The fact that this game was actually nominated as “best RPG” with the likes of baldurs gate 3 and final fantasy XVI is ludicrous enough.
to be fair, ffxvi is not really an rpg either.
I read a reviewer that said “It’s a beautiful game about space exploration that has no space exploration” and they were completely right. It’s just fallout in space. Who thought Quick Travel the game would be compelling space exploration
But it’s not Fallout in Space. I can travel from one edge of the map to the other in Fallout or Skyrim and stumble upon a pitched battle or a cultist ritual or a lost dog or a juicy plot hook. In Starfield I can travel from one interstitial area to the next interstitial area to listen to a bland NPC tell me to go to the next interstitial area.
It’s okay. I look forward to mods. Right now it’s like somebody reskinned Super Mario Bros from the NES with a generative image AI trained on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day and Mass Effect 1 stills.
That’s what I found really interesting about Cyberpunk 2077.
It took me a long time before I even started using fast travel in that game. I actually enjoyed walking through the city. Even on later replays and when I’d finished almost all the side quests.
Far from perfect game even after all the bug fixes, and kinda empty after the end game, but I can’t help thinking it illustrates how Bethesda’s been left behind in many ways. It’ll be interesting to see what the next GTA’s like. If they manage to make a more immersive world to explore.
I gave up on Starfield to try Cyberpunk again with the new fixes and I’m now probably 150 hours in and I think I’ve only fast travelled once? Maybe three or four times if you count the mid mission moments where you’re riding in a car with someone.
It’s kind of wild that Neon had to be split in half by a loading screen, but you can go from one end of Night City to the other with none, and Night City is way more detailed, and quite frankly probably has more unique geometry to load and render than Neon + entire surrounding planet.
The reason for that is because, yet again, for the three hundred thousandth fucking time, Bethesda is using, still, a modified creation engine.
There is an argument to be made that Half-Life: Alyx runs on a “modified Quake engine”. At no point was the engine completely rewritten, though it went through several major evolutions and presumably none of Carmack’s original Quake code still survives… probably.
What matters is that Valve made several major overhauls over the years and is well aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of its engine and taylors its games to them. I mean, you couldn’t run Elite Dangerous on Source 2, but nobody asked. Seemingly, nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of multiplayer (hence Fallout 76), and nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of half the shit that Starfield would have to provide for exploration to be compelling in the way that it is in Skyrim.
I just wish CP2077’s driving was better, I find it impossible to drive the good cars.
Much better after the bug fixes, but still far from perfect. Agreed.
I stuck to bikes which were fun to drive around.
Absolutely. I stopped playing it because it just wasn’t fun, 2.0 is much better. Bikes are way more usable, but I’d love to be able to hoon the cars like a GTA game.
Edit: Ok, I figured it out. You can’t hammer the gas all the time. The driving works more like an actual car than a GTA game. So if you drive more like Forza, you can actually hoon the cars. Bikes are more tolerant to full throttle. Controllers having a variable input for the throttle allow you to control throttle like a gas pedal. So higher acceleration cars become drivable with less throttle and hammering gas produces a “realistic” ice rink feel, as desired. I still prefer Jackie’s bike despite this understanding.
Everything is way better and more detailed in Cyberpunk.
It feels like everybody is so generic in Starfield. They don’t feel like they have personalities.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Cyberpunk and you’ll be dealing with an entirely new set of gangs with their own slang and their own backgrounds and their own heritage.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Starfield and you’ll either find nothing or an entrance to another procgen cave with the same spacers as everywhere else.
For me it’s not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.
It’s just so bland and formulaic. Against deep RPGs like BG3, it just pales in comparison.
The funny thing is, I think the fact that the RPG mechanics are finally better than the last game developed by Bethesda, instead of worse, highlights just how mediocre Bethesda games are.
I still think once mods and DLCs come out in full force it will be remembered more positively.
Agreed. Twas the only thing I thought while playing. This would be better with mods. Which is a sad state because I spent real money on a mod sandbox without the mods.
Yep, I had below Fallout 4 expectations and actually ended up enjoying it more, as I highly value the RPG aspects. It’s still a completely mediocre RPG, but it has a huge sandbox and a ton of potential.
The difference between a Ubisoft game and a Bethesda game is that Bethesda employees still enjoy coming to work.
Sure. I think big budget gaming needs to die, and games need more dev time for less work and higher pay, with worse graphical fidelity and better art styles.
If Bethesda games are so mediocre, why are they so popular among players who love to put hundreds of hours into them? I can’t imagine them all playing total conversion mods.
It’s become such a custom to poop on Bethesda for making “shallow”, “uninteresting” games that still everybody talks about. As if there weren’t enough real flaws in their games to give them heat for.
Because mediocrity and popularity go hand in hand, it’s the profit motive at work. Being largely inoffensive and generally palatable is profitable.
