy) but surely a major Bethesda release would be worth 80 bucks, right?
Right?
riiiiiight
Wrong. They proved that they could no longer be trusted after the release of Fallout 76.
That was a gigantic flaming red flag that I ignored
Only consolation is that it might be good in 5 years… :(
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I’ve had them refund on longer than two weeks but it was because I had 0 play time in it.
I’ve heard that, but once I tried to refund a game at 3 hours and got nothing but an automated response (denial) everytime I requested a refund.
In this specific case it was actually a game I played 2 hours of during a free weekend approximately 4 years before buying it, played one hour after buying it to see if it had gotten better, decided it hadn’t and refunded it. But Steam counts free weekend playtime towards the refund window…
If there’s any actual way to ensure a human reviews it, that’d be neat. 100% it was automatically denied by some code just checking my playtime and seeing it was past two hours.
I know when you’re fighting with Google support as an app store developer, including images in correspondence can get a human to look at it as they can’t properly scan that for automation purposes.
Maybe a url in a claim would be the same for steam? Not sure if you can include images.
I emailed Gabe directly when I had an edge case like that. He forwarded it and it got resolved.
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7 hours of cities skylines before I have up on trying to get a subway to align in what’s supposed to be a relaxing game. My fault that most of that time was afk, I suppose. Steam refused to refund.
Even 2 weeks isn’t the hard limit, at least in Australia.
I finished Doom Eternal at launch and put about 20-30 hours into it, but got it refunded when Bethesda added Denuvo to it 3 weeks post launch
Ngl I’m honestly happy with the trade off of being able to refund games when publishers try to pull shit vs being able to buy a Steam Deck
I think Valve are much more open to late refunds when developers do something unpopular to a game, such as this
I once got a refund after 5 hours. I opened the game, left it running at the main menu, then went to make lunch and completely forgot about it. Wasted probably about 3.5 hours in the menu. When I asked for a refund, I didn’t even explain that I’d left it open in the main menu; I just pointed out why I didn’t like it and why I wanted a refund. The game in question was Mount and Blade, store country was Germany, and I submitted the refund request on the same day I bought it.
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The more recent installment, Bannerlord, had caught my attention, but a lot of people were saying it was unfinished and that devs weren’t updating the game to deliver things that were promised and instead were making minor hotfixes that even broke the mods attempting to address the game’s inadequacies. A lot of the complaints compared it to the first installment in the series and were recommending trying it out, especially since it had had a thriving mod scene and was more fleshed-out over all. I tried it out, but it just felt too dated for my taste; couldn’t get into it.
Maybe I would’ve gotten into it had I given it more time. I just felt pressured to quickly make a decision on whether to refund it after I had wasted more than 3 hours of my “trial” sitting in the main menu.
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Oof, original M&B is pretty rough… Should’ve tried with Warband first.
I did try for a refund at 20 hours but no luck
I’m at 5hr and was denied. Really didn’t think Bethesda could make such a wreck… Or at least would try harder post fo76.
Perhaps Steam’s policy should be 2 hours or 10% of expected playtime as set by the devs, whichever is greater, perhaps with a max of 10 hours. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
For real i have a 5800x3d and 4080 it shouldn’t be running the way it is
So, what have we learnt for the next big release?
Pirate before I buy
A bit late now but it’s on Game Pass. You said it took two hours to realise your computer couldn’t run it well, so that was enough I guess?
Same thing happened to me for X4 foundations. Took me a good 30-40 hours to understand what a waste of time it was.
Literally zero enjoyment and it sits on my library laughing at me.
Huh, so this is what happens when you passive-aggressively diss your customers’ reviews and tell them “no, it isn’t our fault our game feels dated and like a step down from what we had before, you guys are just playing the game wrong”…
Somehow it got nominated for the “most innovative gameplay” in the Steam awards. Absolute joke
IDK, it’s been awhile since someone had the audacity to make something so repetitive and pass it off as AAA gameplay.
It required true innovation to make a game this aggressively mediocre and bland. True
Yeah, the last time was FO4
FO76 is calling…
you need to be able to open the game to see the bland gameplay
It’s completely beyond me. Bethesda fanboys had to be on some hard as shit copium to nominate it.
