Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[Lyric Suite]

I have like 600 hours

This is why we cannot have any nice things.

 

[quixotic]

Give us complex character development, give us weapon and armor variety, give us compelling progression, give us good characters and stories. If there’s content people want to engage with they will tolerate jank.

The thing is, they aren’t capable of doing any of that. All they can do now is make retarded, dull, disjointed, unfun garbage.

 

[Lemming42]

I wonder what changed internally between the Fo3/Skyrim era and the Fo4 era. Company got too big? Microsoft fucked it (I can't remember when they bought Bethesda)? Adam Amascowicz was the only person with talent and his concept art was somehow sufficient to save whole games?

 

[Cohesion]

I have like 600 hours

This is why we cannot have any nice things.

Rich from dude with 2k hours in goyslop elden ring.

 

[Gargaune]

A “bug-free” Starfield was impossible​

This is marketing spin, "bugs" ain't the reason Starfield had a lackluster reception, the gameplay is. This is no one's first rodeo, gamers expected bugs and they got 'em, Bethesda still benefits from that "forgiveness", but they also expected a Skyrim or at least a Fallout 4 IN SPAAAACE, and it seems they didn't get that. Making gratuitous excuses for "bugs" is an attempt to channel the discussion onto that more manageable topic from the latter elephant in the room so that Joe Public will think it's just same ol' Bethesda, but that's not the case.

“That level of polish also comes at a price,” we were told. “Are you willing to let the game sit for six more months and be delayed six more months in order to try to polish it? You’re still not going to get perfection, it’s just going to be better. So at some point you have to make the decision to publish, and to publish something you know has bugs. You’ve got a list of them—all 700 or whatever—and they’re out there anyway because I can’t fix them all.”

Uh-huh... So what you're saying here is no one should buy your games for at least six months after release? Look, we all get it, games have bugs and complex Bethesda games have even more bugs, but you're not doing yourself any favours outright stating you want our money now and you'll fix it later. You're literally admitting to selling the product unfinished and I don't see an "Early Access 30% off" sticker anywhere. It's always been the case, more or less, but it speaks to how atrocious things have gotten that devs feel they can now be honest about that.

In our interview, we broached Nesmith with a question: if there’s a list of 700 known bugs, should those bugs be shared with fans on launch to temper expectations. As the Skyrim lead explained, it’s an interesting dilemma: will fans accept that certain issues are present, or will they be upset that they aren’t fixed?

“It’s an interesting problem, because when you’re in marketing, what you’re looking to do is manage expectations,” Nesmith said. [...]

Yeah, totally, like the poet once said:

To be, or not to be deceiving the customer, that is the interesting problem:
Whether 'tis nobler in the quarterly report to suffer
The slings and arrows of low preorder volumes,
Or to purchase advertising space against a gullible public
And by lying cheat them.

 

[Lovely Feather Pillow]

Give us complex character development, give us weapon and armor variety, give us compelling progression, give us good characters and stories. If there’s content people want to engage with they will tolerate jank.

The thing is, they aren’t capable of doing any of that. All they can do now is make retarded, dull, disjointed, unfun garbage.

It’s sad when you think about it. They made insane amounts of money with Skyrim and could have used that to expand strategically and hire legitimate talent. But instead they hired a bunch of browns, queers and women to meet diversity quotas and their games suffered for it

 

[Lovely Feather Pillow]

I wonder what changed internally between the Fo3/Skyrim era and the Fo4 era. Company got too big? Microsoft fucked it (I can't remember when they bought Bethesda)? Adam Amascowicz was the only person with talent and his concept art was somehow sufficient to save whole games?

Yep. The grew too big too fast. They hired like they were some generic consulting firm instead of hiring nerds passionate about making nerd shit. They went making games in a small brick unit above an Applebees, to some sterile corporate office building. Success is the death of creativity.

 

[Butter]

I wonder what changed internally between the Fo3/Skyrim era and the Fo4 era.

Nothing. Fallout 3 was half-assed, a game with barely any content, and what little content it had was either xeroxed Fallout 1 and 2 plot points, or just plain retarded (remember the vampires and the superheroes?). It had a terrible story, terrible combat, terrible mechanics and progression, and was just an overall dogshit experience.

Skyrim was the start of cynical Bethesda. They realized people were dumping hundreds of hours into single playthroughs of their games and said "What if we made the game literally endless?" Enter radiant quests, resetting your skills to 15 so you could grind them up to 100 all over again, endless dragon encounters that don't even stop when you finish the main quest. Dungeons became linear corridors. Magic was stripped down. Every questline in the game is terrible. The story is once again fucking garbage.

