Damn it, “losing steam” was right there to make a great headline pun
The state of journalism today… smh
smh
Steaming my hams?
Strokin’ my hog?
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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.”
Is it something to do with modding-community?
If that generates a load of free cool stuff people may play more for longer.
The main IP rights owner probably doesn’t really want this, they want to develop and sell a new game or expansion.
The main IP rights holder for Star field is the same as that of Skyrim (aka: Bethesda)
Nah, it’s just Todd Howard. His priorities are weird as hell when it comes to games.
Like, dialog and story is not prioritized.
While map size is highly prioritized.
It’s a bit backwards when the games in question are supposed to be RPGs.
Todd is the reason Bethesda games have been steadily getting worse since Morrowind, as a game designer he’s largely a fraud riding on the coattails of much better designers.
16 times the details
4 times the size
Fallout 70 dicks
To some degree, yes. Very few people are playing Skyrim in it’s vanilla format, these days. The same is likely true of Fallout 4.
I enjoyed Starfield but it’s definitely missing something Skyrim had which made me continue playing after I completed the MSQ.
I’ve put close to 500 hours into vanilla Cyberpunk but only around 80 into Starfield. My classic Skyrim, which I did play mostly vanilla, was roughly 250 hours. Where special edition is around 1500 hours purely due to mods.
But I already know I’m not chomping at the bit to mod Starfield like I was other games.
The IP holder at this point is Microsoft, so who knows. Microsoft has bought up a lot of big gaming outfits recently, so this is kind of new territory.
I’m waiting on more world shit mods to play it again, recently saw a house building mod on any planet and have my hopes up more will come. Granted Bethesda might actually want this engagement so they can release a definitive edition with hella mods, to bridge their own technical gaps again lol.
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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.
Yeah I never valued skyrim for replayability… I replayed oblivion a lot (maybe because I was younger), and replayed FO3/NV a bit. But even with mods, I could never get myself to replay skyrim more than a couple hours in.
Just felt so repetitive with boring dungeons and drauger. Stumbling into Blackreach was one of my favorite Bethesda experiences tho. But the gameplay felt stale halfway through my first playthrough. Felt like a chore to finish the story.
I honestly don’t know what other people see in it. Modding maybe?
Pretty much. Bethesda’s RPGs live and die by their mod support.
I liked living Skyrim 4 from wabbajack but yeah the base game isn’t really that special and I haven’t replayed it without mods
I replayed Vanilla Skyrim this year, and yea, it’s boring as hell. Better world design than Starfield, but Starfield is overall a better game when it comes to roleplaying and quest design, in Vanilla.
Modding for me. Whenever I’ve loaded it up again, it’s been with immersion mods that make stuff like weather exposure, food, and travelling things you have to manage. It’s a different game and you do things differently, like, you’re not getting to High Hrothgar until you hunt some furs to wear and have a good tent to shelter from blizzards on the way up. Many mods also bring in entirely new content.
New Vegas was definitely a treat, though. I found Fallout 3 quite mediocre and never ended up finishing it. Skyrim sort of falls in the middle there somewhere.
Skyrim’s true power is that it’s excellent for single-player roleplay. The game is very immersive, the universe feels extremely vast, and the gameplay allows for extremely varied play styles.
The end result is that the game is very replayable if your thing is building a consistent and unique (head)cannon for your character. If you don’t focus the main quest, you can put in hundreds of hours across multiple characters before things get stale. Even the quests that you follow multiple times, you might approach from very different angles.
It’s really not good for roleplaying, though. The game doesn’t give the player much to work with when it comes to creating unique characters, it’s more like a demigod simulator. Mods fix this, but New Vegas still stomps it because the game and the quest design facilitates roleplaying better.
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.
I mean, Harry Potter was the biggest selling game last year, and that has also lost 97% of it’s players.
Not everything is meant to be played forever. I think Skyrim was a one-off tbh.
That’s another exceptionally boring game, though.
Just checking some random games:
Sekiro is currently sitting at 92% players lost from its peak after five years
Spiritfarer is at 80%
Hollow Knight has only lost 63% of players
Witcher 3 also lost 80%, and actually has a larger active player base (in number of players, not proportionally) right at this moment than HL, despite being years older and peaking significantly lower
Big tentpole releases are likely to have a higher peak though, just for the week one FOMO.
Not defending Starfield because by all accounts it is exceptionally average in all areas, just that losing a lot of players from peak is not particularly unexpected.
Kind of feel sorry for those that paid for it on Steam, because it’s the very poster child for a trial month of GamePass.
Witcher 3 had a pretty big update not too long ago though
There hasn’t really been a single point since the game released almost nine years ago where its player count has dropped below current levels (20-40k active players). There was a huge boost with the update but it’s back to normal levels now. Can check steamdb for yourself to confirm
As I understand it, Starfield was supposed to be played for a long time. They literally made the game loop for this reason.
You finish the game by “going to a new universe” and starting over.
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.
