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.
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.
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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Hmm, I missed that about seamless takeoff/landing. But as @dingus mentions, you can use cutscenes and animations and other things to make that feel more immersive / continuous even if they are temporarily dropping you out of the engine.
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
The setting lowered my expectations. Modern sci-fi has this weird obsession with being sterile and boring. Compared the magic of Elder Scrolls and the zany retro-futurism of Fallout, it was guaranteed to be boring.
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 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?
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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 🤔
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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Well a lotta games are “in development”, doesn’t mean that they get developed in that time.
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.
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.
🔥Hot take🔥
Eta: emojis, for that hot take
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It’s 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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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 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 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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The roles played are different.
Can’t have rose-tinted glasses if you’re currently playing it as OpenMW.
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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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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Thanks Todd Howard 🙏
“He can’t keep getting away with it!!”
There’s a trait you can pick that exactly explains my problems.with the game. The trait is ‘Dream Home’. It is described as
‘You own a luxurious, customizable house on a peaceful planet! Unfortunately it comes with a 125,000 credit mortgage with GalBank that has to be paid weekly.’…
I thought this was a cool way of adding increased difficulty for myself. I tend not to play at the hardest setting because I don’t have much time to play. But having to plan ahead and work around this limitation sounded like it would add an interesting wrinkle to the strategy I’d have in the game.
However, when you start the game you discover that the loan has to be paid off in full… And you have unlimited time to pay it off. The only way to be foreclosed upon is if you actively go tell the bank to foreclose on you. It’s like they had the idea, but couldn’t be bothered to implement it.
What’s worse is 120k is nothing in the game. You can easily get there within a few hours of play. This is just one example, but it speaks to the game’s complete unwillingness to give the player anything negative or push them any way from their ‘freedom’. The sheer fact you are not locked out of any faction or faction mission is another example. There are 0 stakes in the game and you feel 0 connection to the people you meet or places you visit. Not helped by Sarah potentially being one of the most annoying judgemental characters in any Bethesda game I’ve ever encountered.
Update: I eventually visited this ‘Dream House’. It kinda sucked. The planet it is on is kinda ugly. There is more to this mechanic than I originally thought, however. When you visit you can pay 500 credits for 1 week of access as a ‘payment’ towards the principal. Still very deceptive of the original description.
The sheer fact you are not locked out of any faction or faction mission is another example.
Ah, so Skyrim in space
vast as an ocean but as shallow as a puddle
I swear every space game is described like this
I think it’s because so many space games try to dazzle with the unfettered dream of exploring the endless cosmos. But you obviously can’t fill an endless cosmos with interesting things to do. Hell, most of space is just dead rocks and hot gas.
I feel like dyson sphere program is somewhere further, it being a sandbox factory game means you can do basically as much as you can reasonably handle on your computer, although story wise it’s not great since it’s not meant to be a story game
Someday I’m interested in making an open world game (short on features because I’ll never have giant budgets) that embraces the friction of inconvenience, but finds enjoyable ways for people to circumvent them.
Eg: You can’t easily locate yourself on the map, but you can use a radio to ping towers and triangulate, which gives a breezy interface - or just ask locals. You can’t fast travel, but train stations get you where you’re going - and you might get an interesting conversation or even a whole questline on board.
When ARMA Reforger released it was chaos, with 95% of the people hopelessly lost at all times. It’s because the game gave you a map, a compass, and nothing else for navigation. Best. Immersion. Ever.
Always on instant GPS with augmented reality waypoints between abstract objectives is what kills player immersion (and developer creativity). If I can just follow an arrow from point to point and complete a game: it wasn’t worth making the game.
Yep. Theres no exploring, theres just “run to waypoint. grab thing waypoint is on, run to waypoint, hand over waypointed item, find next waypoint source, repeat”
Cause devs want to dumb games down so any mouth breathing reject can conquer it without any effort, to bring in that sweet sweet idiot money.
Not every game mechanic needs to be a struggle.
And not every person can dedicate hours of time each week to play. Doesn’t make them mouth breathers.
But I agree they should at least give you the option to turn it off or on.
At least it is a Bethesda game, so someone will mod it in.
Its not a struggle to read the quest text and find a location on your own volition.
If thats a struggle, then you should be playing games that don’t require reading.
I think Zelda does this pretty good already.
