Aside from completely redesigning the world and side quests, there’s nothing they can tack on to the game as is that would make it worth playing again. It’s boring and missing the one thing they actually did pretty well in everything else: environmental storytelling. You can’t exactly use environmental story-telling when your game’s environment is mostly randomly generated; which is what all the areas outside the main cities are. Randomly generated set-pieces that are scattered around an otherwise empty planet.
Strange. I have more playtime in starfield than Skyrim. And the thing that draws me in is the story.
It’s like it got most things right that Outer Worlds got wrong.
I would rather play Outer Worlds than Starfield, and I hated Outer Worlds because it was sold to me as being Fallout 4 with a better dialogue system and it’s not even remotely different. Like everyone complained that FO4 only had 3 choices “Yes, no, and funny yes” but that’s exactly how it’s done in Outer Worlds, too.
As someone just finishing up a first playthrough of The Outer Worlds, I might have to watch for a Starfield sale.
Yall are getting downvoted, but I think it’s great that you have a game you like. I can even see the perspective of this being a better Outer Worlds. I think people like myself are just upset that we didn’t get scifi skyrim. Just saying “scifi skyrim” got me excited again for a game that they unfortunately did not release. Don’t take the downvotes personally imo, people are just mad at Bethesda.
Yall are getting downvoted, but I think it’s great that you have a game you like.
100%. I get baffled that Starfield gets so much hate, but then some of my favorite games aren’t very popular (Book of Hours anyone? lol)
I can even see the perspective of this being a better Outer Worlds
Yeah. Outer world was in reality the polar opposite of Starfield. A game that was excessively theme-driven but had lackluster “everything else” to go with it. A little (less than Outer Worlds used) bit of tongue-in-cheek “Spacer’s Choice” could have worked like Vault Boy does in Fallout, and I wish Starfield had done something like that. But on story and gameplay alone, Starfield destroys Outer Worlds.
I think people like myself are just upset that we didn’t get scifi skyrim
This is the funny part. If I had to describe why I love Starfield to someone who had been living under a rock and hadn’t ever heard of it, I’d say “because it’s like Skyrim in space”. In so many ways, if I’m being honest.
The thing is, the biggest critique people have against Starfield isn’t all the crazy bugs (we remember those from Skyrim) or the really tropey shit, some skyrimmy feature it’s missing, or anything in between. It’s that they don’t find Starfield “fun” in this hard-to-place sort of way. Perhaps that’s you? If so, maybe you can see how someone would feel about Starfield if, for some reason, it clicked as fun from the start.
Now, I have some complaints about Starfield. But most of them have to do with things that Skyrim didn’t even try (the shipbuilder, which I hear has improved of late) or the lategame (which means I got my fun out of it).
Also, I’ve learned not to take downvotes too badly most of the time. Everyone has opinions, and just because I reserve downvote for the rare “this person is an absolute idiot” doesn’t mean other people do :)
Yeah I’d say it was an issue of not “clicking” at first, but I think I defined it a bit more before I dropped my first playthrough. For me, the primary appeal of a Bethesda RPG is that “take off in a direction, you’ll find a story” feel. Starfield kinda has it, but they broke it up with weird design choices. The insanely frequent, lengthy cutscenes cut into the continuous flow. Having to travel at all between planets broke up the action and flow. The choice to use procedural generation was odd and really took away from the more intentional feel of prior Bethesda games, and really cut away some of the quality and quantity of environmental storytelling.
That’s my very surface level opinions from what I remember. It’s been a minute since I played it at release.
I thought the one thing everyone agreed was done well in their last games was “pick any direction, you’ll find something interesting”. Which is also missing on this game
They’re procedurally generated, but I never got a whiff of them being randomly generated. Are you sure? And even if they were, it’s not incompatible with environmental storytelling if those things are components in their model for generating environments.
The terrain isn’t but the POIs are randomly placed. When you open the scanner and see things like “man-made structure” or “cave” or whatever; those are all random and won’t be in the same place for every new game.
Gotcha, I didn’t know that, but I guess it feeds into their new game plus mechanic. To be clear, I don’t believe that stuff sucks because it’s random; it sucks because it was poorly crafted. You can do good environmental storytelling even when the environment is determined by RNG (Dwarf Fortress and Shadows of Doubt both do), and you can have manual, hand-crafted content that sucks (like every non-faction quest in Starfield…why are we still doing thoughtless, boring fetch quests in 2023?!).
The side quests definitely were also lacking. Like, I know there’s only about 4 archetypes of quests (fetch, escort, kill and checkpoint) that you can really do, but you make them interesting with the story and reasons for doing the thing. Starfield really just made a majority of quests “go get this mcguffin because we need mcguffins,” with nothing really cool or interesting about it.
DF was 100% designed around telling a story using RNG. Game is like a mad lib. Starfield didn’t go that far (most games don’t). I actually do not ever expect AAA games with procedural generation to do more than just give you endless repetition over randomness that generate compelling and unique “stories” the way DF or RimWorld do.
One of them was literally just to press 4 buttons and then talk to a guy again. I don’t know who at Bethesda thought these quests were even worth putting in the game.
Entire dev team about to be fired
Too late sad trumpet 🎺
Yeah, that’s what they have been saying for years
played for about 20hrs and put it down never to be picked up again most boring space game ever
Did they finally fixed some of the 1 year old bugs?
Big if true
Honestly, I think you could fix that game but it involves making the jetpack the focus of exploration and combat.
Honestly, I think just making the forward-burst functionality work for controller users instead of as a “keyboard hack” is enough.
It’s bugs, they’re cooking up more bugs
Is it a different, better game?
Yeah maybe a standalone expansion that is way more fun than the original kinda like far cry 3 blood dragon. Use the core of an awful game to make something fun.
My first thought too
… aaand it’s layoffs.
Big layoffs
I just want to know when it’s going start being fun.
I hear they’re going to release a patch for that on June 31st.
Did starfield become profitable? Did they cover their develop and marketing costs yet?
Starfield was a gamepass game, so it entered the vague subscription zone. Microsoft seemed happy with it.
Hard to say if has been profitable as it was in development for a long time. However it probably sold well on the account that people trusted Bethesda to make a Bethesda experience. They effectively traded their remaining good will for sales.
can’t wait, i know everyone else here hates it, but Starfield was EXACTLY the kind of game I like, I still play it often and love getting lost in it.
Starfield Online (with microtransactions).
