It does get a lot of shit and I agree Bethesda is lacking in some creativity departments... but I'd still rate it a solid 6.5-7
I put about 80 hours into it. Enjoyed some aspects, disliked others. It's just HEAVILY mid in my opinion. Worth a playthrough if you like Bethesda rpgs
6.5/7 is fine if you're not paying $70 for the base game. It might be worth it now the costs have come down, but paying a premium price for a mid game justifies some of the shit people gave it.
That said, I played on Game Pass, big fan of the genre, and could only make it a few hours in. Just wasn't for me. But then I really enjoyed The Outer Worlds and people shit on that too.
I beat Starfield the first time before the bad reviews started overwhelming. And I still don't get it (except perhaps as hype). Bethesda games are far from perfect (people seem to forget the negativity around Skyrim being compared to Oblivion), but they scratch a particular itch that millions of gamers have and crave.
What terrifies me is that this whole "Hey look, we're getting 2006 again" attitude is exactly what's going to kill off the Bethesda "genre" the same way SquareEnix gutted the AAA Turn-Based RPG. Sure, it means we might get a black horse game out of left field (Persona 5, talking about you) but it's a shame to see so much hate on the style of game that Bethesda is.
And we need to make no mistake. While some complaints have been valid, the biggest ones that started this snowball have been things like "I shoot guns around guards and nobody comments" or "I murder an entire town and then pay a small bounty and everyone's fine with me again".
I get the "huge procedural universe is soooo boring" complaint; I don't agree with it because I loved Daggerfall and because Starfield has more hand-made content than Skyrim, but I can respect it. But that alone doesn't justify all this "worst game ever" BS. It makes Starfield sound like it's worse than initial-release NMS was (and I can say from experience, it's not).
And for me, I just crossed hour 180 with Starfield, and have not been bored once. I don't expect it to be everyone's favorite game, but it's certainly mine for 2023.
I put 150 hours into it and loved it. Bethesda is such a giant, and I guess this game had such hype that it completely distorted reality.
Funny thing is, I had no hype for the game. I didn't think I'd even play it from the early previews and announcements.
But after it came out and people figured out it followed the Bethesda formula and was "Fallout in space", then I got interested. It had been long enough that I'd played a Bethesda game that it sounded like fun, and it was.
There are a lot of things I'd like to change and refine with Starfield. But it's still a good game.
Same here. I actually expected to be disappointed from hearing the early complaints. I got an xbox subscription because there were a bunch of games I wanted to play, so I wouldn't feel bad if Starfield sucked.
Then I've ONLY been playing Starfield since.
The thing is that for a lot of Bethesda fans the game fully missed the mark that scratches the players itch. If there's one thing people unanimously agree Bethesda games are great at it's creating a world that's interesting to explore. Starfield is by far the least interesting Bethesda game to explore, because there's nothing interesting to catch your attention?
Jake brings it up perfectly. In Skyrim you start a quest and then you start traveling to the quest location. A dragon swoops in and you fight a dragon. A spooky cave is along the way and you check it out. An hour has passed and you're not even at the quest location yet. In Starfield you start a quest, you fast travel to your ship, then you fast travel to the planet the quest is on, you land on the quest location, you walk to the actual and 10 minutes later the quest is done. Nothing interesting happened between the start of the quest and the end of the quest, except maybe for the quest itself.
In Skyrim a quest is an opportunity to explore, in Starfield a quest is a check on a checklist. I don't think Bethesda has necessarily lost its magic but I do think Starfield is missing the Bethesda magic.
My mantra around it has been it's the okayest game of the year.
Thank you for being the voice of reason. Talk about beating a dead horse. If you listen to the internet drama you'd think Starfield is the worst game ever made.
The way I understand this is not that it's the worst game ever. It's that Bethesda should be able to deliver better games.
I'll play it when it's $5
It's on game pass... which is how I justified playing it. Not really paying anything extra 🤷♂️
Well, I kind of like Bethesda formula so I should be Bethesdas target. Played them since old Arena, through Morrowind to Fallout 3. Stopped there because Fallout 4 seemed like more of the same with less rpg and I did not have HW capable of Skyrim at the time.
Thinking about it I liked Morrowind the most. And the thing I liked the most about it was exploration and discovering the world, that is big, well done, believable and also changes in every region so there aren't two places that would look alike.
I haven't played Starfield, but I believe it's going to miss the exploration part of the formula. Sure, there will be different biomes on different planets, but that's not the same. I loved how I travelled the world and was amazed by every new scenery that emerged behind mountain ridge. Leaving swamp to get to volcanic plague storm lands. Then travel through beautiful lake district to emerge on vast grass planes... I fear Starfield will be like jumping through this with fast travel.
