Starfield Was a Mistake | An Analytical Review

[@Monique-iz8lp]

I love how Starfield made everything optional. It was so optional I opted to do something fun instead

[@A_Brofee]

Yeah it was so universally received as being meh then I didn’t even bother to play it . And I used to love Bethesda games I pre-ordered 76 gave up on it came back to it a couple years later gave up on it and came back to work during Covid to give up on it for the final time

[@fubarfubar1977]

Yep. I opted to play Phantom Liberty instead...

[@ninochaosdrache3189]

I stopped playing it after the first temple, because I had experienced no joy or excitement during that time. I just went with the flow and kept playing, because numbers went up. But all in all, I noticed I was just wasting my time.

[@JayMaverick]

Astronauts weren't bored when flying to the moon, therefore your feelings about Starfield are invalid.

[@Theprofessorator]

Couldn't have said it better myself. It just made me want to go play Elite Dangerous instead, where the space actually feels... space-y.

[@enescustovic1883]

I think the biggest legacy Starfield leaves behind isn't "arrow in the knee" or "everyone disliked that" or anything in game, but rather these documentaries about why Starfield is bad lol

[@Miss_New_Booty]

Because it's bad in a fascinating way. A prestige studio spent several years and more than $100 million building Starfield, and this is what came out? Why? How? Who let this happen?

[@taylorlantzy2657]

Haha so true, KZbinrs have been feasting on this game

[@Truth_Teller_101]

These reviewers bravely waited 4 months after the game was released to drop these videos. The people with backbones released their videos within the first week of launch even though they knew the fanbois would attack them. Now that it's "safe" to not like Starfield, everybody else is dogpiling.

[@haruhirogrimgar6047]

​@@Miss_New_Booty I disagree. I adore some of the reviewers/essayists taking down this game. But Starfield videos are aggressively unmemorable. Likely because the game itself is.

[@Fullmetalnyuu0]

​@@Truth_Teller_101You must be new here

[@DAngeloB-c6h]

Starfield killed my hype for Elder Scrolls 6

[@wonipowa7542]

It made it abundantly clear that they did not look at how playing games has evolved in a decade. Cyberpunk 2077 blew all of this away.

[@ElijsDima]

same.

[@RobertFromEarth]

Like many studios, Bethesda's talented artists are long gone. And Starfield has the same designer as Fallout 76...

[@vipermjs]

ES6 will likely be set in one zone like skyrim, morrowind and oblivion. ES6 will be good. starfield is just meant to be a different type of experience.

[@dorianshepard2841]

Real

[@TacticusPrime]

It's shallow, but I seriously can't believe that they decided to do a space game without vehicles. Insane.

[@WHBN2P]

The fact that sarah morgan can be a potted plant and effectively change nothing is such a self dunk

[@Xaevryn]

Yeah that was wild. It broadcasted hard-core how inconsequential Starfield's followers are.

[@reanimatedmagpie]

they really went and made the sexy lamp comparison to their own dang writing. not a good look.

[@zombieranger3410]

Vlad becoming a table and it improves the game I think is funnier

[@UnknownOps]

Arguably, that one is better since she doesn’t talk.

[@bixmcgoo5355]

You guys do realize that she's not actually a plant, right?? Like y'all aren't actually dumb enough to take that joke seriously are you?

[@PrimroseParadox]

"The astronauts weren't bored when they went to the moon" yeah todd they were on fraggin' moon and I'm sitting at my desk playing your shitty game.

[@deptusmechanikus7362]

They also had a kick-ass rover.

[@gianghuynh9570]

Rick and Morty had a joke about this in a season 6 episode where Beth banged her clone.

[@SJDSt]

They've tried to save some oxygen all the time and not aimlessly running around like morons in a mmorpg.

[@אוריפרץ-ח9ב]

you made my day dude 🤣🤣

[@nagger8216]

lol I know right? Everyone else goes through so many elaborate counterarguments to this stupid ass point, and I'm just over here like "Well, I'm not actually on the fucking moon like they were, Todd."

[@ImOblivious]

The biggest crime is that they set the game during the most uninteresting time frame of their own universe. The big war is over, there's no conflict except someone passive aggressive peace, and any threat that rises up is very minor in the grand scheme, and then anything you do is just reset by a universe jump so none of your choices really mattered.

[@RareNine]

How this is not talked about a lot is crazy to me, something bugged me a lot during my playtime of why the game was just boring until fit just hit me. The timeline felt like the most anticlimactic point chosen.

[@sgtass1]

I think the story-writing could have been a lot better too. A lot of the factions just feel like checkboxes instead of actual organizations. The UC feels all over the place

[@ventriloquistmagician4735]

amen, well said

[@karolyburkhalter]

Everyone complained about radiants on Skyrim and Fallout 4, the solution for them was to make the entire game a radiant 😁Scamfield was a fraud from the begin, Idk why many people were hyped by this. It just prevented tes6 and fallout 5, even if we know that they will probably suck too because gaming industry is ill nowadays and people are quitting games or going to retrogames because they are bored of this modern day trash videogames. Skyrim player are just waiting for Beyond Skyrim or Skyblivion series to come out, Fallout players are just waiting mods they could add to TTW or Fallout 4 New Vegas and Fallout Capital Wasteland for Fallout 4, everything for free. In fact, the fanbase of these TES-Fallout games are quite loyal, but many unfortunately got scammed by the ''fake light'' promoted by Scamfield. Bethesda didn't even deserve a single buck for that garbage.

[@Michael5029]

by your logic any grounded FPS that doesnt take place during WW2 would not meet your standards

[@chriscarter4563]

Starfield 2 preorders are going to come with dev kits and players will be tasked with making the game themselves, you craft the experience, you set the deadlines, you talk to shareholders.

[@Sinner987]

Ang BGS gets the money when they sell the game you made with the dev kit you paid for, in the new creation club.

[@DailyCorvid]

Instead of character creation, you start off with a C# prompt and a manual. And to use commands you have to grind through a bunch of lootboxes which you pay for with internal currency. Which you buy using Bethesdacoins, which you win on scratchcards. In the mobile version. Which is pre-order only, with Legacy Special Edition Starfield 1. Lol, change my mind.

[@GhostOfSnuffles]

They'll start selling chunks of the creation kit as DLC.

[@Furzkampfbomber]

@@Sinner987 They they sue you for using their assetts.

[@Ed-ealmighty]

It feels like it right now

[@FruitloopLeviathan]

The most unforgettable thing to me is how bland the lore of Starfield is. That's definitely something you cannot blame on technological or workforce limitations.

[@Ruteekatreya]

I thought the technological limitations confound was a wild thing to bring up in anno domini 2023. Consoles are more than powerful enough to handle any particular variety of gameplay complexity; you could maybe overwhelm them with specific implementations, but that was never going to be a gameplay issue bethesda was going to run into, not even with starfield.

[@TempoLOOKING]

Yes it is. Hire scify nerds. This is just 2001.., but shit.

[@TempoLOOKING]

​@@Ruteekatreyajocks making a scyfy game...8 years of failure...fire your HR guys.

[@gonza360]

It’s the writing. It’s absolute shit

[@throbbingfellow1136]

Absolutely, I couldn’t believe how bland the setting was. Why make a scifi game if you don’t have anything interesting to show the audience?

[@TheDrunkMunk]

It's fascinating how Todd talks about dumbing and watering down their games as if it's such an intellectual feat they've undertaken. I've been mad about the simplification of their games since Oblvion, and I always assumed it was a cynical way for them to just make more money. But hearing Todd talk about removing environmental hazards in such a whimsical way makes me believe he genuinely believes it's a good, clever thing to do. Just a complete lack of taste and soul, I have to wonder how much he actually had to do with Morrowind.

[@jennydeaf9O9]

yeah really, fkmg delusional losers. 400 million down the drain. i blame emil after doing some research.

[@ludisnemo887]

I hear what you're saying but I think he's just knowingly selling junk because that's his job. They may not have cynically set out to do that, but that's where they are now. "That empty space? Let me tell you how that makes the game better!" It is a craft in its own right and that is what he's perfected: selling dung as if it's gold.

[@TheDrunkMunk]

@@ludisnemo887 I feel like I can tell when someone is full of it. Todd seemed genuine in that interview. Which is even sadder than the more cynical money-grubbing angle.

[@planescaped]

Todd's main contribution to Morrowind was pretty much just the Imperial Legion questline... the worst written faction in Morrowind. They could have had a faction storyline centered around fighting the 6th House and actually portraying this rebellion that Dagoth Ur was waging against the Empire, instead we got some random small-scale busywork quests that culminate into nothing and with no overarching story.

[@OldSlimJolo]

Yea i remember playing Skyrim the first time and one thing that stood out to me in it was the intentional layer of accessibility too it, it really seemed designed around being popular and flashy but was at least still atop a good game - one that was more brazen to me was Fallout 4, where the game literally abandons its own lore in the opening tutorial zone, giving you the types of weapons and endgame armor to kill the universes literal most dangerous monsters, deathclaws, cutting through them like swiss cheese - its clear some marketing aims to capture a vibe / aesthetic for the audience has kind of taken precedent over the other immersive rpg elements of past Bethesda titles. Like, dont get me wrong - FO4 was right to make wearing powerarmor and actual *system*, you SHOULD feel like you're wearing a tank in the fallout universe when you're in power armor, which is why it should be end or lategame content to give you an appreciation narratively/aesthetically for what a boon power armor is for the factions who operate it. Instead its like they're so seperated from the lore of their fallout intellectual property that they just wanted a game that looks cool and is easy to play and wrapped it in a fallout coat, completely cheapening all the actual danger of the wasteland, brutalism etc, to very light elements because, look, you have cool futuristic armor and you can paint it!!! The people behind marketing etc seem to think the best way of reaching a wide audience is creating a game MANY people can play and it seems like it's turned their games into Action games with RPG elements rather than RPG adventure experiences they actually at least were arguably across Morrowind / Oblivion / Skyrim still. They're just been cheapening their own content more and more with each title, and it's kind of like it reached the absolute widest people are willing to accept with games like 76 and Starfield haha. Bethesda doesn't think their players are smart enough in general to navigate an open world and stuff anymore, pick up narrative threads, etc. Bethesdas world design seems like its come full circle/horse shoe too back to Daggerfall lol, where they've made a technically massive 'open world' but it's open world in a way where the exact same content is literally everywhere in the game world regardless of where you are because its all copy paste random gen.

