I think it could've used a few more years, because its still not that fun.
Exploation is meaningless, which completely takes the fun out of it. There's nothing interesting to discover.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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The amount of loading screens and forced cutscenes was just painful. I was so thankful for the gamepass trial because I would have been so upset if I bought this game.
I would just love an option to stay in first person. Make the loading screens show the entire takeoffs and landings. We know the engine can already do most of it because of the glitch when you get into a random landed pirate ship and it takes off.
The cutscenes look good the first 20 times you see them but I don't need the ground perspective of watching my ship take off and turn left every time.
Give them 7 more years.
For modders to fix it.
They can't and won't. For whatever reason they decided to take what has made their last 3-4 games long lasting (modding) and changed their system so much that modders have been saying it's simply too difficult to mod now (past smaller graphical things) and something about a file structure they used to use is now bastardized in some way that the game will always break their mods way beyond what a normal update would have done in the past when they do update the game or add DLCs.
From what I remember seeing some "big names" in modding Skyrim/fallout have said they're skipping starfield and moving on to better games.
To Paradox games (cities skylines 2) and Microsuck: ruining modding is so unbelievably short sighted it actually makes sense you did it. Corpos always go for short sighted moneygrabs... But we get it, a modder makes something similar to what you want to sell that means less potential money for you... So they give modding the shaft until their get their DLCs out and then they'll throw us a bone, except by then it is too late and we've all moved on.
To ruin Elder Scrolls 6
No they didn't.
They took 7 years to release a game that isn't that fun to play.
I wonder how the game was at first if this is what they consider "fun"
7 years wasted I'm afraid
I feel like this is emblematic of why many AAA titles are so dull.
I mean, you gotta give Bethesda some props here for developing their own engine. Indies don't do that.
But still, 8 years ago, they had this idea of a Bethesda game in space. Maybe they should have seen it coming that this concept won't work out terribly well, but ultimately someone decided to go ahead with it and then they spent 7 years building a space physics simulation, procedural planet generation and so on.
There was no way, they could have not released this game after realizing the concept doesn't work out terribly well. Or taken a step back and shifted the focus of the game towards space flight. Or taken a step back and deviate from the Bethesda-typical formula for this space theme.
These are options you have, when you've spent a few months prototyping, not after multiple years. They had to roll with the concept and basically try to bruteforce the fun into it.
Blizzard, back in the day, was willing to simply can games, even highly anticipated ones, when they didn't meet their standards, even after a couple years of work. StarCraft: Nova, Lord of the Clans...
And Square-Enix managed to take an MMORPG that was already released, tear it down to bare bones and completely rebuild it to make it good, with FFXIV: A Realm Reborn.
So it is possible to completely redo something if it doesn't work out...
Anyone who wants to make a space exploration game needs to play The Outer Wilds. It has one star system all the planets are about 10 miles across and the game resets every 20 minutes and there is no combat, and yet it's still an infinitely better game than StarField. Why?
Because it actually has things to do and explore and interact with. Everything you do has reason to it, It has intention. There's nothing in the sidelines that was added just a pad the experience out because it's embarrassing having 11 quadrillion planets and nothing to do on any of them, so better add some random quests.
They do not get props for trying to recycle their engine for the 100th time, because Creation sucked when they used it for Oblivion and it sucked when they upgraded it for Skyrim and it continued to suck through Fallout 4 into Fallout 76 and is very clearly not an engine designed to support a large game in space. Same bugs all the way through like five consecutive games.
Starfield was the least rocky release probably in Bethesda history in terms of bugs, but that's only because MS took literally the entire QA team from Xbox and assigned them to Starfield and brute forced a lot of the initial bugs out of the launch. A good engine doesn't need an entire megacorp's fucking quality assurance department to get ironed out.
Ultimately it feels like the same engine, despite having been improved to 64 bit for SKSE, upgraded even further for FO4, and then slapped with netcode for FO76 - it's still not good. It's unbelievable that we can have games with life-scale cities and zero loading screens, while Bethesda still needed to cut Neon in half and instance basically everything behind a billion loading screens. Even Jemison is like, 4 separate zones and not just one whole city.
Believe me, I really don't care to defend Bethesda. I'm not saying their engine is incredibly good.
I'm mostly saying, I feel like their games would be different and even more AAA-generic, if they built it on top of Unreal or Unity. And I'm giving them mild props for not just buying into the duopoly.
But I'm also just saying that, as a result of building their own engine, Bethesda can't just quickly prototype something. To see what the final game looks/feels like, they have to invest years into engine development.
I'm not quite sure what took them seven years. It's not exactly what you'd call fleshed out, is it?
It would have been a better game if it had been a smaller game, as it is all of the content is kind of sprayed out over a vast area.
Yup, remove the space part and just fast travel between planets. Then spend whatever resources they spent on doing the space stuff on making the dungeons more interesting and character animations better.
Wait starfield is fun to play? News to me
So it will be good and fun in 7 years then?
Yeah if we trust the modders, I suppose.
This is the first Bethesda game that I'm not sure mods can truly save... At least not quickly. They'd almost have to make a totally different game :/ At least with other Bethesda games, the core gameplay loop is fun. With starfield, ehhhhh...
Yeah it's not fun being a stealth archer/sniper in Starfield. I got an Orion and it was good for a while but at a certain point everything becomes a massive bullet sponge and it's just annoying.
About as fun as NMS on release.
Space games really aren’t that much fun. They seem fun when I read about them, but they’re not.
NMS is the least worst analogue to Starfield, and I can’t play that anymore because it’s the same thing over and over.
I feel like it's not impossible for them to be fun, for example the Everspace series does focus on action gameplay, but yeah, tons of titles try to go for realism and showing off the scale correctly, which is neat for space nerds, but quite contrary to actual fun.
There will be no Freelancer slander!
Freelancer rocked so hard, and no other game has come close to how much I enjoyed space combat in it.
Star Citizen is the 'spiritual successor' but I wish we had a quick and dirty standalone game that wasn't in development hell.
Space games are one of my favorite genres and they can absolutely be fun. But space is really really vast and mostly empty and most space games are too shallow and/or constrain the player too much. Starfield does have some good polish and stories but is so frustratingly restrictive and non-immersive with traveling.
I think you'll find that what's actually not fun is boring games. There are plenty of fun space games but the requirement is that they are fun, and have things to do rather than just being big.
As a general rule if it tells you how many star systems there are, it's going to be a boring space game because it means that they all are procedurally generated which means they're all boring.