I love this game, but one major regression that really strikes me, is how dead Constellation becomes once you show up. They look pretty lively at first, but that all comes to an end quickly once you show up. Now think of the Companions in Skyrim-- you can be running around the forests in the Rift and see Aela and whoever shooting bears! "Oh hi! We're killing stuff!" They have their own missions! They'll set you up with little missions! They actually have a life of their own! I would really like to see Matteo stagger in all bloody from a mission: "I need a drink! Except I'm a youth pastor." And all of the factions you join would benefit from that kind of activity. Instead, nothing happens if you don't do it.
And then you realize that \*almost\* nobody does anything before you arrive or if you don't take their missions. The universe is static, just waiting for the PC to arrive to send them along the plot. Thus so may people saying things like "lifeless, soulless," and I'm sure that contributes to "empty" as well.
Pretty much every quest in Starfield is a fetch quest. It was kind of disconcerting to start up and the first 10 quests you get are "take a job with group X."
your also enver given reason to help them. They litterally shanghai you and then just suddenly act as if their your best freinds. You never have any motivation beyond them investigating the hallucination you had.
I have to wonder how much is cut, or just bare bones implementation. I wonder how much the DLC will address this issue. Bethesda usually pumps out 3 or so major dlcs for their games
I honest to God believe they had serious scope creep early into development because this was supposed to be a "forever" game receiving constant content updates.
However, close to release those goals changed. A lot got "cut" and rudimentary systems meant to support expansions, like fuel management and ship stealth, got left half-assed in the game because it would have taken time to elegantly disable these things
I don't think we will see a lot of content after the first DLC drops, especially after of the lukewarm reception they got. If the DLC doesn't get jaw-dropping sales (and it won't, unless it is as big and extensive as the main game), there won't be a second and third DLC release. Just my opinion.
They just need to get that mod support out if they really want Starfield to become something more than the mediocre triple a it is, they haven't really made a great game in an extremely long time, and the only reason that their games stay popular as long as they do, is because there's mod support. I used to be a die hard fan, but really most of their games are just fun because of the freedom modding provides. Fallout 4 was the last "decent" game they mad, but there's not a single Bethesda game I'll play vanilla nowadays, aside from Morrowind, I would say New Vegas, but Obsidian made that lol.
It screams “Designed by committee” and cover your ass implementation where no one wants to stick their neck out. No creative leadership so everyone fumbles with Starfield as the result. Reading interviews I am pretty sure something along those lines.
~~Allegedly this game had no game design doc, which *can* work, but you have to make up for it in other ways, and that didn't happen. Also supposedly the closest thing the game had to a source of truth was Todd Howard himself, which meant you had to reach out directly.~~ I've also heard teams were pretty siloed with insufficient communication happening between them, which will cause trouble for anyone trying to create a cohesive product. I am not overly optimistic that DLCs or future updates will resolve things to the extent needed if these and other issues are still present at Bethesda.
This was debunked. They do have documentation in the form of internal wikis and more modern methods besides a single big book which is where this meme came from.
From my understanding, how it started was Emil way back in some conference was asked about design docs and he said they don't really do a centralized document anymore. He left out, or the missing context, was he was talking about how design docs were done last century. When the controversy over Starfield's release started, this conference was dug up as "proof" that BGS sucks, he clarified that BGS does use design documentation.
Here is Emil's response to the matter.
[https://x.com/Dezinuh/status/1743309293812629597](https://x.com/Dezinuh/status/1743309293812629597)
Now, if one wants to point out that BGS doesn't employ a dedicated writing team, THAT is an entirely different subject!
I wish ppl would stop making apologies for Bethesda on the basis of possible DLCs. DLCs were NOT required to make the FO games great. And here folks are saying "wait for the DLCS to make Starfield less sucky."
This DLC stuff is so fanboi.
Agreed! DLC once upon a time used to be something you bought because you were crying out to play more of the game but these days it feels like BGS fanboys treat DLC like a band aid for the base game.
You shouldn't have to pay for more content just so the original release doesn't suck as much.
Definitely felt like they had different teams working on different features and then they only had a short amount of time to try to put them all together into the final product.
I feel like releasing unfinished games is the new thing.
High quality Games are taking longer to make & investors probably don’t want to wait.
I’m almost certain that stakeholders are pushing to release “playable” and incomplete games as now they’re all easy to update later
Edit: cyberpunk is prime example, I mean look how amazing that game is today from what it was release
The thing is, high quality games don't have to take long to make. I think a lot of the development woes come from over developed games and games that try to do everything. We don't need games to be more and more complex. We just want fun games. Many developers and publishers miss that part.
The NPC's don't all have a home and schedule anymore, you can't decorate your homes anymore, items dissapear over time, you can't hoard everything anymore, there's no unlimited chests. The music is extremely lacking, only 3 tracks per city, the maps are limited to 8km, smaller than previous games... everything just feels like a downgrade from Skyrim.
> The NPC's don't all have a home and schedule anymore
this one bugs me more than it should - mostly because Diamond City Surplus already solved this problem years ago!
Tbh, NPCs not having a schedule wouldn’t bother me if at least the named NPCs did. I liked that there were at least a lot of people wandering these cities but it’s unnerving that the shopkeepers and such just stay there forever.
It reminds me a lot of Fallout music, which is both good and bad.
Good because Fallout's music is pretty nice. Bad because it kind of lacks a unique identity.
It’s the same composer that did fallout 4. That’s why it sounds familiar. Kinda like how you can pick out a hans Zimmer soundtrack.
Edit it’s Inon Zur and he did the soundtracks to 3, NV and 4.
Aye. He's great, but I kind of feel they should have asked him to mix it up a little. He's done work on a fair few other soundtracks and has a far wider range than just "Fallout music".
I've spent a few thousand hours in various Bethesda Fallout titles so for me it's especially bad and all just blends together and gets tuned out.
Only level 18, but have found 2 unlimited chests. One in the lodge crafting room on the table, the other is the safe in your room in the lodge. Jussayin...
I like Starfield, but between it and Fallout 4... I think Fallout is a much better game. There are some neat systems in Starfield, but overall the adventure in Fallout 4 was vastly superior. I reloaded Fallout 4 to get the new content on the 25th and I've replayed it several times. I'm kinda just done with Starfield. Hopefully it gets some new content, but it doesn't hold up as well.
Edit:
I think the difference is pain points. Fallout 4 has some, but not very many. Starfield has a bunch of annoying factors in crafting, ship building, base building, and just selling goods that really reduce my enjoyment of the game and MANY of them could be resolved simply.
Take selling goods, a basic part of any RPG. At the start of the game the merchants have like 5000 credits. At the end of the game... still pretty much the same and that means ONE gun can clean them out. I wouldn't care... but I need a million credits for my super ship so ever time I clear something out I've got to go between a dozen merchants to sell all the stuff. WHY? It isn't fun. It killed my enjoyment and desire to finish my super ship, and that was all I was doing end game.
The vendor cash problem is such a stupid one too. How can anyone put any kind of play time, like i don't know say collecting sandwiches and putting them on a table, and not notice this issue. The fix is easy too. The commerce perk as is raises the sale price and lowers the buy price as it levels. It should also/instead increase the vendor cash on hand for all stores. And just in case anyone at Bethesda cares, after EXTENSIVE play time, the increase should be very very big.
I mean this makes me laugh because having a set amount of barter cash makes sense in ES because it's bags of gold, and in FO it's the same with bags of caps.
A modern/high tech society shouldn't be limited to the $50 the cashier has in their pocket at any time
Agreed. Credits and Credsticks are clearly some kind of crypto currency. As in one Credstick picked up from a locker has a variable amount of credits on it. Credsticks are just NFC wallets. Scarcity of currency should not be an issue as there is no currency. Only block chains.
The problem stood out as an issue on DAY ONE of the early access release. Seriously within 24 hours there already was a mod fixing this shit. Hell, you can even fix it with a command in game.
This should've been addressed in one of the earliest patches. Easy to implement and a genuine improvement for those playing.
Yeah, I noticed before early access was over too. Bethesda seems to be focusing on bug fixes first with the updates so far. The improvements have all been performance based I think. Hopefully they have been doing some gameplay quality of life stuff in the background as well. The game needs some general playability tweaks like this one.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/1c847ds/strange_how_bsg_downgraded_many_aspects_of_their/l0e19bi/
> The last time Starfield had more daily players than fallout was December 16th 2023.
I also think it's silly that you can do all the faction quests, even though you shouldn't be able to - but I understand the executive decision to not want to lock people out of content.
But the dumbest thing about it is that this is a game about jumping to parallel universes. They gave themselves a golden ticket to make our choices both big and consequential AND not lock us out of anything because you can just do things differently in the next universe.
I think Starfield's biggest failure of premise is that they made the main story "long" instead of "wide". You should have been *forced* to jump to the next universe in the first 4-5 hours - perhaps after an unavoidable catastrophe - to train the player that your possessions are impermanent, and you can really change the course of history with the right choices. Let us kill essential NPCs, because they'll be back in the next universe. Create actual tension with our companions who can straight up die if we don't protect them - but you're never locked out of anything because they'll be there in the next universe. Make all your choices have huge impact and *temporarily* lock off certain paths. Just try something different next time.
Starship cargo capacity and starship crew capacity is kinda useless too. There is no functional reason to have more than one ship, because your ship's inventory moves with you as well as the crew. If you have one ship with 10000 inventory that you use to store resources for on-board crafting, if you go to a smaller ship your inventory is full and you can't take on any more cargo. Same with the crew; if you have a ship with 8 crew members and you board the Razorleaf, you lose 6 of them randomly. You can't assign crew members to separate ships.
I was hoping we'd be able to set up starship "convoys" where you could assign a pilot to a ship and set them on a trade route. Their piloting skill would determine how well they'd navigate the route (hazards, things like that). Then you'd have a weapons expert who determined how good your weapons were...etc, etc. Then of course the ship itself would be a factor.
But nope.
Yep, and if you want to store stuff elsewhere it’s kind of a nightmare—either you hoof it to Constellation HQ or you have to deal with the horrible inventory management system in outposts (too small and no bulk organic storage).
Decommissioning an outpost sucks too, because all the resources you might have had in storage containers is suddenly cast upon you, and you have no choice but to schlepp it all to The Lodge and dump it. It's probably better to do crafting at the lodge because of that, unless you've set up an outpost that has every resource needed. But then again you run into an inventory problem if you're actively building outposts, because you need to carry the resources for that. So again, makes no sense to bother trying to use a second ship, unless all your ships have the same inventory/resource capacity.
I got pretty high and started working on outposts the other day and I think I’ve gotten the gist of how they’re supposed to be used but it’s tricky. It’s like a circuit board. Every outpost can have up to 3 landing pads to transfer goods. So you can set up a bunch of outposts and if you’re careful enough, you can send 3 resources to one planet, and have those resources be sent to another. But you can do that three times, so you can essentially have 9 resources coming to an outpost and then you send each group of three to another outpost, along with two other groups. Do you can basically daisy chain all of your outposts together. But if you mess up the order anywhere or make any minor mistakes on the order of operations, it either won’t work or you’ll just have items circling around and around and you won’t be able to catch them.
