OT: Video Games VI

[Block]

Reading the comments section, ppl don't really like Ubisoft

Or Black men.

 

[usiel]

I find the phrase Twitch Drops inherently annoying.

I did see a quick gameplay of that game and appreciated the more quake-like speed.

 

[usiel]

Looks like game play reveal on the 11th.

 

[Jags]

The Creation Kit for Starfield finally came out yesterday. This is about when Bethesda games start getting interesting for me -- modders not just adding content, but tools that let you tweak the game more to your liking.

So a little something to look forward to. There's some Creation content out with the release to try now, and a bunch of modders apparently got the CK ahead of time, so there's already "unofficial" mods dropping.

I've only had the game a couple weeks and have been out of gaming for a while, so my take on this might not be all that relevant... I'll keep it short for the TL;DR crowd, but I am enjoying it so far. There's a good framework to build on if the community is still there, and the CK and announced DLC arriving later this year should stoke some interest if they're any good...

 

[Kalopsia]

The Creation Kit for Starfield finally came out yesterday. This is about when Bethesda games start getting interesting for me -- modders not just adding content, but tools that let you tweak the game more to your liking.

So a little something to look forward to. There's some Creation content out with the release to try now, and a bunch of modders apparently got the CK ahead of time, so there's already "unofficial" mods dropping.

I've only had the game a couple weeks and have been out of gaming for a while, so my take on this might not be all that relevant... I'll keep it short for the TL;DR crowd, but I am enjoying it so far. There's a good framework to build on if the community is still there, and the CK and announced DLC arriving later this year should stoke some interest if they're any good...

I'm sure mods will make Starfield better, there's a ton of little quality of life issues (a shocking number of which were solved in previous Bethesda titles and inexplicably regressed with Starfield) that can be improved. I don't think it's enough to save the game, because the biggest issues are really at the game's core. The choice to rely so heavily on procedural generation came at the direct cost of Bethesda's greatest strength, environmental storytelling. The game universe also feels totally disjointed and inconsistent like it was written by people in silos and thrown together at the end, probably as a result of working on it during the pandemic and this being Bethesda's first new IP in years, as well as the reported lack of a design document. Bethesda's always been one of my favorite game studios for how immersive their games are, but Starfield really shook my confidence.

 

[Kalopsia]

Starfield's latest update draws player ire by sticking a bounty hunting quest behind the Creation Club paywall

Starfield's latest update has drawn some player ire by making a bounty hunting quest part of the Creation Club.

www.vg247.com

Charging $7 for what's reportedly a 15 minute quest also does not inspire confidence in the direction Bethesda's taking.

 

[Jags]

The game universe also feels totally disjointed and inconsistent like it was written by people in silos and thrown together at the end, probably as a result of working on it during the pandemic and this being Bethesda's first new IP in years, as well as the reported lack of a design document. Bethesda's always been one of my favorite game studios for how immersive their games are, but Starfield really shook my confidence.

I think the genre and their ambition have hamstrung them a bit.

The genre, if we're being fair, doesn't lend itself all that well to their brand of storytelling. In the way they've presented it, space has to be and feel vast. The game probably would have benefited from being set in a handful of systems at most, if not just one or two -- maybe one for each major faction. So it's kind of a blessing and a curse. The game does feel expansive, but there isn't enough content to fill that massive space.

There's an intimacy to Skyrim's more limited setting, for example. That's an amazing game, but even it struggled to embody the space it took up. A "kingdom" consisted of a town with 20 or so NPCs with only a half dozen or so distinct voices, for example. The setting rarely, if ever, felt as big as the story wanted it to seem. That was a space that DLC and mods could fill though, and they did. Starfield could benefit similarly, giving the procgen formula more to create with. Procgen was inevitable for a game with this scope.

And their ambitions, though admirable and responsible for most of the game's strengths, also hurt them. The game is like 5 games in one, and they're all pretty good, just not fleshed out. It's a good shooter, good space sim, good vehicle builder, good colony builder... But to be great at any of those things requires more focus and individualized content.

The good news is how those elements overlap and elevate the whole. Outposts might be a bit of an outlier, but outposts and ship building on top of a good crafting/upgrade system for armor and weapons... That's a really tall order all by itself. And then Starfield also has to be competitive as a shooter and space sim, two genres with lots of competition setting high bars.

Still, each aspect informs and fleshes out the others to varying extents. Struggling with space combat? The ship builder helps, is easy to understand, and is affordable to make real strides with even at low levels and with no skills. And having those different elements allows players to shift focus from one to the next, which can help keep things fresh. Each aspect needs more development though, and that's why the major issue has been...

Not getting the creation kit out WAY sooner. Enabling the mod community should have been priority number one. That huge infusion of free content could have buoyed interest in a fickle marketplace. Hopefully there's either enough renewed interest to bring old modders back or inspire new ones.

Though we're mostly in agreement, I think I'm enjoying it more because it's 9 months on and lots of the kinks have been ironed out (no crashes for me so far); the modding scene *has* been busy even without a CK, allowing players to customize their experience (40+ mods so far for me); and Starfield is still a shiny new object for me. It hasn't worn thin yet.

And I'll give Bethesda a little credit for fleshing out their difficulty system a lot last month, allowing in-game tweaks to not just outright difficulty (you can scale your damage and enemy damage on foot and in space however you want with 4 separate settings), but also control over one's approach to their sprawling loot system. You can set how far away you can access your ship's inventory (in steps from not at all to from literally anywhere), your carry weight (stepped from extremely low to ridiculously high), and vendor wealth (from pretty poor to pretty damn rich).

Might seem like minor things, but together you can use them to customize your game experience in a pretty big way. So it feels like they've pivoted to focus on community experience, probably because the game's community has been waning.

Charging $7 for what's reportedly a 15 minute quest also does not inspire confidence in the direction Bethesda's taking.

*shrug*

It's paid DLC. Plenty of huge game companies do it. You're right that it's a dodgy move because of the timing and the spot they appear to be in with this game, but it's not essential content, "premium" buyers can opt to get it free, and again, it's not exactly unheard of. People pay a few bucks to have their guy wear a different outfit in CoTW, get a new couch in The Sims, and so on.

