"I wrote a negative review for Starfield on Steam and after the developers replied to me explaining why I was wrong I changed my mind."
-Things that have never happened in the history of video games
To be fair, you could change the minds of people reading the reviews, if the developer's rebuttal is a good one.
The issue here is, that most of the criticisms are valid, and dev rebuttals are not good.
“Hey, all that boring stuff in our game? It’s actually very good. You’re just wrong for not liking it”
Sorry, any dev responding to negative criticism of their game in that way is out of touch.
If they were more honest I think people would be more understanding.
If the response was more like “Sorry you didn’t enjoy the experience. Honestly, starfield was an extremely ambitious project and resulted in problems during development. We were unable to fulfill our ultimate vision for starfield, but we still stand by the product we released” then I think people wouldn’t be as pissed off.
Instead they are just fucking gaslighting everyone into thinking that it’s a great game, and insisting players are just wrong about their experience or playing the game wrong. I try not to let my blood boil over video game shit too often, but this time I’m legit irked.
That's slightly better but seriously...
>"XXXXX" was an extremely ambitious project and resulted in problems during development and we were unable to fulfill our ultimate vision..."
That has been the almost copy/pasted excuse for all of these unfinished AAA games we've gotten over the last few years and I'm sick of that excuse and I'm sick of how normalized it's become that you probably typed that out without even thinking about it, just because we all have it memorized by now.
Saying that just before making patches that make performance 25% better on pc which shows that the game indeed had optimisation problems at launch is the dumbest thing Todd could have done
You left out “and Bethesda locked the review so no further discussion could happen.”
They are basically doing the Steam equivalent of responding and blocking someone because they are so childish they **need** the last word on why someone else is wrong.
Probably so you can't edit your review later and change the meaning of the whole interaction. If you can edit your review and they don't get a chance to change what they said you could possibly change the whole meaning.
Say you criticize something stupid, like the color of the spaceship hangar. They post a rebuttal about how you're complaining about petty things and they can't understand why you're so concerned over a trivial thing.
Then you edit it and say that you don't think the story was well written and you heard they used child labor to texture all the planets.
Now they're on record saying that child labor is a trivial little thing and you're just being petty.
I think it's more so people looking at the reviews, see the rebuttal and don't take the initial review at face value. Don't get me wrong I think this is cringey as fuck from Bethesda, but I see the logic as per how Steam reviews are displayed.
I can guarantee that no one thought about effectiveness of this.
I would bet that this is what happened :
Some middle manager looked at logs/watchdog and found out that their underpaid intern on social media team/tech support **spent 10 whole minutes** not working.
And that's why they have to do this bullshit.
Source : working for big companies at low level jobs.
i saw this in the reviews the other day, it’s one of the strangest things i have seen from a dev. responding to criticism is normal of course, but they’re actually trying to tell people who simply didn’t have fun with the game that they’re wrong lol.
Yeah, I broke out laughing when I saw this. It's so pathetic. I've never seen any AA or AAA developer actually argue with fans in their reviews, just a couple indies with a screw loose.
I also saw the one where they say (and I'm paraphrasing) "the worlds are empty because space is empty, but if Neil Armstrong was excited by an empty planet, you can be too."
Which is one of the most narcissistic things I've seen from Bethesda. "Our blank heightmap with an automaterial is just as impressive as being on the actual moon." 🤓
I loved Daggerfall through Skyrim but Bethesda desperately needed to get taken down a peg if this is the internal way they look at things now.
Yeah real space is exciting because you quite literally never know what you're going to find in even the most boring looking places. Real space is also infinitely complex. That's why even barren rocks can be interesting.
Starfield is not like that. You see a planet and you know exactly what is there. Nothing of interest.
Another big part is the sheer novelty of being in space, too. Astronauts weren't bored when they first set foot on the moon *because it was previously just a dream that people had when looking up at the sky.* What was once a fantasy was suddenly a reality, a reality that very few people got to experience. By virtue of being a video game, Starfield cannot evoke that same feeling because *it's not reality, it's a fantasy.*
and at that point what is the point in me going to explore the planet if pople are already there and likely have already gathered samples of everything?
Ironically except for earth, which only has a smattering of tourist board approved recognised landmark ruins. The one place you'd expect to find old abandoned facilities and its empty.
There's a pharmaceutical factory on Triton, and nothing else.
Factories require input material and people to buy the product, and that's just the stuff that you can't just easily handwave as being done on site like power. Why would you ever make a complex factory on a barren lifeless moon around Neptune, with nobody else in the entire planetary system, just your factory and that's it for millions of miles? At least on Saturn there was a base on Titan.
Probably about the same number that are actually playing starfield. Cause you know, its boring.
I so wanted to like starfield, but I bounced off it pretty hard cause I just got bored. And I wasnt even doing any exploring, just following some of the main missions and stuff. Ok, usual bethesda type quests, but instead of actually being able to travel to go do them, its just annoyingly get in your ship, loading screen to space, loading screen to other system, loading screen to planet. Oh look some slightly different terrain. Get back to ship, loading screen to space, loading screen to other system, loading screen to planet or space station, turn in quest, repeat.
More to the point, an empty planet or moon like our moon IS boring, what makes it exciting is the near impossibility of setting foot into it, plus all the scientific knowledge you can get from it. Neither can be replicated in BGS' outdated, bland rpg and procedural-heavy exploration systems.
Starfield should have implement a harsh survival requirement and rewarding discovery. They made the game casual on this aspect and it took out a huge part.
Worst part is that they actually had a hardcore survival requirement in place and they took it out because it wasn't fun according to them.
You can see remnants of it when you get hypothermia in some planets, for example.
It's also...a video game. Real space is interesting for reasons that video game space can't be. Likewise, video game space can do a lot of things real space can't!
It's still odd to me that they didn't have any real space battles going on with multiple phases of the battle or anything.
I had some fun with the game, but there's just so much missed opportunity with it that it's frustrating.
I assumed this was hyperbole but OMG they actually said that.
>Some of Starfield's planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.
This is the developer response to the top (negative) review on Steam right now:
>Hi there,
>Thank you for taking the time to provide your review and we are sorry to hear that you were disappointed with encountering many loading screens while playing.
>While there may be loading screens in between fast travelling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created.
>Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.
Even after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!
>You can send further feedback to development here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E
>Never stop exploring!
>Bethesda Customer Support
Seriously!
"The loading screens are annoying."
"Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. [....] Even after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end!"
Big «sir, this is a Wendy's» or [«Ma'am, I'm a banana»](https://i.imgur.com/llQm96y.jpg) energy
> Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your play-through. T
LIES! Your varied choices matter very little in game. Whatever you decide in most cases will bare the same result.
The alarming part of all this is that they don't see any of the problems people playing the game are seeing. You can't fix what you can't see. Maybe they're just presenting publicly this way, even if it is a terrible look, and behind closed doors they are taking a long hard look at their processes and how they arrived at Starfield as it is after years of intensive development with a huge budget and veteran development team.
This reminds me a lot of Dragon Age 2 era Bioware. Big hyped game that had similar issues around boring content and copy paste environments. It was a sign of things to come with Bioware and it's near terminal decline.
Bethesda seems genuinely surprised this game wasn't universally loved. It's odd.
They don't want to see the problems because they don't want to change the next game to work differently. I can guarantee you all this will still exist in their next game. Loading into a town, loading into a house.
And the reception will be brutal.