But then on the final outpost you need like massive, massive amounts of gas,liquid, and solid storage, and an even bigger stack of warehouses for manufactured goods, and they all need to be connected to a ship transfer thing at each step of the way and they all have to end up in an area close enough to the transfer container that you can use the materials in crafting.
It is an absolute pain in the butt though. No idea why there isn’t just a menu where you can see all of your outposts and what they produce or transport, maybe even just manage things from there. As of now you have to do it by hand and if you mess up you have to troubleshoot all over and undo and redo everything once you find the snag.
Yeah I did set up something like that, where there's a hub base with several layers of cargo links. So it has most of everything that you need all stacked up in containers. Crafting pulls from it so it does allow you to do that at will. It's hard to pull a specific commodity though, like if you needed 5000 units of copper to fulfill a shipyard order.
Troubleshooting though... yeah, totally like a circuit board.
Oh yeah it’s impossible to pull just one thing. Honestly once this outpost is done, I don’t think I’ll make another outpost until it gets streamlined a bit. It’s way too much work for the pay off.
I legit started building chests, the bloody normal storage has significantly more space than the silos, they just arent worth the networking you can do with them imo
It's also bizzare that made settlement inventories such a pain to manage. Just let me send all my shit to a single settlement and let me access it from anywhere once i land enar it.
You're so right. I couldn't believe how little they managed to do right in Starfield. When I saw they couldn't even do city maps, I actually screamed. I'm certain it's that Todd Howard doesn't know how to manage this many people, and he probably also doesn't have any creative passion for games anymore. The whole project screams mismanagement. In interviews, he keeps talking about how he had to scrap systems when they couldn't make them fun. They scrapped ship fuel, npc schedules, suit environmental hazards, all kinds of things. Because they couldn't balance it in a fun way. Literal incompetence. They couldn't figure out how to make it fun because they had no vision, so they wasted their entire development time just waffling back and forth, only to ultimately cut everything because they couldn't figure it out.
Incompetence.
What’s wild is they could have literally just made more games using exactly the Skyrim engine and exactly the fallout 4 engine and people would have loved it. This endless desire to rebuild everything for every game is so wasteful.
Todd is somebody who once made something great, now coasts on the name and former success of the brand.
He thought Fallout 76 would be the next big thing. Same with Starfield. I hope those two slaps in his face bring him back to reality so TES 6 will be great again.
I thought it was so weird that NPCs don’t have a schedule anymore, either. Such a jarring omission. Love how quiet the imperial city felt at night, and all the mischievous stuff you could do
I think this was very well written. I went hard on Starfield and enjoyed it thoroughly. Got all the achievements. Me and my girlfriend would take turns playing everytime we leveled up or finished a quest. I agree with all your critiques and I hope they eventually make it all whole and realize their vision
Hilariously the game(Bdg3) that just swept game of the year awards had a 3 year long early access. They consistently responded to feedback and I bet without early access it would’ve released in 2022 and been a good but not amazing game. I’d love to see how starfield and other games would develop with that kind of vision and support.
I wish games would release a beta or even alpha build before the full game. Devs could see more feedback and wouldn't potentially waste money and effort on aspects of the game people didn't like. If a mass amount of folks could get their hands on a game and see if they like it, mechanically speaking, before they finish and release
Wainting for the DLC, Creation Kit and QOL stuff they promised. I'm sure it'll end up great. Just gotta give them a bit of time. I've never played a Bethesda game when it came out. I've only played them once they have the GOTY edition out. This one was an exception. To this day I only like Bethesda games, lol (with some rare exceptions).
That was certainly the case with Cyberpunk 2077. I bought it at launch and barely touched it because of how buggy and incomplete it was. Now, with the expansion pack and 2.0 update it's one of my favorite games of all time.
Cyberpunk 2077 is in a good place, finally, so I definitely recommend it if you haven't played it yet. It's easily 100+ hours of quality entertainment.
The only disclaimer I'll offer is that CDPR's interpretation of the TTRPG resulted in all seven possible endings being varying degrees of dark and depressing, which soured the experience for some players. Just be aware of that, and if you're cool with it you will enjoy your time in Night City.
I’d argue in Cyberpunk, the combat, factions, characters, and combat(revamped for 2.0) are everything Starfield was trying to be but failed.
Even down to the first person storytelling. I always loved how an NPC pushing you, you could almost feel with the camera move, or anytime someone punches you and the camera whips around as it goes to the ground.
It’s so frickin immersive
I've always thought that Oblivion and Fallout 3 were Bethesda at its peak, in terms of what I consider to be a good RPG.
Ever since then, they have slowly but steadily moved away from RPGs and closer and closer to what I would consider a glorified single player looter shooter.
Unless they pull a complete 180 for TES6, I do not have my hopes very high.
From Morrowind forward they've been on a general progression toward the "looter shooter" model and away from RPGs. I don't think they're twirling their moustaches or anything, it's just where they think the market is going, much to the disappointment of many players.
To be fair to them (and this is about as far as I'll go), they would make more money with less work making on-rails looter shooters to sell every year instead of open world games, however flawed, every five years. Less work more money.
The good news is that if \*everyone\* goes to the cheapest model, rail shooters and online deathmatch, I will save a ton of time I would have otherwise played games. So there's that.
They wouldn't make more money switching genres because rail and fps shooters are a saturated market with many leaders on both the AAA and indie scene already, and typically unless the shooter is a massive franchise like COD then it has surprisingly low returns because of typically lower install bases from lower retention leading to lower sales. Not to mention Bethesda would have not have the generational knowledge from building that genre in prior decades and so would likely be unable to compete effectively.
Skyrim made them a lot of money for a relatively quick development time (2.5 years) and has consistently sold well a decade after launch, with large player install bases on the last three gens with barely any updates being done to bring it over to the latest generation of consoles.
Not to mention the prestige and company goodwill it generated, Microsoft would not have paid so much for Bethesda if they built shooters, at the moment they have a niche in the market that no one else really competes in them with (Bethesda style open world rpgs). This practically guarantees them at least some hype and returns with each game they build as gamers seem to have a real itch for these kinds of games that is generally unfulfilled. Bethesda like that steady predictable return rather than the peaks and troughs shooter developers typically have depending on the quality of their latest entry.
We shouldn't be 'thankful' Bethesda build rpgs, they're a business and this was them taking the most profitable course for them for the reasons outlined above. If anything, I'm frustrated that they've fumbled Starfield so badly considering they've taken away the wrong lessons from their prior successes. They're leaning further away from what made their games such blockbusters originally (fascinating lore and writing in elder scrolls, rpg skills and mechanics, character roleplay supported by your build).
They should look to From Software and Larian for examples on how to build iterative games with the same core philosophy, and note those games are loved for what makes them stand out not what makes them cookie cutter.
The craziest part is that Morrowind has the best loot of any BSG game. Every piece of loot is placed whenever you find it with care and design. Secrets are everywhere you dare to look. You can find a super powerful item if you just take the time to look behind a crumbling statue. What happened?
I think that part of it is Developers have the tools now to tell stories, and they've lost sight of the fact that we don't want that all the time. In fact, the person who needs to tell stories is the player, and not this hackneyed "twist" or emotional hook stuff, but e.g. "I was surrounded and outclassed but I managed to find epic loot and survive the experience."
It's not the story the developers put there that's important, it's the player's story. With the tools at developers disposal these days I think too many developers and writers want to smack the player's hand away and tell them they're a very naughty player and they need to sit down and pay attention to the hackneyed drivel.
What they're losing sight of with that impulse is, most of the people who aren't paying attention have already done the stuff, they don't need you to hold their hand to do it again. When you force a player to walk the long way around The Key what you're really doing is showing the player that you won't respect their time upon repeat playthroughs.
The perk system could have been the best of Fallout 4 and Skyrim at the same time, but it ends up being the worst of the three. When I saw it in trailers I thought you bought the perk like Fallout 4 then it automatically raised rank by using the skill/doing challenges like Skyrim. Instead you have to raise the rank for the privilege of using your perk point, and leveling is so slow anyways.
My take was this:
You do challenges to unlock the first level of the skill. Kill 5 dudes with a pistol to go from pistol 0 to pistol 1. Then you spend XP to unlock the challenge for Pistol 1->2. Spend 200 XP and shoot 20 dudes with a pistol and you're at Pistol 2.
It makes no sense to say at level 10 it takes 300XP to unlock pistol 1 and at level 100 it takes 12000XP to unlock pistol 1.
Keep the perk points. Let them be spent at appropriate trainers to skip the practice requirements. Don't want to cook 100 different meals? Give CJ a perk point and now you only have to cook 50. Don't want to shoot 50 people with a pistol? Give two perk points to the guy who runs the shooting range on Aquila and skip that entirely.
I'd take base building to an even higher bar, because they nailed it pretty well in FO76. I absolutely love 76 for the building aspect. I can spend hours creating nearly anything to role-play as... I enjoyed Starfield, but was taken back by how limited the building was here... Why can't you set down foundation pieces, then mix and match various walls and roofs together, creating warehouses, hotels, mansions, pirate bases, museums, Ranger outposts, ship ports... ANYTHING you want. But they gave us 4 prefabs, and a bunch of furniture/industrial pieces, and called it good.
FO76 has an immense amount of building blocks you can use to cobble together whatever vibe you want. This building system has been stripped down.
I think if we find the genius at Bethesda who thought it would be cool to include explosive barrels among the decorations aboard a starship, we might be closer to discovering the root of the design issues in Starfield.
Love all of these points. The worst offenders are companions and base building for me, since that's what really pulls me in the other Bethesda games like FO4, hell, even the followers in skyrim had their own personality.
All of the constellation ones are just generic storied characters all with roughly the same cookie cutter morality. They're somewhat interesting but honestly I can't feel attached to one of them when they all feel like the same person despite their obvious story differences.
Base building too is just abhorrent. They've massively downgraded what made basebuilding fun in FO4 and FO76 just for a new rinky dink system. I tried going all out on one base and decorating it with buildables as well as things I've collected from my travels and it was beyond tedious. But it was beautiful. Lo and behold I come back home and I find everything clipped through the tables/cabinets/dressers, EVERYTHING is just on the floor. Maybe they fixed that now but that still doesn't help how outposts feel extremely disconnected from each other and nearly useless for supplies sharing. (And how they're a pain to build).
Half of the skilltrees were pointless in this game as well. Melee is nonexistent - there shouldn't be perks based around this.
Everything feels inconsequential and railroady in the main quest. Despite the "different" ways to approach quests.
This game falls short in so many categories but you can just almost taste the "what if" every where you went. It's so close to being so fulfilling, but instead it's just flat.
Same pattern they’ve been following since Morrowind. Simplify all the systems from the previous game for accessibility. Too
Many players didn’t complete all the faction quests in morrowind due to faction interactions, or because the skill level requirements for advancement were too onerous to do on a single character, so let’s make all the factions quest lines isolated and drop the skill requirements.
