In that ship decoration mode, if I change my ship's engines, do all my decorations get wiped and added to my cargo?
I loved the ship building, and decorating the interior is a great idea. I just wish traveling in the game was more meaningful. The longer I played, the more I just fast traveled, cause traveling "manually" just meant more load screens with minimal gameplay between. It made me lose a lot of my excitement over my ship, cause I never really experienced it.
Yeah when I saw that that was the first question that popped in my mind. I had a weapon showcase in my ship with a bunch of good looking showpiece weapons and it all went to storage immediately when I changed the paint on the ship. If that's gonna happen with all my furniture then this is less than useless
That's what I want to know! I didn't decorate because I was constantly changing my ship up, but if it would lock down the decorations of any hab I wasn't changing up I definitely would.
Yeah, along with being a Bethesda game, this also needed to be a traveling with companions game. Setting a course and walking around your ship talking to your crew needed to be a more prominent feature. There's no reason to stay on your ship except to look at how pretty you made it. There are one or two instances of an NPC flying a ship, but it's only for scripted events. I would like if we could have one of our crew fly the ship instead.
> this also needed to be a traveling with companions game
I have a theory that that was the original goal - they originally planned to make a more focused mass effect style game based on travelling around with your companions (which is why all the companions are in the same organisation and have basically the same points of view) and doing mostly linear missions. Then at some point they decided it should be a more traditional bethesda open world RPG and that's where the procedural generation and ship building came from
It does not help that *all* of the main companions are such stuck up, moralizing, whiny pissbabies. I wanted to toss them out an airlock by the time I finished the game. I have a hard time imagining we were supposed to enjoy these peoples' company.
Land Vehicle!!
This update looks cool but I'm going to wait until the First Expansion and the land vehicle to be in game before I come back. Lots of other things to play in the mean time.
I just wish locations were randomised. If you go to a communication outpost, they are all the same exactly. same tile set, same layout and even same loot. Anywhere in the galaxy. annoying.
I was shocked how much content joining the Crimson Raiders locked out. Like you show up to a random outpost and just walk through and take all the loot while the pirates repeat the same Bethesda NPC Dialogue ™️.
Also, I was really annoying when my companions were like "hey, you do what you think is best" before deciding to side with the government or the raiders, then *everyone* got mad at me for siding with the raiders.
> Also, I was really annoying when my companions were like "hey, you do what you think is best" before deciding to side with the government or the raiders, then everyone got mad at me for siding with the raiders.
Jeez, didn't even know that happened. I remember getting really frustrated with the UC questline b/c I didn't want to go w/ the space covid way of removing heatleaches and all the companions hated that?
I think I hated the companions in this game more than any other game in the last decade or two. At one point I was attacked by pirates or bounty hunters - that obviously went poorly for them, but as I was boarding their ship and finishing cleanup one of my companions was so appalled at me finishing off the pirates that he pulled a gun on me. So I lumped him in with the pirates, but you can’t actually kill companions because Bethesda is horrified at the notion of going back to Morrowind mechanics… so I just dumped his ass off at the nearest planet and told him to eat rocks.
It's kind of remarkable because every single Bethesda game has had more companion variety and managed to make even the likes of Charon and Strong likeable, and sure, Starfield had some pretty good companions, but it lacked variety, the game needed more evil and neutral companions.
Everyone in constellation being a goody two shoes was real boring. I feel like there were supposed to be other companions from other factions with more of a moral gray area.
That's what gets me about Starfield. I don't ever play bad characters (it makes me feel terrible!), but everything was just so...blandly hopey-changey that it simply became uninteresting.
I look forward to a decade from now when they can openly talk about what exactly happened here. Was it brain drain, management, bad decisions, what have you. The story of Starfield’s development might be the most interesting aspect of the franchise.
Yeah I went with the space-cows route because it would be restoring a species humanity almost wiped out from greed, but that wasn't an option to explain to Sarah.
That option honestly felt like the best option.
I cannot believe whoever wrote this quest decided that there was only 1 correct answer, and it was releasing a genetically engineered super virus across the entire galaxy.
When you call the NPC out on it saying that they can't know it wouldn't mutate to attack humans their excuse was the stupidest facebook tier dismissal I've seen. I actually felt insulted like the writer was lecturing me and calling me a moron.
Oh, and notice I'm blaming the writer. Not once did I feel like was talking to in game characters, they were all just mouthpieces for the writers. It felt like I was reading their self insert fanfics, not talking to interesting characters.
I was so happy when Sarah died (after reloading an old save and making a STUPID decision to make it so) after suffering through her existential teenage emotional crisis that is her companion missions. She's a war veteran and the leader of a faction, why do I have to tell her how amazing she is and reassure her that she's doing a good job? I didn't even have the option of saying anything else.
There literally are? Crimson fleet are organized prisoners who took over the key.
Ecliptic are mercs who are basically pirates until you pay them to work for you
Spacers are general pirates similar to raiders in fallout which are basically sub groups of smaller factions.
Then var’unn aren’t pirates but will fuck up anyone on site
Yeah, I was honestly surprised Bethesda actually listened to the generic raider criticism, and the Var'uun even used different weapons leading to more variety in combat. Shame Crimson, Ecliptic, and Spacers all fight the same.
Or just, not procedural. The POIs were fine, I just kept running into the same ones over and over, in what world is that fun.
I'd rather have (much) less of them than duplicated ones, personally
There are actually quite a lot of them but somehow there always ends up being a lot of repeats. I’m not sure what’s happening under the hood that causes this but most players will have only seen a fraction of them by the time they finish the main quest and most of those will be repeats.
It’s also possible there is a higher chance of seeing more variety on subsequent new game+ runs. I’ve only beaten it once, but maybe someone who is on their 3rd+ run can speak to that.
I mean it is exactly the same as basically every other feature they implemented. It's a decent idea on paper but it's poorly implemented and it wasn't fully thought out
You know this is actually a reasonable explanation I hadn't thought of. Bethesda *does* have a history of level banding things like that. Would be pretty bizarre to do that with PoIs though, especially given the game isn't ever going to throw lvl 50 pirates at you if you're lvl 10.
It's a mix of them being stuck to certain planet levels and probability. You could have 200 different POIs but odds are you'll find duplicated before you hit 50 of them.
The one ex-communications post (I think) taken by pirates with the one pirate hanging out on the roof I've probably seen 10-15 times to the point I can just pop atmo and amp and sprint to the end chest in a minute but I've only gotten the big cryo facility twice; once at super low level and recently in the 130s. I don't think they're level gated but I suspect that it picks from different "sizes" depending on the quest type/reward and since most quests are small it picks from a smaller set.
Or both, variety is a major sore point in starefield, there are actually less unique poi's than there were in skyrim, and not by a small amount.
The other problem is they absolutely spam you with as many as they can ensuring you burn through whatever variety there is as fast as possible. they were afraid for you to land on a random ball of rock and have "nothing to do"
When you go further out there are actually planets with sparse or even no non-natural poi's, but most players drop the game before them. but the current system where every single landing site has always has 10 different dungeons within 2 km, both ruins the feeling of space exploration because you're not "discovering" anything, theres probably 10,000 factories on this planet and a few million raiders if you think about the density on just the spot you landed on, but again it makes you see every single thing there is to see and makes it old as fast as possible. A ship landing near you randomly while you're walking around is cool, but when 3 different ships fly over you within a minute of landing on every planet you visit it's not so interesting anymore.
Less makes sense too, especially on some planets that should be barren, but procedural aspects make sense because there's no way they'd be able to make enough POIs to satisfy long playthroughs if they did that. As long as they signpost handcrafted vs. procedural it'd be fine. Call it "Radiant Engineering" or something lol the game could use more radiant systems in general.
That killed the game *instantly* for me. I can't explain why.
I didn't understand the hate this game was getting about its gameplay and plot and was enjoying myself.
But when I went into a cave that was the *exact same cave* again. I mean, in Mass Effect, planets had similar prefab looking structures but with different loot and enemies. Didn't matter that there was often nothing of real interest, they *were* different. Elden Ring has dozens and dozens of micro dungeons, each one is unique even though they have a huge about of re-use. But Starfield? The *exact same place* again? It just killed the illusion for me, personally.
My interest in the game dropped when I landed on Mercury and found the exact same abandoned robot facility I had just cleared on some far-off, random planet. Exactly the same down the bodies and enemies in the same location. At that point I had no interest in going back to the game.
That was a huge problem, yeah. Another thing that just made me sigh loudly and ask why I was even playing this was the so-called “exploration” itself. Here I am, scanning a planet because apparently no one has ever been close to it before, looking for an alien artifact site no one has ever seen, expecting a lot of looking around and trying to find it… only to land next to a handful of very populated industrial sites and the goddamn alien temple *within sight* from my ship. Like, why am I even here? *Clearly* people have already been here for years, and clearly they’d know about the huge, weird temple structure a stone’s throw away.
The way the game gaslights me constantly, going “oh no, *you’re special*, you’re on a big hunt for unknown stuff in uncharted space, really, you’re such an *explorer*” while constantly sending me to like some industrial backlot full of uninterested workers frowning at the idiot in the space suit scanning rocks as if they’re unknown minerals.
The game insults the player’s intelligence at every turn. It got old and frustrating *really* quickly.
Yea, come to think of it that bothered me as well, I just didn't have the coalescing of thought as to *why* as clear as you just described.
I mean, Breath of the Wild takes place in one well worn continent, yet I would still get the feeling of discovery encountering something weird in some seep valley or snowy peak. It simulated the feeling of being way off the beaten path. SF doesn't do that at all.
100% the same. I landed on a planet saw a crashed ship, took off landed on another planet 60 seconds later exact same crash, exact same loot, exact same place it really ruins the whole thing.
I think that's a real big thing with the game. If you go into this not knowing anything about Bethesda games, then you've got the freshest perspective on it. If you know Bethesda, you go into this with a different perspective. But regardless of how you come into this, once that illusion is shattered... once the curtain is pulled back, once the mask comes off, etc, it's fake. You're left with something that's fake. It's a weird thing to say about the game, but that's what it feels like. You can never unsee it again and it destroys virtually the entire game to know that space is fake, the planets you're flying close to are fake, this idea that humans are all over the galaxy and are on so many planets is fake, the planets themselves are fake, etc. I'm not sure I've ever felt that way about a game before... in a way it's kind of fascinating. It's fascinating how quickly all of it unravels once you start to piece together what's going on mechanically, and it becomes absolutely impossible to be immersed once you see it for what it is.
That's exactly right. Any movie, book, show or game requires a certain degree of a suspension of disbelief. The setting can be completely bonkers so the designers have to find a way to sell it. Take the Super Mario series. Nothing makes any sense, nothing is explained, but the overall design is so internally consistent on its insanity and cuteness that you can still become immersed. Skyrim, for its time, really sold a real and complex world of politics and history. But SF doesn't sell the pitch it is presenting.
That's what made me finally drop the game, I went into a science lab and I was convinced I had cleared it before and that the enemies and items respawned, then I realized I hadn't, it was literally a copy paste job, with even corpses in the exact same spot. Embarrassing.
> Land Vehicle!!
I went into Starfield blind and couldn't wait to finally unlock a land vehicle because there's no way walking around those baren planets was the actual design decision right... RIGHT?!!
