I’m glad we’ve reached the point where most people accept the game’s lacking in so many ways and overall a disappointment.
There was some hard cope when the game first released, with the fanboys telling everyone who criticised it that they were wrong or being unreasonable.
Any reviewer who gave this game 10/10 was smoking crack. Enjoyment of a game is subjective, but if you try to be remotely objective (their job) then there’s no way you can give it 10/10.
I dunno - it’s sort of what’s wrong with reviews these days.
Starfield’s first few hours are really slow and suck.
Then there’s this point at around 20-40 hours where it just clicks and you feel like you are in this massive open universe with so much to do.
And I think most reviewers were writing their reviews having rushed through to around that point.
And then you keep playing.
And you realize that in fact there isn’t a huge universe with so much to do, there’s a huge effective map with literally copy and paste repetition of everything you’ve already done. And it even doubled down (or rather went twelvefold down) on this repetition.
And that sense you got earlier on of a universe of untapped potential that had you looking past the flaws in an outdated engine and poor design choices now suddenly come up short, you are left with a game that has little redeeming value at the 60+ hour mark even though you might have thought it was potentially amazing at the 40 hour mark.
I can see why it reviewed well, as if I was under deadline to write a review for it and rushed a few faction quests and the main quest line and looked at the map of so much more to see having barely dipped a toe into certain other quests and exploration, I’d have rated it quite well. Even though after around 80 hours I was so over it that it’s nearly forgettable with the last 20 of those 80 hours being a miserable slog where I kept hoping to rediscover some magic. And I say that as someone who typically plays around 200+ hours in Bethesda games.
It sucks, but it takes too much time to realize it sucks for fans of the genre if you already forced yourself to play past the opening 15 hours hump as all reviewers have to.
I think it’d be really healthy for the industry if review scores regularly got updated by reviewers who continued to play past the point of writing the first stab at it.
I still don’t really see how you could give the game 10/10, but I think you’re right about that sweet spot.
Would be interesting to see how many 10/10 reviewers would still stand by that rating though.
They would because they get paid for it. These people aren’t journalists, their job is just to write the favorable articles for the people who paid their boss for it. Whoever gives 10/10 to anything should not be taken seriously.
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It’s also hardly an RPG. The only choice accepted by the game is being the good guy and almost every character will be exactly the same. You can’t even reasonably have a choice in weapon type because melee sucks and there all of three or so laser weapons. Dialogue choice is also as bad as FO4 despite then saying they’d learned from that mistake. You still only have “yes, no, sarcastic yes, more information” options, but now they’re in a traditional selection menu instead of a wheel. Why even change the display if they aren’t going to take advantage of why that system is better?
Ocean wide, puddle deep. Every single planet is the exact same with only minor cosmetic differences.
Holy vague, sweeping, definitively incorrect generalization, Batman.
Not that incorrect. Sure, it’ll select from 15 different plants, 8 different creatures, and a handful of ground textures, but they’re functionally the same unless you’re building an outpost. There’s really not anything I can do on one planet I can’t do on another.
What I mean is that you’re correct, but only in terms of randomly generated planets that don’t have unique quest content or locations on them, which does exist, so not “every single planet is the exact same with minor cosmetic differences”. Even the generated planets differ in mineral content and such.
I’m all for calling out Starfield where it deserves it, and variety of generated planets is one such place, but try not to be too over exaggerated and hyperbolic, there’s enough to genuinely criticize that we don’t need to do that.
Kinda odd youre kibitzing over completely deserved criticism because you can kind of nitpick about mineral deposits.
It’s more that the difference between unique quest locations and city planets is being swept under the rug in order to just dunk harder on the game. It dunks hard enough on itself, I fundamentally dislike such blatant, hyperbolic misinformation, so I’m gonna be the change I wanna see in the world and call it out. Shit, the OP of the comment even admitted it was incorrect, just “not that” incorrect.
By city planets, you mean cities?
Obviously the cities arent procedural. But thats not something to hail and praise, thats just normal. Its no more swept under the rug than “at least the guns shoot bullets at the enemies, and eventually it makes them die” is being swept under.
I’m just glad it’s been acknowledged now, so that people who aren’t us that can say “obviously” know that there’s more to it and it’s not “every single planet is exactly the same”.
I’m over 200 hours in and still mostly enjoying Starfield. There are a lot of things that could be better and the limitations of the game engine are pretty evident. I feel like the game will continue to evolve with expansions and mods but that’s not good enough for people who expected everything day 1.
The repetition of points of interest is definitely a bummer. It also doesn’t make sense that no matter where you land on any planet there is always a handful of structures and people nearby. Or that another ship always seems to land near you shortly after touching down.
