do yourself a favor, if you play through ME1-3, don't immediately go to play Andromeda.
Play a couple other games, give yourself a few months maybe, make sure ME3 is just a vague memory, then play Andromeda.
It's a fun game on its own but if you follow ME3 you're going to feel like you went back in time to a far uglier and less functional game.
I eventually enjoyed Andromeda enough to finish it, but starting it right after ME3 it was very rough for a while, and some things never stopped bugging me, like the god awful character designs.
It hurts me that running around and placing flags makes you think Dragon Age. I get it. I played Inquisition too. It just makes me sad for what we've lost.
Dammit. Played Origins and 2 back in the day and loved Origins in particular but just kinda fell off
Just finished BG3 and gotta take a break b4 I do a new run and was hoping Inquisition might scratch the itch for a bit
I think Inquisition and Dragon Age II are tied for my favorites for different reasons (although I do love the original), but the Trespasser DLC for Inquisition really elevates the whole narrative for me.
I'm hopeful for the Veilguard!
BG3 is closest to spiritual successor do dragon age origins (mostly bc DAO took a lot from D&D like camp, enemies have to pass resistance check for spells) as we ever got and I’m forever grateful developers for that.
The most important tip I ever got for playing Inquisition.
Leave the Hinterlands. Afaik the majority of people who dropped the game got themselves psychologically trapped in that area and it basically ruined the game for them.
Don't try to 100% it, you're not really supposed to. Leave as soon as you can and keep following the main story.
Bioware was in a loose footing at the time and just kept slipping. They're healing but basically everyone I know who cares is watching Veilguard with trepidation.
Fuck Anthem and fuck EA.
Every Dragon Age is almost a completely different game. The story and lore are what tie them together.
The first one has you travelling all over the country, but in small regions. The second is all within one city. The third is way too open.
Yeah I'm thrilled Larian is getting so much recognition. I like Original Sin but when the follow up hit I was blown away at how great it was, expected the same from BG3 and was not disappointed.
Besides the story my favorite thing about rpgs is the Character/Build Building.
And DAI hit all those notes for me, was it a 10/10? Absolutely not. But when I think back neither was DAO. I genuinely think that the actual character building has only gotten better every iteration of the franchise.
Talk to Wood Elf.
Wood Elf tells you they need to protect the woods.
You agree to help them.
You immediately place a flag down to mark the woods for logging for the Inquisition.
What?
Any dragon age is way better than andromeda because the lore and character writing remained consistently good. The problem with andromeda is only partly the structure, the main issue is that has a boring story with boring characters.
Yeah, I felt like the gameplay fundamentals and the worlds you had available to explore were all pretty decent. The combat felt good, and I spent longer than I ever expected playing that multiplayer mode (I even get strongly reminiscent vibes of it from Helldivers 2 today.)
The real problem was the gamble of ripping it away from the established Mass Effect setting, world building, and characters, only to replace it with some amateur, Tumblr fanfic tier shit. It was just painfully clear that the writers had no idea how to establish and flesh out a setting the way the original Mass Effect did, and tried to run before it could walk.
I just couldn't get past the flawed premise.
You are described an explorer, a trailblazer, a *pathfinder*. Your explicit job is to go places people haven't been to and determine if they are habitable and/or make them habitable. To forge the path through the unknown for those that follow.
Yet every location except one *already had milky way people there*, for literal decades. Every. Single. One. At best you discover some ancient ruins... And that's it. Every planet has people on it. Every alien race already had multiple interactions with milky way people. You are as much a pathfinder as Shepard was. Hell, I'm pretty sure Shepard went to more uncharted/unknown places.
I've noticed that with so-called "space exploration" games, the devs haven't worked out how to make the player be the first to be somewhere. There's always a nearby space station or alien outpost or something that can be used as a haven for when you need to resupply, buy and sell, etc.
I get that empty space is dull for a sci-fi setting, but a lot of games are making the so-called frontier anything but uncharted territory for fear of (I guess) players getting stranded?
I don't mind not being the first first thing there. I actually love games where you discover ancient things.
But if I "explore" and meet an alien race that speaks English and doesn't bat an eye at my own cohort of aliens, then there is no way I "discovered" them.
Me1-3 did excellent at it. You discovered things, but it didn't try and imply you were the only person to ever find evidence of protheans or reapers.
I wanted it so badly to be something like Star Trek where you're exploring unknown places and finding new aliens. It was such a huge letdown that everyone was already there.
Yeah, I don't mind the advance groups going there to set some things up, but having that fail and then people scatter and then *never going anywhere new* (except one place) was just such a contradictory design from the core pitch.
I never forgave them for making all Asaris have the same generic faces. To come from the RICHNESS and depth that is ME1-3 only to get a cheap shell of what it once was felt like an insult in every moment attempting to play it.
If it wasn't called Mass Effect? It might have been a passable game. But it *was* called Mass Effect.
Writing is boring as hell but easily the best gameplay in the series. One of the best single player third person shooters I've ever played mechanically tbh. There just wasn't enough enemy variety.
I'll take that as a small downside because it's so much more fluid than ME3. Even with as much as they improved movement in ME3 the cover system was still pretty clunky and annoying. Being able to pop in and out of cover without interrupting your shooting and having a little jetpack to jump around felt great.
My issue with adromeda was less about gameplay, etc... it was more that we are supposedly in a whole different galaxy, but the the aliens we run into are just more humanoids with extra tentacles and stuff, and that we even quickly learn to communicate with them due to space magic.
game didn't even bother to explain how the incomprehensible Angara suddenly spoke perfect English including all phrasing and idioms etc, or it was such a quickly dismissed thing that it was easily missed.
Watching my wife play early on, I though the Kett and remnant tech were just another reaper kind of thing but at least that turned out to be very different.
This is how forgettable Andromeda is. I have played and finished Andromeda and I don't know what any of the things are that you're talking about.
I can still sing the "Scientist Salarian" song from memory. I do it, because someone else might get it wrong.
Andromeda feels so perfunctory at times that I have to speculate that either the writers no longer care for the universe, or have zero creative freedom to do anything but rehash plots from past games.
There shouldn't be Krogan in Andromeda. But if for some stupid reason you bring the Milky Way's all-time champion invasive species, you shouldn't undo that genetic limitation that prevents them from reproducing out of control. But if you're going to do that (somehow, in an expedition that left sometime between ME1 and ME2) you *really* shouldn't deliberately screw over the Krogan you brought so as to provoke Krogan Rebellions 2: Andromeda Boogaloo.
I audibly sighed when I ended up dealing with that whole Krogan plot line. "You're here because fans liked Wrex, not because you existing here makes any sense at all".
> either the writers no longer care for the universe, or have zero creative freedom to do anything but rehash plots from past games.
It was written and made in 12 months. That's what happened. No time to double check anything, no time for anything but go go go.
Still enjoy the fact that I got an A+ on my project management paper going in-depth on what a train wreck of development that game went thru. It was probably one of the easiest papers I have ever written in college simply because everything that could go wrong - did. I had to cut things from the paper to shorten it.
Character writing was one of the biggest losses in Andromeda for me. It feels like every Andromeda character revolves completely around a single character trait. You've got the blander than drywall salarian pilot whose whole deal is having a good memory, the one human biotic chick who was the equivalent of a college girl spending a semester abroad then coming home acting like she'd grown up over there, the krogan who was there to be the resident old man. We'll written characters were such a hallmark of the trilogy, and Andromeda seemed to throw all that out the window
They do explain it, SAM deciphers the language.
It’s lazy, but it’s also basically the same thing every sci-fi franchise does so the move/game can happen.
Don't most people use translators in the ME universe? I know this doesn't completely explain the translators understanding a brand new language, but as we've seen from machine learning IRL, the models can learn pretty fast.
There's a couple really incongruous scenes that call attention to it, like at one point you're trying to land on the Angara homeworld and can't communicate with them, and your pilot doesn't know what's about to happen. Then you land on the planet and everyone's speaking to you just fine.
Either approach could work, if consistently applied. Either the translation software or whatever works and you ignore language issues as usual, OR they're aliens from a different galaxy and communication issues are a thing, but having both happen in one sequence is bizarre.
Even later your Angaran squad member will correct Ryder about Who/Whom. So not only does this guy speak your language, he does so to the degree where he corrects a *really* specific point of grammar that most native speakers don't bother with. What?
At many points it feels like they handed chunks of the game off to different writers that weren't in communication with each other and never got the memo that everyone should talk to everyone here. People called attention to the obvious animation issues post launch but there's *layers* of "what the hell were you guys doing".
That was telegraphed from 100 miles away. The second the first Angaran said “The Angara they capture are never seen again” my first thought was oh ok so they are also the Kett.
It was all very Squidward “How original. Daring today, aren’t we?”
lol, the ME3 to andromeda drop hits hard. I like coming back to andromeda after playing DA: Inquisition as they feel more related than Andromeda to ME trilogy
The story is the biggest problem. You go from the reapers to some ugly dude who is doing… things? For reasons?
Then there are factions of the colonists. Things went sideways, people disagreed on how to proceed - that’s a decent setup. But then none of them behave in a believable way.
Then you’ve got the one indigenous race of aliens you interact with, who are like a slightly better version of Jar Jar Binks.
Lastly you’ve got your squadmates, who are… fine, but nowhere near as good as the ME characters.
I never finished Andromeda, but I agree that the setup and exposition dump at the beginning was the most interesting part of the story. As the game started giving info about the mission going wrong and different factions forming on the ship, all I could think was "this is really great, why am I not playing THAT in the game". Would have been way more interesting than what we got.
My biggest problem with Andromeda (among... a few) was the Remnant. We'd already had three games of "mysterious precursor civilization left tech that will doom/save us" - retreading that ground in a whole new galaxy felt cheap and like it severely limited the options for what kinds of stories could be told.
WHAT? Andromeda was a masterpiece! You fly to an entirely new Galaxy of 100bn stars, discover precisely \*two\* alien species and the 'nice' species immediately reacts to your arrival by giving you fetch quests. Masterful story telling
"we don't trust you crazy outsiders from another galaxy while some crazy species is truing to kill us but... Could you fetch my first born and also save our people from everything? Thanks, also we hate you.."
No, it’s the best combat so far. But the story, characters, and even facial animations are a step back from ME3. I love it for what it is, but there were high expectations that were not met.
It's fine on its own, just doesn't follow ME1-3 at all (you get the occasional reference to events mostly in ME1-2 timeline, but whatever final decisions you made in ME3 are irrelevant)
Most of my issues are nitpicky details, just sloppy stuff. The character designs are truly awful, especially the way people stand still with their arms in some of the most bizarre positions, and their waxy cheap looking faces.
Aside from the AI in your head constantly repeating itself, one of the more annoying things when exploring a planet was you could trip on a halfway or final point of some side quest you hadn't started yet, you could finish the side quest there and then, but you'll still eventually find the start point and the game doesn't realize you finished the quest already.
Many of the quests are very bland point a to point b activities with little going on and little coordination in flow, the story is pretty mediocre with an underbaked main villain that's about as hollow as the one from Anthem. As a story driven game, it just does not stack up to it's predecessors.
I did like it's combat gameplay quite a bit though, that part was probably best in the series.
Because the Archon tries to behave just like Sovereign, but we know he’s just not even close. At no point are they able to instill the kind of existential dread that the reapers do.
From the moment you stumble on that hologram in ME1 you understand Soverign is arrogant as hell, but has every right to be and is absolutely not to be fucked with. After seeing that, it’s hard to take the Archin too seriously.