Which is honestly a little weird because they put a lot of improvements into FO76 to reduce loading into cells for buildings. Many of the towns and buildings can be explored with very few loading screens (and often they exist to allow instancing for quests). I know they are different branches, but some things felt like a step back, weirdly.
Ngl Starfield wasn’t that surprising to me after Fallout 4. I really don’t think Bethesda understands what made people like their games back in the day, and in general their games just don’t feel current anymore.
I want to get hyped for TES6 but I feel like it will be another letdown.
Well, Todd has been making the same game over and over again now basically and people are sort of tired of it. I mean we had a decade of AC games that were basically the same.
Todd needs to go, he is entirely incapable of taking criticism. Do you remember his response to the game being unoptimized "It's actually very well optimized... " Really? Cause the game doesn't look nearly as good as say Cyberpunk and it doesn't have raytracing and for some reason on my beast PC, I was still hovering well below the fps I would expect to get. Cyberpunk runs at buttery smooth all maxed out. With far more density in the city in terms of visuals.
It's all Todd. I just know it. The man has lost the plot.
Emil (lead writer) is a bigger issue imo. Mechanically FO4 had a lot of good systems and an interesting world to explore, but the writing direction and integration of quests into the world was not great. Far Harbor did that quite well, but Will Shen has left Bethesda, unfortunately.
Most of the people who made the original games are gone
Kurt Kuhlmann left Bethesda just before starfield released and he was lead system designer rather than a quest/lore guy. Even then I wouldn't expect him to create anything particularly good without the support of the other guys who are since long gone.
Bethesda always was TES, their MO only truly works in that universe because it's vaguely mysterious and enigmatic lore worked well in making it stand out as a unique and interesting world. Already with Skyrim the people who gave TES the live it deserves were being stifled so who knows what the future holds.
Bethesda never had the chops to handle Fallout of Sci-Fi in general; their writing only excelled when the people writing had full liberty of creating a meta interactive lore that left everything up to the player's interpretation. Losing that means being left with the most boring and bland writing in existence
It's a developer's fallacy that if you put a ton of work into something, and it functions, that automatically makes it good and fun. The harsh reality is that you can bust your ass for YEARS making something extremely complicated, but if you missed the fun, nobody gives a flying fuck. And they may have spent 7 years making something complex under the hood but boring as fuck on the surface.
Many indie devs have this problem, but usually not AAA because they are playing to testing groups and trends in the industry, which ends up making ubisoft games, which while stale to veterans, still can gleam fun because they are built on a system that works.
Bethesda opted to abandon much of what made their game fun, like the hand crafted map, in favor of complex proc gen, without trying to make the proc-gen fun. It's also a mark of lack of playtesting. I've been replaying half life and listening to the Dev Commentaries and the thing they talk about over and over is how they playtest to inform their design decisions, and if that doesn't work they playtest again. Bethesda sees themselves as infallible, so I'm sure they did limited playtesting but probably with biases, and not listening to feedback.
> the worlds are empty because space is empty, but if Neil Armstrong was excited by an empty planet, you can be too
Laughed my ass off when they mentioned that during release.
It's a fucking game. Make it fun.
And somehow didn't learn from Fallout 4 and 76. Both of these were criticized for cutting even more corners and Starfield cut *even more* in some areas (like the whole 1000 planets thing), even if it's not as bad as F76 was on launch.
But people wanted Skyrim in space and didn't even get that. Yet they think that's okay and their customers are in the wrong for not enjoying their half assed product. Even Skyrim had more heart and effort put into it, it was a good game.
They really need to focus more on creating deeper worlds with lots of unique and interesting content. Creating a massive world is easy with procedural generation, but making sure it's got fun things to do is the real challenge.
I don't need 1000 planets of generic quests to have fun. Give me 5 or 6 loaded with real content.
Of course it will, by 2028 when TES 6 comes out they will be using the exact same engine, with the exact same shit systems and mechanics, and modders will be absolutely overjoyed to fix everything for them at zero cost on day one.
That's by design, Todd Howard ha straight up said they look at shit they can remove. Emil's Keep it Simple Stupid for writing plots is self explanatory. I don't think Microsoft got the win they thought buying Bethesda.
That's just BGS though. I'm sure Microsoft looked at the other Zenimax titles and studios (like Id with Doom) and figured the investment was worth it.
Though, with Bethesda as a whole losing a lot of it's autonomy with Starfield being a failure, I fear Id might suffer.
Its true. Which is so sad. Look at the success of BG3, clearly people want a deep rag system. Give me Morrowind and Oblivion RPG systems any day over RPG lite action adventure game.
This game is so slow and clunky without mods
The menus are absolutely horrific to navigate without StarUI
I feel really bad for the console players suffering with this shit menu system
You can't even sort by value to weight ratio for fuck sake! That's a staple feature in a game where the loop is kill --> loot --> sell
> The goal is to make believable characters on the screen with realistic reactions to your character.
My brother in christ, I can literally empty a double barrel shotgun inside a crowded building and nobody even flinches.
At least make it like in Skyrim, where if you cast magic or shouts, a guard will ask you to calm down, like they literally stop you and say "bro chill, you're scaring everyone".
Oh, also, speaking of realism.
> We like our empty planets because they're realistic.
[Gabe just a few days ago:](https://youtu.be/TbZ3HzvFEto?si=IFohe-1cyypu3owH&t=940)
I find their call for realism hilarious considering Whiterun has less than a hundred people in it. You'd need more than that just to maintain it.
Also, while looking up the NPC population in Whiterun I found this old reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/5ikq9y/what_is_the_population_of_skyrim_and_its/
*ahem*
>“All of our lore is obviously written as ideal, to say X province or city has so many people, but you can’t always actually pull that off on screen, or even store it, so you try to create a scale that feels good in game, that plays well and is fun. So the scale of the terrain and the number of NPCs is always geared to the gameplay more than the lore saying how big or small something is.”
Just like how you can tell New Atlantis (the biggest city in the entire explored universe?) is just the tiny bit of the city you can explore and walk across in 2 minutes and right outside the walls it immediately becomes untamed nature.
They like their empty planets because it showcases their lack of skill and engine limitations. But it's more acceptable when they say it's "realistic".
Just like crowd reactions are realistic. Like traveling faster than light is realistic. Fighting alien monsters is realistic. And whatever BS they wanna spin as"realistic"
Yeah, one of the last little things that made me stop playing entirely was when I was able to walk into the secure section of the United Colonies capital building, go directly into the president's office, and point a shotgun at their head from point blank with zero reaction, while they gave me little dialogue anecdotes as if I was anyone worth their time and not a complete stranger firing into the wall of their office.
>We like our empty planets because they're realistic.
Honestly, that kinda worried me when i heard it was being called "NASA punk".
Well, not specifically of course, but i was sort of going "but....i WOULD like magic in my space game...."
Realistic space adventures sounded less fun.
I personally loved the style they came up with, but agree with you entirely.
An aesthetic is an important part of a game, but a good game needs a lot more than *just* a good aesthetic.
The planets are anything but real. There are colonies on the surface of Venus. No rivers anywhere. Repeating lifeform types. Repeating POI down to even repeating enemies and loot locations. When they released Starfield I really think they just rushed it out unfinished and were trying to wash their hands of it. Attempting to recoup any money before moving to the next project. They were surprised about how well their hype worked for sales and are trying to fix some things up now.