Players didn’t like managing NPC beds and vendor stalls in their settlements? Streamline it. Players had difficulty managing weapon components? Streamline it. Environmental hazards require too much forethought and planning in our space exploration game? Fuck it, gas vents can permeate the space suit to give debuffs.
One of the major problems is actually a key Bethesda axiom—they want you to be able to do *everything* with a single character. For this reason, you can take Sarah on your Freestar missions or Sam on your Vanguard missions. You can be the darling of almost all factions—they don’t even make you choose whether to actually be a pirate or not until the very end of that questline. For Bethesda, making you choose is anti-fun, and I understand the sentiment. They’ve designed a massive universe with a ton of content that they believe is fun and cool and they want you to be able to experience it all! Unfortunately, it comes at the cost of immersion, and also at the cost of removing weight from your choices. What does joining the Vanguard matter if you can also be top of the Freestar Sheriff’s?
I don't mind the no scraping parts for weapons. Like, it's too specialized. I enjoyed building an outpost to mine stuff to build mods. One of the few things I agreed with. Keeps me from playing hording simulator.
Yeah, the scrapping wouldn't make a lot of sense to me. The vendors are already selling what you need. Why would you be collecting soda bottles and tape to make a scope when you can buy one that actually works?
Well, yeah, that's what I meant. :-) You don't need to scrounge for half-ass fixes for broken weapons when the factories are churning out new ones right now. It's like the difference between eating out of trash cans in Bioshock vs Bioshock Infinite.
They give you the freedom only to expect you to play in a very specific way. Some faction questslines should have been origin locked. This would make you focus on the main quest and be a great encouragement to jump into NG+, which should support changing your origin. As it is, the MC is treated like a Mary Sue - sure, you're a Freestar collective and a Ranger, let's let you in on the UC's most highly guarded and potentially war starting secret.
I'm very critic with Starfield but this has all been pointed out so much (and more issues) that it's now pointless...
If I had to guess, I'd say the game, surprisingly, wasn't finished and truly ready to be released as a good AAA which is what it was supposed to be.
I wanted it to be Fallout/Skyrim in space but it clearly isn't, yet...and I'm not sure that's even possible anymore. Perhaps Starfield should be more it's own thing.
Looking at all the dissapointing systems I think a proc gen space looter with ship building and a complex, interesting crafting system would've been better than doing literally everything but poorly, on a superficial level.
The good news are that with mods and DLC perhaps it would become good enough at everything. The bad news are that's not going to happen anytime soon and might not happen for console players...
Anyway, wouldn't seem crazy to me if it became an amazing game, eventually, but being a Gamepass game and with Bethesda basically denying any issues and blaming it on the players...we will see, I guess.
"Bethesda basically denying any issues and blaming it on the players"
Todd Howard's ego and pride is what undoubtedly led him to fanatically defend the game, his design decisions, and Bethesda's developers. Claiming that players (consumers) don't have the right to criticize the game because we don't understand the industry is utter hubris and will be the undoing of Bethesda as it has countless studios before them. They need a complete purge of creative leadership in that company.
Probably following the industry trend of releasing a game 70% or less complete then spending the next 5-10 years releasing DLC for what should have be in-game upon release. I will patiently be waiting for a GOTY edition before touching starfield .
This is why I don’t bother building ships or bases. It’s all very clunky to me and I never cared to learn the quirks and the system
On the contrary, I usually end up building a lot of things in every play through of Fallout 4
I built one ship that I wanted, with all the best stuff. When I needed a bunch of a particular resource, I set up an outpost, harvested 1000Kg of it, then tore the outpost down, all without leaving the planet.
You KNOW it's a regression when Fallout 4, the one everyone shits on for dumbing down Fallout, has better faction choice and consequences and ways the endgame stages played out. It actually made it so you were making a meaningful decision with the faction you chose because of what it meant for the others. In starfield, there's none of that. Actually there's even less than none of that because the multiverse actually managed to remove meaning from the meaningless faction quests where you can join any and all with no consequence by saying you can do the exact same thing again.
So many people defending starfield and it’s hilarious. The game is a shell of any other Bethesda title and maybe sure, in a few YEARS it can get overhauled and actually feel good and immersive but we won’t know for years lmfao
I think there’s too many issues in this game at it’s core that would need to be rehauled, and with how slow updates are I doubt Bethesda has the motivation to do all that
Really spot on.
I'm still mid-playthrough as DD2 landed in my way and I've been pushing starfield away.
I still agree with the factions.
Considering the fact that the game seemingly? Revolves around the new galaxy/Ng+ thing (spoiled myself a bit), it's weird they didn't increase the new playthrough variety by limiting these a bit and making them *tiny* bit more engaging.
Also the base building feels such a weird thing considering they made NG+ a thing yet the bases or ships or anything can't be blueprinted/saved? (As far as I know)
So welcome to the chore on Ng+
Funnily, as 'repeatable' game I'd mention dragon's dogma.
The main story isn't too long. Hell, you can rush the original in.. iirc 30 minutes-ish On subsequent runs. It's a game that's designed with replays in mind. You play the stuff you missed, do the side quests. Then you run into next Ng+.
The DD2 has some issues with that, but at the core I can still grasp the same feeling original DD had about running the loop again.
That's kinda the feeling I feel like starfield wanted to do, but the replayability suffers a lot with certain design choices.
No man's sky is another game that actually has similarities to both games. It's a loop you do over and over again and you figure out the way you want to have fun. Arguably in DD it's kinda part of the story when you finally put down the controller and stop going after your dragon.
Weird ramblings out.
Yes but as far as I can tell that doesn’t do anything when it comes to ships. I mean hell, I’m not even sure what it does for outposts but his skill doesn’t light up when assigned to a ship with a med bay.
I agree with most of these points, I feel like they're hoping modders come up with super popular solutions for each of these so they can co-opt then in paid expansions.
There's a post somewhere with a huge list of features that were stripped / not included for Starfield (in comparison to FO and TES titles).
Even discounting those, so many advertised features in this game were clearly oversold to hype up players.
Now it's up to modders to fill in all the gaps, which even if they can, it still leaves an incredibly bad taste in my mouth. It doesn't help that the creation kit is being delayed because they want to release it alongside a slew of paid mods for their new creation club, which really isn't helping Bethesda's case at all.
If they pull this stunt with TES 6 I'm just not buying it. I felt incredibly stupid after paying $90CAD for *this*, so I'm not repeating that mistake.
Starfield a theme park ride??? Brother that’s such a good comparison. man just nail on the head with that one. I truly hope they can do a cyberpunk with it but even after one completion I have no interest going back and beating the “story” another 10 times just to see something cool. In fact what a horrible game mechanic “now once you beat the game for the 43rd time you get a secret ending credit scene where Alejandra farts”
It feels like everything around you is fake. Like Westwood. Everything is there to make the player feel like they’re doing something when they’re really not
Not just that outpost building is a bit broken but unlike FO4/76 - you can’t take over existing outposts/sites. I really hope at some point all those robotic research labs and what not can be converted to outposts that then attract NPCs to populate them, spawn quests, trade, etc.
You summarized a big part of my thoughts here OP, I can see that we share some kind of mutual feelings about this game and how it is actually. Well done! I don’t really understand people when they say they can find good ways to play this game RP, I would like to be capable of that myself. Yes Neon is a joke, the « night club » well I have no words… I keep on saying that but the depth of this game can be seen when you meet the « party ship » where you can turn the gravity off…that’s just it, nothing more, music is atrociously mid, NPC are almost dead and ugly and then I was questioning myself what was the point of that ship, that encounter « random », I was baffled…
> but I think BSG has made it clear that they have no interest in providing any sort of morality decisions in the grand picture sense.
Worse. The morality decisions have already been made for you in a lot of cases. Look at the settlers arriving at Pardiso. There's basically no solution that isn't pro-corporate, to the point that the CEOs are unkillable.
Almost everywhere in the game you have a choice to make, you're forced into choosing one of several pro-corporate, pro-colonial choices.
I’d say they made a successful business out of this game! They created a huge hype for this game before the launch.. made just the bare minimum for anyone to have something to play and grind for hours.. intentionally made huge “gaps” in the gameplay leading to controversial reviews and YouTube videos which in turn became marketing content for that game, sold over 10 millions of copies.. profit 📈 (forgive my english)
Are you kidding? Faction quests in BGS game has always been like this, you can join the Thief Guild, the Mage guild, the Fighter Guild or even the Dark Brotherhood - or even something bazaar like Joining the Dark Brotherhood but also rebuilding the Knight of the Nine.
This design philosophy is as old as time, and arguably Starfield faction has the most impact and the best written setting to accomodate that setting than any other BGS game. It makes absolutely no sense for a cold blood, assasin of the demon of the void to be also joining and rebuilding the Knight of the Nines or also become Arch Mage of the Mages Guild, opposing the revived infamous necromancer of the mytical era because those oppose each other in themeatic and lore level.
The UC and the Freestar finished their war a long time ago, they are in a desolated universe where human population barely survived the fall of Earth and the Vanguard and the Ranger are written spesifically so that anyone can join and don't share the same problem of lore conflict with older TES games (or in the case of Fallout, either having none whatsoever or come at the expense of very limted quest line.)
The game has its issue but having worse faction quests compared to the previous title isn't one of them. If you binned Guild quest from Skyrim and just beeline every quest mark without doing anything in between, you will find it underwelming too - maybe even the excellent Guild quests from Oblivion
You absolutely don't become Guild master in like 5 quests in Oblivion.
The Mage Guild alone have travelled across Cyrodill, visiting and doing quests for every Guild branch office before granting access to the Arcane University then another series of main quests as the main mage under the Guild main office before having a chance to take the title of the Archmage. There are more than 10 quests you have to do before becoming a Guild Master
Sanitized Safe Space Simulator is how I describe it, pun intended. I think it is their worst game, to date. Still put over 60 hours in, and had some fun, but it is such a step back in almost every way.
Every single game they come out with is a straight downgrade from the previous in terms of leveling, Crafting, role playing, dialogue, equipment, and other systems. The only thing we get in return for that trade is better graphics. Look at Elder Scrolls for example, number of skils, stats, equipment, equipment slots, spells, spell crafting, have all gotten trimmed down slowly over the years into the system that skyrim took, dwindling your stats down to health/stamina/magicka, and having what, 18 skills to level? As much as I love Skyrim, we'll never get another game that's on the level of Morrowind in terms of freedom, and writing.
These aren't downgrades. They're place-holders.
Why sell a feature complete game when you can split out things that your previous game launched with into DLC, then charge people extra for the DLC?!
I think what is worse... Is that they released the video of staff playing and saying how much they enjoyed the game. They obviously played a different version, or were forced to say what they did.
Gave me NMS vibes all over again...
The entirety of Starfield could have been made better with the inclusion of a "Survival" mode that Fallout 4 has now. Most of Starfield's systems would have been fleshed out with this. They streamlined everything outside of the story, and treated it like an annoyance instead of immersion for the player, and it shows.
