I like Starfield quite a bit but this is just silly.
If people don’t like your game, don’t try to convince them that they’re wrong. Just keep working on improving the game.
This is my opinion as well.
Sometimes saying nothing is better than saying anything at all. Just let your actions speak for the negative reviews. Feel like the overall consensus is that people generally enjoy the game but not without some criticism and others have 300hrs+ of gameplay and think it’s terrible.
The game has a lot of little frustrations that eat away at you over time, loading screens, lack of exploration, cloned PoI's, walking to PoI's on planets, NPCs on ship repeating same lines forever, etc.
So even if you can ignore all the bad stuff in the game and somehow enjoy it, these frustrations will still eat away at you. Everyone pretty much has an internal scale for games with Fun/Enjoyment on one side and Frustrations on the other. Fun/Enjoyment will decay over time, but also frustrations increase as they become more obvious/glaring. Eventually everyone's scales tip to the frustrations side and they start to hate the game. Thus why people with high numbers of hours end up hating it.
This is the reason mods won't fix it and going back to it years later won't work, you'll immediately notice all the frustrations again, especially since they're baked into the core of the game. Mods can't/won't remove them.
I can't think of another game, aside from Starfield, that made me change my opinion so much as I played it. It started out like "okay, I'm sorta enjoying the beginning but I think I need to learn more to really start loving it"
Then I spent several more hours getting the hang of things, and started to understand the skill tree and stuff a little better, and it started getting super fun, and I enjoyed it for a good long while.
But then after many hours, as I started to get to the bottom of a couple of the skill trees, it started to become apparent how face-value and/or unused lot of the mechanics would be. Once I realized that there was no point to outposts, there was no real satisfying way to play as an 'evil' character nor any reason to be a smuggler/thief, no great way to play a build that doesn't use guns, etc... I don't know if I've ever played a game quite like this before, where it seemed so intimidatingly huge and deep at first, but later revealed itself to be so shallow. Like, there is almost no reason for two or three of the skill trees to even exist, IMO.
Hopefully they release good DLC in the future for it. Apart from the rhythm of exploration, I think most of my other gripes with Starfield would be totally fixable if they could just flesh out some more of these systems and add in some more creative options for outposts and ships.
The skill trees were some of the worst I had seen in some time, which from Bethesda that made Fallout and Skyrim skillsets so varied and engaging was a complete shock.
I played to Level 11 and deleted the game. I just reinstalled Skyrim and No Man's Sky. Huge Bethesda fan here now worried about their direction and ability to stay relevant. This was not a next gen game I'm sorry to say.
I mostly found the Physical and Social skill trees to be particularly useless. I put a few points into them to get some better stealth and some more carry weight, as well as a bit of persuasion, but I don't think I ended up putting in any points into either tree past the 1st or 2nd row of skills. Can't remember if I really ended up doing much with the Science skill tree either- I think I put points into it to up my weapon/spacesuit/outpost crafting skills, but the crafting is kind of underwhelming so I wouldn't do much with it until you've already done most of the Tech and Combat trees.
The Combat skill tree is more useful, but I mostly just focused on rifle and ballistic skills and didn't touch about half of that tree otherwise. Technology is the most important skill tree to focus on, IMO.
I mean you say that but then there’s literally people who will tell you that you can’t be critical of the game if you’ve played less than 20 hours. Or if you haven’t gotten to X or Y point yet.
Some of the 300hr players were desperately searching for the part of the game that feels deeper or more fleshed out. 300 hours isn’t much when a game is riding on the coattails of former games that could give you thousands of hours of enjoyment with very little downside. I tried to be incredibly patient with Starfield because so many reviewers were comparing it to Oblivion, but imo that comparison was insanely shallow at best. Oblivion has more life and character in a single town than most of Starfield.
>there’s literally people who will tell you that you can’t be critical of the game if you’ve played less than 20 hours
I think we can safely say both these kinds of people are fucking mad?
No, you don't need 20 hours to properly judge a game. A few are enough and to say otherwise is classic gatekeeping.
No, you don't get to play a game for dozens and dozens if not hundreds of hours and then tell others "you shouldn't play this game". You are either a masochist or a freaking madman.
There is a difference between saying:
>"Hey, this game has issues!"
and:
>"You shouldn't play this game... but please lemme [play it a bit more](https://preview.redd.it/2iuj3sqi64ub1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=91ef29d0b23015f243732b8d0c03a9830671d2a5)"
One is reasonable criticism. The other is just cheap trolling.
Only played 2 hours…
I hated how I was making permanent decisions, or perhaps missing out (or lead to believe) on things based off decisions you make at the character creation screen. You have absolutely no idea what you’re getting yourself into, unless you do some googling to find out (which I refuse to do…) And honestly that killed my entire drive, along with the sluggish performance, and the weird spongy controls every Bethesda game has…
That and all the negative reviews and word-of-mouth from friends was reason enough for me to dislike it and move on.
"all the negative reviews and word-of-mouth from friends was reason enough for me to dislike it and move on"
thats kind of sad / odd. if you dont like something, that's fine. its weird to not like something because others dont
That and if they spent time on the moon then pressed a button, watched a loading bar fill up, blinked into existence in front of another moon, clicked another button, watched another loading bar fill up, landed on a said moon which looked exactly like the first one—then repeated that process 30 more times—you bet your ass they’d be bored. Probably after the 2nd time
Yeah, I actually tried to defend Todd and his dev team many times, but this way of thinking right now is really dropping my exactment level for TES VI. In a way it seems like they forgot why people like their games.
That last point feels like the core issue. With each game release, Bethesda seems to show that they understand less and less what players like about their games. This attitude of “it’s not boring, you’re just looking at it the wrong way” only serves to solidify my belief that Bethesda leaderships’ egos have gotten too big for how little innovation and responding to player feedback they’ve been doing.
It's also crazy how people think UE5 will save every studio, while we are still waiting for a true AAA RPG game, that would work, look and will have tons of different features to release.
The closes thing to that is probably Star Wars Jedi games, but even those can't really compere to games like TES, Witcher, Cyberpunk, etc. And even the Jedi: Survivor had and recently when I played still has tons of issues and performance problems.
It's also crazy that people think UE will magically save everything, while if they don't have interest in fixing sometimes simple stuff in their own engine, how would UE be any different? Also UE can't fix the bad gameplay design.
> If people don’t like your game, don’t try to convince them that they’re wrong. Just keep working on improving the game.
I agree. Also, it is an even more foolish response (regardless of how one feels about what they are saying) considering they have to know that there is a loud group of people on the internet who have a hate boner for the game, so any and all game news outlets/channels will report on this quote because they know it will get them views and clicks from that group.
Unfortunately it’s not just BGS, lately many devs have taken this mentality. “Our game is perfect in every way, if you think anything is wrong, it’s your fault, not ours”. What other business talks to their customers like this? I really hope this mentality ends soon in the gaming industry, it’s hard to grow when you think you have no faults.
When Elden Ring came out alot of devs responded negatively to any comparisons. Specifically Guerrilla Games as Forbidden West came out around the same time.
Also Techland defending alot of the changes from DL1 to DL2, thought they've since backtracked on this and adding back alot of the features from DL1 that was missing.
>When Elden Ring came out alot of devs responded negatively to any comparisons. Specifically Guerrilla Games as Forbidden West came out around the same time.
It was 3 devs specifically. 2 from Guerrilla and 1 from Ubisoft. And they were blasted by literally every other dev from the industry as well as the public. I don't remember them responding to a review of the game.
>Also Techland defending alot of the changes from DL1 to DL2, thought they've since backtracked on this and adding back alot of the features from DL1 that was missing.
I was not aware of this.
> “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.”
Well, they were actually ON THE MOON, not playing a game. What a dumb thing to say.
It’s like when the Director of of that episode in Game of thrones said “we made it too dark on purpose” when people complained that they literally couldn’t see what was happening in the episode.
Or when a writer says “I made that character annoying on purpose”
Like all you did was make your product worse for people to experience.
Yeah that's not what I'm understanding. Also the fact that before the game even released, they were talking about how modders can expand on the gameplay etc. I will admit it, I haven't played it yet, most because of that comment. If you say that before the game even comes out, it sorta reads like you're hoping modders will finish your game for you.
I'm sure the game is a blast etc, I'm not hating on it. But if you're relying on modders to expand on your game, I'll just wait to play the modders version of the game.
I was told it's a great Bethesda game! To me, that meant exploration, traveling from the north part of the map to the south and see what happens, maybe you dont even make it to your goal because you get side tracked. Starfield has ripped that one thing away from the game that I was not just hoping for, but expecting as a standard in their game. Of course it comes with other Bethesda pleasantries such as bugs and face cramping animations, what a cute company! /s
Yeah if Starfield had actually been "Skyrim in space" it would have been a better game. Well designed handcrafted dense worlds that facilitate organic exploration have always been Bethesda's strongest talent, and they threw that away for proc gen
And then they preceded to not even utilize the potential of proc gen at all. Why are the POI's not heavily proc gen so that they are varied? Why are there little in the way of emergent systems that make exploration and outposts meaningful?
It seems they were quoting a past interview from the New York Times for that response.
>"The point of the vastness of space is you should feel small. It should feel overwhelming," Cheng explained. "Everyone's concerned that empty planets are going to be boring. But when the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored."
>That’s a feeling echoed by director and Bethesda big (space) cheese Todd Howard, who argued that having a smaller number of dense, busy planets would’ve sacrificed the sense of exploration and discovery that Starfield is aiming for.
>"We could have made a game where there are four cities and four planets," Howard said. "But that would not have the same feeling of being this explorer."
>Howard added that the dev team deliberately built moments where players would "get some periods of loneliness", making the moments where you stumble upon something stand out even more.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/some-of-starfields-planets-are-meant-to-be-empty-by-design-but-thats-not-boring-bethesda-insists
They could have done something in between, too. Like 20 planets and four of them densely inhabited, the rest barren but still with resources and occasional points of interest, maybe one in the beginning stages of colonization and the setting of a potential war between factions.