It’s also annoying how 300 years in the future, people seem to have completely forgotten about night vision and your only option for illumination is the built in flashlight.
I think that’s maybe the most frustrating thing: it’s easy to see how the game could’ve been cooler in so many ways, but due to the engine or development constraints shortcuts were taken that result in subpar play.
Finally someone who shares my sentiment on the whole “this game feels so empty” complaints. I WISH it felt empty, at least then you could feel like the first person to step foot on a planet, but nope, this random ass moon in the fringes of space just happens to have a solar farm or an abandoned robotics lab :(
An open world game with loading screens between locations is like toll booths every mile on a highway. More locations doesn’t mean much if getting there is the same slog it currently is.
Yeah. What we need is more locations in the same worldspace.
That qualifier is important.
This is why I’ll never understand people who get excited about news like “We have over 1000 planets!”
Spend all that time and effort making like, 15 really complete, kick ass ones in the same physical space that I can explore instead.
The articles take is still out of kilter with a lot of opinions. He’s focused on the empty procedurally generated content but then talks about how “phenomenal” the main quest is?
The main quest is ok. I wouldn’t say it’s “phenomenal”. I’m not seeing the depth of gameplay and writing that I saw in Baldurs Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. Starfield is not a bad game, but it’s also not phenomenal. It’s ok. I’m more excited by the next CD Projekt Red or Larian game than I am about the next Bethesda game at this point.
I would say it just needs more of everything really but the explorable areas where def the biggest issue.
Wasn’t this by design?
The emptiness is, the non empty areas being generic was laziness. Though I suspect both are the result of Bethesda expecting modders to fill out the galaxy.
I don’t think it’s laziness, I think it’s a tighter grip over development.
I’ve heard that with Skyrim’s development, many of people’s favourite side quests were conceived, performed, and coded in a couple nights by a couple of people just cause they thought it was a fun idea, vs. Starfield had a way more locked down and controlled development cycle with way more of a top down, prescribed, development style.
I never heard why that might be, but it does make sense in terms of if you were trying to plan content for 1000+ worlds and doing it top down, you would lean way more on procedural generation and consequently you’d want way tighter controlled areas and things that can happen to not mess with your multi planet generation engine, but then that ultimately results in them all being soullless.
That and they broke the fundamental exploration loop by making loading screens such a core and frequent requirement. In Skyrim you’d have to do a quest over there, start walking towards it, see something neat, go check it out, find someone doing something, help them kill this villain, collect a reward, climb to the top of the mountain you’re partway up, look around and see some more cool stuff, remember you have a quest to do, and climb back down and towards the cave entrance that starts your quest.
With Starfield you have a quest to do over there so you fast travel to your ship, fast travel to the planet’s orbit, and fast travel to the quest location.
It does make sense. I mean it’s about resource management; they could add more locations, but that might mean more burden on QA, maybe some performance optimizations to support newer sections, maybe dialing back some of the art work on other areas to make it happen. Skyrim had great quests but no doubt it still performs quite poorly even on modern consoles at times, and still has more bugs given its relative size.
I got a strong sense of laziness from so many aspects of the game, but now I’ve had more time to think about it… it’s more likely yet another case of upper management forcing the game out earlier than the devs wanted. Same thing happened with CP2077.
Upper management often doesn’t give a shit about the game at all, all they’re interested in is how much money it’s going to make; so the longer it’s in dev, the more times it gets pushed back, the harder they’re chomping at the bit to just release it already.
There was probably some pressure as the game was in development for a really long time it got already delayed by almost a year, but I also feel like it has a lot of design choices which aren’t great. The development started right after Fallout 4, so I feel like 8 years of development is a pretty long time and if it had to be rushed out, there had to be some management problems. Feature creep is probably what especially happened, because there are so many game mechanics and features that don’t really have good impactful use cases.
Not to spoil anything, but the story and lore is pretty meh. There’s really no real sense of exploration like I have felt in Elder scrolls or Fallout. There’s just too many loading screens all the time (This is probably an engine limitation, but something that should have been realized in the early phase of development. Probably not really something you can change later). There’s a lot of sidequests, but most are just boring without a real story behind them.
The AI is just dumb and once you play for a while, the battles just doesn’t challenge you in any way even on higher difficulties. The outpost system just doesn’t make sense. It’s not like there’s not enough features in the outpost system, it just doesn’t make sense to use it properly. The stealth system often doesn’t make sense and is not useful in any way.
And to not to end it too negatively, I still liked the game. It’s just frustrating because I see so many potential game mechanics around me while playing that don’t really make sense to use.
The development started right after Fallout 4, so I feel like 8 years of development is a pretty long time and if it had to be rushed out, there had to be some management problems.