Not that big a deal, but I agree with you that it's not the best look for them at the moment.

 

[Kalopsia]

I think the genre and their ambition have hamstrung them a bit.

The genre, if we're being fair, doesn't lend itself all that well to their brand of storytelling. In the way they've presented it, space has to be and feel vast. The game probably would have benefited from being set in a handful of systems at most, if not just one or two -- maybe one for each major faction. So it's kind of a blessing and a curse. The game does feel expansive, but there isn't enough content to fill that massive space.

I agree with almost all of what you've said, although I think I'm a bit harsher on the game than you are.

There's an intimacy to Skyrim's more limited setting, for example. That's an amazing game, but even it struggled to embody the space it took up. A "kingdom" consisted of a town with 20 or so NPCs with only a half dozen or so distinct voices, for example. The setting rarely, if ever, felt as big as the story wanted it to seem. That was a space that DLC and mods could fill though, and they did. Starfield could benefit similarly, giving the procgen formula more to create with. Procgen was inevitable for a game with this scope.

The key difference between Skyrim and Starfield is that while both of them have features that are clearly scaled down and we're meant to imagine they're actually bigger, Skyrim really nailed a consistency in scaling things down that Starfield didn't. Everything in Skyrim is smaller than the lore indicates, but in Starfield some things are and some things aren't. The cities are super scaled down, but the space traffic above them isn't. There's really not that many friendly NPCs or cities, but there's human construction on every planet you can land on. The Freestar Collective fought and won a massive interstellar war that featured space battles, giant mechs, and xenowarfare, but they need walls to hide from the space wolves on their planet. Skyrim is cohesive, while Starfield's a jumbled mess. I don't think mods are going to fix that.

And their ambitions, though admirable and responsible for most of the game's strengths, also hurt them. The game is like 5 games in one, and they're all pretty good, just not fleshed out. It's a good shooter, good space sim, good vehicle builder, good colony builder... But to be great at any of those things requires more focus and individualized content.

I'd say it's a passable shooter, below average space sim, good vehicle builder, and bad colony builder. The space combat and base-building are both super shallow, and the base-building in particular seems like it was designed around a version of the game where survival and resource management mechanics were more of a focus. I remember it being super tedious to set up resource extraction and storage at the bases, and then the only thing you needed those resources for was building more bases, so it was all pretty pointless.

Still, each aspect informs and fleshes out the others to varying extents. Struggling with space combat? The ship builder helps, is easy to understand, and is affordable to make real strides with even at low levels and with no skills. And having those different elements allows players to shift focus from one to the next, which can help keep things fresh. Each aspect needs more development though, and that's why the major issue has been...

Maybe this is something that's changed since early on, but I remember shipbuilding being super expensive. That was the one aspect of the game that I really enjoyed, but I was constantly running out of credits and having to go and grind in the high level systems for stuff to sell. Then the worst part was coming back to sell the loot and having to run around between a bunch of vendors who all have barely any money and then use the wait mechanic because with one shipload of loot it took multiple passes through every vendor in the main city. It literally took me longer to sell loot than it did to acquire it.

That was one of those things that made me wonder if they did no play testing or if they just ignored everything the testers said. Increasing the vendor cash is such an obvious quality of life issue and it's a super simple fix, and I can't believe play testers wouldn't have mentioned that it made selling higher level loot an awful, tedious experience. A lot of Bethesda's past games even had mechanics where you could invest in vendors to increase their future funds but somehow they didn't do that here. I know they've added a slider for this now but allowing this to be an issue for 9 months after release makes absolutely no sense to me. Go into the code, add a 0 to every vendor cash variable, and send out the update.

Also, you definitely need skills for the shipbuilding. All the good pieces are locked behind higher level perks and others only appear when the player reaches certain levels.

Not getting the creation kit out WAY sooner. Enabling the mod community should have been priority number one. That huge infusion of free content could have buoyed interest in a fickle marketplace. Hopefully there's either enough renewed interest to bring old modders back or inspire new ones.

Though we're mostly in agreement, I think I'm enjoying it more because it's 9 months on and lots of the kinks have been ironed out (no crashes for me so far); the modding scene *has* been busy even without a CK, allowing players to customize their experience (40+ mods so far for me); and Starfield is still a shiny new object for me. It hasn't worn thin yet.

And I'll give Bethesda a little credit for fleshing out their difficulty system a lot last month, allowing in-game tweaks to not just outright difficulty (you can scale your damage and enemy damage on foot and in space however you want with 4 separate settings), but also control over one's approach to their sprawling loot system. You can set how far away you can access your ship's inventory (in steps from not at all to from literally anywhere), your carry weight (stepped from extremely low to ridiculously high), and vendor wealth (from pretty poor to pretty damn rich).

Might seem like minor things, but together you can use them to customize your game experience in a pretty big way. So it feels like they've pivoted to focus on community experience, probably because the game's community has been waning.

I like what I've heard about the recent changes, but I don't think they deserve any credit for taking 9 months to provide minor quality of life fixes that fans have been begging for since release. At this point in the life cycles of Fallout 3 and 4 both games had already received all their DLC. The sluggishness of Bethesda to react to the issues with this game is really inexcusable for a AAA developer. Also, getting people to pre-pay for a game's DLC based on your history of getting DLC out within the first year and then not doing any DLC in the first year is pretty scummy.

*shrug*

It's paid DLC. Plenty of huge game companies do it. You're right that it's a dodgy move because of the timing and the spot they appear to be in with this game, but it's not essential content, "premium" buyers can opt to get it free, and again, it's not exactly unheard of. People pay a few bucks to have their guy wear a different outfit in CoTW, get a new couch in The Sims, and so on.

Not that big a deal, but I agree with you that it's not the best look for them at the moment.

I get that it's DLC, my issue is that it's 15 minutes worth of DLC and they're charging $7.