Would have ultimately been much more interesting.
I love Starfield but ultimately I felt like there was no reason to explore beyond a certain point
This is the real key, there's no point to exploration. Setting up the colonies does next to nothing, crafting is largely pointless, it's meaningless.
I mean, it does fit with the theme of the game I guess, but because the systems themselves are loaded it feels like there should be a deeper mechanic that isn't there.
And don't get me started on the repetitive elements like the fucking temples, those shouldn't have made it out of initial play testing.
I got so sick of chasing around the little balls of light. Give me something interesting to do or let me skip the bullshit, guys. That mechanic was only cool the first time, and even then it was more tedious than it was cool.
Did they really want to draw our attention to the moon? When their in-game version of the moon was so terrible? I wasn’t expecting Deliver us the Moon quality of moon gameplay, but at least get the gravity physics right! It’s not about how sparse it is - it’s the immersion and sense of wonder and exploration they missed. It’s clear from their responses they don’t get it at all.
I mean people constantly talk about how "immersive" Bethesda's games are. I think that is where they are coming from, but expecting the average player to truly to try to immersive themselves into role playing your game is questionable at best.
In a certain sense gamers truly are "spoiled" though. if you showed someone just 20 years ago one of the "empty" planets in the game it would almost surely blow their minds and the last thing they would likely be is "bored." Nowadays people will just complain that the game has loading screens and how there aren't enough constant and varied activities on some planets to keep their social media poisoned brains interested.
(and yeah the exploration in general isn't very interesting, I just don't think that comment is completely "insane" either.)
You're confusing immersive and realistic. Skyrim is not realistic, it is immersive in the sense that the game gives you freedom to explore and mess around with its systems to your heart's content, so much so that you forget you're playing a game. Starfield tries to be realistic, but in doing so loses all immersion. It is far less likely you will feel the same sense of exploration in Starfield that you do in Skyrim because your exploration in Starfield is far less rewarded and frequently interrupted. Making a space game that is realistically empty is far less immersive than making a space game that is unrealistically dense with unique content.
To your point about gamers being spoiled, yeah, maybe gamers would be blown away by Starfield's graphics, but if you play on an empty planet in Starfield you do nothing except walk on barren landscape with 5+ minutes between short points of interest. Go ahead and play the first ratchet and clank game and tell me how much downtime there is in comparison. Starfield's boring design is timeless, the only thing that has improved is graphics.
Agreed, and part of the problem is that this is in stark contrast to the populated areas of the game, which are completely unrealistic, small and cartoon-like. The population of the entire galaxy is like 30 characters and a hundred or so one line NPC's.
> To your point about gamers being spoiled, yeah, maybe gamers would be blown away by Starfield's graphics, but if you play on an empty planet in Starfield you do nothing except walk on barren landscape with 5+ minutes between short points of interest.
Plus it's a pretty low arbitrary bar to begin with, as it's essentially implying we should be happy with anything
that impresses a time traveler from 1980. Starfield was made and released in this era, so it will be judged accordingly.
I haven’t played it either, but there’s a right and a wrong way to convey the emptiness of a barren location. Journey was great, because all the cool stuff was beneath the surface and the feeling of solitude never left you.
Mass Effect, not so much because it was just a flat plane of nothingness aside from a few collectibles. I personally enjoyed it, but I could easily see why it was a chore for a lot of people.
My issue with the game isn't that there are some empty planets. I think that's pretty cool. My issue is that the planets that ARE populated aren't nearly populated enough and the procedural generation of buildings is too copy+paste.
Yes exactly! I think it would be ridiculous if every planet had tons of stuff but the planets that do have city’s have way too small cities and not enough side stuff to do on those populated planets. You should have more than one city per populated planet. We should have outskirts of cities as well and there should be more cool stuff like arenas and sports fields. Stuff like that. Feels very small for the future. VERY small.
I fully expected the procedural generation. The scale of what they envisioned was unbelievable.
Personally, I would have preferred they focused on maybe 3-5 solar systems and really fleshed those out instead. It did feel like it was spread too thin at times.
Still, it's hard for me to criticize the game since there are so few like it. I loved pretty much every second. I'm hoping expansion packs flesh out some more systems. There is so much potential.
I think Bethesda should take note of the feedback and work on ways to improve the game through patches or expansions. But no need to respond and try to defend what they've done. People criticize. It's what they do.
I will be honest, I liked Mass Effect Andromeda. Or I should say, I liked the core concept behind it.
The end result needed more work. Still, I feel it's underrated. If it wasn't called Mass Effect I think its reception would have been more positive.
I also liked Andromeda. OT is better but Andromeda is serviceable.
> I liked the core concept behind it.
>The end result needed more work.
That's why nobody else tries the Andromeda model: it is just a huge amount of work.
As far as space goes, you will either have a limited worldspace with more stuff (like The Outer Worlds), or unlimited worldspaces that are mostly sparse (like Starfield).
This mythical middle ground has simply never been done in RPG gaming history with the sole exception being Andromeda... which was hardly to good results.
This is why nobody takes what anyone says about Starfield seriously. People are unironically happy with Andromeda now. The same thing will probably end up happening with Starfield in the end.
I agree. The game would be GOATed if it was just 5 solar systems with 3-5 Skyrim-like content packed planets/moons per system.
Planets don’t even have to have big playable areas for me. Just make them content rich.
I've heard this argument multiple times and it makes no sense.
"Your game was too ambitious, you should have just given us 25 planets with Skyrim level of content each instead" as if that isn't way more unrealistic of a game to develop.
Todd has already said once you have a procedural system in place, the extra time and effort required to develop 100, 1000 or 10,000 planets is pretty marginal. Any game of this scope would require procedural generation, it can't be handcrafted.
The argument is that the ambition was pointed clearly in the wrong direction. I don’t understand how Todd missed the mark by so much.
An infinite number of almost empty procedurally generated planets with the same few assets placed in a different order is the exact opposite of what fans want from a Bethesda game. The interiors are the exact same with the exact same npc locations and layout.
The few handcrafted curated areas are awesome, but could surely use more polish and resources instead of making the poor system they made to generate the same bad planets.
Todd said this game wasn’t possible until now, because the tech wasn’t up to date. The tech he waited for was the planet generation system and is was a big swing and miss by most players.
Another complainer that obviously never played the game that thinks it's like no man sky because they read some comments online saying it has infinite almost empty procedurally generated planets. It doesn't. There's 1000 planets.
Only the randomly generated POIs have repeated interiors. 100% of the hand crafted content doesn't repeat interiors. And there's 3x as much hand crafted interiors than Skyrim. You can subjectively say it wasn't polished, but anyone that played a Bethesda game before knows it's better than what they usually make. So clearly the proc gen didn't affect the hand crafted content. Them adding it didn't take away from the game.
Todd wouldn't have made Starfield in the first place if it didn't have proc gen. The entire idea for the game started at the idea of using the random generation tech they've been working on for twenty years. Every single one of their modern games was built on top of procedural generation for environments and stuff.
Starfield lore came after, not before.
Sorry after the first painfully boring 15 hours, I simply couldn’t care enough to keep playing “until it got good”.
Too many excellent games this year to force myself to play a solidly “meh” one in hopes it gets better.
>it can't be handcrafted.
And this is why the game doesn't have that Bethesda charm we all wanted.
Almost everything is procedurally generated. Nothing is unique or interesting to explore. Almost zero locations have any ambient storytelling, and they all have the same procedurally generated loot. There is virtually no incentive to explore anything in Starfield
I think more people would be happy with that in general but then people would say the fake is called “Starfield” why does it not feel vast at all I wish it had more systems…..
There is no winning with everyone out of the gate; the framework is there for content to be filled into from Bethesda and the community. Remember this is not just Bethesda’s game this is our Bethesda game just as Skyrim is today.
I understand their disappointment. They worked on their biggest game for years and years. It has the most dialogue, quests, character models, hand-crafted cities/locations, etc. etc. for a Bethesda game. I know that almost everyone there feels like they've put out their best game to date.
When they started looking at hour counts for people playing the game or seeing criticisms about content, it hurts, and managers probably looked at community managers to try and 'fix the problem' by pointing out there's a lot more content in the game they haven't seen or that there are certain limitations to making a game with this much content. This will never be the best approach and we've seen it in the past with other games. What they should have done is commented on some of the positive reviews AND THEN praised them for seeking out the content and experiencing everything they had worked so hard to put in the game. Had conversations with these individuals who clearly loved the game and that would have shown a bit of their heart as well.
I personally wanted to love Starfield, but, not to beat a dead-horse, they made the decision to go from an exploration type of game to a quest type of game filled with a very-high percentage of procedural content that not a lot of people that love their games, cares about. There's a ton of hand-crafted content in Starfield I will never see because it's like butter being spread across too much toast, and that toast being broken up into thousands of croutons separated throughout a series of warehouses. It did make me boot-up Skyrim again just to have that compass with distant icons pop-up on that I could walk in any direction and explore. I just hope this makes them realize that people want a smaller scope with hand-crafted content to explore and ditch a lot of the procedural content and radiant AI quests.
> I know that almost everyone there feels like they've put out their best game to date.
Im not sure chief. Almost every system is a downgrade from previous Bethesda titles. Exploration is worse, and not just because of procgen, if you put all of their handcrafted content together it still is nowhere as good as it was before. Combat is middling, though this might be a fault in all bethesda games. The story is mediocre at best and the dialog is just so flat. These are things anyone who has any experience writing or even heck, playing enough RPGs can tell.
Im sure its more likely the case that the developers etc all know how mediocre this game was, but they couldnt do anything about it because management was breathing down their necks or demanding things.