You can hate on it all you want, even say the game was boring and bland.
But the way they did New Game + was very innovative.
You have to complete the game to even play the New Game +, dont think that’s what got them the nomination
That’s like a film winning an award based on the director’s cut
A directors cut you cant even watch until you watch the regular cut that no one cares for
I thought that was a good idea, and I’m a huge fan of timeloops… But so much of the rest was poorly done that after a couple loops, you stop wanting to loop.
True that idea was definitely cool
I can’t really think of any part of it that is innovative. Just basic game systems that have all been done before slapped together.
I was incredibly tempted to pre-order Starfield. Everything about it should be right up my alley. I love Sci-fi, space and all things related. But I learned my lesson after pre-ordering Diablo 4. I decided to try out the pirated version shortly after release and was so disappointed and glad I didn’t buy it. I dropped it after a few hours and had no desire to play it after that.
Also coming into it straight after playing Baldur’s Gate 3 made it look so dated. The plastic doll looking NPC’s and animations, boring dialogue and writing. I’m not even that into fantasy/D&D type settings and BG3 drew me in for many hours.
I really hope someone makes a game as good as BG3 but set in space, similar to Mass Effect etc.
The real reason behind anti-piracy efforts: They might find out our software sucks without having to buy it to figure that out.
/s. Sorta.
Yeah, similar for me. On one had, the idea of a space based “Skyrim” type game sounded pretty cool.
On the other hand, yet another Bethesda “skyrim/fallout” type of game has been overdone without much innovation by Bethesda. So my hopes were quite tempered.
Fingers crossed on Larian getting a licence for Traveller…
I think BG3 is making a lot of normal quality games look really bad this year. Like putting a super model in a picture of normally okay people.
That said BG3’s true innovation was literally just putting the work in. They didn’t make anything truly new, they just did everything game developers have learned in the last 40 years to a very high standard.
The one thing I would argue that is a bit “new” is that they had a design paradigm similar to immersive sims on their systems, and that is not so common on these kind of top down rpg.
But yeah, the real “innovation” was just making an actually polished game.
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I just started BG3, it feels like a modern Dragon Age, Mass Effect with serious focus on the RPG elements. The posing and character models aren’t a leap like the Witcher 3, but the voice acting is top notch
I mean there is Rogue Trader. Not BG3 level, but what I’ve heard it is pretty good.
it’s like poetry
What client are you using to get ads?
It isn’t an ad. I just linked to the store page itself and I don’t post affiliate ads and those aren’t possible on steam anyway. It’s just resolving the link and there just happens to be a salve for that garbage shaped game.
garbage shaped game.
Game shaped garbage.
Garbage shaped garbage
Throwback to the hard cope when this game released, the fanboy dismissal of any criticism was insane.
You should have seen the fucking starfield subreddit before release lmao. One guy on there was genuinely convinced this was “something special” and would revolutionize the gaming industry.
The basis for that claim? The way Todd fucking Howard was acting, and the marketing material for the game.
The game is a solid 7 and still holds immense potential. The lack of updates combined with a lot of quest & progression breaking bugs and dismissal of such criticism is a 0 and why I wrote a negative review.
I think Fallout 4 was a solid 7. Starfield seems to have been aiming for F4 in space but it falls short in just about every arena. I remember the settlement feature being really cool but unfortunately not very well integrated into the game, and a little half baked. I was so hype to see Starfield would be bringing it back, but instead it was entirely pointless and a total waste of time, as well as being far more restrictive.
The main quest in F4 was at least relatable and interesting enough with some very nice side quests. Starfield has the most boring narrative of every game I’ve ever played, the mind brainless go-hum fetch quest side quests, and no interesting characters in sight. It was literally the 7/10 Fallout 4 but somehow worse.
Fallout 4 but somehow worse.
Fallout 4 was very mid compared to FO3 and Skyrim.
Fallout 4 was much better than Fallout 3. Only New Vegas on the other hand would be hard to beat.
A solid 7? I’d give it a 4-5. I very stupidly preordered and I very much regret it. The one and only time I ever did so as well. The game shows a shocking lack of care. It definitely has some systems which ought to be interesting but they’re rendered pointless by the game and the main plot is utterly appalling.
