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).
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.
Don’t forget to replace the map view with a field of sparse blue dots floating in a sea of black.
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.
Wait till you play New Vegas.
Planescape Tournament, Disco Elysium…
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.
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…
the problem with Fallout 3 is the world is dead, because nothing you do at X matters in Y.
Its a collection of segregated short stories,isolated in their own little worlds with no contact or interaction with eachother, all plopped into a single map, with nothing connecting to anything else. The only lasting impact of anything outside their own isolated containers is to your nebulous karma stat, which only affects peoples general disposition towards you.
Huh i replayed that game several times Not once do i remember letting the gouls in to ten penny tower
If i remember right (looong time ago) letting ghouls into the tower was one option for how to play out that quest line. It was kind of written to be the “bad” outcome because it obviously killed all the people in the tower, so likely most people didnt play it out that way…buuut, that was the rich, snobby people, so ya know…eat the rich.
There’s even an ending that has both living amicably if you kill the ghouls leader and tenpenny before the ghoul guy gets there first. That’s my canon ending at least, I’m sure it’s just an oversight.
I used to destroy nuke town, i thought that was the bad choice. Maybe i should play again. I was actually thinking about it the other day because of the set the world on fire song.
The half hour I spent watching this beast rampage through the ship was probably the most actual fun I had in this game. https://imgur.com/YLD39Za
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.
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.
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.
Lol I’ll give Bethesda credit for a lot of things, but innovation definitely isn’t one of them.
I’d say radiant AI was innovative, but they haven’t done anything like that in almost 20 years now.
Oblivion was the last truly innovative game they made. Not that I dislike their more recent games, but they’ve been coasting on Oblivion ever since.
I thought it was Steam players colluding to meme about it… Because it’s obviously not true
The New Game + was one of the most innovative mechanic that came out this year.
It isn’t the Game of the Year award.
*New for Bethesda
Other games have had similar features for years.
Other games just replay the story with the same stats.
Starfield has (or at least tries) to depict different universes.
Example (Spoiler for Starfield):
spoiler
The Constelation is different each time you run a New Game +
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You meet the non-starborn version of yourself. You can convince yourself to join your crew, and thus you mentor yourself. All other Constellation members are missing/dont exist.
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Same as Above but all the other members are alive and well.
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Multiple version of yourself hang out at Constellation, like a sort of Citadel in Rick and Morty
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Andreja has gone evil, has taken over the Lodge, and wants to take down Constellation.
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Walter Stroud is not benevolent with his money but instead uses it to control Constellation and sells you the artifacts for 100k each.
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You meet the Hunter who has already killed all of Constellation. He gives you the artifacts.
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Cora Coe has returned as a Starborn and wants to avenge her father’s death.
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Evil You is there trying to kill everyone, a wounded Sarah fills you in.
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Only kids are at Constellation, all the members are gone and there are kids in their place.
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Another kid one where all the members are retired and slight changes to the one above.
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Everyone is dead and only Vasco remains.
It is pretty innovative I think, although it could have been better executed.
It also leaves a door open for future innovation as well.
An “update to quest dialog and option flow for some players” patch notes can hide entirely new quest iterations from people.
Everything done and repeatable can be adjusted, expanded, or added and the lore is already there to back it.
IMHO they’re gonna have a tricky time trying to balance things since they clearly also want “the classic BGS” experience to remain valid, but it doesn’t have to be for lack of innovation.
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How is ng+ innovative? Have you played many other games this year? Dave the diver, boneraiser Minions or Astrea have shown me more innovation in gameplay than any AAA game in years.
Thanks for bringing Boneraiser to my awareness!
NG+ isn’t new, but NG+ as part of the normal play through was kinda different.
Can you explain how new game+ works? I got bored and stopped playing before reaching the endgame.
You have the option to get reincarnated at the end of the story. It starts you off with a neat ship and some nice gear, which gets a little better every time you restart. You keep all your powers, so you can re-run quests with opposite options to get whichever powers you missed. IIRC, it takes three or four playthroughs to actually get all the powers. It also gives you new dialogue options, which allow you to skip huge swaths of the story missions.
But it’s not anything super new or innovative. It’s new to Bethesda games but it’s not new.
That’s cute and interesting. As you said, not new but nice to have at the very least.
Thank you for taking the time to answer. :)
Almost every skill provides new dialog skill checks ranging from merely funny to altering your options for quest resolution.
As you progress in new or other skills, you reveal new parts of quests that every BGS and similar game before would require new games for.
The set pieces for the Main Quest and Factions are rife with alternate paths and options to also make use of new skills.
The Ryujin one for example, I’m up to 6 runs and still enjoying variating. Mind control guy to hack computer and blow up door? Which of the three vents is best, the one that requires Gymnastics and space magic? The one behind the security computer?