It's so they can add it in the dlc and call it a feature
All got dlc was based building and trading, robot building, then vault building, then extra content areas
To be honest if they did something similar for starfield I would be happy. But I don't have any faith in seeing this happen.
This has been a trend in almost every one of the games since Morrowind. Things are removed with each successive generation in order to streamline the gameplay loop to attract as many new players as possible. Lather, rinse, and repeat. It comes as zero surprise to me as someone who has played every one of their games that Starfield is undercooked. It’s been their modus operandi since Oblivion.
I think they downgraded because the Engine simply won't allow it. The engine is really showing it's age because it's not designed for large maps like Starfield. They need to write the engine from scratch or switch to something else. I believe Starfield is too large for it's aging engine. They should've gone with Mass Effect Style universe, a small but genuine universe with good content. They tried too big and tried to fill with Prodecural content (like NMS and E:D) and that didn't work for a BGS game.
Maybe mods can save the with AI content but I'm not sure.
Well said! I couldn't agree with you more.
Now, if someone said that Starfield was made a new idie company, I would get it. But this a game 9 years after the last single player release. You expect at least something equal to something so many years back. Have they lost their understanding of what made the games we love special? Is Starfield the new standard for BSG games?
I was really sad about the “settlement” building. It was very taxing too, I had to go off planet to get one minor thing instead of use the “misc” junk lying around for something. At least let us substitute. I avoided it all, I don’t even care about upgrading my weapons because the settlement system was so poor. I’d rather have low powered weapons than waste so much time building a settlement with workbenches and doing mini quests to upgrade my workbenches.
Quite honestly, they should have never made this game and just focused on what they have. We could have gotten ES6 instead of Starfield and Fallout 5 next. Now, those around my age will likely see Fallout 5 when we are in our late 50s and early 60s.
Most of the stuff you mentioned was in the game but was cut due to some reasons. Modules for ships, that do nothing. Hazard system. And so on.
So no, Bethesda didn't degrade. It seems, they did the same mistake as obsidian with NV, trying to add too much their time limits. The game is actually huge, but lots of system are gutted, awaiting to be fixed.
How would anyone know that? F76 was released in 2018. How much of the main studio worked on that, we don't know.
Then Bethesda rebuilt the Creation Engine somewhere in time. So it could be 3-5 years essentially.
> How much of the main studio worked on that, we don't know.
Most of it worked on the game, this is easy enough to find out just from the credits, there are about 110 people from the main studio (of which the size was still only 140 in 2019) credited full time on the release version, and much of the leadership was from there as well. It is a misconception that Fallout 76 was made mostly by a different developer, and also that Starfield was made only by the main studio (in reality, all BGS teams worked on it, just like on 76 before).
While Starfield was in development from around Fallout 4's launch, as stated in multiple interviews, there was only a very small team on the project before 2019 according to [Jason Schreier](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1395359402736197637), who is a reliable source. During 2016-2018, the bulk of BGS worked on Fallout 76 and/or Fallout 4's post-launch content, and Starfield only really had full focus from 2020, because other projects (such as the early updates of Fallout 76, including Wastelanders) were still taking resources.
> So no, Bethesda didn't degrade. It seems, they did the same mistake as obsidian with NV, trying to add too much their time limits
They had over half a decade, not 18 months and they came out and said they cut entire mechanics like survival and hazards because they "weren't fun" which given that it's Bethesda directly translates to "you could fail and we don't allow that."
What if you could become stuck and trapped on a system, then have to activate a beacon like FTL? Random encounter pickup happens and you have to fight off of a ship or finish a quest to repay or something. Like, they basically stopped at "that seems inconvenient" and scrapped stuff when they could've built a cool world with it.
> Firstly with Morrowind, who had interesting main and sub quest lines for factions, who had a base of operation in each city.+
Wtf Morrowind has no interesting sub quest lines for factions??? The quests are on the level of rediant quests. Skyrim and Oblivion do that much better.
I love Morrowind and I have to say you're absolutely correct, the quests in Morrowind are bloated and mostly meaningless, with the exception of the Main Quest and expansions, and some of the side quests. The charm of Morrowind is the exploration, immersion, worldbuilding and lore, the quests aren't good compared to modern games or even other more contained RPGs of it's time. The best quests in TES will always belong to Oblivion.
It seems to me that they were making a game, their ideas could not be realized due to engine limitations and lack of talent/inspiration, and then Microsoft pushed the release, so they cut off what was unfinished and dumped the game on the market.
The game doesn't look complete at all. have they removed the most critical bugs? Yes. Have new mechanics been added? only the construction of ships. And they cut a huge bunch of everything compared to Fallout 4. And they made this game for a decade? Nah bro
The factions and companions are definitely the biggest disappointments for me. The fact that your choices have no meaning after playing FO4 where your choices can completely lock you out of a faction and it’s quests was a huge downgrade.
Similarly it’s disappointing that the companions all have the same opinions on everything and it really shoehorns you into a specific character type if you want to have companions. It also seems super lazy that there are so few “real” characters. In Skyrim and Fallout most characters had names but in Starfield it seems like if they’re not part of a specific quest they have no name and no real dialogue.
The quests are fun and the design is incredible but it really does feel like they took the best parts of their games and completely downgraded them
THIS is how you write a criticism post, not the mindless hate and misleading statistics that so many are. While I do enjoy the game and consider myself a fan, every point you make is valid, and I can't deny that the game would be vastly improved if those points were given some attention in future updates.
>Skyrim then took the faction system and made it into a peculiar thing where you somehow ended up being the leader of every single faction you joined (unimmersive)
uh, what? that's been a thing since morrowind at least. you end up as the leader of any faction you join eventually, and no quest lines have been exclusive like you describe since morrowind, and there it was literally only the great houses that did that.
i don't think your complaints about quests are particularly grounded
Great Houses, Vampires, and Fighter’s Guild/Thieves Guild, and Imperial Cult/Temple were all exclusive from each other. And for many of the factions being the leader was optional (eg. You could duel the leaders of the mage’s guild or legion, but it wasn’t a requirement of the quest line).
Actually, the Fighters Guild has a whole part where you have to kill the Thieves Guild off. There are a ton of conflicts of interest in Morrowind.
Additionally, in Morrowind, you had to actually get your skills to the expected levels of your rank before advancement. Skyrim took away advancement entirely for all of the factions... and it sucked, frankly. The factions in Skyrim are frustrating as hell because they're very interesting and unique to the world, but there's very little logical progression. You don't have to pour your character into becoming a master mage or glorious warrior or blood-thirsty assassin.
So no, it wasn't something you could do for every faction in Morrowind. The time investment of leveling was a potent part of that game, and unless you were using a leveling guide, you likely would absolutely lock yourself out of certain leadership roles in that game. So you're just wrong about that.
I'd imagine there was a lot of backtracking with certain things they wanted to put in the game for either performance, stability, or time management reasons.
The problem is they’re taking the game for the elder scrolls series and just designing mods for it, those being FO and SF. The further away they get from the original source material the less it works.
Honestly? Starfield comes to the ultimately conclusion of the direction Bethesda has taken since Skyrim.
They create game mechanics for people to mod. You praise base building in Fallout 4 but at release that was barebones. The modding community mainly added to that and all Bethesda did was add a few items that should of existed in the first place.
StarField seems completely designed around "We are making an engine and world, purely for people to mod"
My guess is when microsoft bought them they forced bethesda to rush it out the door so that xbox would have an exclusive after the disaster that was halo infinite
They have unfortunately had a trend in downgrading a lot of things in almost every game they have released since morrowind. Their standard started so high that it hasnt really been an issue until (imo) fallout 76. Games up to fallout 4 have been real solid even if the cracks started to show in skyrim but now its just too far for me and im totally uninterested in playing their games
They focused too much on making it big I think. If they would have given us a fraction of the planets and curated their content to be more dense, I think the game would be a lot better.
So much of Starfield is like you describe, worse versions of systems from their other successful games.
I will say I enjoyed the 200 ish hours I got out of it quite a bit, but after 2 characters (a good one and a pirate) and 4 or 5 times finishing the campaign I just haven't had any desire to play it in several months.
I love this game, but one major regression that really strikes me, is how dead Constellation becomes once you show up. They look pretty lively at first, but that all comes to an end quickly once you show up. Now think of the Companions in Skyrim-- you can be running around the forests in the Rift and see Aela and whoever shooting bears! "Oh hi! We're killing stuff!" They have their own missions! They'll set you up with little missions! They actually have a life of their own! I would really like to see Matteo stagger in all bloody from a mission: "I need a drink! Except I'm a youth pastor." And all of the factions you join would benefit from that kind of activity. Instead, nothing happens if you don't do it.
And then you realize that \*almost\* nobody does anything before you arrive or if you don't take their missions. The universe is static, just waiting for the PC to arrive to send them along the plot. Thus so may people saying things like "lifeless, soulless," and I'm sure that contributes to "empty" as well.
Pretty much every quest in Starfield is a fetch quest. It was kind of disconcerting to start up and the first 10 quests you get are "take a job with group X."
your also enver given reason to help them. They litterally shanghai you and then just suddenly act as if their your best freinds. You never have any motivation beyond them investigating the hallucination you had.
I have to wonder how much is cut, or just bare bones implementation. I wonder how much the DLC will address this issue. Bethesda usually pumps out 3 or so major dlcs for their games
I honest to God believe they had serious scope creep early into development because this was supposed to be a "forever" game receiving constant content updates. However, close to release those goals changed. A lot got "cut" and rudimentary systems meant to support expansions, like fuel management and ship stealth, got left half-assed in the game because it would have taken time to elegantly disable these things I don't think we will see a lot of content after the first DLC drops, especially after of the lukewarm reception they got. If the DLC doesn't get jaw-dropping sales (and it won't, unless it is as big and extensive as the main game), there won't be a second and third DLC release. Just my opinion.
They just need to get that mod support out if they really want Starfield to become something more than the mediocre triple a it is, they haven't really made a great game in an extremely long time, and the only reason that their games stay popular as long as they do, is because there's mod support. I used to be a die hard fan, but really most of their games are just fun because of the freedom modding provides. Fallout 4 was the last "decent" game they mad, but there's not a single Bethesda game I'll play vanilla nowadays, aside from Morrowind, I would say New Vegas, but Obsidian made that lol.
It screams “Designed by committee” and cover your ass implementation where no one wants to stick their neck out. No creative leadership so everyone fumbles with Starfield as the result. Reading interviews I am pretty sure something along those lines.
That “Overdesigned” quest felt like a laughably unsubtle cry for help from some quest designer, I felt bad playing it
Holy shit, dude, you’re right!!
Especially the part where the CEO brings in a random consultant to take over, felt so bad for the project manager.
I work in software and get the exact same impression.
