I've never understood why that matters for anything other than purely multiplayer games.
People finish games and move on. It's not some GaaS bollocks.
Skyrim is 13 years old and has many more players. It says "Starfield was not a return to form for Bethesda."
Vanilla Skyrim < Vanilla Starfield
Modded Skyrim >>> Vanilla Starfield
Simple as. I went back and replayed Vanilla Skyrim this year, and let me be the first to tell you that Starfield is legitimately a better game when it comes to roleplaying, choices, and quest design. Skyrim has a far more interactive and immersive world design, but to me that falls flat when the game is so fucking boring to interact with (hot take, I know).
Mods fix all of those problems with Skyrim, and that's what people are playing now.
I thought replayability was sort of Bethsoft's MO?
I dunno, I played Skyrim through once, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of replay value to me.
It's very long, and you can do everything in one playthrough. The only difference is which army you want to win, and you make that choice right at the end.
You can even take control of the magic guild even though you know no magic. I honestly don't know what other people see in it. Modding maybe? Not something that interests me. New Vegas was a lot more interesting.
The opposite, actually. Bethesda goes for infinite playability, rather than infinite replayability. New Vegas is far more replayable than anything Bethesda has released.
It's not really a great sign for the developers if their game doesn't have a ton of replay value I imagine. Consider Skyrim, it's the same general type of game, but people play that game over and over and make modifications to it to keep it fresh and enjoyable even now, and as a result Bethesda has been able to resell it for other platforms or with extra content or related merch for years, because people like it enough to keep coming back. If Starfield isn't managing the same despite being the same sort of game from the same company, then that both serves as a warning to those who haven't gotten it yet that the game probably isn't as enjoyable by comparison, and also doesn't give the devs as much incentive to keep making any improvements to it.
Starfield was very bland and had very limited dialogue/storyline in comparison to skyrim, but skyrim was so repetitive and boring with so much of the game being spent in similar looking dungeons fighting drauger...
Even with mods, I never made it through a second playthrough because the gameplay just fizzled with the boring dungeon-crawling required for so many questlines/words of power.
At least in oblivion, most of the caves/oblivion gates were totally optional. So much of skyrim is spent in boring ass dungeons...
This isn't an argument for Starfield replayability tho. Starfield doesn't have enough storyline for much replayability. Felt so bare bones in comparison to skyrim or any other Bethesda game.
I mostly agree, but I can guess one reason why it's useful. With a game that's not that old, but well received, I'd expect new players to keep coming in for a while. Not to the degree of when it first came out, but someone like me will wishlist a game and wait until there's a sale or I have time to play it to buy and play. If the drop off is huge, and sales don't help much, it does reflect on the game somewhat.
Yeah, this headline reads "disappointing single player game somehow stopped selling all that much after 6 months"
Like... Yeah???
I'm supposed to move on?
I love Bethesda, but putting TES6 on the back burner to make Starfield for eight years was an idiotic decision. They also took the wrong lesson from Skyrim, believing that streamlining the game through stripping of features was the reason for its success. They've done this same with each successive game since, and each has been more poorly received than the last. Go back to your roots and make a good, deep Elder Scrolls game. Continue to leave the shitty +5 modifier leveling system out, but at the very least restore attributes and birthsigns. Restore spellmaking. STOP FUCKING IT UP. You're on your last strike here and I don't have a lot of faith that you're going to make the right call.
Hard disagree that taking the chance on a new IP was a bad call. It didn't work out, but more of the same thing forever would be worse.
New IP would have been fine if they didn't drag Gamebryo's corpse into it, as well as the worst part of Fallout 4's perks, "+5% pistol damage at night" and adding requirements onto those like it made them special. Almost every RPG part of this game is bland and uninteresting and it's so fucking unfortunate. Star Citizen might be taking a dozen years to complete but at least they're using Unreal Engine and actually adding some fucking depth to their shit.
If they wanted to create something fresh then sure, but the end result was the same game they've released multiple times, except this time it's with a new coat of paint.
They could've spent that time adding to an existing IP instead of creating a new IP to make the same thing again.
Yeah, also imagine waiting this long for the next elder scrolls and it was this quality. Now they have one more chance to get things right and apparently they needed it.
I don't even know, if I would normally truly agree that simplification isn't at least aiding their mass appeal, but Starfield did get absolutely stumped by a traditionally complex RPG (Baldur's Gate 3)...