Because people can’t have different opinions?
I still think the game is fine. I still think it did some very interesting things. I got over 100 hours of playtime from it. I played on gamepass too. So I definitely got my monies worth.
Does it have problems? Sure. Quite a few, but it’s still enjoyable enough of you don’t expect the too much. It also had tons of potential of they actually release the creation kit.
I don’t think it’s the worst game ever. It’s not even their worst game.
It’s the worst Bethesda RPG game I’ve ever played. What did you think was worse? I suppose the MMOs?
Brink, Rogue Warrior and Fallout 74 come to mind.
Bethesda doesn’t only make RPGs
OK, fair. I was just thinking of the rpgs. Would you agree that it’s their worst RPG?
I’m mostly enjoying it, but that’s after I spent a lot of hours modding the game to look great. I don’t mean installing mods I mean modding. (I’m on the Luma mod team). That means fixing the horrible compressed range that is terrible for OLED. Completely replacing the Hable tone mapper after multiple attempts allowing contrast to get properly ramped up. Finally properly fixing the ridiculous fog in shadows from the color grading. Last, I replaced the film grain when theirs just raises blacks and is more digital camera noise than film-like. That only took 3 months. I’ve enjoyed the technical challenge from doing it, but if this were a game that couldn’t be modded, I wouldn’t have given it a week.
I also just realized the best part of the game are the story missions. Not the side quests, not the activities or exploration.
The worst part of the game is it’s both all fast-travel: where you have to jump from planet to planet in a fetch quest; and it’s no fast travel where the game expects you to run on foot 2000km to complete a survey.
The story and characters have charm and personality and that’s time better spent. I think there’s some good elements there, but overall I don’t recommend the game. It’s a solid 7/10 game, but completely hit-or-miss if you connect with it.
Thank you for your contribution. Mod Authors in general are GOATed for what they do, but the ones that do tiny things like these are some unsung heroes, IMO.
Upvoted for a spot on review lol
Yeah, I have 300 hours from doing all the quests up to ng+ but I couldn’t bring myself to repeat all that. Especially the temples.
…and also I am very impressed by the engine. Fallout 4 would have me running into LOD version of the world if I sprinted for too long, Starfield handles
setav speedmult 500like a champ. Makes exploring a breeze.The tone mapping is awful, it really makes exteriors look dull. Good on you for managing to change that. I can’t relate with the part about the characters though, I found them completely devoid of life… and that’s one of the main things that drew me away from the game after roughly 25hrs
Weird. Bethesday replying to reviews refusing to acknowledge their game is boring didnt help then? Who could have thought
I got so damn bored. After 40 hours I put the game down and said to myself “I don’t think I’ll be playing this again.” It just all seemed so pointless.
Pointless is definitely the word. Some of he coolest systems in the game are ship building and base building, but the half baked new game plus bullshit gameplay loop fucking deletes all that
Couple of hours in (on console) and it just feels a bit fiddly, and… not sure why I need to be doing what I am. There’s some attempt at providing intrigue, but none of it makes me want to come back. I got an Xbox and Game Pass for it, yet I’ve been playing Slay the Spire (which I’ve already played hundreds of hours on Deck/PC) a lot instead.
You can’t even get 40 hours playtime in most games.
If you can’t get 40 hours out of a AAA game then it wasn’t a AAA game.
Most games don’t aim to provide hundreds.
True, but games are different and an open-world game should be fun for far longer than for example a linear shooter, due to density and freedom with sandbox elements.
i had a lot of fun. i think people just expect too much from this type of game and bethesda. look at no mans sky, i still think its just as boring as when it released but it has gained a great following. people now seem to just assume if a game is made by a AAA team everyone must love it regardless of personal taste. in my opinion that mind set is the reason most AAA get focus grouped to death. im scared that people are going to kill off the type of games i like because everyone acts like its crime to release a game that doesn’t appeal to everyones exact tastes/desires.
i will say though starfield is my least favorite bethesda game. starfield 7/10
People expected a game about exploration. Because it’s a Bethesda game, and because it’s a space bethesda game, and somehow Bethesda managed to make a game that doesn’t really have exploration in it despite having loads of planets.
