It does get a lot of shit and I agree Bethesda is lacking in some creativity departments... but I'd still rate it a solid 6.5-7
I put about 80 hours into it. Enjoyed some aspects, disliked others. It's just HEAVILY mid in my opinion. Worth a playthrough if you like Bethesda rpgs
6.5/7 is fine if you're not paying $70 for the base game. It might be worth it now the costs have come down, but paying a premium price for a mid game justifies some of the shit people gave it.
That said, I played on Game Pass, big fan of the genre, and could only make it a few hours in. Just wasn't for me. But then I really enjoyed The Outer Worlds and people shit on that too.
It's really weird how many people stop "a few hours in". Modern Bethesda games are notoriously slow-starts. A few hours in is still "training wheels" for the game.
I'm not saying you should go back to it, but how did you know it's not for you that quickly?
As for Outer Worlds. I enjoyed it for what it was, but I'm of the fringe view that it doesn't hold a candle to Starfield. It has more style, but less substance than Starfield IMO.
I beat Starfield the first time before the bad reviews started overwhelming. And I still don't get it (except perhaps as hype). Bethesda games are far from perfect (people seem to forget the negativity around Skyrim being compared to Oblivion), but they scratch a particular itch that millions of gamers have and crave.
What terrifies me is that this whole "Hey look, we're getting 2006 again" attitude is exactly what's going to kill off the Bethesda "genre" the same way SquareEnix gutted the AAA Turn-Based RPG. Sure, it means we might get a black horse game out of left field (Persona 5, talking about you) but it's a shame to see so much hate on the style of game that Bethesda is.
And we need to make no mistake. While some complaints have been valid, the biggest ones that started this snowball have been things like "I shoot guns around guards and nobody comments" or "I murder an entire town and then pay a small bounty and everyone's fine with me again".
I get the "huge procedural universe is soooo boring" complaint; I don't agree with it because I loved Daggerfall and because Starfield has more hand-made content than Skyrim, but I can respect it. But that alone doesn't justify all this "worst game ever" BS. It makes Starfield sound like it's worse than initial-release NMS was (and I can say from experience, it's not).
And for me, I just crossed hour 180 with Starfield, and have not been bored once. I don't expect it to be everyone's favorite game, but it's certainly mine for 2023.
The thing is that for a lot of Bethesda fans the game fully missed the mark that scratches the players itch. If there's one thing people unanimously agree Bethesda games are great at it's creating a world that's interesting to explore. Starfield is by far the least interesting Bethesda game to explore, because there's nothing interesting to catch your attention?
Jake brings it up perfectly. In Skyrim you start a quest and then you start traveling to the quest location. A dragon swoops in and you fight a dragon. A spooky cave is along the way and you check it out. An hour has passed and you're not even at the quest location yet. In Starfield you start a quest, you fast travel to your ship, then you fast travel to the planet the quest is on, you land on the quest location, you walk to the actual and 10 minutes later the quest is done. Nothing interesting happened between the start of the quest and the end of the quest, except maybe for the quest itself.
In Skyrim a quest is an opportunity to explore, in Starfield a quest is a check on a checklist. I don't think Bethesda has necessarily lost its magic but I do think Starfield is missing the Bethesda magic.
I put 150 hours into it and loved it. Bethesda is such a giant, and I guess this game had such hype that it completely distorted reality.
Funny thing is, I had no hype for the game. I didn't think I'd even play it from the early previews and announcements.
But after it came out and people figured out it followed the Bethesda formula and was "Fallout in space", then I got interested. It had been long enough that I'd played a Bethesda game that it sounded like fun, and it was.
There are a lot of things I'd like to change and refine with Starfield. But it's still a good game.
The whole situation is blown out of proportion as is tradition in the modern world everybody can agree with that. But the complain is warranted in my opinion. What you might describe as a "genre"(it's a style) can also simply be arguments against a lazy studio that doesn't really progress in a meaningful way. Most of the issues people have with Starfield are the same they were having with almost all the games Bethesda makes. They simply ignore criticism about design. Of course it sells so they have an argument for continuing but that attitude made them stagnate as a studio. They never improved dialog choices. They never improved performance and optimization. They never improved npc AI. They never improved on UI design... They're just painting by the same numbers every time just with the latest new tech in paint. So while the core is kinda dumb fun most of us like, it's getting old now and we have every right to hold that against them.