I think at this point for me my problem is less about Starfield itself and more about how the process of Starfield has shaken my confidence in what used to be my favorite developer. They seem to be moving away from the things that made their games great and engaging in a lot of shady practices. Bioware's a shadow of its former self and CD Projekt Red had a lot of issues with Cyberpunk (though that game's in much, much better shape now than at launch). Bethesda felt like the last dev I could trust and now that trust is gone.

 

[usiel]

Appreciate the longs post on Starfield. Had a lot of hope for it but several of the multiple games it added in here paled compared to Eve Online a 20 year old plus space game. Seems like it was missing the most fundamental thing a coherent and engaging story line. Sandbox games are...OK but without a creative narrative line they will die on the vine. And guess what creative is hard and costs money.

 

[John Price]

Some new football game Maximum Football (Beta) dropped on Steam

Everyone knows Madden is shit so it's good to have other football games exist

 

[Jags]

First of all, your posts are always well-considered and thoughtful, so thanks for that. And I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think most of our disconnect on this is perspective. I said at the top of my first post that I always wait to get Bethesda games because I know that I want to customize the experience, and it takes time for modders to sink their teeth into it.

So I entered the game with it tweaked to my liking. Difficulty mod to increase the length and immersion of combat, for example -- just that little tweak upped the shooter quotient dramatically for me. It made combat more enjoyable and rewarding.

Speaking of rewards, this is a good example of what I'm talking about. I benefited from having the vendor money totals tweak available to me immediately. It was never difficult for me to sell, and if that mechanic hadn't existed, there were mods for it.

I expect to have to mod a Bethesda game to fully enjoy it, is my point. I'm PC exclusive when it comes to gaming, so I figure there's little reason not to fine tune a game so I can get the most out of my 70 bucks. I probably wouldn't like vanilla Starfield much. Skyrim's console-focused UI was a complete dealbreaker for me when I first tried it on PC. Superb game with an absolute dogshit interface. Watching console players stop multiple times mid-fight to do simple and necessary things broke my brain. One mod opened that door for me entirely.

I'm not far enough into Starfield's story to fully see its shortcomings. I liked the setup of the overall story when I started the Vanguard questline and the first they did was walk you through the history of the game. I thought the backstory was cool; reminiscent of some of my favorite sci-fi stories and franchises. How that translates into the playable story is still a bit of a mystery to me. I've started some faction quests and am focusing on companion affinity to do their quests, too. So I'm taking the shotgun approach the game's story, because I know how linear Bethesda storylines are and I want to mix it up and make the experience feel far fuller.

I also typically start by doing a lot of radiant stuff to get a feel for the game, which brings me to...

Maybe this is something that's changed since early on, but I remember shipbuilding being super expensive.

That was definitely not my experience, and I'm not sure this is a "Vanilla Launch" versus "9-Months In Modded" issue. Being able to sell via their vendor difficulty tweak probably helped though. It didn't make me rich, just made it feel like enough cash comes in that I can spend without too much worry.

For ships, my early struggles sent me to the builder, and the first thing I noticed was that particle weapons have three times the range, and there were a couple cheap ones. That one switch -- pop on one or two of those with no other weapons so you can streamline your power distribution -- got me to even with the game at a challenging difficulty level very early on.

Doing radiant quests to familiarize myself with combat helped, too, as did fully reading the skill options to see what'd be most beneficial for how I like to play. One early point in Targeting (?) allows you to lock on ships. That opens the door to boarding ships, and that multiplies the value of the quest cuz you get to loot the guys and the ship. Selling the ship can be tedious, but it helps if you need cash. More kills is more XP, more perk points, and so on.

And after the first Constellation mission when Vasco said, "Hey, you should build an outpost!" I figured why not? I benefited from having YouTube vids to hasten my understanding of how they work, but it didn't take very long before I was able to craft components, turning free resources into more coin. So it became part of my cycle to stop off at the outpost to craft. Crafting is easy XP, more perk points, and so on.

I did what the game encouraged me to do and it led directly to the gains I needed to improve my cash on hand and skills. That's Bethesda's linear progression system that they've always had. The formula is always simple. If you feel like necessary parts are hidden behind level walls and skill trees, you're not following the formula. Shame on you!

Wanting the vanilla mechanics to be perfectly balanced on launch day is a tall order. You're supposed to have to work for it. The ship builder had everything I *needed* at Level 1. Plenty available to get your ship patched up at first and to improve as you level, and to make countless cosmetic changes. I agree that it takes too many levels to flesh everything out (and I hate their grindy additional requirements for each skill rank), but you're meant to focus on the things you want most.

And that's where I think we agree. If you followed their limited formula at launch, I still don't think the content would have filled the void for you. The skill challenges are intended to stop you from being able to lockpick everything early, for example. It'll take you time to pick the 20 or 50 locks for the next rank, which is what they want because you'll spend your skillpoints on other things in the meantime, forcing a broader focus on other aspects of the game. Same with the vendor cash limit. They put it there to force you to explore the cities and find all their nooks and crannies, and to stumble on side quests as you go.

All that shit gets old quick. And again, that's true in ALL of their games. Vanilla Skyrim pre-DLC didn't have more content than Vanilla Starfield. They just did a better job of presenting it within the framework of the game. The genre and setting of this game makes it feel thin and exposes its linear storytelling mechanics.

So you jumped in at launch knowing all this and were disappointed. That was pretty much guaranteed. I know you don't need any of this explained to you, so sorry if it's coming off wrong. My point is that knowing what you do about these games, there was a way to go about it that likely would have maximized your likelihood of enjoying it for a longer period of time. You're right that we should be able to enjoy games at their fullest from the beginning, but that's a Utopia that doesn't exist. How many games these days are truly great out of the box? No developer is going to stop milking a billion-dollar formula until they're forced to.

So be realistic next time with Bethesda. Wait a year or so. They release raw, unripe products. Every time. Without fail. This one maybe especially, but I think your reflections on their older games are a little rose-colored.