Why did they not just make a single solar system full of curated content, why did it have to be set in the vast universe forcing them to use random generation, that is full of nothing? They sent themselves up to fail on this one.
after starfield i finally played Outer Wilds (not a typo) and goodness, i have so much more memories with that game than starfield, despite the fact i finished it in half the time i beat starfield
if you’re craving incredibly crafted space exploration play Outer Wilds, don’t look up anything about it though, it’s one of those that will make you wish for amnesia so you can experience it again for the first time
The expansion is very good too if you haven’t played it yet. Luckily my memory isn’t the best so when I managed to replay the game after finally picking up the DLC I got to rediscover many parts of the game.
oh i did, it was absolutely wonderful and terrifying
Yeah “reduced frights” mode was required for me to get through some sections lol. Incredibly well done addition though.
I actually haven’t finished the DLC because that single menu option very literally gave me nightmares. I gotta suck it up and play.
it’s worth it! but don’t be ashamed to take breaks, the devs know how to do horror well and it shows
i think they thought it would be more fun than most people seem to think it is. and being wrong is an easy path to failure.
Make it some weird bizarre aliens that can live without atmosphere and have it set on an extremely small pair of binary moons set to real scale.
I knew what to expect, and I was still disappointed. I was expecting the constant loading, and the jank, and the shit AI, etc. I was also expecting the world building to be decent, and the quests to be interesting with tons of distractions that keep you coming back. That’s what makes it a disappointment; the actually good things about a Bethesda RPG are totally absent in Starfield. It’s just the mechanics and formula; none of the flair or personality.
If only old school Bethesda fans had warned us of this trend of Bethesda removing the very things that make their games worthwhile for their last four major releases.
Still a 7? Just curious, what made it fun for you? What were the expectations? Legit curious, as finding a good comment about the game that doesnt sound salty af is far in between.
I found skyrim fun for 60ish hours and than got extremely bored. Never touched it again. Starfield looked like that but barren as hell, which is not what it is sold as. Those are my personal reasons for not touching it though!
well, i thought of it as fallout 4 in space before playing. it has a couple core gameplay changes i liked and a couple i didn’t. it is the slowest paced bethesda game for sure, which is why i think most people call it boring. if you didnt replay skyrim i doubt you would replay this game. i give it a 7/10 for people of my taste and i would consider myself the intended audience. i have played bethesda games since oblivion and average about 200 hours per bethesda game, usually 3 playthroughs seperated by about a year or 2. for reference here are my top bethesda games:
- Fallout: New Vegas - 9/10(obsidian for a major win)
- Fallout 3 - 9/10
- Oblivion - 9/10
- Skyrim - 8/10
- Fallout 4 - 8/10
- Starfield - 7/10
- Fallout 76 - 3/10 - i wish i could enjoy this game
these scores reflect how much i enjoyed each game. but if New Vegas had no technical issues it would be 10/10 for me.
Ye, that makes perfect sense, thanks! From your other scoring, i can see the game isnt that bad, but just average. Even compared to the others, which are rated a lot higher. From this i can also assume id enjoy the game for like 30sh hours, because this isnt 100% my jam. For me that wouldnt be worth the full price, but i can understand for somebody that would put 200h in np it would be worth it :)
Yeah it’s not a bad game by any standards, but it’s not mind-blowingly great either. It has some cool and interesting concepts.
It’s on game pass if you want a (potentially) cheaper way to try it.
No thanks. Im personally against gsme pass. I dont like their model snd prefer to own things
yeah pretty much. i wouldnt recommend it to anybody that doesn’t love bethesda’s other games.
New Vegas
Mirrors from a tower plant magically turning into solar panels when installed on an airbase? 0/10 unplayable.
Can I mod new Vegas to make it look or perform better on an Xbox? The graphics really break my immersion.
The Xbox version sucks ass, easily the buggiest version. Play it on PC, anything can run it now.
New Vegas has no technical issues if you mod it properly these days!