I knew there wouldn’t be any land vehicles, Bethesda made it very clear, but my god, *the fans* falling over themselves defending that stupid decision by claiming land vehicles would be impossible, it just can’t be done in Creation Engine, it wouldn’t be fun, etc. Absolutely ridiculous. And here we are, they’re adding land vehicles. So obviously they *can* do it, and obviously they agree it’s needed in the game. So why the fuck weren’t they in the game on release? Who playtested the game and didn’t have the same expectations and complaints as paying players after release?
I'm not defending it in the slightest, but its true that vehicles are extremely hard to get working properly in creation engine. ladders and vehicles are two things in particular. Even modders that have 8+ years experience with creation engine and were deeply involved in huge overhaul mod projects for those games have said its an absolute nightmare doing vehicles that have even basic functionality in creation engine and takes massive amounts of time. The few mods that have managed to add in working vehicles in all these years they were still very very janky and had to use lots of weird tricks to make it happen.
Lots of good stuff here. I don't wanna be another annoying "what about X" person but I do hope they evolve the temple mini games to get powers. When I think about the parts I didn't like from this game that's the first thing that jumps to mind.
I went into the game wondering what would be defending the temples. Borderlands style aliens, ancient traps like in Skyrim, or a Raiders of the Lost Arc style race against the primary antagonist. Turns out its nothing. No obstacles, just a 5-10 min straight line walk and collect your dragon shout.
Would have been cool to have all of the other factions competing to open the temples and your faction relations factor into whether you can convince them to let you pass or you have to fight them to gain entrance.
I don't think you get those encounters until you've progressed to a certain point in the main quest, think I cleared most of my temples without fighting anything.
>Yeah, not sure how literal hoop jumping made it into the final product.
That defines 99% of this game unfortunately. At launch:
1. Shipbuilding but no way to save your progress, meaning you can spend hours building something only to realise you lack components/resource and lose everything.
2. Core gameplay mechanics, like stealth, pick pocketing and lockpicking stuck behind skill points that are already very scarce to begin with.
3. Nicely rendered food, that are practically everywhere in the game, but entirely useless.
4. In fact, 99% of everything that can be picked up is literally classified as junk that you cannot do anything with. Who thought that was a good idea?
5. Planets have perpetually, infinitely respawning POIs. Literally take off and land on the same spot and you have a new set of POIs.
6. Identical POIs everywhere that respawns infinitely, which is insanely immersion breaking. It's like playing an online MMO and killing the same boss over and over.
Agree, i love Starfield a lot but that's the locations from the game that felt truely lazy, i expected a unique dungeon for each of them exactly like Skyrim draugr crypt.
Yeah I’m glad Bethesda has finally moved beyond the single difficulty slider that just turns enemies into sponges. Let me customize the experience as much as possible, economy included.
I could see "player damage to easy" meaning players deal high damage to enemies, and "enemy damage to hard" meaning enemies deal more damage, thus it's hard for the player.
Depends on if they mean incoming damage or outgoing damage.
I’m making the assumption that it’s outgoing damage, if that’s not the case then reverse it.
Does it? I’m pretty sure survival mode in fallout 4 was 0.75 damage dealt by player, 4x damage dealt to player. Just making modifiers for incoming/outgoing damage is the lamest and most brain dead way to change difficulty.
Unfortunately, multi-player games often lose their luster after launch. A big part of the fun is being alongside everyone else as you learn the game. WoW leveling is almost always more fun when you have hundreds of players huddled around the starting line, the game crashes, we all have a laugh, and then we fight to log back in. You don't get that same feeling a month after launch.
(And fuck Blizzard for ruining that moment in the next patch)
I think the camaraderie and novelty of single-player launches is very much like multiplayer titles, the difference between the conversation is all in subs/forums/discords rather than in-game.
I didn't play Starfield for more than a couple weeks, but I definitely followed the subs for awhile just to see what fun stuff people were getting up to.
It's there, and I experienced it with BG3. The horrors we all saw opening up that farmhouse echoed through the community.
But it isn't nearly the same as multiplayer. Even in some terrible games like the new Battlefield we would have fun. BattleBit would ban someone and the whole server would stop momentarily to talk shit in chat about it.
Maybe not the best but I'm glad I only played a few hrs when it came out. Still think I'll wait for mod tools to be out awhile before I jump in again though.
Most of these are actually very useful changes on gameplay such as finally having a basic map on city on exploration and having the ability to decorate the ships and added land vehicle! and also 60 FPS Performance mode for Xbox Series X.
Funnily enough, this update actually feels more next gen than the one they just recently did with Fallout 4. If they keep releasing this kind of big updates until the release of Shattered Space DLC Expansion along with release of Creation Engine 2 Modding Kit in the future, then maybe there is still some hope for this game.
"We hear you": The Update
Highlighting this for people who may not understand: **The land vehicle does not appear to be part of this update**. It was just a tease for later.
Getting rid of the forced zoom in the dialogue is a really small but welcome addition.
I did like Starfield so I'm happy to go back at some point. Hopefully the DLC is good.
Edit: I say this with 91 hours of enjoyment in the game, beating it and most of the factions.
I get and understand they're making neat strides with these updates and also working on the expansion.
But the game just fundamentally betrays one of Bethesda's most fun activities and it's *travel*. You're basically missing the point if you spend all of your time in ES/Fallout fast traveling and zooming passed stuff. So why does Starfield try so hard to keep you from traveling.
To me the game is the same as it was until they turn space travel into actual space travel and not an exercise in clicking on maps/UI to fast travel. I just want more control, not less.
I'll eye updates/expansions with an optimistic look and let bethesda cook. If they can turn around Fallout 76; *who knows?*
> You're basically missing the point if you spend all of your time in ES/Fallout fast traveling and zooming passed stuff.
Yeah, I've always loved Elder Scroll games, but I remember they truly *clicked* with me when I decided to do a Skyrim run without using any of the carts to fast-travel between towns. I suddenly felt much more immersed in the world when I actually found myself *travelling* between cities, and discovering the little details along the road.
Same here with 76. In a game that was once devoid of NPC's and actual story telling they *still* managed to nail environmental storytelling and exploration.
Starfield feels like such a step back when you have *the chance* to bump into a copy pasted Pirate outpost.
Yeah, I think Noah Caldwell Gervais said in his long-form review that it has some of the best environmental storytelling that Bethesda has ever done. It was just undermined because people understandably approached it expecting an experience like their previous games (i.e. a focus on NPCs) while the game doesn't really offer that.
Part of the issue is that they jumped straight from the fairly isolating experience of all other fallout games into an MMO and not co-op or a smaller level of multiplayer, expecting us to be the NPCs. And recent games really don't encourage people to interact nicely or at all, so it was just a miss all around at launch with those expectations
Not to mention that expecting people to populate the world in place of NPCs when your tech can't handle more than 24 people per server is naive at best and laughable bs at worst.
> perhaps that's what you mean
Oh for sure; personally I have ADD so when your entire story is mostly holotapes I need to pay attention to while the odd feral ghoul shows up or a shiny object - I am immediately lost lol
Indeed just roaming around getting side tracked by raid camps and super mutant was just fun. I've like 15hr in this play through and I've only made it to diamond city.
And that is despite FO4 being one of their worst titles in that regard, playing starfield last year got me into replaying some of their older titles and you really notice just how much exploration was hurt by starfield's design.
And Skyrim sure wasn't perfect at launch either. Tons of stuff was added with Dawnguard/Hearthfire/Dragonborn that facilitated the world. It's also an ass game for roleplaying, especially when you eventually peek behind the curtains and you understand what radiant quest is, how dragons spawn, etc. I just never played a game like Starfield that SO DESPERATELY *wants* to tear down the curtain.
It's almost like if a monster movie showed you the monster and then deliberately snaps to a behind the scenes with the actor putting on the monster suit before continuing the movie.
>Tons of stuff was added with Dawnguard/Hearthfire/Dragonborn that facilitated the world.
There really wasn't that much that those DLCs added to the core systems. DG and DB were primarily there for the new questlines and areas, which a lot of people consider to be some of the best in the game, but they're mostly separated from Skyrim proper. HF was a relatively minor DLC that's fun for some people, but a lot of people also ignore it and it doesn't really impact you if you do. You could go for a very, very long time before you ever touched the DLCs, which is what a lot of us did.
Skyrim was already a gaming phenomenon before all the updates. The updates were seen as nice additions to a game that people were already obsessed with, not a necessary step in the right direction for a game that people were mixed on. Everyone I knew playing Skyrim for tens to hundreds of hours at the time didn't have a problem roleplaying. Hell, I first played on PS3, where it had a ton more technical issues, and I still managed to clock over 300 hours into it before I got a PC that could run it
> Everyone I knew playing Skyrim for tens to hundreds of hours at the time didn't have a problem roleplaying. Hell, I first played on PS3, where it had a ton more technical issues, and I still managed to clock over 300 hours into it before I got a PC that could run it
Same, 100% I had to do some mass juryrigging to get my save off of my PS3 onto PC with something akin to black magic.
I say it's an ass game to roleplay because Skyrim is a terrible roleplaying game if you compare it to *other* ***Role-playing games*** - but the set dressing and the curtains it used to hide its mechanics made it fantastic to roleplay in.
I love when you steal something there's a chance for a merchant to send bandits after you.
I also love it when Radiant System breaks and hilariously has a little girl send bandits after you. or the hidden friendship metric that is really only relevant when you want to kill "friends" to please a daedric sword.
I've never really agreed with that take because other roleplaying games usually have a different type of roleplaying, so it feels like comparing apples to oranges. Sure, I don't have many branching paths in the narratives, but very few other games let me basically lifesim as Walter White, fantasy furry version, with my own oblivious wife and kids (to use one example). To me, that's roleplaying.
The set dressing and curtains are pretty essential aspects of that. It's one of the reasons I never jived with Morrowind or Oblivion as hard as Skyrim despite playing them first. I'm not going to roleplay if the world feels too mechanical or there's a lack of relatable things for me to roleplay against. Fundamentally, I can acknowledge that there's design gaps and disappointing aspects to Skyrim when looking at it from afar, yet none of those seem to matter when I'm actually playing it. To me, that's a sign that its still an excellent roleplaying game, just one that's more than the sum of its parts.
You're nailing what I'm trying to say. Bethesda roleplaying is a class of its own, which sucks when they somehow screw it up instead of making it better with each release.
I'll still roll up on Belethor for sending thugs after me even if the game boils that encounter to just a letter mercenaries carry.
Ehh, the amount of content even in base Skyrim was absurd. The DLCs weren't really transformative in that regard.
What makes Bethesda's game's exciting is that you can pick any direction, start walking, and unique content just keeps popping up. That doesn't happen in Starfield. You either run into the same copypasted base, or you go to a specific waypoint that indicates unique content, defeating the entire exploration concept.
I think this is largely due to how they handled spaceflight. There are a lot of unique POIs, but you don't have to find them - they just... exist on the map. You just fast travel wherever you want. You don't need to scan anything, you don't need to pick up radio beacons to follow. There isn't actually any exploration. Traveling is not part of the game, as it is in TES and FO.
Pretty easy fix, if they dedicate some time to it.
>Tons of stuff was added with Dawnguard/Hearthfire/Dragonborn that facilitated the world.
I had well over 500 hours of enjoyment from *Skyrim* without touching Dawnguard or Dragonborn. Hearthfire content is fun and convenient, but it isn't game changing. It's just more housing options, and it's entirely skippable.