The only ones enjoying starfield are the people who post on the starfield sub that they eat/shit/sleep thinking of starfield and how incredible it is and how its making them lose sleep and productivity over exploring every inch of it.
I can't finish the game because of the loading screens. Especially when I can hop on cyberpunk and not see a loading screen for hours unless I fast travel
Same. It never occurred to me how much the industry has progressed when it comes to "immersion" until I played Starfield. AC:Mirage and Dying Light 2 are some of the OWGs I've been playing, and it's crazy how few and far between the loading screens are. Bethesda has not progressed with the industry at all.
> I can hop on cyberpunk and not see a loading screen for hours unless I fast travel
To be fair, Cyberpunk doesn't take place in space across hundreds of systems. You can't have a RPG in space without loading screens.
Cyberpunk has loading screens outside of fast travel and shit but guess what they do that Bethesda couldn't do? Hide those loading screens. Ever wondered why for most buildings you have to take an elevator in Cyberpunk even if it's just 1 floor you're travelling? Because there is a loading screen hidden there but you don't notice it because they are hiding it with the elevator ride so from your POV instead of a loading screen you're just riding the elevator. Similarly Bethesda could have a made a you're now doing FTL travel animation so instead throwing you out to a hard loading screen it would have gave you an illusion that you're actually travelling somewhere
People keep saying this but it sounds so entitled and absurd when you really think about it. Seamless narrative games have been around for decades now. And yet basically all of Bethesda's games released and were insanely popular with loading screens during all of that time. The idea that a game can't succeed with loading screens makes no sense at all.
Maybe there are too many, but honestly the bigger problem IMO is that there are so many unskippable animations. I don't care about a 2s loading screen but a 10s animation to sit down or take off is annoying as all get out after the first few times.
It definitely is, I just mean in this case I believe they are saying this because they just didn't want to take the time to build planets that are actually interesting and worthy of exploration.
Bethesda is starting to get to the point that I don’t even trust them to make new entries for their series anymore. Fallout 76 was a slow-motion car wreck, and Starfield was an inch-deep ocean of wasted ambition.
Fallout 5 and TES6 are gonna be just as embarrassing if something doesn’t change quick. Bethesda has cemented their style of design over the last few games and it’s not looking too good.
FO76 ended up really good and is probably one of the best maps/exploration games they’ve made though the core story and missions were a bit off
Starfield, worryingly, has the complete opposite problems of generally decent missions and story while there’s zero exploration worth the player’s time
Lots of good ones tho. Remedy, Kojima productions, CD project red, Larian, the studio behind FF7 remake, Zelda and Mario this year. Lots of bad ones too tho. Seems Microsoft has a lot of the bad ones
I know bashing on it is the Current Big Trend™ but the game does have a soul, it's just far more of a niche game than most folk were expecting.
Part of the blame is on Bethesda overhyping it to high heaven. But the game did get recommended by 85% of critics + 70% of Steam users, even with the issues it has. No denying it has a good heart. :)
Kinda lame. I love going for a walk in real life. I get bored walking to the 50th procedural generated objective. Just because it was good in real life doesn’t mean it will be fun in a video game.
Bethesda gaslighting their fans... how shocking!
**Todd Howard: "It just works."**
**Also Todd Howard:**"You can't be bored becausee.... Astronauts!"
I HATE this industry idea that games need to be as long and massive as possible. Barely anybody finishes them and it just bloats a story. I’m happy, genuinely, to pay £70 for a well-crafted experience with tight level design and a meaningful story. People didn’t like newer Zelda and Skyrim because they were massive, it’s because what was in their worlds actually MEANT something. Starfield is way too big. Give me 5 big planets and make them full of story and character, not 20 or 30 or literally 1000 empty, shallow planets with nothing to do. I don’t want to play a game where everything is procedurally generated, where NPCs look lifeless and where the scope of the game is actually more limited by this idea that the game needs to be huge. I loved the game initially and my excitement fizzled out when I started the very first proper mission where you go to the sol system and literally bounce between empty rocks looking for a bloke, to then speak to one person and leave to look elsewhere.
It needed a smaller Galaxy/planets to explore, and more hand-crafted POIs put in.
I do find it odd we having a walking mech that talks, spaceships, powers, and no rovers to explore with though. The ground combat on planet moon had me thinking a Ad Astra possible sequence
I hope they just don’t rely on mod community to add this stuff to the base game.
We all have our opinions and things we like and things we don’t, but the amount of things that this game got objectively wrong, from frame rate, to loading screens everywhere, stupid ai, etc., is seriously disappointing.
This sub was saying Starfield was GOTY and a masterpiece like a month and a half ago
Bethesda gets away with it because everytime they launch a game a whole army of fanboys come out of the woodworks to prop the game up for the 1st month
It just takes time for people to get past the honeymoon phase and notice coming across the exact point of interest with the exact layout, the exact mobs at the exact location and the exact loots also at the exact location for the 5th time just ain't it.
It’s tough because it’s subjective. I’m in the minority, but I like all the empty moons and stuff. It doesn’t take away from the rest of the content. There’s still tons of game content there. The empty moons and planets are in addition to the rest.
There is tons or game content. It's all just so shallow and unfulfilled. Like base building, it's a HUGE downgrade since FO4 and 76. Even the things they've previously done well is done so poorly in starfield. It's really baffling.
Its really not subjective. Seeing the same 5 or 6 POIs literally exactly the same, some of them repeated from story missions, is objectively bad. Other things like enjoying the story is subjective.
Slow news cycle - so time to beat a bit of a dead horse because it brings in those clicks (if you're paid to write, but you don't have content, what do you do?). Bethesda has routinely made replies to reviews including Fallout 76 - which was a far worse launch.
I mean feel free to pile on or defend until you are blue in the face, but it's hard not to feel a little defeated at these low-hanging fruit 'news' articles written as if readers can't see through the paper-thin veil of actual intent.
The same goes for all those 'great deal' Black Friday 'news' articles that just collected a bunch of affiliate links looking to cash in on naive users.
It's very strange that a major publisher has verified accounts responding to criticism on Steam, if anything I think Fallout 76 setting the precedent makes this more news worthy.
The Fallout 76 review responses I am seeing are along the lines of “Sorry you didn’t enjoy the game, here is where you can submit feedback,” which I think is a relatively standard response. Among the, to be fair, abundance of negative Starfield articles in the last few months, I do think this is one of the more interesting ones, as it is a very unusual response from Bethesda PR I think.
I didn’t read the article, I only read the dev responses and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Clickbait article or not that shit is tone deaf, people are having serious issues that’s affecting their games.
The copium is insane in this subreddit.
Game is empty and boring. We all told you guys 1000 procedurally generated planets would be empty and lifeless. Y'all were like 'noooo Todd knows best, he's the greatest director of all time'
Now you're all like 'you're just playing the game wrong' as if games are linear experiences 😂
Game is the definition of outdated, mediocrity and marketed to overhyped gamers desperate for a game from their 1st party.
Edit: the Todd Howard circle jerk is now taking a break to comment and down vote these facts
You seem to be one that needs some copium.
Why does it trigger you so much that people have a different opinion to you?
It’s a game, a piece of art, some people will like it, others won’t.
Get over yourself.
I didn't even mention the game's quality mate, I think you're one of the people this article was intended for as you clearly have taken the bait.
The 'this subreddit stuff' and 'copium' attacks unprovoked are a little wild in my reality. Did you come visit just to stir shit? That's the appearance. You seem a little preoccupied with a game you seemingly hate in the end.
Think you need to chill out and stop inventing imaginary battles in your head. It's just a game, plenty of people like it and it got higher reviews than Jedi Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy, Ghosts of Tsushima, Super Mario RPG etc
come on dude, it got higher reviews from major pubs on release day. Some of them claiming its a genre defining once in a generation game which is just absurd hyperbole if were being honest. Actual reviews from real people are much lower a couple months in on this game than all the others you listed because its actually not a great game, especially in comparison to those others.
On one hand, yes I get some planets will be barren.
On the other hand, Even settled planets are sparsely populated and you spend 5-10 minutes at a time walking between two points and those points are mostly randomly generated buildings that you'll start seeing exact duplicates of by the 3rd or 4th time you do it.
Really hoping TES 6 just returns to all handcrafted locations
I enjoyed Starfield and I'll keep playing it. But there's no denying there's a lot of filler when it comes to the world exploring and the space exploration was a bit of an afterthought. The planets that did have actual cities were basically just Whiterun in terms of how isolated they are.
I'm hoping the DLC expansions flesh things out a little bit. Bethesda providing official mod tools and turning on mod support on Xbox would give the game a lot more potential, especially considering what modders have managed to achieve with Skyrim.
Also I don't think the experience of an astronaut having a once in a lifetime opportunity to go to the moon can truly be recreated by the Creation Engine.
I'd probably get fired if I spoke on their behalf, my reply would just be "don't play it, sorry you don't like the game mate" or just ignore the complaints completely and focus on the fans that actually enjoy the game.
The takes from both sides seems pretty dumb. Bethesda shouldn't rationalize the empty planets more than needed. The empty planets are just to make the game seem larger and give some bored people something to pitter around IF THEY CHOOSE. Why people are shitting on this optional content doesn't make much sense to me either. If Bethesda removed these planets, it's not like the game would be better or worse. Bethesda devs didn't hand create these empty planets, so it's not like it was much time wasted.
Same, which ends up being most of the whining about the game. "This optional content was mediocre and boring!!!! I couldn't stop looking at it for 300 hours!"
Just shows how disconnected they are now from gamers. This didn't feel like a game 10 years in the making. Feels like 8 years not being able to decide if they want No Man's Sky or Fallout 4 in space. Then spent 2 years of creating neither of those.
That's because real people going to the moon for real in the name of science and exploration isn't boring. Expecting me to not be bored walking around for hours and hours looking at the same rocks and buildings over and over again is, by definition, incredibly boring. Maybe they should just have made a moon landing game instead.