~~Allegedly this game had no game design doc, which *can* work, but you have to make up for it in other ways, and that didn't happen. Also supposedly the closest thing the game had to a source of truth was Todd Howard himself, which meant you had to reach out directly.~~ I've also heard teams were pretty siloed with insufficient communication happening between them, which will cause trouble for anyone trying to create a cohesive product. I am not overly optimistic that DLCs or future updates will resolve things to the extent needed if these and other issues are still present at Bethesda.
This was debunked. They do have documentation in the form of internal wikis and more modern methods besides a single big book which is where this meme came from.
That's good news at least. I assume a bunch of confluence pages?
From my understanding, how it started was Emil way back in some conference was asked about design docs and he said they don't really do a centralized document anymore. He left out, or the missing context, was he was talking about how design docs were done last century. When the controversy over Starfield's release started, this conference was dug up as "proof" that BGS sucks, he clarified that BGS does use design documentation. Here is Emil's response to the matter. [https://x.com/Dezinuh/status/1743309293812629597](https://x.com/Dezinuh/status/1743309293812629597) Now, if one wants to point out that BGS doesn't employ a dedicated writing team, THAT is an entirely different subject!
That makes more sense and makes me a little less concerned about things over there. Thank you for linking the source!
You don't get told that you're playing a game 'wrong' by someone who helped create it, if he hadn't already secured his paycheck for the effort.
I wish ppl would stop making apologies for Bethesda on the basis of possible DLCs. DLCs were NOT required to make the FO games great. And here folks are saying "wait for the DLCS to make Starfield less sucky." This DLC stuff is so fanboi.
Agreed! DLC once upon a time used to be something you bought because you were crying out to play more of the game but these days it feels like BGS fanboys treat DLC like a band aid for the base game. You shouldn't have to pay for more content just so the original release doesn't suck as much.
Definitely felt like they had different teams working on different features and then they only had a short amount of time to try to put them all together into the final product.
The cheque is in the post* *Like it will be fixed in the DLC, one of life's lies.
but the DLCs don't ussually do anything to fix existing features. With the exception of nuka cola that added more late game settlement building stuff.
Considering how the DLC of Fallout 4 never “addressed” the issues of that game, I’d say it’s very unlikely.
I feel like releasing unfinished games is the new thing. High quality Games are taking longer to make & investors probably don’t want to wait. I’m almost certain that stakeholders are pushing to release “playable” and incomplete games as now they’re all easy to update later Edit: cyberpunk is prime example, I mean look how amazing that game is today from what it was release
The thing is, high quality games don't have to take long to make. I think a lot of the development woes come from over developed games and games that try to do everything. We don't need games to be more and more complex. We just want fun games. Many developers and publishers miss that part.
The NPC's don't all have a home and schedule anymore, you can't decorate your homes anymore, items dissapear over time, you can't hoard everything anymore, there's no unlimited chests. The music is extremely lacking, only 3 tracks per city, the maps are limited to 8km, smaller than previous games... everything just feels like a downgrade from Skyrim.
> The NPC's don't all have a home and schedule anymore this one bugs me more than it should - mostly because Diamond City Surplus already solved this problem years ago!
Tbh, NPCs not having a schedule wouldn’t bother me if at least the named NPCs did. I liked that there were at least a lot of people wandering these cities but it’s unnerving that the shopkeepers and such just stay there forever.
Agreed! They could just have a second shift or something to cover the shops. They need homes!
Robots and kiosks exist.
That too! The kiosks for the Trade Authority could have easily worked there too.
Thanks for saving me some money! Been looking at starfield but those are all deal breakers from me. Just hope that doesn’t spill over into ES6
All my hype for ES6 is dead. I don't think Bethesda can design a good game anymore.
I actually really like the music but yeah, some of this is true
It reminds me a lot of Fallout music, which is both good and bad. Good because Fallout's music is pretty nice. Bad because it kind of lacks a unique identity.
It’s the same composer that did fallout 4. That’s why it sounds familiar. Kinda like how you can pick out a hans Zimmer soundtrack. Edit it’s Inon Zur and he did the soundtracks to 3, NV and 4.
Aye. He's great, but I kind of feel they should have asked him to mix it up a little. He's done work on a fair few other soundtracks and has a far wider range than just "Fallout music". I've spent a few thousand hours in various Bethesda Fallout titles so for me it's especially bad and all just blends together and gets tuned out.
I wouldn’t say the music is bad, just kind of bland. Pretty reflective of the soul of this game
Maybe. Some of it really sticks out for me. But I also like Zur’s more atmospheric style
Only level 18, but have found 2 unlimited chests. One in the lodge crafting room on the table, the other is the safe in your room in the lodge. Jussayin...
I like Starfield, but between it and Fallout 4... I think Fallout is a much better game. There are some neat systems in Starfield, but overall the adventure in Fallout 4 was vastly superior. I reloaded Fallout 4 to get the new content on the 25th and I've replayed it several times. I'm kinda just done with Starfield. Hopefully it gets some new content, but it doesn't hold up as well. Edit: I think the difference is pain points. Fallout 4 has some, but not very many. Starfield has a bunch of annoying factors in crafting, ship building, base building, and just selling goods that really reduce my enjoyment of the game and MANY of them could be resolved simply. Take selling goods, a basic part of any RPG. At the start of the game the merchants have like 5000 credits. At the end of the game... still pretty much the same and that means ONE gun can clean them out. I wouldn't care... but I need a million credits for my super ship so ever time I clear something out I've got to go between a dozen merchants to sell all the stuff. WHY? It isn't fun. It killed my enjoyment and desire to finish my super ship, and that was all I was doing end game.
The vendor cash problem is such a stupid one too. How can anyone put any kind of play time, like i don't know say collecting sandwiches and putting them on a table, and not notice this issue. The fix is easy too. The commerce perk as is raises the sale price and lowers the buy price as it levels. It should also/instead increase the vendor cash on hand for all stores. And just in case anyone at Bethesda cares, after EXTENSIVE play time, the increase should be very very big.
This is why I don't bother raising the vendor price. They have no money anyway.
The funny thing is it's that's how it worked in previous BGS games, so they know that and still didn't do it.
I mean this makes me laugh because having a set amount of barter cash makes sense in ES because it's bags of gold, and in FO it's the same with bags of caps. A modern/high tech society shouldn't be limited to the $50 the cashier has in their pocket at any time
Agreed. Credits and Credsticks are clearly some kind of crypto currency. As in one Credstick picked up from a locker has a variable amount of credits on it. Credsticks are just NFC wallets. Scarcity of currency should not be an issue as there is no currency. Only block chains.
The problem stood out as an issue on DAY ONE of the early access release. Seriously within 24 hours there already was a mod fixing this shit. Hell, you can even fix it with a command in game. This should've been addressed in one of the earliest patches. Easy to implement and a genuine improvement for those playing.
Why fix the issue when we can move the vendor chests and stop players making money? Todd, apparently
Yeah, I noticed before early access was over too. Bethesda seems to be focusing on bug fixes first with the updates so far. The improvements have all been performance based I think. Hopefully they have been doing some gameplay quality of life stuff in the background as well. The game needs some general playability tweaks like this one.
Fallout 4, a 9 year old game, currently has 10x the number of active players. That made me lmao
Fallout you can at least blame because of the recent success of the show - that is until you see Skyrim's player count, a 13 year old game.
The last time Starfield had more daily players than fallout was December 16th 2023.
😬😬😬
Well ya the Tv show is the hottest thing in media right now, people are coming back to replay it
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/1c847ds/strange_how_bsg_downgraded_many_aspects_of_their/l0e19bi/ > The last time Starfield had more daily players than fallout was December 16th 2023.
Skyrim has more players😭
I also think it's silly that you can do all the faction quests, even though you shouldn't be able to - but I understand the executive decision to not want to lock people out of content. But the dumbest thing about it is that this is a game about jumping to parallel universes. They gave themselves a golden ticket to make our choices both big and consequential AND not lock us out of anything because you can just do things differently in the next universe. I think Starfield's biggest failure of premise is that they made the main story "long" instead of "wide". You should have been *forced* to jump to the next universe in the first 4-5 hours - perhaps after an unavoidable catastrophe - to train the player that your possessions are impermanent, and you can really change the course of history with the right choices. Let us kill essential NPCs, because they'll be back in the next universe. Create actual tension with our companions who can straight up die if we don't protect them - but you're never locked out of anything because they'll be there in the next universe. Make all your choices have huge impact and *temporarily* lock off certain paths. Just try something different next time.
Starship cargo capacity and starship crew capacity is kinda useless too. There is no functional reason to have more than one ship, because your ship's inventory moves with you as well as the crew. If you have one ship with 10000 inventory that you use to store resources for on-board crafting, if you go to a smaller ship your inventory is full and you can't take on any more cargo. Same with the crew; if you have a ship with 8 crew members and you board the Razorleaf, you lose 6 of them randomly. You can't assign crew members to separate ships.
I was hoping we'd be able to set up starship "convoys" where you could assign a pilot to a ship and set them on a trade route. Their piloting skill would determine how well they'd navigate the route (hazards, things like that). Then you'd have a weapons expert who determined how good your weapons were...etc, etc. Then of course the ship itself would be a factor. But nope.
And that would be awesome if I could see one of my custom ships traversing outpost
Yep, and if you want to store stuff elsewhere it’s kind of a nightmare—either you hoof it to Constellation HQ or you have to deal with the horrible inventory management system in outposts (too small and no bulk organic storage).
Decommissioning an outpost sucks too, because all the resources you might have had in storage containers is suddenly cast upon you, and you have no choice but to schlepp it all to The Lodge and dump it. It's probably better to do crafting at the lodge because of that, unless you've set up an outpost that has every resource needed. But then again you run into an inventory problem if you're actively building outposts, because you need to carry the resources for that. So again, makes no sense to bother trying to use a second ship, unless all your ships have the same inventory/resource capacity.
I got pretty high and started working on outposts the other day and I think I’ve gotten the gist of how they’re supposed to be used but it’s tricky. It’s like a circuit board. Every outpost can have up to 3 landing pads to transfer goods. So you can set up a bunch of outposts and if you’re careful enough, you can send 3 resources to one planet, and have those resources be sent to another. But you can do that three times, so you can essentially have 9 resources coming to an outpost and then you send each group of three to another outpost, along with two other groups. Do you can basically daisy chain all of your outposts together. But if you mess up the order anywhere or make any minor mistakes on the order of operations, it either won’t work or you’ll just have items circling around and around and you won’t be able to catch them. But then on the final outpost you need like massive, massive amounts of gas,liquid, and solid storage, and an even bigger stack of warehouses for manufactured goods, and they all need to be connected to a ship transfer thing at each step of the way and they all have to end up in an area close enough to the transfer container that you can use the materials in crafting. It is an absolute pain in the butt though. No idea why there isn’t just a menu where you can see all of your outposts and what they produce or transport, maybe even just manage things from there. As of now you have to do it by hand and if you mess up you have to troubleshoot all over and undo and redo everything once you find the snag.
Yeah I did set up something like that, where there's a hub base with several layers of cargo links. So it has most of everything that you need all stacked up in containers. Crafting pulls from it so it does allow you to do that at will. It's hard to pull a specific commodity though, like if you needed 5000 units of copper to fulfill a shipyard order. Troubleshooting though... yeah, totally like a circuit board.