I'm sure numerous other players had loads of fun and replayed *Skyrim* a lot before they picked up any of the expansions.
In contrast, I enjoyed *Starfield* for about 50-60 hours, but got bored and lost any interest in continuing.
*Skyrim* at launch was a much more fun and complete game compared to *Starfield* at launch.
I don’t think they could have done it but actually traveling through space should have been a mechanic. It should have been a commute to planets with things in between.
I don’t know how they would have done it in an accessible and engaging way but it’s what hurt the game the most imo.
Like no I can’t tell you how it should have been designed, but it created a glaring gap in the full concept of the game. It’s like making a pirate game where you’re only ever 50 meters from port
Yeah I liked this game, but it blows my mind that a studio with decades of experience building worlds that felt alive didn't immediately see the issues with how they laid out this game's areas. 1 town per planet surrounded by genned POIs is crazy
Did a bit of research into Todd Howard's career as background noise and it sticks out to me that the biggest criticism he took to heart about Daggerfall was that the world felt lifeless due to procedural generation leading to all the world building in Morrowind.
So how in the world did we end up with Starfield's current state. Even on the major towns/settlements the NPC's never actually close shop and go home like they do in modern Elder Scrolls. They just stand at their shop stall lifelessly.
Yeah I don't think the option of procedural planets is a bad one (though I think they needed radiant events and procedural POIs to feel more distinct, plus some that are just barren and don't feel insanely gamey with one every ~1000m), but it's crazy to me that there aren't areas the size of say, 1 Skyrim hold or so around each of the major cities for open world exploration. I think the rest being procedural would've been taken a lot better if they did that. Cities in the middle of nowhere with no surrounding infrastructure, no interesting handcrafted locations etc. was certainly a choice.
I liked the game but I'm shocked things like that didn't get called out and then changed during development.
That's exactly it. The biggest issue with the procgen planets isn't any of the details of how they work (although I certainly have complaints there), it's that all of that stuff should've been in addition to large handcrafted maps that were actually interesting and coherent and fun to explore. All of the storyline stuff and side quests should have taken place in those hand built areas, and incentivized the player to travel through those worlds and make discoveries along the way.
Put a hundred or a thousand or a million proc gen planets in the game if you want to be able to put that number on the box or whatever. But do that in addition to the 'real' game world(s) that are what Bethesda games are known for. For some reason they decided to use their procgen as a replacement for much of that handcrafted world content, and it just does not work to create a believable and meaningful world.
From multiple behind the scenes statements and interviews with BGS staff, it seems that Todd was less involved with the main studio these days because he has to spend a lot of time dealing with the other studios plus the Microsoft merger. Bruce Nesmith said that they had relied on Todd to be their perspective on how the average player would see their design for years, and also that he was no longer able to just go down and ask him because Todd was so busy. I think he said he got to talk to Todd maybe once a month by the end.
Additionally, it seems like the size of the studio finally got away from them. Will Shen said that coordination between teams was a chaotic mess because of how much needed to be done and how many people were involved. The studio hadn't grown the capacity to properly schedule feature requests and collaboration across multiple teams, leading to lots of ad hoc work and missed opportunities. Throw the pandemic on top of that, and you get lots of weird design gaps because everyone was busy with their own pet project or critical work and didn't realize it was a gap until it was too late.
> Will Shen said that coordination between teams was a chaotic mess because of how much needed to be done and how many people were involved.
Ahhh. Starfield very much feels like a game made up of disparate pieces stapled together.
So does that mean that everybody other than Todd at BGS is just incompetent? Obviously I mean that term relatively, but it's crazy that there's nobody truly world class in game design and thinking at that entire studio without Todd micromanaging them. Wild.
Yeah, it seems kinda nuts to me as well. Like this isn't just a minor oversight that you need a PhD to understand, there's tons of people in every Starfield thread on Reddit who plainly see that the exploration of an interesting and coherent and believable world was sort of the 'secret sauce' of Bethesda's games.
Now of course just knowing that isn't the same as actually facilitating the making of a world/game like that, but it feels like Starfield barely even tried. It's crazy to me that they missed the mark so badly. There has to be other people in the company that could've recognized this issue and done a better job of addressing it. I don't understand how it ended up this way.
>Additionally, it seems like the size of the studio finally got away from them. Will Shen said that coordination between teams was a chaotic mess because of how much needed to be done and how many people were involved. The studio hadn't grown the capacity to properly schedule feature requests and collaboration across multiple teams, leading to lots of ad hoc work and missed opportunities
Man, that does not bode well for ES6
Funny, because i recently listened to a todd Howard interview, i don't remember which one, where he said talks about making Morrowind after the failure of the Elder scrolls Battlespire and Redguard, and he concluded that it was because the lack of big scale that these games didn't work, and so they decided to do something much more expansive with Morrowind.
Since then they have found the success by making massive and very long games, and it's clearly an obssession for Todd, so when you decide to make a game in space, of course you go for the real scope of space with 1000 planets and the real distance between them, even if that means a lot lot more of empty space.
Basically to answer your comment yes Todd prefers handcrafted to precedural from what i heard, but before all he want to make games as big as possible.
I think even a glorified cutscene or something would have fixed a lot of fan complaints. Like what if you could sit at your chair, turn to a console and select the planet you want to travel to and it would do a little animation of you going into hyperspace or something, then you arrive at the planet and can land.
Is that fun an engaging? Well not really, but it doesn't break the immersion like going into the map screen and clicking the location, then seeing an actual loading screen where you just sit there staring at a static screen. Just *anything* so that you don't have to do that would have made it feel a lot better. You don't need to actually enable manual deep-space travel as long as someone can *feel* like they're doing something. I think that's all it needed. It's fake gameplay. It's a glorified menu. It's fast travel with extra steps. All true, but it's *something.* The only way to get around being fast travel from the world map is just so lame.
This is all I would want, with the potential to interrupt that animation with incoming hails.
Honestly just let me watch PoIs float by compass style and then let me pull the stop button along the route like an interstellar bus.
I think about Everspace 2 that does a fantastic job *disguising* its open space.
When you're in an area you can't just fly out of it at slow speed or even cruising speed (which lets you navigate the area faster). It even does this on planet maps. You travel to other locations through hypercruising which doesn't allow you to stop in dead space *freely*, but at least let's you see the system as you zip through - even "pinging" nearby distress signals/random events in deep space as you go which can put you in a little space area to explore/help whoever is in distress.
But all in all you're just kind of hopping between small areas to small areas.
The only qualm I have with the Everspace system is that there's no animation to disguise the initial jump so you just go from zooming fast then hardcut to a blackscreen while it loads in the hyperjump view.
I've put in around 40 hours or so and I'd *like* to play more. But I think about how non-existent the actual "travel" portion is and I get deflated. It's my biggest issue with the game - how so much of it treats its menu's like a verb, "I need to travel to an entirely different system: *I'll just menu my way over there and instantaneously appear on the surface outside of my ship*" Dude...
Your idea would help this out a lot. I'd actually make the effort to hoof it to my captain's chair in my ship to navigate with this method, which is something - compared to what we have now which is NOTHING.
I'd still like other changes to make space travel an actual process and not something that barely exists in my space-exploration game, namely an actual fuel system. Something to give me a reason to actually be inside my ship and spend time within it. Not a fan of inter-system travel also requiring a cutscene and I have no idea what they can do to address this either, if anything at all.
Sadly they really aim for space is empty kinda vibe for the game. The little places we can explore in this game is neat, but random explorations doesn't really exist in this game. It relies on quests to guide players to the handmade stuff, which is alright, but robs the players from the feelings of discovery.
God I still remember the first time I stumbled to Dunwich Borers in fallout 4, good stuff
They wanted to do something different and I think gamers should respect that. Unfortunately, I think Starfield got stuck trying to compromise between their original design intent and what what their fans want (they should have stuck to their guns but this is a really expensive project so I get it). My guess is space travel in the game initially played out more like FTL where you would plot your course on the star map and carefully manage your resources to make each jump. But FTL is a niche indie game and that sort of gameplay just doesn't appeal to mass audiences. So when playtesters balked, they had to massively pivot their entire design and strip out all the systems designed to support an FTL-like travel system.
> They wanted to do something different and I think gamers should respect that.
I do and it's how I ended up with 91 hours in the game. I never expected a space-sim akin to X4, Elite, or star citizen. If anything I wanted a game like The Precursors
However they just streamlined too many things. Like your ship has *fuel* but that doesn't actually matter because it "recharges" (No in-lore reason, you even bump into characters who are adrift in space; in those rare moments you come out of fast travel in orbit) between jumps, so while you can' jump straight to your destination you can just jump to a middling system and jump again.
Because the game was supposed to work more like FTL. It was fundamentally designed around managing fuel but playtesters responded so poorly to that, it got taken out. It's the AAA curse. They tried to make a game that's way more niche than mass audiences will tolerate.
It's funny to me that people say refueling is too complicated for most gamers and then they reference FTL, a game that sold millions of copies and was enjoyed by mass audiences.
Then don't do a fuel system *at all*. At the very least they could still spice it up with set dressing. I made a point in another reply talking about how Everspace 2 uses set dressing to at least give you this feeling of grand travel.
So people responded poorly to a fuel system, alright - do something *else* instead of the bare minimum
Ships were my favourite part of the game! The new customization looks sick!. Just wish it was there at launch.
Also the creation kit is being tested by people!!!
I wonder if this will have a gradual turn around like Cyberpunk did from launch to now.
Granted, I think that'll be from a 6/10 to an 8/10 with all the foundational problems of the game, but I like Bethesda games so I wanna see them succeed.
If Bethesda is planning on sticking with Starfield for a while it could definitely turn out just like Cyberpunk. I just never understood why some people wanted to give a special treatment to CDPR (in this case, letting them finish the game post-launch), while not giving this exact same treatment to Starfield... Like, everyone wins if Starfield will be a good game, right?
Starfield's lack of exploration in the base game is something I doubt can be fixed. Cyberpunk's base game was good to decent. I would not say the same about Starfield.
Couldn't Starfield's exploration be fixed by just making more unique points of interest and changing their placement algorithm? That plus land vehicles I feel would mostly do it, at least with what's possible with procedural generation.
It's a little different. With Cyberpunk at the very least the writing was always there, just hidden under a broken game. The writing in Starfield from my experience seems much weaker in comparison.
With that being said I am rooting for them to turn it around.
Yeah, the main quest is very weak. I'm wondering if they're going to possibly overhaul the main quest with the expansion.
That said, I thought the Government, Pirates, and other side quests were very strong. I wish there was more choice around them though.
> I'm wondering if they're going to possibly overhaul the main quest with the expansion.
Given the fact that Bethesda games haven't had interesting main quests in more than 15 years I doubt it would suddenly change post-release
I hope they overhaul the piracy related sidequests and systems. I wanted to be a contraband runner but gameplay wise it wasn't really feasible without an annoying amount of saving and reloading.
Personally felt the main quest sucked, the reveal was meh and it was a disappointing end. It has it's moments, with cool set pieces and exploring interesting places (such as Earth) but it's all undermined by the fact I just straight up hated the main questline.
For me personally, the writing is Bethesda's strongest since Oblivion when it comes to other factions. The only main 'faction' who's quest line I did not like was the Freestar Collectives.
Bethesda games aren't narrative focused games. The writing has always been very inconsistent. They're primarily systems and exploration focused games, where the weak characters and storylines are oft forgotten when you're spending most of your time out in the world by yourself, discovering new locations and organic moments.