 

[Kalopsia]

First of all, your posts are always well-considered and thoughtful, so thanks for that. And I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think most of our disconnect on this is perspective. I said at the top of my first post that I always wait to get Bethesda games because I know that I want to customize the experience, and it takes time for modders to sink their teeth into it.

So I entered the game with it tweaked to my liking. Difficulty mod to increase the length and immersion of combat, for example -- just that little tweak upped the shooter quotient dramatically for me. It made combat more enjoyable and rewarding.

Speaking of rewards, this is a good example of what I'm talking about. I benefited from having the vendor money totals tweak available to me immediately. It was never difficult for me to sell, and if that mechanic hadn't existed, there were mods for it.

I expect to have to mod a Bethesda game to fully enjoy it, is my point. I'm PC exclusive when it comes to gaming, so I figure there's little reason not to fine tune a game so I can get the most out of my 70 bucks. I probably wouldn't like vanilla Starfield much. Skyrim's console-focused UI was a complete dealbreaker for me when I first tried it on PC. Superb game with an absolute dogshit interface. Watching console players stop multiple times mid-fight to do simple and necessary things broke my brain. One mod opened that door for me entirely.

Same to you man. And I agree we came into Starfield from very different perspectives. Personally, I'd been following Starfield since ZeniMax filed a trademark for the name. My two favorite franchises were Fallout and Mass Effect (at least right up until the ending of ME3 but that's a rant for another time) and I fully expected Starfield to be a game I played for years and years. I waited a loooong time for it and and was very invested in it (hence writing mini-essays about it months after I stopped playing), so when I saw I could pay a little extra to pre-order it and get early access right at the start of Labor Day weekend I bit the bullet and locked myself away to play it, and did so on a Series X because I've always been primarily a console gamer. I fully expected the bugs and quality of life stuff, but I can overlook that if the core game is solid. Starfield was fun through that weekend, but I pretty quickly realized just how shallow and uneven it was. The shipbuilding kept me going for a while as I cycled through building, running out of money, grinding for loot, grinding to sell it, and repeat, but once I'd built the best ship I could there wasn't anything left to keep me coming back.

I'm not far enough into Starfield's story to fully see its shortcomings. I liked the setup of the overall story when I started the Vanguard questline and the first they did was walk you through the history of the game. I thought the backstory was cool; reminiscent of some of my favorite sci-fi stories and franchises. How that translates into the playable story is still a bit of a mystery to me. I've started some faction quests and am focusing on companion affinity to do their quests, too. So I'm taking the shotgun approach the game's story, because I know how linear Bethesda storylines are and I want to mix it up and make the experience feel far fuller.

The Vanguard questline is the best in the game that I've seen, and I think it should've been the main quest. It gives the player a sense of threat and urgency, gives a great introduction to the lore of the setting, and it actually feels like it belongs in an M-rated game while most of the quests feel weirdly sanitized. I started on some of the companion stuff but I really didn't like any of the major companions they provided. They all had the same morality and were weirdly judgemental after explicitly saying they wouldn't be when I joined Constellation. I ended up leaving them all in the lodge and using one of the minor hireling companions instead.

I also typically start by doing a lot of radiant stuff to get a feel for the game, which brings me to...



That was definitely not my experience, and I'm not sure this is a "Vanilla Launch" versus "9-Months In Modded" issue. Being able to sell via their vendor difficulty tweak probably helped though. It didn't make me rich, just made it feel like enough cash comes in that I can spend without too much worry.

For ships, my early struggles sent me to the builder, and the first thing I noticed was that particle weapons have three times the range, and there were a couple cheap ones. That one switch -- pop on one or two of those with no other weapons so you can streamline your power distribution -- got me to even with the game at a challenging difficulty level very early on.

Yeah, particle weapons are just straight up better than everything else in the game. That's part of why I said it's a below-average space sim. They didn't do a good job of balancing the weapons, and made ballistics and missiles totally unnecessary because particle weapons were better at everything. EM weapons are good for boarding after you've knocked everyone else out with the particle beams, but that's the extent of the tactics to space combat.

Also, balancing power during a fight on console is absolutely impossible, so I just never did it. They took that idea from FTL, a game I absolutely love, but they really botched the execution by not giving the player a way to pause or at least slow time while making power adjustments the way FTL does. Not sure if this is still a thing, but they also had weird bugs where your power would be randomly reallocated when you arrived somewhere after a jump. There were multiple times where I jumped into fights without shields and was dead before I could turn them back on.

The space combat felt like a big missed opportunity. They did so well with the shipbuilder that if the space combat was engrossing they could've combined to make a fun gameplay loop despite the other shortcomings. They just needed to tweak things some more before release.

Doing radiant quests to familiarize myself with combat helped, too, as did fully reading the skill options to see what'd be most beneficial for how I like to play. One early point in Targeting (?) allows you to lock on ships. That opens the door to boarding ships, and that multiplies the value of the quest cuz you get to loot the guys and the ship. Selling the ship can be tedious, but it helps if you need cash. More kills is more XP, more perk points, and so on.

This was what I did for my grinding, I'd go to the Serpentis system and jump around attacking House Va'ruun ships and hijacking the more expensive ones. At that point the ship vendors didn't seem to refresh their cash though, or maybe they did but on a really long timescale, so I got to the point where I'd exhausted the credits of every shipbuilder and could only sell more ships after I'd blown all my credits buying ship parts. When I finished maxing out my ship and wasn't buying parts anymore, I ran out of ways to sell the ships I stole and sort of got soft locked out of doing that anymore. I could still board ships and clear them out of course, but having to leave the ship behind because I couldn't do anything with it kind of killed that for me.

And after the first Constellation mission when Vasco said, "Hey, you should build an outpost!" I figured why not? I benefited from having YouTube vids to hasten my understanding of how they work, but it didn't take very long before I was able to craft components, turning free resources into more coin. So it became part of my cycle to stop off at the outpost to craft. Crafting is easy XP, more perk points, and so on.

