MorsInvicta
Literate
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2023
- Messages
- 7
Damn it. I posted this on a thread, but a user gave me the brilliant idea to make my own thread starting w/ my review. So here it is:
My review on Shitfield:
Bethesda Game Studios is a company that broke ground on some truly revolutionary games like The Elders Scrolls: Arena, and its sequel Daggerfall. However a long line of commercial failures afterwards pushed the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Its next game had to be a success to save the company, and the result was TES: Morrowind, a truly fantastic game of incredible creativity, set in a world unlike any seen before. It captured my attention like few other games have when it released in 2002.
Then they released the next game, TES: Oblivion. And they played it safe. Utterly safe. Gone was the fantastic creativity of Morrowind, replaced instead by the most bog standard fantasy world you could possibly create. All elements that could offend anyone were removed or heavily toned down. But it still worked, the joy of freely exploring such a vast fantasy world still held up even if the world was comparatively shallow. And with their next series of games, Fallout 3, TES: Skyrim, and Fallout 4, the formula held up. Successful, but increasingly safe, shallow games plagued by weak writing and increasingly inconsistent lore, held up primarily by the freedom of their open world and the endless modders supporting the games for decades after release.
That brings us to Starfield, the latest game from Bethesda, their first new IP in ages, and the final destination of their increasingly lazy, uninspired and utterly "safe" game design. Though I fail to understand why they were so hell bent on creating a "new" IP when they did absolutely nothing original with it. Starfield does absolutely nothing new, it's just a long series of sci-fi tropes done better by others without adding anything, or putting an interesting new spin on anything. With the recent Elder Scrolls and Fallout games they had the luxury of copying the homework of the great talents that created those franchises, but with Starfield they had to learn to walk on their own, and they faceplant right out of the gate.
The main story is the most tedious, derivative and repetitive slog I've ever experienced in a Bethesda game. Most quests are simple fetch quests, the EXACT SAME fetch quest, repeated for hours on end. The story takes forever to build any kind of momentum, and it barely reaches the pace of a gentle jog before it reaches its final unsatisfying end. It opens to a far inferior version of Mass Effect's inciting event, before going into some pseudo-religious claptrap and ultimately devolving into the most overdone sci-fi trope that has been plaguing popular culture in recent years. You'll know it when to get there, trust me. I can barely describe how much I hated the main story, and it certainly didn't help that I predicted most of the big story reveals along the way.
But what about the open world? It's always carried Bethesda games before. 1000 planets of adventure must be something, right? No. Bethesda dropped the ball here monumentally. The open world is basically a lie, an illusion of content. In truth the worlds you visit are little more than vast empty expanses of open terrain with the occasional copy/pasted structure dotted around. And it's extremely obvious how lazy it is, every "random" structure is identical down to the placement of every last item, enemy, and decoration. Worse yet is the fact that you can't fly directly to the structures, nor are there any kinds of mounts or vehicles available so you'll spend vast amounts of time walking to things. At least you can fast travel back, and good god you have to fast travel a lot in this game. Enjoy the loading screens.
The worldbuilding is some of the worst I've ever seen. There's no depth to anything. In playing it safe, every faction is just a generic stock entity, "space law enforcement", "space bank", "space bandits", "space pirates". Every character is a basic cardboard cutout, with terrible facial animations and wooden acting to boot. All animal and plant life across the galaxy is basically the same models, just with different names. It's all so bland and repetitive I can barely remember the names of any of the characters I encountered. There's nothing to distinguish one person or place from any other. Every area is equally diverse, with no distinguishing features to set them apart from any other. The worst example of this I experienced is when I found a 200 year old generation ship, launched at sublight speed from Earth to colonize another planet, and I discovered the people born and raised on said ship all spoke with clearly distinct Earth accents like Russian, African, English etc. Are you joking? Did the Africans isolate themselves in a ghetto in Cargo Bay 3 for two centuries? Did the Russians conquer and establish a fiefdom on deck 9? Bethesda's writers have clearly never experienced a truly multicultural society, because it doesn't work like this. After growing up together in a community sealed inside a spaceship they should speak the same English accent, and probably a strange form of English that distinctly diverged from what everyone else speaks after two centuries in isolation. But that idea was just too clever for Bethesda.