Did Star Citizen change engine? I thought they used a modified CryEngine. Just checked, they now use Lumberyard, which is based on CryEngine.
Wait, really? I would have bet real money on it being UE4. Whelp, my mistake.
I’m pretty sure UE4 wasn’t even close to being released when Star Citizen started, and changing engine is a good way of wasting a lot of time.
UE4 released in 2014 and Star Citizen started releasing modules in 2013, so pretty close actually.
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.
baldur’s gate was incredible at this. i think part of that was their mindset wasn’t “how do we make this more accessible to casual players?” they’re mindset was more “how do we make this less tedious and/or annoying for everyone?” like the quick select buffs ui that comes up with every roll. in early access, and other larian games it was still possible to add buffs mid dialogue, but you’d have to like ungroup the buffer, sit then outside, start the dialogue, then sneak them in to hit you with the buff, which might not work right if you already opened the roll interface…
they’ve even added a custom difficulty mode where you can turn off more of their ease of use features. for example, i personally believe the game is better with the “perception check failed” notifications removed. if your whole party fails the perception check, you still know the trap is there… it makes the whole mechanic a bit pointless at times. with it turned off you’ll still do the check, and it’ll still show you if you succeed, it just hides the rolls from you until then.
I’d really like to play that one. I sucked at BG1 and was never able to get very far without getting my ass handed to me by enemies. Maybe I needed to be better at D&D in general in order to properly execute fights. Either way, I hear I don’t actually need to play those two to pick up 3.
BG3 is completely different to the original games. Think Fallout 3 compared to Fallout 2 levels of difference.
I agree with you but the silliness of the leveling system did have its own charm. As a kid I spent so much time jumping around and putting points into getting those athletics skills high enough that it became a bit game breaking.
There’s a certainly a balance somewhere in there but I don’t think the game was ever difficult enough, playing on medium difficulty, to feel like you’ve fallen too far behind the curve. For context I’m thinking mostly about oblivion.
I probably played through oblivion more times making builds that weren’t optimal and had weird stats than I did trying to min/max my attributes. I think, for me, leaving room for that kind of gameplay is part of what made the older games so special.
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.
That works too. I loved diving through books and stuff, but sometimes the quest dialogs just got too wordy.
TES books are the best, dude. I’m playing a (heavily modded but largely vanilla+) playthrough of Skyrim right now and just came across a large trove of tomes. I grab whatever I come across that I haven’t read while in dungeons or what have you, and at night when I return to my campsite (Campfire mod) I like to gather wood, roast a meal, and sit down to read through whatever literature I found that day. I have a stash sack full of some too for those nights where I’m feeling too wiped to really get into the game. I can just relax to the sound of crickets or morning birds and catch up on my lore.
I’d kill for a Daggerfall remake. That was my first TES experience and I still remember staying up all night to play it in highschool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXOWKABmxCQ
Theres never been a more perfect time! This project recently reached 1.0 converting it over to Unity and is supported by mods!
That’s Awesome! Thank you!
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.
I love doing playthroughs where I don’t use fast travel at all. Especially with the mods that remove loading screens from cities and the mod that makes it so you experience the carriage rides between cities in realtime!
I have a hard time believing they spent one year on this game, let alone eight. Half of it, including the game’s engine, the leveling system, and the fucking dragonshouts in space, is pulled from existing sources, the writing sucks, the base building is a pointless perk sink, there’s maybe three dozen unique structures copy-pasted again and again, the enemies are spongy and boring as hell, and despite being Bethesda’s “Least Buggy” work to date, it’s still chock-a-block with bugs.
You know what I think? I think they jerked around exactly like Randy Pitchford did with DNF and they’re trying to pretend they didn’t.
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.
I definitely think that it was voted for as a “joke” vote
The problem with joke votes is that it really corrupts the entire thing. RDR2 getting “most loving updates” or whatever it was called after it was shut down is a middle finger to the devs who actually keep up with their games.
Kinda reminds me of brexit: “I didn’t think that it’d actually happen!”
“And now here we are, on an island with a failing economy and scrambling to establish trade routes with the people we just told to fuck off.”
Considering the awards are nigh-useless anyway, sacrificing some “credibility” to call out shitty business seems worth it imo.
It’s not like it’s a “haha look how silly this is” joke–it’s a “you all fucked this up though for the public to hate you, do better” joke.
Think of it like this: You could annoy some shit companies for a few minutes or give a small dev a life achievement they will cherish for years.
Don’t undermine these things please. We used to not have awards, award shows, anything for games. Showing we don’t give a shit is a quick way for them to disappear.
Award shows have been on the way out for well over a decade, and have been purely marketing tools for even longer.
More importantly, the devs who got their games nominated likely saw sales spike, which means more players enjoying the things they created, and they were properly compensated for their work. That means way more than a BS award that sits on a shelf.
It’s “undermining gaming” to give award show results so much weight when we know how biased they are.
… Homie, every single year I look forward to the games I had a ton of fun with and emotionally connected with get the recognition they deserve so the people who worked so hard on it get a little more than just a paycheck and a high five.