And Bethesda were rewarded for their laziness and cynicism. People ate Skyrim up by the tens of millions, and thanked Bethesda for the opportunity to fix it themselves with mods.

So they doubled down on this design with Fallout 4. It dumbed down the already drooling retard tier Fallout 3 mechanics even further, added more sources of radiant quests, continued the Bethesda tradition of garbage stories, and focused on presentation above all else. Fallout 4 is literally just Skyrim with a post-apo coat of paint. The only thing it got worse was the music, because Inon Zur is no Jeremy Soule.

 

[Lemming42]

Nothing. Fallout 3 was half-assed, a game with barely any content, and what little content it had was either xeroxed Fallout 1 and 2 plot points, or just plain retarded (remember the vampires and the superheroes?). It had a terrible story, terrible combat, terrible mechanics and progression, and was just an overall dogshit experience.

I don't agree Fo3 was half-assed, the main quest was very poor but the side quests showed a lot of effort and had some fairly creative ideas and some surprisingly in-depth reactivity - the superhero quest you mention has more reactivity and alternate solutions than any Fo1 or Fo2 quest I can think of. You can think whatever you want about the writing and the ideas involved, but a lot of that game clearly seems to me to be the result of a team engaged with the project and trying their best to make something they were interested in, which is a quality generally missing from Fo4 and Starfield. Similarly, stuff like VATS, for all its faults, was a genuinely unique attempt to bring aspects of Fo1 combat into real-time 3D. Again, I'm really not convinced they'd be able or willing to come up with something like that nowadays.

Skyrim had truly bad quests IMO but the world itself still had a lot of attention and passion put into it, which is the core of what people liked about the game and why it's still played today. I don't find this in Fo4 and I'm someone who's made sincere attempts to like the game - the world is just empty and boring in a way that Skyrim never is. You can feel that at least some people working on Skyrim really cared about it and wanted to express something through the project, whereas Fo4 and Starfield generally feel like a bunch of outsourced Indian workers were forced to make a game for minimum wage, which I suppose is literally true in the latter's case.

You could probably reasonably argue that Skyrim did represent the start of a shift from "small team making games in an office" to "multinational corporate company making Product" but I think people are generally right to consider Skyrim as the last enjoyable game before Bethesda's descent into shit.

 

[Lovely Feather Pillow]

It’s easy to shit on Skyrim but you could definitely feel the passion there. You could see it in their marketing too. Beautiful world to explore, dungeons with Liches and loot chests at the end, amazing soundtrack. They were confident in what they had.

Fast forward 15 years and they have some chick talk about hoarding sandwiches in Starfield. Ok.

 

[Jaesun]

Vic How is the new expansion going?

 

[Inec0rn]

It’s easy to shit on Skyrim but you could definitely feel the passion there. You could see it in their marketing too. Beautiful world to explore, dungeons with Liches and loot chests at the end, amazing soundtrack. They were confident in what they had.

Fast forward 15 years and they have some chick talk about hoarding sandwiches in Starfield. Ok.

Agree with this, i can't believe they've got a free pass shilling and great reviews for anything released after Skyrim.

 

[destinae vomitus]

Adam Amascowicz was the only person with talent and his concept art was somehow sufficient to save whole games?

Let's not forget about Jeremy Soule. I doubt Skyrim in particular would've been as popular if it weren't for the main theme they used in pretty much all the trailers and marketing material, it alone sold people on the game I'd say.

 

[Latelistener]

I wonder what changed internally between the Fo3/Skyrim era and the Fo4 era. Company got too big? Microsoft fucked it (I can't remember when they bought Bethesda)? Adam Amascowicz was the only person with talent and his concept art was somehow sufficient to save whole games?

They made the person with no creativity to be the creative director of Bethesda and let him run amok.

Just a reminder, that Todd didn't give a shit about RPGs and came to Bethesda to make sports games. He used the success of Morrowind to move higher, but it wasn't really his work that made this game legendary.

Skyrim just came out at the right time: no competition and the whole market of consoletards that didn't know about RPGs and TES in general. Then the modding scene made it immortal.

And Starfield is just a snowball of those 3 problems: creatively bankrupt person who surrounded himself with sycophants, insanely outdated engine and conservative and narrow-minded management (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Adam Amascowicz was the only person with talent and his concept art was somehow sufficient to save whole games?