I did some outpost building, but pretty quickly realized that it was much easier and faster to just buy resources from vendors in order to research and craft weapons and armor. The only thing that required large-scale resource extraction was building outposts, so it seemed like outposts were just a solution in need of a problem.

All that shit gets old quick. And again, that's true in ALL of their games. Vanilla Skyrim pre-DLC didn't have more content than Vanilla Starfield. They just did a better job of presenting it within the framework of the game. The genre and setting of this game makes it feel thin and exposes its linear storytelling mechanics.

My understanding is that Skyrim had more non-radiant quests pre-DLC than Starfield does.

Skyrim really nailed the feeling of exploration. While traveling for a quest you could find unique, hand-crafted points of interest along the way to investigate which made the world feel more real. While traveling for a quest for Starfield you're mostly just going through cutscenes as you jump to the system and land at the specified location. Even if you have the opportunity to walk across the environment to another location, all you'll get in between are proc gen terrain and locations that you've seen cut and pasted on a dozen other worlds. For a game that was supposedly all about exploration, that really ended up being the weakest pillar of the gameplay for me.

I think the feat-only system was also a mistake. Skyrim has replay value because leveling skills encourages specialization and there's real differences in combat if you go melee vs archer vs the various schools of magic. In Starfield you can technically do an unarmed or melee weapon playthrough, but there's very little to actually suport that besides a couple feats, and I don't think they ever even made mods for melee weapons. It was basically a given you were gonna use guns, and maybe you take a couple perks to specialize in a specific type but they'd probably just be flat damage bonuses instead of anything interesting. I've done multiple playthroughs of Skyrim (and Fallout 3, NV, and 4) to try out different builds and siding with different factions, but with Starfield it didn't even feel like I was doing a build. If I started over I'd basically just end up doing the same thing again minus some feats I realized later were useless. I also never had to choose between major factions aside from choosing between the UC and the pirates. I think this is a big reason why Starfield's player base fell off way, way faster than any previous Bethesda game. I made this a while ago using data on Steam players from steamdb.

Game	Month 1 Peak	Month 5 Peak	Retention
Skyrim	287,411	64,119	22.3%
FO4	471,955	57,169	12.1%
Starfield	330,723	17,914	5.4%

Right now Skyrim has twice as many players on Steam as Starfield. Even when you factor in that Skyrim has DLC and more mods, it's insane that a 13 year old Bethesda game from two console generations ago has twice the players as their 9 month old game.

So you jumped in at launch knowing all this and were disappointed. That was pretty much guaranteed. I know you don't need any of this explained to you, so sorry if it's coming off wrong. My point is that knowing what you do about these games, there was a way to go about it that likely would have maximized your likelihood of enjoying it for a longer period of time. You're right that we should be able to enjoy games at their fullest from the beginning, but that's a Utopia that doesn't exist. How many games these days are truly great out of the box? No developer is going to stop milking a billion-dollar formula until they're forced to.

So be realistic next time with Bethesda. Wait a year or so. They release raw, unripe products. Every time. Without fail. This one maybe especially, but I think your reflections on their older games are a little rose-colored.

Yeah, I'm definitely adjusting my expectations for the next Bethesda game. They were the last developer I was willing to pre-order from, but I won't be doing that anymore. I'm also in the process of switching over to PC so I have more access to mods for the next one.

I still don't think if I'd approached Starfield the way you did I would've been happy though. I'm used to quality of life issues and bugs in Bethesda games, but I've always been able to overlook them if the game immerses me in a cool world. Starfield never did that, and I don't think any mods will ever change that because the the problems are core world design choices. Might try it again down the line when all the DLC's out and I can buy a definitive edition on Steam for half price, but not before then.

 

[Jags]

My two favorite franchises were Fallout and Mass Effect (at least right up until the ending of ME3 but that's a rant for another time) and I fully expected Starfield to be a game I played for years and years. I waited a loooong time for it and and was very invested in it

I haven't played a good space sim since Wing Commander, which I still remember fondly but I was young and dumb so it might not hold up.

I missed the boat on ME, which I always thought I'd like when I heard about it, but never got around to it. You had really high expectations for Starfield. I was just hoping to fall for another Bethesda game after Skyrim, which is easily one of my all-time faves that I played for a ridiculously long time. Fallout was never quite my cup of tea, though I did enjoy it. Just didn't reel me in as much.

My early experience with Starfield has been good, but you've got me bummed out now.

The Vanguard questline is the best in the game that I've seen, and I think it should've been the main quest.

I agree on the quality of that story, which has probably helped skew my overall view of the story early on cuz it's the only questline I've gotten deep into. I did the main quest for a little bit, got the first power with all the trippy lights and stuff, and was a little let down. Starborn/Dragonborn, Powers/Shouts mapped to the same key... I did most of my Skyrim playthroughs with alternate start mods to skip the main quest because I'm not big on the magic stuff, so I was hoping SF would be more sci-fi/tech focused. I guess they had to do the space wizard stuff for the Star Wars nuts.

I started on some of the companion stuff but I really didn't like any of the major companions they provided.

Ah, I've only focused on one so far and am not quite sure how much affinity-ing I have to do to get the quest started, but I'm working on it. Since there are only 4 of them I'm hoping their quests are lengthy and/or worthwhile. We'll see...

Yeah, particle weapons are just straight up better than everything else in the game. That's part of why I said it's a below-average space sim. They didn't do a good job of balancing the weapons, and made ballistics and missiles totally unnecessary because particle weapons were better at everything.

Well shit, I just figured that was an early game thing that would balance out later. I watched some ship building videos and everyone's got missiles and lasers, so I assumed that meant they'd have utility later; that their range would improve, or that late-game NPC ships wouldn't be so susceptible to particle weapons, forcing a more balanced, situational, and multi-faceted approach.

Bummed to hear there's little or no change to that part of the game as you advance.

Not sure if this is still a thing, but they also had weird bugs where your power would be randomly reallocated when you arrived somewhere after a jump.

I noticed that, but there's a mod for it. The 40+ mods I'm using are mostly stuff like that -- fixes and tweaks to game mechanics. QOL stuff.

