I don't get it.
People wanted another Bethesda game.
They got what they wanted.
I said in 2008, after playing the first Fallout game by Bethesda instead of Black Isle: "Only Bethesda could manage to make a post apocalyptic prostitute boring."
They've always been boring, they've always had ugly character models, and the writing has always been bad. You get what you paid for. A Bethesda game.
I think we were all expecting them to rebuild the engine sometime between fallout 4 and now instead of just duct tapping a flashlight (new lighting system) to it.
It's such a bad engine the Phil Spencer came out and said every QA tester at Microsoft is working on Starfield:
https://www.gamesradar.com/every-qa-tester-at-microsoft-is-working-on-starfield-according-to-phil-spencer/
The Creation Engine itself is just Gamebryo with a flashlight duct taped to it. IMO the engine is a huge part of what makes Bethesda games so fascinatingly unique.
The engine should be rebuilt from the ground up though. It's full of problems and it's fundamentally dated, for example one of the most obvious things a new version of the engine should include is making the world completely seamless - no more loading instances, no more loading screens entering interiors, etc etc. But all the other problems with the engine need addressing. And they can do a huge amount to make it better for the mod scene if they rebuild.
Continually slapping more and more fixes on this engine fundamentally ignores the fact it is impossible for it to get around several issues it has at its core without a rewrite.
This engine is already great for modding, but I suppose it can always be better. Do you know any technical details about why the worlds can't be made seamless? There were open cities mods for Oblivion & Skyrim, so it seems like it's probably technically possible. Seems like that may be more of a compromise related to memory allocation on consoles.
I dunno, I don't expect Bethesda to write a new engine from scratch, no one does that. They made New Atlantis seamless to an extent I haven't seen in previous Bethesda games, so as long as they keep making incremental improvements, I'll be satisfied.
Do you know any technical details about why the worlds can't be made seamless?
I don't know the technical details but I know that when you attempt to add new map area to any existing map (for example the overworld) the physics engine does not engage for those spaces. You have to create new map areas for anything new.
There are also hardcoded limits to the number of entities that can be loaded in-engine at any one time. When you go over the alotted number of NPCs for example it starts spawning them in the sky, this causes the infamous flying horse bug everyone has seen in modded Skyrim when they've added too many new NPCs to zones. I think newer games have had some bandaids slapped on the engine to increase this but it's still there.
Open Cities works because the cell already exists, so they just took everything in the city zone and moved it into the existing world cell, which is identical in size. So there's no problem with this causing issues. This can't be done for a lot of buildings (to create interior/exterior) because of various issues such as NPCs not knowing where their house is unless it's a defined place you go through a loading screen on, so taking houses and slapping them into open world would completely break scripting for their daily routines, same for every building in the game. Some of them are tardis design too, bigger on the inside than the actual building is on the outside.
Well a lotta games are “in development”, doesn’t mean that they get developed in that time.
Rule of thumb. Wait until your see top ten mod lists for Bethesda games and is at least on sale.
I'm waiting for the Moddinglinked (Viva New Vegas and Midnight Ride) guide before I starts torrenting it
i have gamepass unrelated to this game, i'm probably going to try it out if the dlss mod can be installed on the gamepass version (which looks like it can be). if the game sucks, i'm happy, nothing kills excitement better than actually experiencing the thing and getting disappointed, so i can finally evict this game from my head. and if the game doesn't suck, i'm also happy because all these years later i finally get to play star citizen, i just apparently had to wait for bethesda to make it.
Why are people pretending the game isn't getting glowing reviews? Is the Bethesda hate circlejerk still going on?
I like the game, but reviews are pretty unreliable these days. Cyberpunk 2077 also got a load of 8/9/10s on release and that game ran like shit and was full of bugs.
hmmm people seem to like this thing i don't like
ah it's because they're actually lying for the purposes of fooling me, the objectively correct main character
I somehow entirely missed the hype around this game and came across it again only accidentally on early release day when looking at some other sale on Steam. Been playing it and it seems fine to me in a vague Skyrim-in-space sort of way, which is all what I was expecting from a Bethesda RPG.