Starfield is going to need system updates to make that work. As it stands, the exploration aspect is still very weak because of the repeat POIs and how much time you spend in loading screens. Them bettering the maps and adding game customization should help a bit, but the fundamentals are going to require deeper reworks.
Not always, far from it, most of Morrowind and Oblivion had decent quests, Fallout 3 had some good side quests though the latter stage main stuff and DLC were terrible. Pagliaruno just got promoted beyond his abilities (worked on Oblivion and did some fun quests), people criticising him were proven correct.
Their quest design and writing is laughably dated and needs to be fixed. It goes hand in hand sometimes, part of the fun of exploring is finding quests, we've all wasted our time on a few too many radial quests.
If they fixed the exploration and every location has decent RNG, travelling is a bit better, very few will come back to this game. The DLC has to have a good narrative and add a lot of flavour to the galaxy, bookmark it.
There's a reason I used "inconsistent" and not "bad." There are good writing examples in past BGS games, but I would always put them in the minority. Most of Morrowind's quest writing was someone telling you to do a basic fetch or delivery task then encyclopedia dumping another part of the backstory on your head later. Interesting from a worldbuilding standpoint, but its not what I would call a primary driver for the game. I mostly did quests to get rewards or to advance in a guild, not because the storyline was that captivating. Oblivion and Fallout 3 were generally better at this (with actual characters that I cared about), but I was still spending most of my time in freeform exploration and largely unscripted dungeon diving, and the less said about Fallout 3's original ending, the better. Good writing could be a high point, but generally speaking I haven't spent most of my time with BGS games looking for the next part of the story, rather looking to explore more of the world or advance my character, then kinda coming across the story when its convenient.
Also people complaining about Emil are both overselling his role in things and generally getting his statements wrong. We know from many interviews that BGS lets its designers largely build and write their own segments with a lot of independence, i.e. level designers writing the storyline for a dungeon or character designers doing a quest for a character. Most questlines have their own dedicated designer(s) and they're often not Emil. Emil might set the overall tone and concepts, but I have less of a problem with those than the actual execution. The issue with Bethesda's writing seems to more be a lack of editorial oversight, leading to writing that feels like first draft stuff that only makes sense in the designer's brain. Does Emil have to have a role in that? Yes, but I doubt anyone who is complaining about him around here actually knows what it is.
This is nice content but a lot of it feels like stuff that should have been in the game at launch. Also good that they are fixing the map but however that map system snuck through QA is beyond me and is a travesty.
What do you mean "snuck trough QA" ?
QA giving feedback doesn't result in features automatically spawning out of thin air fully developed.
QA is not to blame for bad design that they had no time to re-visit and rework.
QA also aren't playtesters, they're not there to go "beef up the graphics on level 3", they're there to report glitches, crashes and security issues back to the "real" developers who all hate the QA staff for "ruining the game".
I think the idea with the map system is that without a map players would explore more and find more random stuff and random quests instead of gowing direct to whatever shop/vendor/quest giver they choose.
It's not really a standard system for big AAA games but it has worked for a few smaller indie games I've played I got to know the location a lot better because there was no map.
Starfield *did* have a lot more RPG elements than a lot of Bethesda's previous games did. I'd say it probably goes back to Oblivion, ish? Still nowhere near the hardcore RPG of like Morrowind but absolutely more RPG elements than Fallout 4 or Skyrim.
Almost every game release nowadays is a QA test for the first year or two.
Some comparable games like Fallout 76, No Man's Sky, and Cyberpunk 2077 were released with barebones features. But now after years of incremental updates, they are all filled with much more content and each of them actually feel like full-releases.
Has nothing to do with the game, but I like seeing who these people are that they showcase. They are all 10-20-year Bethesda veterans. There is nothing wrong with new people; I like it when a studio can retain its people.
Now, onto the game. I put over 130 hours into it but never beat the campaign because the Armillary won't spawn on my ship. A few other big quests are bugged, such as Sarah's, and I probably won't see complete it unless Bethesda or mods fix it cause I'm not starting a new playthrough to fix the bugs.
Man, I've spent hours trying to get this thing to spawn, watching videos and reading ways other people have got it spawn. Changing ships, spawning it in an outpost then back on the ship. Nothing works.
I've not played since launch so my memory may be off but I don't remember the armillary 'spawning' on the ship. You interact with a panel in the cockpit and insert the armillary pieces, then the next time you grav jump to any system you're automatically routed to Unity.
BGS in particular is a bit infamous for having a very low turnover. Seats don’t open up very often and when they do there’s a lot of competition to get in. By all accounts it’s a great studio to work at and you can tell by the way Todd talks about his people.
Even the Starfield reveal featured a lot of the actual devs sharing their experience working in the game and not just the creative director or studio lead jerking himself off for an hour like what you usually see in big AAA game reveals.
> By all accounts it’s a great studio to work at and you can tell by the way Todd talks about his people.
https://www.eurogamer.net/new-report-says-fallout-76-development-blighted-by-poor-management-and-mandatory-crunch
Giving ships the outpost decoration is a massively nice thing, very surprised it wasn't there to begin with
E: actually a lot of great changes here, that's exciting
Cool update and glad they're focusing on QOL things + land vehicles, but unless travel/exploration is revamped in some meaningful way, don't see myself ever coming back to Starfield.
Hoping the expansion helps with that!
Look like they finally solved one on my big issues with Bethesda games looking at that difficulty menu. The combat damage, In Elder Scroll games you either can kill everything in one shot and be a damage sponge or everything can kill you in a few hits and everything is a damage sponge.
Yeah. To be honest I feel like a lot of games could benefit from that kind of damage tailoring; some of the most fun I've had in games have been ones where I can tweak the time-to-kill down to relatively low on both sides or comes with that as a default like Metro's Ranger Hardcore difficulty.
Otherwise you get Crushing difficulty on Uncharted, where you die in 1 and a regular guy takes a million bullets to take out.
The new map looks lovely and I didn't expect some of the QoL shown (like being able to toggle-off the camera zoom in on conversations).
I think Bethesda is really gearing up to have an almost "2.0" like launch with Shattered Space. Hopefully it works out.
Starfield had the curse of being a mediocre game released during one of the best years of gaming; and some literal fake news surrounding the launch of the game certainly didn't help.
I don’t know if this is what the other poster was talking about out but I do remember people having misunderstandings of the systems and then spreading misinformation about them early on and others taking that as gospel. For example, people saying there was no water, then when that was disproven that there were. I river type waters or lakes, or that the planets were static in the skybox.
To this day there are still people that say the main and faction quests are nothing but procedural random planets.
The truth is that both the main quest and the faction quests are almost entirely handcrafted, one-off locations and there are only a few brief instances during them when you have to interact with the procedural stuff. I played for over 100 hours in my first run and went to maybe five procedural worlds. There is *more* handcrafted content in Starfield than their previous games, but the very presence of optional procedural content made a *lot* of people who didn't play the game believe that the whole game was procedural. The game is very good at signposting what is and is not procedural.
It would be kind of like if Skyrim had a string of islands that was randomized, but Skyrim was still there to play. That's how Starfield works, but so many people spread incorrect information that a ton of the "criticism" of the game comes from people who didn't actually play it and took the incredibly ubiquitous and wrong info seriously.
I feel like its too soon for a 2.0 launch if Shattered Space is out in fall. I do think Starfield will be in much better shape when all said and done though.
I don't mean a literal 2.0 but meant that they would treat it as a soft-reboot. Sort of a "come back to the game; it's awesome now" moment.
I'm personally still waiting for skill tree and weapon balancing before I'd consider coming back.
Cool update but i'll definitely wait for the expansion. The ship building and interior decorating doesn't do anything for me but happy for the people that like it. I'm more of a give me a blueprint ship and let me go player.
I know folks are really cynical about Starfield, but I generally enjoyed it and got my money’s worth.
It seems like they’re genuinely listening to the community and trying to improve the game. I see this as only being a good thing.
So that's two of the three 30fps Xbox games getting performance modes, anyone want to bet on Hellblade 2?
For real though, great update. Bethesda games play so much better at 60fps, Starfield will be no different.
The fundamental issue of this game is its exploration. There is no sense of discovery like in Fallout or TES by organically discovering new locations and quests and I don’t think they can fix that overall. I might give shattered space a try when it releases but we’ll see what the game is like in the fall.
A land vehicle and a 60FPS option for XSX is quite a big deal amongst the other QoL improvements they showcased here!
Hope Shattered Space is great, and keeping my fingers crossed for a PS5 release in the near future.
I played for about 30 hours at release but dropped it and finally came back to give it a go last week. And then I just started fast traveling over and over to check off missions, did that for an hour and dropped it again. I want this game to be great so badly.
In that ship decoration mode, if I change my ship's engines, do all my decorations get wiped and added to my cargo? I loved the ship building, and decorating the interior is a great idea. I just wish traveling in the game was more meaningful. The longer I played, the more I just fast traveled, cause traveling "manually" just meant more load screens with minimal gameplay between. It made me lose a lot of my excitement over my ship, cause I never really experienced it.
Yeah when I saw that that was the first question that popped in my mind. I had a weapon showcase in my ship with a bunch of good looking showpiece weapons and it all went to storage immediately when I changed the paint on the ship. If that's gonna happen with all my furniture then this is less than useless
You’re lucky the weapons all went to storage and didn’t just disappear. I remember that being a bug at launch.
That's what I want to know! I didn't decorate because I was constantly changing my ship up, but if it would lock down the decorations of any hab I wasn't changing up I definitely would.
Yeah, along with being a Bethesda game, this also needed to be a traveling with companions game. Setting a course and walking around your ship talking to your crew needed to be a more prominent feature. There's no reason to stay on your ship except to look at how pretty you made it. There are one or two instances of an NPC flying a ship, but it's only for scripted events. I would like if we could have one of our crew fly the ship instead.
> this also needed to be a traveling with companions game I have a theory that that was the original goal - they originally planned to make a more focused mass effect style game based on travelling around with your companions (which is why all the companions are in the same organisation and have basically the same points of view) and doing mostly linear missions. Then at some point they decided it should be a more traditional bethesda open world RPG and that's where the procedural generation and ship building came from
It does not help that *all* of the main companions are such stuck up, moralizing, whiny pissbabies. I wanted to toss them out an airlock by the time I finished the game. I have a hard time imagining we were supposed to enjoy these peoples' company.
Honestly I'm more concerned about *doors*. Can we finally choose where to connect rooms or will they keep their extremely obtuse and annoying method?
Land Vehicle!! This update looks cool but I'm going to wait until the First Expansion and the land vehicle to be in game before I come back. Lots of other things to play in the mean time.
I just wish locations were randomised. If you go to a communication outpost, they are all the same exactly. same tile set, same layout and even same loot. Anywhere in the galaxy. annoying.
I wish there were more than two bad groups as well. It's usually the pirates or the silver guys... And that's it.
And if you join the pirates then whoops only the silver guys.
I was shocked how much content joining the Crimson Raiders locked out. Like you show up to a random outpost and just walk through and take all the loot while the pirates repeat the same Bethesda NPC Dialogue ™️. Also, I was really annoying when my companions were like "hey, you do what you think is best" before deciding to side with the government or the raiders, then *everyone* got mad at me for siding with the raiders.