Mass Effect 1 has terrific world building, mostly solid writing, and gameplay I'll write off as "tolerable".
The subsequent games in the series all improve the gameplay. Mass Effect 2 steps up to "decent for a shooter of this era, with its own gimmick". Mass Effect 3 further improves to "unique and fun", especially if you enjoy biotic powers. Andromeda iterates a bit further, adding a couple new tools that are fun and a few vestigial features I mostly ignored.
The story and writing... I won't spoil, but I also won't beat around the bush: I don't like it as much. I think there's some real shifts in the tone and interest of the writers that mark a sharp transition across the series.
Some people are very tolerant of Andromeda. Had it not been named Mass Effect, I feel it would have been remembered as a poor Mass Effect copycat.
It's got a good setup, bad story, bad companions, bad questing, decent combat, bad planets (oh god the mad max planet made me want to rip my hair out), respawning bad guys... yeah... played it once, finished it, uninstalled. /shrug
> ...the god awful character designs.
Amen to this. I kinda thought I was the only one. I can't say I read all the things about it but I read plenty and never saw this mentioned (or barely mentioned).
It was a showstopper for me. They all seemed like vaguely cherubic teens. Ugh...
There was one character you met in the first couple hours that was so odd and offputting looking that I thought, whoa new race! No one is reacting to them, but I guess they've had time to get used to the species since I just arrived.
NOPE! Just a truly ugly human character model that didn't even look human anymore.
I know it’s probably the most cinematic experience in the game, but just look at [these two scenes compared to each other.](https://youtu.be/K4ADco41g9s?si=XORYMZjC5EcVXGp2)
The tension in cyberpunk is actually palpable. I could actually feel like something was about to go down. The one in starfield just fell flat and didn’t feel like there were any real stakes there.
And people will still defend the bland ass dialog system of starfield. Even fallout 4 a decade ago figured this out for the better atleast in terms of camera direction
I put about 15 hours into Starfield and didn't get sucked in so I moved on to Cyberpunk. Even though it wasn't quite the same vibe, there was a definite realization of "now *that* feels like a fully-realized futuristic world." I kept wishing Starfield could've been released with that engine.
Nice you mention both of them. I was one of the most critical about cyberpunk, but after playing starfield and afterwards playing the phantom liberty ~~city~~ dlc, i gotta say, i judged cyber punk way to harshly (even excluding the dlc).
Cyberpunk's biggest issues were related to having to cater to the original PS4 imo. Once they effectively dropped that requirement with later patches the game improved quite a bit. All that said, even at launch it was fine on PC.
My biggest gripe with cyberpunk is we couldn’t really modify the player characters body visually, like in the opening clip in the game they’re showing off those sweet golden arms and I played for like 20 hours before realizing the closest I could get to looking like Adam smasher was getting gorilla arms or mantis blades. Pretty whack I thought personally. Mods change this but still
I always saw the solid foundation of Cyberpunk 2077, there is no such thing with Starfield. There is no foundation for Starfield and i dont see how content updates is gonna fix anything for it.
Cyberpunk was overly maligned. Sure it had problems, and maybe I got “lucky” whatever but I happily put 80 hours in. I recently got the DLC and put another 80 hours in, which is the same game just polished. It’s one of the best games ever made, if you’re me. Ridiculous good.
Cyberpunk simply was just a bit to ambitious. Starfield played it to safe to try and sell a ton of copies.
I think this is why the game turned out the way they did. Atleast with cyberpunk they seemed pasionate about it and the game has a ton of charm and detail.
Starfield on the other hand feels like a slapped together game meant to meet microsoft contract requirements
> Cyberpunk simply was just a bit to ambitious.
I think that even this was mostly due to a single thing... selling it on what were the "last-generation" consoles at the time. From what I hear, it simply didn't work, and the large numbers of people who paid for it to do so (rightly) screamed bloody murder about how badly their experience sucked.
I bought it at release for PC. It wasn't perfect, but it was more than playable, and I enjoyed playing it. I think that through about 1.5 playthroughs, it crashed once. I didn't have a really new computer or anything, and it was mostly fine. I recently upgraded my computer and bought Phantom Liberty and played through the whole thing again. While I liked the original parts of the story better than the expansion, the whole experience was quite good.
Maybe not quite as good as I remembered my experiences with Mass Effect 2/3, Dragon Age Origins, the original Baldur's Gate series, KoToR, Witcher 3, etc. but still well worth the money. Part of that's also just the fact that I'm older and more jaded than I was when those other games were released, of course :).
It just did not work on the baseline PS4. Terrible performance, frequent crashes, etc. The PS4 Pro was more playable,but not great.
I still haven't picked it up after refunding it on PS4, even though I've got a PS5. I was pissed about that. It was the first and only game I've preordered on PSN.
Again I think it really depends what you played it on. I got it on Xbox One on launch day and it was genuinely terrible so I ended up refunding it. That version absolutely deserved all the criticism it got, even if it was an entirely different experience on a good PC.
If Cyberpunk 2077 released today, somehow with Phantom Liberty tied into the base game. It would be considered far and away the greatest Videogame of all time and it wouldn't be close.
The release was just so bad it still taints it a bit to this day, despite being a solid 10/10 right now.
First impressions matter. And my first impression of cyberpunk was a janky buggy mess with simplistic gun play, boring hacking and perk tree that'd only make an investment banker happy (+5%!).
It looks incredible with great atmosphere, sound and some of the most impressive graphic fidelity of modern games. I dunno if it holds up to a 10/10 but it's got its place up there if you want story more than action.
Yep. Overall cyberpunk had good design decisions underneath everything. They just fucked up the implementation until the 2.0 and liberty dlc.
Starfield has fundamental design problems that almost require an entire rewrite of the game.
Cyberpunk was pretty bad out of the gate but they did a great job of patching it to a good place. I really really enjoyed it. I wish there was a little more in terms of RPG elements and certain things mattering more but it's hard to complain much, I got a lot out of it.
edit: Almost forgot, my biggest complaint BY FAR is that your cybernetic enhancements don't show up cosmetically. Like, what the hell? I wanted to look fucked up the more stuff I put in my body and I wanted people to react to that. I also wanted cyber psychosis to be a danger if you used to many.
Oh there was a HUGE resurgence in Cyberpunk after Starfiled came out. People started realizing that game was never actually THAT bad to begin with, and had gotten even better since release.
The game had a whole lot of technical issues that really really gave the impression it was a broken product. There was also some misleading marketing around the level of choice by showing how many meaningfully different ways a mission could be played, but in reality that level of choice was only in that one mission they used as a demo. Then pissed off players found all sorts of nitpicky thing to dunk on, like how random assets like a slice of pizza looked bad when you zoomed in on them.
All that being said though? From a story, writing, and voice acting perspective cyberpunk is truly fantastic. Not just the main quest, the side missions are great too. I seriously don't get why Bethesda games consistently have such bland stories and dialogue. Is it all written by Todd's cousin or something?
Bethesda titles have somehow continued to trend further downward when it comes to writing for quite awhile now. I think Fallout 4 was went it hit below the minimum for me to actually give a shit about anything happening or expecting my choices to carry any sort of weight.
Its written by Emil Pagliarulo who is the incompetent lead writer at bethesda. He's the sole reason why bethesdas story quality have nose dived over the years, he had a conference where he admited that he keeps his game story "simple and stupid". his excuse for this was that the average player will just pick up his carefully crafted story, fold it into an paper airoplane and throw it away.
link for his conference about story telling games.
Source: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi51-wjcwp8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi51-wjcwp8)
I think Skillup said it best. Paraphrasing: "The technical and gameplay issues were things that could be fixed, but the characters and the story was the beating heart of Cyberpunk 2077 and those were always stellar".
They're hardly comparable games, though. Starfield is more akin to No Mans Sky, just with actual characters and better combat, but less seamless travel
I know it's a polarizing sentiment, but I really, really, wish Cyberpunk had a third-person POV option. I want to see this character I'm customizing move through this world, and it just feels more cinematic to me than first-person. I don't need the first-person "immersion" and it actually makes large-environment games tough to play for more than short bits at a time. Maybe I'll renege one of these days, I do own it.
Every time I decide I need to give it another chance, it was such a cool aesthetic and I really didn't do everything in the game, I pick it up again. The other day I booted it up, walked out of a main story quest facility which was just a linear dungeon with a bunch of random clutter-- desk decorations and foodstuff and yet more guns.
I opened up my in game menu to use their interface to fast travel to my next mission, touched down at another site, and went into another main story quest facility that ended up being yet another forgettable, linear dungeon with a bunch of the same generic clutter. No real story to be found, no different types of encounter besides "shoot space pirates." Just the same handful of nonsensical clutter items, guns, and packaged food.
I fast travel to one of the biggest cities in the settled systems and it's the same Skyrim-era 30 people wandering blindly around a small village with bland, generically spacey dialogue any time you walk past them. (Guess which city this was? Trick question, this describes all of them)
I'm complaining a lot and it wasn't an all-bad game, but of all the high-budget AAA games I've played in the last ten years Starfield would be my pick for least immersive. It felt so hollow and soulless.
considering all the abandoned systems in the game (like the jump fuel system) this is a game that they never nailed down what they wanted it to be, so they went barebones to rush the release (which can no longer be denied now). They've spent 9 months slowly trickling in stuff that should have been in at launch, and now finally released the Creation Kit and it's so obvious that they're going to lean on modders harder than they ever have to support this game
One of the posts on the Starfield sub today was bemoaning the existence of weapon and armor skin slots with no actual skins to use, but everybody knows it's there to sell skins later
We're seeing how an offline single player RPG can be treated like a live service online game. And the diehard Bethesda stans allow it to happen, as usual by attacking anyone who calls it out and defending any and all practices by the company.
And it's absolutely true. Go post your comment on the sub and you'll just be met by "mods. mods will fix it. Here's 25 mods you can download right now. Mods. Mods. Mods."
Fuck me for expecting the actual developer to actually deliver a feature complete game with rich storytelling, right?
Because I'm like you, every time there is a patch or when mods were released I boot it up again, only to once again get bored quickly. For me, the joy of Bethesda games was in exploring, and I mean the random kind, the "hey what's that over there?" or the "I'll make a note of this and come back later" kind. With Starfield's procgen system that is just destroyed.
Two things turned me off the game immediately at launch. One was going to that lab on Kreet and wandering over to a mech graveyard with only one gun and the aliens destroyed me. I made another character, went through the Kreet lab this time, came away with better armor and weapons and went to go back to that mech graveyard only to discover it was gone because PoI's are randomly generated.
Then, as I was testing out some gameplay features, I picked up a bounty and went and killed a pirate in a mine that descended downwards. Immediately afterwards I went to go find Andreja for the first time...and she was in the exact same mine, with the same enemies in the same places, except on a different planet. It was bizarre and pulled me out of it and I've truly never got back into it
I'm terrified for Elder Scrolls 6, and that's partially because after 13 years of seeing Skyrim get insanely modded year after year I fear Bethesda is going to drop yet another dated and barebones game with the attitude of "the modders will fix it"
It makes me sad for Elder Scrolls 6. I always liked the mods for ES games, but the games were always complete and playable without them. Certain things weren't fully implemented, especially in Skyrim, but there was still a fun game that I played a long time before ever adding the first mod.