I think the sweet spot is finding a way to make tradition mechanics a bit more casual friendly without removing them outright. I don't think Morrowind or Oblivion's attribute and skill system was difficult to grasp, but the leveling system was pretty bad. You either played the way you wanted to, using the skills you believed your character should be using, and received low modifiers as a result, or you meticulously selected and planned out major/minor skills that weren't reflective of your actual playstle, just so you wouldn't blow your chance at earning +5 modifiers.
You couldn't just comfortably advance to the next level. You had this paranoia that it would be a weak and wasted level-up because you didn't spend enough time jumping or something. It poisoned the gameplay with this annoying meta that was purely about exploiting the leveling mechanics so you wouldn't be at a huge disadvantage. They remedied this in Skyrim, but at the cost of making all characters feel generic. The heart was taken out of your character and who they were. You no longer had a class identity. Everything was just kind of same-ey.
If they could at least restore attribute points so I could give my character a deeper identity and allow more dialogue checks related to said attributes so these identities mattered, we'd be heading in the right direction. They don't have to be so impactful that casual players are put off by them, but c'mon, man.. I want to feel like there's a deeper system at work here. I want to measure my character in more ways than "Good with sword" and "Good with heavy armor".
Did I mention how much I miss skill checks too? Fallout 3 and New Vegas handled these superbly.
Basically give us a Morrowind clone with a better leveling system, remove the hit rolls, and updated visuals.
OH, and voice acting. Nit because it's better than text, but because the writing on Morrowind was way too verbose. I don't need to read a 30-page essay on the history of the history of a family whose servants once believed they spotted a mythical ring that culminate in a fetch quest.
I want the Morrowind levels of text, but let it be optional for those who want to delve into those branches of dialogue, and feel free to use splicing/AI to voice the extended options.
You speak to an NPC and it comes up with a few options like Skyrim, but included [More] at the bottom with far more topics.
I disagree that they took the lesson that streamlining was the reason for Skyrim's success, because Starfield is not streamlined in the least. It's a complex series of menus and loading screens that lead to empty planets and probably other types of content, I'm not sure, because I hated navigating the menus and loading screens.
The lesson they should have taken from Skyrim is that the more immersive the game feels the more popular it will be. Immersion doesn't require streamlining, and features like spellcrafting would be hugely welcome back for ES6, IMO.
But there's no way to enjoy a space exploration game where the space exploration is handled so incredibly clunkily.
I think the number one rule of space exploration is “players must be able to fly wherever the fuck they want in their spaceship.” Their engine couldn’t handle that so they were hobbled from day one. All the design decisions were working back from that catastrophic mistake. They should have used Unreal or built a new engine or radically overhauled Gamebryo.
Very well said. Skyrim is incredibly immersive. Vanilla would be difficult for me to feel the same way about it I went back to it now, but with flora mods like Nature of the Wild Lands, grass mods, and environmental audio overhauls like Sounds of Skyrim, the game continues to draw me in like never before. I play the game much more slowly now, and spend more time walking and taking in the sights and sounds. I hope Bethesda can match this on their next title.
Let's hope Starfield taught them the right lesson for TES6. I mean it won't, but there's a chance.
To play devil's advocate, Starfield is absolutely a better RPG than Skyrim when it comes to roleplaying, quest design, and more. They made huge improvements to complexity and options for the player.
They just also paired that with awful world design, and could no longer rely on lore written by GOATs no longer working for the company.
No way but it won Steam's most innovative gameplay award for 2023.
That game was dead on arrival for me, everything from gameplay to story was absolutely outdated and not interesting.
same. i really tried to like, but after ten hours i just uninstalled it.
Same. Played for 40 hours, did the ranger questline, went "is thats it?" And basically felt no urge to play again.
For contrast, 24 hour peak for BGS game since skyrim
Skyrim base + special edition = 28.5k
Fallout 4 = 18k
Fallout 76 = 8.3k
Starfield = 9.2kStarfield + fallout 76 can't even surpass Fallout 4. They sure is losing the plot lately.
I guess “lately” is relative considering that Fallout 76 has been out for awhile and had a disaster of a launch.
I say this as someone who is a huge Skyrim and fallout fan, but people need to realize that Bethesda might be dead soon and be absorbed into Microsoft.
Let me help wake you up to why. First, their games are developed incredibly slowly. This is showcased by Starfield really well. That game took 7 or 8 years to make and yet, it’s very unfinished. They cannot make games quickly. And clearly they’re being forced to. Fans will wait a long time, but when your franchise gives each generation one game to play, your goose is cooking. Not to mention the glacial pace means that Starfield screwed them big time.
