So there I was a low paid unskilled worker in a mine, till one day I touch a magic space rock then before you know it a complete stranger just gives me his ship and his robot and tells me I’m the chosen one. This broke my immersion and my fun.
Like most gamers I am a total success in life. A fulfilling carrier, relationships, money and the respect of my peers. So when I play a video game I really want an escape from this quant nightmare that is my perfect life and just play as a low life shlub who gets paid minimum wage to risk his life in order to increase the profits of those above him. Is that too much to ask Bethesda?
Sounds like you want to play Deep Rock Galactic more than Starfield :)
Rock and stone, boys!
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is exactly what you’re looking for.
I’m sure eve online has a job for you
Genuine questions: What does Starfield do to innovate? Are there mechanics, narrative twists (no spoilers), or features moving the industry forward in a new direction? What’s here that I haven’t played before?
Worse mechanics than games that are dedicated to each function.
Ship building is janky, it doesn’t actually make any kind of difference, and there are other games with better, cooler customization that allow you to do more granular things. The ship stats don’t actually matter, because you can carry your crew of flunkies around the galaxy with any kind of setup, regardless of the actual stated crew stations and passenger capacity. Fuel exists but is inconsequential, it’s a number that goes up and down as you travel independent of your interaction with it. Space Engineers and Empyrion Galactic Survival are two games off the top of my head that kick the shit out of Starfield’s ship building and exploring.
I feel like the gunplay is worse than it was in Fallout 4. That might not be because of how the guns fire so much as it’s probably directly related to how much everything is a pointless bullet sponge. You can have a pimped out Orion and shit still takes a bunch of hits to go down, and they’re all the same sets of enemies: renegade spacers in random mines and outposts.
The only new thing on top of all the mechanics culminating from Skyrim through Fallout 76 that they added was a research system, which is perfunctory at best and super annoying and artificially limiting at worse.
So to answer your question? Nothing. There’s nothing they improve upon that hasn’t been done elsewhere - the gimmick functionally just is that all these elements exist in the same game in a very disjointed fashion.
Damn, that’s what I suspected.
Personally I really hate when you fight the same generic enemies but they just get bigger numbers to become bullet sponges. A lot of games that want to be “endless” do this, e.g. Warframe. At least make the tougher baddies bigger? Give them cooler armor or something? Don’t make them look identical to the level 1 grunt.
Fuel exists but is inconsequential
My theory is that they used to have actual fuel costs but they cut it late in production when they realized it wasn’t fun.
It would explain some of the loading screen tips that reference refueling.
It attempts to have a ton more proc-gen content in a single player, massive sandbox RPG. That’s about it, really.
Supposedly No Man’s Sky was the vanguard of procgen but I wasn’t impressed. I get the impression that Starfield uses it very similarly.
For characters and ships, all NMS seems to do is combine permutations of prebuilt parts, not create any actual unique parts. Spore was way more impressive a decade and a half earlier because it tried to animate whatever wacky creature the player designed.
For terrain, NMS doesn’t even create biomes. You won’t find a river, glacier, waterfall, or oasis anywhere. They didn’t even apply the system to space stations, those are identical everywhere in the universe. Valheim and even Minecraft did better.
Is that an accurate comparison?
Starfield’s biome and planet generation is extremely barebones, but placing that in a single player RPG with the radiant quest systems is fairly innovative. Imagine STALKER Anomaly style tasks, but with proc-gen landscapes.
This combo allows any character to have more content available to suit that character style far more than Skyrim or Fallout 4 style faction radiant quests.
Still needs far more work though, it’s half-baked.
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Starfield frustrates me, because in many ways its a major step in the right direction. It has much better roleplaying mechanics than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but at the same time the lore is half-baked and the skill system is fairly weak. It has great potential, but a lot of it feels toned down and less “real” because of it. Space exploration has a lot of potential as well, but setting every objective so far apart on planets ruins exploration by filling it with monotonous procgen.
That’s why I’m fairly confident that once properly patched, and mods/DLCs are in full swing, it will probably be remembered very fondly despite the release state. It’ll pull a Cyberpunk.
They have to rebuild the entire game to make it fun. Every mechanic is poorly implemented.
Shipbuilding? Inconsequential.
Gun modification? Same as it ever was.
Food and drink? Why do I give a shit?
Base building? Just as janky as FO76.
Research? Annoying progression block.
The map? So spread out that everything is behind a loading screen.
Everything from stem to stern is just…bad. Stop using the fucking Creation engine you dumbasses! That’s why nothing fucking works! You don’t have an engine that’s even capable of supporting a large space game. Why did they think it could? Sunk fucking cost fallacy out the ass.
I’m completely disgusted by the thought, but I’m like 90% sure they half assed everything “knowing” modders would fix it and they fully intend on charging you for those mods…
It’s absolutely fucking disgusting that Bethesda feels entitled to the profits of other peoples work to fix their shit games… They are testing out the new creation store with an update to Skyrim coming very soon and have already built starfield with that in mind (modders have already spoken about the difficulty of modding starfield at the moment because of these changes.)