Not op but I too give it 6 or 7. I liked the story. I liked shooting things. I liked the dialogue. I liked the base building. Liked the graphics, it was super quick for me on my 4900 xt. But everything was liked. Not loved. It was mediocre in everything. The POI were fun, but there are like 10 that get recycled. I like the planets but they’re also recycled. I like the cities but they’re all the size of a tiny town. It’s fun but it was sold as something grand which undersold it’s promises. First colony outside of earth, biggest civilization, has like a population of 100 if that. They should have sold the entire story as worlds on the rim. Not the hub of humanity.
yeah i would agree with you for the most part. i guess im lucky i ignored the hype after the announcement. i have seen the hype train derail too many times.
look at no mans sky, i still think its just as boring as when it released
I get opinions are subjective, but I don’t believe this is a fair opinion to have, based on the amount of new content they have released over the life of the game. They’ve added more quests and more things to do and explore.
It’s a very sandboxy game, which may be what you’re speaking towards (if you don’t enjoy sandbox games that is)?
There’s no voiceover work to be spoken of. You’re constantly just reading dialog and menus. The loop isn’t that different from almost any other open world survival crafting game, except it has spaceships you can fly from planet to space - just like in Space Engineers an arguably better space sandbox game that’s actually a sandbox.
My comment was directed towards this though, and not what you mentioned …
i still think its just as boring as when it released
… I was challenging the before and after nature that the OP was commenting about, especially after all the new content that was added to NMS over the years.
When I mentioned sandbox that was because I was trying to determine if he’s a ‘guided path’ versus ‘sandbox’ type of player, and maybe that’s what might be driving his boredom factor throughout the life of NMS, versus the before and after nature comparison.
As far as your comment goes (see below), none of that talks towards the boredom of the NMS game, just a similarity to other survival games, as well as mentioning another sandbox game that you thought was better.
There’s no voiceover work to be spoken of. You’re constantly just reading dialog and menus. The loop isn’t that different from almost any other open world survival crafting game, except it has spaceships you can fly from planet to space - just like in Space Engineers an arguably better space sandbox game that’s actually a sandbox.
i watched all of the update for NMS. the updates are cool but non of them made it more interesting. i would like to say i think it is a good game, but at the end of the day starfield aligns with my likes much better.
I bought it about 2 years after launch, played through the main story, and then kinda got bored with it because it’s just the same thing over and over again. I came back after the first major update, played it for a few weeks and then got bored again because it was mostly a “fixing things to how we wanted them to be”. I played after the next major update as well and while it did bring some new life back into the game, it’s still essentially just “build a base to put these few things in and collect resources so you can build more stuff” or “do these pointless side quests so that you can buy/build more stuff”.
Thanks for the clarification. I am curious about one thing though?
Are you a ‘sandbox’ type of player, or a ‘guided path’ type of player (if you had to choose one)?
I’m wondering if you’re the latter type of player, and if it has driven your outlook on the game, throughout all the years it’s existed, with all the additional content added to it throughout those years?
Yeah it’s funny to mention NMS, as what I’ve heard from most people is that you’d have money AND get more value by buying that particular today over Starfield
Starfield is essentially NMS with a storyline and better graphics.
Usually the latter, but I have played various sandbox games over the years. I find that sandbox style games tend to get boring after a while due to the repetitive nature and little variation. I’d usually skip the “fetch” quests in RPGs for the same reason.
It’s cool to build huge bases, but I see little point in if there’s only like 5 useful things that you can put in it. The majority of my space was taken up by storage containers.
The problem is that the game fell flat even on a lot of basic expectations, especially exploration.
When you first arrive on a new star, you’re automagically orbiting the “most important planet”, if it has one. Without doing anything other than arriving, you already know all the inorganic resources of every planet and moon around that star (you don’t know where, but you already know it’s there without a scan). Not only that, you know which planets have abandoned mines or settlements and where. While flying in orbit, if “nothing happens” in the first 10 seconds, nothing will happen, period. POI in space all have to be fast traveled to.
It manages to be worse than NMS where the parallel is obvious, like in scanning fauna/flora, where you activate the scanner, point and click and call it day. But do it 8 times just to say it’s different.
Shipbuilding is fun, but the fucked that up by locking many parts behind two different skills, Piloting and Starship Design. It really feels like something they did because they couldn’t figure a way to balance the economy around ship prices. They could’ve made it so that you get access to better parts by completing faction missions, that’d give actual reason for the players to do them other than sheer curiosity, but nope, spend precious skill points to get better ship parts!