This was what I did for my grinding, I'd go to the Serpentis system and jump around attacking House Va'ruun ships and hijacking the more expensive ones. At that point the ship vendors didn't seem to refresh their cash though, or maybe they did but on a really long timescale, so I got to the point where I'd exhausted the credits of every shipbuilder

Yeah, that vendor loot increase tweak they added would have changed a lot for you. And mods... I haven't used any yet that really affect balance, but I've seen what's available. Of course they had a jillion "Rich Vendor" mods within a week of launch, but there's also some clever ones that let you build vendor terminals at your outposts (that are probably rich), portable vendor menus so you can sell wherever you want, and so on.

I get why people love console gaming, but as a PC purist I missed eveything after the PS1 for like a decade, then when I tried easing back in I couldn't work the damn controllers. Two sticks, a D-pad, 18 buttons, 4 triggers... I can't do it, and I immediately miss the precision of mouselook.

And specifically when it comes to Bethesda games, I can't imagine not playing on PC, not having one-touch access to their dev console, not being able to tweak every aspect of the game via mod. Even leaving aside content mods, you can reshape the game into exactly how you want it to be. I'm not all that hardcore a modder, but by final Skyrim install was wildly different from vanilla in dozens of ways.

The only thing that required large-scale resource extraction was building outposts, so it seemed like outposts were just a solution in need of a problem.

I set up three. One in a nice place to live, one mining 4 types of metal, and one mining H3 to tie them all together. So at first it was just to craft for a few quick levels, then I set up the automatic fabricator things and they just churn all day. Every now and then I sell whatever's built up in the warehouse for around 10K. Mine the right things and you can print money, but I haven't found cash to be an issue thus far, so I'm just letting it run for giggles.

With that mod to enable selling at your outpost and adding the other mission terminals, build all your crafting stations in one spot, it's a one-stop shop for everything you need to do between whatever else you do.

*shrug* It's just something to do for the folks that like building stuff in games, and this is the type of thing modders will go nuts with. Look at the thousands of house mods for Skyrim, a game that didn't have much of a building mechanic (and the one they did have isn't used in any way by modders except to steal the sites they carved out in the world to build better houses).

Skyrim really nailed the feeling of exploration. While traveling for a quest you could find unique, hand-crafted points of interest along the way to investigate which made the world feel more real.

Skyrim's a pretty perfect game, all things considered. It sets a high bar for sure. But its staying power is 100% due to the mod community. Starfield might be too far gone for mods to revive in a big way, but people LOVE this genre and it's a sandbox with plenty of potential. I wouldn't be surprised if it hangs on or even surges like No Man's Sky apparently did after a shaky start.

Skyrim has replay value because leveling skills encourages specialization and there's real differences in combat if you go melee vs archer vs the various schools of magic.

100% agree. The skill tree they went with in this game is a weird one. It might be worth it if there was WAY more content to keep people plugging away for ridiculous numbers of levels, but that isn't the case. Specialization made Skyrim perfect for repeated playthroughs, making it the perfect sandbox to build on for modders to keep it going for this long.

Some of the science and tech stuff should have been subskills that you can develop from far fewer overall skill choices, and I've yet to see the point in most of the social ones. Hugely popular Skyrim mods completely redid the skill and combat systems, so we'll see if there's anyone willing to tackle things like that in Starfield.

I still don't think if I'd approached Starfield the way you did I would've been happy though.

Definitely not. Like I said, even if you had gone about it exactly the way I did there wouldn't have been enough content to fuel the type of commitment you were hoping for. The mechanics of the game would have to change entirely. And even if modders pull that off -- which they probably will at some point -- it likely wouldn't match up to the story content anymore, and if the numbers don't rebound Bethesda will start to see it as a "putting lipstick on a pig" type situation.

Yeah, I'm definitely adjusting my expectations for the next Bethesda game.

Well, let's hope Bethesda learns from this, too. The landscape of this idea was too big and probably ahead of its time. Marry an AI engine to a procgen engine whenever that's possible, but in the meantime a game spanning dozens of star systems is pretty impossible to sandbox in this way. Stick to smaller "worlds" that you can make feel rich and lived-in.

No more half-baked releases.

Anyway, this discussion with you has me tempering my expectations going forward. So in a way I'm glad you had a terribly disappointing time with the game so I could avoid getting my hopes up. You're a mensch.

 

[usiel]

I haven't played a good space sim since Wing Commander, which I still remember fondly but I was young and dumb so it might not hold up.

I missed the boat on ME, which I always thought I'd like when I heard about it, but never got around to it. You had really high expectations for Starfield. I was just hoping to fall for another Bethesda game after Skyrim, which is easily one of my all-time faves that I played for a ridiculously long time. Fallout was never quite my cup of tea, though I did enjoy it. Just didn't reel me in as much.

My early experience with Starfield has been good, but you've got me bummed out now.



I agree on the quality of that story, which has probably helped skew my overall view of the story early on cuz it's the only questline I've gotten deep into. I did the main quest for a little bit, got the first power with all the trippy lights and stuff, and was a little let down. Starborn/Dragonborn, Powers/Shouts mapped to the same key... I did most of my Skyrim playthroughs with alternate start mods to skip the main quest because I'm not big on the magic stuff, so I was hoping SF would be more sci-fi/tech focused. I guess they had to do the space wizard stuff for the Star Wars nuts.



Ah, I've only focused on one so far and am not quite sure how much affinity-ing I have to do to get the quest started, but I'm working on it. Since there are only 4 of them I'm hoping their quests are lengthy and/or worthwhile. We'll see...



Well shit, I just figured that was an early game thing that would balance out later. I watched some ship building videos and everyone's got missiles and lasers, so I assumed that meant they'd have utility later; that their range would improve, or that late-game NPC ships wouldn't be so susceptible to particle weapons, forcing a more balanced, situational, and multi-faceted approach.

Bummed to hear there's little or no change to that part of the game as you advance.



I noticed that, but there's a mod for it. The 40+ mods I'm using are mostly stuff like that -- fixes and tweaks to game mechanics. QOL stuff.