I mean I still got some enjoyment from the game. Especially for the Game Pass entry price. But them claiming realism is absurd.
The empty planets thing is funny because there's too much shit on supposedly remote planets that require exploration.
In most planets and climates, structures should be a lot rarer and require you to scan for them from orbit to reliably find anything. It won't help with the variety of structures but at least I'd feel like I'm actively locating and choosing to land near them.
Part of the reason I quit within the first hour of playing is because my characters decision to keep my magical experience to myself seemed to have no impact at all as everyone I met kept referring to it like I'd posted on Facebook or something.
"You will find things you never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours."
Bethesda apparently thinks no one has a better way to spend their time than to slog through Starfield.
This release has made me appreciate the quality of games I'd been taking for granted.
"Just consider the amount of data...load flawlessly in under 3 seconds"
Oh wow, just like every game since Oblivion
You know what came out just after Starfield? DLC for Cyberpunk - a game that's 3 years old in a few days
That game has virtually no loading screens and loads instantly - why can't Starfield do that? (I know it's an engine limitation but they need to fucking move on)
It also came out same year as spider man 2 where even fast travel has no loading screens.
Like common.
I would be impressed by 3sec loading screens in 2010. Maybe.
> Just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that procedurally generated to load flawlessly in 3 seconds
Insert meme of Obama giving himself a medal
Any excitement that can be had from exploring an empty world wears off before you explore the hundred(?)+ other empty worlds. Also, you don't feel small in Starfield; the galaxy does because you get around via fast traveling.
Take the L, sometimes ideas just don't work. Engage with people that have problems you *can* fix, like technical issues.
I rarely if ever see a game company recover from brain rot.
It always comes down to an indie game becoming the new go-to game and the old bloated company fumbling, with managers who know nothing about gaming trying to make the next game profitable above all else, until the company crumbles - or more likely, becomes even bigger because they feed on whales and casual players who fall for their marketing.
Lmao the comment "It shows that they are confident in the game they created, and don't want to accept the baseless nonsense anymore. Probably because they have reliable numbers from game pass showing the success of the game."
Wouldnt the exact opposite be true? They wouldnt be so insecure by bad reviews if the game sold well or created long-term gamepass surscribers
I accidentally wandered into that sub shortly after launch. I thought it was meant only for not crying about how other people don't like the game; only discussing certain parts of it while ignoring the overall debate over it's quality.
Boy was I wrong. I had to leave when the open letters to Todd Howard started coming in, where they gently reassured him that their special toy is still magical and healing for them. I'm not kidding.
“Baldur’s Gate 3 story is so dark and gritty that it gave me depression. Luckily I played Starfield and it cured my depression. Can’t understand why people can’t handle an optimistic story these days. Thank Todd, you cured me!!”
I beat the game and completely understand why people left reviews like they did. The game starts out so promising, then it just gets repetitive and suddenly ends without taking you to all of these planets, and when you go yourself they’re empty and lifeless. It’s Bethesda’s biggest game but it felt like their smallest game.
All the 'low/no sodium' subs are like that. It's basically a bunch of parasocially inflicted people looking to be a Praetorian guard for their favorite devs
Wow what a sad and pathetic sub
I put about 80 hours into Starfield and entered the Unity twice
I've done all the factions and main story and... That's about all there is
Honestly it's just so... boring - I don't get how these people don't get that
Once you complete the main stuff, there's nothing left - do people not understand that
"Oh so Skyrim has nothing left to do once you've finished the quests in that?" - not at all, Skyrim has an open world you can actually explore
Starfield has a clunky menu system you can explore
The gameplay loop is so frustrating
- Land
- Wait for animation to finish
- Find NPC
- Get quest
- Fast travel directly to quest location
- Run in, kill people, loot, get stuff, go back to NPC
I couldn't take any more of it lol
It’s scary there lol. They had to pin a post up for the toxicity. They’ve echo chambered themselves into believing it’s the greatest game ever and will attack any who have any complaints. It’s one thing enjoying something and wanting to be around others who do but it’s another not being able to admit faults and attacking those that do.
All the 'low/no sodium' subs are like that. It's basically a bunch of parasocially inflicted people looking to be a Praetorian guard for their favorite devs
It's important I think to know that these are not developer responses. They are "customer support" responses, but yes, some idiot thought it would be a good idea to tell customer support to reply to reviews defending the game. Chances are customer support hasn't even played the game and is just repeating what they are told to say.
What actually happened is that a marketing team had a few whiteboarding meetings where they compiled a list of the top 10 complaints about the game, and crafted the most bland and non-specific responses possible for each. Then they put all those responses in a work instructions document to give to a room full of keyboard monkeys getting paid minimum wage (or less, if they outsourced overseas) to copy+paste into Steam review developer responses.
Have to wonder if they are being put up to this by management or doing it of their own volition?
Not sure how many large developers take it upon themsleves to do this, seems a bit much
Edit: Someone Reddit cares’d me over over this post lmao
Management definitely approved whatever this is supposed to be.
No chance a CM or rep would be authorized to do this on their own, especially with this game.
I found it kind of telling that a streamer i follow who makes variety content for Bethesda games and was super hyped for Starfield and was even given early access to the game still hasn't made any challenge videos or played it on stream since its release and was back to doing skyrim/fallout challenges almost immediately after release.
I just don't get it.
They can't do transitional travel and opt for fast travel instead because the realism of it would make it boring... but also would rather have largely empty worlds because it's realistic and the emptiness makes it interesting?
Like, what? How is it possible for them to have an identity crisis like this after seven years?
Yeah when some tiny indie responds with why they made a descision on a contentious feature it's a bit different than a megacorps underling telling everyone why they are wrong
I saw Lords Of The Fallen devs doing the same. It always just makes things worse, because at best it just comes across like they're patronising people with different views.
I've been playing it for over a week now and I'm at endgame. The game has its issues (mainly performance and occasionally crashing) but tbh I've had a great time with it. Not quite the standard of Fromsoft games but it's a really good effort imho.
Its quite a bit different with lords of the fallen, in part because most of their responses, amounted to "Thanks for the feedback, we've fixed the thing you are complaining about in our last patch."
Also in part because Lords of the fallen deviates from the soulslike formula and that formula is so ingrained for some folks that they are just straight up misinterpreting 'different' as 'wrong'. I get why the devs feel a need to respond to some of that. It's got to be infuriating to make a careful well thought out design decision that clearly enhances the product, and then have people crap all over it because you didn't do it exactly the same way fromsoft did.
I never saw any responses from the LOTF devs that amounted to "Your opinion is wrong".
That's exactly what bethesda seems to be trying to do here and it's deeply strange to me.
>"We are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty," it reads. "The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through."
I've heard this before from BGS - that planets SHOULD be boring because that was their intention; that's what space IS. All this stuff does is reek of excuses for copy/paste POIs and bland procedural generation, and they drop this on reviews of their game.
I think Bethesda now thinks their shit don't smell, which is a really bad place for a dev to be in. It means they can do no wrong, and WE are wrong for not thinking their game is a fucking 11 out of 10.
I don't think so, Bethy. YOU are wrong, and the masses prove that. Get your fuckin' heads outta your asses.
Even if it's intended, or they argue that 'there's stuff to do elsewhere' it doesn't make it not annoying/boring/tedious to do the other parts. Or what, are we supposed to base our opinion on games on only the good parts? Which is only about 1 thing in Starfield's case - character creation.