They pitch it as a boon to modders as they’ll get paid, but modders always had links to patron accounts that Bethesda/(now Microsuck) couldn’t get their greedy fingers on… I hope no one mods the game to be honest even though I preordered it with the high hopes of modding making the game even better than Skyrim… Greed kills again.
The criticism that Bethesda doesn’t finish their games because they expect volunteer modders to has been around since at least Oblivion IIRC. I always thought it was BS, but since Fo4 was essentially remade from the ground up into a now quite beloved game by the mod scene they may have considered this with Starfield. Bethesda now is more Zenimax than the Bethesda of 10 years ago so while I didn’t believe it then I have less reason to doubt now.
Shipbuilding doesn’t need to be rebuilt, just add the fuel mechanic back to give drive upgrades weight and add more space content.
Gun Modification is fine, it doesn’t need to be overhauled. It can be better, and cosmetic paints could be added I suppose.
Food and Drink just need the previously hinted at survival mode, so you actually have to plan trips. Not rebuilt from the ground up.
Base building is fine-ish, just needs more benefits.
Research just needs rebalancing, it’s fine as a gate for progression.
The map just needs distances cut in half for proc-gen formulas and more locations added to the pool.
The game doesn’t really need to be rebuilt, it just needs a survival mode, some new assets and uses for base building (reinforced by survival mode), and distances cut in half for proc-gen.
What made Bethesda games decent was how dense the maps were, but there is no density here.
Skyrim and Fallout are games where you can pick a direction, go, and probably find something weird or interesting - a side quest, a fun environmental story, etc. Starfield literally cannot have this by design because everything is on a different planet, in a different system - the density of the map is gone, and scattered across a giant cosmos that can’t be navigated without loading screens.
What happens on a procgen planet if I pick a direction and go? The same thing, every time - a boring cave or outpost filled with the same bullet sponge spacers as literally everywhere else.
There needs to be actual stuff to do outside of quests to make the game fulfilling. There’s so much nothingness.
The cities are more dense, actually. The open space is far less dense though.
Skyrim and Fallout 3/4 were games where you could pick a direction and find something fun. New Vegas isn’t, but it more than made up for it with roleplaying and quests, which Starfield generally does better than Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4.
The procgen content is 5-10% of the game, Starfield just fundamentally isn’t a Skyrim clone. Trying to play Starfield as though it is is just determination to be disappointed.
Do I think Starfield is perfect? Absolutely the fuck not, it’s just not an imperfect game because it isn’t Skyrim, it’s an imperfect game on its own merits.
I just think it needs a ton of work before it has a Cyberpunk-level renaissance.
100% agree! Thankfully, Bethesda games function almost similar to FOSS, and will be fixed by the community. As I’ve demonstrated, the fixes for Starfield meaningfully boil down to a well-balanced survival mode, and reducing the locus of exploration and adding more locations to the proc-gen pool. These are 100% achievable via mods.
DLCs are planned in abundance for Starfield, and will similarly go a long way in adding more hand-crafted content.
Starfield sure is popular to hate on
I mostly hate on it because it completely botched a genre / gameplay type that I enjoy a lot (sci fi exploration and survival) and turned it into a loading screen simulator that couldn’t feel less interesting if it tried.
I got the game for free and couldn’t even be bothered to finish the intro. Just a wholly bland, uninteresting setting that at no point manages to make me feel like I am exploring space, or having fun. By far the “best” made aspect is space combat, and that’s only moderately fun either.
I got it for free with my cpu, spent three hours trying to get it to work on Linux and then, finally achieving that, spent two hours in game and just got bored. The Bethesda veneer is fully on display here and it’s hard to not feel like Neo at the end of The Matrix when he sees the underlying design behind everything. You just realize it’s the same game all over again with a different skin, with no evolution in mechanics, UI, or technology.
I specifically recall getting to the major city hub and walking past a mission board and just thinking “well fuck that” and walking right past it. That is shit lazy design. Side quest emergence should be organic, not a shopping list. I spent twenty minutes trying to travel to a moon that was very much visible to me before realizing I’m not actually able to and have to fast travel. That was an unbelievably frustrating experience and is inexcusable given how long Space Engine, Elite: Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, Star Citizen (at least partially) and others have existed.
The writing in the tutorial and Constellation intro fell very flat for me, and the hook was very very weak. The turnaround from “you’re a nobody” to “you’re a galactically important person” gave me whiplash and the Constellation group felt unrealistically eager to bring a stranger on board (except, of course, for token Mr. Tropey McGrumpypants). It felt less like a story and more like a shoehorn.
“Why would they do that?” "So the game can happen. " “Oh ok.”
I mean, Bethesda writing has always been pretty bare bones and pedestrian, so I guess it’s not that surprising, but it is still disappointing and jarring.
Oh and the companion robot was easily the most annoying companion I’ve ever had in a video game. I put it down after those two in game hours over a month ago and have had no compulsion to revisit it whatsoever.
I feel like Bethesda, from top to bottom, has a lot of introspection to do. Sadly, from this news, it doesn’t sound likely to happen.