The world seems alive enough and there are plenty of side-quests and amusing / interesting things to discover. Now suddenly I have been coming across a bunch of posts everywhere where the game is supposed to be terrible or something. Still seems fine to me, but maybe I have lower standards after decades of gaming. shrug.
Its fallout 4 in space.
But with a worse interface and a lot more menus that are annoying to navigate.
Honestly this plus "Skyrim-in-space" make me feel pretty confident that this game is going to have staying power just because we know how good the modding community is for bethesda games. Skyrim was panned up front as genre generic fantasy with a pinch of viking magic but has been played continuously for a decade plus because it made for such a good blank slate to add onto. Also I guarantee every current UI issue already has modders working on it. Starfield script extender just dropped and the game hasn't even officially been released
Which really sucks, if you think about it.
Cause you and I both know the only thing that makes Bethesda games big sellers is the fact that anyone that buys them goes "Oh boy, I cant wait for the modders to make it actually interesting/fun/etc"
Some mods have attempted to fix the menus.
I'd like to see some complete UI overhauls at some point, but right now I'm using a mod that increases the refresh rate to 120hz from 30 in the menu's
Yeah the interface is awful.
On the other hand, I came across pirates boarding a freighter yesterday. I shot down the pirate ship and boarded the freighter. The gravity generator was malfunctioning so it would sometimes have gravity and sometimes be zero g. There were navigation puzzles, some of which could only be done in normal grav and some in zero-g.
None of the random side content in FO4 is anywhere near that interesting.
It'd probably grate on me the second time I do it. Doesn't mean that it's not more interesting than the generic "this settlement needs you to shoot some dudes" FO4 encounter.
Its more interesting because its the first time you've encountered it. after a year you'll have the same criticisms about starfield radiant quests that you did about fallout 4 radiants.
that's just console first UI design school Bethesda have subscribed to since Skyrim.
Damn starfield is bad? With its premise being Another basic america glass towers neolib united federation in space, while also made by bethesda? Who could have known.
Yes but this game is political because it lets you pick pronouns. Give me back my wholesome, unpolitical, giant stars and stripes robot spouting anticommunist catchphrases, Bethesda game!
Stop complaining. Play it if you want, don't if you don't want to. People just like to be popular and liked. Everyone bandwagoned on Baldurs Gate being good but I can't think of a type of game I hate more than that. Now everyone is bandwagoning on this because A- they don't have an Xbox or a PC, or B- they want to be cool and alternative.
I mean come on, last week everyone was saying "omg Baldurs Gate has no microtransactions! Roleplaying! GOTY!" And now with Xbox/Bethesda making a game just like that, you guys instantly roast it for being......a Bethesda game.
I cannot stand turn based combat and generally avoid RPG's these days and even I think this is a ridiculous take.
I don't own BG3 but I've played at a friend's place and that game is about a thousand levels deeper than Starfield. If you like RPG's and mucking around with dice whilst you play computer games, BG3 is a god damn masterpiece.
Well if you want to get nitpicky there's no "roleplaying" in a Bethesda games because there are no bad outcomes. Minor spoilers about BG3.
For instance in BG3 I went into a camp swords blazing and murdered everything in sight. Turns out I killed a recruitable companion along the way that I never would've found out if I hadn't read about it online. Technically speaking that's an undesirable outcome because I'm going to miss out on some content but at that moment I didn't give a fuck and similarly the game just went along with it. At no point did the game even hint that maybe I shouldn't kill that character, if anything the game told me the objective is to kill that character. Had it been a Bethesda game I 100% would've been prevented from just murdering that companion and the game had given me a chance to recruit them.