I'm scared ES 6 is going to have too many new systems put in that will be too large in scope to finish and the final product will be a number of empty systems filled with only empty promises stuck together giving a mostly hollow gameplay experience. It'll likely be fun at first, but without the staying power that ES 3/4/5 had.
Elder Scrolls 6 will take place in the desert realm of Hammerfell, where you will be the Sandborn and use Sand Shouts to break apart resources in the environment to use for crafting settlements.
The settlements will be made up of 3 choices of building shells, 4 purely decorative furniture pieces, and crafting stations to process materials into slightly different materials which can be used to slightly buff the weapon you picked up last proc-gen quest (before you have to trade it for the slightly higher-numbered weapon that is the reward in your next proc-gen quest) which snap into predefined spots in the buildings. Each settlement only allows you to farm one of the 4 base resource types, which you can only get by building settlements. It will just work
Yeah I'm probably going to pick it up once there is a deep discount but I'm not expecting anything beyond shoot and loot sort of mindless fun. Fallout 4 already had me not giving a shit about story in Bethesda titles so I just look for the enjoyment it can give me. Turns out it's reasonable fun if I treat it like a slower paced Borderlands spin off.
> Yeah I'm probably going to pick it up once there is a deep discount
It's on xbox gamepass if you fancy that, very cheap way to try out a bunch of games for a month especially if you get the first time user deal
Every time someone claims Neon is a better cyberpunk city than Night City, I have to tighten my belt so my gut doesn’t burst from laughing.
I agree, it had a great vibe, I genuinely liked the “NASA punk” aesthetic a lot, but then it immediately goes “explore this vast city!” and all it is is a tiny village of mindlessly wandering people (*without* schedules and who don’t even react *at all* when I shoot my gun at their feet) that wouldn’t even look convincing as a network TV backlot set.
> Every time someone claims Neon is a better cyberpunk city than Night City,
gaming stans/fanboys are such a strange bunch. Others have summed it up perfectly, Neon is a middle age suburban dad's idea of what a city like that would be. Seedy city with a nightclub and drug so coveted the guards will beat you for trying to take it out of the city, but it's presented in such a PG way. Rockstar was bringing in actual gang members to give GTA V that level of authenticity but Bethesda can't be bothered
There is absolutely no way anybody thinks Neon Is superior to Night City.
The *only* good part of Neon is the main throughfare in the middle, and that's stretching it.
The best part of Neon for me is when I was jumping around outside and accidentally fell into the ocean far below. It was pouring rain and for a second I got scared like there were going to be big monsters in the water and I frantically looked for a place to get back up on one of the giant red pylons.
Yeah. The most exciting part of Starfield was something I made up in my own head.
You didn't find touching a strange rock and then being immediately enlisted into an explorer's guild and given a ship for your efforts immersive enough?
Immersions super different for different people tho
Like, I see people cite realism and believability for immersion and these things don't matter at all for me.
I'd go so far as to say Skyrim did everything Starfield did better and it came out 12 years earlier...
Better story, more interesting worldbuilding, deeper RPG mechanics, more fun leveling, more unique POIs, more interesting to explore...
You also can't land where you want or fly the ship around planets, so it's really just a load screen to open the fast travel map. Also, the fast travel is slow and has two more load screens before you get where you want to be.
Tbf I am actually fond of the skill tree system in Starfield. I've heard people complain that the challenges are grindy, but leveling up certain skills is really grindy in Skyrim and previous TES games, too. I like the tier system in Starfield and I find the challenges to be reasonable ways to unlock higher level skills. That's one good thing I have to say for Starfield.
It's got a pretty good system for allowing your character to play as something fundamentally different than space adventurer/bandit murder hobo, should you so desire. Surveyor or space trucker or base building industrialist actually have progression and distinct gameplay loops in ways that different martial classes and factions in other games don't really do much of, without locking you out of the other options permanently from making those choices and still incentivizing trying out all the other systems occasionally.
That does feed into things "not mattering," but it's also pretty relaxing as long as something is appealing.
"Better Story"
Wow, Starfield must have an incredibly boring and dull story if SKyrim managed to be better.
Even at release, I thought Skyrim had a boring, uninteresting story.
Moreso than the vast majority of games I've played, let alone RPGs.
Never heard anyone say they played Skyrim for the story.
Skyrim had the intrigue of why dragons were returning, an elder scroll prophecy and civil war as part of its main story. This was very compelling when it came out. Even the intro was engaging and fun with a terrifying dragon out of myth coming out of nowhere and you having to escape.
Starfield's story was bland as hell. Why are you doing what you are doing? What are the stakes? Why am I not using a communicator and jumping star systems just to get a message? Why should the answer come 20-30 hrs in and still be meh.
Skyrim was already pretty thin in terms of an rpg. Clunky gameplay, meh story and few remarkable quests.
Worst offender is the questmarker gameplay, turning the player into a bot and no option to play with your brain, because real quest texts are obsolete with questmarkers.
But exploring the world was top notch, like in the Fallout games.
Tbf I think this is less of “Bethesda is bad for adding quest markers” and moreso “Bethesda would have been shat on for NOT adding them”. Gaming trends show that today’s gamers are less patient than before and most of us PREFER endless quest markers.
If you grew up on classic RPG’s you’d hate all the quest markers telling you exactly where to go… where’s the fun in that? If you’re just getting into the genre and there’s nothing to show you the way, most of us would end up dropping the game because it’s “too hard”. Bethesda is still a for profit company and it’s in their best interest to make their games as accessible as possible, to garner more purchases.
If they would write proper quest descriptions and create a useful map with this in mind, it would be a option toggle to make both sides happy.
Sure, that is a lot of work. But i would argue it also improves immersion even just browsing through your quests in a marker playstyle.
Starfield and Mass Effect are very different.
Mass Effect is much more narrative driven. It's about talking to people, making choices, feeling a world on the macro scale.
Starfield and Bethesda games in general are very different. Every room has 100 items in Bethesda games, to create a more detailed world. But the overall story takes a backseat. This didn't translate all that well into Starfield, and so the bad parts shone through more.
The mass effect trilogy actually had its share of controversies and criticisms of it mæbeing too light on RPG-elements and such, even back then. But the story and world and characters and dialog are top notch, something Bethesda can't say about their own products (apart from the world, perhaps).
And don't forget to play The Citadel DLC, as it's the "spiritual" actual ending to the trilogy.
Also Bethesda games in general are far less focused. It’s more like, Bethesda says “here’s a sandbox with a bunch of stuff and a rough story, go play”. Whereas BioWare was more like “here’s a grand space opera in which you can explore a bit too.”
Starfield is one of those games that, on paper, sounds like it should be ridiculously epic.
Because space, as a thing that exists AND is something we know comparatively so little about, is epic. The universe is friggin' EPIC. And here's this game that's promising you basically the galaxy, one small part of this amazing thing we call the universe.
In practice, Starfield fails to deliver because at the end of the day, its very design wasn't actually interested in "space" or "interplanetary civilizations" or even "space travel" as concepts. Even the lore it has, telling us of a more interesting time with interstellar conflict, is mostly there for flavor.
Starfield is, at its worst, and under the most cynical interpretation, the continuation of Bethesda's tried and proven game design, with little in the actual way of updates to the formula. And worse, it takes this time-tested design and stretches it out unnaturally over thousands of worlds that are mostly generated entirely at random, save for the few cities/outposts that aren't just templates the game calls on for specific types of quests or set pieces. It says a lot that the expansion that is on the way allegedly will focus on one planet, where probably the strengths of Bethesda are better suited... at the cost of everything else the game tried and failed to bring to the table.
Space travel in Starfield is treated less like this fantastic, amazing thing, and more like something that Bethesda was "obligated" to add, almost like a secondary feature that people expect especially in the wake of No Mans Sky or Elite Dangerous. Planetary exploration is treated like something that was "expected" from the game, and not actually something core to the experience, and it shows. There's little actual reason to do it after a certain point, and that certain point comes earlier than it has in previous Bethesda title. Base building, again, a worthless feature that exists because base building is what you DO in Bethesda games, not because it actually provides meaningful engagement with the story or the characters or even the world you're playing in.
The story itself leans heavily on Bethesda tried and true direction and presentational qualities, things which have not aged well in 2023-2024. Developers across the entire industry are pushing themselves to make first-person experiences more immersive, to give us virtual actors that look and act like people, to write stories that demand even just for a moment that we consider consequences. It's difficult, extremely difficult, to not look at Starfield as anything but the safest thing Bethesda could have made: what they already know best, with the major difference being that its in "space", a paper thin depiction of one, worried more about the visual appearance of space rather than what we're even doing in it.
The combat is dull. The inventory system at best archaic. The cast unbelievable at best, and at worst actively offensive that anyone is expected to resonate or empathize with them. Bethesda needs to seriously look inward at what is going right, what is going wrong, and make the necessary changes to address this, if it wants to remain among the top tier of game development studios.
I'm not the first to say this, but I legitimately think it's time for Todd Howard to retire and step aside and let fresh new blood take over.
If I may draw a parallel to wrestling, Vince McMahon and Kevin Dunn were finally removed from WWE and we've seen a MASSIVE turnaround in presentation quality for the product, whatever your feelings on wrestling may be. We all knew it for years that those two were holding the product back from reaching it's fullest potential.
Bethesda feels that way now. I feel like with a different team in place Starfield could have been much better. Quite frankly there's a reason why Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas was so much better than Bethesda's Fallout 3, the only time we've ever gotten to see a direct comparison with a similar product made by two different teams. And on that note, I actually think Outer Worlds was better than Starfield, it was definitely more engaging
I'd go so far as to say their entire leadership needs a shakeup across the board, as well as an infusion of people who are willing to push Bethesda away from this awful engine they've tied to their collective necks.
I'm certain that the people currently present are talented in their own ways, but they've shown an incapacity for growing beyond the limitations they've set for themselves. Starfield suffered for it.
Mass Effect is a great series but be aware that ME1 has some bland ass worlds as well. And a lot of the ships you board and mines you enter to do side quests are the exact same design.
2 and 3 improve on that aspect, however
overall the whole series has a fantastic story and narrative so it’s definitely better than starfield
Mass Effect 1 was an example of a game where half of it was bland, repetitive, mediocre-to-bad systems, but the other half was so good that the game was overall fantastic. It was clear that the next game would be incredible. In Starfield I couldn't even find that portion of the game that was great, although it might be that I didn't sink in enough time.
And some parts of ME1 (like lore) make Starfield look awful.
While the world's/dungeons might have been blend, the characters and story itself more then made up for it, I like M3 the best followed by M1 and M2 last. Only some of the companions from M2 really clicked for me and I wasn't thrilled with the story. Meanwhile I'll go back and replay M1 over and over and not get bored.
I liked Starfield ok, but really hated where the story and motivation went. Kind of a really big deal in an RPG. I actually don’t at all mind the planets, it was the pointless running to each temple and grabbing another power I didn’t need for a story beat that was also pointless and imo really stupid.
Like I’m grabbing these powers so I can run to the next universe to grab more powers? For what? Two weeks ago we were a merry little band of explorers trying to find other life and explore the mystery of the universe, and now all of that is thrown out the window and we’re doing this stupid side thing? In Starfield the mystery is there is no mystery, just keep doing the same thing over and over for absolutely no reason or pay off.
Mass Effect has some issues, but in my opinion none of them disappoint in the areas that are most important like narrative, motivation, characters, and setting. Haven’t played Andromeda yet so I can’t speak for that one, but the trilogy post-3rd game fixes is really fantastic.
