The setting is by far the weakest point, imo. 300 years in the future and instant communication seems exclusive for ship-to-ship. People on the floor don’t have phones, radios, nothing. The two major faction cities are 300m² blocks in the middle of fucking nowhere. “A big war happened some time ago” - over one of the most stupid reasons about where to settle and that did fuck all, with random settlements around random worlds pledging allegiance to no one anyway.
There’s also the general disregard of npcs to anything going on around them. If you shoot up in the air while the city, people will just stare blankly at you. Same if you use space magic. “Don’t go around showing it off” - pfft.
Not to mention that they managed to make the most boring multiverse in fiction, which is much closer to a groundhog day time-repetition if you look into it.
I put a ton of time into starfield, still consider it one of my favorites. But I put it down and have tried to pick it back up a few times and just couldn’t get into it again.
One thing I thought would be a simple fix to add more interest to the game would have been to randomize the “play sets” you find on the planets. There are maybe a dozen different kinds of sites you can find on planets and I still remember the first time I wandered off the storyline and found some pirates in a base. It was fun and exciting. But the 50th time you enter the same identical base with the exact same floor plan, exact same enemy placement, etc, it gets boring.
I thought it would be easy for them to make some building segments that could be mixed and matched procedurally to make new base designs. Even if the segments were kinda chunky, entire floors, you could still get a lot of different layout combinations with a handful of each. Even if you just had 3 floors in a base and 5 of each, that’s 5 X 5 X 5 = 125 different combinations.
Sure you’d still know every floor, but it would make exploring the little side play sets more interesting and rewarding.
I still think though that the first time I had a zero-G gunfight on the casino ship was one of the most fun gaming sessions I’ve had.
the free lanes update recently fixed some of those issues. a lot of people never even saw most of the POIs because they would just never spawn. they changed it to where it’s more on a rotation so you are a lot less likely to see repeats so often
You may like it, fair enough. But it’s not by any stretch of the imagination amazing. If that were the case, it wouldn’t have been a dud, and more people would be playing it.
It’s dull, the characters awkward, and the mechanics outdated. Bethesda is just a shell of its former glory.
There’s always more for me to find and explore. I can make entirely different stories with different characters and have playthroughs that feel unique. I sympathize with the npc characters and their plights and found them interesting and compelling. My current character is basically Zer0 from Borderlands and I have a lot of fun with summoning a body double and teleporting around with a futuristic sword and slicing people. Or just putting everyone who shoots at me into a brig on my ship and then selling them to the authorities.
I understand a lot of people were disappointed. It’s just rather subjective.
I like Starfield, but the game sure tries to make me hate it with the amount of annoyances packed into it.
Dialogue, almost exclusively meant a railroad of one singular outcome not matter what you picked, or consisted of dialogue options that didnt correctly communicate the degree of emotion that would be applied to it. So often I would either say “I dont want to pick any of these options,” but I was forced to stay in the conversation, or “the character didnt say that how I expected them to and now I want to say something else,” but that usually looped back to the first complaint.
Ship customization is awesome. Not enough parts or tweakability.
So many ugly characters and armor suit designs. Ugly characters comes down probably to rendering, maybe its lighting or something but man so many characters in the game are just ugly looking. And the armor designs are worse, because the lighting on them is actually fine but the designs are just atrocious. When I first heard “NASA-punk” as an aesthetic, I expected designs based on NASAesque objects. You know, whites, gold foil, utilitarian. Not whatever ended up in the game.
Ship flight. I love Elite Dangerous, and even Star Citizen. Too games with space flight models that already exist and allow the player to seamlessly fly between planetary atmosphere and space. There is no reason the Creation engine couldnt have this functionality added. Even if its a cloud covered load screen like No Mans Sky had.
I think a big problem with the game is the NASA-Punk aesthetic, honestly. If they had just gone through with their likely original plans of a Star Wars or Alien esque design board, most people probably wouldnt hate it as much. Most people coming into the game expect Star Wars Skyrim, Bethesda probably should have just made that. Heck, I would have even liked if it was closer to Star Trek, too. But its simultaneously both and neither at the same time.
I really enjoyed my first playthrough. Never felt the need to play again, but I got a solid 65 ish hours in and enjoyed it the whole time. I haven’t played it for a while now, maybe I should do another playthrough.
I like it as well… The mix between all these different game genres is very interesting. Idea is great, execution is lacking a bit, but it is good that they tried… Just sad that it didn’t work out so well… Hope they try again and improve on the concept.
I have been meaning to go back and give it another chance. I played it on launch and got to some place like 30 minutes in that they clearly wanted to be some big “ooo, ahh” moment but I just felt bored. I shut it off and never played again. I do enjoy Bethesda games though so it’s possible I would like it if I pushed through.
i love starfield, despite its flaws. the public opinion was very… 😬
The setting is by far the weakest point, imo. 300 years in the future and instant communication seems exclusive for ship-to-ship. People on the floor don’t have phones, radios, nothing. The two major faction cities are 300m² blocks in the middle of fucking nowhere. “A big war happened some time ago” - over one of the most stupid reasons about where to settle and that did fuck all, with random settlements around random worlds pledging allegiance to no one anyway.