There’s a little open world game called Miasmata with that triangulation system! It’s an open world survival horror. It’s pretty short though, and I bet you could get it for just a few bucks on sale. I really enjoyed my time in it, and the world is the perfect mix of dreary and serene.
So if you don’t pay, they still won’t foreclose on you? So what’s the point of paying lol
Man. Was really hoping to be wrong about it, but I mean, it is bethesda. Can’t expect a full up to date game without gamebreaking bugs or missing features when they could just rely on unpaid mod creators for that.
There are no (known) gamebreaking bugs
Why didn’t you pick any of the more negative traits? Like your example is the most basic harmless one. There’s ones with way more downsides. Did you pick the ‘2 loving parents’ trait and are mad they don’t kill you on sight? lmao. Like I picked wanted where I always have a bounty and it’s cool. I’ve had a bounty hunter show up in the middle of a boss fight before. Both in space and on ground. Added a decent complication. A few of the others are pretty long term negatives like weakening aids and food.
I also don’t know if you explored much because the game has a pretty robust ailments system. Like if you pre-plan sure you can have all the expensive cures on hand, but you can get quite a few ailments at once from fucking around. I had a cough for like 4 hours because I couldn’t find an aid for it. I eventually had to go to a doctor to get rid of it.
I did pick other negative traits. My problem with this one is it straight up lies to you in the description. You think it is going to be negative but instead it is the most basic boring version of what that trait could be. I’ve explored many hostile environments where conditions are common and haven’t had a situation where I didn’t already have the sure on hand but I tend to loot a lot.
You can’t change your traits after starting. For my play style, this one should have been perfect. Instead it just sucked all fun out of the potential mechanic.
its like the trait that gives you living parents.
makes a big deal out of having to send them money every week.
Its little more than a rounding error on your accounts, the amount you end up sending.
And they end up giving you several amazing things or free.
spoiler
___ A big honkin awesome ship, Thats got amazing cargo capacity for as early as you get it: Just gotta visit them a few times to get it and a pretty fuckin awesome pistol that, when i got it, was outdamaging everything i had except shotguns by at least a factor of 2.
Seriously, money in this game is a joke. Getting to be a rich removed is easier than building water purifier settlements in Fallout 4.
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.
Rule of thumb. Wait until you see top ten mod lists for Bethesda games and is at least on sale.
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
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.
I’m waiting for the Moddinglinked (Viva New Vegas and Midnight Ride) guide before I starts torrenting it
Why are people pretending the game isn’t getting glowing reviews? Is the Bethesda hate circlejerk still going on?
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It didn’t come out on PS5.
I like the game, but reviews are pretty unreliable these days. Cyberpunk 2077 also got a load of 8/9/10s on release and that game ran like shit and was full of bugs.
this game is a negative -5/7 in my heart
I somehow entirely missed the hype around this game and came across it again only accidentally on early release day when looking at some other sale on Steam. Been playing it and it seems fine to me in a vague Skyrim-in-space sort of way, which is all what I was expecting from a Bethesda RPG.
The world seems alive enough and there are plenty of side-quests and amusing / interesting things to discover. Now suddenly I have been coming across a bunch of posts everywhere where the game is supposed to be terrible or something. Still seems fine to me, but maybe I have lower standards after decades of gaming. shrug.
Its fallout 4 in space.
But with a worse interface and a lot more menus that are annoying to navigate.
that’s just console first UI design school Bethesda have subscribed to since Skyrim.
I know, its heavily consolified, but its bad even for bethesda.
Skyrim
arguably since Oblivion
Honestly this plus “Skyrim-in-space” make me feel pretty confident that this game is going to have staying power just because we know how good the modding community is for bethesda games. Skyrim was panned up front as genre generic fantasy with a pinch of viking magic but has been played continuously for a decade plus because it made for such a good blank slate to add onto. Also I guarantee every current UI issue already has modders working on it. Starfield script extender just dropped and the game hasn’t even officially been released
Which really sucks, if you think about it.
Cause you and I both know the only thing that makes Bethesda games big sellers is the fact that anyone that buys them goes “Oh boy, I cant wait for the modders to make it actually interesting/fun/etc”
But at the same time these games are very moddable. Not every game has great mod apis and they suffer for it. It’s like would you rather buy a shitty product that breaks easily or a shitty product that breaks easily that you can also fix easily? Clearly the second. That’s what Bethesda’s games and reputation were (in my mind at least) pre Fallout 76. So no, I don’t think it’s shitty at all. The community of modders exist because Bethesda made the games moddable, not because the games suck. If the games sucked and weren’t moddable then people wouldn’t be buying them in the hopes they could mod it.