Then there are the bugs, of which there are many. This is pretty much part and parcel of any Bethesda game, but needs to be addressed. I've personally experienced a plethora of minor irritants such as t-posing corpses, wild physics and poorly scripted quests and triggers. This on top of many, many crashes and freezes. Save often is my advice. Hard saves, so that you can revert if necessary.
Beyond bugs there are also endless little irritating quirks that makes the game a pain to play. There are no local or interior maps, so finding your way around cities or buildings becomes irritating. Particularly in cities which have been built around long detours to get to anything, most likely to hide how small they really are.
The "skill challenges" you have to complete to progress character skills. It's just another system meant to slow the game down, to pad out the time it takes to get anything done. And the challenges are never anything interesting like, breaking into the secure vault of a band of religious zealots, or hunt a lethal predator loose on a space station that's falling into a black hole. No, it's just a grind. Do X thing Y number of times. I particularly hated having to grind space combat to pump up my Piloting skill so that I could use a ship with longer jump range.
Then there are escort quests, thankfully I haven't found many, but trying to keep a character with the survival skills of a clinically depressed lemming alive is never fun, especially with the sheer number of bloodthirsty aliens the game throws at you.
Ultimately a lot of the game's issues beside the stale writing and uninspired worldbuilding, boil down to engine limitations. The game is built on the back of the aging Creation Engine, which itself is an evolution of the Gamebryo Engine Bethesda has been using since Morrowind, over 20 years ago. Please Bethesda, let it rest. It can go no further.
To conclude, Starfield is all the bad connotations of the word "Bethesda" distilled into one game. This is the final destination for all of the lazy choices, overhyped features, stale writing, and "vast but shallow" design philosophy that Bethesda is known for. What else can I say but this? Bethesda. This isn't good enough any more! Your lazy, half-assed efforts aren't good enough. You had the unmitigated gall to ask 100$ for early access to this uninspired piece of ♥♥♥♥, the worst product you have ever cobbled together. If we are to have any hope of a decent Fallout or Elder Scrolls game in the future, there has to be a serious shakeup at Bethesda. And I doubt Todd Howard is the only problem as some have suggested. For a game to so utterly fail in so many aspects takes a considerable team effort. I can only hope that this game's failure is a wake up call and that the future will see some positive changes.
Final score: Bethesda / 10
My review on Shitfield:
Bethesda Game Studios is a company that broke ground on some truly revolutionary games like The Elders Scrolls: Arena, and its sequel Daggerfall. However a long line of commercial failures afterwards pushed the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Its next game had to be a success to save the company, and the result was TES: Morrowind, a truly fantastic game of incredible creativity, set in a world unlike any seen before. It captured my attention like few other games have when it released in 2002.
Then they released the next game, TES: Oblivion. And they played it safe. Utterly safe. Gone was the fantastic creativity of Morrowind, replaced instead by the most bog standard fantasy world you could possibly create. All elements that could offend anyone were removed or heavily toned down. But it still worked, the joy of freely exploring such a vast fantasy world still held up even if the world was comparatively shallow. And with their next series of games, Fallout 3, TES: Skyrim, and Fallout 4, the formula held up. Successful, but increasingly safe, shallow games plagued by weak writing and increasingly inconsistent lore, held up primarily by the freedom of their open world and the endless modders supporting the games for decades after release.
That brings us to Starfield, the latest game from Bethesda, their first new IP in ages, and the final destination of their increasingly lazy, uninspired and utterly "safe" game design. Though I fail to understand why they were so hell bent on creating a "new" IP when they did absolutely nothing original with it. Starfield does absolutely nothing new, it's just a long series of sci-fi tropes done better by others without adding anything, or putting an interesting new spin on anything. With the recent Elder Scrolls and Fallout games they had the luxury of copying the homework of the great talents that created those franchises, but with Starfield they had to learn to walk on their own, and they faceplant right out of the gate.
The main story is the most tedious, derivative and repetitive slog I've ever experienced in a Bethesda game. Most quests are simple fetch quests, the EXACT SAME fetch quest, repeated for hours on end. The story takes forever to build any kind of momentum, and it barely reaches the pace of a gentle jog before it reaches its final unsatisfying end. It opens to a far inferior version of Mass Effect's inciting event, before going into some pseudo-religious claptrap and ultimately devolving into the most overdone sci-fi trope that has been plaguing popular culture in recent years. You'll know it when to get there, trust me. I can barely describe how much I hated the main story, and it certainly didn't help that I predicted most of the big story reveals along the way.