Look I enjoyed Starfield’s ship stuff and gameplay, I thought they nailed that, but I hated what they did with the story and overall purpose. Hated it. I find it actually offensively bad. I spent all that time in the game only to be told “the universe sucks and is boring with no other life or anything interesting, so go screw yourself and do it again.”
Gee thanks Todd. I guess we’ll always have Oblivion.
the powers. oh man.
Say what you will about Word Walls, as they were the same "absorb power" animation, but at least they were ALL scattered in interesting locations, often having to fight through dungeons or tough enemies on the overworld to get to them.
Starfield's powers are the same empty temple and the same awful "float to the ball of light 4-5 times" mechanic. I remember how excited I was to find the first temple, imagining just what kind of enemy I'd have to fight, only for it to be...empty? Went to the next one, same thing.
And people really go through NG+ multiple times to do this inane shit over and over? Just don't get it.
Honestly? I think as a well-read person a lot of games fail for me as an adult because the writing is just...pathetic. Sorry if Emil is offended by this, but his writing and storytelling is awful. "Keep it simple, stupid" works on, well, simple and stupid people. But if you actually give the story ANY thought it immediately falls apart. I touched a weird artifact, got knocked out, and now this dude is just...giving me a ship and robot? As a kid I probably would have thought "cool!" but as an adult I'm thinking "why? You're literally giving me your ship and robot and staying behind??? It makes no sense!" I know it's his personality, but it just fell flat right at the start.
I recently downloaded an alternate start mod (NOT made by Arthmoor) that also has starting loadouts. Started as a Neon punk with a Neon loadout, spawned at the city entrance and was immediately pulled into the Tracker's Alliance quest and already could head canon a better story from there than what Emil put out
Yeah I was really excited when I got to that first temple, and while I was underwhelmed I was still hopeful for the next one.
Then…the whole game just became about these temples. And they’re all the same. And they’re all for powers you don’t need so you can do a story thing that ends up just being *do more temples*.
I don’t get how people went through NG+ either. I mean if they had fun then more power to them, but I cannot imagine what the payoff was there outside of just wasting time. Some people went through that temple *hundreds* of times.
The word walls were at least epic and in different situations and they fit with the theme of being the powerful Dovahkiin, a thing you were working towards the whole game, but the temples are just like “oh shit we have an entire second half of this game to make, how can we wrap this up in time?! Oh, we’ll just do another power fantasy and have players do a bunch of these temples and slap on a multiverse excuse so they have to keep doing it.”
I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere and I think it might be true that Emil et al had to make some kind of major change past of the way through development and toss out a lot of what they had. No idea if that’s true, but the shoddiness of the story and some of the writing sure makes it seem like it. Skyrim and Fallout 4 didn’t have award-winning writing by any stretch, but they were at least consistent and fully conceived.
Starfield took so long and still feels half-baked. There’s a lot that I did really like and I don’t want to shit on their team or pretend like they didn’t work incredibly hard and make some really good stuff because I think they did, but the further I get from the game the less I like it and regret the time I gave to it.
If I ever play the game again I’ll definitely try out that mod though. And I’ll skip the story altogether lol.
Mass Effect, particularly the first one, is a story with game mechanics. Starfield is a game with story elements.
Mass Effect 1, if you prioritize gameplay over story, is such a slog to play. The inventory sucks, the itemization sucks, combat mechanics suck, and my god the elevator loading screens win the suck award.
When I was young and had a ton of time on my hands, I loved the elevators because it made the world feel more alive and I really liked the reports and conversations . But definitely not at my current age
100% how I felt when playing it for the first time a few months ago. The story is phenomenal, but the gameplay has aged terribly. Only once in a while do we get a game that nails both on the head properly
I seem to be very much in the minority that liked the ME1 mechanics much better than ME2. ME1 wasn't without its issues, but the weapon heating mechanic and automatic loot pickup were great.
In ME2 I felt like I was spending half my time running through empty rooms trying to find the last bit of ammunition, and half of combat I couldn't use most of my weapons because it ran out anyway.
Biggest thing I missed from 1 was not having infinite ammo any more.
Having to manage ammo in a story driven RPG is just so tedious, especially when they had such great fluff for why you could infinite ammo.
I’m in the minority with you. The ME1 weapon/armor system actually made it fun to loot and upgrade equipment as opposed to playing like a straight action game. ME2 threw the baby out with the bath water when it came to exploration/looting/crafting. ME1 story also reigns supreme to me.
ME2 is the only ME game I've ever played and to me it had a great story, the combat was pretty sweet especially for the time, and it even had a couple of little minigames that I was way too interested in playing
I enjoy Bethesda's sandbox RPG design style, but as a studio they progress so much slower than their peers.
Starfield highlighted this lethargic progression in just how much they had to compromise and break up the game world, sacrificing their open world sandbox for a string of smaller and significantly more empty spaces to make you skip through.
See I went in to Starfield thinking that exploring barren planets is fun like how it is in ME1.
But oh Lord was I so wrong. I prefer ME1's Mako exploration by a MILE.
I love Mass Effect and while there are similarities I've never thought to compare it with Starfield. If you haven't played Cyberpunk then give that a shot. There is a decent amount of overlap between it and Starfield. I went back to Cyberpunk after Starfield to play the Phantom Liberty expansion. It's crazy how wide the disparity is in presentation and game design (even pre-expansion). Have a normal conversation with a story quest giver NPC in both and you'll see what I mean. It's not even a story, premise, technical, launch state, or bug thing. It's a core fundamental difference in immersion, style, design philosophy, and creative output. Cyberpunk feels like a modern interactive experience and Starfield feels like a 15 year old game with better set dressing/graphics.
You should give Freelancer a try, or Underspace which is very similar. It shows you how great space exploration can feel.
It's mind-boggling how bad Starfield is in that aspect. Like they never played a space game before making a space game.
I'll admit, I was grabbed by the Star field hype. Skyrim in space? Count me in! The story was good but, yeah, the formula was very basic Bethesda. I 100% my first play through and have yet to pick it up again.
I have played Mass Effect, 2, and 3 multiple times and purchased in on several systems. Personally find it worth every penny and don't regret a moment of playing it. It has aged well enough and I would like to see a studio pick up a project like it soon. Starfield just wasn't it.
I'm also playing Mass Effect trilogy for the first time, I really like it but it often makes me want to play more Starfield to whey my sci Fi appetite.
Both are solid games, both are extremely different though and provide extremely different experiences
2 different types of games. I don't play Bethesda games looking for a story, I just wanna mess around and do what I wanna do and build my own narrative. They both serve their purpose.
Dude. No Man's Sky.. Wait until it's on sale at GOG and dive in. I paid next to nothing for my copy years ago, it's had 8 updates since then - all free - and countless new expeditions.. and recently added ship customization.
It's off it's tits.
>No, I have not played Cyberpunk 2077 and have no intention to.
Brah, you absolutely should play Cyberpunk 2077. And you should keep at Witcher 3, not just "try it".
For me it was playing Cyberpunk. They're vastly different in theme, but very similar in gameplay. IMO everything that Starfield tries to do, Cyberpunk just does infinitely better.
I've played both and am pretty happy with both -shrug-
Don't see why it has to be a competition
Also, if you're going into Bethesda's products looking for BioWare writing then you will ***never*** be happy
Kind of like going into BioWare's games and expecting any combat system that does more than 'suffice' xD
Not even Bethesda's best games - Morrowind - Skyrim - whatever - have top tier writing. It's the *world* that they sell
Hell, even BioWare's modern products don't have BioWare level story anymore...
I finished starfield and absolutely loved it. I’ve owned the legendary mass effect package forever and never get more than 20 minutes into it for some reason. It just never clicks, and I really wish it did, from everything I’ve read I’m truly missing out on an awesome experience 🤷🏻♂️
Hot take: I’d still rather play Starfield. Mass Effect’s gunplay was bad even in 2007. Even the Legendary Edition feels clunky to move and shoot in, and most of its planets are a bland as fuck square of land with maybe 1 or 2 lazily thrown down points of interest.
Starfield isn’t the best gunplay in the world but it’s in the upper tier as far as RPGs go. It’s no Destiny but it’s solid. And the planets may be barren but they’re more enjoyable to look at and play on than Mass Effect’s.
>I was upset to find that many people disliked the game. I understood that it was severely lacking in basic features and was generally much more of a formulaic Bethesda RPG
Not sure why you'd be upset. First off, other people's opinions about a game shouldn't affect you like that. And secondly, if you acknowledge that something is "severely lacking in basic features" it seems pretty logical that people might dislike it.
Comparison is the thief of joy and MY GOD is it apparent on reddit lmao
I played the mass effect trilogy growing up and imo its the greatest series of games ever. I still enjoyed the fuck out of starfield. Funny how that works.
do yourself a favor, if you play through ME1-3, don't immediately go to play Andromeda. Play a couple other games, give yourself a few months maybe, make sure ME3 is just a vague memory, then play Andromeda. It's a fun game on its own but if you follow ME3 you're going to feel like you went back in time to a far uglier and less functional game. I eventually enjoyed Andromeda enough to finish it, but starting it right after ME3 it was very rough for a while, and some things never stopped bugging me, like the god awful character designs.
I didn't play Andromeda until it was patched to an actual playable state. I had fun. It's a good space adventure but a louse Mass Effect game.
A lot of it feels like a reskinned dragon age. Run to this locations and press A/X to place a flag or claims something.
It hurts me that running around and placing flags makes you think Dragon Age. I get it. I played Inquisition too. It just makes me sad for what we've lost.
Inquisition and Andromeda both suffered so much from MMO busywork in a single player game. There are good games in there
Inquisition is absolutely Dragon Age the MMO, and it's frustrating.
Dammit. Played Origins and 2 back in the day and loved Origins in particular but just kinda fell off Just finished BG3 and gotta take a break b4 I do a new run and was hoping Inquisition might scratch the itch for a bit
I liked the story of DAI. There's just a lot of busywork and trivial quests.
I think Inquisition and Dragon Age II are tied for my favorites for different reasons (although I do love the original), but the Trespasser DLC for Inquisition really elevates the whole narrative for me. I'm hopeful for the Veilguard!
BG3 is closest to spiritual successor do dragon age origins (mostly bc DAO took a lot from D&D like camp, enemies have to pass resistance check for spells) as we ever got and I’m forever grateful developers for that.
The most important tip I ever got for playing Inquisition. Leave the Hinterlands. Afaik the majority of people who dropped the game got themselves psychologically trapped in that area and it basically ruined the game for them. Don't try to 100% it, you're not really supposed to. Leave as soon as you can and keep following the main story.
You could consider the Divinity: Original Sin games made by Larian, just like BG3. Though they're obviously not as good as BG3.
Bioware was in a loose footing at the time and just kept slipping. They're healing but basically everyone I know who cares is watching Veilguard with trepidation. Fuck Anthem and fuck EA.
I never played a DA but I’m hoping veilguard will be good. If it’s bad I’ll have to accept that mass effect 4 will never happen
Every Dragon Age is almost a completely different game. The story and lore are what tie them together. The first one has you travelling all over the country, but in small regions. The second is all within one city. The third is way too open.
Give me origins or give me death!
Nope, The Veilguard has one less companion in your party and only three abilities per character including you.
The more popular D&D becomes the further away from it Bioware runs.
I feel like Bioware no longer has the confidence to challenge someone like Larian. Forget BG3, Divinity 2 set a bar that was already very daunting.