Alternate “timelines” switching up the Main Quest/replacing it entirely.
A system emulating the idea of endless possibilities for a discrete purpose; You can easily add more of all of this to the mix with as much or as little fanfare as you want, and it’ll fit right in.
I for one, hope individual devs start getting lee way to remix quest lines the same way they were allowed to do new environmental stories for future DLCs like they did for Skyrim’s DLC tenure.
I can keep going. Seriously. There’s plenty of game and innovation alongside the rest of what makes a human released software product a jank mess of an attempt to deny the Universe’s entropic march.
Just gotta be willing to trade a smirk for a smile for a lot of people reading this.
The main story let’s you choose if you want to become starborn so you can basically go to a new universe get a cool ship and armor and keep your stats. Each time you have a chance that the universe is different in some ways
Thank you for taking the time to explain. :)
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.
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.
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
Basically Warframe minus any of the good parts from the sounds of it
That’s like comparing gold to literal dog turds.
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.
These two games might both be set in space but they are in wildly different genres.
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…
Hello (I have never played it)
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.
The mod tools haven’t been released yet.
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While I think it makes some business sense to release the modding tools between 6 months to a year after (when their devs aren’t working on the game anymore so they can actually develop the tools and strip it of any proprietary software) I do wonder sometimes how things would change if they just delayed the game until the modding tools were ready.
They’re actually stupid in this case.
There was a big post by Nexus Mods about how effed up the Creation Engine is now, and how its unsurprising Bethsoft has been unable to release modding tools for the game because it’s so broken.
I’m going to play the game only a small amount until the modding tools come out
Because the mods are the only thing that is going to breathe in life into this game
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
I think some modders like the challenge or enjoy making a shitty game more fun for the community to actually play
I mean, if a modder has so much ability and creativity that they can essentially rewrite the whole game (because nothing short of that will save this absolute snoozefest of a story) they might as well create their own game and make bank in the process.
Modding a game doesn’t make much sense if the foundation sucks. So much wasted effort, making mods for already good games is much more rewarding in my experience (released about two dozen for different games)
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Xfire? You mean the old gaming chat program? 😅
I didn’t find it boring, in fact I enjoyed it a lot. 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. They need to really work at making the planets and their pre-fab buildings more diverse. I can understand it if the structures themselves are pre-fabs based on templates, but having the exact same layout down to dead bodies and storage containers was really bad. Fix that and add in a survival mode that makes resource gathering necessary, and let the modders fill in the gaps with new quests and locations and I’ll be back. But probably not for a couple years.
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.
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?
Well if you play skyrim and fallout 4 after the dlcs you can get a ton more than 100 hours. I’m hoping Stanfield ends up the same way, I enjoyed my time playing it but still felt a bit short
High dozens to hundreds, and you might not actually get to see some of the uniques that are radiantly placed too.
Dozens to hundreds of hours of guided content at the least.
On a game that came out on September and already has 6 week updates planned out for 2024 starting as early as February, nearly a full dev team, and a Megacorp already prefunded it all.
They did make the PR mistake of being a brand saying any opinion at all within a user score system, that was dumb.
I make stupid comebacks too when gaslit with things like Cyberpunk or Skyrim having a better launch.
Otherwise, literally (Way back machine it if you ever want to see History rhyming) Same complaints every BGS game gets.
The same ones that years later turn to praise. It’s demented
Yes, you can see a lot of the expected ‘shareholders said to fix this in 2024, they need holiday bonuses first’.
But somehow the 3–that’s less than a handful–of truly disrupting to game play choice bugs (extremely frustrating, but appearing and worsening over dozens to hundreds of hours of gameplay on average) means the rest of the package might as well not exist, let alone be a topic you can discuss online.
Impossible to have a nuanced conversation on anything actually related to the playing of the game.
Especially on nearly every space that dares declare itself as a place to discuss Starfield.
The subreddit of the same name, Steam page, Xbox club page, game effing faqs page.
Just copies of the same toxicity filled–not negative mind you, I’d happily debate a lot of the games negative–disingenuous takes.
I’ve played the thing for just over 200 hours.
I know the bugs, the systems, how to avoid them, and how to make my fun when
the trek to Riftenflight to Elos is being considered versus fast traveling there.Because that’s the rub, the scene transitions are awkward (but even on console 2-4 seconds, because they’re a mall store in construction window dressing and not engine limitations as is often touted) but you can explore and take them sequentially. Things will and do happen in-between.
I love this game.
But my love pales in comparison with even a billionth of a billionth of a percentage of the number of times the word ‘hate’ is etched in each ‘nanoangstrom’ of the neurons making up the collective video games and video game industry discussion… industry.