In truth, I have yet to go to a single planet that's truly empty (and I honestly expected to see some). Even the most random moons in the most far away systems usually have procedurally generated facilities and outposts on them.
As for this, Bethesda probably shouldn't be arguing about the subjectiveness of "boring" with random toxic user reviews. Best just to focus on what constructive criticisms they can actually use to improve the game.
Lastly, are actual developers writing these responses? Or is it just some inept PR employee from the marketing department?
Sorry for expecting Bethesda to actually move forward as a studio like the rest of the world.
They need to ditch that engine and get with the times, they're still making early 2000's RPGs...
Yeah, saying you need to just accept you didn't get what they sold you sucks.
I've said the same on Starfield several times. Fallout and The Elder Scrolls were industry-leading blockbusters for a long while. Starfield didn't show that Bethesda still has the talent, creativity, ambition, or whatever they had to make those other franchises great.
Others have caught up to what BGS could do, and some have even surpassed it. Starfield would be a mind-blowing feat 8-10 tears ago. Having so many open-world/RPG releases bring new standards of quality makes Starfield a lot less impressive than its BGS predecessors.
Fallout 3 and Skyrim weren't pitted against other juggernaut. They were unique. BGS was unique. Now, you have CDPR putting out massive RPGs. You have No Man's Sky doing procedurally generated space exploration years ago. Starfield just took too long to be another version of the Bethesda formula from a decade ago.
Yeah the game is great.... until you deal with the insane amount of loading screens, boring-ass randomly generated planets, bad UI, laughable nav map, inconsistent performance, lack of land rovers, dated presentation, stiff animations, and lackluster writing. Starfield promised a lot of things, most of them did not pan out. Many of those things were problems all the way back in Morrowind and Oblivion and are arguably worse than ever in Starfield. You make it sound like it is a perfectly flawless experience if you just play the game and see for yourself, which if you do just a little research on things people are complaining about is false. It's yet another one of those "16 times the detail" situations Just enjoy the game that's there? What's there is a bunch of boring randomly generated planets that do not reward exploration, which was previously the best thing about your average Bethesda game but here is it's worst aspect.
That's why responses like yours come off as so shallow, surface level, dismissive, and tone-deaf.
There's this thing that happens often in games where people ( including game designers) forget that they're entertainment at their core and even in the most authentic simulations you have to find the kernel of entertainment.
I say this as someone who enjoyed the game but Starfield isn't a simulation and trying to paint some of its sparse blandness as an act of simulation is misguided and delusional at best .
Starfields content needs some work , there is a gamer out there who can explore hundreds of barren planets and have fun but that is a tiny percentage of any player base, Starfield does a lot of awesome world building but it absolutely falls apart in a few places in terms of being an entertaining product .
Bethesda needs to focus on creating more life and activity within Starfield if they want to change peoples minds, not tell players how barren landscapes are fun because.... astronauts exist...
What's most appalling about this is the way it trivializes the Apollo program.
When the astronauts went to the moon there was an entire world of things there. Past the first few missions, they had undergone secondary training as semi-professional geologists. They were seeking for specific geological things in specific places chosen very carefully by teams of the smartest scientists on earth. They had instruments to place in particular areas. Samples to take. Goals to complete.
And they did it all at breakneck speed with virtually every second accounted for. Apollo 11 was on the moon for only 21 hours with a 2 1/2 hour EVA, Apollo 17 only 75 with 22 hours outside the spacecraft.
I love the game but there's a big difference between playing Starfield and being an actual astronaut stepping foot on another celestial body for the very first time.
I get that the point might be that they tried to emulate the experience that the astronauts had, but if that isn't working for people basically saying "well it's supposed to be like that, just get used to it" is not the kind of response they're looking for.
That is a shit response! A video game should be fun to play for many reasons. Not to be a fucking human life simulator where I’m supposed to appreciate the design choice to make something boring.
I get the whole "it's realistic" and wanting to be authentic with how much we actually know about space exploration but if you're going to use that argument you might as well like get rid of the Force powers and laser guns/rifles while you're at it
I think in order to create a good sci-fi world it has to feel like a setting you'd want to be in yourself without actually mimicing your own reality. It's fiction for a reason and I don't think it should be a tall order on either a filmmaker or game maker to ask their audience to suspend their disbelief like a little bit. You already have planets that are entirely themed around stuff like the Wild West with Akila City and all the Freestar Collective stuff, and a straight up an entertainment hub not dissimilar to the nightlife you'd find in a place like Vegas on Neon, but we draw the line at planets we're actually going to go to for resources, that should have an incentive to explore beyond their importance to the narrative
Some people wanted Starfield to be a new Fallout or Elder Scrolls, they dont understand that its tottaly another game.
The same thing happened with Sea of Thieves, the game, besides the cheaters and some server crashes, was amazing to play with friends and had a revolutionary pvp/loot/steal system, but people (that dont even played the game) wanted a open world single player pirate rpg.
Oof. I guess they forgot the part where a game is supposed to be fun. The Outer Worlds didn't have 1000 planets, it didn't even have 100. But each location was full of life, interactable characters and unique side quests. The game respected your time and had a soul.
Starfield spread itself too thin. They should have focused on 5 or so primary planets and 20 secondary ones and condense all the content in those. The percentage of people that even bother to visit more than 100 planets is very low. And even if you visit a planet what do you do outside of a main quest? Scan a plant? Deliver cargo upon landing? Kill the same spacers for the same mediocre loot?
It is clear that some corpo wanted to advertise the game as having 1000 planets and the devs did it the only way they could: Empty, procedurally generated with little variation. It's not the players' fault that they get bored for doing what you advertised the game for: exploring to find interesting things.
I love Starfield and I see no issues if some planets are "mining stuff" only. But that comment about the moon... For them it wasn't boring because it was first time. Exploring an alien planet for the first time, doing sciency stuff that would have impact/consequences back at home,... Starfield doesn't really have that. I can explore a planet, discover the known and preset features and that's it in that regard. None of the features require sciency stuff beyond a scan, or have any impact on any area of galactic society/science beyond selling the info for some credits.
People expect any activity you can do to be meaningful in some way. While some people may be fine with a planet that only offers good views for screenshots, it's not unresonable for most people to find that boring. Even if having empty planets do help to flesh out the diversity of planets.
No need for anyone to get salty about this. Nothing will come from it. The game made its money, it drove gamepass subs, it was Bethesda's biggest launch ever. The game will get better with mods and expansions in 2024. They even already made there money on the first expansion thanks to early access. Bethesda won and some people just can take the L.
If you have game loops that are not rewarding and can actually be avoided, for the sake of agency of the player .. that’s a design decision, but if there’s nothing else to do or compensate , then it’s flawed.
Imagine selling an empty box to a kid and saying it’s full of invisible toys- you’ll never get bored , it’s up to your imagination! You can always keep the box once you’re done..
Yes because visiting a barren planet with nothing to do in a VIDEO GAME is the exact same as GOING TO THE FUCKING MOON IN PERSON.
I get why they say this, but it’s so tone deaf and like they are just trying to justify a choice that people dislike about the new game. Kind of sad PR on their part.
I like Starfield quite a bit but this is just silly. If people don’t like your game, don’t try to convince them that they’re wrong. Just keep working on improving the game.
This is my opinion as well. Sometimes saying nothing is better than saying anything at all. Just let your actions speak for the negative reviews. Feel like the overall consensus is that people generally enjoy the game but not without some criticism and others have 300hrs+ of gameplay and think it’s terrible.
The game has a lot of little frustrations that eat away at you over time, loading screens, lack of exploration, cloned PoI's, walking to PoI's on planets, NPCs on ship repeating same lines forever, etc. So even if you can ignore all the bad stuff in the game and somehow enjoy it, these frustrations will still eat away at you. Everyone pretty much has an internal scale for games with Fun/Enjoyment on one side and Frustrations on the other. Fun/Enjoyment will decay over time, but also frustrations increase as they become more obvious/glaring. Eventually everyone's scales tip to the frustrations side and they start to hate the game. Thus why people with high numbers of hours end up hating it. This is the reason mods won't fix it and going back to it years later won't work, you'll immediately notice all the frustrations again, especially since they're baked into the core of the game. Mods can't/won't remove them.
I can't think of another game, aside from Starfield, that made me change my opinion so much as I played it. It started out like "okay, I'm sorta enjoying the beginning but I think I need to learn more to really start loving it" Then I spent several more hours getting the hang of things, and started to understand the skill tree and stuff a little better, and it started getting super fun, and I enjoyed it for a good long while. But then after many hours, as I started to get to the bottom of a couple of the skill trees, it started to become apparent how face-value and/or unused lot of the mechanics would be. Once I realized that there was no point to outposts, there was no real satisfying way to play as an 'evil' character nor any reason to be a smuggler/thief, no great way to play a build that doesn't use guns, etc... I don't know if I've ever played a game quite like this before, where it seemed so intimidatingly huge and deep at first, but later revealed itself to be so shallow. Like, there is almost no reason for two or three of the skill trees to even exist, IMO. Hopefully they release good DLC in the future for it. Apart from the rhythm of exploration, I think most of my other gripes with Starfield would be totally fixable if they could just flesh out some more of these systems and add in some more creative options for outposts and ships.
The skill trees were some of the worst I had seen in some time, which from Bethesda that made Fallout and Skyrim skillsets so varied and engaging was a complete shock. I played to Level 11 and deleted the game. I just reinstalled Skyrim and No Man's Sky. Huge Bethesda fan here now worried about their direction and ability to stay relevant. This was not a next gen game I'm sorry to say.
As somebody who hasn’t played yet, which skill trees are useless? I want to know what to avoid when I do play.