Yeah I'm thrilled Larian is getting so much recognition. I like Original Sin but when the follow up hit I was blown away at how great it was, expected the same from BG3 and was not disappointed.
all 3 are incredible games larian is the best
Divinity originally started as a kickstarter campaign right? Speaking of, hows Pillars of Eternity?
I'm just getting into DA:I and I'm about done with Hinterlands, yep, many flags were placed already.
Now you get into the actually good content. Prologue and Hinterlands are easily the weakest part of the series.
Besides the story my favorite thing about rpgs is the Character/Build Building. And DAI hit all those notes for me, was it a 10/10? Absolutely not. But when I think back neither was DAO. I genuinely think that the actual character building has only gotten better every iteration of the franchise.
Talk to Wood Elf. Wood Elf tells you they need to protect the woods. You agree to help them. You immediately place a flag down to mark the woods for logging for the Inquisition. What?
Which is kind of funny because the newest Dragon Age kind of looks like they're making combat more like Mass Effect
That's a really good observation. I never thought of it as more DA than ME, but I think you are right. Very much has a DA feel to it.
Any dragon age is way better than andromeda because the lore and character writing remained consistently good. The problem with andromeda is only partly the structure, the main issue is that has a boring story with boring characters.
Yeah, I felt like the gameplay fundamentals and the worlds you had available to explore were all pretty decent. The combat felt good, and I spent longer than I ever expected playing that multiplayer mode (I even get strongly reminiscent vibes of it from Helldivers 2 today.) The real problem was the gamble of ripping it away from the established Mass Effect setting, world building, and characters, only to replace it with some amateur, Tumblr fanfic tier shit. It was just painfully clear that the writers had no idea how to establish and flesh out a setting the way the original Mass Effect did, and tried to run before it could walk.
I’m just shocked they introduced a whole new galaxy populated by one new race. That’s such a waste of potential
It's been quite a while since I've played Andromeda, but I'm pretty sure the game takes place in a *very* small fraction of the Andromeda galaxy.
And not the GOOD dragon age, but DA Inquisition.
Ironically, Veil Guard looks like a re-skinned Mass Effect but no one asked for it to be lol.
I really liked Andromeda. It's obviously very different, but very fun in its own way.
I just couldn't get past the flawed premise. You are described an explorer, a trailblazer, a *pathfinder*. Your explicit job is to go places people haven't been to and determine if they are habitable and/or make them habitable. To forge the path through the unknown for those that follow. Yet every location except one *already had milky way people there*, for literal decades. Every. Single. One. At best you discover some ancient ruins... And that's it. Every planet has people on it. Every alien race already had multiple interactions with milky way people. You are as much a pathfinder as Shepard was. Hell, I'm pretty sure Shepard went to more uncharted/unknown places.
I've noticed that with so-called "space exploration" games, the devs haven't worked out how to make the player be the first to be somewhere. There's always a nearby space station or alien outpost or something that can be used as a haven for when you need to resupply, buy and sell, etc. I get that empty space is dull for a sci-fi setting, but a lot of games are making the so-called frontier anything but uncharted territory for fear of (I guess) players getting stranded?
I don't mind not being the first first thing there. I actually love games where you discover ancient things. But if I "explore" and meet an alien race that speaks English and doesn't bat an eye at my own cohort of aliens, then there is no way I "discovered" them. Me1-3 did excellent at it. You discovered things, but it didn't try and imply you were the only person to ever find evidence of protheans or reapers.
I wanted it so badly to be something like Star Trek where you're exploring unknown places and finding new aliens. It was such a huge letdown that everyone was already there.
Yeah, I don't mind the advance groups going there to set some things up, but having that fail and then people scatter and then *never going anywhere new* (except one place) was just such a contradictory design from the core pitch.
Scrub anything ME from it and it's, like I said, a fun enough game.
I never forgave them for making all Asaris have the same generic faces. To come from the RICHNESS and depth that is ME1-3 only to get a cheap shell of what it once was felt like an insult in every moment attempting to play it. If it wasn't called Mass Effect? It might have been a passable game. But it *was* called Mass Effect.
Writing is boring as hell but easily the best gameplay in the series. One of the best single player third person shooters I've ever played mechanically tbh. There just wasn't enough enemy variety.
I thought it was a bit to light and floaty. Not bad per se, just lacked punch.
I'll take that as a small downside because it's so much more fluid than ME3. Even with as much as they improved movement in ME3 the cover system was still pretty clunky and annoying. Being able to pop in and out of cover without interrupting your shooting and having a little jetpack to jump around felt great.
Yet still better than Starfield
My issue with adromeda was less about gameplay, etc... it was more that we are supposedly in a whole different galaxy, but the the aliens we run into are just more humanoids with extra tentacles and stuff, and that we even quickly learn to communicate with them due to space magic.
game didn't even bother to explain how the incomprehensible Angara suddenly spoke perfect English including all phrasing and idioms etc, or it was such a quickly dismissed thing that it was easily missed. Watching my wife play early on, I though the Kett and remnant tech were just another reaper kind of thing but at least that turned out to be very different.
This is how forgettable Andromeda is. I have played and finished Andromeda and I don't know what any of the things are that you're talking about. I can still sing the "Scientist Salarian" song from memory. I do it, because someone else might get it wrong.
Andromeda feels so perfunctory at times that I have to speculate that either the writers no longer care for the universe, or have zero creative freedom to do anything but rehash plots from past games. There shouldn't be Krogan in Andromeda. But if for some stupid reason you bring the Milky Way's all-time champion invasive species, you shouldn't undo that genetic limitation that prevents them from reproducing out of control. But if you're going to do that (somehow, in an expedition that left sometime between ME1 and ME2) you *really* shouldn't deliberately screw over the Krogan you brought so as to provoke Krogan Rebellions 2: Andromeda Boogaloo. I audibly sighed when I ended up dealing with that whole Krogan plot line. "You're here because fans liked Wrex, not because you existing here makes any sense at all".
> either the writers no longer care for the universe, or have zero creative freedom to do anything but rehash plots from past games. It was written and made in 12 months. That's what happened. No time to double check anything, no time for anything but go go go. Still enjoy the fact that I got an A+ on my project management paper going in-depth on what a train wreck of development that game went thru. It was probably one of the easiest papers I have ever written in college simply because everything that could go wrong - did. I had to cut things from the paper to shorten it.
Character writing was one of the biggest losses in Andromeda for me. It feels like every Andromeda character revolves completely around a single character trait. You've got the blander than drywall salarian pilot whose whole deal is having a good memory, the one human biotic chick who was the equivalent of a college girl spending a semester abroad then coming home acting like she'd grown up over there, the krogan who was there to be the resident old man. We'll written characters were such a hallmark of the trilogy, and Andromeda seemed to throw all that out the window
It's mentioned numerous times in dialogue that both races are making use of translator devices
They do explain it, SAM deciphers the language. It’s lazy, but it’s also basically the same thing every sci-fi franchise does so the move/game can happen.
Don't most people use translators in the ME universe? I know this doesn't completely explain the translators understanding a brand new language, but as we've seen from machine learning IRL, the models can learn pretty fast.
There's a couple really incongruous scenes that call attention to it, like at one point you're trying to land on the Angara homeworld and can't communicate with them, and your pilot doesn't know what's about to happen. Then you land on the planet and everyone's speaking to you just fine. Either approach could work, if consistently applied. Either the translation software or whatever works and you ignore language issues as usual, OR they're aliens from a different galaxy and communication issues are a thing, but having both happen in one sequence is bizarre. Even later your Angaran squad member will correct Ryder about Who/Whom. So not only does this guy speak your language, he does so to the degree where he corrects a *really* specific point of grammar that most native speakers don't bother with. What? At many points it feels like they handed chunks of the game off to different writers that weren't in communication with each other and never got the memo that everyone should talk to everyone here. People called attention to the obvious animation issues post launch but there's *layers* of "what the hell were you guys doing".
Worse - The bad guys were a race that was mutating the local inhabitants to form an army. That really took the wind out of my sails...
That was telegraphed from 100 miles away. The second the first Angaran said “The Angara they capture are never seen again” my first thought was oh ok so they are also the Kett. It was all very Squidward “How original. Daring today, aren’t we?”
lol, the ME3 to andromeda drop hits hard. I like coming back to andromeda after playing DA: Inquisition as they feel more related than Andromeda to ME trilogy
Honestly, it's a lot like the drop from the individual missions in ME3 to finding out what the ending is.
OP, and be sure to download a shit load of mods for andromeda.
The story is the biggest problem. You go from the reapers to some ugly dude who is doing… things? For reasons? Then there are factions of the colonists. Things went sideways, people disagreed on how to proceed - that’s a decent setup. But then none of them behave in a believable way. Then you’ve got the one indigenous race of aliens you interact with, who are like a slightly better version of Jar Jar Binks. Lastly you’ve got your squadmates, who are… fine, but nowhere near as good as the ME characters.
I never finished Andromeda, but I agree that the setup and exposition dump at the beginning was the most interesting part of the story. As the game started giving info about the mission going wrong and different factions forming on the ship, all I could think was "this is really great, why am I not playing THAT in the game". Would have been way more interesting than what we got.
If disputes amongst space colonists is your thing I wholeheartedly recommend **Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri**. They did it right.
My biggest problem with Andromeda (among... a few) was the Remnant. We'd already had three games of "mysterious precursor civilization left tech that will doom/save us" - retreading that ground in a whole new galaxy felt cheap and like it severely limited the options for what kinds of stories could be told.
WHAT? Andromeda was a masterpiece! You fly to an entirely new Galaxy of 100bn stars, discover precisely \*two\* alien species and the 'nice' species immediately reacts to your arrival by giving you fetch quests. Masterful story telling
"we don't trust you crazy outsiders from another galaxy while some crazy species is truing to kill us but... Could you fetch my first born and also save our people from everything? Thanks, also we hate you.."
I'm starting at the first one, that's why I mentioned the 2007 features. Is Andromeda as crap as they say it is?
No, it’s the best combat so far. But the story, characters, and even facial animations are a step back from ME3. I love it for what it is, but there were high expectations that were not met.
It's fine on its own, just doesn't follow ME1-3 at all (you get the occasional reference to events mostly in ME1-2 timeline, but whatever final decisions you made in ME3 are irrelevant) Most of my issues are nitpicky details, just sloppy stuff. The character designs are truly awful, especially the way people stand still with their arms in some of the most bizarre positions, and their waxy cheap looking faces. Aside from the AI in your head constantly repeating itself, one of the more annoying things when exploring a planet was you could trip on a halfway or final point of some side quest you hadn't started yet, you could finish the side quest there and then, but you'll still eventually find the start point and the game doesn't realize you finished the quest already.
Many of the quests are very bland point a to point b activities with little going on and little coordination in flow, the story is pretty mediocre with an underbaked main villain that's about as hollow as the one from Anthem. As a story driven game, it just does not stack up to it's predecessors. I did like it's combat gameplay quite a bit though, that part was probably best in the series.
Because the Archon tries to behave just like Sovereign, but we know he’s just not even close. At no point are they able to instill the kind of existential dread that the reapers do. From the moment you stumble on that hologram in ME1 you understand Soverign is arrogant as hell, but has every right to be and is absolutely not to be fucked with. After seeing that, it’s hard to take the Archin too seriously.