This part is huge though: their tools are ancient and always have been. I know engines get reworked to fit new projects, it’s common in development. However, they haven’t invested at all in their engine and it shows big time. People were even saying it about FO4 how it ran very very poorly and couldn’t handle the cities at release. Everything in that engine was very similar to Skyrim so of course Starfield failed because it’s the same engine with little time spent upgrading it properly. In fact, that’s why the game sucks. They spent too much time on engine stuff and the project moved forward without content due to technical limitations.
Then all the minor stuff. Their PR sucks. FO76 was a scam and still has a subscription to it. Horse armor. Re-releasing games 3 times.
But that’s just the game studio. What about the publishing arm? Well, mostly fine except for Redfall. Seems the only thing they can manage sorta well is the Doom franchise. But my god what happened to Prey and why not have Prey 2?
In summary, Bethesda doesn’t appear to have it in them despite being a huge studio and I’m not looking forward to its future handling of TES6
If enough people already bought it, I doubt they care.
The thing is they're still milking Skyrim over a decade later. They wanted the same for Starfield.
Ohh they should, the sales doesn't look too good.
I wasn't expecting anything groundbreaking to be honest, and I was fine with that. And yet, it still underdelivered.
The opening section where some hotshot explorer just GIVES you his organisation's only ship and robot has to be the most idiotic and unbelievable moment in gaming narrative history (at least in my experience).
"Ok... Maybe it gets better." I thought. It didn't.
Most of the quests are just fucking awful and nonsensical - "Oh hi, I'm a top scientist for MAST, we have access to all the latest cutting edge technonology. Oh, apart from WiFi. Sorry can you go and pick up my sensors I placed nearby because I'm fucking lazy? Thanks." Honestly, I had no words for this one, and it wasn't the only one. Just laughably dogshit.
I had some good fun initially exploring and the ship customisation was cool, and I even enjoyed the space combat for a while, but the whole game feels like it was made 20 years ago.
That's quite an accomplishment in a way I suppose.
I don't think even modding can save it.
The opening section where some hotshot explorer just GIVES you his organisation's only ship and robot has to be the most idiotic and unbelievable moment in gaming narrative history (at least in my experience).
THANK YOU for calling this out. The story is the most hamfisted, milquetoast, bland, unbelievable lazy writing I’ve ever seen in a video game. Hey, you’re a random miner on her first day at work, here’s a ship and a secret society you’re supposed to be in. Welcome to the video game.
Fuck off.
Hahah yes exactly. I know Beth isn't highly regarded for writing/narrative but it makes Skyrim look like Shakespeare.
I actually thought Skyrim's environmental storytelling was pretty good to be fair.
And yeah I think you called it with "lazy". As a writer myself I actually found it almost offensive how utterly dogshit and low effort it was from a company that has the resources to do so much better.
I think Bethesda, and really all other RPGs could benefit from being basically sandboxes without any real "main quest".
Make it about me and what I want to be in this fantasy world. Not what lame ass story the writers shat out to meet deadlines.
Lore, not linear stories. World building and evironmental story telling, not a tiny fish bowl with little exploration.
I mean, the main quest is like 10 percent of the game and playtime for most players. The remaining 90 percent is exploring, side quests, meeting interesting people, and obtaining power and fame. All of which happen on account of the player and their own story they want to tell in the dev's world.
Yep. Depends on the RPG and what you want to play to some extent - Baldurs Gate 3 shows just how good a well-written "traditional" branching narrative RPG can be for example.
When it comes to sandbox RPGs, I totally agree. Or at the very least keep the main story optional.
Have you played Kenshi? It does that really well I think.
I mean part of that is people just finishing the game. That's fine.
But also the consensus seems to be the game is at best "okay", and people won't be going back to it like they do with Skyrim.
I'm not sure if anyone at Bethesda honestly expected it to be better.
I can see that side of things, but people often re-play games that they love.
Looking at Bethesda's games being played right now, Starfield is 4th place, but the newest by far.
Skyrim (special Edition) https://steamdb.info/app/489830/charts/
26,600 players online when I made this comment.Fallout 4 https://steamdb.info/app/377160/
19,650 players online when I made this comment.The Eldar Scrolls online https://steamdb.info/app/306130/charts/
16.304 players online when I made this comment.Starfield https://steamdb.info/app/1716740/charts/
9,086 players online when I made this comment.Fallout76 https://steamdb.info/app/1151340/charts/
7,596 players online when I made this comment.ESO is live service and an MMO, it doesn’t really belong in this list, but otherwise yeah basically everything you said.