[@grimvisionz91]

Starfield has about 6.7k players on steam right now. Skyrim Special Edition has about 22.3k players. It explains itself.

[@skyriminspace]

Are there any other 12/13 year old games with those sort of numbers?

[@steel5897]

That's actually the case for a bunch of other AAA western games recently, Suicide Squad had 800 players (lmao) while at the same time Batman Arkham Knight had 1900, same time. A huge live service game that just came out vs a 9 year old single player game that the same studio developed in 1/4 of the time. The colossal wave of layoffs may be sad but they're very expected, game studios are incapable of competing with their own work despite being several times larger now.

[@DogBackwards816]

Because Starfield doesn’t have any sex mods yet lol

[@grimvisionz91]

@@DogBackwards816 hold up, this guy is onto something lol

[@grimvisionz91]

@@steel5897 kill the justice league player count vs old Arkham games player count is a great example.

[@vomm]

The problem is that Bethesda is getting more and more arrogant. They think the players want a bad story. They don't want a good introduction. They want bugs, they want old technology, they want a bit of everything from every genre and confusion and who knows what else. And even though it's clear where this attitude comes from, namely the fact that the players actually memeify everything Bethesda fucks up, they're just wrong. It's not what the players want, but what the players forgive - if the rest of the game is great. The confidence with which Todd presents all these mistakes as great, well-considered decisions is just frightening. What I don't understand is why Microsoft doesn't step in, but just watches as this part of its empire delivers crap. Sure, Starfield was a financial success, and by the time TES 6 comes out, the players who have now lost confidence will have forgotten and will buy it anyway ... but yeah ... oh what am I talking about ... it's all pointless anyway. The players will buy everything as usual. Bethesda can do whatever it wants. In the end, Todd is right.

[@dungeonpastor]

I don't think so. A lot of people are not buying and are stepping back and waiting. It will catch up with Bethesda eventually.

[@alastor8091]

All people who buy Bethesda games at this point want is to see the Bethesda logo when they start up the game. Actual drones.

[@Zorothegallade-rpg]

Bethesda has cone fully corporate, but they still like to pretend they're a quirky borderline indie studio where everyone gets to be creative. With the result that everyone pools ideas in the final game that don't mesh together at all

[@abrahambobst4602]

No, it's Emil who thinks we want bad story with his BS writing philosophy of KISS which doesn't belong in writing. KISS is for technical fields to ensure you don't kill people, and make tech work safely.

[@verisimuli]

I'm never paying for a Bethesda product. I'll happily torrent it so that I can play it and tell my friends about how boring and shallow it'll inevitably be.

[@DJWolfHouse]

Skip to 1:57:46 if you’ve already watched the preview.

[@wesss9353]

Thanks, he should have started the video there...

[@TheHalogen131]

Thank you kindly! Private Sessions should have left a pinned comment with timestamp, or something.

[@MegaDeathRay10]

What a chad

[@thesidneychan]

​@@wesss9353 no, it should be complete. Otherwise it would be scattered in 2 parts. This is great for newcomers too.

[@wesss9353]

@@thesidneychan already listen to the preview though.

[@entririhunter]

Trying to equate the majesty and significance of people actually being on the moon to people running around in a videogame is very, very bonkers.

[@demomanchaos]

Especially since the people on the moon had quite a lot of things to do, unlike in Starfield's wastelands.

[@anthonykarnes6804]

Insignificance*

[@schizophrenic_AI]

If you time-traveled to 1998 with a PC capable of running this game and a OLED monitor capable of displaying the graphics, anyone who played the game would find the analogy reasonable. Unfortunately, in the space year 2024, they are half a century too late for this to be anything other than stale, boring, and disappointing.

[@anubis7457]

@@anthonykarnes6804Mankind reaching the moon was a huge significant step.

[@SyndicateOperative]

@@anubis7457 It was nothing. It was a fucking meme.

[@mathyoucanwaitk7905]

Starfield reviews are 100× more entertaining than Starfield itself

[@dean_l33]

That'd imply starfield entertainment value is a positive number

[@lotsathedetox]

Here we have yet another post exposing how asinine the hate campaign is for Starfield. It is just a damn video game. Why on Earth does it bring you joy to see a hate campaign at work? I will never understand what motivates people these days. It is incredibly strange to see what the internet and gaming communities have become. And why would anyone trust reviews from random people on KZbin who can push any narrative they want to fit their agendas and needs, versus actual gaming sites and actual writers where it has 86 on Metacritic. It isn't like Fallout 76 had good reviews when it came out so why would they give another horrible Bethesda game an 86?

[@dean_l33]

@@lotsathedetox The reason many hate it is because for one it's shit. The second, bethesda promises the sky and give us a bunch of bollocks. Thirdly it's because they're a geniun fan of bethesda that drove them critize Starfield for the wasted potential that it represent

[@Jupa]

@@lotsathedetoxexactly… just one crappy space game. So why do you care? I’ve seen your replies everywhere lol. End of the day this was an obscenely stupid waste of $400m, charging customers $70 promising a galaxy of things to do. It only manages to denigrate the players intelligence. I think they have a right to hate considering the numbers.

[@fridaysatjons1097]

@@lotsathedetoxBethesda just wasted time, money and resources on a boring space game sure the game isn’t horrible, but it’s definitely not higher than 3/10.

[@NepNepTech]

What kills me is they make this space game with no pre-established lore holding them down but instead of making a unique galaxy full of cool alien species that maybe you could even play as, we get only humans in what feels like fallout 4 with a crusty, space themed paint job.

[@jurassicarkjordanisgreat1778]

Its funny how spore does everything better than starfield does.

[@thedonofthsht76-58]

YEA a whole galaxy out there but everyone is human. The characters and story are painfully boring. I wanted to love the game but it's so bland

[@KizaruB]

I’m fine with having humans as the only intelligent life if they’re going for a space western like Firefly, Outer Worlds, or Borderlands. The problem is they didn’t fill it with interesting things to see and do. It also needs a stronger sense of atmosphere to carry a premise like that.

[@PaxBritannia]

Ironically there are aliens in Fallout 🤣

[@aaronhumphrey3514]

I don't have any issue with having a more grounded sci-fi setting if it's well-realized and there's good writing to back it up. Unfortunately, they completely failed on both fronts.

[@SaintJames14]

"The astronauts weren't bored when they were on the moon" Wrong, Todd, they started playing another game (golf) just like I did

[@JacobYaw]

Underrated comment if ever there was one. 😂😂😂😂

[@Melinmingle]

Man that comment from Todd was Just retarded. Those are astronauts, beeing paid a shitton of money with limited fuel food and oxygen and the main questline consists of collect samples and run tests.

[@KevinJDildonik]

Real talk. Astronauts basically have 24/7 schedules. Because it takes billions of dollars to launch science into space. So you have a full day every day making use of it. Astronauts only get a "day off" when things are running really smooth so they finish stuff early, or things go very wrong like an experiment broke so there's a hole in the schedule. Like if you have a period where an experiment needs 30 minutes to run, you're flying to the window to take pictures while it runs. That half hour is gold. Astronauts don't have time to be bored. Space is their job. Todd's comment only makes sense if players are doing QA because Starfield was never finished. Or he's a liar.

[@r.k.5031]

Excellent

[@bigboicreme]

I started playing golf again also

[@kashashk]

That Mom and Dad overlapping lines is just the Bethesda touch that this game both needed and didn't.

[@skyriminspace]

I think it's what they referred to as radiant ai in oblivion. They've really scaled it back or cleaned it up over the past three games but it's still there. It can cause goofy or even frustrating moments, but it's also a crucial part of what makes the npcs feel like living characters.

[@kopicat2429]

​@@skyriminspace Well, guess I'll keep looking for examples of it working as intended. Because all I see online, and experience myself, are messed up conversations that screams bugged NPC's in a video game rather then living characters. I've never thought Bethesda NPC's feel very much alive to begin with. So when you say the Radiant AI is a crucial part to make them feel like living characters, I wonder if you've had a very different experience with the games then I have. Maybe if I had more examples of it working as intended, rather then the buggy mess it is 9 out of 10 times.

[@personwhohasayoutubechannel3]

​@kopicat2429 yeah I'm so confused what he even meant by that. How could it being poorly made with 0 synchronicity or awareness be what makes it feel alive?

[@Ruteekatreya]

@@skyriminspace There are so many games that have done this better than bethsoft has ever done; literally could just have basically static or patrolling people repeating a loop and it would feel more alive for most folks.Bethesda refusing to bring out a fucking dialogue screen both kills cinematography and a naturalistic feel both.

[@chalibard3826]

​​@@skyriminspace and I loved it in Oblivion, then they purged de immersive parts like npc living their lives and now we only have the bad dialogue and repetitive empty dungeons left.

[@helmaschine1885]

3:23:38 "So not only are we dealing with a multiverse story written by a bunch of people who haven't been able to write a coherent LINEAR story in over a decade, we're also dealing with a story where there's zero internal consistency with how it's universes work." Perfect summary if Bethesda as a whole

[@brkenppt2222]

This comment is dripping with hate and disdain, kinda sad imo

[@sunblade704]

​@@brkenppt2222 It's not hate, it's criticism. Learn the difference

[@schmecklin377]

​@@brkenppt2222LOL

[@ballisticwaffles]

@@brkenppt2222 I'm sorry this person didn't deliver the verbal equivalent of a deli slice that has been corpo-sanitized for your viewing pleasure.

[@crazyscotsman9327]

Bethesda desperately needs dedicated quest writers and to can Emil he is so bad as a writer.

[@TheMarcHicks]

In hindsight, it seems crazy now that Larian were clearly concerned that Starfield would be a bigger hit than BG3, and thus steal their thunder.

[@MrSpartan993]

That’s the funniest shit I’ve heard all day! Ha!

[@canadiangaming5139]

they were worried about that? that's fucken golden, they were worried that the most mid game in existence would be a bigger hit then BG3, I think Larian should look at this and realize, so long as the continue to make fire ass games, that nothing will touch them.

[@Dajudge06]

I actually played BG3, even "free" on gamepass I still wont touch Starfield.

[@megyskermike]

If Bethesda showed up to bat, it could have at least been kind of competitive, and the brand name alone makes them sell like hot cakes. I can understand the concern even if it turned out to be truly nothing but comedy.

[@firstandforemost87]

@@canadiangaming5139 It isn’t even mid. I’ve been able to get decent play time out of mid games. I dropped SF after less than 8 hours and never went back.