This game is a pile of bad design decisions on top of more bad design decisions and whether the company is AAA or not is irrelevant. Bad implementation, aka errors and bugs, is a matter of coding. Bad design is a matter of direction, or lack thereof.
by locking many parts behind two different skills, Piloting and Starship Design
And upgrades locked behind levels, plus not having all parts at all shipyards (or even all parts of one brand at their main location).
i agree that the exploration outside of the main areas is very sparce, but i think its important to cosider thats is what was promised, and the lore backs it up. i liked the hand-crafted areas a lot but outside of those areas tends to feel like NMS with a couple generic things to do every some often. but i still enjoyed building my bases and running in a circle around them destorying all abandon factories with rando baddies i could find.
i agree the fact that they are a AAA studio is irrelevant, but most people do judge things differently when considering this. its too often i see people praising indie games that i eventually try and hate. but i dont freak out and call it terrible, i stop playing. and i see well made AAA games that i greatly enjoy get review bombed for defending there design decisions which were based of what the designers consider fun.
but i dont agree that they made a “pile” of bad decisions. Again i think they were trying to make a fun game and most of the designer probably enjoyed playing it before releasing. but the majority of people who thought bethesda was making “their” dream space shooter didn’t like it so know bethesda is evil for some reason. i liked this game, i will play the dlc, and likely replay it.
I agree that the skill-locked purchase of physical equipment is garbage but I found myself sticking on the question of if you got the ‘de-facto’ best ship part for each category because you had the relevant skill.
Like some quest is occuring and, in dialogue, you have a choice locked by being the most-skilled pilot and choosing it leads to one set of the best ship parts. How does that flow? Does that read as the same thing, or is it more enjoyable now as a reward for character build?
you have a choice locked by being the most-skilled pilot and choosing it leads to one set of the best ship parts. How does that flow?
You got my idea wrong
you get access to better parts by completing faction missions,
I meant that, as a reward for finishing a quest, or series of quests, the ship parts become available. It’s not “choose to get a ship part during the quest”, it’s “complete quest, vendors now sell new stuff”.
For instance, completing mission 4 of the UC Vanguard opens up B class parts because “congratulations, we’re promoting you” or, given how that questline flows, “We’re promoting you because things are getting dangerous and you need access to the extra stuff”. Completing the final mission unlocks C class parts. But those are only at the Deimos Staryards, since they’re the sole contractor for UC. It wouldn’t make sense to complete their questline and also get access to FC’s B and C class ship parts, for that you’d have to complete their Freestar Ranger questline. That’s the idea.
I got Starfield free with my new graphics card and tbh I’m glad that was the case as otherwise I’d have serious buyers remorse. I put a good 50 or so hours into the game, enough to finish the main storyline and most of the factions quests, but at the end of the day it just felt like a hollow experience, and I doubt I’ll be going back to replay it.
The NPCs are shallow and robotic, and once you’ve explored their dialogue tree once you may as well never talk to them again as they’ll never say anything new.
The game worlds look quite visually impressive but aside from the handful of cities and occasional settlements and outposts there is just nothing to do. Who would have guessed simulating a lifeless grey rock would be boring?
The fast travel system is completely broken and ruins the purported objective of the game; to explore. Instead of encouraging the player to do so by landing on planets to find fuel for their ship, the player can just teleport across the galaxy with no consequences.
The only aspect of the game I found to be really fun was the space combat. The ship builder, while quite frustrating at times, was also enjoyable.
Overall, Starfield feels like a game whose ambitions exceed the technical capabilities of the engine it is based on. You can see the janky workarounds that are used to make the game fit the engine from a mile away; cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view, invisible barriers in the world to prevent you from walking too far without reloading, a cut to black when transiting between interiors and exteriors, and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.
It’s past time that BGS put the rotting hulk that is Gamebryo/Creation Engine/whatever this latest iteration is called out to pasture (at least for new IPs like this) as clearly it is now actively hindering their creative ambitions.
I mostly agree, but making me land on boring planets to farm for fuel will not improve the game. It’ll just make it more tedious.