I mean that's what the other commenter said, it was okay, they played it but it's not good enough to play again.
Starfield's only hope is a robust modding community, but it's not there yet.
mod makers need to want to make mods for it first... we can't just assume that the modders will fix it if there's nothing worth fixing. multiple modders that have made mods for previous Bethesda games have said they aren't doing this one.
If there's any ability to change the setting and character models, someone will add Star Wars or WH40K. I am waiting for that.
And tons, like Enai Saion (one of the absolute powerhouses elevaring skyrim) will mod Starfield. More will come once the modding community gets started.
DLCs and the Creation Kit will fix this, and Starfield will get many "Starfield is underrated!" videos. I am calling it now, just like I did a couple weeks after release.
The bones of Starfield are better than the bones of Skyrim by a huge margin, even if the skin is far worse.
Wait. You're telling me Starfield doesn't have the recently reported 30 million mods?
Because it becomes a boring point and click simulator with some exploration
The game doesn't even let you fly to and land on planets
Skyrim is fun, Starfield isn't
I never really understood that fly and land on aspect that a lot of people pick on. No man's sky does it and that game bores the hell out of me. It's cool for a couple of times I guess.
That's what space sims are though. Not your type of game, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have open flight.
I'm one of those people. I played as a "good guy," played as a pirate, got to NG+10. I did every major quest line and most of the side quests.
I didn't stop playing because I don't like the game. I finished the game. Isn't that normal?
I dunno. I finished Borderlands 3 years ago, and I still pick it up and play regularly. I've played the campaign through four times - once for each character.
Heck, I'd still be playing Destiny if it hadn't gone to total shit with the focus on coop.
Long before that, I played the original God of War trilogy through multiple times, and it didn't even have different character classes.
It's not my bag, but there are people out there playing Skyrim for years. Hell, I fire up No Man's Sky every so often, and I bought it on release when it was really rough.
It's common for people to replay good games. I'm not even sure what the point of Starfield is - are they trying to be an MMORPG? If so, that huge of a player loss is a massive failure. If it's not - why is it even online? Isn't it supposed to be some massive, explorable universe with endless gaming possibilities?
Starfield isn't online. It's very much a single-player RPG. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think I have about 200 hours into it. The biggest problem is that while there is a vast galaxy to explore, there's not much point. You can travel wherever you want, but unless you're doing a mission, there's not much to do once you get there. Walking around looking at plants and animals gets boring very quickly.
The way enemies scale with your skill level isn't great, either. Maybe it's how I spec'd my character, but at the higher levels, I am essentially invincible in person-to-person combat but ship-to-ship combat is exceptionally difficult.
It's still one of my favorite games, but it doesn't lend itself to replayability after a while.
That's that Skyrim In Space game, right? Extremely corporately made RPG with very well done graphics and otherwise basically nothing special going on?
It's graphics aren't great and they lost the exploration element of Skyrim. It just sucks
The graphics are actually really dated. I don't use Reshade very often, but for this game it's necessary if you want even basic things like ambient occlusion (seriously, the shadows and lighting are so bad in this game).
But yeah, "corporate RPG" is correct. The game checks nearly every box for what you'd expect from a Bethesda game, but the game is just so soulless and boring. Bethesda doesn't write the best stories but they really dropped the ball on this one. At no point did I form any sort of feelings for the characters. They never have anything interesting to say nor give me any reason to care if they live or die.
It's not my genre. I own absolutely nothing made by Bethesda so I'm half remembering Yahtzee bitch about it.
It's a BARELYYY upgraded creation engine that they used for Skyrim. The NPC mechanics got 0 changes.
No, it's that Skyrim on random planets game, with a bit of space between.
If you want to play a star game I recommend Starsector. I've been getting back into it recently and it's great. More a mount and blade in space than a Starfield though. Updates are slow but significant and there's plenty of game to enjoy already.
One really cool mechanic is story points which you get alongside levelling up (and you keep earning after the level cap) which you can spend in certain parts of the game to do special stuff or break the normal rules which is really cool. Many interesting things tie into it but yeah, lot's of interesting mechanics.
New update just arrived with colony events too. But I have to wait for all the mods to update..
Starfield was so bad people consider The Outer Worlds to be a better Bethesda RPG in space, try telling that to someone in 2022.
The Outer Worlds was good, though...
Its just kinda plain.