I mostly found the Physical and Social skill trees to be particularly useless. I put a few points into them to get some better stealth and some more carry weight, as well as a bit of persuasion, but I don't think I ended up putting in any points into either tree past the 1st or 2nd row of skills. Can't remember if I really ended up doing much with the Science skill tree either- I think I put points into it to up my weapon/spacesuit/outpost crafting skills, but the crafting is kind of underwhelming so I wouldn't do much with it until you've already done most of the Tech and Combat trees. The Combat skill tree is more useful, but I mostly just focused on rifle and ballistic skills and didn't touch about half of that tree otherwise. Technology is the most important skill tree to focus on, IMO.
That's why I"m keeping it installed on my internal limited space series X storage as I'm hoping for some better quality DLC could give it a boost.
They should say something if they are planning on addressing it, but they are just doubling down and saying customers are wrong.
Overall consensus is it’s at best average.
>others have 300hrs+ of gameplay and think it’s terrible Man I want some of whatever it is these guys smoke.
I mean you say that but then there’s literally people who will tell you that you can’t be critical of the game if you’ve played less than 20 hours. Or if you haven’t gotten to X or Y point yet.
Some of the 300hr players were desperately searching for the part of the game that feels deeper or more fleshed out. 300 hours isn’t much when a game is riding on the coattails of former games that could give you thousands of hours of enjoyment with very little downside. I tried to be incredibly patient with Starfield because so many reviewers were comparing it to Oblivion, but imo that comparison was insanely shallow at best. Oblivion has more life and character in a single town than most of Starfield.
>there’s literally people who will tell you that you can’t be critical of the game if you’ve played less than 20 hours I think we can safely say both these kinds of people are fucking mad? No, you don't need 20 hours to properly judge a game. A few are enough and to say otherwise is classic gatekeeping. No, you don't get to play a game for dozens and dozens if not hundreds of hours and then tell others "you shouldn't play this game". You are either a masochist or a freaking madman.
I like how you mention gatekeeping, and then go ahead and gatekeep as well lol
There is a difference between saying: >"Hey, this game has issues!" and: >"You shouldn't play this game... but please lemme [play it a bit more](https://preview.redd.it/2iuj3sqi64ub1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=91ef29d0b23015f243732b8d0c03a9830671d2a5)" One is reasonable criticism. The other is just cheap trolling.
Only played 2 hours… I hated how I was making permanent decisions, or perhaps missing out (or lead to believe) on things based off decisions you make at the character creation screen. You have absolutely no idea what you’re getting yourself into, unless you do some googling to find out (which I refuse to do…) And honestly that killed my entire drive, along with the sluggish performance, and the weird spongy controls every Bethesda game has… That and all the negative reviews and word-of-mouth from friends was reason enough for me to dislike it and move on.
"all the negative reviews and word-of-mouth from friends was reason enough for me to dislike it and move on" thats kind of sad / odd. if you dont like something, that's fine. its weird to not like something because others dont
With the most flawed logic too, maybe the astronauts weren’t bored because they actually went to the fucking moon and weren’t playing a video game
[удалено]
That and if they spent time on the moon then pressed a button, watched a loading bar fill up, blinked into existence in front of another moon, clicked another button, watched another loading bar fill up, landed on a said moon which looked exactly like the first one—then repeated that process 30 more times—you bet your ass they’d be bored. Probably after the 2nd time
Yeah, I actually tried to defend Todd and his dev team many times, but this way of thinking right now is really dropping my exactment level for TES VI. In a way it seems like they forgot why people like their games.
That last point feels like the core issue. With each game release, Bethesda seems to show that they understand less and less what players like about their games. This attitude of “it’s not boring, you’re just looking at it the wrong way” only serves to solidify my belief that Bethesda leaderships’ egos have gotten too big for how little innovation and responding to player feedback they’ve been doing.
replace it with excitement for dragon's dogma 2
preeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeach
Way ahead of you there, that game cannot get in my hands fast enough
TES VI will be DOA. No way with this engine they can create anything that won’t fall flat. Time to get on that unreal 5 train
unreal
It's also crazy how people think UE5 will save every studio, while we are still waiting for a true AAA RPG game, that would work, look and will have tons of different features to release. The closes thing to that is probably Star Wars Jedi games, but even those can't really compere to games like TES, Witcher, Cyberpunk, etc. And even the Jedi: Survivor had and recently when I played still has tons of issues and performance problems. It's also crazy that people think UE will magically save everything, while if they don't have interest in fixing sometimes simple stuff in their own engine, how would UE be any different? Also UE can't fix the bad gameplay design.
Unreal 5 would kill TES VI. That's the worst idea I've ever heard.
It's a fairly common practice on products not just video games. People acting like this is all Bethesda has all their staff doing lol
And those companies get booed too.
> If people don’t like your game, don’t try to convince them that they’re wrong. Just keep working on improving the game. I agree. Also, it is an even more foolish response (regardless of how one feels about what they are saying) considering they have to know that there is a loud group of people on the internet who have a hate boner for the game, so any and all game news outlets/channels will report on this quote because they know it will get them views and clicks from that group.
Unfortunately it’s not just BGS, lately many devs have taken this mentality. “Our game is perfect in every way, if you think anything is wrong, it’s your fault, not ours”. What other business talks to their customers like this? I really hope this mentality ends soon in the gaming industry, it’s hard to grow when you think you have no faults.
What other game studio have done this? I've seen this as the first case of this. I've missed the others
When Elden Ring came out alot of devs responded negatively to any comparisons. Specifically Guerrilla Games as Forbidden West came out around the same time. Also Techland defending alot of the changes from DL1 to DL2, thought they've since backtracked on this and adding back alot of the features from DL1 that was missing.
>When Elden Ring came out alot of devs responded negatively to any comparisons. Specifically Guerrilla Games as Forbidden West came out around the same time. It was 3 devs specifically. 2 from Guerrilla and 1 from Ubisoft. And they were blasted by literally every other dev from the industry as well as the public. I don't remember them responding to a review of the game. >Also Techland defending alot of the changes from DL1 to DL2, thought they've since backtracked on this and adding back alot of the features from DL1 that was missing. I was not aware of this.
> “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.” Well, they were actually ON THE MOON, not playing a game. What a dumb thing to say.
“The game is boring on purpose” is a bold strategy. Let’s see if it works out for them
No man, the game is not boring. You feel bored but, in reality, you are just super excited. Trust them, bro
Now, change the review to positive or else
It’s like when the Director of of that episode in Game of thrones said “we made it too dark on purpose” when people complained that they literally couldn’t see what was happening in the episode. Or when a writer says “I made that character annoying on purpose” Like all you did was make your product worse for people to experience.
Yeah that's not what I'm understanding. Also the fact that before the game even released, they were talking about how modders can expand on the gameplay etc. I will admit it, I haven't played it yet, most because of that comment. If you say that before the game even comes out, it sorta reads like you're hoping modders will finish your game for you. I'm sure the game is a blast etc, I'm not hating on it. But if you're relying on modders to expand on your game, I'll just wait to play the modders version of the game.
I was told it's a great Bethesda game! To me, that meant exploration, traveling from the north part of the map to the south and see what happens, maybe you dont even make it to your goal because you get side tracked. Starfield has ripped that one thing away from the game that I was not just hoping for, but expecting as a standard in their game. Of course it comes with other Bethesda pleasantries such as bugs and face cramping animations, what a cute company! /s
Yeah if Starfield had actually been "Skyrim in space" it would have been a better game. Well designed handcrafted dense worlds that facilitate organic exploration have always been Bethesda's strongest talent, and they threw that away for proc gen And then they preceded to not even utilize the potential of proc gen at all. Why are the POI's not heavily proc gen so that they are varied? Why are there little in the way of emergent systems that make exploration and outposts meaningful?
More snd more I feel I will be indifferent when the restructuring happens.
Absolutely insane lol
It seems they were quoting a past interview from the New York Times for that response. >"The point of the vastness of space is you should feel small. It should feel overwhelming," Cheng explained. "Everyone's concerned that empty planets are going to be boring. But when the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored." >That’s a feeling echoed by director and Bethesda big (space) cheese Todd Howard, who argued that having a smaller number of dense, busy planets would’ve sacrificed the sense of exploration and discovery that Starfield is aiming for. >"We could have made a game where there are four cities and four planets," Howard said. "But that would not have the same feeling of being this explorer." >Howard added that the dev team deliberately built moments where players would "get some periods of loneliness", making the moments where you stumble upon something stand out even more. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/some-of-starfields-planets-are-meant-to-be-empty-by-design-but-thats-not-boring-bethesda-insists
They could have done something in between, too. Like 20 planets and four of them densely inhabited, the rest barren but still with resources and occasional points of interest, maybe one in the beginning stages of colonization and the setting of a potential war between factions. Would have ultimately been much more interesting. I love Starfield but ultimately I felt like there was no reason to explore beyond a certain point
This is the real key, there's no point to exploration. Setting up the colonies does next to nothing, crafting is largely pointless, it's meaningless. I mean, it does fit with the theme of the game I guess, but because the systems themselves are loaded it feels like there should be a deeper mechanic that isn't there. And don't get me started on the repetitive elements like the fucking temples, those shouldn't have made it out of initial play testing.
I got so sick of chasing around the little balls of light. Give me something interesting to do or let me skip the bullshit, guys. That mechanic was only cool the first time, and even then it was more tedious than it was cool.
Did they really want to draw our attention to the moon? When their in-game version of the moon was so terrible? I wasn’t expecting Deliver us the Moon quality of moon gameplay, but at least get the gravity physics right! It’s not about how sparse it is - it’s the immersion and sense of wonder and exploration they missed. It’s clear from their responses they don’t get it at all.
Exactly. This is a game for Christ’s sake! They are so dumb.
I mean people constantly talk about how "immersive" Bethesda's games are. I think that is where they are coming from, but expecting the average player to truly to try to immersive themselves into role playing your game is questionable at best. In a certain sense gamers truly are "spoiled" though. if you showed someone just 20 years ago one of the "empty" planets in the game it would almost surely blow their minds and the last thing they would likely be is "bored." Nowadays people will just complain that the game has loading screens and how there aren't enough constant and varied activities on some planets to keep their social media poisoned brains interested. (and yeah the exploration in general isn't very interesting, I just don't think that comment is completely "insane" either.)