[@jojodelacroix]

Man, imagine living in a world where there's a major housing crisis but an utter refusal to build new housing. Truly dystopian.

[@james-s-smith]

Did you know NYC has the greatest population of millionaires on Earth (340,000), while San Francisco has the greatest population of billionaires (63)? I don't know why this just popped into my head, since in Starfield neither of these cities exist anymore, just an idle thought.

[@WobblesandBean]

Right? Good thing we don't live in a world where the majority of the dwindling housing is snapped up by rich people and corporations to use as investments rather than places to live, robbing ordinary people of being able to buy a home.

[@WobblesandBean]

Good thing we don't live in a world where millionaires and corporations buy up the little available housing left to use as an investment instead of living in them, making it impossible for ordinary people to use them as homes.

[@radscorpion8]

@@WobblesandBean its really not just a matter of blaming millionaires and corporations. If you read more about the issue, for example in Beverly Hills, there is a desperate need for housing, but none of the upper middle class neighbourhoods want apartment buildings to be built in their neighbourhood. The "not in my backyard" stuff is what prevents new development from starting. Cities can also pass bylaws that restrict that kind of investment, they do so in Toronto, and it helps a little, but if there is not enough supply then no amount of laws and taxes on the rich will resolve the issue. This is overwhelmingly a problem of not enough supply to feed growing demand.

[@cruncher576]

thats just canada man 😂

[@AlarienEvenstar]

It's amazing to me what modern games sometimes try to pass off as a "city." New Atlantis wouldn't even qualify for a minor settlement. There's no believability when your city is one square mile with no housing space. At least with the Citadel in ME, you could see the rest of the structure/city enough to feel like it was real.

[@sss1029]

@lif6737Soyfield runs on the skyrim engine, they couldnt make anything acceptable even if they wanted to.

[@TheSergio1021]

Disneyland is bigger than New Atlantis

[@renaldoawes2210]

@lif6737 The reason is becausxe people cucked about Skyrim being amazing when it wasn't. The cities were super small. Smaller than Oblivion. There was no excuse for it but fanboys were like "hurr they should be small because skyrim is less populated" but the cities were never matching realistic sizes anyway so that excuse never worked. The lack of criticism led Bethesda to keep doing it. Love em or hate em, the critics are the ones who push for changes.

[@faffywaffle561]

@@sss1029 Soyfield 😂😂😂

[@samwise1790]

Its so weird that somehow humanity is so expansive that you can find randos on all these many planets but there isn't like any largely urbanized planet or really population centers of any scale or kind. Who is making all these ships, buildings an items? How could a war have even been fought with seemingly so few people and habited worlds? The fact that earth has been abandoned and were so technologically advanced but there's no courascant-like hubs of mega cities/planets is wild. Or like, giant orbital spacestations/shipyards? Theres zero believability about this game world from the moment you start playing it. We're in an advanced future civilization but reduced to essentially 'artisanal' mining operations with like 5-10 people and it isnt fully automated at scale. The game would have unironically been better if there was a ton of unexplorable set dressing giant cities/industry, at least it would appear believable.

[@awereal]

I found it funny that Ted Price in that interview was smiling in that happy, satisfied way as Todd told him how his team failed to implement a core gameplay feature.

[@_holy__ghost]

i genuinely give props to those interviewers. if i was doing an interview with blizzard as they told me overwatch pve is cancelled my jaw would hit the floor. in journalism thats grounds for firing (or at least a demotion). im sure the interviewer knows todd is rolling for gaslight, he just cant make it obvious he knows.

[@p0k314COM]

This "interviews" are bunch of prepared lies to gaslight scandals.

[@awereal]

@@_holy__ghostFunny you should say that. I just reached the 3:45:00ish or so Todd interview and Ted's mouth popped open for a few seconds, oops!

[@_holy__ghost]

@@awereal even nerves of steel falter in the face of such unfiltered bullsht

[@anna-flora999]

​@@_holy__ghostwhy would an interviewer not be allowed to nail them for stuff like that?

[@ItsYaBoyYogi]

No one can convince me that starfield wasn’t the worst game of last year. Doesn’t do a single thing that hasn’t been done better by games almost ten years old at this point. What games do you have to compare it to to where Starfield looks favorably out of last year’s catalogue? King Kong and Gollum?

[@Greedisgood-qy2ed]

Gollum is the goat

[@TheAxeLordOfFire]

Gollum and King Kong were at least laughably bad; sure, they were horrible games, but it was still a lot funnier to mock them for how terrible they were. Starfield may not be _as_ bad as those two games speaking on an entirely objective level, but it commits the worst sin a game could possibly commit: being _boring._ I'm not even a diehard Bethesda hater; for the record, Fallout 3 is one of my favorite games of all time and I admit that I like it even more than NV for a variety of reasons, while Morrowind and Oblivion are both classics, and Skyrim is also a childhood favorite even if I recognize with age how much mods come in clutch with that game. But they somehow took all the wrong lessons from Fallout 4, a game I think is a fun "Skyrim with guns" but terrible Fallout game, and have only taken issues that were problems in the earliest Bethesda games until they were nearly-impossible to ignore anymore. Everything from the story to the worldbuilding to the gameplay is *_BORING._* I think the fact you could have several essential NPCs be replaced with a fucking object a more damning indictment on the game's lack of faith in its own writing than anything else. You could legit kidnap a Comedy Central writer at 2 AM, bring them to an abandoned warehouse, drug them with ketamine and hallucinogenics, and force them at gunpoint to write a South Park episode in their lurid, drugged-up state in 20 minutes, and I can assure you the result would be considerably more _coherent_ than the plot of Starfield.

[@lunafencoven]

Starfield was undoubtedly the biggest disappointment of 23. Still, many horrendous games were released on 23, like Forspoken, Kong, Gollum, and who could forget 'The Day Before,' the biggest scam I've ever seen in gaming.

[@Zorothegallade-rpg]

Starfield can be summed up as: "We made a game with everything, but were afraid players wouldn't want to do everything, so we made everything into nothing so players that didn't want to do everything didn't miss anything."

[@Special_Places]

"No Man's Sky is such garbage!" - 2016. "No Man's Sky is a comeback story!" 2023. "Cyberpunk 2077 is the worst game of all time! What a crappy game!" - 2020. " "Cyberpunk 2077 is an amazing game!" 2023. "Starfield is the worst game of 2023!" - 2023. Gain perspective, stop listening to KZbinrs like this...hypercritical ans clearly not able to think for himself and be happy about a game until everyone else is.

[@callumr4245]

finally Mum and Dad's starfield videos are out and I can watch them like the unintentional companion videos that they never intended for them to be before I never think about this game ever again.

[@kylekozlov3674]

Who's the other one? Patricia?

[@imgrizze]

​@@kylekozlov3674yes

[@wiebitteichhabeesvergessen]

American families

[@Bigbabki]

​@@kylekozlov3674 yes they were married during the 76 campaign

[@xaikken]

lol feels

[@publiusdos5925]

When the most fun you have playing the game is blowing up Grandma to horrify Sarah, then gaslight her into forgiving you, there is something systemically wrong with your game.

[@lukew6725]

I mean, that does sound pretty fun. 😂

[@Ninja1Ninja2]

they brought the adoring fan back so he could be the least annoying npc

[@5115neo]

Gamers when they figure out everyone has their own definition of fun and that they can form their own opinions without basing them off 4 hour hate essays

[@CaleebTalib]

@@5115neowell then Bethesda shouldn’t hype up their games to high heaven. They basically tried saying it was going to be red dead redemption 2 level of detail in space. In reality if you compare the two RDR2 is like deep sea diving with how much content there is versus starfield which is more like a wave pool. Wave pools can be cool but not when you market it as deep sea diving, ie they lied about a lot.

[@BlackWeeeb]

the most fun i have with fallout 3 and NV or even HL1 is killing the npc’s mid conversation. does that make those games boring?

[@vrabo3026]

"Starfield bad" is my new favorite type of youtube documentary genre.

[@therandomdickhead5744]

you and me both

[@BreezyVIL]

Legit 😂

[@Swat_Dennis]

But is it true or is it not?

[@PensFan35]

@@Swat_Dennisits a bad game. I spent enough hours playing it to know that whatever magic Bethesda used to have is completely gone. The real question now is: will it ever come back? Can it? Is ES6 already doomed? Starfield is in the past now. Pay it no mind. No one will remember its name. This was a waste of 8 years.

[@yeahyeahwowman8099]

My thing is that you don't need several youtubers all talking about the same crap when the faults of the game can be summed up in like 5 minutes. That Suicide Squad disaster, yeah its a dad looter shooter, most of the time they are terrible. Yeah we don't need an hour long documentary telling us.

[@Oozaru85]

I started a new playthrough of FO4 few months ago. Been mostly exploring, haven't even been to Fort Hagen in the main quest, yet. I've explored every nook and cranny in Downtown Boston, pretty much. All the interiors, the terminals there, all the holotapes and notes I could find. Then went to Quincy, cleared out the Gunner's and went to the Wilson Atomatoys factory to get the Giddyup parts for that ghoul in the slog. When I had the parts and finally talked to the guy, I had a totally new dialogue I've never heard before. And I was baffled when suddenly Nate recognized the ghoul guy, because I didn't and I had no idea what was going on. Then Nate gave him a holotape I had discovered in the Wilson Atomatoys corporate HQ in Downtown Boston. And suddenly I understood his obsession with these Giddyup toys and it brought some tears to my eyes. In all the years I've been playing this game, I've never discovered this dialogue. And many other dialogues which one only gets by exploring the game world without starting the accompanying quests beforehand. I highly doubt I'm gonna have such experiences in Starfield, with it's copy pasted research facilities and mines on procedurally generated planets. I sure haven't had them in the 100 hours I have played the game so far. I'm not interested enough in the game to keep playing. Replaying FO4 and Skyrim is much more enjoyable and I still discover new stuff, even after so many years.

[@admiralalyssa]

Ever since I found that holotape of his daughter, I always bring it back to him.

[@hadookin47]

With modded Fallout 4 I legit forget Starfield exists, especially with all the community made content and more on the way. Too bad the next gen update messed a lot of stuff up

[@RachelsDollies]

I've also played F04 and Skyrim a lot. Right now my fav game is Cyberpunk 2077. I tried Starfield, bought it at launch (regret that), played 100 hours then uninstalled. So lifeless, especially compared to game like CP2077. I won't be preordering anymore Bethesda games, I'm done.