I'm playing through The Outer Worlds now. I'd consider it more enjoyable than what I played of Starfield. Gives me Borderlands vibes with Bethesda dialogue.
The outer worlds was so much better than starfield in every single way. Better gameplay, world and companions.
Yeah, Starfield has no legs. I got bored with it pretty quick; for me that BGS spark is gone.
This game is such a disappointment. Paused a bg3 game to test it. Did the tutorial rolling my eyes all the time. The first few missions hitting my head on the desk and finally, got back to Shadowheart.
It felt soooooo empty. So shallow.
i think starfield looks just as uninspired and boring as the next guy, but i think we should take player retention with a grain of salt on linear single-player games. of course people are less inclined to continue playing when they’ve finished the main quest
anyway play resident evil 2 remake
Wait. It didnt help that Bethesda argued against reviews that said the game isnt fun by arguing "Yes it is fun"?
Starfield is a made by committee game. It was destined to be bad.
That is a stark insult. But it may be true.
The game is pointless to return to. Base building has not point. There is no reason why anyone should even build a base. And the ship builder is cool, but it’s like a Lego, you can’t fly it.
This IP isn’t going to last a long time without that stuff.
To spoil it for anybody, Starfield has a "new game plus" where you carry over your character, stats, and inventory to a new universe (the new universe has new things).
But here's the kicker:
That base and ship you spent all that time building? DISAPPEARS.
And the game encourages you to do NGs so there seriously is no reason to build.
Doesn't matter because Bethesda still got their money.
I played and beat the main quest for both Skyrim and Starfield, and I thoroughly enjoyed both games. And while I agree that Starfield has things to complain about, I enjoyed the plot much more in Starfield. I'm a big sci-fi nut, so that helps, but once I finished the main quest in Skyrim, I didn't feel the pull to go any further.
In Starfield, I'm still loving all the side quests, and NG+. And although the ship builder is clunky, I love modding my ships.
I'm glad Bethesda finally came up with a new IP. I really don't get all the backlash.
I actually went back and replayed Vanilla Skyrim this year because I found myself enjoying Starfield more than Skyrim, and I'll back you up. Starfield's quest design is more complex, more apt for roleplaying (multiple options for each major questline so you don't have to be a psychopath to play both Companions and Dark Brotherhood), and general RPG design, but the world design is more lacking than Skyrim.
I'm glad to know somebody enjoys it. I found it quite dull.
Playing Starfield, and actually enjoying a good part of it, like the faction quests, side quests, radiant quests even, and the increased roleplaying potential, then seeing a huge backlash against it, made me replay Skyrim, Vanilla, in 2024. The results may shock you!
The TL;DR is that Skyirm only beats Starfield in world interactivity like NPC schedules, and the percentage of gameplay you interact with that's hand-crafted vs procedural.
Comparing the faction quests of, say, the Dark Brotherhood and Crimson Fleet, you must play the Dark Brotherhood as a psycho assassin, while for the CF, you can be a fed, a brutal pirate, or someone walking that line, with your own background added for flavor.
The quest design in Starfield also gives more options, as well!
This overall means that, IMO, Bethesda game design itself is kind of shit without mods.
World interactivity is one of the most important things in open world games. Starfield is just completely empty
And because many of the sites you find on a planet are just RNG, there's not much visual story-telling, either. Which is one the things they've always done pretty well until now. It's just a place to find loot with no actual context or story behind it, which makes the exploration little more than "oh hey, there's something here."
I don't disagree. However, some of the absolute worst aspects of Bethesda games, like roleplaying mechanics, quest design, and more were actually improved in Starfield. BG3 still smokes it, same with New Vegas, but it's also much better than Skyrim with those respects.
That's why it's interesting.
It lost me after 20-something hours sometime during the week after release. What a pile of shit
How does that look for other singleplayer games that take some 50-100 hours to beat?
Compare Starfield(330.7k > 9.2k) to games like Spiderman remaster(66.4k > 5.1k) or RE4(168k > 2.9k) or Armored Core 6(156.1k > 1.3k) or even a game build with multiplayer and replayability like Elden Ring(953.4k > 47.3k), all in 5 months timeframe, i think it's to be expected as starfield didn't launch with mod tools. The score doesn't looks good tho, as people really don't like the gameplay loop and the loading.
Copied from above comment:
Skyrim base + special edition = 28.5k
Fallout 4 = 18k
Fallout 76 = 8.3k
Starfield = 9.2kThanks. I meant how many percent they lost after 6 months.
Lol