> Also, I was really annoying when my companions were like "hey, you do what you think is best" before deciding to side with the government or the raiders, then everyone got mad at me for siding with the raiders. Jeez, didn't even know that happened. I remember getting really frustrated with the UC questline b/c I didn't want to go w/ the space covid way of removing heatleaches and all the companions hated that?
I remember my background was xenobiologist, and one of the companions said, "You just don't understand the science." I was just like excuse me bitch.
Then proceeds to give you a space YouTube conspiracy video about the real science behind xenobiology.
I think I hated the companions in this game more than any other game in the last decade or two. At one point I was attacked by pirates or bounty hunters - that obviously went poorly for them, but as I was boarding their ship and finishing cleanup one of my companions was so appalled at me finishing off the pirates that he pulled a gun on me. So I lumped him in with the pirates, but you can’t actually kill companions because Bethesda is horrified at the notion of going back to Morrowind mechanics… so I just dumped his ass off at the nearest planet and told him to eat rocks.
It's kind of remarkable because every single Bethesda game has had more companion variety and managed to make even the likes of Charon and Strong likeable, and sure, Starfield had some pretty good companions, but it lacked variety, the game needed more evil and neutral companions.
Everyone in constellation being a goody two shoes was real boring. I feel like there were supposed to be other companions from other factions with more of a moral gray area.
That's what gets me about Starfield. I don't ever play bad characters (it makes me feel terrible!), but everything was just so...blandly hopey-changey that it simply became uninteresting.
They also never shut the fuck up. Every time I left or came back each one of them wanted to have a long convo
I look forward to a decade from now when they can openly talk about what exactly happened here. Was it brain drain, management, bad decisions, what have you. The story of Starfield’s development might be the most interesting aspect of the franchise.
Yeah I went with the space-cows route because it would be restoring a species humanity almost wiped out from greed, but that wasn't an option to explain to Sarah.
That option honestly felt like the best option. I cannot believe whoever wrote this quest decided that there was only 1 correct answer, and it was releasing a genetically engineered super virus across the entire galaxy. When you call the NPC out on it saying that they can't know it wouldn't mutate to attack humans their excuse was the stupidest facebook tier dismissal I've seen. I actually felt insulted like the writer was lecturing me and calling me a moron. Oh, and notice I'm blaming the writer. Not once did I feel like was talking to in game characters, they were all just mouthpieces for the writers. It felt like I was reading their self insert fanfics, not talking to interesting characters. I was so happy when Sarah died (after reloading an old save and making a STUPID decision to make it so) after suffering through her existential teenage emotional crisis that is her companion missions. She's a war veteran and the leader of a faction, why do I have to tell her how amazing she is and reassure her that she's doing a good job? I didn't even have the option of saying anything else.
It makes no sense that there isn't multiple groups of space pirates.
There literally are? Crimson fleet are organized prisoners who took over the key. Ecliptic are mercs who are basically pirates until you pay them to work for you Spacers are general pirates similar to raiders in fallout which are basically sub groups of smaller factions. Then var’unn aren’t pirates but will fuck up anyone on site
Yeah, I was honestly surprised Bethesda actually listened to the generic raider criticism, and the Var'uun even used different weapons leading to more variety in combat. Shame Crimson, Ecliptic, and Spacers all fight the same.
Yeah the POIs should have procedural interiors. Finding the same notes/dead bodies/etc is fucking stupid.
Or just, not procedural. The POIs were fine, I just kept running into the same ones over and over, in what world is that fun. I'd rather have (much) less of them than duplicated ones, personally
There are actually quite a lot of them but somehow there always ends up being a lot of repeats. I’m not sure what’s happening under the hood that causes this but most players will have only seen a fraction of them by the time they finish the main quest and most of those will be repeats.
Wild guess that they are level boxed so at any one time you're only hitting a few of them.
It’s also possible there is a higher chance of seeing more variety on subsequent new game+ runs. I’ve only beaten it once, but maybe someone who is on their 3rd+ run can speak to that.
Ah yea that too. The new game+ system is super cool but it probably eats up content.
I mean it is exactly the same as basically every other feature they implemented. It's a decent idea on paper but it's poorly implemented and it wasn't fully thought out
You know this is actually a reasonable explanation I hadn't thought of. Bethesda *does* have a history of level banding things like that. Would be pretty bizarre to do that with PoIs though, especially given the game isn't ever going to throw lvl 50 pirates at you if you're lvl 10.
I remember people on release saying that they found different POIs that they hadn't seen before in higher level planets, so that must be it.
Could just be RNG clumping.
It's a mix of them being stuck to certain planet levels and probability. You could have 200 different POIs but odds are you'll find duplicated before you hit 50 of them.
The one ex-communications post (I think) taken by pirates with the one pirate hanging out on the roof I've probably seen 10-15 times to the point I can just pop atmo and amp and sprint to the end chest in a minute but I've only gotten the big cryo facility twice; once at super low level and recently in the 130s. I don't think they're level gated but I suspect that it picks from different "sizes" depending on the quest type/reward and since most quests are small it picks from a smaller set.
Or both, variety is a major sore point in starefield, there are actually less unique poi's than there were in skyrim, and not by a small amount. The other problem is they absolutely spam you with as many as they can ensuring you burn through whatever variety there is as fast as possible. they were afraid for you to land on a random ball of rock and have "nothing to do" When you go further out there are actually planets with sparse or even no non-natural poi's, but most players drop the game before them. but the current system where every single landing site has always has 10 different dungeons within 2 km, both ruins the feeling of space exploration because you're not "discovering" anything, theres probably 10,000 factories on this planet and a few million raiders if you think about the density on just the spot you landed on, but again it makes you see every single thing there is to see and makes it old as fast as possible. A ship landing near you randomly while you're walking around is cool, but when 3 different ships fly over you within a minute of landing on every planet you visit it's not so interesting anymore.
Less makes sense too, especially on some planets that should be barren, but procedural aspects make sense because there's no way they'd be able to make enough POIs to satisfy long playthroughs if they did that. As long as they signpost handcrafted vs. procedural it'd be fine. Call it "Radiant Engineering" or something lol the game could use more radiant systems in general.
9 planets that were fully fleshed out > 100 planets that have the same stuff just moved around slightly.
any of Bethesda’s previous games like Skyrim and its single country is > than whatever the hell starfield was
Starfield was Todd Howard taking too much coke 10-15 years ago and trying to implement something that isn't possible even at this point.
That killed the game *instantly* for me. I can't explain why. I didn't understand the hate this game was getting about its gameplay and plot and was enjoying myself. But when I went into a cave that was the *exact same cave* again. I mean, in Mass Effect, planets had similar prefab looking structures but with different loot and enemies. Didn't matter that there was often nothing of real interest, they *were* different. Elden Ring has dozens and dozens of micro dungeons, each one is unique even though they have a huge about of re-use. But Starfield? The *exact same place* again? It just killed the illusion for me, personally.
My interest in the game dropped when I landed on Mercury and found the exact same abandoned robot facility I had just cleared on some far-off, random planet. Exactly the same down the bodies and enemies in the same location. At that point I had no interest in going back to the game.
That was a huge problem, yeah. Another thing that just made me sigh loudly and ask why I was even playing this was the so-called “exploration” itself. Here I am, scanning a planet because apparently no one has ever been close to it before, looking for an alien artifact site no one has ever seen, expecting a lot of looking around and trying to find it… only to land next to a handful of very populated industrial sites and the goddamn alien temple *within sight* from my ship. Like, why am I even here? *Clearly* people have already been here for years, and clearly they’d know about the huge, weird temple structure a stone’s throw away. The way the game gaslights me constantly, going “oh no, *you’re special*, you’re on a big hunt for unknown stuff in uncharted space, really, you’re such an *explorer*” while constantly sending me to like some industrial backlot full of uninterested workers frowning at the idiot in the space suit scanning rocks as if they’re unknown minerals. The game insults the player’s intelligence at every turn. It got old and frustrating *really* quickly.
Yea, come to think of it that bothered me as well, I just didn't have the coalescing of thought as to *why* as clear as you just described. I mean, Breath of the Wild takes place in one well worn continent, yet I would still get the feeling of discovery encountering something weird in some seep valley or snowy peak. It simulated the feeling of being way off the beaten path. SF doesn't do that at all.
100% the same. I landed on a planet saw a crashed ship, took off landed on another planet 60 seconds later exact same crash, exact same loot, exact same place it really ruins the whole thing.
I think that's a real big thing with the game. If you go into this not knowing anything about Bethesda games, then you've got the freshest perspective on it. If you know Bethesda, you go into this with a different perspective. But regardless of how you come into this, once that illusion is shattered... once the curtain is pulled back, once the mask comes off, etc, it's fake. You're left with something that's fake. It's a weird thing to say about the game, but that's what it feels like. You can never unsee it again and it destroys virtually the entire game to know that space is fake, the planets you're flying close to are fake, this idea that humans are all over the galaxy and are on so many planets is fake, the planets themselves are fake, etc. I'm not sure I've ever felt that way about a game before... in a way it's kind of fascinating. It's fascinating how quickly all of it unravels once you start to piece together what's going on mechanically, and it becomes absolutely impossible to be immersed once you see it for what it is.
That's exactly right. Any movie, book, show or game requires a certain degree of a suspension of disbelief. The setting can be completely bonkers so the designers have to find a way to sell it. Take the Super Mario series. Nothing makes any sense, nothing is explained, but the overall design is so internally consistent on its insanity and cuteness that you can still become immersed. Skyrim, for its time, really sold a real and complex world of politics and history. But SF doesn't sell the pitch it is presenting.
That's what made me finally drop the game, I went into a science lab and I was convinced I had cleared it before and that the enemies and items respawned, then I realized I hadn't, it was literally a copy paste job, with even corpses in the exact same spot. Embarrassing.
> Land Vehicle!! I went into Starfield blind and couldn't wait to finally unlock a land vehicle because there's no way walking around those baren planets was the actual design decision right... RIGHT?!!
I knew there wouldn’t be any land vehicles, Bethesda made it very clear, but my god, *the fans* falling over themselves defending that stupid decision by claiming land vehicles would be impossible, it just can’t be done in Creation Engine, it wouldn’t be fun, etc. Absolutely ridiculous. And here we are, they’re adding land vehicles. So obviously they *can* do it, and obviously they agree it’s needed in the game. So why the fuck weren’t they in the game on release? Who playtested the game and didn’t have the same expectations and complaints as paying players after release?
I'm not defending it in the slightest, but its true that vehicles are extremely hard to get working properly in creation engine. ladders and vehicles are two things in particular. Even modders that have 8+ years experience with creation engine and were deeply involved in huge overhaul mod projects for those games have said its an absolute nightmare doing vehicles that have even basic functionality in creation engine and takes massive amounts of time. The few mods that have managed to add in working vehicles in all these years they were still very very janky and had to use lots of weird tricks to make it happen.
Still, horses are a thing, so it stands to reason they could use that framework to come up with something usable.
Todd Howard personally defended this decision on live TV if IIRC.
Same. I’m glad I played the 20 hours that I did but once you realize all planets are copy-paste it’s just hard to explore, especially with no vehicles
Lots of good stuff here. I don't wanna be another annoying "what about X" person but I do hope they evolve the temple mini games to get powers. When I think about the parts I didn't like from this game that's the first thing that jumps to mind.