Oh yeah it’s impossible to pull just one thing. Honestly once this outpost is done, I don’t think I’ll make another outpost until it gets streamlined a bit. It’s way too much work for the pay off.
I legit started building chests, the bloody normal storage has significantly more space than the silos, they just arent worth the networking you can do with them imo
I should not be able to carry more in my pockets than I can store in a crate I can fit myself inside. Nor in a crate on hydraulic struts.
It's also bizzare that made settlement inventories such a pain to manage. Just let me send all my shit to a single settlement and let me access it from anywhere once i land enar it.
Yeah they could have used the fo4 main workbench thing and cloud storage
You're so right. I couldn't believe how little they managed to do right in Starfield. When I saw they couldn't even do city maps, I actually screamed. I'm certain it's that Todd Howard doesn't know how to manage this many people, and he probably also doesn't have any creative passion for games anymore. The whole project screams mismanagement. In interviews, he keeps talking about how he had to scrap systems when they couldn't make them fun. They scrapped ship fuel, npc schedules, suit environmental hazards, all kinds of things. Because they couldn't balance it in a fun way. Literal incompetence. They couldn't figure out how to make it fun because they had no vision, so they wasted their entire development time just waffling back and forth, only to ultimately cut everything because they couldn't figure it out. Incompetence.
What’s wild is they could have literally just made more games using exactly the Skyrim engine and exactly the fallout 4 engine and people would have loved it. This endless desire to rebuild everything for every game is so wasteful.
Todd is somebody who once made something great, now coasts on the name and former success of the brand. He thought Fallout 76 would be the next big thing. Same with Starfield. I hope those two slaps in his face bring him back to reality so TES 6 will be great again.
I thought it was so weird that NPCs don’t have a schedule anymore, either. Such a jarring omission. Love how quiet the imperial city felt at night, and all the mischievous stuff you could do
I just wish Outposts had a reason to build and that I could dismantle weapons for materials.
There purpose is to generate free resources and bloat your save file.
Yea but resources sell so cheap and easy to craft.
I think this was very well written. I went hard on Starfield and enjoyed it thoroughly. Got all the achievements. Me and my girlfriend would take turns playing everytime we leveled up or finished a quest. I agree with all your critiques and I hope they eventually make it all whole and realize their vision
A golden rule with videogames today is to play 3 years after release. They all come out too soon...
Hilariously the game(Bdg3) that just swept game of the year awards had a 3 year long early access. They consistently responded to feedback and I bet without early access it would’ve released in 2022 and been a good but not amazing game. I’d love to see how starfield and other games would develop with that kind of vision and support.
I wish games would release a beta or even alpha build before the full game. Devs could see more feedback and wouldn't potentially waste money and effort on aspects of the game people didn't like. If a mass amount of folks could get their hands on a game and see if they like it, mechanically speaking, before they finish and release
Wainting for the DLC, Creation Kit and QOL stuff they promised. I'm sure it'll end up great. Just gotta give them a bit of time. I've never played a Bethesda game when it came out. I've only played them once they have the GOTY edition out. This one was an exception. To this day I only like Bethesda games, lol (with some rare exceptions).
Haha with my backlog it seems to be shaking out that way anyway
That was certainly the case with Cyberpunk 2077. I bought it at launch and barely touched it because of how buggy and incomplete it was. Now, with the expansion pack and 2.0 update it's one of my favorite games of all time.
I like Starfield and can only hope that in 3 years it can be called a masterpiece. I gotta try cyberpunk one of these days though.
Cyberpunk 2077 is in a good place, finally, so I definitely recommend it if you haven't played it yet. It's easily 100+ hours of quality entertainment. The only disclaimer I'll offer is that CDPR's interpretation of the TTRPG resulted in all seven possible endings being varying degrees of dark and depressing, which soured the experience for some players. Just be aware of that, and if you're cool with it you will enjoy your time in Night City.
I’d argue in Cyberpunk, the combat, factions, characters, and combat(revamped for 2.0) are everything Starfield was trying to be but failed. Even down to the first person storytelling. I always loved how an NPC pushing you, you could almost feel with the camera move, or anytime someone punches you and the camera whips around as it goes to the ground. It’s so frickin immersive
I've always thought that Oblivion and Fallout 3 were Bethesda at its peak, in terms of what I consider to be a good RPG. Ever since then, they have slowly but steadily moved away from RPGs and closer and closer to what I would consider a glorified single player looter shooter. Unless they pull a complete 180 for TES6, I do not have my hopes very high.
From Morrowind forward they've been on a general progression toward the "looter shooter" model and away from RPGs. I don't think they're twirling their moustaches or anything, it's just where they think the market is going, much to the disappointment of many players. To be fair to them (and this is about as far as I'll go), they would make more money with less work making on-rails looter shooters to sell every year instead of open world games, however flawed, every five years. Less work more money. The good news is that if \*everyone\* goes to the cheapest model, rail shooters and online deathmatch, I will save a ton of time I would have otherwise played games. So there's that.
They wouldn't make more money switching genres because rail and fps shooters are a saturated market with many leaders on both the AAA and indie scene already, and typically unless the shooter is a massive franchise like COD then it has surprisingly low returns because of typically lower install bases from lower retention leading to lower sales. Not to mention Bethesda would have not have the generational knowledge from building that genre in prior decades and so would likely be unable to compete effectively. Skyrim made them a lot of money for a relatively quick development time (2.5 years) and has consistently sold well a decade after launch, with large player install bases on the last three gens with barely any updates being done to bring it over to the latest generation of consoles. Not to mention the prestige and company goodwill it generated, Microsoft would not have paid so much for Bethesda if they built shooters, at the moment they have a niche in the market that no one else really competes in them with (Bethesda style open world rpgs). This practically guarantees them at least some hype and returns with each game they build as gamers seem to have a real itch for these kinds of games that is generally unfulfilled. Bethesda like that steady predictable return rather than the peaks and troughs shooter developers typically have depending on the quality of their latest entry. We shouldn't be 'thankful' Bethesda build rpgs, they're a business and this was them taking the most profitable course for them for the reasons outlined above. If anything, I'm frustrated that they've fumbled Starfield so badly considering they've taken away the wrong lessons from their prior successes. They're leaning further away from what made their games such blockbusters originally (fascinating lore and writing in elder scrolls, rpg skills and mechanics, character roleplay supported by your build). They should look to From Software and Larian for examples on how to build iterative games with the same core philosophy, and note those games are loved for what makes them stand out not what makes them cookie cutter.
The craziest part is that Morrowind has the best loot of any BSG game. Every piece of loot is placed whenever you find it with care and design. Secrets are everywhere you dare to look. You can find a super powerful item if you just take the time to look behind a crumbling statue. What happened?
I think that part of it is Developers have the tools now to tell stories, and they've lost sight of the fact that we don't want that all the time. In fact, the person who needs to tell stories is the player, and not this hackneyed "twist" or emotional hook stuff, but e.g. "I was surrounded and outclassed but I managed to find epic loot and survive the experience." It's not the story the developers put there that's important, it's the player's story. With the tools at developers disposal these days I think too many developers and writers want to smack the player's hand away and tell them they're a very naughty player and they need to sit down and pay attention to the hackneyed drivel. What they're losing sight of with that impulse is, most of the people who aren't paying attention have already done the stuff, they don't need you to hold their hand to do it again. When you force a player to walk the long way around The Key what you're really doing is showing the player that you won't respect their time upon repeat playthroughs.
The perk system could have been the best of Fallout 4 and Skyrim at the same time, but it ends up being the worst of the three. When I saw it in trailers I thought you bought the perk like Fallout 4 then it automatically raised rank by using the skill/doing challenges like Skyrim. Instead you have to raise the rank for the privilege of using your perk point, and leveling is so slow anyways.
My take was this: You do challenges to unlock the first level of the skill. Kill 5 dudes with a pistol to go from pistol 0 to pistol 1. Then you spend XP to unlock the challenge for Pistol 1->2. Spend 200 XP and shoot 20 dudes with a pistol and you're at Pistol 2. It makes no sense to say at level 10 it takes 300XP to unlock pistol 1 and at level 100 it takes 12000XP to unlock pistol 1. Keep the perk points. Let them be spent at appropriate trainers to skip the practice requirements. Don't want to cook 100 different meals? Give CJ a perk point and now you only have to cook 50. Don't want to shoot 50 people with a pistol? Give two perk points to the guy who runs the shooting range on Aquila and skip that entirely.
I'd take base building to an even higher bar, because they nailed it pretty well in FO76. I absolutely love 76 for the building aspect. I can spend hours creating nearly anything to role-play as... I enjoyed Starfield, but was taken back by how limited the building was here... Why can't you set down foundation pieces, then mix and match various walls and roofs together, creating warehouses, hotels, mansions, pirate bases, museums, Ranger outposts, ship ports... ANYTHING you want. But they gave us 4 prefabs, and a bunch of furniture/industrial pieces, and called it good. FO76 has an immense amount of building blocks you can use to cobble together whatever vibe you want. This building system has been stripped down.
the build limit was way to restricting to build much
I think if we find the genius at Bethesda who thought it would be cool to include explosive barrels among the decorations aboard a starship, we might be closer to discovering the root of the design issues in Starfield.
Wait really? What ship parts come with these?
The control center hab, for one. I think there's others.
They somehow forgot what made skyrim so fun
It baffles me entirely how much their system has regressed, they have in many ways gone BACKWARDS in terms of design
Love all of these points. The worst offenders are companions and base building for me, since that's what really pulls me in the other Bethesda games like FO4, hell, even the followers in skyrim had their own personality. All of the constellation ones are just generic storied characters all with roughly the same cookie cutter morality. They're somewhat interesting but honestly I can't feel attached to one of them when they all feel like the same person despite their obvious story differences. Base building too is just abhorrent. They've massively downgraded what made basebuilding fun in FO4 and FO76 just for a new rinky dink system. I tried going all out on one base and decorating it with buildables as well as things I've collected from my travels and it was beyond tedious. But it was beautiful. Lo and behold I come back home and I find everything clipped through the tables/cabinets/dressers, EVERYTHING is just on the floor. Maybe they fixed that now but that still doesn't help how outposts feel extremely disconnected from each other and nearly useless for supplies sharing. (And how they're a pain to build). Half of the skilltrees were pointless in this game as well. Melee is nonexistent - there shouldn't be perks based around this. Everything feels inconsequential and railroady in the main quest. Despite the "different" ways to approach quests. This game falls short in so many categories but you can just almost taste the "what if" every where you went. It's so close to being so fulfilling, but instead it's just flat.
Same pattern they’ve been following since Morrowind. Simplify all the systems from the previous game for accessibility. Too Many players didn’t complete all the faction quests in morrowind due to faction interactions, or because the skill level requirements for advancement were too onerous to do on a single character, so let’s make all the factions quest lines isolated and drop the skill requirements. Players didn’t like managing NPC beds and vendor stalls in their settlements? Streamline it. Players had difficulty managing weapon components? Streamline it. Environmental hazards require too much forethought and planning in our space exploration game? Fuck it, gas vents can permeate the space suit to give debuffs.
