Bethesda delivered a Bethesda game. What exactly were people expecting? This is exactly what I expected and am loving it.
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Starfield
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I saw a video that claimed no one would have expected the way starship travel works and I'm like "I totally expected it to be work this way!" From the moment they announced it was still on Creation, I had expectations that space travel would be simple cell changes and not seamless travel. I actually expected it to be janky as fuck, too, when actually doing space combat but it's actually quite fine. I mean, the AI is dumb as shit, but it's not full of weird bullshit. The things that did not meet my expectations are all actually good things. I expected it to barely run; it runs fine even with unsupported hardware. I expected to see bugs aplenty; at worst, I've seen some ragdolls spaghettifi.
Maybe it just took getting a relatively stable release for people to realize they have always been fairly shallow action oriented games, with light story and narrative elements that aren't even that well written. There's nothing else to really whine about. 🤷🏻♂️
I imagine the starships are still hats on an invisible NPC.
I doubt it. My suspicion is that the player is sitting still the whole time and everything is being moved around them. This does several things that are smart. Physics for the player stay the same, with gravity being down, without any extra work. It also removes concerns about floating point errors happening around the player, so they could theoretically fly forever in one direction without issues.
There was one part of a certain quest where I board someone else's ship and they take off while I am standing in the bridge; it clearly shows the game is capable of moving these ships as actual vehicles. But you only ever get to see them in motion everywhere else while locked in the seat, in empty space. Cuz even if you were to stand up while at full throttle, the ship stops as soon as you get up.
Yeah couldn't have said it better myself. I'm actually quite impressed with the creation engine improvements. FO4 ran like shit on good hardware when it released. Also based on the newest discoveries it seems like modders actually have a good chance to allow interplanetary travel without fast traveling. I have a theory that the CE devs got the engine 90% of the way there on PC but Bethesda just needed to pull the trigger and release it with feature parity between Xbox S S/X and PC.
They haven't always been action focused games, but they have been moving more and more that way since Oblivion. I played Morrowind for the first real time (I bounced off after not understanding the game the first time) a year or so ago. I spent my first few hours without any combat. I'm not saying that figuratively. It was literally no combat. The game was totally accepting that that's how I wanted to play. There's also plenty of story and interesting mechanics to interact with. Now they make shallow theme parks that try to get you onto the next ride as fast as possible. If you have five minutes without action they think you'll get bored and leave.
When I say action, I really just mean how you play and not necessarily just focused on combat. They focus on the actions you can take, over the dialogue choices you can make. Even Arena and Daggerfall were light on what you could actually change through story stuff, and were more about the player having fun in a myriad of ways. Morrowind, too. Especially with it's somewhat unique dialogue system. You didn't really have choices, as much as being given heaps of information based on keywords. But your choice of how you explored, handled enemies, and what not was incredible.
Plus, they wouldn't be able to warp without moving space around them.
Really thoigh, that sounds incredibly plausible.
It looks like one, but isnt as enjoyable as ones before. Might have been a bad choice to navigate the world in menu format. Quick travel to X location to explore. No walking around a big world, but many small ones. Even tiny ones.
It wouldn't have been horrible if they did it in an Immersive way. For example, Mass Effect had it's big hologram system map. You walk up to it and it zoomed to it, or whatever happened, and it didn't take you out of the world into a menu. It's still a menu, but it feels like it's part of the world. Similarly, the Fallout menus are in the pop boy. While not perfect, it does help it feel Immersive.
The Starfield UI doesn't even try. They give you the watch thing like they're going to do the Fallout menu thing, but then they just don't. There is zero attempt to make it feel like part of the universe. They have the navigation consoles that open the system map, but it still just opens the same menu. That's still better than what you do 99% of the time though.
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Yup, and it has some level of replayability that previous titles didn't have.
https://www.thejimquisition.com/post/starfield-empty-spaces-review
that's the actual review, don't bother with this shitty forbes article
Shitty Forbes blog post, even.
i need to get dressed up. no one ever warned me! actually it's fine.
"An ocean wide, and a thimble deep" has been said about every Bethesda game since Oblivion
true, and I have played an unhealthy amount of modded skyrim. let's resurrect the idiots who killed Morrowind, and remind them of their crimes.
Also every space sim in the last decade (yes, I know starfield isn't one). It's such a tired phrase at this point that it lost all meaning anyway.
Almost every time something negative is said about Starfield, it feels like walking into a room with Draco Malfoy, Geoffrey Baratheon and bully Maguire bullying on Bethesda/Todd.
But here in this thread, on the worst review I've seen so far, people are actually chill, acknowledging the flaws, but enjoying the game. It's such a fresh breath of air.
Whoops I guess I'll stop having fun then.
Elite Dangerous is as wide as the galaxy and deep as a puddle but that was fun for long time too.
You're allowed to have fun and enjoy things regardless of their quality level, and people who say otherwise are silly and rude.
That also means that just by the nature of enjoying something doesn't mean critiques of it are invalid, that would also be silly and rude.
This 100% was said about Skyrim. Bethesda just makes weak RPGs with no stakes or personality.
I don't think it's fair to call Bethesda games RPGs. They're more like environmental looter shooters. And if you take them kind of easy breezy not serious you can have fun. But you're not going to get real roleplay.
You'll find some cool stories, but not roleplay
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I'm not sure if everyone's opinion just changed over night, but saying anything bad about Skyrim or Bethesda games used to get you downvoted to hell in casual video game communities, and this is even a Bethesda community.
