Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[ColaWerewolf]

>Very Positive steam reviews

>Trailing BG3 in concurrent players on steam

Man, did not expect either of these.

Oh no, the Codex vocal opinion bubble made up of frustrated whiny manchildren was wrong! Who could have predicted such a thing?

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

 

[Vyvian]

That fool has been coping and shilling harder than anyone I've ever seen.

 

[Lovely Feather Pillow]

>Very Positive steam reviews

>Trailing BG3 in concurrent players on steam

Man, did not expect either of these.

Oh no, the Codex vocal opinion bubble made up of frustrated whiny manchildren was wrong! Who could have predicted such a thing?

Codex BTFO

 

[Ibn Sina]

Despite getting rid of voiced protagonists all dialogue options are still Yes, Yes with Complaints, and Not right now.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

So there is this main mission where you are saving the black guy that gave you the ship in the beginning. You basically go to this pirate base that has a main building, which doesn't have any doors. It's normally furnished and there is a pan with a potato and a carrot on stove. Obviously this is where some of the pirates live...

The issue is that this dust ball has no atmosphere and the temperature is -192 degrees. Good luck heating up that food!

 

[darkpatriot]

Despite getting rid of voiced protagonists all dialogue options are still Yes, Yes with Complaints, and Not right now.

It seems to be a modern Bethesda design rule to rarely let you fully decline a quest. They assume (probably rightfully for many players) that one day they may be interested in doing that quest once they run out of other things to do, so they always want to leave you the ability to come back and accept it. You also left out "Yes, but ask for more money".

But I would note that accepting quests is only a tiny minority of dialog nodes.

The most common pattern is 2-3 ways to react to the last statement (sometimes cosmetic, and sometimes a real choice) + 1 or 2 questions for more information that don't move the dialog along to the next node and are just a way to get more information/lore.

For more involved NPCs that have a recurring function (such as a shop keeper) you have the the opening dialog options that let you access that functionality + any quest related dialog tree paths if they are also part of a quest.

So really, a bit formulaic but not that different than most RPG dialogs trees you find in games. Those patterns describe the majority of BG3 dialogs as well, for example.

 

[Konjad]

Right, here is my rather long 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

I saw it on Steam, so that's you? https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970355321/recommended/1716740/

 

[Ibn Sina]

I was torn between refunding or keeping it until It got better but I refunded. I got the game during the 5 day early access and played about 29 hours. I submitted a refund today and it was approved. I wrote poor performance as reason. Seems like they are getting lots of refund request because of this reason which is why I think it got approved.

I will pirate it with all DLC a year from now. Game is bad don't waste your time on it.

 

[darkpatriot]

So there is this main mission where you are saving the black guy that gave you the ship in the beginning. You basically go to this pirate base that has a main building, which doesn't have any doors. It's normally furnished and there is a pan with a potato and a carrot on stove. Obviously this is where some of the pirates live...

The issue is that this dust ball has no atmosphere and the temperature is -192 degrees. Good luck heating up that food!

There are quite a few environment dressings that are questionable. Open food left out in vacuums/poisonous atmospheres being one of the more common ones.


An entertaining bug I had the other day was that they played the ship taking off animation without first removing the service technicians NPCs standing around running animations like they were checking on the ship. As a result one was right under one of my landing gear thrusters and took a full blast of thruster. He didn't show any reaction to it, of course.

 

[Ibn Sina]

The worst thing for me imo was how genderless and sexless everything is. It really feels like a PG game. So sanitized. Even the wars in the game lore are described in the most soft, inoffensive ways possible. They describe WW2 as being more deadly than their futuristic wars with xeno bioforms, biological weapons, and killer MECHS of mass destruction.

 

[Robotigan]

>Very Positive steam reviews

>Trailing BG3 in concurrent players on steam

Man, did not expect either of these.

Oh no, the Codex vocal opinion bubble made up of frustrated whiny manchildren was wrong! Who could have predicted such a thing?

Codex is going to have to come to terms with the fact that euro-style narrative RPGs are mainstream, normie-core now.

 

[AlwaysBrotoMen]

The Bethesda director is the video game industry’s Christopher Nolan, pushing the boundaries of the medium, from Elder Scrolls to Fallout. But nothing compares to Starfield. In a rare, in-depth interview, Howard opens up about the game he's waited for his entire life.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a44998288/todd-howard-starfield-interview/

 

[Vic]

any tl;dr of the last 8 pages?

 

[Old Hans]

The Bethesda director is the video game industry’s Christopher Nolan, pushing the boundaries of the medium, from Elder Scrolls to Fallout. But nothing compares to Starfield. In a rare, in-depth interview, Howard opens up about the game he's waited for his entire life.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a44998288/todd-howard-starfield-interview/

The sci-fi epic, out today, boasts an entire universe of fictional stars, galaxies, and planets that players can travel to via spacecraft. Along the way, they shoot lasers, fight space pirates, and enjoy pure freedom, unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the medium. The twist? You're just fast traveling everywhere.