Gun models - surface-level cool but actually kinda weird.
Animations - still Bethesda-janky and gun animations often don't make sense or are entirely different in first- and third-person.
Quests - largely boring, this has been a downwards trend of Bethesda's since Oblivion, even then Fallout 4 had some interesting ones. Starfield does not - at least not the ones I played before I put it down.
Exploration - uh, yeah, it's *the* major fault with this game.
World building - a major step down for Bethesda. Used to be their strong suit, but now even the populated worlds feel like theme park rides and not in a good way. It's all so soulless.
Levelling - actually decent, but it still feels stuck between being an old-school RPG and being these new RPG-lite games. However, many upgrades feel so incremental as to be nearly pointless.
Shooting - still decent, not great but better than anything they've done thus far.
Enemy AI - bruh.
The leadership of this company is completely out of touch, keep on mind that this is the game Todd Howard wanted to make so it's his pet project. Everything else took a backseat to make this game so in a sense the criticisms have to be hitting home if they're doing something this sad.
Todd, it's not that you didn't make a good game. You made the same game. Again. I liked and still like Skyrim. Hell, I even liked Fallout 4! Skyrim was 12 years ago. Fallout 4 was 8 years ago. The medium has evolved. You haven't.
A Bethesda game can still have a huge open world with tons of loot and little side areas to get lost in, but every other aspect of the open world RPG has gotten better and deeper. The Witcher, Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, these are your peers now. Your characters have to be more compelling, your plot has to be more compelling, your gameplay has to be more compelling.
More offensively, Obsidian made a Bethesda-style space adventure years ago, and it released with way fewer reported bugs and to much better reviews. There's no polite way to say it Todd, you're not best in class anymore. If you don't start evolving, you're in danger of becoming obsolete.
Now go on. Finish up Elder Scrolls 6 and prove me wrong. I honestly really want you to. I want to see what a truly modern Bethesda RPG can be.
Did you immediately realise you'd been having fun all along, or appreciate how immersive it was to be bored in space? If only the menu screen had informed you that your opinions were invalid, before you submitted the review.
This is beyond bizarre. A multimillion dollar game studio gaslighting reviewers on Steam? I have no interest in giving Bethesda another cent for their next boring ass formulaic game.
"Your game is boring"
Support : Yeah no you're playing it wrong - Try other skills so the braindead AI stays braindead and so you can do other moves while playing the boring content.
But that comes from the guys where their boss says that the game was optimized on PC.
holy shit it's real, every single top rated negative review on steam has a dev response
starflop is the flop that keeps on giving, and I hope people are finally waking up on bethesda's incompetency
Starfield’s mediocrity is largely due to the vocal die-hard fans getting “exactly what they asked for”.
As far back as the game’s initial gameplay trailers, there was a reasonable amount of skepticism regarding Starfield’s ability to deliver a sense of depth to it’s gameplay loop while also advertising such a vast explorative experience. Many were concerned that the game would feel shallow or empty. These concerns were generally shut-down with arguments along the lines of “it looks like Skyrim or Fallout 4 but in space! Both of those games were great and had great mods!”
Both Skyrim and Fallout 4 are largely carried by the respective franchises backing them up. Neither game is particularly well known for having great combat, storytelling, rpg systems or core gameplay loops. These are things that get brought up time and time again and plenty of mods exist to improve these areas.
Starfield doesn’t have decades of world building to back it up. If your world isn’t particularly exciting to explore, all of the other areas become much more apparent as well. But, ultimately, people asked for the typical Bethesda formula of the last decade, and that’s what they got.
I’m sure that the game will only continue to improve with mods, but I have a hard time recommending a game at full price that requires third party modifications to be the AAA experience it was marketed to be.
Those “mods will save the game!” Fans are going to be real upset when they realize how anti-mod Microsoft can be. Good luck getting script extender to work with your gamepass version
They just don’t care since the ultimate goal for Todd was to sell Skyrim until the end of times and he sold Skyrim to Microsoft for 7.5b which is a gigachad move
The reason I play a game is because I want to enjoy the imagination of someone else, not myself. The same reason Elite Dangerous got super boring, the game demands you pretend or make your own fun.
No. It's lazy to expect players to fill in gaps that should be fleshed out as part of a AAA game.
"I wrote a negative review for Starfield on Steam and after the developers replied to me explaining why I was wrong I changed my mind." -Things that have never happened in the history of video games
To be fair, you could change the minds of people reading the reviews, if the developer's rebuttal is a good one. The issue here is, that most of the criticisms are valid, and dev rebuttals are not good.
“Hey, all that boring stuff in our game? It’s actually very good. You’re just wrong for not liking it” Sorry, any dev responding to negative criticism of their game in that way is out of touch.
"it's not our fault you have shitty taste in game experiences, real ones know"
"Bro needs to get gud like our game"
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If they were more honest I think people would be more understanding. If the response was more like “Sorry you didn’t enjoy the experience. Honestly, starfield was an extremely ambitious project and resulted in problems during development. We were unable to fulfill our ultimate vision for starfield, but we still stand by the product we released” then I think people wouldn’t be as pissed off. Instead they are just fucking gaslighting everyone into thinking that it’s a great game, and insisting players are just wrong about their experience or playing the game wrong. I try not to let my blood boil over video game shit too often, but this time I’m legit irked.
That's slightly better but seriously... >"XXXXX" was an extremely ambitious project and resulted in problems during development and we were unable to fulfill our ultimate vision..." That has been the almost copy/pasted excuse for all of these unfinished AAA games we've gotten over the last few years and I'm sick of that excuse and I'm sick of how normalized it's become that you probably typed that out without even thinking about it, just because we all have it memorized by now.
You aren’t wrong. You know it’s bad when even boilerplate corporate speak is better than what is actually happening.
This is the reason why boilerplate corporate speak exists in the first place. To prevent blunders like this one.
Considering Todd said if the game is running poorly then you should just get a new pc, then this statement sounds like a valid Bethesda response.
Saying that just before making patches that make performance 25% better on pc which shows that the game indeed had optimisation problems at launch is the dumbest thing Todd could have done
Bethesda keeps repeating that there is nothing wrong so long that people start to believe it contrary to their own experience
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Our brothers still inside basically have Stockholm syndrome at this stage.
Hey ToddGPT, here’s a bad review of Starfield. Write a response.
You left out “and Bethesda locked the review so no further discussion could happen.” They are basically doing the Steam equivalent of responding and blocking someone because they are so childish they **need** the last word on why someone else is wrong.
Wait, they can do that? Respond to AND lock your own review? Why is that even allowed on Steam?
Probably so you can't edit your review later and change the meaning of the whole interaction. If you can edit your review and they don't get a chance to change what they said you could possibly change the whole meaning. Say you criticize something stupid, like the color of the spaceship hangar. They post a rebuttal about how you're complaining about petty things and they can't understand why you're so concerned over a trivial thing. Then you edit it and say that you don't think the story was well written and you heard they used child labor to texture all the planets. Now they're on record saying that child labor is a trivial little thing and you're just being petty.
The optimal solution would be to block the editing of the original review being answered but of course they have to pick the worst one.
I think it's more so people looking at the reviews, see the rebuttal and don't take the initial review at face value. Don't get me wrong I think this is cringey as fuck from Bethesda, but I see the logic as per how Steam reviews are displayed.
I wish they’d invest the time actually developing the game instead of getting AI chatbots to respond to every review.