[@BehuraStudio]

All my homie love Arlen Glass

[@dorianshepard2841]

Todd howard: the scale of this game is so big Me: played through once and ran into the same dungeons dozens of times each and the same random encounters 5-10 times each

[@Varangian_af_Scaniae]

I run into the same outpost 4 times during my first 2 hours of gameplay. I got the exact same story from a man in one base and a woman in the base I visited right after. I quit right there and then.

[@dorianshepard2841]

@@Varangian_af_Scaniae when I first played the game I explored a lot of land on Kreet where I landed and went to all the bases I found. Captured a landed ship...little did I know I would encounter duplicates of those same bases on every planet

[@petercottantail7850]

just having unique areas would have made the game so much more endurable. i would have put up with the other boring stuff, the idea that more than 6 different enemy outposts is too much to ask for is ridiculous, seems like the head devs just don't care or know they can get away with copypaste. I remember the first week this game came out, I would read people raising this same issue but the defenders said they played for +40 hours and never or rarely got repeat content.

[@dorianshepard2841]

@@petercottantail7850 the people saying they never got repeat content after 40 hours are just objectively lying. Given the current state of the industry I'm sure some of them were people paid by the company to run interference, something that movie studios have been proven to do. Then there are others who will blatantly lie about something in the game because they feel the truth invalidates their purchase decision. A sort of cognitive dissonance. I've seen it myself when perk bugs were discovered and reproduced with 100% surety and then someone on reddit will claim the bug doesn't exist and that you simply don't understand the game mechanics. E.g. for the first several months (idk about now) all reload speed Perks disabled when you had grenades equipped. Unequip the grenades and your reload Perks activated again, repeatable every time for everyone who got that bug The Bethesda problem starts at the top, imo. If you look at Todd and Emil and the rest of their leadership positions, none of them are people with leadership skills. Whatever skills they may have, it doesn't extend to their ability to manage and command a large group of employees. In fact I'm not sure I'd even trust them to organize a small group of 12 effectively.

[@bigboicreme]

Did they put the n word in the game?

[@danielgolden8116]

When they were designing Starfield, they clearly focused so much on the question of “how big can we make the world(s)” that they forgot to ask “how big *should* we make the world(s)?” A gigantic, empty planet is basically just a loading screen

[@lordmarshmal_0643]

This has me thinking about a game I myself wanna make, a more traditional RPG in a distant future context like Starfield's I have told myself, however, to try and keep it small - one star system, for character-specific reasons including but not limited to: - The player's main character, Korven, has a life-long streak of misfortune and prefers staying in sparsely-populated areas to avoid causing too much collateral; this streak isn't a curse or anything that Korven can break/do something about, lady luck just hasn't been the kindest to him, but he's acquired a fair number of friends and skills to help with times where the streaks gets the better of him - The player's second character, Omega, hails from a long-forgotten civilization of robots, equipped with a nanobot weapon named the "Phoenix Virus" and the goal to rebuild his civilization, but despite being fully autonomous Omega lacks a moral compass to use it responsibly; Korven has to be a mediator in this regard and would really rather not try his luck going to more populated systems with Omega in tow

[@LN997-i8x]

They're not even that big, all things considered.

[@avenage]

This is the main issue IMO. Having 100 planets with lots to do on each is way better than a thousand barren wastelands. What they should have done is trim the initial focus and release sections of the galaxy as DLC. Honestly, I think the curated content is actually decent, and the base building is in a lot of ways superior to previous titles. But the issue is that "Fallout 4 in space" suffers from all of the same problems that the barren wastelands in Fallout 4 has, except on a bigger scale. And as I say in every comment when it comes up about Starfield, they did Earth dirty - only one building left standing in a few major cities is insulting.

[@precisionleadthrowing4628]

No, they focused on diversity inclusion and equity the DIE concept that kills and destroys everything. It's woke. Go woke - go broke

[@benhawk4214]

​@@LN997-i8xi mean they are pretty massive, actually. What makes them so small is that there's pretty much nothing to do, and no impedances to slow you down

[@seandoyle296]

It’s kinda wild that Mass Effect did the whole “space opera about ancient alien artifacts, with squad combat and enjoyable planetary traversal” way, WAY better all the way back in 2007. Like, it’s completely unacceptable that a space game set in the 24th century wouldn’t have some sort of small vehicle to traverse a planet, like the Mako from ME. And yet Bethesda really just said “Nope, you’re walking!”

[@TheAxeLordOfFire]

Man, the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition really goes to show how well the trilogy has aged in the last decade or two. Whenever I see gameplay like Starfield, it makes me just want to boot up and play Mass Effect again.

[@illseeyaonthedarksideofthemoon]

To be fair, if only a little, the team behind Mass Effect was behind Knights of the Old Republic, you can see similarities in the story between the first 2 games of their franchises.

[@DailyCorvid]

Starfield does have one fun aspect. Photo mode is fun, especially when you encounter glitchy NPC's. Aside from that, it's very barren. Fallout 4 even with no mods is so much better in terms of raw gameplay. And as noted, lore is non-existent here. This Universe is pointless.

[@DailyCorvid]

@@tommyg8570 A few signposts in the game would go a long way, like when you leave Whiterun in Skyrim there is a signpost pointing to 4 locations. Considering the small amount of stuff in Starfield that would be an easy mod.

[@vexile1239]

To be fair to bugthesda, they can't make "land based" vehicles with how old and defunct their creation engine is

[@lordfizzz]

At this point BGS is the guy from high school who had really good party tricks but now we're all in our late 20s early 30s and opening a bottle of beer with your teeth isn't as cool as it was 15 years ago

[@numetal_samurai]

No, because the problem with BSG is not that it keeps doing the same thing. Starfield is very different from Morrowind in every way possible.

[@graxxor]

Yeah, an 8 year old opening beer with his teeth would be a hard act to top.

[@AntonioFerrari8]

I’d say BGS is more like that really chill friend in college who was eclectic, unique, and showed you really cool electronic music and arthouse movies, introduced you to the hot goth chick on campus, but now it’s 15 years later and your old friend called you up to invest in a new cryptocurrency that they started on their laptop

[@SimonRobeyns]

@@numetal_samurai this < same when fallout 4 released, it was so much worse than even fallout 3 let alone 1-2-vegas, if it was anywhere near the same it wouldve been great

[@NicholasWilliams-uk9xu]

Gov is cracking down on addictive elements in games, because the gaming community is a easy target, it isn't a "respectable community of people". Meanwhile, Tech companies are addicted to your personal data, using it to generate world wide conflicts for attention based ad revenue (destroying children for profit).

[@Dogtrio]

The worst part of outposts is not that they are clunky. Its that the point of them is to get resources... but there is no use for mass amounts of resources.

[@KaiSoDaM]

You can sell resources, 20k, by visiting 300 vendors, then you go afk 48hours in game, go back sell more stuff. With that money you can...

[@mrnigl1]

@@KaiSoDaM...do nothing

[@katsu1715]

kind of the recurring theme of Starfield honestly "what is the point..." they didnt make Space wonderous and mysterious, they made it miserable and nihilistic, imagine going through the unity only to live out 1-3 weeks of life again just to repeat it, Bethesda literally explored this concept in fallout 3 with Dr. Braun torturing the other vault residents for fun....

[@plywoodduck]

The resources one can get from settlements weigh a ton and have virtually no value. Freaking money farms? I think not. There's no reason for settlements.

[@gfimadcat]

Yeah I had this whole brilliant setup going and then I was like wait, what exactly am I able to do with these resources in the end? Getting them sold was a chore in and of itself and there was just no end game to that whole thing.

[@LordofBroccoli]

Man, I will never get tired of people pointing out how shitty Starfield is.

[@lotsathedetox]

Here we have yet another post exposing how asinine the hate campaign is for Starfield. It is just a damn video game. Why on Earth does it bring you joy to see a hate campaign at work? I will never understand what motivates people these days. It is incredibly strange to see what the internet and gaming communities have become.

[@LordofBroccoli]

@@lotsathedetox Because of the enormous hype Starfield had despite Bestheda's track record and literally everything that happened with Fallout 76. I was one of the few who tried telling people to not preorder the thing because of Fallout 76, but no, I was told I'm just a doomer and to fuck off because Bethesda can do no wrong and surely Fallout 76 was just an anomaly. "This is Todd Howard's big project, he didn't even care about F76, this'll be different." I am honestly appalled how quickly players forgot and dismissed that piece of shit, saying "oh, it wasn't that bad" and "people just hated it for clicks". Well, now it seems the majority of people is finally aware of how mediocre Bethesda is and always has been, and I for one couldn't be happier. One less overhyped dev to join the ranks of Ubisoft and ABK.

[@josephjed2008]

This game seemed so promising man is BS it ended up being ass

[@Yurikon3]

@@lotsathedetox I guess it is about communal experience. Playing it alone is not very inspiring experience, but thrashing it even in parasocial context brings some fun out of it.

[@Amara87387]

@@lotsathedetoxbecause games cost money, thus when we put money in, we expect something good in return. Statistically speaking, it’s a telling sign that most of the comments on a highly thorough critique are commenting on how good the critique is, or adding onto it, with very little in terms of posing actual counterpoints to the point given. Starfield was overhyped and underperformed.

[@ryansarafin12]

I find it very ironic that Emils writing strategy is "keep it simple, stupid" because no one will play/pay attention to the story, even though the most common complaint I see about BGS is how subpar the writing is

[@Shadowhunterbg]

I have yet to see something good out of him. It's pretty obvious that he is a horrible writer that says this to make an excuse for his incompetence. I can forgive if he at least tried but he is also extremely lazy not using documentation like everyone else and doing zero research about things related to what he is trying to write about. He is a delusional incompetent and narcissistic clown. He is stupid enough to even calls us idiots, the customers and not worthy to be spent any effort for.

[@WobblesandBean]

He clings to that mantra because he refuses to admit he's just not that good of a writer.

[@SkaffaS]

@@kay94 i think most complains about Cyberpunk was about the buggy state the game was released in, i only first played it last year when the big update released, and i must say it's an amazing game now. Thoroughly enjoyed myself for a good 100 hours. Starfield however i quit and uninstalled after 4 to 5 hours of mediocrity, not because of bugs, but because it was just a very bland game with outdated game design.