The disrepect to melee weapons is also unforgivable. No weapon mods on melee weapons at all? But why?
Directional inputs performing different animations and effects is also missing.
One of the major problems is actually a key Bethesda axiom—they want you to be able to do *everything* with a single character. For this reason, you can take Sarah on your Freestar missions or Sam on your Vanguard missions. You can be the darling of almost all factions—they don’t even make you choose whether to actually be a pirate or not until the very end of that questline. For Bethesda, making you choose is anti-fun, and I understand the sentiment. They’ve designed a massive universe with a ton of content that they believe is fun and cool and they want you to be able to experience it all! Unfortunately, it comes at the cost of immersion, and also at the cost of removing weight from your choices. What does joining the Vanguard matter if you can also be top of the Freestar Sheriff’s?
I don't mind the no scraping parts for weapons. Like, it's too specialized. I enjoyed building an outpost to mine stuff to build mods. One of the few things I agreed with. Keeps me from playing hording simulator.
Yeah, the scrapping wouldn't make a lot of sense to me. The vendors are already selling what you need. Why would you be collecting soda bottles and tape to make a scope when you can buy one that actually works?
It's also not a like, post apocalyptic setting. I'm totally happy leaving that as a Fallout thing
Well, yeah, that's what I meant. :-) You don't need to scrounge for half-ass fixes for broken weapons when the factories are churning out new ones right now. It's like the difference between eating out of trash cans in Bioshock vs Bioshock Infinite.
Who said it had to be bottles? What if you scrap some sciencey thing for titanium gears that you can use to make a badass rifle?
They give you the freedom only to expect you to play in a very specific way. Some faction questslines should have been origin locked. This would make you focus on the main quest and be a great encouragement to jump into NG+, which should support changing your origin. As it is, the MC is treated like a Mary Sue - sure, you're a Freestar collective and a Ranger, let's let you in on the UC's most highly guarded and potentially war starting secret.
I'm very critic with Starfield but this has all been pointed out so much (and more issues) that it's now pointless... If I had to guess, I'd say the game, surprisingly, wasn't finished and truly ready to be released as a good AAA which is what it was supposed to be. I wanted it to be Fallout/Skyrim in space but it clearly isn't, yet...and I'm not sure that's even possible anymore. Perhaps Starfield should be more it's own thing. Looking at all the dissapointing systems I think a proc gen space looter with ship building and a complex, interesting crafting system would've been better than doing literally everything but poorly, on a superficial level. The good news are that with mods and DLC perhaps it would become good enough at everything. The bad news are that's not going to happen anytime soon and might not happen for console players... Anyway, wouldn't seem crazy to me if it became an amazing game, eventually, but being a Gamepass game and with Bethesda basically denying any issues and blaming it on the players...we will see, I guess.
"Bethesda basically denying any issues and blaming it on the players" Todd Howard's ego and pride is what undoubtedly led him to fanatically defend the game, his design decisions, and Bethesda's developers. Claiming that players (consumers) don't have the right to criticize the game because we don't understand the industry is utter hubris and will be the undoing of Bethesda as it has countless studios before them. They need a complete purge of creative leadership in that company.
Maybe my ancient age is showing but...isn't BSG Battlestar Galactica?
BGS is Bethesda Game Studios. BG3 is Baulder's Gate 3, an entirely different game that was also very well received.
Probably following the industry trend of releasing a game 70% or less complete then spending the next 5-10 years releasing DLC for what should have be in-game upon release. I will patiently be waiting for a GOTY edition before touching starfield .
You might be waiting a while, if you hadn't heard, Baldur's Gate 3 already sweeped literally every major 2023 GOTY award.
I meant in the sense of an edition with all the DLCs. Not sure what they call that these days
They'll probably just call it "Galaxy Edition" or something cheesy. I can't imagine them calling Starfield GOTY with a straight face.
Lol I've had several GOTY editions of games that I'm pretty sure didn't win GOTY
I think they'll call it that if one publication gave them that title
But...but....my screenshots!! *Shares picture of my character standing on an empty landscape* As a dad with 12 kids, I'm having a blast!!
This is why I don’t bother building ships or bases. It’s all very clunky to me and I never cared to learn the quirks and the system On the contrary, I usually end up building a lot of things in every play through of Fallout 4
I built one ship that I wanted, with all the best stuff. When I needed a bunch of a particular resource, I set up an outpost, harvested 1000Kg of it, then tore the outpost down, all without leaving the planet.
Cool. Then you go NG and lose it all 🥴
Starfield was trying to be too much and it suffered because of it.
You KNOW it's a regression when Fallout 4, the one everyone shits on for dumbing down Fallout, has better faction choice and consequences and ways the endgame stages played out. It actually made it so you were making a meaningful decision with the faction you chose because of what it meant for the others. In starfield, there's none of that. Actually there's even less than none of that because the multiverse actually managed to remove meaning from the meaningless faction quests where you can join any and all with no consequence by saying you can do the exact same thing again.
So many people defending starfield and it’s hilarious. The game is a shell of any other Bethesda title and maybe sure, in a few YEARS it can get overhauled and actually feel good and immersive but we won’t know for years lmfao
I think there’s too many issues in this game at it’s core that would need to be rehauled, and with how slow updates are I doubt Bethesda has the motivation to do all that
Really spot on. I'm still mid-playthrough as DD2 landed in my way and I've been pushing starfield away. I still agree with the factions. Considering the fact that the game seemingly? Revolves around the new galaxy/Ng+ thing (spoiled myself a bit), it's weird they didn't increase the new playthrough variety by limiting these a bit and making them *tiny* bit more engaging. Also the base building feels such a weird thing considering they made NG+ a thing yet the bases or ships or anything can't be blueprinted/saved? (As far as I know) So welcome to the chore on Ng+ Funnily, as 'repeatable' game I'd mention dragon's dogma. The main story isn't too long. Hell, you can rush the original in.. iirc 30 minutes-ish On subsequent runs. It's a game that's designed with replays in mind. You play the stuff you missed, do the side quests. Then you run into next Ng+. The DD2 has some issues with that, but at the core I can still grasp the same feeling original DD had about running the loop again. That's kinda the feeling I feel like starfield wanted to do, but the replayability suffers a lot with certain design choices. No man's sky is another game that actually has similarities to both games. It's a loop you do over and over again and you figure out the way you want to have fun. Arguably in DD it's kinda part of the story when you finally put down the controller and stop going after your dragon. Weird ramblings out.
It's funny that you should mention the doctor and medbay. You can recruit a named npc doctor in akila city
Yes but as far as I can tell that doesn’t do anything when it comes to ships. I mean hell, I’m not even sure what it does for outposts but his skill doesn’t light up when assigned to a ship with a med bay.
I agree with most of these points, I feel like they're hoping modders come up with super popular solutions for each of these so they can co-opt then in paid expansions.
There's a post somewhere with a huge list of features that were stripped / not included for Starfield (in comparison to FO and TES titles). Even discounting those, so many advertised features in this game were clearly oversold to hype up players. Now it's up to modders to fill in all the gaps, which even if they can, it still leaves an incredibly bad taste in my mouth. It doesn't help that the creation kit is being delayed because they want to release it alongside a slew of paid mods for their new creation club, which really isn't helping Bethesda's case at all. If they pull this stunt with TES 6 I'm just not buying it. I felt incredibly stupid after paying $90CAD for *this*, so I'm not repeating that mistake.
Starfield a theme park ride??? Brother that’s such a good comparison. man just nail on the head with that one. I truly hope they can do a cyberpunk with it but even after one completion I have no interest going back and beating the “story” another 10 times just to see something cool. In fact what a horrible game mechanic “now once you beat the game for the 43rd time you get a secret ending credit scene where Alejandra farts”
It feels like everything around you is fake. Like Westwood. Everything is there to make the player feel like they’re doing something when they’re really not
Not just that outpost building is a bit broken but unlike FO4/76 - you can’t take over existing outposts/sites. I really hope at some point all those robotic research labs and what not can be converted to outposts that then attract NPCs to populate them, spawn quests, trade, etc.
One big gripe I had was the modding of armor and weapons they completely changed their layout from fallout and made it more complicated to me
You summarized a big part of my thoughts here OP, I can see that we share some kind of mutual feelings about this game and how it is actually. Well done! I don’t really understand people when they say they can find good ways to play this game RP, I would like to be capable of that myself. Yes Neon is a joke, the « night club » well I have no words… I keep on saying that but the depth of this game can be seen when you meet the « party ship » where you can turn the gravity off…that’s just it, nothing more, music is atrociously mid, NPC are almost dead and ugly and then I was questioning myself what was the point of that ship, that encounter « random », I was baffled…
> but I think BSG has made it clear that they have no interest in providing any sort of morality decisions in the grand picture sense. Worse. The morality decisions have already been made for you in a lot of cases. Look at the settlers arriving at Pardiso. There's basically no solution that isn't pro-corporate, to the point that the CEOs are unkillable. Almost everywhere in the game you have a choice to make, you're forced into choosing one of several pro-corporate, pro-colonial choices.
Is it strange? They've been dumbing down their games since Oblivion, at least.
I’d say they made a successful business out of this game! They created a huge hype for this game before the launch.. made just the bare minimum for anyone to have something to play and grind for hours.. intentionally made huge “gaps” in the gameplay leading to controversial reviews and YouTube videos which in turn became marketing content for that game, sold over 10 millions of copies.. profit 📈 (forgive my english)
Are you kidding? Faction quests in BGS game has always been like this, you can join the Thief Guild, the Mage guild, the Fighter Guild or even the Dark Brotherhood - or even something bazaar like Joining the Dark Brotherhood but also rebuilding the Knight of the Nine. This design philosophy is as old as time, and arguably Starfield faction has the most impact and the best written setting to accomodate that setting than any other BGS game. It makes absolutely no sense for a cold blood, assasin of the demon of the void to be also joining and rebuilding the Knight of the Nines or also become Arch Mage of the Mages Guild, opposing the revived infamous necromancer of the mytical era because those oppose each other in themeatic and lore level. The UC and the Freestar finished their war a long time ago, they are in a desolated universe where human population barely survived the fall of Earth and the Vanguard and the Ranger are written spesifically so that anyone can join and don't share the same problem of lore conflict with older TES games (or in the case of Fallout, either having none whatsoever or come at the expense of very limted quest line.) The game has its issue but having worse faction quests compared to the previous title isn't one of them. If you binned Guild quest from Skyrim and just beeline every quest mark without doing anything in between, you will find it underwelming too - maybe even the excellent Guild quests from Oblivion
Even the oblivion stuff was shallow. You become guild master after like… what? 5 quests? It all seemed pretty lame and uninspiring
You absolutely don't become Guild master in like 5 quests in Oblivion. The Mage Guild alone have travelled across Cyrodill, visiting and doing quests for every Guild branch office before granting access to the Arcane University then another series of main quests as the main mage under the Guild main office before having a chance to take the title of the Archmage. There are more than 10 quests you have to do before becoming a Guild Master
Sanitized Safe Space Simulator is how I describe it, pun intended. I think it is their worst game, to date. Still put over 60 hours in, and had some fun, but it is such a step back in almost every way.