Bethesda. Bethesda never changes. This is a company that is well known for releasing extremely buggy games and letting the modders fix them for free so it really doesn’t come as a surprise that their public response to valid criticism of their half-assed writing and development would basically be “you just don’t understand our genius”.
gameplay type … survival
Bethesda never claimed starfield would be a survival game.
Yeah… The only genre they ever claimed it would be is a Bethesda-style open world game. Which it definitely is. People who expected the next NMS or Elite Dangerous were setting themselves up to be disappointed.
It barely even did that right. What makes Bethesda games work is that they’re such an a dense amount of content on a map, but because they partitioned this out through different points in space, it just felt like it was floating around everywhere.
It’s such a joke how disconnected everything is.
Jemison is at least three separate zones, Neon is cut in half, and this is in an age where we have city-scale games that have absolutely no loading screens during traversal - Cyberpunk and Spider-Man to name a few. That’s like a New Vegas-era problem from a decade ago, where we had to cut Freeside in half. Made sense then, unacceptable now.
Everything is behind a loading screen, usually triggered by fast travel.
Starfield is a Bethesda style open world game like the Transmorphers movies are transformers style movies. It’s in the style yes, but it’s nothing compared to the original.
I’m honestly impressed that Bethesda managed to Asylum-knockoff their own games.
They hyped it up as being as expansive as NMS. It’s not that we set ourselves up it’s that we bought into the marketing.
While the game does have a lot of loading screens, I think the disappointment mostly comes from people having wrong expectations.
The people complaining mostly seem to be people that expected a game that feels like an open galaxy Star Wars game. Starfield is not that. Starfield is more like a 2009 Space Odyssey game. It leans farther into “realistic” space games like Elite Dangerous and less into “fantasy” space like Star Wars. For example, planets in real life are mostly just lifeless barren rocks, as Elite and Starfield both depict. Actually, there is more to explore in Starfield than Elite due to the procedural cave systems and outposts on planets being more plentiful in Starfield. Elite feels bigger because there are other players playing with you, and both politics and economy change in realtime in response to collective player actions. Not so in Starfield. Elite is also very good at hiding its loading screens so that, for the most part, they do not interrupt gameplay like they do in Starfield. In actuality, Starfield is a bigger game than Elite. Not in that there are more planets or anything, but that there is more to explore. More NPCs to interact with in a meaningful way. Because Elite was built as a space sim and not an RPG, this is by design.
Starfield itself is quite good. The end user experience suffers due to loading screen fatigue and players expecting planets to not be barren lifeless rocks like they would be in reality. This is where I believe the problem lies.
Regarding the lifelessness argument: one of my favorite and most played games ever is space engineers, which is essentially a Minecraft like sci fi sandbox in a largely procedurally generated map.
The game has no concept of npcs in the expected sense, the only real pve component are randomly spawned hostile vessels. There are no cities or inhabited planets, no actual story. Actual planets and moons are maybe a dozen overall, everything else is procedurally generated asteroids. The physics are only a rough approximation to real life.
And still, the game has hooked me for literally thousands of hours, simply because I can actually do shit. Once you are loaded into a map there isn’t a single loading screen to deal with. Piloting your ship is wholly your responsibility and you do it from start to orbit to wherever you want to go. And you can actually go anywhere you want, no railroading or handholding period. You are fully in control at all times.
Even just taking off in a random direction in space is fun: What might happen? Find a resource rich asteroid and make a mining station? Encounter a pirate fleet and get into a firefight? Accidentally slam my fuel tank into an asteroid, causing me to lose my fuel? Do I freeze to death in space or do I chance into an asteroid with more?
It lacks almost everything starfield has, on paper, but is still miles ahead as a game about exploring space.
It’s making it so easy.
That’s so pathetic. There is a comedy club near that does this. If your review isn’t glowing, they respond shittily to your complaints. All this does is make the business/developers look petty and gross.
Whenever I see this, on Google reviews or whatever, it just solidifies what the complaint was and basically is tantamount to the responder doubling down on whatever the reviewer was saying. Valid or not. When you respond with passive aggressive “kindness” or denial, it just makes you look like a piece of shit, even if you are actually in the right. I cannot fathom how people don’t understand this.
That doesn’t seem desperate or anything
My honest review, I had fun with it. It’s best described as an ocean of content but only 1” deep. The ship building was really the only unique thing in this game and it was really well done I thought. Beyond that it was the usual Bethesda mess that I expected. So I wasn’t totally put off by the jenk. Except for the late game crashes…. In the end game on the series S, I would crash ~ 40% of the time I paused to save if I was in action. Really frustrating.
It’s best described as an ocean of content but only 1” deep.
Ok, that right there is taking Starfield off my wishlist. I don’t enjoy games with this sort of super wide but shallow design at all. Thanks for the heads up!
I keep thinkig that Steam’s review feature should be urging developers to make better and more polished games, and yet, here we have games like Starfield…
Goes to show that some AAA corpos truly do not give a single fuck about their customers