Now, if there was a questline to find and repair or create fuel depots in each system, that could actually be fun.
The problem keeps coming back to planets being really boring outside of a few hotspots. If they solved that problem, a lot of the other problems wouldn’t be nearly as noticeable. But instead, they dug in their heels and declared that real astronauts don’t find them boring. And I’m not even sure I believe that. The first steps were very exciting, but after that, it was mostly just anxiety about dying and making sure they prevent that. They’d actually be fighting down the boredom to make sure they didn’t make a stupid mistake out of complacency.
Oh yes, 100% - if they were to implement a fuel system, then just mining for fuel manually on the existing planets would be incredibly dull. Building something like a fuel refinery on the other hand would make sense - it would even give a purpose to habitats/planetary bases, which are completely superfluous at the moment. At no point in the game did I need to build one, and if the game didn’t keep reminding me that base building existed I would probably have forgotten all about that feature.
That’s a tradition going back to Fallout though. Why should you build a base in Fallout 4? Because you can’t advance the game without doing so. Beyond a crafting station it was completely superfluous. I’m not surprised they haven’t figured out how to have it be a natural impulse yet.
I’m not surprised they haven’t figured out how to have it be a natural impulse yet.
They probably have, but decided to not bother, “too much work” involved. I mean, I can easily think of many ways to make outposts something players would look forward to mechanically:
- outpost can create a trade route to a city, lowering prices of certain goods there and/or making new goods appear on the vendors. Making this increase vendors’ credit stock alone would make most players create at least one outpost.
- remove outpost engineering skill, let the player buy blueprints to learn new stuff AND also allow the player to buy prefab from vendors, or let the player hire a construction crew to build some stuff instead, such that, when you arrive at the outpost, you’ll see their ship and have X of the bought stuff “in stock” to place “for free”
- make the research aspect happen in a crewed outpost with a research lab. Let the npc create an activity/side quest asking for the components. Adding to this, let the player buy stuff and ask it to be delivered to an outpost for a fee, or have a new NPC that is basically a space trucker to make deliveries to your outposts.
cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view
Docking is more egregious. It’s not even hiding a loading screen, it’s just wasting our time so things like the CF/SysDef back and forth take longer.
and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.
It’s worse IMO, NPCs don’t seem to have schedules anymore. Which is kind of okay, my least favorite thing in Skyrim was shops being closed because there’s no “fast travel and arrive in the morning” option, but they feel a lot less alive when they stand in one place forever.
About lack of schedules, at least for shops, there’s a very easy solution: have a second NPC for the night shift, sharing the same inventory. That way the shop stays open 24h and the npcs can still have some downtime.
Instead of buying this game, I started a new run in New Vegas. I am having the best time.
Seriously. Everyone should play older games even if they’ve played them before.
You’d be surprised how well they hold up and are even better than most games released today.
Same! I’m hoping to get a modlist sorted and played before getting into Fallout: London, another astounding mod-effort that will reinvigorate a boring base game.
There are so many new games I want to experience before doing replays, but I’m super tempted to go back to New Vegas after all the incredible mods that have come out the past year and a half (when I played last).
Removed by mod
It’s funny. Everyone bitches that there’s no content and the world is bland, and then says “you can fast travel everywhere so there’s nothing in-between nodes.” Maybe, just maybe if people traveled between locations by actually launching into space and walking around in towns they’d run into all the random events that made me take 2 hours to cross the street in some places. Instead everyone just jumps point to point and says “the only thing interesting is the main story.” Is Starfield a GOTY quality game? No. But people sure seem to be going out of their way to play the game in bad faith for a bad review.
Maybe, just maybe if people traveled between locations by actually launching into space
You are aware that there isn’t anywhere to go while in space, right? You can’t manually fly from Cydonia to Deimos Staryards, nor can you go “beyond” the bounds of the planet cell you’re in. You can’t go from a “Settlement” planetary POI to an “Abandoned Mine” POI that is some 200km away from it without fast travel.
Or the developers could have put the story hooks in front of fast travel instead of hiding them? Look at Baldur’s Gate 3 with fast travel nodes. You can pick up several quests just by going to a few nodes. And other quests are found on the logical route to complete story quests. And a few are explorer rewards.