Bro you skipped New Vegas???
It's not "real" Bethesda. Have it installed right nowand it's pretty damn good. But not really in Bethesda way.
And the thing I liked the most about it was exploration and discovering the world, that is big, well done, believable and also changes in every region so there aren’t two places that would look alike.
... and Morrowind achieved that with an island you could chuck a frisbee across, using brown and more brown, and about six minutes of voice acting.
Bethesda's peak moment, no jokes.
I had no idea that the game is that bad. Now I really have no interest in playing it anymore.
I mean for me, I just got bored. It wasn't terrible, but I had no drive to pick it up again after 40 hours.
I'm sure too people will be like "oh but you played 40 hours! It can't be that bad" but the first 10-15 are misery from a gameplay perspective, like you're just trying to level up to get more carrying capacity and get more combat options.
There's too many basic things locked behind perk points before you can even begin doing whatever it is. Like, I spent most of a day to grind to get to be able to buy and fly a bigger ship only to then not be able to put any extra crew on the ship because that is also a perk.
Looking back at the 50 hours I spent on it, I have to contextualize how much of it wasn't spent having fun. How many of those hours did I spend building an S-class ship and outposts with 4+ materials before I discovered that all of that was utterly worthless due to the main questline destroying everything? Building the ship certainly wasn't fun. Having a planet on my screen for three hours at a time while I scout for an outpost one pixel at a time was miserable. The point of those was that the reward would be worth it, but then during the main questline it all gets erased and you have to push the stone back up the hill again.
Contrast that with the game I spent the most time on this year: Hi-Fi Rush. It took me 80 hours to FC that game, and I was having a blast almost the entire way through! The tower was a bitch and a half before I learned the meta, beating Mimosa without taking damage took a good two dozen tries, but you know what Hi-Fi Rush has that Starfield doesn't? Exciting gameplay. A soundtrack. A story worth paying any attention to. Likeable characters. The Prodigy. Even though replaying every level on every difficulty setting is tedious as all hell, the process of doing it was still fun, and I can still open the game up and admire the Wall. I can't open up my Starfield file and admire my fully customized ship, the Death of Shame. It was erased along with every outpost and every relationship with every NPC.
Yeah same here. Around the 40 hour mark. I found I moved onto something else. People spending time and resources on building big and different ship designs and building a base seemed pointless to me given the gameplay loop.
There's this weird anti-hype going on. Realistically, for people not loving it, it's defensibly a 7 or so. There's PLENTY of us who put it a lot closer to a 10.
It's a lot of things, but it's definitely not a "bad" game.
Fair enough but it does sound very repetitive and grindy. Would you disagree?
Maybe it is not bad but it definitely didn't deliver what was promised. I know, I know, how could I expect that from Todd?
Fair enough but it does sound very repetitive and grindy. Would you disagree?
How experienced are you with Bethesda games post-1995 or so? They all have the same grind-factor. The game is tuned so you can play and win with zero grind, but it has these "treadmill" mechanics that you can either embrace or skip.
If you want to max out your perks at level 328, it's absurdly grindy. But you can beat the game around level 30 or so. If for some reason you want to max out a skill/perk you don't really use, it's a bit grindy. But if you use the skills as you get them and get the skills you'll use, you unlock their levelups asically for free.
Maybe it is not bad but it definitely didn’t deliver what was promised
I hear this again, and again, and again, and again. But nobody has yet to cite one promise Bethesda objective broke with Starfield. You say "how could I expect that from Todd"? That means you know what kind of games Bethesda releases. And they promised a Bethesda game in space. And they delivered a Bethesda game in space.
I underestand people who hate Bethesda games. You can toss a pebble and hit one of them. But I really don't understand the level of toxicity this time around. I actually almost didn't buy Starfield, and boy am I pissed because it was a lot better than I expected.
Life is too short to play 7's.
I would say life is too short to play games you don't enjoy. The 1-10 scale is trying to measure overall quality, not enjoyability to an individual.
I hate Witcher 3. Its 92 on metacritic doesn't mean I have to force myself to play it more than I already have. But there's a line after which I usually will not touch a game because its objective failings make it highly unlikely I will enjoy it. Starfield's 83 in metacritic (not sure why the toxicity hasn't dragged it down more yet, perhaps because it's an echo chamber) puts it cleanly in a "give it a chance" level for me.