That’s a really good point tbf. 8 years, and this is what they released!
I’ve completed the game and agree, while it is an engaging game in some aspects, many systems felt ‘mile wide / inch deep’. Especially the AI. And I fucking hated the stealth, it just didn’t seem to work (though apparently a big reason for that is, many of us had armour ‘set to invisible in settlement’ which meant we’re tramping around with all our armour on, which makes us very visible / audible even though we can’t see the armour ourselves).
The development time was longer because they finally rewrote their old engine, so several of the years were just getting the engine working. So the game itself still could have been rushed out in the last couple years.
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Not really.
By design was using procedural generation to build out the planets and to place points of interest into the world.
But what’s wild is that they had such repetitive and uninteresting “points of interest.”
They aren’t interesting at all. The name is a lie.
So yeah, if you wander the procedurally generated planet you can come across a cave. But it’s effectively the same cave you have gone through a half dozen times already.
My suspicion is that the creation engine isn’t very well equipped for complex procedural generation, so the point of interest areas are also broken up onto reused tiles that get repetitive quickly, as opposed to more modern engines that allow for procedurally generating levels and assets with enough entropy that even if it looks familiar it isn’t that it looks exactly the same.
Like, just look at the demoed features of UE5’s procedural generation, and how much less repetitive it looks when filling in areas than Starfield.
I expected more from Bethesda given Todd Howard has been focused on procedural generation for decades now, but I think they really shot themselves in the foot with not sending creation engine to a farm upstate.
Yes, they were able to reuse a lot from past development, but the core of what they were trying to deliver completely fell apart ultimately and his decades old dream project is going to be forgotten within a few years.
It’s too bad procedural generation gets away as such a blanket term. What Starfield’s non quest planets really have is procedural generation of the geography of the surface, and then procedural placement of hand designed plant, animal, and mineral assets, then procedural placement of hand designed points of interest and buildings. The factory dungeon you just went through was by no means procedurally generated.
Already uninstalled, Starfield was just entertaining for 80 hours, which is still great, but definitely not as Skyrim or Fallout4, I’ve got thousands of hours on those. Out of the people in my social circles, the ones that are still playing are doing so because they can only play very little due to work, but everyone else is already moving off with 40-60 hours in the game.
They should just steal from players. There are a million user settlements built. Just grab copies of them, and place them elsewhere permanently as decorations elsewhere. Yes, there will be penises and swastikas, but we’ve seen that before. Just put a ‘request nuking from orbit’ button in the game.
Or the release of the Creation Kit.
Earth needs more ruins I don’t care what Todd says
Also I wish they’d hurry up and publish mod tools, I wanna make more space suits
Its a Bethesda Game, what did people expect?
Enjoyable exploration at the very least. It’s the one thing Bethesda has always excelled at, but I knew Starfield was going to be a massive disappointment full of copy+pasted POI’s as soon as they mentioned “1000 planets” and procedural generation. So not only does Starfield fall flat on its face in the story and wooden dialogue departments (imo, all their games suffer here), it isn’t even able to save itself with the kind of immersive and rewarding exploration experience you’d have expected Bethesda to at least provide as they did with their previous games by merit of a handcrafted, curated map.
I’m glad the honeymoon period is over with this game and people are finally seeing it for the half baked, outdated, and bland exercise in mediocrity that it actually is.
I expected what it is but I hoped for better. Proc Gen has been done well many times. Bethesda even used to excel at it. They failed here though. The fact they don’t even use procedural tools to change facilities is frustrating. They could have doors positioned in different places, locked at different levels, secret shortcuts different to each one, and enemies placed in different locations. They didn’t do any of this. Every facility is exactly the same as the last time you saw the same one. Every container is in the same spot even. It’s impressively lacking in procedural generation where it would actually help and only used where it hurts the game.
More entertaining glitches
Got in 160 hours or so, enjoyed it and have no regrets buying it. I’ll probably play a little bit again in the future, but not so much. So it was a fine game, but not their best outing for sure.
From what I’ve seen (I don’t have the game myself) the key point of this game is that it offers a platform to build on, with the main quest as a kind of “game sample”. When they supply a proper support for mods and DLCs, there is a good chance that this game will really thrive.
That just translates to empty and unfinished game. We need less of those.
If you need mods to thrive, thats kinda like saying that deer corpse just needs some fungal action to thrive.
Its dead, jim. Someone else is eating it to grow something new, but theyre eating it because its dead.
We will see. The overall platform is not bad, and I expect it to grow. It all depends on how good they will expand on it. Minecraft was way worse when it started.
Minecraft was in alpha and beta states for years, and its modding community treats mods as if they were completely different games.
It is not favorable to starfield to compare it to minecraft, imo