We also cannot ignore all of the other studios making games in the same genre. CDprojeckt released Witcher 2 and 3 which are great example of progress and Cyberpunk which had a rocky start but was still miles in front of anything Bethesda story and role-playing wise. Obsidian themselves made a better Starfield since space exploration is a letdown in both. We just got Baldur's gate but Larian made both Original Sins that were already chock full of what makes BG so great. Add to that Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Dark Arisen, Breath of the Wild, ALL the Souls games except for Demon. All of that in between Skyrims and Starfields releases. That's a lot of competition, the genre changed and matured just like shooters did and so many other genres since. You just can't slap a new coat of paint and then act offended by the criticism. Bethesda has shown many times now that they either ignore or simply don't understand why they are getting negative feedback. Instead they rely on brand name, overpromise/lie, meme about their weaknesses (which is why I think they are lazy, they know) and then deflect criticism or blame players for being too picky.
That being said I also have over 100 hours in Starfield and I'm not saying it's a guilty pleasure. It is fun to roam around being a half god everybody fears or love and everything being entirely without meaningful consequences. But I can't ignore the shortcomings. And when I do so I keep remembering I've had the same for a decade.
Edit: I also don't think the game is a 1/10 or whatever. I'd say it's a 6 or so.
Thank you for being the voice of reason. Talk about beating a dead horse. If you listen to the internet drama you'd think Starfield is the worst game ever made.
i just don’t get the appeal of the game at all. you load in, walk for a few minutes, talk to generic npcs to get generic quests, fast travel, walk for several minutes, shoot your way through unthinking npcs, scan some planets, etc.
bethesdas combat and writing has been lackluster for quite some time, but before they had the excuse of having interesting worlds to explore. here that is not the case. there’s like 3 or 4 copy pasted dungeons on most planets, and the rest is completely barren. i just don’t really see the joy in the game, it all feels so monotonous.
The copy/paste aspect of it is what really got me, and made me want to stop playing.
I'm okay with procedural generation, and there's a lot of games that handle that sort of thing well. I never feel like exploration is a waste of time in Minecraft, for example, because there are always unique sorts of quirks about how the world is assembled that can still surprise you even if you've played for a while.
Starfield was fun for me early on. I was enjoying some of the sidequests and taking some time to just wander aimlessly in different planets. I would actually wake up feeling excited to play more during that first week.
But there was one moment where I was exploring a new planet, and I came upon the exact copy of a dungeon that I had done once already. Exactly the same, down to the layout of the halls, the trip mines placed up near the entrance, the locations of the enemies, and so on. That's when it felt like I was running out of things to do. The world is procedurally generated, but it's procedurally generated in a bad way, where there's really only a small handful of different "things" that can just be anywhere, and there's nothing really different in the ways that you can interact with them.
Plus the comedy of being on a no-atmosphere planet and seeing some of the clutter on outdoor balconies be, like, open food and drink packages as if people are just casually snacking in the vacuum of space.
Well, I kind of like Bethesda formula so I should be Bethesdas target. Played them since old Arena, through Morrowind to Fallout 3. Stopped there because Fallout 4 seemed like more of the same with less rpg and I did not have HW capable of Skyrim at the time.
Thinking about it I liked Morrowind the most. And the thing I liked the most about it was exploration and discovering the world, that is big, well done, believable and also changes in every region so there aren't two places that would look alike.
I haven't played Starfield, but I believe it's going to miss the exploration part of the formula. Sure, there will be different biomes on different planets, but that's not the same. I loved how I travelled the world and was amazed by every new scenery that emerged behind mountain ridge. Leaving swamp to get to volcanic plague storm lands. Then travel through beautiful lake district to emerge on vast grass planes... I fear Starfield will be like jumping through this with fast travel.
I'm sure too people will be like "oh but you played 40 hours! It can't be that bad" but the first 10-15 are misery from a gameplay perspective, like you're just trying to level up to get more carrying capacity and get more combat options.
Yeah same here. Around the 40 hour mark. I found I moved onto something else. People spending time and resources on building big and different ship designs and building a base seemed pointless to me given the gameplay loop.
There's this weird anti-hype going on. Realistically, for people not loving it, it's defensibly a 7 or so. There's PLENTY of us who put it a lot closer to a 10.
It's a lot of things, but it's definitely not a "bad" game.
I loved it. The reality of this game is so distorted. Yes, it's far from perfect. But in no way is it bad. Everyone has a right to their own opinion, and not everyone will enjoy it. But so many people would have you believe it's an objectively bad game, and it isn't.