I’d rather buy a product thats decent, and doesnt rely on waiting 6 months for the community to do all the dev legwork.
Yeah, no shit, that’s not the point of the comparison though, goober.
its literally what we’ve been talking about this entire time.
and please, if you’re gonna insult me, at least be more inventive at it than a grandmother from the 1950s
Some mods have attempted to fix the menus.
I’d like to see some complete UI overhauls at some point, but right now I’m using a mod that increases the refresh rate to 120hz from 30 in the menu’s
Yeah the interface is awful.
On the other hand, I came across pirates boarding a freighter yesterday. I shot down the pirate ship and boarded the freighter. The gravity generator was malfunctioning so it would sometimes have gravity and sometimes be zero g. There were navigation puzzles, some of which could only be done in normal grav and some in zero-g.
None of the random side content in FO4 is anywhere near that interesting.
You’ll be bored by that new radiant by the 10th time you do it.
It’d probably grate on me the second time I do it. Doesn’t mean that it’s not more interesting than the generic “this settlement needs you to shoot some dudes” FO4 encounter.
Its more interesting because its the first time you’ve encountered it. after a year you’ll have the same criticisms about starfield radiant quests that you did about fallout 4 radiants.
Fallout 4 is a much better FPS. But Starfield is a much, much better RPG.
Eh… I’m not sure I agree with that statement, but to each their own
you guys really think it’s boring? :/
At this point I don’t trust anyone. Reviewers obviously paid off to give positive reviews, but then just as annoying is all the pure anti Bethesda hate here. I don’t trust anyone to separate their Bethesda love/hate from the review of the actual game.
I think there was one review that was like “it’s a sci Fi Skyrim in space” and that sounds like it’ll be the most accurate.
sci Fi Skyrim
Shit bro that’s all you gotta say.
I’m a basic bitch like that I like my Bethesda kiddie pools.
“it’s a sci Fi Skyrim in space”
Tbh, that DOES sound pretty great IMO 🤷
That’s all I really wanted from this game. I like the fact the environments are actually different looking instead of Wasteland Fallout or Fantasy Skyrim.
For me this is the first Bethesda game I’ve played (other than a few hours of Skyrim but I didn’t get far), and I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit. It’s not a perfect game, probably not even my game of the year, but I’ve been finding myself wanting to play it over all of the other games currently in my backlog.
I really don’t see what the hate is about, Bethesda promised space Skyrim, and that’s basically what we got.
The one time ign was actually on top of it, and people mass disliked the video. That 7 was deserved.
Yea I felt the same way and spent the $30 bucks on Xbox to play it early. I really think this game is a huge “Your mileage may vary”.
If you have a PC I would look into a gamepass trial or something to try it out before buying it. Or like someone said buying it on steam and then refunding if it’s not your thing.
I didn’t have super high expectations but honestly it’s really solid and it does have its flaws that are sometimes in your face, but I’ve had a lot of highs so far when playing too. If you’ve played a Bethesda game before, you can expect what you’re getting into.
I’ve found if you have a good attitude going into things you’ll generally feel better about them. Going in expecting it to be shit, and all you’ll find is shit.
I played 10hrs on Steam then refunded.
I was expecting a 2023 game with 12 years of development and 6 months delay for polish.
I got Fallout 4 (2015) with scifi-skin.The thing that pissed me off the most:
It’s not as open and “huge scale” as people seem to think it is. It’s kind of “fake open” if that makes sense. You cannot get into your ship and fly 800m east to your mission. If you do that, a new instance is loaded and your mission is not there. You have to run that 800m.How do you refund after 10 hours? You get 2 hours max i thought
Steam can refuse a refund after that time, but they are usually incredibly flexible because a) they want to keep customers on Steam and b) many jurisdictions have much firmer and consumer favoured laws around product refunds, Australia for example is a large reason for Steams current refund policy in the first place.
imo refunding after 10 hours is not the right thing to do, and could undermine the whole refund system if it becomes a common thing people do.