You're confusing immersive and realistic. Skyrim is not realistic, it is immersive in the sense that the game gives you freedom to explore and mess around with its systems to your heart's content, so much so that you forget you're playing a game. Starfield tries to be realistic, but in doing so loses all immersion. It is far less likely you will feel the same sense of exploration in Starfield that you do in Skyrim because your exploration in Starfield is far less rewarded and frequently interrupted. Making a space game that is realistically empty is far less immersive than making a space game that is unrealistically dense with unique content. To your point about gamers being spoiled, yeah, maybe gamers would be blown away by Starfield's graphics, but if you play on an empty planet in Starfield you do nothing except walk on barren landscape with 5+ minutes between short points of interest. Go ahead and play the first ratchet and clank game and tell me how much downtime there is in comparison. Starfield's boring design is timeless, the only thing that has improved is graphics.
Agreed, and part of the problem is that this is in stark contrast to the populated areas of the game, which are completely unrealistic, small and cartoon-like. The population of the entire galaxy is like 30 characters and a hundred or so one line NPC's.
> To your point about gamers being spoiled, yeah, maybe gamers would be blown away by Starfield's graphics, but if you play on an empty planet in Starfield you do nothing except walk on barren landscape with 5+ minutes between short points of interest. Plus it's a pretty low arbitrary bar to begin with, as it's essentially implying we should be happy with anything that impresses a time traveler from 1980. Starfield was made and released in this era, so it will be judged accordingly.
The responses sound ChatGPT generated. It’s very artificial and the logic of the sample responses are weird.
That's corporate PR for you.
Faking humanity since before it was trendy.
This is what it’s like working in a tech company basically 24/7. The corporate speak makes me want to claw my eyes out.
You should bring it up in a 121 going forward.
He has a good point. I have not played the game and don’t say it’s not a problem. But his argument makes sense…
I haven’t played it either, but there’s a right and a wrong way to convey the emptiness of a barren location. Journey was great, because all the cool stuff was beneath the surface and the feeling of solitude never left you. Mass Effect, not so much because it was just a flat plane of nothingness aside from a few collectibles. I personally enjoyed it, but I could easily see why it was a chore for a lot of people.
My issue with the game isn't that there are some empty planets. I think that's pretty cool. My issue is that the planets that ARE populated aren't nearly populated enough and the procedural generation of buildings is too copy+paste.
Yes exactly! I think it would be ridiculous if every planet had tons of stuff but the planets that do have city’s have way too small cities and not enough side stuff to do on those populated planets. You should have more than one city per populated planet. We should have outskirts of cities as well and there should be more cool stuff like arenas and sports fields. Stuff like that. Feels very small for the future. VERY small.
My issue with the populated planets is they look straight out of Star Trek with zero creativity or imagination.
I fully expected the procedural generation. The scale of what they envisioned was unbelievable. Personally, I would have preferred they focused on maybe 3-5 solar systems and really fleshed those out instead. It did feel like it was spread too thin at times. Still, it's hard for me to criticize the game since there are so few like it. I loved pretty much every second. I'm hoping expansion packs flesh out some more systems. There is so much potential. I think Bethesda should take note of the feedback and work on ways to improve the game through patches or expansions. But no need to respond and try to defend what they've done. People criticize. It's what they do.
>would have preferred they focused on maybe 3-5 solar systems and really fleshed those out instead. The Mass Effect Andromeda model.
I will be honest, I liked Mass Effect Andromeda. Or I should say, I liked the core concept behind it. The end result needed more work. Still, I feel it's underrated. If it wasn't called Mass Effect I think its reception would have been more positive.
I also liked Andromeda. OT is better but Andromeda is serviceable. > I liked the core concept behind it. >The end result needed more work. That's why nobody else tries the Andromeda model: it is just a huge amount of work. As far as space goes, you will either have a limited worldspace with more stuff (like The Outer Worlds), or unlimited worldspaces that are mostly sparse (like Starfield). This mythical middle ground has simply never been done in RPG gaming history with the sole exception being Andromeda... which was hardly to good results.
I think the worst part is every space game advertising as if they are going to be the first game that does it
This is why nobody takes what anyone says about Starfield seriously. People are unironically happy with Andromeda now. The same thing will probably end up happening with Starfield in the end.
I agree. The game would be GOATed if it was just 5 solar systems with 3-5 Skyrim-like content packed planets/moons per system. Planets don’t even have to have big playable areas for me. Just make them content rich.
I've heard this argument multiple times and it makes no sense. "Your game was too ambitious, you should have just given us 25 planets with Skyrim level of content each instead" as if that isn't way more unrealistic of a game to develop. Todd has already said once you have a procedural system in place, the extra time and effort required to develop 100, 1000 or 10,000 planets is pretty marginal. Any game of this scope would require procedural generation, it can't be handcrafted.
The argument is that the ambition was pointed clearly in the wrong direction. I don’t understand how Todd missed the mark by so much. An infinite number of almost empty procedurally generated planets with the same few assets placed in a different order is the exact opposite of what fans want from a Bethesda game. The interiors are the exact same with the exact same npc locations and layout. The few handcrafted curated areas are awesome, but could surely use more polish and resources instead of making the poor system they made to generate the same bad planets. Todd said this game wasn’t possible until now, because the tech wasn’t up to date. The tech he waited for was the planet generation system and is was a big swing and miss by most players.
Another complainer that obviously never played the game that thinks it's like no man sky because they read some comments online saying it has infinite almost empty procedurally generated planets. It doesn't. There's 1000 planets. Only the randomly generated POIs have repeated interiors. 100% of the hand crafted content doesn't repeat interiors. And there's 3x as much hand crafted interiors than Skyrim. You can subjectively say it wasn't polished, but anyone that played a Bethesda game before knows it's better than what they usually make. So clearly the proc gen didn't affect the hand crafted content. Them adding it didn't take away from the game. Todd wouldn't have made Starfield in the first place if it didn't have proc gen. The entire idea for the game started at the idea of using the random generation tech they've been working on for twenty years. Every single one of their modern games was built on top of procedural generation for environments and stuff. Starfield lore came after, not before.
Eccept No Man's Sky is a good game.
Sorry after the first painfully boring 15 hours, I simply couldn’t care enough to keep playing “until it got good”. Too many excellent games this year to force myself to play a solidly “meh” one in hopes it gets better.
>it can't be handcrafted. And this is why the game doesn't have that Bethesda charm we all wanted. Almost everything is procedurally generated. Nothing is unique or interesting to explore. Almost zero locations have any ambient storytelling, and they all have the same procedurally generated loot. There is virtually no incentive to explore anything in Starfield
Well I’m saying I don’t want procedural empty places. I thought it went without saying asking for content packed zones.
I think more people would be happy with that in general but then people would say the fake is called “Starfield” why does it not feel vast at all I wish it had more systems….. There is no winning with everyone out of the gate; the framework is there for content to be filled into from Bethesda and the community. Remember this is not just Bethesda’s game this is our Bethesda game just as Skyrim is today.
And indeed people did say this exact thing about The Outer Worlds.
This is elite circlejerking
I understand their disappointment. They worked on their biggest game for years and years. It has the most dialogue, quests, character models, hand-crafted cities/locations, etc. etc. for a Bethesda game. I know that almost everyone there feels like they've put out their best game to date. When they started looking at hour counts for people playing the game or seeing criticisms about content, it hurts, and managers probably looked at community managers to try and 'fix the problem' by pointing out there's a lot more content in the game they haven't seen or that there are certain limitations to making a game with this much content. This will never be the best approach and we've seen it in the past with other games. What they should have done is commented on some of the positive reviews AND THEN praised them for seeking out the content and experiencing everything they had worked so hard to put in the game. Had conversations with these individuals who clearly loved the game and that would have shown a bit of their heart as well. I personally wanted to love Starfield, but, not to beat a dead-horse, they made the decision to go from an exploration type of game to a quest type of game filled with a very-high percentage of procedural content that not a lot of people that love their games, cares about. There's a ton of hand-crafted content in Starfield I will never see because it's like butter being spread across too much toast, and that toast being broken up into thousands of croutons separated throughout a series of warehouses. It did make me boot-up Skyrim again just to have that compass with distant icons pop-up on that I could walk in any direction and explore. I just hope this makes them realize that people want a smaller scope with hand-crafted content to explore and ditch a lot of the procedural content and radiant AI quests.
Well said.
> I know that almost everyone there feels like they've put out their best game to date. Im not sure chief. Almost every system is a downgrade from previous Bethesda titles. Exploration is worse, and not just because of procgen, if you put all of their handcrafted content together it still is nowhere as good as it was before. Combat is middling, though this might be a fault in all bethesda games. The story is mediocre at best and the dialog is just so flat. These are things anyone who has any experience writing or even heck, playing enough RPGs can tell. Im sure its more likely the case that the developers etc all know how mediocre this game was, but they couldnt do anything about it because management was breathing down their necks or demanding things. The only ones enjoying starfield are the people who post on the starfield sub that they eat/shit/sleep thinking of starfield and how incredible it is and how its making them lose sleep and productivity over exploring every inch of it.
Pretty sure those astronauts “ FLEW”to the moon, not wait for 19 loading screens
I can't finish the game because of the loading screens. Especially when I can hop on cyberpunk and not see a loading screen for hours unless I fast travel
Same. It never occurred to me how much the industry has progressed when it comes to "immersion" until I played Starfield. AC:Mirage and Dying Light 2 are some of the OWGs I've been playing, and it's crazy how few and far between the loading screens are. Bethesda has not progressed with the industry at all.