There’s also the general disregard of npcs to anything going on around them. If you shoot up in the air while the city, people will just stare blankly at you. Same if you use space magic. “Don’t go around showing it off” - pfft.
Not to mention that they managed to make the most boring multiverse in fiction, which is much closer to a groundhog day time-repetition if you look into it.
I put a ton of time into starfield, still consider it one of my favorites. But I put it down and have tried to pick it back up a few times and just couldn’t get into it again.
One thing I thought would be a simple fix to add more interest to the game would have been to randomize the “play sets” you find on the planets. There are maybe a dozen different kinds of sites you can find on planets and I still remember the first time I wandered off the storyline and found some pirates in a base. It was fun and exciting. But the 50th time you enter the same identical base with the exact same floor plan, exact same enemy placement, etc, it gets boring.
I thought it would be easy for them to make some building segments that could be mixed and matched procedurally to make new base designs. Even if the segments were kinda chunky, entire floors, you could still get a lot of different layout combinations with a handful of each. Even if you just had 3 floors in a base and 5 of each, that’s 5 X 5 X 5 = 125 different combinations.
Sure you’d still know every floor, but it would make exploring the little side play sets more interesting and rewarding.
I still think though that the first time I had a zero-G gunfight on the casino ship was one of the most fun gaming sessions I’ve had.
the free lanes update recently fixed some of those issues. a lot of people never even saw most of the POIs because they would just never spawn. they changed it to where it’s more on a rotation so you are a lot less likely to see repeats so often
Good to know, I haven’t picked it back up since free lanes landed. Might be time to give it another go.
Thanks!
I liked it too. At least I didn’t hate it as much as everyone else. It’s not a perfect game but whatever I still had fun.
Starfield is one of the best frameworks for a game I have ever played, I just really really wish they had remembered to put an actual game inside it
Legitimately it’s amazing. I love it.
You may like it, fair enough. But it’s not by any stretch of the imagination amazing. If that were the case, it wouldn’t have been a dud, and more people would be playing it.
It’s dull, the characters awkward, and the mechanics outdated. Bethesda is just a shell of its former glory.
I want my money back.
Right, I disagree on all of those points.
There’s always more for me to find and explore. I can make entirely different stories with different characters and have playthroughs that feel unique. I sympathize with the npc characters and their plights and found them interesting and compelling. My current character is basically Zer0 from Borderlands and I have a lot of fun with summoning a body double and teleporting around with a futuristic sword and slicing people. Or just putting everyone who shoots at me into a brig on my ship and then selling them to the authorities.
I understand a lot of people were disappointed. It’s just rather subjective.
I like Starfield, but the game sure tries to make me hate it with the amount of annoyances packed into it.
Dialogue, almost exclusively meant a railroad of one singular outcome not matter what you picked, or consisted of dialogue options that didnt correctly communicate the degree of emotion that would be applied to it. So often I would either say “I dont want to pick any of these options,” but I was forced to stay in the conversation, or “the character didnt say that how I expected them to and now I want to say something else,” but that usually looped back to the first complaint.
Ship customization is awesome. Not enough parts or tweakability.
So many ugly characters and armor suit designs. Ugly characters comes down probably to rendering, maybe its lighting or something but man so many characters in the game are just ugly looking. And the armor designs are worse, because the lighting on them is actually fine but the designs are just atrocious. When I first heard “NASA-punk” as an aesthetic, I expected designs based on NASAesque objects. You know, whites, gold foil, utilitarian. Not whatever ended up in the game.
Ship flight. I love Elite Dangerous, and even Star Citizen. Too games with space flight models that already exist and allow the player to seamlessly fly between planetary atmosphere and space. There is no reason the Creation engine couldnt have this functionality added. Even if its a cloud covered load screen like No Mans Sky had.
I think a big problem with the game is the NASA-Punk aesthetic, honestly. If they had just gone through with their likely original plans of a Star Wars or Alien esque design board, most people probably wouldnt hate it as much. Most people coming into the game expect Star Wars Skyrim, Bethesda probably should have just made that. Heck, I would have even liked if it was closer to Star Trek, too. But its simultaneously both and neither at the same time.
I really enjoyed my first playthrough. Never felt the need to play again, but I got a solid 65 ish hours in and enjoyed it the whole time. I haven’t played it for a while now, maybe I should do another playthrough.
I like it as well… The mix between all these different game genres is very interesting. Idea is great, execution is lacking a bit, but it is good that they tried… Just sad that it didn’t work out so well… Hope they try again and improve on the concept.
I have been meaning to go back and give it another chance. I played it on launch and got to some place like 30 minutes in that they clearly wanted to be some big “ooo, ahh” moment but I just felt bored. I shut it off and never played again. I do enjoy Bethesda games though so it’s possible I would like it if I pushed through.
if you treat more of a meditative exploration rather than dungeon crawler (like skyrim or fallout excelled at) you may like it
Same! Played around 500 hours when ut first released. Haven’t played any of the DLC, definitely replaying from scratch with those sometime soon.