[@piggymaster3209]

If out of touch was a person, it would be Emil

[@spacebassist]

​@@kay94 calling the souls game "outdated design" is a little unfair. it's tried and tested, "ain't broken, don't fix it" design. i'd argue demon's souls is outdated, a ton of that predicates on you knowing the level inside and out to not die, it's full of cheap-shots and blind-siding, which is very dated design now. dark souls 1 mostly did away with that, you tend to see it coming and have to learn enemy attacks rather than "there's an ambush from behind here full of completely new and unpredictable enemies" also ignoring bloodborne, sekiro and elden ring. i know they're not souls in name but they very much are in... soul. they did things differently, it's the foundation that's the same there's plenty of outdated design, like placing coins in a platformer leap of faith that guides the player to death, leaps of faith at all, pixel perfect jump(s) (bonus points if it's 5 minutes after the last checkpoint), pixel-hunting in a point and click, combining nonsense items in a p&c, QTE's or a reaction test that kills you if you don't know it's coming, balancing the difficulty to what challenges you as the dev rather than an ordinary player, cranking enemy health up and player damage down and calling it "hard", texture hunting for a button, backtracking an entire level for one item/button to progress. that can be called bad game design but it's avoided now and thus becomes a thing associated with the past when game design wasn't fully understood and pro studios still included these things. there's so much that (good) devs don't do anymore because it's obnoxious and others had to fail and keep cramming these in for the new blood to learn a better example would be something like life counters, fps's with keycards, a point and click that has sierra levels of sadism that plays it for comedy, tank control games (i know those are mostly horror and were intentional in the day but still). some of those are a little contentious but plenty of people still like them. i guess i'm describing things people got tired of, had a break from and can now enjoy when done more sparingly or with some mod-cons to make it more bearable. there is no perfect resurrection of an old design because they didn't work and it annoyed the player. there's always some new polish or tweaks to make them bearable so it's a mutation of outdated design i'm not gonna hound you for liking starfield because it's your opinion and your life but it's also unfair to say people only dislike it bc youtube. bethesda's not been doing too hot on PR the last few years and people like me are kinda tired of seeing bethesda's game design barely change since skyrim. some people are okay with that and it's none of my business to say "you're wrong" but it's also not yours to tell people who didn't want to give bethesda money to give up 10+ hours of their life to reinforce their conclusion sorry, i didn't mean to sound blunt or anything but more people have informed opinions than you think

[@Duchess_Van_Hoof]

I swear, when I browse the reviews, the positive ones are basically: "Boring, repetetive, and Bethesda's blandest game ever. Too many loading screens and it is just not that good." And then there's a big green thumbs up to the review.

[@UncleDon226]

This game made me really appreciate how fleshed-out the world of Mass Effect 1-3 was. Take the guns for instance. Mass Effect said that the guns have a block of metal and every time you shoot, a shaving is taken off that block, about the size of a grain of sand, and propelled at absurd speeds giving it effectively endless ammunition capacity. But they couldnt solve the heat buildup, so you need to eject the heat-sink to "reload". That's a genius way to implement ammunition restrictions for gameplay within a sci-fi setting. Meanwhile in Starfield, they expect us to believe that in the age of lasers, the .45acp would still be so prolific?

[@coolsenjoyer]

The heat buildup as ammo management in the first game was neat idea but I always thought when it was turned into reload based system in the sequels, they should've just had the lore say that they needed to start using bigger chunks of metal because the sand grain sized projectiles were too weak agains Geth so they now run on actual ammo instead of ejecting heat sinks, because it makes no in-universe sense to not have the old style heat dissipation system as backup when you run out of the heat sinks

[@KaiSoDaM]

Since you mentioned Mass effect. The first game was heavyly critized for having empty open world to explore. Yet, I completed all planets on both my playthrough of the 3 games. ( I'm a very lazy gamer I never replay stuff) What I found enjoying was that every planet, no matter how empty always had (3) main objetives/quest/landmark. You could get resources, find a piece of lore, a random artefact that made you question how stuff worked on that universe. Little animals. But the planets where just big circles with mountains, but I loved going for these pieces of lore/resources.

[@UncleDon226]

@@KaiSoDaM It's embarrassing how many hours I spent trying to get my Mako to sit at the highest peak on every map

[@kaiserruhsam]

@@coolsenjoyer mass effect 2 just kinda shit the bed with that and having powers on shared cooldown

[@Zero-ds9ws]

@@coolsenjoyer My thought when they introduced that idea is that they could've gone for a hybrid system. Instead of just making it purely reload based, keep the heat management system while giving you a limited amount of heat sink replacements to instantly cool down the gun, explaining it as a measure to ensure troops can keep up the offensive. Still, making it the standard reload thing in of itself was fine, though the one convo where Shepard just goes "oh it just made sense" at some guy was kinda funny.

[@jayporter1981]

What's bad is the planets on helldivers 2 look exponentially better than planets on starfield. And the engine helldivers 2 was built on was discontinued in 2018.

[@BigVorst]

I was thinking the same thing playing HD2.

[@p0k314COM]

Helldivers 2 engine is 6 years old, team is generally new, Starfield engine and dev team are 20-25 years old.

[@Zero-ds9ws]

@@p0k314COM I feel that just makes it exponentially worse. For all intents and purposes Bethesda should know every little thing about the engine, its limitations and precisely what to exploit to make it run smoothly and to ensure everything works well. Failing that, they should've made a new proprietary engine rather than spruce up one that is clearly unsuited for the task of creating a game of the size they wanted. They have the experience, manpower and resources to make that a reality. The Helldivers engine and dev team being relatively newer and fresher than Bethesda's own really just puts into perspective that Bethesda simply has stopped caring and trying.

[@benhawk4214]

​@@p0k314COMthat's not how engines work lol, just because it goes by the same name doesn't mean it doesn't receive tweaks and updates. You wouldn't say Unreal Engine 5 is the same as unreal 4

[@p0k314COM]

@@benhawk4214 In Bethesda this is what the engine situation looks like. They are outdated by about 20 years. This piece of software is complete sh*t.

[@Syenthros]

Private Sessions: "I have to disagree that enemies are bullet sponges." Also Private Sessions: *shows video of a random non-boss raider eating an entire magazine of headshots from a sniper rifle without dying*

[@NicholasWilliams-uk9xu]

Gov is cracking down on addictive elements in games, because the gaming community is a easy target, it isn't a "respectable community of people". Meanwhile, Tech companies are addicted to your personal data, using it to generate world wide conflicts for attention based ad revenue (destroying children for profit).

[@kron7536]

Either he lucked out on how many bullet sponges he came across or he experienced much worse in other games so the bar is extremely low

[@missivory_missraine]

​@@kron7536 MMORPGs have insanely low bars.

[@OminousPortent]

The only thing good that came out of Starfield are videos like these. This video will be worth the lack of sleep I'll have.

[@Argusthecat]

The grim realization during the exploration section that the footage is NOT LOOPING, and this is just different iterations of the same room over and over. Like if Groundhog Day were an FPS and also horrible.

[@katsu1715]

it is quite literally a nightmare you would have from intense anxiety about your life going nowhere

[@nuclearpugg]

This is what I felt like getting to level 100 at launch but I still had fun with the game

[@Boomer04888]

I was hopeful for the game at first, but I must admit that my first major point of realization that this game is *NOT* what I was hoping for was when the first 3 planets I visited all had the exact same UC Listening Post location. Within the first few hours, I had memorized a dungeon layout and scanned the exact same "melted glacier" on three different planets lightyears apart from each other.

[@NicholasWilliams-uk9xu]

Gov is cracking down on addictive elements in games, because the gaming community is a easy target, it isn't a "respectable community of people". Meanwhile, Tech companies are addicted to your personal data, using it to generate world wide conflicts for attention based ad revenue (destroying children for profit).

[@Geraduss]

The biggest mistake in exploration was for them to focus entirely ON the planets. It should have been focused on space it self, flying your ship and finding points of interest in the "Star Field", and planets just be resource/habitation hubs for quests.

[@assortmentofpillsbutneverb3756]

Tbh they shouldn't really have done planets. They easily could have a mix of air tank timers and bioengeered safe spaces to limit planets into far more designed areas. "Highlight" segments of planets while have lore reasons and mechanics explain why exploring it all isn't needed

[@Blisterdude123]

The biggest mistake was Bethesda's sheer arrogance and audacity in thinking they could get away with farting out such a sub-par, boring, bad, sloppy game after an entire decade on the basis 'the modders will make it good later lol'. I'm done with Bethesda, what an abhorrent attitude to take, as a major developer. What a repugnant, and unpleasant, and lazy work ethic. Charge your audience nearly a hundred bucks for a game they expect their audience to make good for free. F uck them. The sheer entitlement is absurd. I hope none of the insanely talented modders working out there touch this thing with a barge pole, Starfield deserves to be forgotten.

[@Geraduss]

@@Blisterdude123 The only modding I see happening that would be worth a damn is complete overhauls into entirely new games and settings just using Starfields assets and engine as a platform, within 2 years I bet we'll see StarWars and Warhammer mod projects, pity actually if you ask me, the best setting that would work with the games assets would actually Blizzards IP of StarCraft, turned to an RPG.

[@WobblesandBean]

One thing space exploration games never do is add animals in space. Star Trek offers so many bizarre, fascinating creatures who just live in space, and I wish game devs would do the same.

[@whitehawk4099]

@@Geraduss I don't think enough people are going to be interested enough in Starfield for that to happen. There needs to be a certain underlying level of quality for people to create those kinds of total conversions.

[@LadyMutare]

I never felt like an explorer as there was always a building nearby.

[@Boomer04888]

A copy-pasted building you've already seen and explored 10 times over on planets lightyears away, no less

[@bigflea11-ig8jr]

Did they just make no man's sky?

[@Discovery2024-rn8kn]

Just click and teleport. No risk exploring deep space, no survival or dangers.

[@Nabo42]

"He's the type of guy who listens to a bunch of Alan Watts presentations and suddenly considers himself an expert on Eastern philosophy." I died laughing at this line because I've seen quite a few people like this online.

[@Iaotle]

The construction in Dogtown is not ongoing because of Hansen, it's leftover cranes and equipment from when Pacifica was being built. They just left them there.

[@mispap1]

The fact there’s only 20 real poi’s is actually insane. How could it take them that long to only create that many….

[@rioplats]

They only had 10 level designers on this game, total. And these people have to create all of the other interiors, exteriors, ships, shops and other spaces too. The bigger question is why they didn't either A. hire more level designers, or B. make POIs procedural. Having said that, since everything is done with the Creation Kit which has its own inbuilt cell editor, they could have just done a POI-bash week where everyone, level designer or no, spends a week creating a single small POI, and then they'd have had a few hundred to select from. They had plenty of options, they just chose to do... None of them.