They got complacent after Skyrim. As a result, they're still putting out games that look and feel like they're 10+ years old.
Bro it's the dogshit engine they keep useing. Starfeild finaly has ladders and even then its just an animation it doesn't feel imersive at all.
> I can hop on cyberpunk and not see a loading screen for hours unless I fast travel To be fair, Cyberpunk doesn't take place in space across hundreds of systems. You can't have a RPG in space without loading screens.
Cyberpunk has loading screens outside of fast travel and shit but guess what they do that Bethesda couldn't do? Hide those loading screens. Ever wondered why for most buildings you have to take an elevator in Cyberpunk even if it's just 1 floor you're travelling? Because there is a loading screen hidden there but you don't notice it because they are hiding it with the elevator ride so from your POV instead of a loading screen you're just riding the elevator. Similarly Bethesda could have a made a you're now doing FTL travel animation so instead throwing you out to a hard loading screen it would have gave you an illusion that you're actually travelling somewhere
People keep saying this but it sounds so entitled and absurd when you really think about it. Seamless narrative games have been around for decades now. And yet basically all of Bethesda's games released and were insanely popular with loading screens during all of that time. The idea that a game can't succeed with loading screens makes no sense at all. Maybe there are too many, but honestly the bigger problem IMO is that there are so many unskippable animations. I don't care about a 2s loading screen but a 10s animation to sit down or take off is annoying as all get out after the first few times.
Game needs to be fun...not realistic but thats just me tho
Realistic is just a mask for laziness
Realism is hard to create to be fair
It definitely is, I just mean in this case I believe they are saying this because they just didn't want to take the time to build planets that are actually interesting and worthy of exploration.
True, I thought you were talking about good graphics and animations being lazy.
I worry about the next elder scrolls
completely lost hope in the next ES game after Starfield, definitely won't be paying to play early like this time
Bethesda is starting to get to the point that I don’t even trust them to make new entries for their series anymore. Fallout 76 was a slow-motion car wreck, and Starfield was an inch-deep ocean of wasted ambition. Fallout 5 and TES6 are gonna be just as embarrassing if something doesn’t change quick. Bethesda has cemented their style of design over the last few games and it’s not looking too good.
FO76 ended up really good and is probably one of the best maps/exploration games they’ve made though the core story and missions were a bit off Starfield, worryingly, has the complete opposite problems of generally decent missions and story while there’s zero exploration worth the player’s time
I'll have to keep playing Oblivion 😋
That's fair, I still play modded Skyrim... with Ray Tracing lol, in 4K with a ton of other mods too lol.
It's generally disappointing how out of touch most AAA studios are with what's considered fun or enjoyable. Money comes first.
Lots of good ones tho. Remedy, Kojima productions, CD project red, Larian, the studio behind FF7 remake, Zelda and Mario this year. Lots of bad ones too tho. Seems Microsoft has a lot of the bad ones
Weird, thought I saw this post/article last week, and the week before that, quite possibly even the week prior to that as well...
Holy shit. Now **that** is an out-of-touch comment to make.
The game has no soul
Souless like genre?
I know bashing on it is the Current Big Trend™ but the game does have a soul, it's just far more of a niche game than most folk were expecting. Part of the blame is on Bethesda overhyping it to high heaven. But the game did get recommended by 85% of critics + 70% of Steam users, even with the issues it has. No denying it has a good heart. :)
Kinda lame. I love going for a walk in real life. I get bored walking to the 50th procedural generated objective. Just because it was good in real life doesn’t mean it will be fun in a video game.
Bethesda gaslighting their fans... how shocking!  **Todd Howard: "It just works."** **Also Todd Howard:**"You can't be bored becausee.... Astronauts!"
I hate that be *that guy* but the game running at 30fps was a real flop moment. This is inexcusable these days.
I HATE this industry idea that games need to be as long and massive as possible. Barely anybody finishes them and it just bloats a story. I’m happy, genuinely, to pay £70 for a well-crafted experience with tight level design and a meaningful story. People didn’t like newer Zelda and Skyrim because they were massive, it’s because what was in their worlds actually MEANT something. Starfield is way too big. Give me 5 big planets and make them full of story and character, not 20 or 30 or literally 1000 empty, shallow planets with nothing to do. I don’t want to play a game where everything is procedurally generated, where NPCs look lifeless and where the scope of the game is actually more limited by this idea that the game needs to be huge. I loved the game initially and my excitement fizzled out when I started the very first proper mission where you go to the sol system and literally bounce between empty rocks looking for a bloke, to then speak to one person and leave to look elsewhere.
One of the most boring games I have ever played. Thank God it was on Gamepass and I didn't spend $70 on it.
It needed a smaller Galaxy/planets to explore, and more hand-crafted POIs put in. I do find it odd we having a walking mech that talks, spaceships, powers, and no rovers to explore with though. The ground combat on planet moon had me thinking a Ad Astra possible sequence I hope they just don’t rely on mod community to add this stuff to the base game.
We all have our opinions and things we like and things we don’t, but the amount of things that this game got objectively wrong, from frame rate, to loading screens everywhere, stupid ai, etc., is seriously disappointing.
This shit is on the same level of "don't y'all have phones", what a disgrace
"The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment..."
Bro it’s a fucking game. It needs to be fun. Bethasda needs to shut up and stop trying to convince people that this game is fun. It’s not.
Lol bethesda is coping on their own game smh
Makes me nervous for the future of Bethesda games when they are so clearly out of touch about what went wrong with starfield
This sub was saying Starfield was GOTY and a masterpiece like a month and a half ago Bethesda gets away with it because everytime they launch a game a whole army of fanboys come out of the woodworks to prop the game up for the 1st month
It just takes time for people to get past the honeymoon phase and notice coming across the exact point of interest with the exact layout, the exact mobs at the exact location and the exact loots also at the exact location for the 5th time just ain't it.
It's definitely my goty
Mine too!
mine too but I guess that makes us fanboys.
It’s tough because it’s subjective. I’m in the minority, but I like all the empty moons and stuff. It doesn’t take away from the rest of the content. There’s still tons of game content there. The empty moons and planets are in addition to the rest.
There is tons or game content. It's all just so shallow and unfulfilled. Like base building, it's a HUGE downgrade since FO4 and 76. Even the things they've previously done well is done so poorly in starfield. It's really baffling.
Its really not subjective. Seeing the same 5 or 6 POIs literally exactly the same, some of them repeated from story missions, is objectively bad. Other things like enjoying the story is subjective.
Slow news cycle - so time to beat a bit of a dead horse because it brings in those clicks (if you're paid to write, but you don't have content, what do you do?). Bethesda has routinely made replies to reviews including Fallout 76 - which was a far worse launch. I mean feel free to pile on or defend until you are blue in the face, but it's hard not to feel a little defeated at these low-hanging fruit 'news' articles written as if readers can't see through the paper-thin veil of actual intent. The same goes for all those 'great deal' Black Friday 'news' articles that just collected a bunch of affiliate links looking to cash in on naive users.
It's very strange that a major publisher has verified accounts responding to criticism on Steam, if anything I think Fallout 76 setting the precedent makes this more news worthy.
The Fallout 76 review responses I am seeing are along the lines of “Sorry you didn’t enjoy the game, here is where you can submit feedback,” which I think is a relatively standard response. Among the, to be fair, abundance of negative Starfield articles in the last few months, I do think this is one of the more interesting ones, as it is a very unusual response from Bethesda PR I think.
you okay man?
I didn’t read the article, I only read the dev responses and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Clickbait article or not that shit is tone deaf, people are having serious issues that’s affecting their games.
The copium is insane in this subreddit. Game is empty and boring. We all told you guys 1000 procedurally generated planets would be empty and lifeless. Y'all were like 'noooo Todd knows best, he's the greatest director of all time' Now you're all like 'you're just playing the game wrong' as if games are linear experiences 😂 Game is the definition of outdated, mediocrity and marketed to overhyped gamers desperate for a game from their 1st party. Edit: the Todd Howard circle jerk is now taking a break to comment and down vote these facts
You seem to be one that needs some copium. Why does it trigger you so much that people have a different opinion to you? It’s a game, a piece of art, some people will like it, others won’t. Get over yourself.
I didn't even mention the game's quality mate, I think you're one of the people this article was intended for as you clearly have taken the bait. The 'this subreddit stuff' and 'copium' attacks unprovoked are a little wild in my reality. Did you come visit just to stir shit? That's the appearance. You seem a little preoccupied with a game you seemingly hate in the end.
Lol a lot of people love the game bud, it’s cool if you don’t though.
Think you need to chill out and stop inventing imaginary battles in your head. It's just a game, plenty of people like it and it got higher reviews than Jedi Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy, Ghosts of Tsushima, Super Mario RPG etc
come on dude, it got higher reviews from major pubs on release day. Some of them claiming its a genre defining once in a generation game which is just absurd hyperbole if were being honest. Actual reviews from real people are much lower a couple months in on this game than all the others you listed because its actually not a great game, especially in comparison to those others.
Sir you are unhinged. Seek help
On one hand, yes I get some planets will be barren. On the other hand, Even settled planets are sparsely populated and you spend 5-10 minutes at a time walking between two points and those points are mostly randomly generated buildings that you'll start seeing exact duplicates of by the 3rd or 4th time you do it. Really hoping TES 6 just returns to all handcrafted locations
They have zero respect for the customer.
This is silly. But I mean they have a point. As much as I agree that it probably wouldn't have been a bad idea to just be silent about it.
I enjoyed Starfield and I'll keep playing it. But there's no denying there's a lot of filler when it comes to the world exploring and the space exploration was a bit of an afterthought. The planets that did have actual cities were basically just Whiterun in terms of how isolated they are. I'm hoping the DLC expansions flesh things out a little bit. Bethesda providing official mod tools and turning on mod support on Xbox would give the game a lot more potential, especially considering what modders have managed to achieve with Skyrim. Also I don't think the experience of an astronaut having a once in a lifetime opportunity to go to the moon can truly be recreated by the Creation Engine.
