I honestly can't understand how Starfield was so boring. I played it a bit waiting for the fun to start and it just never did. Such a weird game
First new IP in 25 years and this time they don't have decades' worth of other people's writing to build lore off of. Their failures of imagination are front and center now.
It’s because it’s unironically just Skyrim with spaceships, but it’s not even good because like @FourteenEyes@hexbear.net said, they don’t have much material to go off of.
They also expect modders to fix everything and I imagine most of them are content with making stuff for fallout and elder scrolls instead.
unironically just Skyrim with spaceships,
hell it's worse because of all the mandatory loads. somebody made open cities skyrim but i doubt there's going to be a mod letting you manually fly between planets and even if that did exist it would be boring af instead of interesting.
This "they expect modders to fix everything" thing isn't even true because the vast majority of their sales are on consoles, where mods can't even do much.
waiting for the fun to start and it just never did.
fallout 4 was that for a lot of people.
I'm doing all the main and side missions while ignoring radiant or filler stuff and it fuckin' sucks. I played Fallout 4, which I consider mediocre at best, the same way and remember having a MUCH better time. Starfield is so utterly boring that I'm actually kind of fascinated by it. It's immediately obvious the first time you set foot on an "unexplored" planet that the entire allure of Bethesda games since at least Oblivion has been abandoned. There is no intricately designed open world here, just copy-pasted garbage.
Never mind how the world feels even more disjointed than ever. There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
Even that could have been done ok if the factions weren't both garbage self-defeatingly stupid fascist shitholes. Like if the UC was a socialist state that had tacitly tolerated/been unable to stop capitalist colonists from establishing corporate powers and so found itself effectively in a permanent low-intensity conflict with itself as the central party tried to keep control over these large parallel power structures, while the FC was a coalition of breakaway fascist corpo-states that were actively trying to encircle and undermine the UC.
But as it is the two factions are "the fascists from Starship Troopers" and "the Confederacy but it's constituent parts are feudal corpo-states" and they're both stagnating and rotting away and being chipped away at by petty warlords in a universe where the literal only hope is that maybe the reform Serpent cult might have a not-dogshit ideology and they successfully wipe out all the fascists and ancaps, but we don't know anything about them because they're almost completely absent from the story as it is. And the Bethesda execs and a terrifying chunk of their fans think it's a good, aspirational setting full of hope.
I think the real problem is that they wanted to have both a well-established space-faring society but also an american frontier settler-brainworm aesthetic, when the two are clearly mismatched. The FC makes sense if the grav drive has only been around for a single generation or something, not the 200+ years as depicted in-game.
maybe the reform Serpent cult might have a not-dogshit ideology [...], but we don't know anything about them because they're almost completely absent from the story as it is
:todd: had to remove any content involving House Varuun so that it could be made into a $30 DLC later.
The FC makes sense if the grave drive has only been around for a single generation or something, not the 200+ years as depicted in-game.
Having watched a bunch of Bethesda game analysis essays, this is a problem that is consistent with their writers. Bethesda doesn't really seem to understand time spans.
Aside from the obvious issue of Fallout 3 where 200 years later everything is still a wasteland and unlooted, the same problem is present in Skyrim. For instance, Esbern, one of the last remnants of the Blades, somehow manages to live in hiding for 25 years in a sewer, without any way to earn money and buy food, and while avoiding detection.
The Thieves Guild questline is also made substantially worse by a 25 year gap in the backstory.
Like DAMN Karliah, you were working on this revenge plan for 25 years and this is all you have? A stupid mead business scheme and one single dose of the poison everything hinges on?
Of course, the fact that the writers keep patting themselves on the back by having every other character comment on how genius her plan is doesn't help
if the grave drive
I'm imagining a setting where Starfield's early designers made that same typo and just rolled with it instead of admitting their mistake to tod, and how much more interesting of a setting it would be if their FTL tech was some weird necromantic bullshit.