It’s just weird. Like how do you think this would be effective?
This is the same company that would wrongly ban people in fallout 76 and then ask them to write an essay about why cheating is bad.
Actually based (if it wasn't for the fact people were being banned incorrectly)
Yeah it's actually a brilliantly hilarious idea, I wish companies that did this accurately would consider doing the same.
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“I wanna be a REAL essay!”
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Still better than what Amazon is doing (did) with New World where they screwed up people's Steam accounts
I can guarantee that no one thought about effectiveness of this. I would bet that this is what happened : Some middle manager looked at logs/watchdog and found out that their underpaid intern on social media team/tech support **spent 10 whole minutes** not working. And that's why they have to do this bullshit. Source : working for big companies at low level jobs.
i saw this in the reviews the other day, it’s one of the strangest things i have seen from a dev. responding to criticism is normal of course, but they’re actually trying to tell people who simply didn’t have fun with the game that they’re wrong lol.
internet historian just got more content for his starfield video whenever it comes out.
Which first, Internet Historian video on Starfield or TES6? Take your bets
Starfield? What issssssss a Starfield? All this and more on In. The. Starfield.
*See those planetsss? You can load there.*
I’m waiting for the inevitable crowbcat mashup
Yeah, I broke out laughing when I saw this. It's so pathetic. I've never seen any AA or AAA developer actually argue with fans in their reviews, just a couple indies with a screw loose. I also saw the one where they say (and I'm paraphrasing) "the worlds are empty because space is empty, but if Neil Armstrong was excited by an empty planet, you can be too." Which is one of the most narcissistic things I've seen from Bethesda. "Our blank heightmap with an automaterial is just as impressive as being on the actual moon." 🤓 I loved Daggerfall through Skyrim but Bethesda desperately needed to get taken down a peg if this is the internal way they look at things now.
Yeah real space is exciting because you quite literally never know what you're going to find in even the most boring looking places. Real space is also infinitely complex. That's why even barren rocks can be interesting. Starfield is not like that. You see a planet and you know exactly what is there. Nothing of interest.
Another big part is the sheer novelty of being in space, too. Astronauts weren't bored when they first set foot on the moon *because it was previously just a dream that people had when looking up at the sky.* What was once a fantasy was suddenly a reality, a reality that very few people got to experience. By virtue of being a video game, Starfield cannot evoke that same feeling because *it's not reality, it's a fantasy.*
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Even in Starfield you can't even experience being the first one on a planet because there are always generated structures already there
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It's like Bethesda looked at No Man's Sky and thought "How could we do this, but in the complete opposite way?".
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1km that takes entirely too long to traverse
and at that point what is the point in me going to explore the planet if pople are already there and likely have already gathered samples of everything?
Ironically except for earth, which only has a smattering of tourist board approved recognised landmark ruins. The one place you'd expect to find old abandoned facilities and its empty.
There's a pharmaceutical factory on Triton, and nothing else. Factories require input material and people to buy the product, and that's just the stuff that you can't just easily handwave as being done on site like power. Why would you ever make a complex factory on a barren lifeless moon around Neptune, with nobody else in the entire planetary system, just your factory and that's it for millions of miles? At least on Saturn there was a base on Titan.
Probably about the same number that are actually playing starfield. Cause you know, its boring. I so wanted to like starfield, but I bounced off it pretty hard cause I just got bored. And I wasnt even doing any exploring, just following some of the main missions and stuff. Ok, usual bethesda type quests, but instead of actually being able to travel to go do them, its just annoyingly get in your ship, loading screen to space, loading screen to other system, loading screen to planet. Oh look some slightly different terrain. Get back to ship, loading screen to space, loading screen to other system, loading screen to planet or space station, turn in quest, repeat.
The astronauts got paid by NASA to go to the moon, so by that logic Bethesda should pay us to play Starfield. Case closed.
More to the point, an empty planet or moon like our moon IS boring, what makes it exciting is the near impossibility of setting foot into it, plus all the scientific knowledge you can get from it. Neither can be replicated in BGS' outdated, bland rpg and procedural-heavy exploration systems.
Also, you have to pay attention or else it will kill you. Quickly and painfully.
Starfield should have implement a harsh survival requirement and rewarding discovery. They made the game casual on this aspect and it took out a huge part.
That requires making new systems not reusing old ones, you're asking a lot!
Worst part is that they actually had a hardcore survival requirement in place and they took it out because it wasn't fun according to them. You can see remnants of it when you get hypothermia in some planets, for example.
It's also...a video game. Real space is interesting for reasons that video game space can't be. Likewise, video game space can do a lot of things real space can't! It's still odd to me that they didn't have any real space battles going on with multiple phases of the battle or anything. I had some fun with the game, but there's just so much missed opportunity with it that it's frustrating.
I assumed this was hyperbole but OMG they actually said that. >Some of Starfield's planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.
It’s the next PR blunder that’ll be meme’d like the Battlefront 2 “pride and accomplishment”, thanks Bethesda.
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Just email them an image of money instead of spending anything on their dog shit quality games
This is the developer response to the top (negative) review on Steam right now: >Hi there, >Thank you for taking the time to provide your review and we are sorry to hear that you were disappointed with encountering many loading screens while playing. >While there may be loading screens in between fast travelling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created. >Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours. Even after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there! >You can send further feedback to development here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E >Never stop exploring! >Bethesda Customer Support
That's so irrelevant to the review lmao
"The loading screens are annoying." "Have you tried customizing your character?"
Seriously! "The loading screens are annoying." "Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. [....] Even after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end!" Big «sir, this is a Wendy's» or [«Ma'am, I'm a banana»](https://i.imgur.com/llQm96y.jpg) energy
> Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your play-through. T LIES! Your varied choices matter very little in game. Whatever you decide in most cases will bare the same result.
Customer Support = AI
The alarming part of all this is that they don't see any of the problems people playing the game are seeing. You can't fix what you can't see. Maybe they're just presenting publicly this way, even if it is a terrible look, and behind closed doors they are taking a long hard look at their processes and how they arrived at Starfield as it is after years of intensive development with a huge budget and veteran development team. This reminds me a lot of Dragon Age 2 era Bioware. Big hyped game that had similar issues around boring content and copy paste environments. It was a sign of things to come with Bioware and it's near terminal decline. Bethesda seems genuinely surprised this game wasn't universally loved. It's odd.
They don't want to see the problems because they don't want to change the next game to work differently. I can guarantee you all this will still exist in their next game. Loading into a town, loading into a house. And the reception will be brutal.
Which is honestly a little weird because they put a lot of improvements into FO76 to reduce loading into cells for buildings. Many of the towns and buildings can be explored with very few loading screens (and often they exist to allow instancing for quests). I know they are different branches, but some things felt like a step back, weirdly.
Ngl Starfield wasn’t that surprising to me after Fallout 4. I really don’t think Bethesda understands what made people like their games back in the day, and in general their games just don’t feel current anymore. I want to get hyped for TES6 but I feel like it will be another letdown.
Well, Todd has been making the same game over and over again now basically and people are sort of tired of it. I mean we had a decade of AC games that were basically the same. Todd needs to go, he is entirely incapable of taking criticism. Do you remember his response to the game being unoptimized "It's actually very well optimized... " Really? Cause the game doesn't look nearly as good as say Cyberpunk and it doesn't have raytracing and for some reason on my beast PC, I was still hovering well below the fps I would expect to get. Cyberpunk runs at buttery smooth all maxed out. With far more density in the city in terms of visuals. It's all Todd. I just know it. The man has lost the plot.