Let's not forget about Jeremy Soule. I doubt Skyrim in particular would've been as popular if it weren't for the main theme they used in pretty much all the trailers and marketing material, it alone sold people on the game I'd say.

The main theme of Skyrim is a revision of the title track of Morrowind ("Call of Magic" or "Nerevar Rising") by Jeremy Soule, which was also featured in a revised version in Oblivion.

 

[Yosharian]

'Horror expansion' is apt

 

[ind33d]

Someone do me a favor and play Starfield with some of this music and tell me if it's fun. I really liked ES 2-5 and I'm completely convinced now that all of those games were carried by their soundtracks.

 

[kites]

A lot of modern hip-hop sampler-beat type stuff just sounds like Youtube advertisement music to me now. I think the original OST fits the game fine; though too overproduced and high-tech for my taste. And not very memorable. Lots of “modular” and clean sounding synth-work propped up by an orchestra. Sometimes it almost hits a synthesis of a Mark Morgan/Jeremy Soule sort of palette/mood but that’s not often the case.

Something that’s more naturalistic/rough yet still electronic-based may not have gelled with the game’s general post-earth futurist themes and tone, but it would have been more pleasing to my ears. Like some of the more placid tracks of BoC’s 90’s output

Spoiler

 

[Lemming42]

I always forget that Starfield is set post-Earth. Did they literally just include it because that's a plot point in Starflight?

It's kind of hard to think of a soundtrack that fits the game because there's just too many disparate ideas and moods - if Todd asked me to come up with a track for Cyberpunk Planet and a track for Cowboy Planet and they both had to sound like part of a coherent soundtrack with a signature sound, I dunno where I'd even start. I can't remember much of the game's OST and I assume that's why; places like the Iliac Bay and Vvardenfell and even the Capital Wasteland are easy to write soundtracks for but Starfield's identity and themes are so vague that the best it's possible to do is just sort of write something that sounds kind of futuristic and call it a day.

 

[Beastro]

Nothing. Fallout 3 was half-assed, a game with barely any content, and what little content it had was either xeroxed Fallout 1 and 2 plot points, or just plain retarded (remember the vampires and the superheroes?). It had a terrible story, terrible combat, terrible mechanics and progression, and was just an overall dogshit experience.

I don't agree Fo3 was half-assed, the main quest was very poor but the side quests showed a lot of effort and had some fairly creative ideas

.....

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Election_Day

 

[Ryzer]

It’s easy to shit on Skyrim but you could definitely feel the passion there. You could see it in their marketing too. Beautiful world to explore, dungeons with Liches and loot chests at the end, amazing soundtrack. They were confident in what they had.

Fast forward 15 years and they have some chick talk about hoarding sandwiches in Starfield. Ok.

Skyrim nailed the Nordic atmosphere back when Viking shit was pretty dire.

 

[Stavrophore]

Tried Starfield over a year after a release thinking it got quality updates, but nope, still fighting with the UI, still no minimap, still delays in menu, still trash hud, still tons of loading screens. This game is irredemable piece of shit, between braindead AI, bullet sponges, automatic weapons somehow doing less damage than semi auto despite using same ammo, and boring fetch quest plot, boring and mindnumbingly resource collecting, the only saving grace is quality of texturing and materials. It's actually astonishing how bethesda could had released such a turd, people complained about skyrim, but this? This should elicit complete ban on any future purchases and any interaction with bethesda as a player.

 

[Yosharian]

Tried Starfield over a year after a release thinking it got quality updates, but nope, still fighting with the UI, still no minimap, still delays in menu, still trash hud, still tons of loading screens. This game is irredemable piece of shit, between braindead AI, bullet sponges, automatic weapons somehow doing less damage than semi auto despite using same ammo, and boring fetch quest plot, boring and mindnumbingly resource collecting, the only saving grace is quality of texturing and materials. It's actually astonishing how bethesda could had released such a turd, people complained about skyrim, but this? This should elicit complete ban on any future purchases and any interaction with bethesda as a player.

Duh modders will fix it, just give it a decade

 

[Stavrophore]

Duh modders will fix it, just give it a decade

jUsT wAiT fOr cReAtIoN kIt.

 

[Late Bloomer]

The cart going haywire in the skyrim opening is from a poorly modded game or retards uncapping their vsync then saying they dont use mods.