I loved it. The reality of this game is so distorted. Yes, it's far from perfect. But in no way is it bad. Everyone has a right to their own opinion, and not everyone will enjoy it. But so many people would have you believe it's an objectively bad game, and it isn't.
Hot take: Starfield isn't "dated," it's actually a much better RPG than anything they've made since Morrowind. However, because they can't rely on the world building and writing of people who have either left the company or worked for a different company they acquired the IP for, Starfield has highlighted just how bad Bethesda game design and writing truly is when done in a wholly original manner.
It's still going to be a modder paradise.
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Two decades.
Daggerfall was way, way, way ahead of its time… but when Vijay, Peterson, & LeFay left Bethesda it was all downhill. Morrowind was a pale shadow of Daggerfall, and it only went downhill from there as each release stripped back progressively more and more of Elder Scroll’s ambition and personality. Who was responsible for all this anti-ambitious anti-progress? Todd Howard.
Morrowind has never been a pale shadow of Daggerfall. It's just another take on the RPG genre, and a masterful one.
Of course, it's not a RPG sandbox like Daggerfall was and that might put off the early Elder Scrolls fans, but it's superior to its big brother on numerous accounts : story lines, lore, immersion, quests, etc.
Morrowind is a handcrafted marvel with manually placed details everywhere that make the game fascinating and fun to explore, unlike Daggerfall which was big, but repetitive due to its procedural system.
For some reason, Elder Scrolls is cursed. EVERY Elder Scrolls game that comes out (except Daggerfall) has a massive number of detractors about some facet of it that is "a pale shadow" of the previous.
I was around when people treated Morrowind like they are treating Starfield now. Then Oblivion had a much smaller complaint-base, but it revolved around the "disappointing lack of immersion" because Morrowind was such an opinionated game. Then Skyrim comes out and "it's like they put Training Wheels on Oblivion".
Starfield is just suffering from the same Elder Scrolls curse (but in space). To me, Starfield is a great game that might not be for everyone, but that some of those walking away from it are being told they don't like it.
And it's a bit of a problem. There's not much to change. The story is deep, so they can't add more story like NMS did. It's the most stable Bethesda game ever, so it's not about building stability. The gameplay mechanics are reasonable, so it's not about adding new systems. Bethesda might well be screwed this time - because there's nothing to change.
I actually heard recently that morrowind used some procedural tech in the generation of it's world. They just picked the generation to go with and built on top of it rather than handcrafting from scratch. Which is what starfield should've done to at least a handful of planets that are off significance.
Todd Howard more like Todd Coward
I've never played a Bethesda game and unfortunately Starfield isn't going to change that (at least in its current form). Based on gameplay footage and reviews I'd rather just stick with No Man's Sky. NMS seems to do the space exploration better and can already scratch that itch for me. The loading screens and fast travel are off putting enough that Starfield doesn't seem worth my time. The only feature that draws me to the game at all is the ship builder.
Is their game design dated? What other RPG has mechanics beyond "run up to NPC, talk to NPC, receive quest from NPC, perform quest for NPC, return to NPC and get reward"?
I 100% agree that the Creation Engine is hot garbage, but are any other RPGs with cleaner newer engines actually innovating RPG mechanics?
I mean, that's a quest at it's core but a good game works it into a narrative and makes it blend. Ideally making all 6 steps anything but tedious. Ideally interesting and fun, but at all times avoiding tedious like the plague.
Best example I've seen is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4ADco41g9s&ab_channel=Nathidraws
Two identical "perform quest for NPC"s, which is your step 4. Negotiate for a thing in a briefcase from somebody who probably will double cross you.
Which one is more tedious? Now combine a 4 minute run in a barren wasteland in your steps 1 and 6...
A few other things that Cyberpunk did, There are several ways to handle that mission, those several options can cause 3 major shifts in that faction. Which affect other missions later on, indeed any time you deal with the maelstrom gang.
Cyberpunk had a lot of flaws but, they're at least innovating. I've never been in a legit standoff like that in a game. It's always been in a static looping animation at 8 paces.
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if you go abstract enough then any game can be dated. all you do is load the game, do some stuff, maybe get some rewards, and then close it.
people are saying bethesda is outdated because of how they implement these abstract ideas. they’re stale and years behind what other games are doing.
Maybe you've heard of a little indie gem by the name of Baldur's Gate 3?
Although personally I'd take more umbrage with the writing, dialogue, voice acting, and lack of mocap performance over the actual gameplay mechanics.
Bethesda struck gold with Skyrim, but I don't think they've moved past it.
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