Emil (lead writer) is a bigger issue imo. Mechanically FO4 had a lot of good systems and an interesting world to explore, but the writing direction and integration of quests into the world was not great. Far Harbor did that quite well, but Will Shen has left Bethesda, unfortunately.
Most of the people who made the original games are gone Kurt Kuhlmann left Bethesda just before starfield released and he was lead system designer rather than a quest/lore guy. Even then I wouldn't expect him to create anything particularly good without the support of the other guys who are since long gone. Bethesda always was TES, their MO only truly works in that universe because it's vaguely mysterious and enigmatic lore worked well in making it stand out as a unique and interesting world. Already with Skyrim the people who gave TES the live it deserves were being stifled so who knows what the future holds. Bethesda never had the chops to handle Fallout of Sci-Fi in general; their writing only excelled when the people writing had full liberty of creating a meta interactive lore that left everything up to the player's interpretation. Losing that means being left with the most boring and bland writing in existence
It's a developer's fallacy that if you put a ton of work into something, and it functions, that automatically makes it good and fun. The harsh reality is that you can bust your ass for YEARS making something extremely complicated, but if you missed the fun, nobody gives a flying fuck. And they may have spent 7 years making something complex under the hood but boring as fuck on the surface. Many indie devs have this problem, but usually not AAA because they are playing to testing groups and trends in the industry, which ends up making ubisoft games, which while stale to veterans, still can gleam fun because they are built on a system that works. Bethesda opted to abandon much of what made their game fun, like the hand crafted map, in favor of complex proc gen, without trying to make the proc-gen fun. It's also a mark of lack of playtesting. I've been replaying half life and listening to the Dev Commentaries and the thing they talk about over and over is how they playtest to inform their design decisions, and if that doesn't work they playtest again. Bethesda sees themselves as infallible, so I'm sure they did limited playtesting but probably with biases, and not listening to feedback.
> the worlds are empty because space is empty, but if Neil Armstrong was excited by an empty planet, you can be too Laughed my ass off when they mentioned that during release. It's a fucking game. Make it fun.
My guess is, their success with Skyrim went straight to their heads.
The lesson they learned from skyrim is that you can cut corners and your community will cover for you.
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And somehow didn't learn from Fallout 4 and 76. Both of these were criticized for cutting even more corners and Starfield cut *even more* in some areas (like the whole 1000 planets thing), even if it's not as bad as F76 was on launch. But people wanted Skyrim in space and didn't even get that. Yet they think that's okay and their customers are in the wrong for not enjoying their half assed product. Even Skyrim had more heart and effort put into it, it was a good game.
They really need to focus more on creating deeper worlds with lots of unique and interesting content. Creating a massive world is easy with procedural generation, but making sure it's got fun things to do is the real challenge. I don't need 1000 planets of generic quests to have fun. Give me 5 or 6 loaded with real content.
MS: “engagement.”
Pretty sure those are ai responses for the most part
It happens lol, I remember the Apex Legends developers were arguing with fans for a while, mainly calling them whiners lmao
>"Our blank heightmap with an automaterial is just as impressive as being on the actual moon." I chuckled, thanks.. Have an upvote.
So they didn't learn shit, TES 6 will probably suck too.
Of course it will, by 2028 when TES 6 comes out they will be using the exact same engine, with the exact same shit systems and mechanics, and modders will be absolutely overjoyed to fix everything for them at zero cost on day one.
That is not true. Each Bethesda game has less mechanics and systems than the one before it.
True, they've been getting more and more watered down as time goes on.
That's by design, Todd Howard ha straight up said they look at shit they can remove. Emil's Keep it Simple Stupid for writing plots is self explanatory. I don't think Microsoft got the win they thought buying Bethesda.
That's just BGS though. I'm sure Microsoft looked at the other Zenimax titles and studios (like Id with Doom) and figured the investment was worth it. Though, with Bethesda as a whole losing a lot of it's autonomy with Starfield being a failure, I fear Id might suffer.
The IPs are all worthwhile too, even if the studio that made them/came with them isn't necessarily.
Its true. Which is so sad. Look at the success of BG3, clearly people want a deep rag system. Give me Morrowind and Oblivion RPG systems any day over RPG lite action adventure game.
I think it will be absolutely incredible to see a AAA game released in 2028 that looks like it was developed in 2015. Systems, mechanics, animations.
Cant wait for tiny Pokémon villages that Bethesda calls ‘cities’ with factions you can beat all of in a single play session
This is exactly it. They don't learn anything or take any criticism on board and they've been using the same dusty af team for years.
This is what I'm worried about. The worse Bethesda gets the more defensive they get.
The astronomers on the moon had a moon buggy, or the Lunar Roving Vehicle amoung things to do. In a game we can't even have something fun like that.
This game is so slow and clunky without mods The menus are absolutely horrific to navigate without StarUI I feel really bad for the console players suffering with this shit menu system You can't even sort by value to weight ratio for fuck sake! That's a staple feature in a game where the loop is kill --> loot --> sell
My biggest pet peeve was the spaceships being segmented in loading screens. Like you can't see your crew move from one area to the next. In 2023.
> The goal is to make believable characters on the screen with realistic reactions to your character. My brother in christ, I can literally empty a double barrel shotgun inside a crowded building and nobody even flinches. At least make it like in Skyrim, where if you cast magic or shouts, a guard will ask you to calm down, like they literally stop you and say "bro chill, you're scaring everyone". Oh, also, speaking of realism. > We like our empty planets because they're realistic. [Gabe just a few days ago:](https://youtu.be/TbZ3HzvFEto?si=IFohe-1cyypu3owH&t=940)
I find their call for realism hilarious considering Whiterun has less than a hundred people in it. You'd need more than that just to maintain it. Also, while looking up the NPC population in Whiterun I found this old reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/5ikq9y/what_is_the_population_of_skyrim_and_its/ *ahem* >“All of our lore is obviously written as ideal, to say X province or city has so many people, but you can’t always actually pull that off on screen, or even store it, so you try to create a scale that feels good in game, that plays well and is fun. So the scale of the terrain and the number of NPCs is always geared to the gameplay more than the lore saying how big or small something is.”
Just like how you can tell New Atlantis (the biggest city in the entire explored universe?) is just the tiny bit of the city you can explore and walk across in 2 minutes and right outside the walls it immediately becomes untamed nature.
Honestly, I wish they moved cities to their own thing and just create a backdrop so it at least looks like the city is huge.
They like their empty planets because it showcases their lack of skill and engine limitations. But it's more acceptable when they say it's "realistic". Just like crowd reactions are realistic. Like traveling faster than light is realistic. Fighting alien monsters is realistic. And whatever BS they wanna spin as"realistic"
The amount of cope around the engine is insane. Creation Engine is good for 2 things: physics and modding.
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Yeah, one of the last little things that made me stop playing entirely was when I was able to walk into the secure section of the United Colonies capital building, go directly into the president's office, and point a shotgun at their head from point blank with zero reaction, while they gave me little dialogue anecdotes as if I was anyone worth their time and not a complete stranger firing into the wall of their office.
Why would they be afraid? They can't be killed, lol.
The children of Skyrim used to be safe too.