The thing is, this is a game design thing we’ve known for over a decade now. So no, if the quests are easily missable, it’s not the player’s fault for not finding them.
That’s on the game design. If players feel the need to fast travel then they aren’t linking to the side stories to the path of the main game well enough. Spider-man had fast travel, i used it once for the trophy and never touched it again because traversal was so good in the game. Red Dead did it brilliantly too. I’m not sure if fast travel existed or not, I never looked for it. The world was rewarding everywhere.
Starfield is one of the most bland games ever made. Bethesda needs to get better. Their game design is outdated. Starfield is not going to get saved by modders.
This is the actual problem and yet I think the idiot publishers are going to think “geez I guess people don’t like space games, we won’t fund more of that then.”
From what I understand modders have already bailed on starfield :(
From what I understand modders have already bailed on starfield :(
Not really. 1 modder made a public rant about how they were quitting Starfield and some “journalist” outlets exaggerated that to make it seem like all modders were quitting
Well, that may be for the best. Good “space games” are really hard to make for a variety of obvious reasons, so publishers should be really picky about the ones they greenlight.
I came across this post while listening to a primarily Elder Scrolls YouTuber talk about Starfield. I haven’t bought Starfield myself, but was planning on doing so when it goes on sale eventually.
He’s going through and just listing mechanic after mechanic that is missing from Starfield that existed in previous Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. Even basic UI and QoL features, but also the mechanics and how they interact, the way the game seems to be trying to be taking multiplayer looter-shooter mechanics for a singke-player experience.
I don’t think their game design is outdated. It looks more like they’ve gotten away from their old game design and are just copying other big modern games.
multiplayer looter-shooter mechanics for a single-player experience.
Well shit that’s the only review I need.
To be clear I haven’t bought or played the game myself. The video on question was from Camelworks if you’re interested.
But yeah right now I can’t see myself buying it for any more than $5 to mess around with. Best-case scenario is probably that they release some DLC that fixes a lot of things and maybe my personal valuation of a “complete” edition goes up to more like $20. I would also probably need to upgrade my RX580 too lol.
Feels like they threw a bunch of different little systems and forgot to connect them in any manner, which makes them pointless.
Outposts exists so you can get materials and create stuff. The “get raw stuff, make industrial stuff” part can be ignored, as you can easily find merchants selling resources and components you might need. Outposts thus become pointless, other than for farming XP.
“Exploration” is there so you have “something” to do while on land, other than to blindly speed towards the nearest POI. The reward for completely “discovering” everything in a planet is a slate that you can sell for 1700~2200 creds to Vladimir.
Your ship exists, but they forgot to give the player a reason to be flying it in the first place. You can “mine” asteroids but, just like outposts, there’s no reason to. Dogfighting in space is passable. Not good, but not terrible. But most of the time, you’re supposed to fully skip it and just go on land anyway. Which makes the “Spacer” weapon modifier (+30% damage in space, -15% on land) one of the worst in the game.
Your description reminds me of Breath of the Wild. Do you think they might have been influenced by that at all?
Which description? Outposts, exploration?
Even basic UI and QoL features
Some time ago I made a new modlist for Skyrim from scratch and forgot to include SkyUI, and after starting the game recoiled in horror. How can you make their baseline interface worse.
I’ve gotta admit: I’ve put probably between 1,000 and 1,500 hours into Skyrim on various platforms. Never found the need to mod anything more than the unofficial patch and script extender.
Even a lot of the “official” mods in the anniversary edition I end up turning off. While I appreciate the spirit of the community, I find most mods just don’t jive with the vibes of the game.
Is it kind of their version of Far Cry’s whole climb towers to explore in every game thing? Or did they FO76 it with content?
I’d say it’s more like Far Cry, where you go somewhere just to clear out the map.
Towers are actually a quite nice mechanic if done right, like in Horizon Zero Dawn or Zelda (or so I’ve heard). Now if it werent’ for Ubisoft being Ubisoft throwing content at their games without rhyme or reason for the sake of having lots of content. In fact HZD is probably the best ubisofty game ever, it takes the formula and does it right.
and these guys thought they deserved GOTY