I’m sorry you’re so jaded and scarred by something that you can’t understand what it means to pour your heart into a project and have one of the biggest stages for that field of work hail it as one of the best pieces of work for the year. Steam awards are directly voted on by us and it’s made clear by the dogshit picks everyone made as a ‘joke’. The award shows themselves have to filter out joke votes for that exact reason or it’s just not fun to watch.
If you’re not clearly better enough at the category to beat the meme, it’s because you don’t deserve the recognition you’re complaining about.
Meme votes are a product of not having anything worth actually voting for.
Bro it is truly, truly not that deep.
The evolution of Surprised Pikachu is the best thing to come out of Lemmy.
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 don’t think it sold nearly as much as they hoped.
But yeah, it probably made back what was spent on it’s making. And a bit more.
But as I understood it, they imagined it being their “Next Skyrim” in terms of success. And it’s nowhere near that.
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.
Your point stands but The Elder Scrolls Online doesn’t count. The game studio is completely different and its akin to comparing an id game.
People are still playing skyrim
Not every game can be Skyrim and setting the bar that high is ridiculous
Bethesda set the bar. It’s their job to raise it with future releases.
^if the power-creep problem were a person
Skyrim was pretty bad. I’d say it’s a pretty low bar. They did get the overall atmosphere right though.
I feel like the “there are dozens of us! Dozens!” meme when I’m like I didn’t think Skyrim was very good. The story was mostly thin, the combat wasn’t great, the systems were shallower than the previous games, the leveling wasn’t great (the scaling was better than oblivion but that’s a lot bar).
I played it a lot but a lot of that was trying to get it into something I liked via mods.
Edit: I think Skyrim also has a certain meme status, where people who don’t play a lot of games play it. That’s a very loose measurement of quality.
The whole point of Skyrim is modding the shit out of it. Not actually playing it.
Regardless of your personal preferences, I don’t think it’s reasonable to call Skyrim’s longevity and continued active user base a low bar
I think it’s reasonable. Skyrim is boring as hell Vanilla, but mods make it great. The devs shouldn’t get credit for modders.
There are Bethesda games as in made by the studio and Bethesda games as in the game genre that only Bethesda (And Oblivion once) produces with their proprietary game engine. A major aspect of the game genre version of Bethesda game is that the “main” story is neither necessary or important for the player’s enjoyment. The main story is typically one of many things the player can do and is not usually what fans of the genre are most interested in. Finishing a Bethesda game means doing everything that’s in it or getting bored at some point before that.
There are still tons of people playing all Bethesda games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 to this day with active mod scenes and setting discussion communities keeping the playerbases of those games alive. People having a nice enough time after the story and quitting since there’s nothing else interesting to do is not what fans of Bethesda games want from a game like this. Compared to other linear shooters I’m sure it’s fine enough, but I don’t think this is what anyone wanted for Starfield.
Lets see how well this age. People said the same about 76 and Bethesda didn’t give up on it.
I played fo76 when it had a free weekend and I really didn’t like it at all. I guess it’s good that people enjoy it, but I thought it kind of stunk.
It takes a bit to get going, but we’ve put a lot of hours into it. But for online game, it’s achieved what it set out to do. The story can be hit or miss but it has a boat load of it so overall it’s super enjoyable due to the usual fallout world building.
achieved what it set out to do can be hit or miss
Damn. I know you meant well, but you sound like a project manager of a feature on an insurance website and the minimum viable product was kinda janky and you are trying to soften the blow to the team during the lessons learned meeting.
But this is a video game. For relaxation and recreation. With lots of competition in the market. What you wrote is more of a condemnation than any hyperbolic gamer nerd rant.
Early on I had an experience where a pack of dogs came at me while I was fumbling around in my menus. I was like fresh out of the vault in a jumpsuit. They bit me so many times, and I didn’t die. Or suffer any consequences.
Feeling like it was all paper tigers really soured me on the experience. Some people probably like that and don’t want a game where you can be defeated. That’s not usually my jam though.
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 sincerely got the bends from basically alt-tabbing from the middle of Baldur’s Gate 3’s superlative storytelling straight into “OMG I’ve never seen someone generically mine a rock as good as you” and I had to turn it off (I eventually played it for about 10 hours, but I also initially installed it to a slow SSD and it was also unplayable aside from the garbage intro.)
environmental storytelling
Oooo! That’s the phrase I’ve been looking for for a few years. Yes! You know what game has amazing environmental storytelling? The MMO RPG Guild Wars 2. It’s typical high fantasy on the surface with its own unique style but the environment slowly unveils that it’s really a post-post-post apocalypse world. I enjoyed that aspect the most. Leaving typical big city fantasy hub to find yourself swimming thru radioactive waters covering a submerged skyscraper. So cool.
Kinda like Elfstones of Shannara book fiction turned out to be.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
The anticapitalism and queer are good, but the gameplay is repetitive
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.
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.