My favorite bit is what Sseth's review pointed out: you can literally kill the last practicing Jew in the universe as a side effect of choosing the "evil" choice in the resort planet quest. One of the unfrozen colonists has kept up all the rabbinical traditions and is implied to be the last living example of his religion in a setting that has largely allowed religion to die out because it doesn't serve corporate interests. What the Austrian painter started, Todd will make you finish 
Holy fuck... How the? What the what?
You WILL carry out Todd's final solution
The thought that had to go into this detail... That's fucking intentional, it has to be, right?
Considering they bullied a transwoman into quitting the company maybe
a setting that has largely allowed religion to die out because it doesn't serve corporate interests
zero historical materialism mfs
Never mind how the world feels even more disjointed than ever. There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
How is this a background tidbit and not the actual plot of the game? 
Well this is Bethesda so the game had to be about you becoming the ~~dragonborn~~ starborn and learning the ~~dragon shouts~~ star powers.
Literally just make Cowboy Bebop The Game. Cowboy aesthetics on other planets, real guns, a variety of jazz genres. It’s so god damn simple.
This brought to you by every video game adaptation ever lol and to be clear I agree with the sentiment, its hard NOT to like bebop but being simple is exactly the same trope perpetuated by people at the top in hollywood/sillicon valley.
The bebop setting you describe is just a very rough outline of what the game would look like, it is by far not enough to build around it. Imagine for a moment once you get past the novelty and somehow ignore the blatant "cultural influence"(read: ripoff) you'd be left with the same fundamental problem with Bethesda games.
The problem is they have a very basic formula for the game loop, their engine is a literal monster from 15 years ago or something and ultimately they must go down the corporate checklist of things "marketing" says must be in the game because how else do you justify the budget?
You're basicaly doing the same thing as telling a blind person to draw a Mona Lisa, even telling them its ok to copy is not the point at all.
Played it for like four hours and moved on, and I'm a big space travel sci-fi buff.... Boring.
Edit: I'm glad I pirated it. I'll probs uninstall it.
You won't be missing anything. The game does not get better. If you are feeling any FOMO you can toss it out of the window.
almost all the tropes I have seen from that game only work well in horror and B-rating-ethesda can't do horror imo
It has a few good sci-fi tropes that could work well, like the generation ship concept. They just can't write in a way that is outside of the system they are in. The only solutions are extremely capitalist and also extremely stupid. There are very few concepts executed well or interestingly, despite the insane amount of sci-fi out there to copy from.
How tf has Bethesda not fallen on their ass yet? Oblivion is the last decent thing they did.
Valve didnt update tf2 so valve still bad.
Valve would rather update rage simulator (Dota 2) which is kept alive by a Saudi prince buying battlepass every year than updating tf2
Giving TF2 the love and respect it deserves is basically the only thing that could turn around my opinion of Valve at this point. Hell maybe its time for a sequel.
Dota 2) which is kept alive by a Saudi prince buying battlepass every year
Which most likely brings Blizzard no end of rage, lol
Maybe an unfair comparison. Half-Life is one of the greatest games of all time.
But my hot take is that I'm glad Starfield was made and released before ES6. If they hadn't then maybe they would be riding too high from making Skyrim and all the other money they made just releasing it and assumed if they made anything similar that it would be successful so they might have made ES6 as well as they made Starfield. Now I just hope Bethesda listens to the critiques and complaints people have of Starfield so that they take it into account when creating ES6 and make it better.
hope Bethesda listens to the critiques and complaints
Skyrim is better than fallout 3 tho. Es 6 will be better than starfield 
it'll be better in that it will be wearing a franchise people like's clothes, making whatever horrible decisions they made seem more tolerable 
Only played starfield from gamepass (lies of p and hifi rush are pretty good) and besides the sterile feeling of the game, fuck bethesda for making melee useless. Why tf a knife and axe has the same swing speed? Why the guns with 0 perks outdamages melee with a full specced melee char.
"Its supposed to be realistic" well fuck realism then. Honestly with the low weight limits and annoying onjuries systsem, i think Starfield was originally a survival space game that bethesda rescapped into RPG today
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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