People praise Skyrim like it's the greatest game ever, like it's the only game they ever played. What happened?
I wish skyrim was as good as people claim it is.
I liked fallout 3 a lot, and i never looked into fallout 4 before it launched. Like i haven't seen anything about the game, except for the launch trailer before i bought it because i happened to be bored. The game was so bad looking and odd that i closed the game to make sure i didn't download the wrong game, or like some scam like: Foulout 4. I did that twice. The game was unplayable and ass ugly. I know they patched a lot of things but the game is just not good, and giving it a 10/10 is insulting to every other video game.
I think Bethesda has enough ass kissing fans who praise their games. Like i wasn't hopeful for starfield at all, but i still had that thing in the bqck of my brain that thought: but what if it's really good. But no, it's optimized badly it looks like modded skyrim, nothing seem to have consequences, the freedom to do whatever you want, absolutely lifeless npc's. They had npc's in all their games but they never got better, but it's fine, best game ever 10/10 can't wait for the next one.
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It's mostly people who grew up playing Skyrim who are super positive about it in my experience.
Eh, I mean I grew up playing Skyrim and love it, but I can also admit that that’s nearly all nostalgia and that it’s a staggeringly shallow game.
Aside from Jim being characteristically edgy and doing the "angry reviewer thing", a major cliché in itself... yeah, checks out. I played for an hour, have been meaning to get back to it... and kind of don't want to.
I will say, as someone who is enjoying my time with it at about 30 hours currently… I felt the same way my first several hours. Which sucks - they absolutely bungled the intro hours of this game - but now that I’ve pushed through that awkward intro I’m having a great time. It’s scratching the same itch that Skyrim did. It’s what I hoped Fallout 4 would be but… in space.
I do tend to run to my ship and physically sit myself in the pilot seat before fast traveling… helps keep me immersed. It’s also a good middle-ground between the convenience of fast traveling to/from star systems and planets versus an endless fast travel menu sim.
I've played thru it once and i'm on NG+. It's about as expected from a BethRPG. It's a fun game with lots of flaws, but I can feel the hook there sucking me back in. I'm happy with my purchase it's a game worth playing IMO. (I especially like how they did the ending and how it feeds into NG+)
It's a Stephanie Sterling review, they've had beef with Bethesda for a long time and recently over Zenimax treatment of a trans employee (which is a fair thing to be annoyed by, but hardly the fault of Todd's team at Bethesda). I wouldn't put much stock in their review of this.
Do reviews only matter when the reviewer has always otherwise liked the company? This makes no sense. You're making it out like a conflict of interest, but not showing how that's actually meaningfully biased the actual review, especially given the actual purpose of reviews.
It reads as very biased. They have some good points but every sentence is riddled with negative adjectives. Seems very childish in my opinion. You can see that in all the screenshots as well. Especially talking about uninspired artstyle even though this artstyle is pretty unique in gaming and I really liked it personally.
Maybe? It's a particularly "edgy" games reviewer, it's part of the deal. Thing is, from where I'm standing, it's rather less biased than the people defending the game. At least the review is making specific arguments I am not seeing counterarguments for; I'm seeing "it's subjective" and "they're mad about stuff" (which is only a rational argument if you also go into how/why that's making their arguments shit) and... excuses.
To play Devil's advocate: even if Jim hates BSW with a holy passion and is firmly determined not to like anything about it ever (even the review isn't all negative), that doesn't make it all wrong. "I don't like people criticizing games I like" is natural and fine, but doesn't make for a lot of discussion. The review makes claims one can argue against - that's great, that's discussion. "Well you're just wrong/mad" is less useful.
Are they wrong, then?
Since reviews are highly subjective its impossible to be wrong, except when you make factual mistakes like missing mechanics or technical facts.
My question was an attempt at getting people to elaborate. Like... no, seriously, what is wrong about the review? Bearing in mind that it, too is a piece of media with a given category: Edgy Angry Review Person, a true if hackneyed classic? A lot of the points seemed fair enough to me, but then I'm not a fanboy or hater. "Toss out the entire review" is not very nuanced and blaming it on them being "mad" is downright unconvincing.
For the record, I don't think subjectivity is a good defense. How well you like the browngray paintjob is subjective. How well you like the menu, controls and writing are subjective. "This game is significantly smaller, buggier and less varied than it pretends" are at least a lot less subjective, and those seem like fairly popular takes.
To counter the "it's buggier than it let's on" (which, how does a game imply that it isn't buggy), I'm about 60 hours in and have had precisely 0 bugs. NPC running into someone talking? Yup. Weird physics things? Yup. I wouldn't call those bugs though; that's just part of having the dialog occur in an active world. If I stopped in a busy street and talked to someone and wasn't a foot away, people would walk through the convo. Physics engines are also just going to be limited in how they solve problems with clipping, etc.
I got roped in by the story and have been throughly enjoying the gameplay. I hated the gunplay in Fallout 4. These style BSW games have never been my thing, I trended much more towards Oblivion and Skyrim, so before even getting into this, I was searching and asking others how the shooting worked, how similar was it to Fallout 4 but in space, so I haven't been hype-beasting this game. I hadn't even seen the trailer for it, still haven't. Just heard good things from friends, grabbed it, and have been putting in time like I haven't with a game in a few years.
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