That’s not the definition of mediocrity. Trying to appeal to a bigger audience doesn’t make a game mediocre in the same way not every niche game has the potential of being a masterpiece just by not being that much likeable.
Some games are popular and good.
What’s good and what’s popular do not necessarily align. Removing “complicated” features for the sake of mass appeal makes the game worse, but more profitable, much of the time.
Also not true. Complexity alone doesn’t make a good game / movie / book / piece of art. And lack thereof doesn’t make anything worse.
Why is it that when many people like a thing because that thing appeals to masses, it’s automatically categorised as lower quality?
Nobody seriously claimed Starfield to be the game of all games. It’s good. It’s fine. It’s not perfect. So what?
The Best RPG list is basically Baldur’s Gate 3, and four more games to make it look like it has competition. It doesn’t.
I still think TotK is a better game overall than BG3.
For me it came pretty close between the two but eventually BG3 came out on top. Totk was great but after 200+ hours I was done with Totk. I currently have almost 200 hours in BG3 and I feel like there’s still so much more to play. I also feel like most of my issues with BG3 (like the poor performance in act 3 and some questlines breaking) are things Larian will fix while the issues with Totk (no rebinds, not being able to infuse weapons from inventory, menus in general, almost everything related to the sage powers) are unlikely to get fixed.
Completely agree, TotK could really use some serious QoL improvements.
And maybe a less brutally aged console to play it on.
Yuzu is all you need!
I played 25hrs of Starfield out of which 20 felt the exact same
I will admit to carrying most Koroks for several minutes rather than trying to make another vehicle out of bits that aren’t all there.
I can’t help but think they wanted me to be a bit more elaborate than just gluing the poor little guy to a horse harness.
BG3 certainly needed a few extra months to bake. There’s still a bit where you can get trapped in a conversation with Mol in Act 1 because as soon as you come out of the cutscene, you’re instantly in range of her to start the dialogue again.
Apparently they released early to beat Starfield, which is hilarious because I’ve seen few games so shat on this year.
Just an FYI in case you’re still playing. There is a feature of you keep playing that lets you build things without the source objects being there, and spending a bit of the ore you get. This trivialises all the korok things by just sticking them to a hoverbike haha
Yeah, I discovered that quite late on.
I do think ability unlock quests should be highlighted in this sort of game. I didn’t even go and get the master sword for ages, because I thought that quest was the end of the game (and indeed when I went to the quest I thought was the end, went deep down into the actual end game area by mistake, and only got deterred by a giant enemy I couldn’t kill).
BG3 was a buggy mess and the story has much to be desired. They should have kept the Chris Avellone writing.
I have not played it. I love scifi and open world games, but the trailers never spoke to me.
The universe looked so generic. I know Bethesda tried to force the label of “NASApunk” (whatever that means) but it just ended up with the same aesthetic of all those DeviantArt pages where people draw angular, scalloped metal scifi greeble over modern pictures. I didn’t feel any kind of vision coming out and grabbing me.
That’s aside from all the optimization and technical issues that I hear are bad even by Bethesda standards.
I watched part one of a play through. The moment I heard United colonies and Freestar Collective. I knew it was going to be the most generic space setting possible.
Starfield was 60 pretty ok hours on game pass, I personally have nothing against it, don’t care about it much. But those who actually give a shit about The Game Awards: why? Slim list of nominees, several categories total bollocks anyway, judges vote worth 90% against 10% crumbs to the public vote ( see ‘how are winners selected’ https://thegameawards.com/faq )
Why would you want extensive public participation in an award ceremony? If you want a popularity contest just look at sales numbers. What purpose do awards even serve if they aren’t curated beyond validating your own preferences?
this is fair but then why hold a public vote at all when it has next to no chance of affecting the outcome anyway?
Yeah, that’s a bit silly, for sure.
Seriously, just drop it then. They need to clarify their role.
Nicely said! I had the same feeling but just didn’t know how to put it into words.
Awards are purchased
I mean Blades Gate 3 has all rights to be GOTY of the year, everyone has been calling it since it got out, but I’m 100% certain that less than 20% of the voters will have players all GOTY nomeene’s. Hell Alan Wake got out two weeks ago. What I care a bit more is for things me coach’s. I’m a CS2 player and I’m sincerely hoping Christine “Potter” Chi will win it, she was so dedicated, and gave her true best, I’m truly happy her team win and J don’t even follow Valorant
It’s an excuse for me and some buddies to get drunk and yell at Geoff keighly for a couple hours.
I put very little stock in them as a true reflection of quality in the industry, though it’s occasionally nice to see Indies and smaller devs get some recognition.
I’m curious what the design, and reaction to, of Starfield might say about what we’ll expect from ES6. For three games now (Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield), have been marked by Settlement building and Radiant quests.
