I literally spent my entire Labor Day weekend playing this game so anybody that says it’s boring I’d really don’t understand what they’re talking about
I have so many hours on my save for a game that just released Thursday night that I should be ashamed… It’s literally in the days, not hours anymore.
I can’t stop lol
Why are people pretending the game isn’t getting glowing reviews? Is the Bethesda hate circlejerk still going on?
It didn’t come out on PS5.
I like the game, but reviews are pretty unreliable these days. Cyberpunk 2077 also got a load of 8/9/10s on release and that game ran like shit and was full of bugs.
Every game gets and 8, 9, or 10 lol.
this game is a negative -5/7 in my heart
I would describe it as a 2015 GOTY. There are areas where other games like Cyberpunk or No Man’s Sky show more polish, and the engine is showing its age, but it’s clear that many years of work have gone into it and you get a lot of content for your money.
If I had a dime for every dumbass who says “the engine is old” or something like that I’d take all of you to Popeyes, asking you guys kindly to stay under 12$ per order.
The engine is literally over a decade old. Yes, they have worked on it in that time, but it’s still Creation Engine with a new major version number. There were moments where I felt as if I was playing some sort of OpenGL demo - when I’m on a quiet part of a planet and all I can see is blocky terrain and a gradient for a skybox. Great game but it would be self-defeating to say there isn’t room for a more immersive sequel.
We’re going into ship of Theseus territory here, but do you really know the extent to which they overhauled the engine? Because when I hear blocky terrain I think of LOD generation which all modern engines use to save processing power. Unreal engine itself is still the same propeitary engine based on C++, which similar to CE, has been overhauled over the years. Really what I see is you getting into the semantics of what makes a new engine without understanding the changes to the back end.
I guess what I was getting at is that it might take another engine overhaul or two before it starts to feel “next gen” to me. Maybe consumer hardware isn’t ready for a game at this scale that has trees that don’t look like paper, textures that don’t look muddy up close, and some sort of particles floating around in the air so that the world feels less static. There have always been sacrifices made to create a world at this scale that performs well, and I just don’t think we’ve hit peak yet. This stance seems to put people on the defensive for some reason. It’s still a good game, don’t shoot
I love this game and this engine.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a horrible gameplay style, the action is constrained and clunky, the stories have too many rails. It doesn’t feel free and open. It’s basically just Grand Theft Auto with better stories.
No Man’s Sky seems endlessly pointless (or pointlessly endless?). It’s a cool idea but I enjoy Starfield a whole lot more.
I agree totally.
I don’t get people stanning NMS over Starfield. I mean No Man’s Sky is alright as a tech demo sandbox but even with the latest update, I get bored so quickly. Even the stations and civilization hubs feel dead, the plot is just so haphazard and slapdash. Starfield feels so much more cohesive and…has actual characters. But they’re also just very different games. Starfield is heavier on story content and NMS is heavier on procedural generation.
I loved Cyberpunk’s story but I’ve found very little reason to come back outside of the main plot. GTA5 was a technical achievement under sweatshop conditions and while I hated the story, the world felt alive and full of things to do and places to explore. Cyberpunk feels like GTA if it was made with half the team and with one less year of development (because it was).
And you stanning Cyberpunk and No Man’s Sky as polished games is hilarious to me.
It took several years of fixing No Man’s Sky before it was anything more than a boring tech demo. Cyberpunk took years of bug fixes and a popular anime to break people out of the hate circlejerk and actually experience the fucking game. Starfield hasn’t even officially released yet. People need to chill the fuck out.
Also what are you talking about with “the engine is showing it’s age?”. This is a brand new fucking engine. I’m playing the game on my Xbox in 4k and it looks better than anything I’ve played this year.
I said “there are areas” for a reason. Seamless space travel is more polished in NMS. Cyberpunk has more visual polish imo.
It’s not a new engine. It’s a major iteration of Creation Engine, which is called Creation Engine 2, but not built from scratch.
Calling it a GOTY for any year in the last decade is still high praise.
I like the game
The game has incredibly bad performance issues and dogshit politics.
For a game they’ve dubbed “Nasa punk”. There’s no punk at all. It’s 98% corporate fantasy wish fulfillment for musk-brained techbros and 2% punk. The criticism of capitalism is so paper thin that you can barely notice its presence anywhere at all.
The space pirates use guns with anarchist symbols on them and say anarchist slogans but are clearly not anarchists in ideology and instead are straight up thugs and raiders.
The UC military is presented as real professionals, which is not really correct. If they accurately represented the US military that they’re based off of then they’d being jarheads, except for the recruiters and media where the professional show is put on. This is fantasy wish fulfilment at best, or propaganda at worst.