The original idea for allowing refunds for digital games (or anything, really) is if you get a broken or defective product. If the game won’t launch, or it’s a buggy unplayable mess, or not what was advertised (and I’m talking blatant false advertising, not some vague speculative comments) you get a refund. If you simply don’t like the game, then you need to own it that you made a bad purchase and move on. It happens.
This is why it’s important to wait for reviews and actual gameplay on YouTube/Twitch first, so you have a much better understanding of what you’re getting. Hell, this why YTers/streamers get free codes on release, so their audience will see the game and want to go buy it.
It’s been said a million times over but I guess it needs saying again: STOP 👏 PRE-ORDERING 👏 VIDEO 👏 GAMES
I agree with your points around not preordering, or waiting for reviews etc. However, I disagree with you that refunding after 10 hours isn’t the right thing to do for a few reasons.
First, the size of the game in question. For a short, 10-20 hour story driven game, a refund beyond 2 hours is ridiculous. For a large, open role playing game, where somebody spent 120 AUD expecting to get 50-100+ hours of gameplay, 10 hours is perfectly reasonable if you’re really not enjoying the product. If I can send back a meal at a restaurant that I’ve had (relatively speaking) two bites of, I should be able to refund a game the same way.
Second, again speaking for Australia as a jurisdiction, is the behaviour of brick and mortar stores. I can purchase a physical copy of a game, play it non-stop for two weeks, and get a refund. They have no way to know I finished it three times, but strong consumer protection laws enable me to game the system like this. I agree that it’s the wrong thing to do, but Steam is aware of the fact that the same consumer protection laws apply to them. While they have enough information to stop people from outright gaming the system, Steam needs to balance that against driving people to other storefronts or back to physical retailers.
Finally, your premise that people can’t reserve the right to get a refund just because they don’t like something. I would agree with this, if game demos were still a wide practise. I can’t get a change of mind refund on a shirt I buy in a physical store most of the time, but I can try the shirt on in the store to see how it looks on me. I can get a change of mind refund on most shirts I buy online, because I have no idea how it’s going to look. Yes, you can wait for reviews and watch gameplay, but it’s always different when you actually play the game. At the end of the day, it still comes down to “I thought this game would be X but it’s actually Y”.
A firm, inflexible refund policy in my mind achieves the opposite of what you are looking for. If people can never get a refund because a game simply isn’t what they thought, what barrier is their to a mildly successful company ridiculously overpromising, securing the bag, and disappearing into obscurity? If everyone buys the game on Steam and can’t get their money back, the company has won in the short term. If 50% of preorders get refunded, the company has just lost all of that money.
2 hours max for a guaranteed refund, anything else (within 2 weeks) needs to be approved by a human to make sure you’re not just beating the game and returning it after.
Steam are usually nicer with games that is not officially released yet.
Oh that’s gonna suuuuuuuck for me
I am the person who will cheese distance running in NMS by triangulating an objective and summoning my ship to it, and Starfield apparently says “lol nope motherfucker you’re walking”
People are weird when it comes to Bethesda. If you like Bethesda games, you’ll probably like this one. I haven’t gotten to play myself yet but watching friends who have it it looks fun. Does it look 10/10 GOTY? Not really. But it looks full* of fun stuff.
I think in some way all Bethesda games can feel ‘boring’, but kinda in a good way? Like sometimes you’re just wandering a city with no real goal. It isn’t thrilling or adrenaline pumping, but it’s cool and immersive. Some people find that kind of slower pace boring. I think it’s cool. Not everything gotta be full throttle all the time.
*edit
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LOL yeah i missed that one. Not even really a huge fan I just try to temper expectations goin in
I think they’ve been putting out very similar games since like fallout 3. If that’s what you are looking for, it’s fun. People for some reason seem to put unrealistic expectations on things. I assume this game is just improved graphics fallout 3 in space. Which isn’t a bad thing, but if you expect a revolutionary game you are in for disappointment.
Some of my friends played and immediately hated it and brought up comparisons to newer games, but this isn’t the new Unreal engine, this is the same Creation Engine they’ve been using for 11 years, which is based on the 26yr old gamebryo engine.
Personally as someone who loves Bethesda games, and who understands the limitations of the engine, I am thoroughly enjoying myself, will it beat bg3 for goty? Unlikely, but it’s still fun
At some point they gotta ditch the Creation engine and make a new one from scratch. The reason Halo Infinite ended up being a turd was because of its engine.