But what about the open world? It's always carried Bethesda games before. 1000 planets of adventure must be something, right? No. Bethesda dropped the ball here monumentally. The open world is basically a lie, an illusion of content. In truth the worlds you visit are little more than vast empty expanses of open terrain with the occasional copy/pasted structure dotted around. And it's extremely obvious how lazy it is, every "random" structure is identical down to the placement of every last item, enemy, and decoration. Worse yet is the fact that you can't fly directly to the structures, nor are there any kinds of mounts or vehicles available so you'll spend vast amounts of time walking to things. At least you can fast travel back, and good god you have to fast travel a lot in this game. Enjoy the loading screens.
The worldbuilding is some of the worst I've ever seen. There's no depth to anything. In playing it safe, every faction is just a generic stock entity, "space law enforcement", "space bank", "space bandits", "space pirates". Every character is a basic cardboard cutout, with terrible facial animations and wooden acting to boot. All animal and plant life across the galaxy is basically the same models, just with different names. It's all so bland and repetitive I can barely remember the names of any of the characters I encountered. There's nothing to distinguish one person or place from any other. Every area is equally diverse, with no distinguishing features to set them apart from any other. The worst example of this I experienced is when I found a 200 year old generation ship, launched at sublight speed from Earth to colonize another planet, and I discovered the people born and raised on said ship all spoke with clearly distinct Earth accents like Russian, African, English etc. Are you joking? Did the Africans isolate themselves in a ghetto in Cargo Bay 3 for two centuries? Did the Russians conquer and establish a fiefdom on deck 9? Bethesda's writers have clearly never experienced a truly multicultural society, because it doesn't work like this. After growing up together in a community sealed inside a spaceship they should speak the same English accent, and probably a strange form of English that distinctly diverged from what everyone else speaks after two centuries in isolation. But that idea was just too clever for Bethesda.
Then there are the bugs, of which there are many. This is pretty much part and parcel of any Bethesda game, but needs to be addressed. I've personally experienced a plethora of minor irritants such as t-posing corpses, wild physics and poorly scripted quests and triggers. This on top of many, many crashes and freezes. Save often is my advice. Hard saves, so that you can revert if necessary.
Beyond bugs there are also endless little irritating quirks that makes the game a pain to play. There are no local or interior maps, so finding your way around cities or buildings becomes irritating. Particularly in cities which have been built around long detours to get to anything, most likely to hide how small they really are.
The "skill challenges" you have to complete to progress character skills. It's just another system meant to slow the game down, to pad out the time it takes to get anything done. And the challenges are never anything interesting like, breaking into the secure vault of a band of religious zealots, or hunt a lethal predator loose on a space station that's falling into a black hole. No, it's just a grind. Do X thing Y number of times. I particularly hated having to grind space combat to pump up my Piloting skill so that I could use a ship with longer jump range.
Then there are escort quests, thankfully I haven't found many, but trying to keep a character with the survival skills of a clinically depressed lemming alive is never fun, especially with the sheer number of bloodthirsty aliens the game throws at you.
Ultimately a lot of the game's issues beside the stale writing and uninspired worldbuilding, boil down to engine limitations. The game is built on the back of the aging Creation Engine, which itself is an evolution of the Gamebryo Engine Bethesda has been using since Morrowind, over 20 years ago. Please Bethesda, let it rest. It can go no further.
To conclude, Starfield is all the bad connotations of the word "Bethesda" distilled into one game. This is the final destination for all of the lazy choices, overhyped features, stale writing, and "vast but shallow" design philosophy that Bethesda is known for. What else can I say but this? Bethesda. This isn't good enough any more! Your lazy, half-assed efforts aren't good enough. You had the unmitigated gall to ask 100$ for early access to this uninspired piece of ♥♥♥♥, the worst product you have ever cobbled together. If we are to have any hope of a decent Fallout or Elder Scrolls game in the future, there has to be a serious shakeup at Bethesda. And I doubt Todd Howard is the only problem as some have suggested. For a game to so utterly fail in so many aspects takes a considerable team effort. I can only hope that this game's failure is a wake up call and that the future will see some positive changes.
Final score: Bethesda / 10
/10