There is no bigotry, patriarchy, etc in this universe and it’s absolutely absurd. The universe would have these, capitalism provides an incentive to exploit. Marginalised people are the easiest to exploit. Capitalism has an incentive not to solve marginalised people’s problems fully and the further away you get from states enforcing laws to try and mitigate these problems the bigger they would get. So in space and because of the colony wars these issues would have gone through the roof.
It is bizarre that there are wars occurring and yet there are no space refugees anywhere? Where are they? Also there’s no homeless people which is fucking weird again. Also no slums or self-constructed accomodation on the periphery of the cities which really ought to exist given that the player can do just that. It’s all so idealised to a ridiculous extent.
Everyone doesn’t have the money for a starship, there is one absurd mission where you apply for an admin assistant job. You’re expected to fly into space and to a space station with your own starship to apply for an administration and assistant job? There should be a private shuttle company that people use to taxi around space for things like this.
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In short, the politics are dogshit and the performance is bad. But, the gameplay is good if you like other bethesda titles it plays just like them. Additionally, I think it’s probably the strongest ever game they’ve released for modding… And probably their best title since Oblivion (not counting New Vegas which they didn’t make).
I somehow entirely missed the hype around this game and came across it again only accidentally on early release day when looking at some other sale on Steam. Been playing it and it seems fine to me in a vague Skyrim-in-space sort of way, which is all what I was expecting from a Bethesda RPG.
The world seems alive enough and there are plenty of side-quests and amusing / interesting things to discover. Now suddenly I have been coming across a bunch of posts everywhere where the game is supposed to be terrible or something. Still seems fine to me, but maybe I have lower standards after decades of gaming. shrug.
Its fallout 4 in space.
But with a worse interface and a lot more menus that are annoying to navigate.
Some mods have attempted to fix the menus.
I’d like to see some complete UI overhauls at some point, but right now I’m using a mod that increases the refresh rate to 120hz from 30 in the menu’s
Honestly this plus “Skyrim-in-space” make me feel pretty confident that this game is going to have staying power just because we know how good the modding community is for bethesda games. Skyrim was panned up front as genre generic fantasy with a pinch of viking magic but has been played continuously for a decade plus because it made for such a good blank slate to add onto. Also I guarantee every current UI issue already has modders working on it. Starfield script extender just dropped and the game hasn’t even officially been released
Which really sucks, if you think about it.
Cause you and I both know the only thing that makes Bethesda games big sellers is the fact that anyone that buys them goes “Oh boy, I cant wait for the modders to make it actually interesting/fun/etc”
But at the same time these games are very moddable. Not every game has great mod apis and they suffer for it. It’s like would you rather buy a shitty product that breaks easily or a shitty product that breaks easily that you can also fix easily? Clearly the second. That’s what Bethesda’s games and reputation were (in my mind at least) pre Fallout 76. So no, I don’t think it’s shitty at all. The community of modders exist because Bethesda made the games moddable, not because the games suck. If the games sucked and weren’t moddable then people wouldn’t be buying them in the hopes they could mod it.
I’d rather buy a product thats decent, and doesnt rely on waiting 6 months for the community to do all the dev legwork.
Yeah, no shit, that’s not the point of the comparison though, goober.
its literally what we’ve been talking about this entire time.
and please, if you’re gonna insult me, at least be more inventive at it than a grandmother from the 1950s
that’s just console first UI design school Bethesda have subscribed to since Skyrim.
I know, its heavily consolified, but its bad even for bethesda.
Yeah the interface is awful.
On the other hand, I came across pirates boarding a freighter yesterday. I shot down the pirate ship and boarded the freighter. The gravity generator was malfunctioning so it would sometimes have gravity and sometimes be zero g. There were navigation puzzles, some of which could only be done in normal grav and some in zero-g.
None of the random side content in FO4 is anywhere near that interesting.
You’ll be bored by that new radiant by the 10th time you do it.
It’d probably grate on me the second time I do it. Doesn’t mean that it’s not more interesting than the generic “this settlement needs you to shoot some dudes” FO4 encounter.
Its more interesting because its the first time you’ve encountered it. after a year you’ll have the same criticisms about starfield radiant quests that you did about fallout 4 radiants.
Fallout 4 is a much better FPS. But Starfield is a much, much better RPG.
Eh… I’m not sure I agree with that statement, but to each their own
I don’t get it.
People wanted another Bethesda game.
They got what they wanted.
I said in 2008, after playing the first Fallout game by Bethesda instead of Black Isle: “Only Bethesda could manage to make a post apocalyptic prostitute boring.”
They’ve always been boring, they’ve always had ugly character models, and the writing has always been bad. You get what you paid for. A Bethesda game.