It just seems terribly mediocre for a AAA game this decade. Definitely not worth $70, and not something to rush out and play. Maybe something we can enjoy a few years from now with proper updates, maybe some fixes mods.
It really isn't, which is funny. It does many things far better than Skyrim or Fallout 4, such as quest design and role playing, it just can't rely on fantastic lore written by people that either no longer work for the company or never did. Now that they are given the opportunity to be wholly original, the issues they've been having ever since Morrowind are shown at full force.
Interesting. As I haven't played the game, I have to rely on other opinions. Have you seen the video? He gave examples of quests that were in the game. Simple fetch quests (go to A, return to B, sometimes go back to A). They seemed to be designed in a very uninspiring way. Combined with the fact that you basically have to fast travel everywhere there's little to catch your attention during such quests. In Skyrim, for example, you might stumble across a cave or some ruins. To me, those are the really enjoyable moments. You just explore and start to wonder what you might find next. Is that even possible in Starfield to a similar degree? Because without that im not sure I can enjoy a Bethesda game. It's not a good shooter, the mechanics are wonky and the UI sucks. Would you disagree?
Hot take: Starfield isn't "dated," it's actually a much better RPG than anything they've made since Morrowind. However, because they can't rely on the world building and writing of people who have either left the company or worked for a different company they acquired the IP for, Starfield has highlighted just how bad Bethesda game design and writing truly is when done in a wholly original manner.
I've never played a Bethesda game and unfortunately Starfield isn't going to change that (at least in its current form). Based on gameplay footage and reviews I'd rather just stick with No Man's Sky. NMS seems to do the space exploration better and can already scratch that itch for me. The loading screens and fast travel are off putting enough that Starfield doesn't seem worth my time. The only feature that draws me to the game at all is the ship builder.
After fallout 4 it went downhill so try any of the previous games depending on how much dated graphics bother you. With mods most of the older games are very enjoyable.
Bethesda has been going downhill ever since Morrowind, to be fair. It's just that with each release, the number of disgruntled people have been growing, and with Starfield its finally the majority opinion.
Is their game design dated? What other RPG has mechanics beyond "run up to NPC, talk to NPC, receive quest from NPC, perform quest for NPC, return to NPC and get reward"?
I 100% agree that the Creation Engine is hot garbage, but are any other RPGs with cleaner newer engines actually innovating RPG mechanics?
I mean, that's a quest at it's core but a good game works it into a narrative and makes it blend. Ideally making all 6 steps anything but tedious. Ideally interesting and fun, but at all times avoiding tedious like the plague.
Two identical "perform quest for NPC"s, which is your step 4. Negotiate for a thing in a briefcase from somebody who probably will double cross you.
Which one is more tedious? Now combine a 4 minute run in a barren wasteland in your steps 1 and 6...
A few other things that Cyberpunk did, There are several ways to handle that mission, those several options can cause 3 major shifts in that faction. Which affect other missions later on, indeed any time you deal with the maelstrom gang.
Cyberpunk had a lot of flaws but, they're at least innovating. I've never been in a legit standoff like that in a game. It's always been in a static looping animation at 8 paces.
What I'm saying is that beyond the clunkiness of the CE, I don't find the flow of gameplay in Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas to be any different than most RPGs, which is to say it's not in my top 5 criticisms of Bethesda. What they did with Starfield looks kinda boring to me so I'm respectfully passing on it.
I've yet to play BG3, but it's absolutely on my horizon. Just picked up DOS2 and gonna give that a go first.
I think "dated" is a terrible concept to apply to game design, despite being able to divide FPS games into pre- and post- Half-Life, boomer shooters are experiencing another boom.
However, Bethesda game design is simply "bad" in my opinion. The RPG mechanics are very surface level and uninteresting, typically an end-game character plays similarly to a beginning character but bullets hit harder or other such styles. Contrast that with games like Cyberpunk, and you unlock new ways to actually interact with combat in meaningfully unique manners.
That's a very underdeveloped point, but it's in the right direction I believe.
I m a fan of Bethesda games, they all have a taste of something different from the other games, I like starfield, it is easy and fun without too much sugar, It isn't boring and I do not crave playing it, but I enjoy doing so simply exploring peacefully following the quests and scavenging.
He's getting really mentally unwell. He's great and hilarious, but he's been on a downward trajectory with his mental health for a number of years now.
Edit: people downvoting me, go watch all of his channel and get back to me. Dude has been public with his mental health issues for years.