TES6 is confirmed to be using Creation Engine as well… That’s like 4 or 5 years down the line. Think of that
That’s about what I was expecting, glad to hear it’s mostly true. I’ll be able to play it in a couple days
It really is. At first I was excited about the apparent scale, but the way they’ve hashed it all together all it does is make you jump through a bunch of janky menus and poorly done travel sequences to get to your next carbon-copy action sequence. Combine that with forcing you into a walking simulator when you COULD just use your god damn space ship and it’s just boring and procedural.
I can see some people really getting into it: the grind to gather resources and build bases etc but really it’s nothing new and if you don’t get off on this kind of mindless gameplay then you are going to be disappointed. Just raid, pick up a bunch of random junk, sell it, build shit. God, how many times have we got to play the same game in a different setting?
I will say that they have dramatically improved gunplay compared to past titles. Like REMARKABLY, and I found the graphics to be pretty decent but if you want to play with everything on ultra and no resolution scaling, you’d better have a supercomputer. Indoor fights are difficult to lose even in the very early game, but trying to raid abandoned space bases etc will put you in a situation where the AI has got a bead on you from 4 or 5 different angles at once. Top, mid and bottom levels, incoming fire from enough places that you simply can’t find cover - the way that you win is by not attempting to take these bases until you have sufficiently upgraded your HP and shields. Literally you are corralled down the story path through sheer necessity until you get to the point you can just jetpack to each enemy whilst taking fire and take them out without too much worry.
EDIT: Another bit of playtime.
Imagine if they left you free to use your ship as you see fit? Crew it with NPC’s, upgrade the firepower and put in a few manned turrets. Maybe let you play with friends and form a pirate crew? You know, the way that battlefield has allowed for this sort of open world vehicular co-op for the last what, 13 years? Once you got good at flight maneuvers you’d be just about unstoppable low flight altitude and it would be fun as hell.
Alas, the ship is nothing more than a teleporter with some janky, repetitive space combat out the front window. What a missed opportunity.
are you playing on PC? I’m on xbox and the shooting feels harder and less natural than it did in FO76 or 4. I wonder if they optimized it for PC more than xbox
I’m on Xbox and enjoying the shooting far more than any fallout. My favorite part of the game so far is the combat I think
huh, maybe it’s just me then. i’ll give it some more time, only about 4 hours in the game so far.
Really dial in the sensitivity I’d say. It took me like legit cranking it up and then adjusting down by 2% at a time to find a sweet spot. But it’s definitely much more responsive and tighter than any other Fallout-esque game they’ve done. Those always felt mushy.
I’ll say too it’s probably that the games aim assist is very light. Like almost hardly there. For a single player offline game it could use a small increase. Like I’m still able to head shot dudes but it’s noticeable, and combined with muscle memory for similar games, having hardly any ‘magnetism’ is an adjustment. I keep meaning to look if there’s a slider in the settings.
ok thanks for the tip! i’ll give that a try. i think i got too used to the mushy shooting in fallout and compensated by using a lot of left stick (moving) to handle the finer aiming. so it’s just not what i got used to haha
Yeah playing on PC. It’s certainly not the best combat ever but it is worlds better than any previous Bethesda title save possibly for their involvement with RAGE, but I think that was more of a publishing deal and the gunplay was all ID software.
I can’t comment on using a gamepad, it has always felt like writing left-handed to me.
This is sadly the first Bethesda game that hasn’t held my attention. The moment I had to deal with that space combat tutorial I knew I would never want to fight in space again for how boring it felt rotating in circles to keep hitting the same button to fire locked on attacks. Nothing about that felt fun or enjoyable and then trying to fast travel and having to go through the menus was worse.
Then when i got to the first area after the prologue I kept getting my AI robot companion running into as I tried exploring. I lost count of the number of times I tried looking in corners of small rooms only for Vasco run straight up to me and push me into a corner I have to spend 1 minutes trying to jump over.
Finally New Atlantis made me ask for a refund from how horrible the map system was. Trying to explore the large place was tedious and just such a step back from all Bethesda’s previous work with making the maps detailed for you to see where stuff was. Here I was just using the mission waypoints and ignoring everything else.