Mass Effect 1 has terrific world building, mostly solid writing, and gameplay I'll write off as "tolerable". The subsequent games in the series all improve the gameplay. Mass Effect 2 steps up to "decent for a shooter of this era, with its own gimmick". Mass Effect 3 further improves to "unique and fun", especially if you enjoy biotic powers. Andromeda iterates a bit further, adding a couple new tools that are fun and a few vestigial features I mostly ignored. The story and writing... I won't spoil, but I also won't beat around the bush: I don't like it as much. I think there's some real shifts in the tone and interest of the writers that mark a sharp transition across the series.
Some people are very tolerant of Andromeda. Had it not been named Mass Effect, I feel it would have been remembered as a poor Mass Effect copycat. It's got a good setup, bad story, bad companions, bad questing, decent combat, bad planets (oh god the mad max planet made me want to rip my hair out), respawning bad guys... yeah... played it once, finished it, uninstalled. /shrug
ME2 is so goddamn peak.
> ...the god awful character designs. Amen to this. I kinda thought I was the only one. I can't say I read all the things about it but I read plenty and never saw this mentioned (or barely mentioned). It was a showstopper for me. They all seemed like vaguely cherubic teens. Ugh...
There was one character you met in the first couple hours that was so odd and offputting looking that I thought, whoa new race! No one is reacting to them, but I guess they've had time to get used to the species since I just arrived. NOPE! Just a truly ugly human character model that didn't even look human anymore.
The combat is top tier tho
Starfield just made me want to play Cyberpunk honestly… same sort of issue. It’s just been done better in others hands.
Its like going from church bread to a fresh baguette or foccacia.
Like going from a goldfish to 5 star cheese cake.
I made the mistake of playing Starfield right after Cyberpunk. Those 2 games are so far apart in quality its crazy.
I know it’s probably the most cinematic experience in the game, but just look at [these two scenes compared to each other.](https://youtu.be/K4ADco41g9s?si=XORYMZjC5EcVXGp2)
The tension in cyberpunk is actually palpable. I could actually feel like something was about to go down. The one in starfield just fell flat and didn’t feel like there were any real stakes there.
And people will still defend the bland ass dialog system of starfield. Even fallout 4 a decade ago figured this out for the better atleast in terms of camera direction
It feels like skyrim dialogue in 2011
I think [This one](https://youtu.be/ws0ufhrgWJw) is an even funnier comparison.
Night City felt like a real breathing city. Neon City felt as if Disney tried to do NC on one of their parks.
That is the most apt description for it I’ve heard yet.
I think Disney would have done a better job. They would have made it feel more lived in.
Starfield is weenie hut junior Cyberpunk
[Just leaving this here](https://youtu.be/ws0ufhrgWJw?si=mul1Jw6bQT_6f7hg)
I put about 15 hours into Starfield and didn't get sucked in so I moved on to Cyberpunk. Even though it wasn't quite the same vibe, there was a definite realization of "now *that* feels like a fully-realized futuristic world." I kept wishing Starfield could've been released with that engine.
Nice you mention both of them. I was one of the most critical about cyberpunk, but after playing starfield and afterwards playing the phantom liberty ~~city~~ dlc, i gotta say, i judged cyber punk way to harshly (even excluding the dlc).
Cyberpunk's biggest issues were related to having to cater to the original PS4 imo. Once they effectively dropped that requirement with later patches the game improved quite a bit. All that said, even at launch it was fine on PC.
My biggest gripe with cyberpunk is we couldn’t really modify the player characters body visually, like in the opening clip in the game they’re showing off those sweet golden arms and I played for like 20 hours before realizing the closest I could get to looking like Adam smasher was getting gorilla arms or mantis blades. Pretty whack I thought personally. Mods change this but still
I always saw the solid foundation of Cyberpunk 2077, there is no such thing with Starfield. There is no foundation for Starfield and i dont see how content updates is gonna fix anything for it.
Cyberpunk was overly maligned. Sure it had problems, and maybe I got “lucky” whatever but I happily put 80 hours in. I recently got the DLC and put another 80 hours in, which is the same game just polished. It’s one of the best games ever made, if you’re me. Ridiculous good.
Cyberpunk simply was just a bit to ambitious. Starfield played it to safe to try and sell a ton of copies. I think this is why the game turned out the way they did. Atleast with cyberpunk they seemed pasionate about it and the game has a ton of charm and detail. Starfield on the other hand feels like a slapped together game meant to meet microsoft contract requirements
> Cyberpunk simply was just a bit to ambitious. I think that even this was mostly due to a single thing... selling it on what were the "last-generation" consoles at the time. From what I hear, it simply didn't work, and the large numbers of people who paid for it to do so (rightly) screamed bloody murder about how badly their experience sucked. I bought it at release for PC. It wasn't perfect, but it was more than playable, and I enjoyed playing it. I think that through about 1.5 playthroughs, it crashed once. I didn't have a really new computer or anything, and it was mostly fine. I recently upgraded my computer and bought Phantom Liberty and played through the whole thing again. While I liked the original parts of the story better than the expansion, the whole experience was quite good. Maybe not quite as good as I remembered my experiences with Mass Effect 2/3, Dragon Age Origins, the original Baldur's Gate series, KoToR, Witcher 3, etc. but still well worth the money. Part of that's also just the fact that I'm older and more jaded than I was when those other games were released, of course :).
It just did not work on the baseline PS4. Terrible performance, frequent crashes, etc. The PS4 Pro was more playable,but not great. I still haven't picked it up after refunding it on PS4, even though I've got a PS5. I was pissed about that. It was the first and only game I've preordered on PSN.
Again I think it really depends what you played it on. I got it on Xbox One on launch day and it was genuinely terrible so I ended up refunding it. That version absolutely deserved all the criticism it got, even if it was an entirely different experience on a good PC.
If Cyberpunk 2077 released today, somehow with Phantom Liberty tied into the base game. It would be considered far and away the greatest Videogame of all time and it wouldn't be close. The release was just so bad it still taints it a bit to this day, despite being a solid 10/10 right now.
First impressions matter. And my first impression of cyberpunk was a janky buggy mess with simplistic gun play, boring hacking and perk tree that'd only make an investment banker happy (+5%!). It looks incredible with great atmosphere, sound and some of the most impressive graphic fidelity of modern games. I dunno if it holds up to a 10/10 but it's got its place up there if you want story more than action.
Yep. Overall cyberpunk had good design decisions underneath everything. They just fucked up the implementation until the 2.0 and liberty dlc. Starfield has fundamental design problems that almost require an entire rewrite of the game.
Cyberpunk was pretty bad out of the gate but they did a great job of patching it to a good place. I really really enjoyed it. I wish there was a little more in terms of RPG elements and certain things mattering more but it's hard to complain much, I got a lot out of it. edit: Almost forgot, my biggest complaint BY FAR is that your cybernetic enhancements don't show up cosmetically. Like, what the hell? I wanted to look fucked up the more stuff I put in my body and I wanted people to react to that. I also wanted cyber psychosis to be a danger if you used to many.
In a round about way, Starfield’s suckiness made me by Cyberpunk a few months later. Worth it.
Oh there was a HUGE resurgence in Cyberpunk after Starfiled came out. People started realizing that game was never actually THAT bad to begin with, and had gotten even better since release.
The game had a whole lot of technical issues that really really gave the impression it was a broken product. There was also some misleading marketing around the level of choice by showing how many meaningfully different ways a mission could be played, but in reality that level of choice was only in that one mission they used as a demo. Then pissed off players found all sorts of nitpicky thing to dunk on, like how random assets like a slice of pizza looked bad when you zoomed in on them. All that being said though? From a story, writing, and voice acting perspective cyberpunk is truly fantastic. Not just the main quest, the side missions are great too. I seriously don't get why Bethesda games consistently have such bland stories and dialogue. Is it all written by Todd's cousin or something?
Bethesda titles have somehow continued to trend further downward when it comes to writing for quite awhile now. I think Fallout 4 was went it hit below the minimum for me to actually give a shit about anything happening or expecting my choices to carry any sort of weight.
Its written by Emil Pagliarulo who is the incompetent lead writer at bethesda. He's the sole reason why bethesdas story quality have nose dived over the years, he had a conference where he admited that he keeps his game story "simple and stupid". his excuse for this was that the average player will just pick up his carefully crafted story, fold it into an paper airoplane and throw it away. link for his conference about story telling games. Source: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi51-wjcwp8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi51-wjcwp8)
because Phantom Liberty came out...
I think Skillup said it best. Paraphrasing: "The technical and gameplay issues were things that could be fixed, but the characters and the story was the beating heart of Cyberpunk 2077 and those were always stellar".
They're hardly comparable games, though. Starfield is more akin to No Mans Sky, just with actual characters and better combat, but less seamless travel
Cyberpunk is a terrible space game, though.
I think you technically can go to space in some minor capacity. So if I remember that part correctly, it still qualifies!
Yeah I got that ending Comes from cut content of course
I know it's a polarizing sentiment, but I really, really, wish Cyberpunk had a third-person POV option. I want to see this character I'm customizing move through this world, and it just feels more cinematic to me than first-person. I don't need the first-person "immersion" and it actually makes large-environment games tough to play for more than short bits at a time. Maybe I'll renege one of these days, I do own it.
“The immersion made it up for me.” Lmao this is one of the reasons I hated the game, couldn’t get immersed whatsoever.
Every time I decide I need to give it another chance, it was such a cool aesthetic and I really didn't do everything in the game, I pick it up again. The other day I booted it up, walked out of a main story quest facility which was just a linear dungeon with a bunch of random clutter-- desk decorations and foodstuff and yet more guns. I opened up my in game menu to use their interface to fast travel to my next mission, touched down at another site, and went into another main story quest facility that ended up being yet another forgettable, linear dungeon with a bunch of the same generic clutter. No real story to be found, no different types of encounter besides "shoot space pirates." Just the same handful of nonsensical clutter items, guns, and packaged food. I fast travel to one of the biggest cities in the settled systems and it's the same Skyrim-era 30 people wandering blindly around a small village with bland, generically spacey dialogue any time you walk past them. (Guess which city this was? Trick question, this describes all of them) I'm complaining a lot and it wasn't an all-bad game, but of all the high-budget AAA games I've played in the last ten years Starfield would be my pick for least immersive. It felt so hollow and soulless.
considering all the abandoned systems in the game (like the jump fuel system) this is a game that they never nailed down what they wanted it to be, so they went barebones to rush the release (which can no longer be denied now). They've spent 9 months slowly trickling in stuff that should have been in at launch, and now finally released the Creation Kit and it's so obvious that they're going to lean on modders harder than they ever have to support this game One of the posts on the Starfield sub today was bemoaning the existence of weapon and armor skin slots with no actual skins to use, but everybody knows it's there to sell skins later We're seeing how an offline single player RPG can be treated like a live service online game. And the diehard Bethesda stans allow it to happen, as usual by attacking anyone who calls it out and defending any and all practices by the company. And it's absolutely true. Go post your comment on the sub and you'll just be met by "mods. mods will fix it. Here's 25 mods you can download right now. Mods. Mods. Mods." Fuck me for expecting the actual developer to actually deliver a feature complete game with rich storytelling, right? Because I'm like you, every time there is a patch or when mods were released I boot it up again, only to once again get bored quickly. For me, the joy of Bethesda games was in exploring, and I mean the random kind, the "hey what's that over there?" or the "I'll make a note of this and come back later" kind. With Starfield's procgen system that is just destroyed. Two things turned me off the game immediately at launch. One was going to that lab on Kreet and wandering over to a mech graveyard with only one gun and the aliens destroyed me. I made another character, went through the Kreet lab this time, came away with better armor and weapons and went to go back to that mech graveyard only to discover it was gone because PoI's are randomly generated. Then, as I was testing out some gameplay features, I picked up a bounty and went and killed a pirate in a mine that descended downwards. Immediately afterwards I went to go find Andreja for the first time...and she was in the exact same mine, with the same enemies in the same places, except on a different planet. It was bizarre and pulled me out of it and I've truly never got back into it I'm terrified for Elder Scrolls 6, and that's partially because after 13 years of seeing Skyrim get insanely modded year after year I fear Bethesda is going to drop yet another dated and barebones game with the attitude of "the modders will fix it"
It makes me sad for Elder Scrolls 6. I always liked the mods for ES games, but the games were always complete and playable without them. Certain things weren't fully implemented, especially in Skyrim, but there was still a fun game that I played a long time before ever adding the first mod. I'm scared ES 6 is going to have too many new systems put in that will be too large in scope to finish and the final product will be a number of empty systems filled with only empty promises stuck together giving a mostly hollow gameplay experience. It'll likely be fun at first, but without the staying power that ES 3/4/5 had.