[@katsu1715]

they probablly spent about 7 years just trying to get spaceships to function as much as they do

[@Ruteekatreya]

@@rioplats We actually know why they didn't choose option A. Bethesda thinks it's still an indy studio, and that the games they're cranking out are being released in 2004. You can go check interviews and they just abjectly refuse to actually hire people because they think they're still small and scrappy. They're not alone in this (The Pokemon Company is the other big name I'm familiar with doing this). They refuse to grapple with the scale of what they're doing and hire more teams to match. Frankly skyrim was already lucky to have released in the basically unplayable state it did. By default a game of skyrim's notional scale would generally have like thrice the number of devs working on it.

[@rioplats]

@Ruteekatreya Yeah, I've been arguing this for years (that they still operate like an indie studio despite the scope of their titles), but I don't get why they keep going bigger without getting bigger. Game Freak, frankly, at least I understand, since their games never really get any more ambitious in overall scope, and they've never had a financial flop ever despite their ineptitude. But Bethesda have had Fallout 76 and yet they've not either A. changed their studio approach to fit the scope or B. just kept the scope limited. That's the part I'm confused about. Is it just Todd wanting to both have his cake and eating it, I wonder?

[@Ruteekatreya]

@@rioplats See, game freak has been getting more and more ambitious in scope more or less from gen 2 on. It's a necessary precondition of a monster game adding more monsters with increasing fidelity, or adding new forms of animation to have to care about (EG the various types of petting, new minigames for monsters to do). But ultimately, the question "Why do they refuse to adapt to the reality of what they're doing?" I mean, without a more in depth view of their psychology... I don't know? People tend not to update their self conceptions of themselves? You'd have to have substantial access not just to like, Todd Howard, but others at his studio who let him keep cooking. There's no way to get a good answer without talking to the people involved.

[@CoolSmoovie]

I died inside when the game told me that the Great War of among the stars happened decades ago :/

[@deptusmechanikus7362]

This video is longer than my own playtime of Starfield since release lmao.

[@minibixxx]

They are more people watching than concurrent players

[@KikyouNeko]

I pirated Starfield, played it for like 3 hours then uninstalled from disappointing of a game it was. I felt so ripped off that I should get a refund for this pile of sh*t.

[@wiebitteichhabeesvergessen]

Why'd you buy it?

[@deptusmechanikus7362]

@@wiebitteichhabeesvergessen I didn't say I bought it.

[@MasticinaAkicta]

It gets good after 4000 hours!

[@That_Puppet]

Nothing makes you feel as though your choices matter like resetting absolutely everything at the end of the main quest and telling them to do it again

[@t-rexreximus359]

“These aren’t even plot holes, these are plot craters” 😂

[@vexile1239]

And the craters have more depth then the plot

[@burnin8able]

no but seriously. the video goes over it a bit, but I just really want to hammer home the idea that the grav drives were so close to perfected that a software update was all it took to stop them from stripping planets of their magnetosphere, but they still decided to go ahead with using them without the update EVEN AFTER THEY WERE WARNED THAT WOULD HAPPEN! it's absolute peak idiot plot trope and I absolutely despise the writers responsible for this travesty.

[@t-rexreximus359]

@@burnin8able agreed! & also the fact that lots of people in Starfield live on moons & planets with no atmosphere, yet EVERYONE had to abandon Earth instead of some creating domes/ habitats. ..Also, why is the Earth now buried in sand? - where did all that sand come from? & why would losing atmosphere cause that to happen in a few hundred years?! 😂

[@burnin8able]

@@t-rexreximus359 it's just so baffling. a simpler explanation might have been seen as a cop-out but it at least wouldn't be as braindead as this. I fully believe they should just just fully blown up earth. say a meteor this size of our moon crashed into it, who cares.

[@ArcangelGamingEntertainment]

Its amazing that no matter how many besthesda themed videos i watch, whether on skyrim, fallout or starfield, everyone uses oblivion ambient music.

[@kestutisvaiciunas8663]

Heck, even Morrowind and Oblivion videos use oblivion music Oblivion truly was peak OST from Bethesda. Skyrim had better implementation, but the songs didn't really deliver the same emotion

[@simethigsomethingidfk]

I have always said this since starfields launch and I really am surprised that they didn't do this. They should have just made an area maybe about 1/4 the size of Skyrim for each major world and fully fleshed out that area. Call it a "Settled Zone" or something and keep the randomly generated stuff for the rest of the planet, just call it a "Wilderness Zone" or something. Put all the big cities in the center of these settled zones and make a bunch of interesting encounters, caves, minor settlements etc etc around them. All the story quests and big events would happen in the fully fleshed out settled areas so you could stumble across interesting caves and random encounters as you went between the quests (so no running 12km with literally nothing happening). But you still have the vast expanse of the world outside this area to make your own settlements in. Plus you have the perfect excuse for all the quests happening in these zones because "Well these zones are where 99% of people live so obviously it would be where all the quests happen". It's such an obvious way to do this but they decided to do the dumbest way instead.

[@lonelystarslibrary9326]

​@ULTRAOutdoorsmanYes

[@Scowleasy]

I would agree that Bethesda’s biggest focuses, and strengths, have been world design and roleplay through mechanics. Bethesda’s trend of ever streamlining their games has only harmed them by neutering what was once their main selling point. An open world sandbox game with nothing to do is just… a big box of sand.

[@Romanticoutlaw]

and then Todd would be confused why you're bored because someone stranded in a desert isn't bored

[@skyriminspace]

Except there's a metric ton of things to do in starfield, & the mechanics to support roleplaying are at least as good if not better than anything since oblivion.

[@BlueBD]

​@@skyriminspaceblatant cope

[@tddNando]

​@@skyriminspace in a skeletal level I agree but bethesda dont even know where the spine is

[@Palindrome3945]

Bethesda's biggest focuses are marketing, lying, and damage control.

[@amysteriousviewer3772]

Bethesda style cities are really immersion breaking in a modern/sci-fi setting like this. The scale is just completely off. Mass Effect or KotoR did this really well because you only ever got to visit parts of a much larger location which made it feel real and believable.

[@thirdtooth4069]

At least in Skyrim I could kind of suspend disbelief and excuse it with the fact that this was a fantasy setting where cities wouldn't have been that large. And in fallout it's a hard-scrabble post-apocalyptic setting. This is a space odessey and the "metropolitan mega-city" of new Atlantis looked more like the entry area to Epcot centre. Pitiful.

[@anna-flora999]

​@@thirdtooth4069for skyrim, that only got me so far. For the small minor settlements, sure, but if you've been to actual medieval cities... It breaks very quickly again

[@thirdtooth4069]

@@anna-flora999 yeah, point taken, but it was still easier to suspend disbelief over that than trying to imagine away why the largest city in the distant future would be something you can walk across in a few minutes

[@cosmictreason2242]

I visited Tromsø in Norway last year and in getting a view of the whole city from the top of a ski lift, it really surprised me how it felt like Skyrim and Assassins Creed, in how everything in the "playable area" was visible in one field of view. Gave me a neat change of perspective. A full sized modern city can fit in a landscape/skybox. Starfield was just making excuses. There's enough hardware to make large cities. It's not hardware limitations, it's laziness

[@XBluDiamondX]

The inability to feel immersed is what put the nail in the coffin for me. I couldn't stand it any longer. For instance, the planets the capital cities are on have so much available space, but homesteading families decide to setup shop on a barren moon/planet instead. Or how about Akila and why they automated their farms. They automated them due to a dangerous 4-legged predator. Yet, they had the technology to build mechwarriors, arms, ships, to take on the UC. Yet, they couldn't go toe-to-toe with some animal and couldn't figure out how to pave roads. It's just a mess.

[@gotthmilk2458]

i went through a big amount of cope when it launched, i wanted it to be good so i lied to myself but looking back... this game is just bad

[@vishalvenkat6]

Even if we don't categorize Starfield as a space sim or big space game, its still a bad game in whatever category you put it in. - Adventure? Boring. - RPG? What role-playing is there? - Action? Please be serious. - Narrative? Dogshit.

[@Dennis-nc3vw]

The combat was great, and so were the roleplaying elements. There were plenty of choices, both dialogue and narrative. It's just the world and story that felt soulless and poorly thought out.

[@vishalvenkat6]

I would disagree. BGS has been playing catchup in terms of satisfying combat and this game still hasn't caught up to modern AAA games(or I guess AAAA games according to Ubi). And as far as RPG elements, this could be down to personal expectations, but this was my first BGS game and heard that they have great roleplaying elements and was let down on how little my actions actually have real world consequences or just consequences within certain quests themselves. The game doesn't let me play the was I want to since it makes it an insane inconvenience to play the game as anything other than a kind, morally-sound straightshooter. All the talk about being able to play as a pirate was just hype without anything meaningful to back it up. @@Dennis-nc3vw

[@jibbanibba2000]

​@@Dennis-nc3vwidk that combat is great comes from, its just a reskin of the one from fallout 4 with extremly dumb AI, if u want great combat check out stalker anomaly, npc AI there does wonders

[@Redroomjjgfd]

@@Dennis-nc3vwthat and throughout my entire 100-hour playthrough I never felt any consequences for any decision I ever made, the special power you get is the most boring thing to go through to unlock them all, the combat is okay but it's nothing special, it feels like gun variety is extremely sub-par, gosh man it hurts my soul.

[@StainsStainsStains]

Idc really. I liked it as a good time waster. I dont have expectations. If it's fun and I get hours of entertainment out of it, its ok in my book.

[@tommyservo9660]

Elder Scrolls 6 is gonna be shit.....

[@Zorothegallade-rpg]

Emil: "I can guess what it takes to make a hostess Twinkie, but I don't work in the factory so what do I really know? Not a lot" Me: "Yeah but if I found a cockroach inside my Twinkie I think I could be pretty confident in stating that a lot of people in the Twinkie factory fucked up."

[@yanentine]

Reminds me of the comedy bit about finding a helicopter in a tree: "I'm no pilot, but even I know that's not meant to be there!"

[@sentegraphs]

Octavia Butler was inspired to write after she saw an awful sci-fi movie, Devil Girl From Mars, and thought she could do better. Just mentioning that to let you know that if you do create your sci-fi world after being "inspired" by Starfield, you're in good company.

