Starfield hits ‘mostly negative’ on Steam, players complain of boredom : starfield

[-] _danny@lemmy.world 124 points 10 months ago

The worst thing a video game can do is be boring. Buggy games can be fun as you laugh at the absurdity of the physics. That was honestly one of the reasons I stuck with fallout 3, because I loved that you could turn someone supersonic with enough landmines. Even if the game crashes and you lose progress, you can't lose the fun you had playing the game.

I recently replayed fallout 3 after starfield failed to scratch my Bethesda itch, and I realized how much more alive the world felt (and how much less often I saw a loading screen when doing quests).

[-] Wogi@lemmy.world 59 points 10 months ago

I am going to make a fallout 3 mod that brings the starfield experience, you can now only fast travel and it adds two loading screens between every location. It will also remove every NPC that isn't strictly quest related and make them immortal. It will also level the wasteland and replace it with a procedurally generated landscape with absolutely nothing to discover in it.

[-] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 43 points 10 months ago

Don't forget to replace the map view with a field of sparse blue dots floating in a sea of black.

[-] Dirk_Darkly@sh.itjust.works 24 points 10 months ago

I think Fallout 3 has the best execution on atmospheric storytelling and plenty of unique, branching quests to compliment that. The takeover of Tenpenny Tower where you let the ferals in will go down as one of the most memorably crazy quests I've played in a game. Completely unrestrained in its brutality. Modern Bethesda is so sanitized and as a result, utterly boring.

[-] MindSkipperBro12@lemmy.world 31 points 10 months ago

Wait till you play New Vegas.

[-] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 14 points 10 months ago

Planescape Tournament, Disco Elysium...

[-] kaosof@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago

Oh, but what about Planescape Tournament 2003...

On a serious note, both are amazing games, and so is Divinity: Original Sin 2 (and Baldur's Gate 3!) as well.

[-] Dirk_Darkly@sh.itjust.works 9 points 10 months ago

I have many times and it's easy to see they made a stronger rpg with better writing, but it's harmed by the setting. Wandering through the desert doesn't hit the same for me as the capital wasteland nor are the stories told by random scenes you can find as compelling.

I know that I'm probably supposed to say that New Vegas is perfect, but I gotta say that Fallout 3 is my favorite. Now if we could have a Fallout 3 made by Obsidian...

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[-] FoxFairline@lemmy.blahaj.zone 90 points 10 months ago

I was very confused, when it was nominated in the steam awards for most innovative game. Made me a bit sad when people do not know what great games are out there that only cost 1/5 of a AAA borefest.

[-] quams69@lemmy.world 28 points 10 months ago

RDR2 was nominated this year for at least one category

It came out years ago, hasn't been updated significantly, and the online component was abandoned. It's a fine game but why the fuck was it in on the ballot for anything? There were a few games this year like that. So weird.

[-] FoxFairline@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 10 months ago

Yeah. Hogwarts legacy and EA football as game of the year is very weird aswell.

Guess there is some brigading in some corners of the internet going on. Or most of the people just have a one dimensional taste in games.

[-] kakes@sh.itjust.works 26 points 10 months ago

Lol I'll give Bethesda credit for a lot of things, but innovation definitely isn't one of them.

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[-] Donut@leminal.space 16 points 10 months ago

I thought it was Steam players colluding to meme about it.. Because it's obviously not true

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[-] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 90 points 10 months ago

Really, really wanted to like this game. Morrowind was like, my entire childhood. Bethesda have been on a downward spiral for so long to me and I've completely lost my faith in their titles. Starfield felt soulless to me when I played. A game that's supposed to be about an organization of explorers, where the exploration consists of fast travel and loading screens. Starfield did a lot of things and it didn't do any of them phenomenally, and only a few of them adequately.

[-] Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 13 points 10 months ago

Haven't played the game.

I'm curious as to how exactly the space exploration differs from Elite Dangerous.