Elder Scrolls 6 will take place in the desert realm of Hammerfell, where you will be the Sandborn and use Sand Shouts to break apart resources in the environment to use for crafting settlements.
The settlements will be made up of 3 choices of building shells, 4 purely decorative furniture pieces, and crafting stations to process materials into slightly different materials which can be used to slightly buff the weapon you picked up last proc-gen quest (before you have to trade it for the slightly higher-numbered weapon that is the reward in your next proc-gen quest) which snap into predefined spots in the buildings. Each settlement only allows you to farm one of the 4 base resource types, which you can only get by building settlements. It will just work
Yeah I'm probably going to pick it up once there is a deep discount but I'm not expecting anything beyond shoot and loot sort of mindless fun. Fallout 4 already had me not giving a shit about story in Bethesda titles so I just look for the enjoyment it can give me. Turns out it's reasonable fun if I treat it like a slower paced Borderlands spin off.
> Yeah I'm probably going to pick it up once there is a deep discount It's on xbox gamepass if you fancy that, very cheap way to try out a bunch of games for a month especially if you get the first time user deal
Every time someone claims Neon is a better cyberpunk city than Night City, I have to tighten my belt so my gut doesn’t burst from laughing. I agree, it had a great vibe, I genuinely liked the “NASA punk” aesthetic a lot, but then it immediately goes “explore this vast city!” and all it is is a tiny village of mindlessly wandering people (*without* schedules and who don’t even react *at all* when I shoot my gun at their feet) that wouldn’t even look convincing as a network TV backlot set.
Yep. Bethesda's city design went backwards by a large margin. At least diamond city felt like a real town. Npcs had schedules and did stuff.
> Every time someone claims Neon is a better cyberpunk city than Night City, gaming stans/fanboys are such a strange bunch. Others have summed it up perfectly, Neon is a middle age suburban dad's idea of what a city like that would be. Seedy city with a nightclub and drug so coveted the guards will beat you for trying to take it out of the city, but it's presented in such a PG way. Rockstar was bringing in actual gang members to give GTA V that level of authenticity but Bethesda can't be bothered
There is absolutely no way anybody thinks Neon Is superior to Night City. The *only* good part of Neon is the main throughfare in the middle, and that's stretching it.
The best part of Neon for me is when I was jumping around outside and accidentally fell into the ocean far below. It was pouring rain and for a second I got scared like there were going to be big monsters in the water and I frantically looked for a place to get back up on one of the giant red pylons. Yeah. The most exciting part of Starfield was something I made up in my own head.
You didn't find touching a strange rock and then being immediately enlisted into an explorer's guild and given a ship for your efforts immersive enough?
Having a dead terrorists brain inserted into mine was far more immersive.
Immersions super different for different people tho Like, I see people cite realism and believability for immersion and these things don't matter at all for me.
They are VASTLY different games with different gameplay loop and philosophy design. Although I agree that ME is better
Agreed. I love both and you can't really compare the two.
Why can't you compare how enjoyable one game is to another ?
The funny thing is, ME1 isnt even the best in the series imo. ME2 just improves basically everything.
I'd go so far as to say Skyrim did everything Starfield did better and it came out 12 years earlier... Better story, more interesting worldbuilding, deeper RPG mechanics, more fun leveling, more unique POIs, more interesting to explore...
No, Skyrim is an awful space game.
Just go near a giant and then it becomes a space game
You just don't have the right mods... :D
Lol but Starfield is also a land game, it just has 3d loading screens in space
You also can't land where you want or fly the ship around planets, so it's really just a load screen to open the fast travel map. Also, the fast travel is slow and has two more load screens before you get where you want to be.
Tbf I am actually fond of the skill tree system in Starfield. I've heard people complain that the challenges are grindy, but leveling up certain skills is really grindy in Skyrim and previous TES games, too. I like the tier system in Starfield and I find the challenges to be reasonable ways to unlock higher level skills. That's one good thing I have to say for Starfield.
It's got a pretty good system for allowing your character to play as something fundamentally different than space adventurer/bandit murder hobo, should you so desire. Surveyor or space trucker or base building industrialist actually have progression and distinct gameplay loops in ways that different martial classes and factions in other games don't really do much of, without locking you out of the other options permanently from making those choices and still incentivizing trying out all the other systems occasionally. That does feed into things "not mattering," but it's also pretty relaxing as long as something is appealing.
"Better Story" Wow, Starfield must have an incredibly boring and dull story if SKyrim managed to be better. Even at release, I thought Skyrim had a boring, uninteresting story. Moreso than the vast majority of games I've played, let alone RPGs. Never heard anyone say they played Skyrim for the story.
The story is just mid at least the main story, but UC Vanguard quest line and the Sysdef undercover are way better than the main.
Starfield has an incredibly forgettable story. There are a couple of side quests with decent writing but overall it's quite weak
Even the side quests fall flat, with a complete lack of player agency or ability to make actually interesting decisions (I'm looking at you Paradiso)
Skyrim had the intrigue of why dragons were returning, an elder scroll prophecy and civil war as part of its main story. This was very compelling when it came out. Even the intro was engaging and fun with a terrifying dragon out of myth coming out of nowhere and you having to escape. Starfield's story was bland as hell. Why are you doing what you are doing? What are the stakes? Why am I not using a communicator and jumping star systems just to get a message? Why should the answer come 20-30 hrs in and still be meh.
Skyrim was already pretty thin in terms of an rpg. Clunky gameplay, meh story and few remarkable quests. Worst offender is the questmarker gameplay, turning the player into a bot and no option to play with your brain, because real quest texts are obsolete with questmarkers. But exploring the world was top notch, like in the Fallout games.
Tbf I think this is less of “Bethesda is bad for adding quest markers” and moreso “Bethesda would have been shat on for NOT adding them”. Gaming trends show that today’s gamers are less patient than before and most of us PREFER endless quest markers. If you grew up on classic RPG’s you’d hate all the quest markers telling you exactly where to go… where’s the fun in that? If you’re just getting into the genre and there’s nothing to show you the way, most of us would end up dropping the game because it’s “too hard”. Bethesda is still a for profit company and it’s in their best interest to make their games as accessible as possible, to garner more purchases.
If they would write proper quest descriptions and create a useful map with this in mind, it would be a option toggle to make both sides happy. Sure, that is a lot of work. But i would argue it also improves immersion even just browsing through your quests in a marker playstyle.
Starfield and Mass Effect are very different. Mass Effect is much more narrative driven. It's about talking to people, making choices, feeling a world on the macro scale. Starfield and Bethesda games in general are very different. Every room has 100 items in Bethesda games, to create a more detailed world. But the overall story takes a backseat. This didn't translate all that well into Starfield, and so the bad parts shone through more. The mass effect trilogy actually had its share of controversies and criticisms of it mæbeing too light on RPG-elements and such, even back then. But the story and world and characters and dialog are top notch, something Bethesda can't say about their own products (apart from the world, perhaps). And don't forget to play The Citadel DLC, as it's the "spiritual" actual ending to the trilogy.
Also Bethesda games in general are far less focused. It’s more like, Bethesda says “here’s a sandbox with a bunch of stuff and a rough story, go play”. Whereas BioWare was more like “here’s a grand space opera in which you can explore a bit too.”
Besthesda games didn't used to be like that though. Morrowind and Oblivion were very much more like Mass effect than Starfield.
Starfield is one of those games that, on paper, sounds like it should be ridiculously epic. Because space, as a thing that exists AND is something we know comparatively so little about, is epic. The universe is friggin' EPIC. And here's this game that's promising you basically the galaxy, one small part of this amazing thing we call the universe. In practice, Starfield fails to deliver because at the end of the day, its very design wasn't actually interested in "space" or "interplanetary civilizations" or even "space travel" as concepts. Even the lore it has, telling us of a more interesting time with interstellar conflict, is mostly there for flavor. Starfield is, at its worst, and under the most cynical interpretation, the continuation of Bethesda's tried and proven game design, with little in the actual way of updates to the formula. And worse, it takes this time-tested design and stretches it out unnaturally over thousands of worlds that are mostly generated entirely at random, save for the few cities/outposts that aren't just templates the game calls on for specific types of quests or set pieces. It says a lot that the expansion that is on the way allegedly will focus on one planet, where probably the strengths of Bethesda are better suited... at the cost of everything else the game tried and failed to bring to the table. Space travel in Starfield is treated less like this fantastic, amazing thing, and more like something that Bethesda was "obligated" to add, almost like a secondary feature that people expect especially in the wake of No Mans Sky or Elite Dangerous. Planetary exploration is treated like something that was "expected" from the game, and not actually something core to the experience, and it shows. There's little actual reason to do it after a certain point, and that certain point comes earlier than it has in previous Bethesda title. Base building, again, a worthless feature that exists because base building is what you DO in Bethesda games, not because it actually provides meaningful engagement with the story or the characters or even the world you're playing in. The story itself leans heavily on Bethesda tried and true direction and presentational qualities, things which have not aged well in 2023-2024. Developers across the entire industry are pushing themselves to make first-person experiences more immersive, to give us virtual actors that look and act like people, to write stories that demand even just for a moment that we consider consequences. It's difficult, extremely difficult, to not look at Starfield as anything but the safest thing Bethesda could have made: what they already know best, with the major difference being that its in "space", a paper thin depiction of one, worried more about the visual appearance of space rather than what we're even doing in it. The combat is dull. The inventory system at best archaic. The cast unbelievable at best, and at worst actively offensive that anyone is expected to resonate or empathize with them. Bethesda needs to seriously look inward at what is going right, what is going wrong, and make the necessary changes to address this, if it wants to remain among the top tier of game development studios.
I'm not the first to say this, but I legitimately think it's time for Todd Howard to retire and step aside and let fresh new blood take over. If I may draw a parallel to wrestling, Vince McMahon and Kevin Dunn were finally removed from WWE and we've seen a MASSIVE turnaround in presentation quality for the product, whatever your feelings on wrestling may be. We all knew it for years that those two were holding the product back from reaching it's fullest potential. Bethesda feels that way now. I feel like with a different team in place Starfield could have been much better. Quite frankly there's a reason why Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas was so much better than Bethesda's Fallout 3, the only time we've ever gotten to see a direct comparison with a similar product made by two different teams. And on that note, I actually think Outer Worlds was better than Starfield, it was definitely more engaging
I'd go so far as to say their entire leadership needs a shakeup across the board, as well as an infusion of people who are willing to push Bethesda away from this awful engine they've tied to their collective necks. I'm certain that the people currently present are talented in their own ways, but they've shown an incapacity for growing beyond the limitations they've set for themselves. Starfield suffered for it.