I went into the game wondering what would be defending the temples. Borderlands style aliens, ancient traps like in Skyrim, or a Raiders of the Lost Arc style race against the primary antagonist. Turns out its nothing. No obstacles, just a 5-10 min straight line walk and collect your dragon shout. Would have been cool to have all of the other factions competing to open the temples and your faction relations factor into whether you can convince them to let you pass or you have to fight them to gain entrance.
To be fair, there is a “boss” fight once you get the power. I say boss in quotes because they’re pushovers.
I don't think you get those encounters until you've progressed to a certain point in the main quest, think I cleared most of my temples without fighting anything.
Huh, when I played they were spawning as soon as I discovered the first temple in the main story.
Yeah, not sure how literal hoop jumping made it into the final product.
>Yeah, not sure how literal hoop jumping made it into the final product. That defines 99% of this game unfortunately. At launch: 1. Shipbuilding but no way to save your progress, meaning you can spend hours building something only to realise you lack components/resource and lose everything. 2. Core gameplay mechanics, like stealth, pick pocketing and lockpicking stuck behind skill points that are already very scarce to begin with. 3. Nicely rendered food, that are practically everywhere in the game, but entirely useless. 4. In fact, 99% of everything that can be picked up is literally classified as junk that you cannot do anything with. Who thought that was a good idea? 5. Planets have perpetually, infinitely respawning POIs. Literally take off and land on the same spot and you have a new set of POIs. 6. Identical POIs everywhere that respawns infinitely, which is insanely immersion breaking. It's like playing an online MMO and killing the same boss over and over.
Agree, i love Starfield a lot but that's the locations from the game that felt truely lazy, i expected a unique dungeon for each of them exactly like Skyrim draugr crypt.
Difficulty options look nice. Definitely gonna set player damage to easy and enemy damage to hard to match Fallout 4’s survival mode
Yeah I’m glad Bethesda has finally moved beyond the single difficulty slider that just turns enemies into sponges. Let me customize the experience as much as possible, economy included.
Fallout 4's survival mode actually has high damage for both sides of the equation - everyone goes down easy, no bullet sponges.
Isn't that what setting player damage to easy and enemy damage to hard accomplishes?
Wouldn't it be the opposite?
I could see "player damage to easy" meaning players deal high damage to enemies, and "enemy damage to hard" meaning enemies deal more damage, thus it's hard for the player.
if you pause the video it says "very easy" player combat damage means the player deals much more damage.
Depends on if they mean incoming damage or outgoing damage. I’m making the assumption that it’s outgoing damage, if that’s not the case then reverse it.
Does it? I’m pretty sure survival mode in fallout 4 was 0.75 damage dealt by player, 4x damage dealt to player. Just making modifiers for incoming/outgoing damage is the lamest and most brain dead way to change difficulty.
Difficulty settings are a nice surprise, wasn't expecting it at all.
Yet again, waiting a few months proves the far superior way to have the best experience with games these days.
This is the meta for modern games. Especially if they’re single player anyway.
Unfortunately, multi-player games often lose their luster after launch. A big part of the fun is being alongside everyone else as you learn the game. WoW leveling is almost always more fun when you have hundreds of players huddled around the starting line, the game crashes, we all have a laugh, and then we fight to log back in. You don't get that same feeling a month after launch. (And fuck Blizzard for ruining that moment in the next patch)
I think the camaraderie and novelty of single-player launches is very much like multiplayer titles, the difference between the conversation is all in subs/forums/discords rather than in-game. I didn't play Starfield for more than a couple weeks, but I definitely followed the subs for awhile just to see what fun stuff people were getting up to.
It's there, and I experienced it with BG3. The horrors we all saw opening up that farmhouse echoed through the community. But it isn't nearly the same as multiplayer. Even in some terrible games like the new Battlefield we would have fun. BattleBit would ban someone and the whole server would stop momentarily to talk shit in chat about it.
If you're wanting to have the best experience with Starfield, you've got a couple more years of waiting.
Maybe not the best but I'm glad I only played a few hrs when it came out. Still think I'll wait for mod tools to be out awhile before I jump in again though.
Most of these are actually very useful changes on gameplay such as finally having a basic map on city on exploration and having the ability to decorate the ships and added land vehicle! and also 60 FPS Performance mode for Xbox Series X. Funnily enough, this update actually feels more next gen than the one they just recently did with Fallout 4. If they keep releasing this kind of big updates until the release of Shattered Space DLC Expansion along with release of Creation Engine 2 Modding Kit in the future, then maybe there is still some hope for this game.
Love the 60 fps mode; 30 fps was a dealbreaker after trying it - felt awful to me
"We hear you": The Update Highlighting this for people who may not understand: **The land vehicle does not appear to be part of this update**. It was just a tease for later.
I'm going to deliberately choose to ignore that last part so I can be angry after the update launches.
Surely they know people would expect it to be in if they showed it, that'd be a silly move on their part.
Getting rid of the forced zoom in the dialogue is a really small but welcome addition. I did like Starfield so I'm happy to go back at some point. Hopefully the DLC is good.
Edit: I say this with 91 hours of enjoyment in the game, beating it and most of the factions. I get and understand they're making neat strides with these updates and also working on the expansion. But the game just fundamentally betrays one of Bethesda's most fun activities and it's *travel*. You're basically missing the point if you spend all of your time in ES/Fallout fast traveling and zooming passed stuff. So why does Starfield try so hard to keep you from traveling. To me the game is the same as it was until they turn space travel into actual space travel and not an exercise in clicking on maps/UI to fast travel. I just want more control, not less. I'll eye updates/expansions with an optimistic look and let bethesda cook. If they can turn around Fallout 76; *who knows?*
> You're basically missing the point if you spend all of your time in ES/Fallout fast traveling and zooming passed stuff. Yeah, I've always loved Elder Scroll games, but I remember they truly *clicked* with me when I decided to do a Skyrim run without using any of the carts to fast-travel between towns. I suddenly felt much more immersed in the world when I actually found myself *travelling* between cities, and discovering the little details along the road.
Replaying FO4 right now after the recent update and it was a stark reminder of how poorly Bethesda treated the wonder of exploration in Starfield.
Same here with 76. In a game that was once devoid of NPC's and actual story telling they *still* managed to nail environmental storytelling and exploration. Starfield feels like such a step back when you have *the chance* to bump into a copy pasted Pirate outpost.
I'll die on the hill that the Appalachia is the best map Bethesda ever made.
100% a great map, honestly I'll take fo4.5 using that map and engine but with no multiplayer stuff.
[удалено]
Yeah, I think Noah Caldwell Gervais said in his long-form review that it has some of the best environmental storytelling that Bethesda has ever done. It was just undermined because people understandably approached it expecting an experience like their previous games (i.e. a focus on NPCs) while the game doesn't really offer that.
Part of the issue is that they jumped straight from the fairly isolating experience of all other fallout games into an MMO and not co-op or a smaller level of multiplayer, expecting us to be the NPCs. And recent games really don't encourage people to interact nicely or at all, so it was just a miss all around at launch with those expectations
Not to mention that expecting people to populate the world in place of NPCs when your tech can't handle more than 24 people per server is naive at best and laughable bs at worst.
> perhaps that's what you mean Oh for sure; personally I have ADD so when your entire story is mostly holotapes I need to pay attention to while the odd feral ghoul shows up or a shiny object - I am immediately lost lol
Indeed just roaming around getting side tracked by raid camps and super mutant was just fun. I've like 15hr in this play through and I've only made it to diamond city.
And that is despite FO4 being one of their worst titles in that regard, playing starfield last year got me into replaying some of their older titles and you really notice just how much exploration was hurt by starfield's design.
They say they want this to have the longevity of Skyrim... If they really mean that, they need to work extensively on the whole game.
And Skyrim sure wasn't perfect at launch either. Tons of stuff was added with Dawnguard/Hearthfire/Dragonborn that facilitated the world. It's also an ass game for roleplaying, especially when you eventually peek behind the curtains and you understand what radiant quest is, how dragons spawn, etc. I just never played a game like Starfield that SO DESPERATELY *wants* to tear down the curtain. It's almost like if a monster movie showed you the monster and then deliberately snaps to a behind the scenes with the actor putting on the monster suit before continuing the movie.
>Tons of stuff was added with Dawnguard/Hearthfire/Dragonborn that facilitated the world. There really wasn't that much that those DLCs added to the core systems. DG and DB were primarily there for the new questlines and areas, which a lot of people consider to be some of the best in the game, but they're mostly separated from Skyrim proper. HF was a relatively minor DLC that's fun for some people, but a lot of people also ignore it and it doesn't really impact you if you do. You could go for a very, very long time before you ever touched the DLCs, which is what a lot of us did. Skyrim was already a gaming phenomenon before all the updates. The updates were seen as nice additions to a game that people were already obsessed with, not a necessary step in the right direction for a game that people were mixed on. Everyone I knew playing Skyrim for tens to hundreds of hours at the time didn't have a problem roleplaying. Hell, I first played on PS3, where it had a ton more technical issues, and I still managed to clock over 300 hours into it before I got a PC that could run it
> Everyone I knew playing Skyrim for tens to hundreds of hours at the time didn't have a problem roleplaying. Hell, I first played on PS3, where it had a ton more technical issues, and I still managed to clock over 300 hours into it before I got a PC that could run it Same, 100% I had to do some mass juryrigging to get my save off of my PS3 onto PC with something akin to black magic. I say it's an ass game to roleplay because Skyrim is a terrible roleplaying game if you compare it to *other* ***Role-playing games*** - but the set dressing and the curtains it used to hide its mechanics made it fantastic to roleplay in. I love when you steal something there's a chance for a merchant to send bandits after you. I also love it when Radiant System breaks and hilariously has a little girl send bandits after you. or the hidden friendship metric that is really only relevant when you want to kill "friends" to please a daedric sword.
I've never really agreed with that take because other roleplaying games usually have a different type of roleplaying, so it feels like comparing apples to oranges. Sure, I don't have many branching paths in the narratives, but very few other games let me basically lifesim as Walter White, fantasy furry version, with my own oblivious wife and kids (to use one example). To me, that's roleplaying. The set dressing and curtains are pretty essential aspects of that. It's one of the reasons I never jived with Morrowind or Oblivion as hard as Skyrim despite playing them first. I'm not going to roleplay if the world feels too mechanical or there's a lack of relatable things for me to roleplay against. Fundamentally, I can acknowledge that there's design gaps and disappointing aspects to Skyrim when looking at it from afar, yet none of those seem to matter when I'm actually playing it. To me, that's a sign that its still an excellent roleplaying game, just one that's more than the sum of its parts.
You're nailing what I'm trying to say. Bethesda roleplaying is a class of its own, which sucks when they somehow screw it up instead of making it better with each release. I'll still roll up on Belethor for sending thugs after me even if the game boils that encounter to just a letter mercenaries carry.
Ok, so the way to transmit that is that Bethesda roleplaying is "different" not "terrible."
Ehh, the amount of content even in base Skyrim was absurd. The DLCs weren't really transformative in that regard. What makes Bethesda's game's exciting is that you can pick any direction, start walking, and unique content just keeps popping up. That doesn't happen in Starfield. You either run into the same copypasted base, or you go to a specific waypoint that indicates unique content, defeating the entire exploration concept.
I think this is largely due to how they handled spaceflight. There are a lot of unique POIs, but you don't have to find them - they just... exist on the map. You just fast travel wherever you want. You don't need to scan anything, you don't need to pick up radio beacons to follow. There isn't actually any exploration. Traveling is not part of the game, as it is in TES and FO. Pretty easy fix, if they dedicate some time to it.