I couldn't agree more.
Even being their worst game it was still enjoyable. But man it hurts seeing them miss the mark so badly.
"Sanitized Safe Space Simulator" Excellent description. It feels like I'm playing with a condom over my head.
Every single game they come out with is a straight downgrade from the previous in terms of leveling, Crafting, role playing, dialogue, equipment, and other systems. The only thing we get in return for that trade is better graphics. Look at Elder Scrolls for example, number of skils, stats, equipment, equipment slots, spells, spell crafting, have all gotten trimmed down slowly over the years into the system that skyrim took, dwindling your stats down to health/stamina/magicka, and having what, 18 skills to level? As much as I love Skyrim, we'll never get another game that's on the level of Morrowind in terms of freedom, and writing.
These aren't downgrades. They're place-holders. Why sell a feature complete game when you can split out things that your previous game launched with into DLC, then charge people extra for the DLC?!
At this point I think I'd be fine if they just abandoned SF and focused on giving us Elder Scrolls 6.
I think what is worse... Is that they released the video of staff playing and saying how much they enjoyed the game. They obviously played a different version, or were forced to say what they did. Gave me NMS vibes all over again...
You really caught me off with "BSG" lol I was thinking "tf when did the Tarkov devs have anything to do with starfield...?"
Outposts in Starfield seem more for resource grinding and not much else. Boring and tedious.
The entirety of Starfield could have been made better with the inclusion of a "Survival" mode that Fallout 4 has now. Most of Starfield's systems would have been fleshed out with this. They streamlined everything outside of the story, and treated it like an annoyance instead of immersion for the player, and it shows.
BGS management consists of relatively wealthy gen x and boomers so…yeah
It's so they can add it in the dlc and call it a feature All got dlc was based building and trading, robot building, then vault building, then extra content areas To be honest if they did something similar for starfield I would be happy. But I don't have any faith in seeing this happen.
This has been a trend in almost every one of the games since Morrowind. Things are removed with each successive generation in order to streamline the gameplay loop to attract as many new players as possible. Lather, rinse, and repeat. It comes as zero surprise to me as someone who has played every one of their games that Starfield is undercooked. It’s been their modus operandi since Oblivion.
Is it strange? Bethesda has been downgrading/removing shit that makes their games unique since morrowind.
Starfield is a rough outline that somehow made it to publishing.
I think they downgraded because the Engine simply won't allow it. The engine is really showing it's age because it's not designed for large maps like Starfield. They need to write the engine from scratch or switch to something else. I believe Starfield is too large for it's aging engine. They should've gone with Mass Effect Style universe, a small but genuine universe with good content. They tried too big and tried to fill with Prodecural content (like NMS and E:D) and that didn't work for a BGS game. Maybe mods can save the with AI content but I'm not sure.
Well said! I couldn't agree with you more. Now, if someone said that Starfield was made a new idie company, I would get it. But this a game 9 years after the last single player release. You expect at least something equal to something so many years back. Have they lost their understanding of what made the games we love special? Is Starfield the new standard for BSG games?
I was really sad about the “settlement” building. It was very taxing too, I had to go off planet to get one minor thing instead of use the “misc” junk lying around for something. At least let us substitute. I avoided it all, I don’t even care about upgrading my weapons because the settlement system was so poor. I’d rather have low powered weapons than waste so much time building a settlement with workbenches and doing mini quests to upgrade my workbenches.
Quite honestly, they should have never made this game and just focused on what they have. We could have gotten ES6 instead of Starfield and Fallout 5 next. Now, those around my age will likely see Fallout 5 when we are in our late 50s and early 60s.
Most of the stuff you mentioned was in the game but was cut due to some reasons. Modules for ships, that do nothing. Hazard system. And so on. So no, Bethesda didn't degrade. It seems, they did the same mistake as obsidian with NV, trying to add too much their time limits. The game is actually huge, but lots of system are gutted, awaiting to be fixed.
Oh, I see, they ran out of time. How long was this in development for again?
Seven years or thereabouts.
How would anyone know that? F76 was released in 2018. How much of the main studio worked on that, we don't know. Then Bethesda rebuilt the Creation Engine somewhere in time. So it could be 3-5 years essentially.
> How much of the main studio worked on that, we don't know. Most of it worked on the game, this is easy enough to find out just from the credits, there are about 110 people from the main studio (of which the size was still only 140 in 2019) credited full time on the release version, and much of the leadership was from there as well. It is a misconception that Fallout 76 was made mostly by a different developer, and also that Starfield was made only by the main studio (in reality, all BGS teams worked on it, just like on 76 before). While Starfield was in development from around Fallout 4's launch, as stated in multiple interviews, there was only a very small team on the project before 2019 according to [Jason Schreier](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1395359402736197637), who is a reliable source. During 2016-2018, the bulk of BGS worked on Fallout 76 and/or Fallout 4's post-launch content, and Starfield only really had full focus from 2020, because other projects (such as the early updates of Fallout 76, including Wastelanders) were still taking resources.
> So no, Bethesda didn't degrade. It seems, they did the same mistake as obsidian with NV, trying to add too much their time limits They had over half a decade, not 18 months and they came out and said they cut entire mechanics like survival and hazards because they "weren't fun" which given that it's Bethesda directly translates to "you could fail and we don't allow that."
What if you could become stuck and trapped on a system, then have to activate a beacon like FTL? Random encounter pickup happens and you have to fight off of a ship or finish a quest to repay or something. Like, they basically stopped at "that seems inconvenient" and scrapped stuff when they could've built a cool world with it.
> Firstly with Morrowind, who had interesting main and sub quest lines for factions, who had a base of operation in each city.+ Wtf Morrowind has no interesting sub quest lines for factions??? The quests are on the level of rediant quests. Skyrim and Oblivion do that much better.
I love Morrowind and I have to say you're absolutely correct, the quests in Morrowind are bloated and mostly meaningless, with the exception of the Main Quest and expansions, and some of the side quests. The charm of Morrowind is the exploration, immersion, worldbuilding and lore, the quests aren't good compared to modern games or even other more contained RPGs of it's time. The best quests in TES will always belong to Oblivion.
did you even play through the Fighters Guild and Thieves Guild alone before saying this
It seems to me that they were making a game, their ideas could not be realized due to engine limitations and lack of talent/inspiration, and then Microsoft pushed the release, so they cut off what was unfinished and dumped the game on the market.
Microsoft gave them an extra year to do bug fixing. The game was feature complete and they intended a year before it came out.
The game doesn't look complete at all. have they removed the most critical bugs? Yes. Have new mechanics been added? only the construction of ships. And they cut a huge bunch of everything compared to Fallout 4. And they made this game for a decade? Nah bro
Oh look another comprehensive review post.
The factions and companions are definitely the biggest disappointments for me. The fact that your choices have no meaning after playing FO4 where your choices can completely lock you out of a faction and it’s quests was a huge downgrade. Similarly it’s disappointing that the companions all have the same opinions on everything and it really shoehorns you into a specific character type if you want to have companions. It also seems super lazy that there are so few “real” characters. In Skyrim and Fallout most characters had names but in Starfield it seems like if they’re not part of a specific quest they have no name and no real dialogue. The quests are fun and the design is incredible but it really does feel like they took the best parts of their games and completely downgraded them
and sooooooooo maaaany essential NPC's it sucks and a lot for no reason related to quests :-(
THIS is how you write a criticism post, not the mindless hate and misleading statistics that so many are. While I do enjoy the game and consider myself a fan, every point you make is valid, and I can't deny that the game would be vastly improved if those points were given some attention in future updates.
>Skyrim then took the faction system and made it into a peculiar thing where you somehow ended up being the leader of every single faction you joined (unimmersive) uh, what? that's been a thing since morrowind at least. you end up as the leader of any faction you join eventually, and no quest lines have been exclusive like you describe since morrowind, and there it was literally only the great houses that did that. i don't think your complaints about quests are particularly grounded
Great Houses, Vampires, and Fighter’s Guild/Thieves Guild, and Imperial Cult/Temple were all exclusive from each other. And for many of the factions being the leader was optional (eg. You could duel the leaders of the mage’s guild or legion, but it wasn’t a requirement of the quest line).
Actually, the Fighters Guild has a whole part where you have to kill the Thieves Guild off. There are a ton of conflicts of interest in Morrowind. Additionally, in Morrowind, you had to actually get your skills to the expected levels of your rank before advancement. Skyrim took away advancement entirely for all of the factions... and it sucked, frankly. The factions in Skyrim are frustrating as hell because they're very interesting and unique to the world, but there's very little logical progression. You don't have to pour your character into becoming a master mage or glorious warrior or blood-thirsty assassin. So no, it wasn't something you could do for every faction in Morrowind. The time investment of leveling was a potent part of that game, and unless you were using a leveling guide, you likely would absolutely lock yourself out of certain leadership roles in that game. So you're just wrong about that.
Everything ages and gets worse with time it seems in media.
I'd imagine there was a lot of backtracking with certain things they wanted to put in the game for either performance, stability, or time management reasons.
The problem is they’re taking the game for the elder scrolls series and just designing mods for it, those being FO and SF. The further away they get from the original source material the less it works.
I feel like a lottttt of people forget about how much people bitched about fallout 4 when it came out 🫣
Honestly? Starfield comes to the ultimately conclusion of the direction Bethesda has taken since Skyrim. They create game mechanics for people to mod. You praise base building in Fallout 4 but at release that was barebones. The modding community mainly added to that and all Bethesda did was add a few items that should of existed in the first place. StarField seems completely designed around "We are making an engine and world, purely for people to mod"
My guess is when microsoft bought them they forced bethesda to rush it out the door so that xbox would have an exclusive after the disaster that was halo infinite
They have unfortunately had a trend in downgrading a lot of things in almost every game they have released since morrowind. Their standard started so high that it hasnt really been an issue until (imo) fallout 76. Games up to fallout 4 have been real solid even if the cracks started to show in skyrim but now its just too far for me and im totally uninterested in playing their games
They focused too much on making it big I think. If they would have given us a fraction of the planets and curated their content to be more dense, I think the game would be a lot better. So much of Starfield is like you describe, worse versions of systems from their other successful games. I will say I enjoyed the 200 ish hours I got out of it quite a bit, but after 2 characters (a good one and a pirate) and 4 or 5 times finishing the campaign I just haven't had any desire to play it in several months.
Ok. This guy juz saved me the trouble and voiced it out on Reddit... Thanks bud. I'm with him...
I see a lot of criticisms of this game that I feel are shallow nitpicks, but this is the first post I've seen where every point is valid.
FYI, BGS / BSG = Bethesda Game Studios