Yeah, that vendor loot increase tweak they added would have changed a lot for you. And mods... I haven't used any yet that really affect balance, but I've seen what's available. Of course they had a jillion "Rich Vendor" mods within a week of launch, but there's also some clever ones that let you build vendor terminals at your outposts (that are probably rich), portable vendor menus so you can sell wherever you want, and so on.

I get why people love console gaming, but as a PC purist I missed eveything after the PS1 for like a decade, then when I tried easing back in I couldn't work the damn controllers. Two sticks, a D-pad, 18 buttons, 4 triggers... I can't do it, and I immediately miss the precision of mouselook.

And specifically when it comes to Bethesda games, I can't imagine not playing on PC, not having one-touch access to their dev console, not being able to tweak every aspect of the game via mod. Even leaving aside content mods, you can reshape the game into exactly how you want it to be. I'm not all that hardcore a modder, but by final Skyrim install was wildly different from vanilla in dozens of ways.



I set up three. One in a nice place to live, one mining 4 types of metal, and one mining H3 to tie them all together. So at first it was just to craft for a few quick levels, then I set up the automatic fabricator things and they just churn all day. Every now and then I sell whatever's built up in the warehouse for around 10K. Mine the right things and you can print money, but I haven't found cash to be an issue thus far, so I'm just letting it run for giggles.

With that mod to enable selling at your outpost and adding the other mission terminals, build all your crafting stations in one spot, it's a one-stop shop for everything you need to do between whatever else you do.

*shrug* It's just something to do for the folks that like building stuff in games, and this is the type of thing modders will go nuts with. Look at the thousands of house mods for Skyrim, a game that didn't have much of a building mechanic (and the one they did have isn't used in any way by modders except to steal the sites they carved out in the world to build better houses).



Skyrim's a pretty perfect game, all things considered. It sets a high bar for sure. But its staying power is 100% due to the mod community. Starfield might be too far gone for mods to revive in a big way, but people LOVE this genre and it's a sandbox with plenty of potential. I wouldn't be surprised if it hangs on or even surges like No Man's Sky apparently did after a shaky start.



100% agree. The skill tree they went with in this game is a weird one. It might be worth it if there was WAY more content to keep people plugging away for ridiculous numbers of levels, but that isn't the case. Specialization made Skyrim perfect for repeated playthroughs, making it the perfect sandbox to build on for modders to keep it going for this long.

Some of the science and tech stuff should have been subskills that you can develop from far fewer overall skill choices, and I've yet to see the point in most of the social ones. Hugely popular Skyrim mods completely redid the skill and combat systems, so we'll see if there's anyone willing to tackle things like that in Starfield.



Definitely not. Like I said, even if you had gone about it exactly the way I did there wouldn't have been enough content to fuel the type of commitment you were hoping for. The mechanics of the game would have to change entirely. And even if modders pull that off -- which they probably will at some point -- it likely wouldn't match up to the story content anymore, and if the numbers don't rebound Bethesda will start to see it as a "putting lipstick on a pig" type situation.



Well, let's hope Bethesda learns from this, too. The landscape of this idea was too big and probably ahead of its time. Marry an AI engine to a procgen engine whenever that's possible, but in the meantime a game spanning dozens of star systems is pretty impossible to sandbox in this way. Stick to smaller "worlds" that you can make feel rich and lived-in.

No more half-baked releases.

Anyway, this discussion with you has me tempering my expectations going forward. So in a way I'm glad you had a terribly disappointing time with the game so I could avoid getting my hopes up. You're a mensch.

Quoted for substantive post length. Achievement unlocked..

 

[AlexBrovechkin8]

Starfield sucks. Thanks for nothing, Bethesda.

To me it’s right next to Red Dead Redemption 2 for biggest letdown but I know my feelings on RDR2 are not shared whereas I don’t know anyone who is an evangelist for Starfield. I had more fun playing Outer Wilds as a space sim than Starfield and Outer Wilds isn’t even a sim.

Also, while I’m throwing out darts, Elden Ring can get f***ed as well. Don’t think I’ve wanted to throw my controller through a screen more playing a game since Battletoads.

 

[Kalopsia]

I'll only respond to parts of this to try to keep the length down, haha!

I agree on the quality of that story, which has probably helped skew my overall view of the story early on cuz it's the only questline I've gotten deep into. I did the main quest for a little bit, got the first power with all the trippy lights and stuff, and was a little let down. Starborn/Dragonborn, Powers/Shouts mapped to the same key... I did most of my Skyrim playthroughs with alternate start mods to skip the main quest because I'm not big on the magic stuff, so I was hoping SF would be more sci-fi/tech focused. I guess they had to do the space wizard stuff for the Star Wars nuts.

You dodged a bullet by stopping after the first one. That temple and the dumb minigame you had to do inside it? They just copy and pasted that 23 more time for every other power. I hated that damn minigame so much... there's a timer on the shimmers so they disappear if you don't get to them fast enough, but the effect when they disappear on time vs when you hit them is pretty similar and there's no clear indication of progress, so you can spend minutes missing them and making no progress without knowing it unless you google the minigame to learn all the mechanics. Oh and if you actually like the powers and want to max them out, you need to acquire each power 10 times across 9 new game+'s, meaning you have to do that exact same minigame 240 times.

Personally, I stopped after 4 or 5 because I hated the minigame and the only power I ever used was the one that refilled my suit's oxygen, because I was constantly sprinting from vendor to vendor to sell stuff or sprinting across open terrain to get back to my ship while overencumbered.

Well shit, I just figured that was an early game thing that would balance out later. I watched some ship building videos and everyone's got missiles and lasers, so I assumed that meant they'd have utility later; that their range would improve, or that late-game NPC ships wouldn't be so susceptible to particle weapons, forcing a more balanced, situational, and multi-faceted approach.

Bummed to hear there's little or no change to that part of the game as you advance.