[@TourFaint]

Man, i remember spending HOURS decorating a house in Morrowind. Arranging books, placing my loot on the tables, arranging ingredients in a way so i remembered what makes the best potions. Imagine killing dagoth and azura just resets you into new game plus. That would actually make me feel loss. This video made me realize this multiverse infinite new game plus loop idea could actually make a good story that makes me feel something. And they didn't even try.

[@skyriminspace]

They certainly did try, & depending on your perspective, might have succeeded. Not every piece of entertainment media lands with every consumer.

[@idiotpuffles]

@@skyriminspacewould love a 4 hour retrospective essay on how this bland corpo sludge is somehow good but it doesn't seem likely

[@iDrumGod]

@@skyriminspacelol stop it. Starfield is a 3/10 game at best regardless of how braindead you are.

[@UnknownName5050]

You’re out of your mind. This game is literal poison.

[@skyriminspace]

@@UnknownName5050 show me on the doll where the game developer touched you little johnny.

[@LordMarlle]

All these clips of Todd looking sad. He knows they worked 8 years on a crappy game with no real vision. I almost feel bad for him

[@saltyshrimppasta]

2:57:19 This is giving me flashbacks to the ME3 streams where the dead Salarian councilor showed up to Thane’s funeral in the DLC, because the writers forgot to script a sequence where the player never talks to him during the base game and he dies of natural causes

[@KopperNeoman]

That sort of combinatorial nightmare is also why the ability to save both Ashley and Kaiden on Virmire was cut. Everyone would do it, but there would need to be so much extra development purely for those curious about the two failure states.

[@bw7754]

Bethesda games are DOA, Starfield just proves to me they’ve just lost their way and don’t care about finding the road.

[@DailyCorvid]

The road is now a menu between two loading screens.

[@aersla1731]

I am not a psychopath but I do miss the dismemberment and melee animations from older BGS titles. They would have done wonders in the small zero g areas.

[@Romanticoutlaw]

the lack of any kind of gore whatsoever does make it feel pretty limp to me ngl. I don't need limb-accurate dismemberment or anything, but have a piece fall off when I hack at an enemy with a blade

[@aersla1731]

@@Romanticoutlaw I agree just something would have been nice, not to mention it would make the heavy weapons feel more punchy. Such a shame because besides the melee this is the best any BSG combat has ever felt.

[@skyriminspace]

@@aersla1731 hey, someone said something positive about starfield!

[@sebastianbronowicki7073]

​@aersla1731 it's not like the bar was set very high in the first place

[@JasonX909]

That and suit breaches. Everyone is using guns against space suits, and causing wounds, but no suits ever leak oxygen apparently. With the oxygen system they have implemented it could just count as permanent fatigue until it gets repaired

[@OmegaZyion]

"Why have stairs next to a ramp?" Wheelchair accessibility. But in all seriousness, the real reason why we didn't get vehicles is likely because it would make the maps feel much smaller and Bethesda likely wanted to milk the playtime numbers for Gamepass by slowing down exploration. Not to mention it would increase the chances that someone would pass the 2 hour Steam refund mark before realizing that the exploration part in a game focused on exploration is boring.

[@WobblesandBean]

Yes, in a game where ANTIGRAVITY AND JET PACKS ARE A THING, clearly we must be mindful to keep everything wheelchair accessible in a fictional video game.

[@citrus_sweet]

It's because they can't manage the memory load of a vast world without suffering the consequences of the game crashing or freezing during a memory refresh. Their idea of a huge world for exploration that's being procedurally generated is a double-edged sword because on one edge, it's boring; on the other edge, it's a technical nightmare to get something like that working fluidly in a 3D game and the developers KNOW it wouldn't work so they don't bother with vehicles.

[@AndyCandyZeroSugar]

I noticed the ramp too, but even if it isn't, it felt like virtue signaling. Why not just have a ramp like pretty much all space ships ever, from old UFO ships to the Millennium Falcon? It just comes off as illogical in universe. Not a real issue, but I feel it shows how the devs think and what priorities they have.

[@ballisticwaffles]

@@AndyCandyZeroSugar "Everything I whine about is virtue signaling" A child's guide to world building. Newsflash, Bot, people are allowed to believe things without it being a cash grab. Loser.

[@AlistairArsene]

I think I've officially spent more hours watching videos dissecting Starfield than I've spent playing Starfield.

[@smakfu1375]

Here’s what happened, IMHO: Todd “Dev Bro” Howard, who’s written 0 lines of code in the last 15 years, came up with a laundry list of “cool sh!t” to put in the game without any understanding of what would be required to make the mechanics work. It’s an RPG, a space sim, a builder game - all build on top of an incredibly dated engine that was designed to be a planar open world RPG. You can’t fly into the planets because it can’t model huge spherical multi-LOD objects, and it doesn’t have the graph depth needed to support all the asset loading and unloading needed to pull it off. Thus you get loading screens all over the place. This is also why you end up with boring empty procedurally generated planets - the engine needs highly explicit scene layout, with object and asset management mapping. But it doesn’t have tooling needed to support a complex procedurally generated environment. The engine was designed in an era when map density was far simpler. For example, when looking at Skyrim and CDPR’s Night City, they’re about the same size, but the object (and related geometry and asset) density is massively higher in CP 2077. And CDPR has invested in upgrading that engine, over time. But today, CDPR, unlike Bethesda and Minimum Todd, understands that RedEngine is at the end of its lifespan, as further refits would become ever more problematic, especially to have it match functionality and tooling as compared to Unreal 5. And this is the core problem that’s plaguing Bethesda: the engine and its tooling are ancient, but their people know the tools, so they can build “stuff” fairly quickly. Bootstrapping a project feels fast, and doesn’t require a lot of upfront engineering or learning time. But the engine lacks the scaffolding to do things needed to connect that “stuff” that Todd’s “dream game” requires together seamlessly, especially as that list of stuff (environments, locations, NPC’s, interaction mechanics, interacting objects, etc.) gets bigger and bigger because Todd’s got a big-ass game in mind. So, due to limitations, you start chopping the game elements into smaller chunks. Then you can’t figure out state management between those chunks, especially as they have bipartite dependencies that become harder and harder to manage. So you start chopping things out, making state static or driven by simpler constants, and taking short cuts. Pretty soon nothing really connects or interacts, and everything becomes “optional” or, as Todd likes to use as an excuse, a “flavor of something”. The whole process should have started with a careful requirements assessment, which probably would have led them to “we need a different and/or newer engine” plus a lot of customization (if off the shelf). So you end up with a big, but poorly interacting game that’s not fun to play. All because Todd wanted his dream game, but didn’t want to make (and probably didn’t understand) the hard and expensive investments in core engineering to make it happen. Put another way, since Fallout 76, and now with Starfield, it’s pretty clear Todd is way out of his depth on the technical decision making around building games, and this ends up torpedoing everything downstream (including writing and quest structure).

[@schmecklin377]

lol at this point i want elder scrolls 6 to come out just to see how much of a mess it is

[@smakfu1375]

@@schmecklin377 So I worked for Satya Nadella back in the day (I worked at Microsoft for quite some time). Todd, while several rungs down the ladder in a subsidiary, is still likely going to get some of that “skip-level” intervention for f’ing up Starfield this badly. These kinds of things don’t just slide at the empire, and even Ballmer got fired for two massive successive screwups (mobile strategy and Windows 8). And believe me, getting skewered by Satya is a hilarious thing to watch because it’s like a cross between Mr. Rogers and Gordon Gekko. The guy is absolutely not full of crap, and given that Todd is completely full of it, that conversation will likely be one of the most uncomfortable of Todd’s life. At the empire, you’re welcome to try new things, propose new products and business avenues - but the place is hard-core on corporate Darwinism. You fail, you get to leave, and you’re only as good as you are in the current fiscal year, and your past doesn’t mean jack if you F up. I liked working there because I understood the rules and was successful (and it was a great training ground for striking out on my own). But Todd doesn’t strike me as the kinda guy who will last long. So I don’t think Bethesda’s next game will be “allowed” to be the kind of mess Starfield turned into. And Microsoft has a lot of very smart, well motivated people who know a crap-ton about complex game development, that would just love to have a shot at the Elder Scrolls IP. IMHO, I think Todd’s out before the end of the year.

[@schmecklin377]

@@smakfu1375 it will be very interesting to see what happens. Todd is so synonymous with Bethesda that it would honestly be shocking to see him go but if anything is gonna do it then it's gonna be this disaster known as Starfield. Pete Hines already left and I suspect it's because he's sees the upcoming shitshow coming their way. Theres been talk about Bethesdas development process with no design documents, outdated tech, and everything having to go through Todd. If Todd isn't fired, at the very least they have to do major shake ups to the way games are made there. They run the place like they're still a little 20 man team about to go bankrupt, not a multi hundred man team with hundreds of millions of dollar budgets. I have absolutely no faith in the current Bethesda staff to make a competent next product, but I do like the IPs so I'd be interested in seeing some new blood tackle them if the old guard gets the boot.

[@smakfu1375]

@@schmecklin377 Well, all I can say is there are no sacred cows at Microsoft and Todd being the face of something doesn't mean a lot. Love or hate Microsoft, they're results driven, and Todd sure didn't deliver.

[@larrote6467]

The enginewas originally for mmorpgs

[@Kudryavka_Noumi]

Starfield single-handledly brought the gaming critique genre of KZbin to a new level.

[@mosthole]

Yeah doing the exact same thing every other youtuber does and complaining about all the same things every other youtuber already complained about in their essay definitely raises the bar lmao

[@reesofraft4166]

you forgot the day before that was criticized way before starfield in a detailed way. (yes, it released later, but only due to other issues)

[@cosmictreason2242]

YOU'RE BORING!

[@civildisorder]

Something fascinating about this video is that, usually when you look at works from the same dev studio, the hindsight you apply on things works differently. "This feature / function being better in the new thing makes me see the old thing in a new light, how it easily could've been better," that sort of thing. Starfield pulled the reverse; it's not just you Private Sessions, but Pat more or less made the same point about how Starfield was somehow regressive in Bethesda's ability to craft, and there is newfound appreciation for how previous games of theirs did particular things. Hearing praise for Fallout 3 for example, it really does make you think.