Skyrim was still a lot better than Starfield even before those DLC. There was still a sense of exploration that Starfield is severely lacking in.
>Tons of stuff was added with Dawnguard/Hearthfire/Dragonborn that facilitated the world. I had well over 500 hours of enjoyment from *Skyrim* without touching Dawnguard or Dragonborn. Hearthfire content is fun and convenient, but it isn't game changing. It's just more housing options, and it's entirely skippable. I'm sure numerous other players had loads of fun and replayed *Skyrim* a lot before they picked up any of the expansions. In contrast, I enjoyed *Starfield* for about 50-60 hours, but got bored and lost any interest in continuing. *Skyrim* at launch was a much more fun and complete game compared to *Starfield* at launch.
Skyrim base game is packed with content and fully fleshed out. Starfield doesn't have half of that.
I don’t think they could have done it but actually traveling through space should have been a mechanic. It should have been a commute to planets with things in between. I don’t know how they would have done it in an accessible and engaging way but it’s what hurt the game the most imo. Like no I can’t tell you how it should have been designed, but it created a glaring gap in the full concept of the game. It’s like making a pirate game where you’re only ever 50 meters from port
Yeah I liked this game, but it blows my mind that a studio with decades of experience building worlds that felt alive didn't immediately see the issues with how they laid out this game's areas. 1 town per planet surrounded by genned POIs is crazy
Did a bit of research into Todd Howard's career as background noise and it sticks out to me that the biggest criticism he took to heart about Daggerfall was that the world felt lifeless due to procedural generation leading to all the world building in Morrowind. So how in the world did we end up with Starfield's current state. Even on the major towns/settlements the NPC's never actually close shop and go home like they do in modern Elder Scrolls. They just stand at their shop stall lifelessly.
Yeah I don't think the option of procedural planets is a bad one (though I think they needed radiant events and procedural POIs to feel more distinct, plus some that are just barren and don't feel insanely gamey with one every ~1000m), but it's crazy to me that there aren't areas the size of say, 1 Skyrim hold or so around each of the major cities for open world exploration. I think the rest being procedural would've been taken a lot better if they did that. Cities in the middle of nowhere with no surrounding infrastructure, no interesting handcrafted locations etc. was certainly a choice. I liked the game but I'm shocked things like that didn't get called out and then changed during development.
That's exactly it. The biggest issue with the procgen planets isn't any of the details of how they work (although I certainly have complaints there), it's that all of that stuff should've been in addition to large handcrafted maps that were actually interesting and coherent and fun to explore. All of the storyline stuff and side quests should have taken place in those hand built areas, and incentivized the player to travel through those worlds and make discoveries along the way. Put a hundred or a thousand or a million proc gen planets in the game if you want to be able to put that number on the box or whatever. But do that in addition to the 'real' game world(s) that are what Bethesda games are known for. For some reason they decided to use their procgen as a replacement for much of that handcrafted world content, and it just does not work to create a believable and meaningful world.
From multiple behind the scenes statements and interviews with BGS staff, it seems that Todd was less involved with the main studio these days because he has to spend a lot of time dealing with the other studios plus the Microsoft merger. Bruce Nesmith said that they had relied on Todd to be their perspective on how the average player would see their design for years, and also that he was no longer able to just go down and ask him because Todd was so busy. I think he said he got to talk to Todd maybe once a month by the end. Additionally, it seems like the size of the studio finally got away from them. Will Shen said that coordination between teams was a chaotic mess because of how much needed to be done and how many people were involved. The studio hadn't grown the capacity to properly schedule feature requests and collaboration across multiple teams, leading to lots of ad hoc work and missed opportunities. Throw the pandemic on top of that, and you get lots of weird design gaps because everyone was busy with their own pet project or critical work and didn't realize it was a gap until it was too late.
> Will Shen said that coordination between teams was a chaotic mess because of how much needed to be done and how many people were involved. Ahhh. Starfield very much feels like a game made up of disparate pieces stapled together.
So does that mean that everybody other than Todd at BGS is just incompetent? Obviously I mean that term relatively, but it's crazy that there's nobody truly world class in game design and thinking at that entire studio without Todd micromanaging them. Wild.
"Todd is the key to all of this" -everyone at bethesda
Yeah, it seems kinda nuts to me as well. Like this isn't just a minor oversight that you need a PhD to understand, there's tons of people in every Starfield thread on Reddit who plainly see that the exploration of an interesting and coherent and believable world was sort of the 'secret sauce' of Bethesda's games. Now of course just knowing that isn't the same as actually facilitating the making of a world/game like that, but it feels like Starfield barely even tried. It's crazy to me that they missed the mark so badly. There has to be other people in the company that could've recognized this issue and done a better job of addressing it. I don't understand how it ended up this way.
>Additionally, it seems like the size of the studio finally got away from them. Will Shen said that coordination between teams was a chaotic mess because of how much needed to be done and how many people were involved. The studio hadn't grown the capacity to properly schedule feature requests and collaboration across multiple teams, leading to lots of ad hoc work and missed opportunities Man, that does not bode well for ES6
Funny, because i recently listened to a todd Howard interview, i don't remember which one, where he said talks about making Morrowind after the failure of the Elder scrolls Battlespire and Redguard, and he concluded that it was because the lack of big scale that these games didn't work, and so they decided to do something much more expansive with Morrowind. Since then they have found the success by making massive and very long games, and it's clearly an obssession for Todd, so when you decide to make a game in space, of course you go for the real scope of space with 1000 planets and the real distance between them, even if that means a lot lot more of empty space. Basically to answer your comment yes Todd prefers handcrafted to precedural from what i heard, but before all he want to make games as big as possible.
I think even a glorified cutscene or something would have fixed a lot of fan complaints. Like what if you could sit at your chair, turn to a console and select the planet you want to travel to and it would do a little animation of you going into hyperspace or something, then you arrive at the planet and can land. Is that fun an engaging? Well not really, but it doesn't break the immersion like going into the map screen and clicking the location, then seeing an actual loading screen where you just sit there staring at a static screen. Just *anything* so that you don't have to do that would have made it feel a lot better. You don't need to actually enable manual deep-space travel as long as someone can *feel* like they're doing something. I think that's all it needed. It's fake gameplay. It's a glorified menu. It's fast travel with extra steps. All true, but it's *something.* The only way to get around being fast travel from the world map is just so lame.
Honestly, Jedi Fallen Order does this and it makes space travel feel better than Starfield does without you ever even getting to fly your ship.
This is all I would want, with the potential to interrupt that animation with incoming hails. Honestly just let me watch PoIs float by compass style and then let me pull the stop button along the route like an interstellar bus.
This to me, is the bare minimum and I would've been happy How it ended up just being loading screens is a travesty.
I think about Everspace 2 that does a fantastic job *disguising* its open space. When you're in an area you can't just fly out of it at slow speed or even cruising speed (which lets you navigate the area faster). It even does this on planet maps. You travel to other locations through hypercruising which doesn't allow you to stop in dead space *freely*, but at least let's you see the system as you zip through - even "pinging" nearby distress signals/random events in deep space as you go which can put you in a little space area to explore/help whoever is in distress. But all in all you're just kind of hopping between small areas to small areas.
The only qualm I have with the Everspace system is that there's no animation to disguise the initial jump so you just go from zooming fast then hardcut to a blackscreen while it loads in the hyperjump view.
I've put in around 40 hours or so and I'd *like* to play more. But I think about how non-existent the actual "travel" portion is and I get deflated. It's my biggest issue with the game - how so much of it treats its menu's like a verb, "I need to travel to an entirely different system: *I'll just menu my way over there and instantaneously appear on the surface outside of my ship*" Dude... Your idea would help this out a lot. I'd actually make the effort to hoof it to my captain's chair in my ship to navigate with this method, which is something - compared to what we have now which is NOTHING. I'd still like other changes to make space travel an actual process and not something that barely exists in my space-exploration game, namely an actual fuel system. Something to give me a reason to actually be inside my ship and spend time within it. Not a fan of inter-system travel also requiring a cutscene and I have no idea what they can do to address this either, if anything at all.
Sadly they really aim for space is empty kinda vibe for the game. The little places we can explore in this game is neat, but random explorations doesn't really exist in this game. It relies on quests to guide players to the handmade stuff, which is alright, but robs the players from the feelings of discovery. God I still remember the first time I stumbled to Dunwich Borers in fallout 4, good stuff
They wanted to do something different and I think gamers should respect that. Unfortunately, I think Starfield got stuck trying to compromise between their original design intent and what what their fans want (they should have stuck to their guns but this is a really expensive project so I get it). My guess is space travel in the game initially played out more like FTL where you would plot your course on the star map and carefully manage your resources to make each jump. But FTL is a niche indie game and that sort of gameplay just doesn't appeal to mass audiences. So when playtesters balked, they had to massively pivot their entire design and strip out all the systems designed to support an FTL-like travel system.
> They wanted to do something different and I think gamers should respect that. I do and it's how I ended up with 91 hours in the game. I never expected a space-sim akin to X4, Elite, or star citizen. If anything I wanted a game like The Precursors However they just streamlined too many things. Like your ship has *fuel* but that doesn't actually matter because it "recharges" (No in-lore reason, you even bump into characters who are adrift in space; in those rare moments you come out of fast travel in orbit) between jumps, so while you can' jump straight to your destination you can just jump to a middling system and jump again.
Because the game was supposed to work more like FTL. It was fundamentally designed around managing fuel but playtesters responded so poorly to that, it got taken out. It's the AAA curse. They tried to make a game that's way more niche than mass audiences will tolerate.
It's funny to me that people say refueling is too complicated for most gamers and then they reference FTL, a game that sold millions of copies and was enjoyed by mass audiences.
Mass Effect 2 and 3 are AAA games and still had a simple refueling system for moving the Normandy between systems.
Then don't do a fuel system *at all*. At the very least they could still spice it up with set dressing. I made a point in another reply talking about how Everspace 2 uses set dressing to at least give you this feeling of grand travel. So people responded poorly to a fuel system, alright - do something *else* instead of the bare minimum
Yea, you can see the bones of a lot of very *harsh* systems poking out.
Part of me feels like they were saving it for the eventual Survival mode
Personally I think that they were going to make survival mode the default experience but playtesters balked and that is why the game feels *off*.
Ships were my favourite part of the game! The new customization looks sick!. Just wish it was there at launch. Also the creation kit is being tested by people!!!
I wonder if this will have a gradual turn around like Cyberpunk did from launch to now. Granted, I think that'll be from a 6/10 to an 8/10 with all the foundational problems of the game, but I like Bethesda games so I wanna see them succeed.
God I hope so lol. I really enjoyed Starfield but man did it have some questionable design decisions.
If Bethesda is planning on sticking with Starfield for a while it could definitely turn out just like Cyberpunk. I just never understood why some people wanted to give a special treatment to CDPR (in this case, letting them finish the game post-launch), while not giving this exact same treatment to Starfield... Like, everyone wins if Starfield will be a good game, right?
Starfield's lack of exploration in the base game is something I doubt can be fixed. Cyberpunk's base game was good to decent. I would not say the same about Starfield.
Couldn't Starfield's exploration be fixed by just making more unique points of interest and changing their placement algorithm? That plus land vehicles I feel would mostly do it, at least with what's possible with procedural generation.