I think the fundamental problem is that people had different expectations for a game set in space, both because Bethesda stoked them (all of that talk of having the idea decades ago / first new franchise in however many years / Microsoft bought the company just to get it as an exclusive / etc) and because after No Man’s Sky people kind of expected that with their budget / resources they would manage to fix that game’s problems and create something richer + more seamless.
In retrospect, if they’d simply sold it as “Skyrim in Space,” admitted to the limitations up front - same underlying engine, limited amount of variety to procedurally-generated content, loading screens instead of seamless takeoff/landing, etc - and not pretended that it was something new, the response would have probably been much more uniformly positive.
I think you’re on the right track, but I think it’s also because recent games did better with similar ideas. People shat all over Mass Effect Andromeda, but it hid loading screens behind interplanetary and FTL travel that was actually visualized. In my brain, I know they’re cutscenes to cover for loading data, but it’s enough to take you out of it being a “game” and allowing you to suspend your disbelief. It’s hard to suspend disbelief when there’s a loading screen constantly in front of you.
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after No Man’s Sky people kind of expected that with their budget / resources they would manage to fix that game’s problems and create something richer + more seamless
That was basically what I hoped for. NMS type game, but with Skyrim/ fallout level modding, stories, quests and deeper meaning to it.
And with better procgen. They have the manpower and expertise to do that.
I haven’t bought the game yet, waiting to see the initial responses. Now… I’ll probably pick it up on sale sometime, when bugs are fixed and there’s solid mods.
Honestly I still think waiting to buy a Bethesda game is smart if you aren’t a huge fan or something. Skyrim was pretty crap at launch and all the praise it gets now is mostly referring to Skyrim well after launch when patches and mods turned it into something good.
I played Skyrim at launch and it was great.
Mods added another level to the game but I can happily play the game without.
I mean, it is extremely polished. I have encountered a total of 2 bugs over my entire playtime. By this time in fallout 4 I lost track of the number of bugs I saw, things jittering atound, people’s faces acting wonky, nome of that here.
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I think we were all expecting them to rebuild the engine sometime between fallout 4 and now instead of just duct tapping a flashlight (new lighting system) to it.
It’s such a bad engine the Phil Spencer came out and said every QA tester at Microsoft is working on Starfield:
The Creation Engine itself is just Gamebryo with a flashlight duct taped to it. IMO the engine is a huge part of what makes Bethesda games so fascinatingly unique.
The engine should be rebuilt from the ground up though. It’s full of problems and it’s fundamentally dated, for example one of the most obvious things a new version of the engine should include is making the world completely seamless - no more loading instances, no more loading screens entering interiors, etc etc. But all the other problems with the engine need addressing. And they can do a huge amount to make it better for the mod scene if they rebuild.
Continually slapping more and more fixes on this engine fundamentally ignores the fact it is impossible for it to get around several issues it has at its core without a rewrite.
This engine is already great for modding, but I suppose it can always be better. Do you know any technical details about why the worlds can’t be made seamless? There were open cities mods for Oblivion & Skyrim, so it seems like it’s probably technically possible. Seems like that may be more of a compromise related to memory allocation on consoles.
I dunno, I don’t expect Bethesda to write a new engine from scratch, no one does that. They made New Atlantis seamless to an extent I haven’t seen in previous Bethesda games, so as long as they keep making incremental improvements, I’ll be satisfied.
Do you know any technical details about why the worlds can’t be made seamless?
I don’t know the technical details but I know that when you attempt to add new map area to any existing map (for example the overworld) the physics engine does not engage for those spaces. You have to create new map areas for anything new.
There are also hardcoded limits to the number of entities that can be loaded in-engine at any one time. When you go over the alotted number of NPCs for example it starts spawning them in the sky, this causes the infamous flying horse bug everyone has seen in modded Skyrim when they’ve added too many new NPCs to zones. I think newer games have had some bandaids slapped on the engine to increase this but it’s still there.
Open Cities works because the cell already exists, so they just took everything in the city zone and moved it into the existing world cell, which is identical in size. So there’s no problem with this causing issues. This can’t be done for a lot of buildings (to create interior/exterior) because of various issues such as NPCs not knowing where their house is unless it’s a defined place you go through a loading screen on, so taking houses and slapping them into open world would completely break scripting for their daily routines, same for every building in the game. Some of them are tardis design too, bigger on the inside than the actual building is on the outside.
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They’ve always been boring
Strongly disagreed. Pre-Oblivion their games were great. Hoping for a return to engrossing stories taking place in a rich, expansive universe was not entirely unreasonable.
I’d recommend you go back and read some critical reviews of Arena and Daggerfall. The complaints are exactly the same: the graphics engine is out of date, the characters are lifeless, the writing is just okay, the story is shallow, etc. Bethesda has scaled back the RPG mechanics since Morrowind, for sure, but their games ultimately have the same Bethesda DNA, for better or worse. For what it’s worth, I’m enjoying Starfield at launch much more than Fallout 4 even now, updated, expanded and modded.