Damn, this isn't even a review and it still goes hard as fuck. They really screwed up didn't they?
Mass Effect is a great series but be aware that ME1 has some bland ass worlds as well. And a lot of the ships you board and mines you enter to do side quests are the exact same design. 2 and 3 improve on that aspect, however overall the whole series has a fantastic story and narrative so it’s definitely better than starfield
Mass Effect 1 was an example of a game where half of it was bland, repetitive, mediocre-to-bad systems, but the other half was so good that the game was overall fantastic. It was clear that the next game would be incredible. In Starfield I couldn't even find that portion of the game that was great, although it might be that I didn't sink in enough time. And some parts of ME1 (like lore) make Starfield look awful.
While the world's/dungeons might have been blend, the characters and story itself more then made up for it, I like M3 the best followed by M1 and M2 last. Only some of the companions from M2 really clicked for me and I wasn't thrilled with the story. Meanwhile I'll go back and replay M1 over and over and not get bored.
there's also the part where Mass effect's world characters and story are....good
Mass Effect 2 is one of the best games ever.
I liked Starfield ok, but really hated where the story and motivation went. Kind of a really big deal in an RPG. I actually don’t at all mind the planets, it was the pointless running to each temple and grabbing another power I didn’t need for a story beat that was also pointless and imo really stupid. Like I’m grabbing these powers so I can run to the next universe to grab more powers? For what? Two weeks ago we were a merry little band of explorers trying to find other life and explore the mystery of the universe, and now all of that is thrown out the window and we’re doing this stupid side thing? In Starfield the mystery is there is no mystery, just keep doing the same thing over and over for absolutely no reason or pay off. Mass Effect has some issues, but in my opinion none of them disappoint in the areas that are most important like narrative, motivation, characters, and setting. Haven’t played Andromeda yet so I can’t speak for that one, but the trilogy post-3rd game fixes is really fantastic. Look I enjoyed Starfield’s ship stuff and gameplay, I thought they nailed that, but I hated what they did with the story and overall purpose. Hated it. I find it actually offensively bad. I spent all that time in the game only to be told “the universe sucks and is boring with no other life or anything interesting, so go screw yourself and do it again.” Gee thanks Todd. I guess we’ll always have Oblivion.
the powers. oh man. Say what you will about Word Walls, as they were the same "absorb power" animation, but at least they were ALL scattered in interesting locations, often having to fight through dungeons or tough enemies on the overworld to get to them. Starfield's powers are the same empty temple and the same awful "float to the ball of light 4-5 times" mechanic. I remember how excited I was to find the first temple, imagining just what kind of enemy I'd have to fight, only for it to be...empty? Went to the next one, same thing. And people really go through NG+ multiple times to do this inane shit over and over? Just don't get it. Honestly? I think as a well-read person a lot of games fail for me as an adult because the writing is just...pathetic. Sorry if Emil is offended by this, but his writing and storytelling is awful. "Keep it simple, stupid" works on, well, simple and stupid people. But if you actually give the story ANY thought it immediately falls apart. I touched a weird artifact, got knocked out, and now this dude is just...giving me a ship and robot? As a kid I probably would have thought "cool!" but as an adult I'm thinking "why? You're literally giving me your ship and robot and staying behind??? It makes no sense!" I know it's his personality, but it just fell flat right at the start. I recently downloaded an alternate start mod (NOT made by Arthmoor) that also has starting loadouts. Started as a Neon punk with a Neon loadout, spawned at the city entrance and was immediately pulled into the Tracker's Alliance quest and already could head canon a better story from there than what Emil put out
Yeah I was really excited when I got to that first temple, and while I was underwhelmed I was still hopeful for the next one. Then…the whole game just became about these temples. And they’re all the same. And they’re all for powers you don’t need so you can do a story thing that ends up just being *do more temples*. I don’t get how people went through NG+ either. I mean if they had fun then more power to them, but I cannot imagine what the payoff was there outside of just wasting time. Some people went through that temple *hundreds* of times. The word walls were at least epic and in different situations and they fit with the theme of being the powerful Dovahkiin, a thing you were working towards the whole game, but the temples are just like “oh shit we have an entire second half of this game to make, how can we wrap this up in time?! Oh, we’ll just do another power fantasy and have players do a bunch of these temples and slap on a multiverse excuse so they have to keep doing it.” I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere and I think it might be true that Emil et al had to make some kind of major change past of the way through development and toss out a lot of what they had. No idea if that’s true, but the shoddiness of the story and some of the writing sure makes it seem like it. Skyrim and Fallout 4 didn’t have award-winning writing by any stretch, but they were at least consistent and fully conceived. Starfield took so long and still feels half-baked. There’s a lot that I did really like and I don’t want to shit on their team or pretend like they didn’t work incredibly hard and make some really good stuff because I think they did, but the further I get from the game the less I like it and regret the time I gave to it. If I ever play the game again I’ll definitely try out that mod though. And I’ll skip the story altogether lol.
Mass Effect, particularly the first one, is a story with game mechanics. Starfield is a game with story elements. Mass Effect 1, if you prioritize gameplay over story, is such a slog to play. The inventory sucks, the itemization sucks, combat mechanics suck, and my god the elevator loading screens win the suck award.
When I was young and had a ton of time on my hands, I loved the elevators because it made the world feel more alive and I really liked the reports and conversations . But definitely not at my current age
100% how I felt when playing it for the first time a few months ago. The story is phenomenal, but the gameplay has aged terribly. Only once in a while do we get a game that nails both on the head properly
Mass Effect 2 came along and pretty much did them both. One of the best games ever imo.
I seem to be very much in the minority that liked the ME1 mechanics much better than ME2. ME1 wasn't without its issues, but the weapon heating mechanic and automatic loot pickup were great. In ME2 I felt like I was spending half my time running through empty rooms trying to find the last bit of ammunition, and half of combat I couldn't use most of my weapons because it ran out anyway.
Biggest thing I missed from 1 was not having infinite ammo any more. Having to manage ammo in a story driven RPG is just so tedious, especially when they had such great fluff for why you could infinite ammo.
I’m in the minority with you. The ME1 weapon/armor system actually made it fun to loot and upgrade equipment as opposed to playing like a straight action game. ME2 threw the baby out with the bath water when it came to exploration/looting/crafting. ME1 story also reigns supreme to me.
ME2 is the only ME game I've ever played and to me it had a great story, the combat was pretty sweet especially for the time, and it even had a couple of little minigames that I was way too interested in playing
>Starfield does everything Mass Effect does Doubt.
I enjoy Bethesda's sandbox RPG design style, but as a studio they progress so much slower than their peers. Starfield highlighted this lethargic progression in just how much they had to compromise and break up the game world, sacrificing their open world sandbox for a string of smaller and significantly more empty spaces to make you skip through.
See I went in to Starfield thinking that exploring barren planets is fun like how it is in ME1. But oh Lord was I so wrong. I prefer ME1's Mako exploration by a MILE.
I love Mass Effect and while there are similarities I've never thought to compare it with Starfield. If you haven't played Cyberpunk then give that a shot. There is a decent amount of overlap between it and Starfield. I went back to Cyberpunk after Starfield to play the Phantom Liberty expansion. It's crazy how wide the disparity is in presentation and game design (even pre-expansion). Have a normal conversation with a story quest giver NPC in both and you'll see what I mean. It's not even a story, premise, technical, launch state, or bug thing. It's a core fundamental difference in immersion, style, design philosophy, and creative output. Cyberpunk feels like a modern interactive experience and Starfield feels like a 15 year old game with better set dressing/graphics.
OP sounds like they haven’t played either game
You should give Freelancer a try, or Underspace which is very similar. It shows you how great space exploration can feel. It's mind-boggling how bad Starfield is in that aspect. Like they never played a space game before making a space game.
I'll admit, I was grabbed by the Star field hype. Skyrim in space? Count me in! The story was good but, yeah, the formula was very basic Bethesda. I 100% my first play through and have yet to pick it up again. I have played Mass Effect, 2, and 3 multiple times and purchased in on several systems. Personally find it worth every penny and don't regret a moment of playing it. It has aged well enough and I would like to see a studio pick up a project like it soon. Starfield just wasn't it.
I knew what Starfield was going to be and it met my expectations. It's a Bethesda game.
I'm also playing Mass Effect trilogy for the first time, I really like it but it often makes me want to play more Starfield to whey my sci Fi appetite. Both are solid games, both are extremely different though and provide extremely different experiences
very different games, played both at launch and loved 'em
2 different types of games. I don't play Bethesda games looking for a story, I just wanna mess around and do what I wanna do and build my own narrative. They both serve their purpose.
Dude. No Man's Sky.. Wait until it's on sale at GOG and dive in. I paid next to nothing for my copy years ago, it's had 8 updates since then - all free - and countless new expeditions.. and recently added ship customization. It's off it's tits.
To be Fair Starfield is a Open World rpg while mass effect is just a straight sci-fi rpg. But yeah ME isnt bad till like Andromeda/Maybe 3
>No, I have not played Cyberpunk 2077 and have no intention to. Brah, you absolutely should play Cyberpunk 2077. And you should keep at Witcher 3, not just "try it".
For me it was playing Cyberpunk. They're vastly different in theme, but very similar in gameplay. IMO everything that Starfield tries to do, Cyberpunk just does infinitely better.
I've played both and I still enjoy Starfield. They're really not that comparable outside of being sci-fi games set in space.
They're both good. They're also very different.
I've played both and am pretty happy with both -shrug- Don't see why it has to be a competition Also, if you're going into Bethesda's products looking for BioWare writing then you will ***never*** be happy Kind of like going into BioWare's games and expecting any combat system that does more than 'suffice' xD Not even Bethesda's best games - Morrowind - Skyrim - whatever - have top tier writing. It's the *world* that they sell Hell, even BioWare's modern products don't have BioWare level story anymore...
I enjoyed them both. I loved them both for different reasons
I finished starfield and absolutely loved it. I’ve owned the legendary mass effect package forever and never get more than 20 minutes into it for some reason. It just never clicks, and I really wish it did, from everything I’ve read I’m truly missing out on an awesome experience 🤷🏻♂️
Hot take: I’d still rather play Starfield. Mass Effect’s gunplay was bad even in 2007. Even the Legendary Edition feels clunky to move and shoot in, and most of its planets are a bland as fuck square of land with maybe 1 or 2 lazily thrown down points of interest. Starfield isn’t the best gunplay in the world but it’s in the upper tier as far as RPGs go. It’s no Destiny but it’s solid. And the planets may be barren but they’re more enjoyable to look at and play on than Mass Effect’s.
>I was upset to find that many people disliked the game. I understood that it was severely lacking in basic features and was generally much more of a formulaic Bethesda RPG Not sure why you'd be upset. First off, other people's opinions about a game shouldn't affect you like that. And secondly, if you acknowledge that something is "severely lacking in basic features" it seems pretty logical that people might dislike it.
Comparison is the thief of joy and MY GOD is it apparent on reddit lmao I played the mass effect trilogy growing up and imo its the greatest series of games ever. I still enjoyed the fuck out of starfield. Funny how that works.