I had fun at the beginning but there are just many things that caused me sway my opinion into not wanting to play it again. Hopefully I can get the $32 refund for the premium shit since I don’t think I’ll be sticking around for the DLC.
How could they? They haven’t played it.
I don’t understand why is it popular to shit on Bethesda games? Just don’t play it if you don’t like it. At least it has no microtransacrions or Battle Pass nonsense.
Bethesda games tend to have awful writing, released with an unacceptable amount of bugs, and not having micro transactions and a battle pass shouldn’t be praised, it must be the standard.
Right now it needs to be praised so it becomes the standard.
The only way it becomes standard is when it isn’t profitable. We can scream all we want, but people still buy that crap.
When will you learn the only thing that gets results is buying or not buying them? Fucks sake. It’s capitalism, if you buy shitty product more shitty product gets made.
It is the standard, idiot fucking gamergoblins dumping their wallets out saying “GIVE ME ADVANTAGES” are the assholes thats are trying to change the standard.
So it should be praised as it currently isn’t the standard in the gaming industry. But hey, let’s shit on it so we can totally tell the industry that this is the wrong path and micro transactions are the way to go!
I expected it to be buggy. I have not yet encountered a bug in my first few hours.
That being said, there’s lots im not liking about it so far.
I had Vasco become a part of the door to the cockpit. I couldn’t enter. I had to leave the ship and hit the specific ‘to cockpit’ button for a few hours because reloading didn’t save him from his torment. Only bug I’ve had but was weird lol.
Vasco quite frequently blocks the door everywhere for me, but at least I have been able to push my way through so far. He’s like my Golden Retriever in that respect so I am used to it from real life.
Real sad that Vasco isnt a full companion. Had so much potential there, instead, all he is is a glorified tutorial escort for the start of the game, and graduates to annoying barricade for the rest of it.
The big super-mutant companion from Fallout 3 did the same.
It’s nice to know Bethesda are keeping all the fan favourite bugs alive and well.
I imagine a lot of people bought it, enjoyed it for a few minutes too long to refund, and are now stuck with 60 bucks down the shitter
Makes you wonder why game demos aren’t a thing anymore
Well steam is really pushing devs to use demos again, given it’s mostly indie at this moment but slowly more and more demos start showing up, which is nice. One can hope AAA will do this to but I highly doubt they will
70 bucks*
I don’t understand why it’s so popular NOT to shit on them. Remember when Andromeda came out with many of the same issues, and people fucking REEMED it (rightly)? Now Bethesda is finally getting SOME criticism for their shitty business and game development practices and we have lots of people out here suckling at their teat defending them for some reason. “Leave them alone, it’s just a Bethesda game, why do people love to hate them, wahhhh.”
As if Bethesda isn’t one of the most beloved companies of all time, and most everyone started from a place of WANTING to love this game. But they’ve been making shitty decisions for years, hiding behind the nostalgia of their past titles, and they are overdue some criticism. It doesn’t mean everyone hates them.
I dont know why pepole shited so much on Andromeda.it was fairly ok title and i personaly was looking forward to next part( which sadly probably wont happen ). Certainly gameplay fitted andromeda more than inquisition. Alghtough from what i have seen i definietly wouldnt be so amazed as some journalist seem to be but Its a ok title. Not a BG3 for certain. Alghtough i admittedly never really liked bethesda style games.i even prefered dragon age 2 rather than skyrim. Bethesda games are too diluted for my tastes.
Remember when Andromeda came out with many of the same issues, and people fucking REEMED it
No, enlighten me, because I fucking hated Andromeda.
Typo on my part, but a definition of ‘ream’ is to reprimand or beat up, essentially
It actually means to make a hole bigger
As a phrasal verb it also means to reprimand severely
I wonder why they’re synonymous.
I dont think gamers know what they want.
They know exactly what they don’t want at least
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If my therapist and my dealer both failed at getting me to do tgat, what chance you think you have?
Tgat? Is that an acronym of "Toke, grin, assess, twerk "?
Occams razor dictates yes.
The negative opinions basically boil down to the following:
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people who have played the game and genuinely don’t like it (like asmongold) and have good arguments why they don’t like it. I respect these people opinions. You can tell them apart because they actually name the things they don’t like in the game with constructive arguments.