While radiant quests were there in Skyrim, in these later games it felt a lot like Bethesda were making it a core part of the mission design structure. There are a lot of blurred lines in Starfield that make it difficult to tell them apart. (That’s more a comment on main missions being so generic than the radiant quests being so good, unfortunately).
Settlement building seems to be a core part of Bethesda’s DNA now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the narrative follows a Kingmaker style where you build up a settlement of rebels over time or similar. I imagine the other ES staples will be tied to this too, Thieves Guild = establishing a branch within your new settlement to attack Big Bad Evil Vs joining an established one etc.
I really wonder how much of this poor reaction to Starfield makes its way through to actual change, but my feeling is ES6 will have a lot of hype, but similar feelings of disappointment. I hope I’m proved wrong.
Ultimately, unless they deviate from the formulaic structure (follow arrow on compass to have awkward uncanny conversation with a mannequin who tells you to go to copy and paste dungeon where you have asynchronous combat against copy and pasted enemies) eventually, people will have the same gripes with ES6 that they didn’t know they had with Skyrim. At this point, Creation Engine games are nostalgic, but Bethesda thinks they’re still the future.
I can’t imagine Beth cares about game awards as long as their sales are good.
It would get them some more downloads, but it might just be too difficult for them to achieve since their games are all the embodiment of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
The thing is that a lot of players like it that way, but it won’t ever win any awards.
I don’t see settlement building as a core part of Starfield, I am 160h in (NG+3) and have not touched settlement building at all. It is a feature of the game, but it is completely optional.
Bethesda did not over promise anything, didn’t over hype. They said they wanted to create Skyrim in space, and that is exactly what Starfield is. For better or for worse.
Starfield being a disappointment to some is only because those players over hyped themselves.
Played my full version demo before purchasing. Was bored on day one. None of this surprises me.
Don’t worry Bethesda, you can try again at next year’s game awards after you’ve fixed the bugs and modders have added the features!
after
you’vethe modders have fixed the bugsI really regret thinking the extra time to polish would result in a game where we don’t need modders to make things decent. The mod tools aren’t even out and people have rebalanced multiple systems to be way better than Bethesda came up with.
And year after that, and the year after that, and so on for the next 15 years as they re-release it.
They don’t need to rerelease it.
Skyrim Special edition released in 2016 and is still one of the most played games on Steam. (place 69, nice)
Painfully average is how I’d describe it. There’s games with better graphics, better RPG elements, better open world, better space sim, better procedural generation use, better writing, better any one thing (except maybe ship building?). For a game that promised it all it’s turned out to be your average jack of all trades, master of none.
It still strikes all the checks I was looking for, whereas the alternatives might be better in some ways but flunk or are completely absent in others. I’m never gonna let GOTY tags determine what I enjoy.
So, The Outer Worlds of 2023?
Played both, and I’d argue that Outer World’s is significantly stronger if only for its companions. Starfield I sunk a good few hours into and I struggle to remember one name. Starfield made me the Main Character and there wasn’t much room for anyone else. Outer Worlds has some pretty fun companion side-quests.
Starfield wins at the sheer quantity of ideas it threw at the wall, Outer Worlds for the decent to good quality of the ideas it threw at the wall. Neither was brilliant, but on my personal preference Outer Worlds has way stronger bones leading into the sequel.
Nah, Outer Worlds was pretty good. Writing and freedom of choice were stellar, RPG aspects were also really well done, the game was just short and felt small. Starfield doesn’t have any aspects that were actually good, everything is average at best.
What’s the point in making a game “as stable as possible”,
when it’s not even fun?
Aren’t you just polishing shit at that point?It is more stable than their other releases, but that’s a very low bar.
I’d never call it stable without that very important context.
Plus, it doesn’t pass that bar by more than a few inches.
Yeah, it isn’t the best game, so it doesn’t belong between the nominations.
Also because so many amazing games came out this year.
But that doesn’t make it a bad game though. Had plenty of fun with it.
Yeah. It’s a good game. That’s all. Pretty formulaic and not Bethesda’s finest work. Good, but nothing award worthy.
Both spider man 2, re4, and tears of the kingdom are just as formulaic if not more, yet there they are. And SM Wonders is somehow super innovative, just because it is not the exact same formula of all marios but the exact same formula “a little bit harder”
It got a best audio nominee at the golden joysticks and a best rpg at the game awards. Taking up air that could have been used for actual worthy contenders but big money’s get the auto nomination
It definitely doesn’t deserve best RPG.
It might win the most “it’s alright I guess”, game of the year award.
When a game like Hardspace has better writing than your game, you fucked up.
Which is not a knock on Hardspace by-the-by. It’s just that writing isn’t the focus of that game, and even Blackbird said, “let’s take a big swing at this anyways”.
And the early access people hated the plot too.
I wish Hardspace would work again. It had lots of potential before they crippled it.
Yeah, I played it back to back with cyberpunk TPL and it felt pretty sterile and soulless by comparison.