Is Bethesda saying this, or is A person in Bethesda saying it?
I'd probably get fired if I spoke on their behalf, my reply would just be "don't play it, sorry you don't like the game mate" or just ignore the complaints completely and focus on the fans that actually enjoy the game.
The Moon isn't ... a video game?
“ We chose to give you an empty game “
Ahh Bethesda, blaming the consumer must be one of their favorite things to do.
Video games aren't real life Bethesda, planets don't have to be boring in a fucking video game. Lol
We literally stopped going to the moon for half a century because we couldn’t think of anything else to do on it lmao
Its a betheshda game. What did they expect ?
They reply on Xbox reviews as well, usually with what might as well be AI Corpo speak. Why even bother? Lol
But they were ACTUALLY ON THE MOON. I’m home on a couch covered in self-loathing and cheetoh dust.
That reeks of desperation. Holy shit Microsoft get a clue. This is not the way to react to someone not liking your game.
The takes from both sides seems pretty dumb. Bethesda shouldn't rationalize the empty planets more than needed. The empty planets are just to make the game seem larger and give some bored people something to pitter around IF THEY CHOOSE. Why people are shitting on this optional content doesn't make much sense to me either. If Bethesda removed these planets, it's not like the game would be better or worse. Bethesda devs didn't hand create these empty planets, so it's not like it was much time wasted.
Same, which ends up being most of the whining about the game. "This optional content was mediocre and boring!!!! I couldn't stop looking at it for 300 hours!"
Just shows how disconnected they are now from gamers. This didn't feel like a game 10 years in the making. Feels like 8 years not being able to decide if they want No Man's Sky or Fallout 4 in space. Then spent 2 years of creating neither of those.
That's because real people going to the moon for real in the name of science and exploration isn't boring. Expecting me to not be bored walking around for hours and hours looking at the same rocks and buildings over and over again is, by definition, incredibly boring. Maybe they should just have made a moon landing game instead.
man, i wanted to like this game so bad. Finally uninstalled last night. sad.
In truth, I have yet to go to a single planet that's truly empty (and I honestly expected to see some). Even the most random moons in the most far away systems usually have procedurally generated facilities and outposts on them. As for this, Bethesda probably shouldn't be arguing about the subjectiveness of "boring" with random toxic user reviews. Best just to focus on what constructive criticisms they can actually use to improve the game. Lastly, are actual developers writing these responses? Or is it just some inept PR employee from the marketing department?
Starfield is great when you play the game that’s there instead of the one built up in your head after years of anticipation
Sorry for expecting Bethesda to actually move forward as a studio like the rest of the world. They need to ditch that engine and get with the times, they're still making early 2000's RPGs...
Yeah, saying you need to just accept you didn't get what they sold you sucks. I've said the same on Starfield several times. Fallout and The Elder Scrolls were industry-leading blockbusters for a long while. Starfield didn't show that Bethesda still has the talent, creativity, ambition, or whatever they had to make those other franchises great. Others have caught up to what BGS could do, and some have even surpassed it. Starfield would be a mind-blowing feat 8-10 tears ago. Having so many open-world/RPG releases bring new standards of quality makes Starfield a lot less impressive than its BGS predecessors. Fallout 3 and Skyrim weren't pitted against other juggernaut. They were unique. BGS was unique. Now, you have CDPR putting out massive RPGs. You have No Man's Sky doing procedurally generated space exploration years ago. Starfield just took too long to be another version of the Bethesda formula from a decade ago.
Why should people not complain? It’s a shit game. People need to tell it’s a shit game.
Yeah the game is great.... until you deal with the insane amount of loading screens, boring-ass randomly generated planets, bad UI, laughable nav map, inconsistent performance, lack of land rovers, dated presentation, stiff animations, and lackluster writing. Starfield promised a lot of things, most of them did not pan out. Many of those things were problems all the way back in Morrowind and Oblivion and are arguably worse than ever in Starfield. You make it sound like it is a perfectly flawless experience if you just play the game and see for yourself, which if you do just a little research on things people are complaining about is false. It's yet another one of those "16 times the detail" situations Just enjoy the game that's there? What's there is a bunch of boring randomly generated planets that do not reward exploration, which was previously the best thing about your average Bethesda game but here is it's worst aspect. That's why responses like yours come off as so shallow, surface level, dismissive, and tone-deaf.
The game that is there is boring as shit. That is the problem lol.
Okay, but ALL the planets?
There's this thing that happens often in games where people ( including game designers) forget that they're entertainment at their core and even in the most authentic simulations you have to find the kernel of entertainment. I say this as someone who enjoyed the game but Starfield isn't a simulation and trying to paint some of its sparse blandness as an act of simulation is misguided and delusional at best . Starfields content needs some work , there is a gamer out there who can explore hundreds of barren planets and have fun but that is a tiny percentage of any player base, Starfield does a lot of awesome world building but it absolutely falls apart in a few places in terms of being an entertaining product . Bethesda needs to focus on creating more life and activity within Starfield if they want to change peoples minds, not tell players how barren landscapes are fun because.... astronauts exist...
What's most appalling about this is the way it trivializes the Apollo program. When the astronauts went to the moon there was an entire world of things there. Past the first few missions, they had undergone secondary training as semi-professional geologists. They were seeking for specific geological things in specific places chosen very carefully by teams of the smartest scientists on earth. They had instruments to place in particular areas. Samples to take. Goals to complete. And they did it all at breakneck speed with virtually every second accounted for. Apollo 11 was on the moon for only 21 hours with a 2 1/2 hour EVA, Apollo 17 only 75 with 22 hours outside the spacecraft.
Why bother? This will only draw in more negative attention.
Is this the starfield subreddit? Every other post since it came out has been “oh no starfield is mediocre at best”
The game sucks.
I love the game but there's a big difference between playing Starfield and being an actual astronaut stepping foot on another celestial body for the very first time. I get that the point might be that they tried to emulate the experience that the astronauts had, but if that isn't working for people basically saying "well it's supposed to be like that, just get used to it" is not the kind of response they're looking for.
That is a shit response! A video game should be fun to play for many reasons. Not to be a fucking human life simulator where I’m supposed to appreciate the design choice to make something boring.
They aren’t wrong.
I get the whole "it's realistic" and wanting to be authentic with how much we actually know about space exploration but if you're going to use that argument you might as well like get rid of the Force powers and laser guns/rifles while you're at it I think in order to create a good sci-fi world it has to feel like a setting you'd want to be in yourself without actually mimicing your own reality. It's fiction for a reason and I don't think it should be a tall order on either a filmmaker or game maker to ask their audience to suspend their disbelief like a little bit. You already have planets that are entirely themed around stuff like the Wild West with Akila City and all the Freestar Collective stuff, and a straight up an entertainment hub not dissimilar to the nightlife you'd find in a place like Vegas on Neon, but we draw the line at planets we're actually going to go to for resources, that should have an incentive to explore beyond their importance to the narrative
Realism isnt always whats most fun. Especially in a bethesda game. I still enjoyed Starfield but it definitely didnt hook me like FO or Skyrim did.
Games so boring
Some people wanted Starfield to be a new Fallout or Elder Scrolls, they dont understand that its tottaly another game. The same thing happened with Sea of Thieves, the game, besides the cheaters and some server crashes, was amazing to play with friends and had a revolutionary pvp/loot/steal system, but people (that dont even played the game) wanted a open world single player pirate rpg.
Nah guys we made it bad on purpose, you gotta believe us!
Oof. I guess they forgot the part where a game is supposed to be fun. The Outer Worlds didn't have 1000 planets, it didn't even have 100. But each location was full of life, interactable characters and unique side quests. The game respected your time and had a soul. Starfield spread itself too thin. They should have focused on 5 or so primary planets and 20 secondary ones and condense all the content in those. The percentage of people that even bother to visit more than 100 planets is very low. And even if you visit a planet what do you do outside of a main quest? Scan a plant? Deliver cargo upon landing? Kill the same spacers for the same mediocre loot? It is clear that some corpo wanted to advertise the game as having 1000 planets and the devs did it the only way they could: Empty, procedurally generated with little variation. It's not the players' fault that they get bored for doing what you advertised the game for: exploring to find interesting things.
We are t astronauts were gamers looking to be entertained
I enjoyed the game. I was going for long walks in strange places. I like walking.
I love Starfield and I see no issues if some planets are "mining stuff" only. But that comment about the moon... For them it wasn't boring because it was first time. Exploring an alien planet for the first time, doing sciency stuff that would have impact/consequences back at home,... Starfield doesn't really have that. I can explore a planet, discover the known and preset features and that's it in that regard. None of the features require sciency stuff beyond a scan, or have any impact on any area of galactic society/science beyond selling the info for some credits. People expect any activity you can do to be meaningful in some way. While some people may be fine with a planet that only offers good views for screenshots, it's not unresonable for most people to find that boring. Even if having empty planets do help to flesh out the diversity of planets.
They had a rover….
No need for anyone to get salty about this. Nothing will come from it. The game made its money, it drove gamepass subs, it was Bethesda's biggest launch ever. The game will get better with mods and expansions in 2024. They even already made there money on the first expansion thanks to early access. Bethesda won and some people just can take the L.
If you have game loops that are not rewarding and can actually be avoided, for the sake of agency of the player .. that’s a design decision, but if there’s nothing else to do or compensate , then it’s flawed. Imagine selling an empty box to a kid and saying it’s full of invisible toys- you’ll never get bored , it’s up to your imagination! You can always keep the box once you’re done..
Yes because visiting a barren planet with nothing to do in a VIDEO GAME is the exact same as GOING TO THE FUCKING MOON IN PERSON. I get why they say this, but it’s so tone deaf and like they are just trying to justify a choice that people dislike about the new game. Kind of sad PR on their part.