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People who haven’t played the game and probably never will and just regurgitate what the hate train is saying. If you ask them why it usually boils down to “it looks boring”, okay cool have played it? No? Okay is there anything else you don’t like? Then the usual “bethesdaslop” and calling people idiots or shills start. I mean what are you even trying to accomplish? Are they just annoyed others are having fun while they’re angry? I don’t take these people seriously and you can usually easily pick them out of the comments.
The game will probably get review bombed on metacritic and the likes, I’m calling it now. Just the amount of stupid articles and YouTube make it a self fulfilling prophecy. I won’t give a shit, I’ll try it on gamepass when it comes out. If I like it I will keep playing it and if I don’t I will stop. It’s as simple as that.
I really don’t see why people feel the need to jump on some hate train just for the sake of disliking something. It’s just as annoying as people who want to be contrarian just to look interesting.
People are just weird, and typically have zero foresight.
I think you’re pretty much spot-on.
I understand some of the negative reviews, but over-all, I’ve enjoyed it so far. More importantly, it has massive potential.
Asmongold gets on my nerves despite the fact he usually has well-conceived opinions. Offhand, do you have a summary of what his complaints are?
I don’t really want to rewatch the 4 hour or so stream but off the top of my head’ -ship combat wasn’t fun (he didn’t get it and found it unreasonably hard) -he did not care for the RPG elements and doesn’t like games where you have to play for a lot of hours before it becomes fun -he found the combat clunky compared to other shooter games
He admitted he probably wasn’t the right audience for the game since he never really liked Bethesda games. He just wanted to try something different. Also story seems to be not that important to him generally. I personally love Bethesda games and can get completely absorbed in them. But I can also definitely understand it’s not for everyone.
All that makes sense. I remember him defending P2W action games. And I did stumble onto a reaction video of him laughing at random things that CP2077 thought of but weren’t in Starfield. Fair enough.
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I think it’s fun, but I’m a run and gun kind of guy. So I’m having a blast shooting dudes in the face. The shooting is much better than Fallout. I LOVE fighting in the zero gravity arenas. It’s so cool like floating between pillars and headshotting a guy off in the distance and his body is now bopping around. Those are so rare though. Idk how I can find more.
But overall I find the game frustrating outside battles. It’s like death by a thousand cuts though. There’s no one thing that’s egregious but there’s just stacking outdated design choices that continually build up. The games indecision around flying your ship being an easy catch all for the multiple failures in making your ship mean anything outside of battles and the map system. For the love of God fix the slide, you slide like 2inches. There’s also a constant battle with backing out of menus. Idk.
But then I find some spacer trap house and have a good time blasting away. Excited for when I can actually can craft bespoke weapons.
Yea menu navigation is terrible, lack of explanation on how to do anything is confusing, basically no map isn’t great. I’m about 10 hours in and enjoying it, but could have been a lot better.
Also, maybe it’s just me but I can never tell if I’m buying or selling to a vendor and end up totally messing it up and needing to reload multiple times.
yeah inventory management is the worst! i don’t get it
Jesus the bar is low
“yeah this space exploration epic is actually not a failure because the mechanics where you shoot people is decent”
that’s not what people wanted, not what they promised at all. The mechanics may be good but it’s not a saving point of the game
“not a failure” I called it frustrating and death by a thousand cuts. Just because I don’t screech failure and send Todd Howard death threats doesn’t mean I’m not being critical of the game. Get some reading comprehension and don’t set the bar at hyperbole. Saying the thing you do 75% of the time is fun isn’t calling it a rousing success either by any means.
Starfield is fun to me 🤷♂️
People keep saying it’s Skyrim in space. Great, I got a good 400-500 hours out of Skyrim.
It’s not. No exploration or interesting story, no ‘wow’ factor like Alduin flying down on you for the first time. Don’t expect Skyrim. Not even close.
No exploration? Isn’t there a class built specifically around it?
You are mistaking true exploration for unlocking new locations
I guess I will find out tomorrow.
Have you not been watching gameplay?
I don’t really do that anymore. Gameplay footage vary rarely gives me what a actual gameplay feels like.
I seen gameplay for Minecraft and shrugged it off originally. Ended up being the best game in the world a year later.
I doubt that OP has played starfield
I literally spent my entire Labor Day weekend playing this game so anybody that says it’s boring I’d really don’t understand what they’re talking about
I like the game
Uhh just play Outer Worlds you nerds