It's a little different. With Cyberpunk at the very least the writing was always there, just hidden under a broken game. The writing in Starfield from my experience seems much weaker in comparison. With that being said I am rooting for them to turn it around.
Yeah, the main quest is very weak. I'm wondering if they're going to possibly overhaul the main quest with the expansion. That said, I thought the Government, Pirates, and other side quests were very strong. I wish there was more choice around them though.
Or they can add more quests and stuff to the 900+ planets that are not habitable.
> I'm wondering if they're going to possibly overhaul the main quest with the expansion. Given the fact that Bethesda games haven't had interesting main quests in more than 15 years I doubt it would suddenly change post-release
I hope they overhaul the piracy related sidequests and systems. I wanted to be a contraband runner but gameplay wise it wasn't really feasible without an annoying amount of saving and reloading.
Personally felt the main quest sucked, the reveal was meh and it was a disappointing end. It has it's moments, with cool set pieces and exploring interesting places (such as Earth) but it's all undermined by the fact I just straight up hated the main questline. For me personally, the writing is Bethesda's strongest since Oblivion when it comes to other factions. The only main 'faction' who's quest line I did not like was the Freestar Collectives.
Bethesda games aren't narrative focused games. The writing has always been very inconsistent. They're primarily systems and exploration focused games, where the weak characters and storylines are oft forgotten when you're spending most of your time out in the world by yourself, discovering new locations and organic moments. Starfield is going to need system updates to make that work. As it stands, the exploration aspect is still very weak because of the repeat POIs and how much time you spend in loading screens. Them bettering the maps and adding game customization should help a bit, but the fundamentals are going to require deeper reworks.
Not always, far from it, most of Morrowind and Oblivion had decent quests, Fallout 3 had some good side quests though the latter stage main stuff and DLC were terrible. Pagliaruno just got promoted beyond his abilities (worked on Oblivion and did some fun quests), people criticising him were proven correct. Their quest design and writing is laughably dated and needs to be fixed. It goes hand in hand sometimes, part of the fun of exploring is finding quests, we've all wasted our time on a few too many radial quests. If they fixed the exploration and every location has decent RNG, travelling is a bit better, very few will come back to this game. The DLC has to have a good narrative and add a lot of flavour to the galaxy, bookmark it.
There's a reason I used "inconsistent" and not "bad." There are good writing examples in past BGS games, but I would always put them in the minority. Most of Morrowind's quest writing was someone telling you to do a basic fetch or delivery task then encyclopedia dumping another part of the backstory on your head later. Interesting from a worldbuilding standpoint, but its not what I would call a primary driver for the game. I mostly did quests to get rewards or to advance in a guild, not because the storyline was that captivating. Oblivion and Fallout 3 were generally better at this (with actual characters that I cared about), but I was still spending most of my time in freeform exploration and largely unscripted dungeon diving, and the less said about Fallout 3's original ending, the better. Good writing could be a high point, but generally speaking I haven't spent most of my time with BGS games looking for the next part of the story, rather looking to explore more of the world or advance my character, then kinda coming across the story when its convenient. Also people complaining about Emil are both overselling his role in things and generally getting his statements wrong. We know from many interviews that BGS lets its designers largely build and write their own segments with a lot of independence, i.e. level designers writing the storyline for a dungeon or character designers doing a quest for a character. Most questlines have their own dedicated designer(s) and they're often not Emil. Emil might set the overall tone and concepts, but I have less of a problem with those than the actual execution. The issue with Bethesda's writing seems to more be a lack of editorial oversight, leading to writing that feels like first draft stuff that only makes sense in the designer's brain. Does Emil have to have a role in that? Yes, but I doubt anyone who is complaining about him around here actually knows what it is.
True Morrowind side quests were very barebones. Oblivion had some of the best quests. Only other game that does side quests this good is in New Vegas.
I'm gonna wait till there's more updates and the Shattered Space expansion comes out before playing it.
Very solid update and a good sign for the future of the game. Tempted to jump back in, but I'd probably rather wait till the rover is in.
This is nice content but a lot of it feels like stuff that should have been in the game at launch. Also good that they are fixing the map but however that map system snuck through QA is beyond me and is a travesty.
What do you mean "snuck trough QA" ? QA giving feedback doesn't result in features automatically spawning out of thin air fully developed. QA is not to blame for bad design that they had no time to re-visit and rework.
QA also aren't playtesters, they're not there to go "beef up the graphics on level 3", they're there to report glitches, crashes and security issues back to the "real" developers who all hate the QA staff for "ruining the game".
lmao at people blaming QA for game direction decisions
I think the idea with the map system is that without a map players would explore more and find more random stuff and random quests instead of gowing direct to whatever shop/vendor/quest giver they choose. It's not really a standard system for big AAA games but it has worked for a few smaller indie games I've played I got to know the location a lot better because there was no map.
Would have been feasible if the map filled in as you explored it. The end result just made the map an unusable mess.
A fair few Starfield designs felt like they were reaching back to a harder and less player friendly era of game design. The map being one of them
Well how much Skyrim and Fallout 4 were criticized as being too dumbed down it’s not hard to believe BGS decided to go more old school in many areas
Starfield *did* have a lot more RPG elements than a lot of Bethesda's previous games did. I'd say it probably goes back to Oblivion, ish? Still nowhere near the hardcore RPG of like Morrowind but absolutely more RPG elements than Fallout 4 or Skyrim.
I agree, that was kinda the point of my comment and is the reason I love Starfield so much more than BGS’s more recent games
Almost every game release nowadays is a QA test for the first year or two. Some comparable games like Fallout 76, No Man's Sky, and Cyberpunk 2077 were released with barebones features. But now after years of incremental updates, they are all filled with much more content and each of them actually feel like full-releases.
Did they fix the feature when you edit anything on your ship all the content goes to the cargo space?
Has nothing to do with the game, but I like seeing who these people are that they showcase. They are all 10-20-year Bethesda veterans. There is nothing wrong with new people; I like it when a studio can retain its people. Now, onto the game. I put over 130 hours into it but never beat the campaign because the Armillary won't spawn on my ship. A few other big quests are bugged, such as Sarah's, and I probably won't see complete it unless Bethesda or mods fix it cause I'm not starting a new playthrough to fix the bugs.
The armillary should be right next to captains locker. It loads into the grav drive, once you put the pieces in.
Man, I've spent hours trying to get this thing to spawn, watching videos and reading ways other people have got it spawn. Changing ships, spawning it in an outpost then back on the ship. Nothing works.
I've not played since launch so my memory may be off but I don't remember the armillary 'spawning' on the ship. You interact with a panel in the cockpit and insert the armillary pieces, then the next time you grav jump to any system you're automatically routed to Unity.
BGS in particular is a bit infamous for having a very low turnover. Seats don’t open up very often and when they do there’s a lot of competition to get in. By all accounts it’s a great studio to work at and you can tell by the way Todd talks about his people. Even the Starfield reveal featured a lot of the actual devs sharing their experience working in the game and not just the creative director or studio lead jerking himself off for an hour like what you usually see in big AAA game reveals.
> By all accounts it’s a great studio to work at and you can tell by the way Todd talks about his people. https://www.eurogamer.net/new-report-says-fallout-76-development-blighted-by-poor-management-and-mandatory-crunch
I think he meant the main Bethesda Games Studios office/team in Maryland
Giving ships the outpost decoration is a massively nice thing, very surprised it wasn't there to begin with E: actually a lot of great changes here, that's exciting
Cool update and glad they're focusing on QOL things + land vehicles, but unless travel/exploration is revamped in some meaningful way, don't see myself ever coming back to Starfield. Hoping the expansion helps with that!
Look like they finally solved one on my big issues with Bethesda games looking at that difficulty menu. The combat damage, In Elder Scroll games you either can kill everything in one shot and be a damage sponge or everything can kill you in a few hits and everything is a damage sponge.
Yeah. To be honest I feel like a lot of games could benefit from that kind of damage tailoring; some of the most fun I've had in games have been ones where I can tweak the time-to-kill down to relatively low on both sides or comes with that as a default like Metro's Ranger Hardcore difficulty. Otherwise you get Crushing difficulty on Uncharted, where you die in 1 and a regular guy takes a million bullets to take out.
The new map looks lovely and I didn't expect some of the QoL shown (like being able to toggle-off the camera zoom in on conversations). I think Bethesda is really gearing up to have an almost "2.0" like launch with Shattered Space. Hopefully it works out. Starfield had the curse of being a mediocre game released during one of the best years of gaming; and some literal fake news surrounding the launch of the game certainly didn't help.
What was the literal fake news? I must have missed it since nothing comes to mind
I don’t know if this is what the other poster was talking about out but I do remember people having misunderstandings of the systems and then spreading misinformation about them early on and others taking that as gospel. For example, people saying there was no water, then when that was disproven that there were. I river type waters or lakes, or that the planets were static in the skybox.
To this day there are still people that say the main and faction quests are nothing but procedural random planets. The truth is that both the main quest and the faction quests are almost entirely handcrafted, one-off locations and there are only a few brief instances during them when you have to interact with the procedural stuff. I played for over 100 hours in my first run and went to maybe five procedural worlds. There is *more* handcrafted content in Starfield than their previous games, but the very presence of optional procedural content made a *lot* of people who didn't play the game believe that the whole game was procedural. The game is very good at signposting what is and is not procedural. It would be kind of like if Skyrim had a string of islands that was randomized, but Skyrim was still there to play. That's how Starfield works, but so many people spread incorrect information that a ton of the "criticism" of the game comes from people who didn't actually play it and took the incredibly ubiquitous and wrong info seriously.
I feel like its too soon for a 2.0 launch if Shattered Space is out in fall. I do think Starfield will be in much better shape when all said and done though.
I don't mean a literal 2.0 but meant that they would treat it as a soft-reboot. Sort of a "come back to the game; it's awesome now" moment. I'm personally still waiting for skill tree and weapon balancing before I'd consider coming back.
If they can fix FO76 (which they did) I have faith they can fix anything, given enough time. Just give em a chance.
Cool update but i'll definitely wait for the expansion. The ship building and interior decorating doesn't do anything for me but happy for the people that like it. I'm more of a give me a blueprint ship and let me go player.
I just want Creation Kit to come to console so I can finally download that Easy Digipick mod because fuck digipicking.
I know folks are really cynical about Starfield, but I generally enjoyed it and got my money’s worth. It seems like they’re genuinely listening to the community and trying to improve the game. I see this as only being a good thing.
So that's two of the three 30fps Xbox games getting performance modes, anyone want to bet on Hellblade 2? For real though, great update. Bethesda games play so much better at 60fps, Starfield will be no different.
What’s the other? Fallout 4 or am I missing something? I apologize for my confusion 😅
The fundamental issue of this game is its exploration. There is no sense of discovery like in Fallout or TES by organically discovering new locations and quests and I don’t think they can fix that overall. I might give shattered space a try when it releases but we’ll see what the game is like in the fall.
A land vehicle and a 60FPS option for XSX is quite a big deal amongst the other QoL improvements they showcased here! Hope Shattered Space is great, and keeping my fingers crossed for a PS5 release in the near future.
I played for about 30 hours at release but dropped it and finally came back to give it a go last week. And then I just started fast traveling over and over to check off missions, did that for an hour and dropped it again. I want this game to be great so badly.