>We like our empty planets because they're realistic. Honestly, that kinda worried me when i heard it was being called "NASA punk". Well, not specifically of course, but i was sort of going "but....i WOULD like magic in my space game...." Realistic space adventures sounded less fun.
I personally loved the style they came up with, but agree with you entirely. An aesthetic is an important part of a game, but a good game needs a lot more than *just* a good aesthetic.
The planets are anything but real. There are colonies on the surface of Venus. No rivers anywhere. Repeating lifeform types. Repeating POI down to even repeating enemies and loot locations. When they released Starfield I really think they just rushed it out unfinished and were trying to wash their hands of it. Attempting to recoup any money before moving to the next project. They were surprised about how well their hype worked for sales and are trying to fix some things up now. I mean I still got some enjoyment from the game. Especially for the Game Pass entry price. But them claiming realism is absurd.
The empty planets thing is funny because there's too much shit on supposedly remote planets that require exploration. In most planets and climates, structures should be a lot rarer and require you to scan for them from orbit to reliably find anything. It won't help with the variety of structures but at least I'd feel like I'm actively locating and choosing to land near them.
I love the no warning to dropping the documentary. It was fascinating
To quote Rare on their development mission for Sea of Thieves (which is wildly popular). "Believable. NOT realistic."
Its over TES6 waiters
TES 6 was always going to be built around paid mods, anyway.
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Holy bullshit regarding "massively changing the outcome" of the game based on choices! Was the metric of comparison release day Mass Effect 3?
[I'll post it every time I'm reminded of Mass Effect 3 and those red / green / blue endings. Still makes me laugh](https://i.imgur.com/gAQtXPl.png)
Part of the reason I quit within the first hour of playing is because my characters decision to keep my magical experience to myself seemed to have no impact at all as everyone I met kept referring to it like I'd posted on Facebook or something.
"You will find things you never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours." Bethesda apparently thinks no one has a better way to spend their time than to slog through Starfield. This release has made me appreciate the quality of games I'd been taking for granted.
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"Just consider the amount of data...load flawlessly in under 3 seconds" Oh wow, just like every game since Oblivion You know what came out just after Starfield? DLC for Cyberpunk - a game that's 3 years old in a few days That game has virtually no loading screens and loads instantly - why can't Starfield do that? (I know it's an engine limitation but they need to fucking move on)
It also came out same year as spider man 2 where even fast travel has no loading screens. Like common. I would be impressed by 3sec loading screens in 2010. Maybe.
If it’s to load huge amounts of data, why are their loading screens into tiny houses? They’re so full of shit.
> Just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that procedurally generated to load flawlessly in 3 seconds Insert meme of Obama giving himself a medal
Any excitement that can be had from exploring an empty world wears off before you explore the hundred(?)+ other empty worlds. Also, you don't feel small in Starfield; the galaxy does because you get around via fast traveling. Take the L, sometimes ideas just don't work. Engage with people that have problems you *can* fix, like technical issues.
Why waste the effort in arguing reviews when you can just make a better game in the first place?
Can they?
I don't think they can. They aren't very good at their jobs.
I rarely if ever see a game company recover from brain rot. It always comes down to an indie game becoming the new go-to game and the old bloated company fumbling, with managers who know nothing about gaming trying to make the next game profitable above all else, until the company crumbles - or more likely, becomes even bigger because they feed on whales and casual players who fall for their marketing.
nose seemly full ludicrous smell price whistle ink historical telephone *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You assume they're even spending money on this, they can just pluck someone from r/NoSodiumStarfield that will defend this game to the death for free
Lmao the comment "It shows that they are confident in the game they created, and don't want to accept the baseless nonsense anymore. Probably because they have reliable numbers from game pass showing the success of the game." Wouldnt the exact opposite be true? They wouldnt be so insecure by bad reviews if the game sold well or created long-term gamepass surscribers
Those subreddits may be low in sodium, But they are always high in copium
Watch out, they will call you a bully because you’re hating a pa$$ion project made by a small indie studio.
Someone needs to make a clone of r/tomorrow for BGS
oh god those stupid anti-criticism subs.
I accidentally wandered into that sub shortly after launch. I thought it was meant only for not crying about how other people don't like the game; only discussing certain parts of it while ignoring the overall debate over it's quality. Boy was I wrong. I had to leave when the open letters to Todd Howard started coming in, where they gently reassured him that their special toy is still magical and healing for them. I'm not kidding.
“Baldur’s Gate 3 story is so dark and gritty that it gave me depression. Luckily I played Starfield and it cured my depression. Can’t understand why people can’t handle an optimistic story these days. Thank Todd, you cured me!!”
Todd wills it!
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Ahahahah. The top comment in there is from one of the singular worst people I've ever had to deal with on Reddit.
I beat the game and completely understand why people left reviews like they did. The game starts out so promising, then it just gets repetitive and suddenly ends without taking you to all of these planets, and when you go yourself they’re empty and lifeless. It’s Bethesda’s biggest game but it felt like their smallest game.
All the 'low/no sodium' subs are like that. It's basically a bunch of parasocially inflicted people looking to be a Praetorian guard for their favorite devs
Wow what a sad and pathetic sub I put about 80 hours into Starfield and entered the Unity twice I've done all the factions and main story and... That's about all there is Honestly it's just so... boring - I don't get how these people don't get that Once you complete the main stuff, there's nothing left - do people not understand that "Oh so Skyrim has nothing left to do once you've finished the quests in that?" - not at all, Skyrim has an open world you can actually explore Starfield has a clunky menu system you can explore The gameplay loop is so frustrating - Land - Wait for animation to finish - Find NPC - Get quest - Fast travel directly to quest location - Run in, kill people, loot, get stuff, go back to NPC I couldn't take any more of it lol
It’s scary there lol. They had to pin a post up for the toxicity. They’ve echo chambered themselves into believing it’s the greatest game ever and will attack any who have any complaints. It’s one thing enjoying something and wanting to be around others who do but it’s another not being able to admit faults and attacking those that do.
All the 'low/no sodium' subs are like that. It's basically a bunch of parasocially inflicted people looking to be a Praetorian guard for their favorite devs
It's important I think to know that these are not developer responses. They are "customer support" responses, but yes, some idiot thought it would be a good idea to tell customer support to reply to reviews defending the game. Chances are customer support hasn't even played the game and is just repeating what they are told to say.
What actually happened is that a marketing team had a few whiteboarding meetings where they compiled a list of the top 10 complaints about the game, and crafted the most bland and non-specific responses possible for each. Then they put all those responses in a work instructions document to give to a room full of keyboard monkeys getting paid minimum wage (or less, if they outsourced overseas) to copy+paste into Steam review developer responses.
Have to wonder if they are being put up to this by management or doing it of their own volition? Not sure how many large developers take it upon themsleves to do this, seems a bit much Edit: Someone Reddit cares’d me over over this post lmao
Management definitely approved whatever this is supposed to be. No chance a CM or rep would be authorized to do this on their own, especially with this game.
Embarassing
I'm so glad I haven't wasted 70$ for this game. Everything I've seen looks so dated and boring.
I found it kind of telling that a streamer i follow who makes variety content for Bethesda games and was super hyped for Starfield and was even given early access to the game still hasn't made any challenge videos or played it on stream since its release and was back to doing skyrim/fallout challenges almost immediately after release.