 

[Vic]

>Trailing BG3 in concurrent players on steam

what do you mean? It has 250k on realease which is way lower than BG3 or even Fallout 4 on release

>Very Positive steam reviews

and the positive review score on steam is because they locked out people who refunded from making a review

 

[AlwaysBrotoMen]

The Bethesda director is the video game industry’s Christopher Nolan, pushing the boundaries of the medium, from Elder Scrolls to Fallout. But nothing compares to Starfield. In a rare, in-depth interview, Howard opens up about the game he's waited for his entire life.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a44998288/todd-howard-starfield-interview/

The sci-fi epic, out today, boasts an entire universe of fictional stars, galaxies, and planets that players can travel to via spacecraft. Along the way, they shoot lasers, fight space pirates, and enjoy pure freedom, unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the medium. The twist? You're just fast traveling everywhere.

"I am a giant Indiana Jones fan. It can be brought to video games in a unique way," Howard tells me. But he refuses to go into the details, only offering, "The game is obviously: you're exploring stuff. It's about him. So if you're playing the game, how do you feel that you are indeed playing versus just watching?"

Howard would talk more about Indiana Jones—I can tell he really wants to—but he's not allowed. Instead, as I exit his office, he flashes that smile.

"We'll talk next year."

indiana jones next game

 

[Konjad]

Bethesda and making good looking character models.
Not even once...

 

[Vic]

Does it not bother anyone else that this world is 300 years in the future, yet everything looks just much the same of the world of today?

did you find a portable CD player yet?

 

[Vic]

Despite getting rid of voiced protagonists all dialogue options are still Yes, Yes with Complaints, and Not right now.

that's fake news, you get unique dialogue options if you have certain perks etc.

 

[darkpatriot]

I was torn between refunding or keeping it until It got better but I refunded. I got the game during the 5 day early access and played about 29 hours. I submitted a refund today and it was approved. I wrote poor performance as reason. Seems like they are getting lots of refund request because of this reason which is why I think it got approved.

I will pirate it with all DLC a year from now. Game is bad don't waste your time on it.

If you played if for 29 hours within a single week you enjoyed it, and you probably don't actually think it is bad. Although bad is a vague subjective word that people can use to mean anything from complete garbage to simply not quite good enough to be called good (which is also a vague word). Unless you are literally a game reviewer and that is your job.


That doesn't mean that any of your criticisms of it aren't valid, and I am not really specifically trying to attack/single you out for this, but this is a very common thing on the Codex. People acting like they didn't enjoy a game and think it is terrible even though they spent quite a good chunk of time playing it. But a person isn't going to spend 29 hours doing something they aren't enjoying, at least in the moment.

But we are going to see a lot of this in the thread. People who played 20 hours, 30 hours, 50 hours, 100 hours, of Starfield and then come to the thread to complain about how much they hate it and how bad it is. Largely because Bethesda is supposed to be one of the game developers who are designated "Bad Developers" who make "Bad Games" on the codex and how much of the codex is geared towards criticizing things.

I find it a bit silly, but it is how the codex is, I guess. Again, it doesn't mean your criticisms aren't valid (there is plenty to criticize in this game), but it does mean you aren't being that open and honest about the things you enjoyed in the game that kept you playing for 29 hours.

 

[Zarniwoop]

So basically every system I get to has a DRAGON SHOUT Totally Original Alien Power now, I'm still waiting for that ERMAGERD THE GAME IS AWESUM moment that Vic keeps shilling about. Nothing has changed my opinion on this game whatsoever.

By the way, anyone bitching about BG3's 6 year development cycle can eat a bucket of donkey dicks. THIS is what one of the biggest studios in the world came up with in 8

 

[skaraher]

The Bethesda director is the video game industry’s Christopher Nolan, pushing the boundaries of the medium, from Elder Scrolls to Fallout. But nothing compares to Starfield. In a rare, in-depth interview, Howard opens up about the game he's waited for his entire life.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a44998288/todd-howard-starfield-interview/

Todd truly did max out Charisma. Remind me of Grenouille from Suskind's Perfume.

 

[Vic]

So basically every system I get to has a DRAGON SHOUT Totally Original Alien Power now, I'm still waiting for that ERMAGERD THE GAME IS AWESUM moment that Vic keeps shilling about. Nothing has changed my opinion on this games whatsoever.

By the way, anyone bitching about BG3's 6 year development cycle can eat a bucket of donkey dicks. THIS is what one of the biggest studios in the world came up with in 8

It’s true they just recycled the shouts from Skyrim

I also said game is not for everyone, I’m just waiting for a while until those people are filtered out.

If you are one of those that like it, it really does open up more as you explore and do the quests.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Howard remembers answering the phones at Bethesda when people were stuck on a part of a game and called for help. Alongside his small team, he'd box the games himself, before they could hire someone else to do it. "To do anything truly great, you have to be so passionate that you naturally make other sacrifices to get there," he tells me, remembering the early days when he'd grind nonstop.

Sigma grindset.