My friend, I don’t need to go read the video game history about Daggerfall: I wrote some of it. :)
And I stand by my statement. That game was the height of storytelling that came out of Bethesda in a bunch of small but important ways, although Morrowind is not far behind, in a somewhat different fashion. And there is a definite shift in the series from the moment Ted Peterson left the team. Patently, not a shift I am personally very fond of, but to each her own.
I can’t remember all that well, I was a child at the time, lol. I go back to Morrowind once in a while, and I do find the writing to be more immersive, as opposed to the more recent games where it’s a series of linear, ham-fisted novellas. So far, Starfield seems much improved over Fallout 4 or Skyrim in that regard, but I’m not all that far in.
Morrowind was their best, but I would say 21 years on, it’s really tough to be like “Yeah, this time they’ll get back to their roots.” No, it’s time to move on. All the people who made those games what they were have retired, moved on, or died.
Surely there’s an element there of rose tinted glasses? All of us were 21 years younger. There were less games coming out and they were harder to get for many of us.
You didn’t need to work so damn much to keep your head above water, or were below working age altogether. It was a lot easier to find the time to really immerse yourself in the lore and it required a lot of reading both in-game and out.
It was also all new to us, truly novel experiences with every leap in gameplay, graphics or mechanics being applied to brains that weren’t completely immune to dopamine and over-stimulated constantly.
I played Ultima VII so much that my friends and I would quote the game to eachother at school…we were fully immersed in it and it was bloody huge for its day.
To be honest I barely even try with these type of games anymore. I know it isn’t going to satisfy me. I tend to enjoy mastering movement mechanics and skill based competitive games. Sure, they also release the same game every year repackaged, but there’s usually enough of a tweak to movement mechanics and gun physics that it’s a challenge to get gud again and I get a real kick out of genuine competition.
I played Starfield for several hours on the weekend and I do my best not to judge too harshly given what I’ve said above but I feel as though there will never be a game ever again that grabs me enough to make that genre worth paying the money. It’s me that’s changed moreso than the lore being watered down. “Damn you, Avatar!”
Not always, n’wah
Skyrim is literally one of their worst-written games and only has a saving grace of a wide open world that is interesting to explore.
Personal opinion, Morrowind was still boring, but had the best writing, best style, and required the most from the player. Morrowind was peak Bethesda and that was over 20 years ago.
Starfield at launch is more compelling than Fallout 4 or Skyrim, but falls short of Morrowind. It’s in the mix somewhere alongside Oblivion and Fallout 3, IMO.
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Morrowind is a role-playing game, and in this role, you needed to be able to do things like research the world you’re in to figure out what to do, not have a rando who has a big fancy exclamation point above him telling you exactly where to go with a waypoint. It’s just different ways to approach the game. One is functionally role-playing within the world you exist in, and the other is “Fuck all this, I just want to play a game, I don’t want to think hard.”
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Really. You’re gonna pull the people like different things argument after telling this person that they’re just pretending to enjoy Morrowind? That’s some next level hypocrisy right there.
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I doubt that OP has played starfield
…not 100% clear on the point of this comic…
I think it’s a fantastic game.
Kinda reminded me of Hogwarts Legacy, except it was a great game.
I’ve got about 15 hours in it. So far so good. Not 10/10 GOTY material no, but good. Probably about a 7 maybe 8/10
Me as fuck. Though I just keep it to myself instead of trying to ruin my friends’ enjoyment.
I’ve put about 200 hours into Oblivion and 180 into Skyrim, 150 each into Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, all without mods. Been happy every time. I think the whiners need their attention spans checked. Go watch Paw Patrol if you need constant action, you big babies.
I does indeed start out slow, but it gets better after a certain point in the main quest. It’s a fairly standard Bethesda open world game, so just don’t be expecting something more and you should enjoy it. One thing I’ve appreciated as a hoarder is that your run speed doesn’t decrease even when you’re hugely encumbered, your stamina (oxygen) just goes down as if you were sprinting.
I’m curious, as a skyrim guy if this would be for me.
Probably if you’re okay with a sci-fi theme and don’t mind that you have to load into most locations rather than being able to run to them. It has more in common with Fallout than Skyrim.
Oof, i tried to like fallout but it wasn’t for me.
What didn’t you like about it compared to Skyrim? That might tell me whether you’d like this one or not.
Just everything, i played it and went: “nah ain’t it” and then i played it more hoping i would like it eventually as it was bethesda, but my opinion never changed.
So if i have to give it a name: the reason i don’t like it is because it isn’t skyrim…i guess.
The biggest difference is the setting and the focus on gun combat as opposed to magic and melee, so one or both of those things would be my guess.