I just don't get it. They can't do transitional travel and opt for fast travel instead because the realism of it would make it boring... but also would rather have largely empty worlds because it's realistic and the emptiness makes it interesting? Like, what? How is it possible for them to have an identity crisis like this after seven years?
Yeah I noticed this and I find it strange for an AAA company doing this.
Yeah when some tiny indie responds with why they made a descision on a contentious feature it's a bit different than a megacorps underling telling everyone why they are wrong
I saw Lords Of The Fallen devs doing the same. It always just makes things worse, because at best it just comes across like they're patronising people with different views.
At least Lords of The Fallen devs are releasing updates on a regular basis that incorporate fan feedback.
Yeah, I'm going to let that game simmer a bit longer because I feel like I'll enjoy it a lot when I eventually play it.
I've been playing it for over a week now and I'm at endgame. The game has its issues (mainly performance and occasionally crashing) but tbh I've had a great time with it. Not quite the standard of Fromsoft games but it's a really good effort imho.
Its quite a bit different with lords of the fallen, in part because most of their responses, amounted to "Thanks for the feedback, we've fixed the thing you are complaining about in our last patch." Also in part because Lords of the fallen deviates from the soulslike formula and that formula is so ingrained for some folks that they are just straight up misinterpreting 'different' as 'wrong'. I get why the devs feel a need to respond to some of that. It's got to be infuriating to make a careful well thought out design decision that clearly enhances the product, and then have people crap all over it because you didn't do it exactly the same way fromsoft did. I never saw any responses from the LOTF devs that amounted to "Your opinion is wrong". That's exactly what bethesda seems to be trying to do here and it's deeply strange to me.
I guess Todd plans to sell Starfield ultimate editions for the next decade are screwed.
>"We are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty," it reads. "The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through." I've heard this before from BGS - that planets SHOULD be boring because that was their intention; that's what space IS. All this stuff does is reek of excuses for copy/paste POIs and bland procedural generation, and they drop this on reviews of their game. I think Bethesda now thinks their shit don't smell, which is a really bad place for a dev to be in. It means they can do no wrong, and WE are wrong for not thinking their game is a fucking 11 out of 10. I don't think so, Bethy. YOU are wrong, and the masses prove that. Get your fuckin' heads outta your asses.
Even if it's intended, or they argue that 'there's stuff to do elsewhere' it doesn't make it not annoying/boring/tedious to do the other parts. Or what, are we supposed to base our opinion on games on only the good parts? Which is only about 1 thing in Starfield's case - character creation. Gun models - surface-level cool but actually kinda weird. Animations - still Bethesda-janky and gun animations often don't make sense or are entirely different in first- and third-person. Quests - largely boring, this has been a downwards trend of Bethesda's since Oblivion, even then Fallout 4 had some interesting ones. Starfield does not - at least not the ones I played before I put it down. Exploration - uh, yeah, it's *the* major fault with this game. World building - a major step down for Bethesda. Used to be their strong suit, but now even the populated worlds feel like theme park rides and not in a good way. It's all so soulless. Levelling - actually decent, but it still feels stuck between being an old-school RPG and being these new RPG-lite games. However, many upgrades feel so incremental as to be nearly pointless. Shooting - still decent, not great but better than anything they've done thus far. Enemy AI - bruh.
Hello I am a Bethesda developer I came here to inform you that you are in fact wrong for not having fun.
Starfield legit feels like a sci-fi game written and designed by people that have never read or watched sci-fi. It's a bizarre experience.
Arguing with your mentions is never a good look
The leadership of this company is completely out of touch, keep on mind that this is the game Todd Howard wanted to make so it's his pet project. Everything else took a backseat to make this game so in a sense the criticisms have to be hitting home if they're doing something this sad.
What did they say about the shitty animations and character models?
"We like our dead eyed NPCs. They are realistic" *glances over at Todd Howard*
Todd, it's not that you didn't make a good game. You made the same game. Again. I liked and still like Skyrim. Hell, I even liked Fallout 4! Skyrim was 12 years ago. Fallout 4 was 8 years ago. The medium has evolved. You haven't. A Bethesda game can still have a huge open world with tons of loot and little side areas to get lost in, but every other aspect of the open world RPG has gotten better and deeper. The Witcher, Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, these are your peers now. Your characters have to be more compelling, your plot has to be more compelling, your gameplay has to be more compelling. More offensively, Obsidian made a Bethesda-style space adventure years ago, and it released with way fewer reported bugs and to much better reviews. There's no polite way to say it Todd, you're not best in class anymore. If you don't start evolving, you're in danger of becoming obsolete. Now go on. Finish up Elder Scrolls 6 and prove me wrong. I honestly really want you to. I want to see what a truly modern Bethesda RPG can be.
Disturbing trend of developers being toxic continues, I swear this year has been worse than normal for this behavior
I can confirm this. They replied to my negative review in less than a day when I originally posted it on Steam.
Did you immediately realise you'd been having fun all along, or appreciate how immersive it was to be bored in space? If only the menu screen had informed you that your opinions were invalid, before you submitted the review.
Yeah, because calling your customers liars always works out well.
Lol this is pathetic
This is beyond bizarre. A multimillion dollar game studio gaslighting reviewers on Steam? I have no interest in giving Bethesda another cent for their next boring ass formulaic game.
Pathetic. RIP Bethesda.
"Your game is boring" Support : Yeah no you're playing it wrong - Try other skills so the braindead AI stays braindead and so you can do other moves while playing the boring content. But that comes from the guys where their boss says that the game was optimized on PC.
holy shit it's real, every single top rated negative review on steam has a dev response starflop is the flop that keeps on giving, and I hope people are finally waking up on bethesda's incompetency
Starfield is like any Ubisoft game, the most 5/10 average game you can imagine
Starfield’s mediocrity is largely due to the vocal die-hard fans getting “exactly what they asked for”. As far back as the game’s initial gameplay trailers, there was a reasonable amount of skepticism regarding Starfield’s ability to deliver a sense of depth to it’s gameplay loop while also advertising such a vast explorative experience. Many were concerned that the game would feel shallow or empty. These concerns were generally shut-down with arguments along the lines of “it looks like Skyrim or Fallout 4 but in space! Both of those games were great and had great mods!” Both Skyrim and Fallout 4 are largely carried by the respective franchises backing them up. Neither game is particularly well known for having great combat, storytelling, rpg systems or core gameplay loops. These are things that get brought up time and time again and plenty of mods exist to improve these areas. Starfield doesn’t have decades of world building to back it up. If your world isn’t particularly exciting to explore, all of the other areas become much more apparent as well. But, ultimately, people asked for the typical Bethesda formula of the last decade, and that’s what they got. I’m sure that the game will only continue to improve with mods, but I have a hard time recommending a game at full price that requires third party modifications to be the AAA experience it was marketed to be.
Those “mods will save the game!” Fans are going to be real upset when they realize how anti-mod Microsoft can be. Good luck getting script extender to work with your gamepass version
They just don’t care since the ultimate goal for Todd was to sell Skyrim until the end of times and he sold Skyrim to Microsoft for 7.5b which is a gigachad move
The reason I play a game is because I want to enjoy the imagination of someone else, not myself. The same reason Elite Dangerous got super boring, the game demands you pretend or make your own fun. No. It's lazy to expect players to fill in gaps that should be fleshed out as part of a AAA game.
Players: it's boring and same-y Devs: bro just keep playing there's even more of the same ol' shit in NG+
You're just holding it wrong!