Fuck, it’s money all the the way down isn’t it?
I’m not going to lie, you lost me about halfway through there.
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.
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
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.
I mean, we see this kind of review all the time. It’s generally people that run out of things to do and start complaining that the game doesn’t have infinite content.
The art of countering a bad review:
Negative review at 2hrs (refunded)
-Hey, you barely even opened the game!
Negative review at 5hrs
-You can’t say that, you’re barely through the tutorial!
Negative review at 15hrs
-You just haven’t gotten to the good bits yet!
Negative review at 30hrs
-You rushed through it and missed all the good stuff!
Negative review at 60hrs
-Well if you played that long, it can’t have been bad!
Isn’t the comment I answered to doing the same though? Based entirely on whether it is positive or negative and the play time, they reached the conclusion that it was sunk cost fallacy.
My point was that user reviews are a mixed bag and people will leave negative reviews on games they enjoyed for whatever reason but I guess it didn’t come across very well.
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and every positive review is a fanboy who licks the boots of the devs. there is no winning
Oh for sure, a lot of that too. But I’ve also noticed an overall essence of boredom and disappointment especially when compared to initial expectation, so it wouldn’t do to dismiss most criticism in this way. Bethesda really fed into the “big immersive universe 25 years in the making” thing and even, for example, emphasized the player’s ship in marketing, even though you hardly really fly the ship at all in-game. NPCs feel flat and buggy, most planets are largely empty, and most quests are just… Fetch quests.
I feel like, as with most Bethesda titles, mods are going to breathe new life into this one eventually.
I feel like Bethesda really missed the mark on what makes their games special.
You can see the improvement in quest design and writing with questlines like the crimson fleet but it’s missing the glue holding everything together, the fantastic open world map that’s always there and Starfield does not have.
I think mods are eventually going to make Starfield into another timeless classic but they’ve never felt necessary before, Skyrim took everyone by storm as soon as it came out.
I don’t even believe mods could save this game. The major things it lacks are also symptoms of the decrepit engine they keep using; such as the overall size of each individual zone of the game and why you have to load between ground, space, and star systems.
I would not be surprised if the space segments were considered interior cells, as they’re actually quite small and empty if you fly around to find the invisible walls.
I agree 100%
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.
Yeah, I got bored at 360 hours. If course, I’d be bored with virtually everything after 360 hours, but some people must have higher expectations.
Seeing how some people put like 6000 hours into Skyrim they might have.
Bethesda games are games we usually can play thousands of hours over decades and still enjoy. We’re only holding them to the standards they set.
I’ve got over 4k in l4d2. All depends on the people too.
Ikr. If I find a game not fun an hour in then I quit. The fuck these people have time for to play 60+ hours on a mid game
Sometimes you just stick with it to see how god awful it is, or just so you can beat it and wash your hands of it.
Having 100+ hours in it doesnt invalidate any criticism you have.
heres my rough story about how I did 100+ hours in it and why that doesnt make it good.
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.
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
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.
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.
It certainly is telling, but not for the reasons you think, I suspect. The game has plenty of glorious eye candy, but why highlight that when only negative media gets engagement?
I’m holding out to see if the updates this year bring some life into the game, but I have doubts.
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
I do wish there was a bit of autopilot to how the ship works.
If I am on my ship on a planet, I would like to be able to pick a destination and have my ship just take me there.
It’s not the fast travel itself that is the problem, it’s just all the damn steps that are involved with it. You want to go to a space station, but you can’t just fast travel there. You have to travel to your ship, then you have to travel into orbit, then you have to the destination planet’s orbit, and then you can land.
And often, traveling to your destination’s landing site isn’t enough, with several key points being a good hike away on foot with no ground transport available to help speed things along. We can use ships to travel between star systems, but asking to put an ATV on board is just too much.
Even if they kept all of the travel steps, just keeping the ship instance loaded while it automatically travels to our final stop would be a huge QoL boon.
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?
They fall asleep with a PC on.
What did you do when you got 100% of the achievements? I could never bother with it anywhere close to that.
I stopped playing 😂
I just like the nice 1000 GS on my account.
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.”
Yeah it gets pretty repetitive in some areas
I just used mods and a game trainer to make the game more fun and explore places without limitations like in game money or ship fuel
But other then the exploration the game does get pretty boring and it’s hard to find good places to explore that aren’t bland
Edit: it also misses the same charm skyrim had, people say it doesn’t have the same charm because it’s a space game but I disagree
I’m enjoying the game.
I do get the criticism. It does feel like it’s missed the mark a bit in terms of what I envisioned for a Bethesda space sim. But it’s still fun to me.