Because in that nearly decade old game, space exploration does largely consist of fast travel warping to systems, scanning them and potentially any planets from your ship, scooping fuel from the stars, avoiding white dwarfs and neutron stars... And its absolutely enthralling.

Curious as to how they screwed up a proven formula.

The weird one to me is that they made it sound like a space survival game where the ship and its maintenance was going to be a primary game element, but other than the ship builder and random encounters outside a planets, it seems like it's hardly a thing.

[-] Nythos@sh.itjust.works 29 points 10 months ago

The space exploration for Starfield only happens in orbit of another planet. From the few hours I played before I gave up on it you couldn’t even fly to a station nearby the planet, you had to fast travel to it which was a loading screen then you had a loading screen for docking on to the station and then another loading screen for getting into the station

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[-] baropithecus@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Elite has a sense of scale and seamless transitions between places (even if they are just well-disguised loading screens). The planets feel planet sized, and you can move around them or between them freely in hypercruise (or whatever the system for traveling inside systems was called). There isn't any fast travel system as far as I'm aware -- if you want to get to the other side of the galaxy, the journey will take you days or weeks, even with a kitted out exploration ship. This, combined with the sense of scale and incredibly well made map system, makes it feel like an expedition, even if the journey itself is extremely lonely and repetitive. Despite Elite's many, many flaws - they absolutely nailed this aspect of a space game.

Starfield feels like clicking through menus to get to boring minigames with different skyboxes. It cannot be overstated how non-immersive the travel and "exploration" is compared to ED.

*Edited disclaimer: I gave up a couple of hours in. If there's a good game in this mess that you get to after 100 hours, as some people have said, I'm sure as fuck not sticking around to find out. More likely it's just the sunk cost coping mechanisms kicking in.

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[-] averyminya@beehaw.org 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I wanted to like it too. I did like my first playthrough after I learned to navigate its ridiculous menu diving, I thought it had some cool concepts and I liked the gameplay well enough for how I played it. Some aspects clearly had cool intentions then just forgot about, like unique NPC followers.

Then after over 100 hours or so I tried out NG+.

It shows all the flaws of the game at 10,000 nits, they are blinding. My first realization that things were bad was one of the first dialogue options that was different was pretty close to, "hey, i already know all of this lets move this along". And the response is, like, "wow, well okay then.".

My second realization it was going to get worse was that continued style of dialogue choice for each follower you can play with - which by the way if you don't like some of them then you're gameplay time is severely limited. I didn't really care about Sam or the religion guy, and the characters that were interesting were locked behind quests that I'd already done and decided whether I wanted them or not.

My third and final realization was that all the items and customizations I put into my ship are also worthless, since now I have to re-find each part and rebuild my ship. Could have done a save mechanic for shipbuilding...

I stopped not long after that. There is just no point to the game after the first playthrough because everything that was interesting about the game was the philosophy. But it's not that motivating as a game. Especially when you're going through copy-paste maps that are totally like that one other place. It's. All. The same.

Also from like a gameplay perspective, what the fuck? You're trying to tell me that *I have all of my knowledge of previous interactions, but none of my blueprint knowledge?" How does that track? It doesn't, and it's bullshit. There were so many ways the NG+ could have played out and they took the absolute laziest possible one.

P.S. the scrooge dream sequence ending of seeing the future of your outcomes was buggy and boring.

And yet it was still better than Rebel Moon...

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[-] EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 73 points 10 months ago

Haven't the modders, who in general always fix all of bethesda's bullshit, mostly gotten bored of this game? I know it was big news when the guy behind the big Skyrim multiplayer mod started working on this star field one and then declared the game stupid and quit.

[-] Arbiter@lemmy.world 23 points 10 months ago

The mod tools haven’t been released yet.

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[-] Nythos@sh.itjust.works 12 points 10 months ago

One of the people who made Skyrim Together came outright saying that they gave up on making the same mod for Starfield because the game is just shit

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[+] ersatz@infosec.pub 30 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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[-] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 18 points 10 months ago

But once you finish all the main+side quests and maybe try out new game + a couple times there’s not really any reason to continue.