Similarly I reloaded one hard fight 4 times to save a character who was relatively important to the story. That bitch just kept on running into AOE effects and getting herself killed. BG3 didn't give a fuck if that character lived or died because the story would've continued without her. We all know how Bethesda handles characters that are important to the story, they literally cannot die.
And finally I'm currently at a point where the game gave me 2 choices, either I send one of my companions into eternal servitude or another character important to the story dies. Maybe there's a third option that lets me save both but I might've missed it. If this was a Bethesda game there wouldn't even be such a situation because it doesn't matter what you choose, either option has a bad outcome.
And those are just examples from my current playthrough. From what I've seen others play you might not even get to those decisions, which means some decisions will lock out other decisions down the line and that's once again something Bethesda does less and less with each game
Baldurs gate 3 gets praise because it's a great game, Starfield gets shit because underneath it's just Skyrim in space. Are we supposed to give praise for a game that follows a decade old design philosophy? If Doom 93 came out today should we lose our collective minds? No, because the industry has moved forward. Our expectations should be higher than Skyrim. There are good things about Starfield. The moment to moment combat seems excellent and Bethesda clearly has improved the visuals compared to FO4 and FO76. But the rest of the game seems it could've just as well been released back in 2011.
And before you think I'm some hyped up tweeb who is now disappointed that Starfield didn't live up to the hype, I haven't been hyped about a Bethesda game since Fallout 3. I'm well aware how easily Bethesda springs up hype and how the final product doesn't really match the hype they promote. I had pretty basic expectations of what Starfield might be and I feel like Starfield was pretty much in the ballpark to the expectations I had: good shooting, lots and lots of loading screens and menus and very little of actual "space". That's to say I didn't have high expectations in the first place.
All that gameplay you described? Is ancient. The industry has moved on as you say. You clicked through menus and virtually rolled dice to do that. That's so old, it predates video games themselves.
At least Starfield is more modern than turn based gameplay.
I think the microtransactions praise was more are, non predatory marketing / extracting every last cent praise. Didn't Stanfield have a premium cost to pay a week earlier or something? Is that not a similar concept, albeit nowhere near as shit as microtransactions.
Are we not all tired of being wrung out for our cash? What's so wrong with just charging what you need so that you can make a game.
The game has incredibly bad performance issues and dogshit politics.
For a game they've dubbed "Nasa punk". There's no punk at all. It's 98% corporate fantasy wish fulfillment for musk-brained techbros and 2% punk. The criticism of capitalism is so paper thin that you can barely notice its presence anywhere at all.
The space pirates use guns with anarchist symbols on them and say anarchist slogans but are clearly not anarchists in ideology and instead are straight up thugs and raiders.
The UC military is presented as real professionals, which is not really correct. If they accurately represented the US military that they're based off of then they'd being jarheads, except for the recruiters and media where the professional show is put on. This is fantasy wish fulfilment at best, or propaganda at worst.
There is no bigotry, patriarchy, etc in this universe and it's absolutely absurd. The universe would have these, capitalism provides an incentive to exploit. Marginalised people are the easiest to exploit. Capitalism has an incentive not to solve marginalised people's problems fully and the further away you get from states enforcing laws to try and mitigate these problems the bigger they would get. So in space and because of the colony wars these issues would have gone through the roof.
It is bizarre that there are wars occurring and yet there are no space refugees anywhere? Where are they? Also there's no homeless people which is fucking weird again. Also no slums or self-constructed accomodation on the periphery of the cities which really ought to exist given that the player can do just that. It's all so idealised to a ridiculous extent.
Everyone doesn't have the money for a starship, there is one absurd mission where you apply for an admin assistant job. You're expected to fly into space and to a space station with your own starship to apply for an administration and assistant job? There should be a private shuttle company that people use to taxi around space for things like this.
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In short, the politics are dogshit and the performance is bad. But, the gameplay is good if you like other bethesda titles it plays just like them. Additionally, I think it's probably the strongest ever game they've released for modding.. And probably their best title since Oblivion (not counting New Vegas which they didn't make).