Nope. My end-game ship had a full array of the top particle beams and they absolutely melted every ship I came across, usually before they could even get into range to return fire. I also kept a couple EM weapons to disable the last ship in the encounter for boarding. There was never a reason to change strategy based on the enemy ship's loadout, and the only time there was ever any danger was when the game scrambled my power distribution right as I jumped into a fight.

Oh, piece of advice - avoid the shield system perks. I don't remember all the details but if you have one of the perks and a companion on your ship that affects the shields, it'll permanently lower your shield rating. This has been known since pretty soon after launch and as far as I can tell Bethesda never fixed it. This guy did a crazy deep dive on it a couple months ago if you want to learn more.

And specifically when it comes to Bethesda games, I can't imagine not playing on PC, not having one-touch access to their dev console, not being able to tweak every aspect of the game via mod. Even leaving aside content mods, you can reshape the game into exactly how you want it to be. I'm not all that hardcore a modder, but by final Skyrim install was wildly different from vanilla in dozens of ways.

I've mostly switched to PC gaming for older Bethesda games, but I never had a laptop that could run their modern stuff until getting my current laptop a couple weeks ago. Having the console to fix bugs is a godsend. If I do ever come back to Starfield, it'll be on PC.

I set up three. One in a nice place to live, one mining 4 types of metal, and one mining H3 to tie them all together. So at first it was just to craft for a few quick levels, then I set up the automatic fabricator things and they just churn all day. Every now and then I sell whatever's built up in the warehouse for around 10K. Mine the right things and you can print money, but I haven't found cash to be an issue thus far, so I'm just letting it run for giggles.

With that mod to enable selling at your outpost and adding the other mission terminals, build all your crafting stations in one spot, it's a one-stop shop for everything you need to do between whatever else you do.

*shrug* It's just something to do for the folks that like building stuff in games, and this is the type of thing modders will go nuts with. Look at the thousands of house mods for Skyrim, a game that didn't have much of a building mechanic (and the one they did have isn't used in any way by modders except to steal the sites they carved out in the world to build better houses).

Being able to sell right at the base would've definitely been a nice improvement. It's so weird how you could set up vendors at your settlements in Fallout 4 but you can't do that in Starfield.

There's a lot of indications from comments by the devs and vestigial systems that seem like they should connect but don't (like H3 mining and ships needing fuel but it automatically refills for free) that point to outposts being a key part of a survival system that was ultimately stripped out because they couldn't find a way to make it fun.

100% agree. The skill tree they went with in this game is a weird one. It might be worth it if there was WAY more content to keep people plugging away for ridiculous numbers of levels, but that isn't the case. Specialization made Skyrim perfect for repeated playthroughs, making it the perfect sandbox to build on for modders to keep it going for this long.

Some of the science and tech stuff should have been subskills that you can develop from far fewer overall skill choices, and I've yet to see the point in most of the social ones. Hugely popular Skyrim mods completely redid the skill and combat systems, so we'll see if there's anyone willing to tackle things like that in Starfield.

A modder doing a full overhaul of the skill system would be one of things I'd need to get back into it. Even just rejiggering it to the original Skyrim system would be a huge improvement.

Well, let's hope Bethesda learns from this, too. The landscape of this idea was too big and probably ahead of its time. Marry an AI engine to a procgen engine whenever that's possible, but in the meantime a game spanning dozens of star systems is pretty impossible to sandbox in this way. Stick to smaller "worlds" that you can make feel rich and lived-in.

No more half-baked releases.

Anyway, this discussion with you has me tempering my expectations going forward. So in a way I'm glad you had a terribly disappointing time with the game so I could avoid getting my hopes up. You're a mensch.

Glad I could be of service! Agree that they definitely bit off more than they could chew. Based on Todd Howard's comment about taking 7 years of an 8 year development cycle to make Starfield fun hopefully they understand that now and can take a critical look at what went wrong so they don't make the same mistakes on the next Elder Scrolls game.

 

[Cush]

Waiting for Shattered Space before jumping back into Starfield. Really looking forward to Fable & Perfect Dark

 

[Marshall]

Also looking forward to Perfect Dark.

 

[twabby]

I was one of the few kids who enjoyed Perfect Dark more than Goldeneye on N64.

Hope the new one is good, because Perfect Dark Zero was kind of bad.

 

[AlexBrovechkin8]

I was one of the few kids who enjoyed Perfect Dark more than Goldeneye on N64.

Hope the new one is good, because Perfect Dark Zero was kind of bad.

Ah so you were that kid… explains a lot (kidding!).

To be fair though, Perfect Dark on N64 was an amazing game but I don’t think it beats GoldenEye on multiplayer.

 

[CapitalsCupReality]

Thanks for all the Starfield banter….guess I’ll skip it. Disappointing after all the hype…

 

[twabby]

Ah so you were that kid… explains a lot (kidding!).

To be fair though, Perfect Dark on N64 was an amazing game but I don’t think it beats GoldenEye on multiplayer.

Goldeneye was more groundbreaking but Perfect Dark was just better across the board.

Better weapons?
Secondary fire?
Better story scenarios?
No Oddjob bullshit?
Funny voice acting?

 

[Devil Dancer]

Laptop gun

 

[AlexBrovechkin8]

Goldeneye was more groundbreaking but Perfect Dark was just better across the board.

Better weapons?
Secondary fire?
Better story scenarios?
No Oddjob bullshit?
Funny voice acting?

Perfect Dark came out three years after GoldenEye and both were published by Rare so yeah, it was a more polished game for sure. I loved Perfect Dark so I don’t begrudge anyone for thinking it’s better than GoldenEye. Hard to beat the immersive experience at the time of GoldenEye, it was really the first game based on a movie that felt true to the film.

As an aside, Rare put out some absolute bangers: R.C. Pro Am, BattleToads, Donkey Kong Country, the Banjo-Kazooie series, GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day.

 

[John Price]

someone said midnight suns was free, I forgot to download it yesterday and was pretty disappointed to see it was 60 dollars until I checked steam and they had it for 20. I like it so far. I didn't know it was an RPG with your own character.