"but"? That sounds like hundreds of hours of gameplay.

[-] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 9 points 10 months ago

It is.

I don't get this fascination with games that allow you to keep playing indefinitely with random generated content.

You saw everything the game has to offer, why don't you just move on?

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[-] devbo@lemmy.world 29 points 10 months ago

its seems like most of those negitive reviews have 60+ hours, some of the top negitive reviews are 250+ hours. the standard for boring seems a little funny to me.

[-] zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 35 points 10 months ago

You play for a while because you feel like you should and really want to like it. Quest after quest you start to figure out that you don't actually enjoy what you're doing, and it takes a while to first figure out why, and then to break your addiction

[-] voxelastronaut@lemmy.world 31 points 10 months ago

Sunk cost. Some people got so hyped up for it, they felt like they had to like it. Turns out that's not how it works and it's just... Not a great game.

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I think it's a fair shake to play the entire game before giving it a review. A game this size, 100-250 hours seems like enough time to have done everything to confirm it is, indeed, boring as shit.

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[-] CodexArcanum@lemmy.world 23 points 10 months ago

It certainly seems telling that everytime a news story about Starfield comes up, the picture with it is just a boring headshot of some normal looking person (or occasionally a pic of the ship builder). Bethesda's other games at least had distinct looks, some sense of art and aesthetic that gave them identity, even Oblivion's potato people.

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[-] Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 22 points 10 months ago

NG+ was a pretty big disappointment. There are a couple of dialogue choices which reference [Starborn] but for the most part you have to play questlines all over again as if you weren't Starborn at all. Seriously, I've lived through this situation seven times already - why can't I cut to the fucking chase that I know exists.

[-] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

cause that would require effort, and planning, and design.

3 things that were clearly missing during the development of the actual game.

i'm sure they'll release 200 dollars of DLC to fix it all, so don't worry! /s

[-] PoopMonster@lemmy.world 22 points 10 months ago

I did the story and enjoyed it, just gotta get over the whole space sim mentality, this is a Bethesda game set in space, and it's decent at that.

However there is 0 fucking chance I'm gonna play though it 10 times just for an Easter egg. Their implementation of new game was kind of disappointing.

[-] Luci@lemmy.ca 18 points 10 months ago

I'm holding out to see if the updates this year bring some life into the game, but I have doubts.

[-] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 15 points 10 months ago

I liked it well enough. I didn't even hate the loading screens all that much.

Flying and docking gets really old, really fast. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people who complain that they have a loading screen for docking probably forget that within a few hours into Elite Dangerous they probably just hit the auto-dock key because repeatedly doing it yourself gets boring as hell.

What disappointed me was that there is simply no reason to replay it post-starborn. Sure...some things "might" be a little different. But it's fundamentally the same experience. So if you've completed most of the questlines before moving to the final mission (like I usually do), there is no reason to keep playing the game.

New Universes is just wasted potential. I wanted my post Starborn life to have the ability to jump between universes, like we were able to in that one mission in the research lab. That was great. And it's a power that should definitely exist.

Imagine you jump into a universe where Sam Coe is somehow the leader of the Crimson Fleet, and in order to accomplish a mission in one universe, you need to steal/get something from the Crimson Fleet, and instead of fighting your way through, you are able to go to the Universe where Sam Coe is the leader and use what you know about him to gain his trust so that he gives it to you and you can take it back with you.

THAT is what I wanted post-starborn; the ability to fundamentally change HOW I complete missions I had already done. What I got was...hey, this person dies instead of this person. So frustrating

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[-] tills13@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago

I really really really liked the game. I have 100% of the achievements. I don't really see the replayability, though... I guess I could go find all the side quests but what's the point? What do people do when they put like 700 hours into a game like this?

[-] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 8 points 10 months ago

They fall asleep with a PC on.

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[-] Frog-Brawler@kbin.social 8 points 10 months ago

Huh… interesting. I got so bored of it that I forgot about it and moved the fuck on. I’m bored of most games, even the “good ones.”