[@katsu1715]

the moment i noticed that was when i needed like rank 4 weapon mods to make the crappy pirate rifle into semi-auto

[@codemonster8443]

4:25:17 "Fortunately that script is mostly complete so it's not gonna take another 8 months for that one" He lied as easily as he breathed lol

[@Loromir17]

It slowly crept up on me that the absolute weirdest thing about Starfield is that it is ostensibly set in our universe. Yknow, like a Modern Warfare or a GTA game; this ain't the Witcher or Star Wars, these are supposed to be normal humans in the good ol' Milky Way galaxy. And its so damn weird, because there's not a trace of reality to them. They are Oblivion npcs in an Oblivion location set: all is formulaic, stingy with detail, somewhat theatrical, and self-contained to the point of lacking any context that is not some very concise fictional addition. Beyond superficial references, the world is completely cut off from the history and realities of the world it supposedly depicts.

[@GSE52]

Bugthesda's new corporate outline of "look at all the work we didn't do" is going to be their downfall. Shortcuts, shortcuts, more shortcuts, insisting on staying with a highly flawed game engine, and KNOWING the game is boring as hell even before they realized it, is no way to keep a business on top. I truly fear for the future of Elder Scrolls titles.

[@benjaminjenkins2384]

This is what you get for thinking any triple A studios are going to actually make an interesting or compelling game.

[@elasmojones]

The hype was real. I just have no idea where it came from.

[@MCArt25]

They're going to be shit so you won't need to care either way.

[@shadowtheimpure]

@@elasmojones Todd Howard.

[@ethanford4402]

The thing I hear the most from players and developers alike is that the "Moders" will fix it. If a AAA Game company has to rely on moders to make their game Interesting,/fun or simply "Work" to quote Todd Howard, the game is unfinished and not worth a full price tag, let alone an early access price.

[@JRexRegis]

The ironic part is that the only game Modders can manipulate to the same extent as the devs did is Morrowind, which didn't need it - hence why we got things like Tamriel Rebuilt instead. Those games that would need an overhaul also are the ones with celebrity voice actors - i.e. not something your average modding project will be able to muster. You could overhaul Morrowind's main quest easily, since its dialogue system is text-based, but overhauling Skyrim's main quest is fucking impossible since not only is half the game built into it for no reason (random MQ scripts contain vital functions etc), but its voice cast features people who would cost millions to hire for voice work.

[@dragonmummy1]

“Look, I know your brand new car is not working very well now, but, you know, nobody WANTS to make a bad car, it’s not easy making great cars that work straight away. Drive it for 200 hours, then you’ll see what a great car it is. And hopefully in the meantime some clever car mechanics will improve it for you for free.”

[@mangaas]

IT's half a year later, and even though modders did make a lot of the mechanics, UI, menu's, and enemy AI better... they did not "fix it". The game is fundamentally bad, and the core gameplay loop, mission/quest structures and story are terrible, along with every single questline. It's bad all around. The only way modders can "fix" Starfield, is by creating an entire new game campaign, and story, with new characters, and large, hand crafted areas on planets to explore, and completely get rid of the randomized POI system, that gets repetitive the 2nd planet you visit.

[@Greedisgood-qy2ed]

modders won't fix starfield, not a chance

[@raduneacsu8382]

Todd said that he wants a game grounded in reality, then proceeds to make a game about a multiverse

[@some-say-gregms]

7 years into development they realized reality is boring and they needed more time

[@KizaruB]

Which stinks because the reason I was looking forward to it was because it sounded like a more hard sci-fi setting like the Expanse

[@Helxas]

Eh, I get what you're saying, but there's a bit of a difference from a worldbuilding and storytelling perspective I think. A world "grounded in reality" doesn't have to perfectly reflect real life, and can go so far as to be quite outlandish, so long as the processes follow logical pathways and characters react in realistic ways to the world around them. The Elder Scrolls, whose games are of a higher quality than Starfield's, can be said to be grounded in a "historical" reality. We see familiar objects like swords and armor, we see familiar concepts like hierarchical power structures, and we even see familiar fictional concepts like magic or dragons from fantasy culture. What makes Elder Scrolls better grounded in reality isn't Tamriel itself - A work of pure fiction that has nothing to do with Earth or the universe as we know it, whereas Starfield is based in an alternate version of the real world. What makes Tamriel better grounded in reality is its relatability to us. I've made my argument above but for lore nerds interested, here's an example of how Tamriel is vastly different to Earth: Tamriel is a continent on a planet called Nirn, which exists at the center of a multiplexal realm called Mundus. Mundus is the mortal realm of the setting, and is the closest equivalent to "the universe" of the real world. It consists of Nirn, its three moons, and eight (or nine) planets, each named after one of the Divines. In fact, the planets are the realms of the Divines, and are in fact the corpses of the Divines, and are each of infinite size and mass, appearing to mortals as spheres due to mental limitations on perception. The blackness of space is the infinitely sized, infinitely many Planes of Oblivion, which are again the realms of the infinite Daedra, and are the Daedra themselves; Mundus is multiplexal, so that it paradoxically encompasses and is encompassed by Oblivion. Beyond this is Aetherius, an existence of pure magic, and where the retained memories of souls go when they die (forgotten memories are claimed by Oblivion). Encompassing it all is the Aurbis, an infinite multiverse. Separating Mundus from the rest of this infinite cosmos is a liminal barrier generated by the planets (the Divines) and great Towers on Nirn constructed by the Divines, some of which are simultaneously present in all planes of the Aurbis. You could go even further beyond and discuss the Dream, the Godhead, and kalpas (universal reincarnations, sort of?). This was all a very simplified visualisation of Elder Scrolls cosmology. Most things in TES lore are not things humans can comprehend. There are no such things as "physical places" which exist as fixtures within the universe, with even Nirn (the most fixed entity) being multiversal. Everything is closer to being, in itself, a malleable state of existence. But most people don't care about that. They want swords, they want to be called leader of the Companions, they want to shoot fire out of their hands, because that stuff is relatable. The team that made the Elder Scrolls was crazy enough to create an impossible cosmology beyond human comprehension, but smart enough to not make it the whole game, creating an interesting enough world within it to keep us grounded there. By comparison, Starfield had to dip into multiversal concepts to compensate for poorly understood systems and a poorly written story.

[@DailyCorvid]

Grounded in the reality of an AI demo game that ChatGPT made in 10 minutes.

[@NicholasWilliams-uk9xu]

Gov is cracking down on addictive elements in games, because the gaming community is a easy target, it isn't a "respectable community of people". Meanwhile, Tech companies are addicted to your personal data, using it to generate world wide conflicts for attention based ad revenue (destroying children for profit).

[@lukeweeks5400]

it really does feel like a giant chatgpt prompt on the human experience in space

[@Jonathan_Fairbanks]

Hey now! That’s a bit harsh! Chatgpt would write something much better than this

[@mike45blue]

What's sad is that I can lay here and watch a 4 hour documentary yet won't bother putting a single hour in the game since I stopped playing it 5 months ago.

[@skyriminspace]

What's sad is how much mileage people can get out of their disappointment & negativity.

[@dialecticcoma]

maybe if you reply to more people the game will be good@@skyriminspace

[@CADClicker]

​@@skyriminspaceSo how sad is it for the people who spend time expressing disappointment and negativity about other people's disappointment and negativity

[@skyriminspace]

@@CADClicker right! I guess i do it out of a desire for understanding. I've had disappointments in my life too, not for anything as inconsequential as a piece of entertainment media such as a video game however. I think on some level i'm trying to learn why humans can't just move on when something lets them down. They have to get hung up, find others with a similar issue, & then bitch about it together. (Plus, some of the responses can be quite funny. People take it very seriously sometimes).

[@personwhohasayoutubechannel3]

​@@skyriminspaceare u the damage control they hired? I have a hard time believing anyone actually liked this game so much they decided to spend their next few hours responding to every comment

[@Gorbz]

For me, the saddest thing about Starfield is that my PC can run the procedural planet zones on high graphics with no issues, but the hand-crafted zones on the lowest settings will crash after a few minutes. An AI algorithm has made a more stable gameplay experience than the experienced dev team.

[@RestingJudge]

Not surprising. Downtown Boston in Fallout 4 is still unplayable after the better part of a decade.

[@tyrians]

Ah yes, the areas that have very little in them run better than the areas full of NPC's and detail? Shocker.

[@GameDevYal]

The procedural planets has nothing in them, that's probably why... x)

[@Truth_Teller_101]

Wong. All the experienced employees at Bethesda left years ago. The diversity hires made this game.

[@chrissennfelder7249]

It's their engine. The thing is just insanely bloated and outdated.

[@mazder360]

It's incredible to me that people were excited for this after 76. Todd's philosophy that it didn't matter if a game launched broken was such a massive red flag

[@yellaturd]

I only just remembered how deceptive the launch was as well. Judging by comments and videos in the weeks leading up to release it really seemed like a large portion of the fans didn't actually know what the game would be. I for one expected to actually be able to fly my ship between planets and potentially fly down to the surface. In no way did I expect the bogus tile system with uninteresting POI placed 1km apart from each other.

[@Jeedash-o8b]

Never commented on KZbin before, but felt compelled to congratulate you on a great video. Glad to hear you’re doing well, too. Cheers

[@kanaria-cu3uv]

calling this game as deep as a puddle would be an insult to puddles.

[@mangaas]

At least with puddles, you can splash around in and have fun.

[@Aaron-qe9ms]

It's a dry puddle.

[@TheParagonIsDead]

It’s pretty deep… stuff has consequences, there are multiple routes, well written relationships and quests.

[@danielbuie6878]

As deep as a mirage.

[@virgovirtuoso]

so true, i have fun in puddles

[@Blackjax137]

Setting Starfield after The Colony War was one of Bethesda's biggest mistakes. You think back to Skyrim... The Empire is licking its wounds after the war with the Aldmeri Dominion. The Civil War (which the player can choose to have an active role in) underpins just about everything. From minor guard comments, to familial blood feuds, to witch hunting of Talos worshippers. It is simple. But it adds depth to the world and its characters and sometimes a motivation for those characters. Starfield is set in the aftermath of that universes' largest war. We don't see the battles between the UC's Xenobiological Weapons and the Freestar Colony's Mechs on Niira in the Narion System. We don't see the destruction and evacuation of Londinion in real time. We don't see House Va'ruun wreak havoc on the Settled Systems in its Great Serpent Crusade. Nothing. We get dropped in picking up rocks during peacetime and then sent on this fetch quest path of discovering the galaxy's greatest mystery. The prize? Do it all over again. And again. And again. Bethesda bugs, wooden performances, empty randomly generated planets and dull gameplay aside... Starfield is just narratively boring.

[@billjacobs521]

Yup. Starfield doesn't have lore, like TES or Fallout; it has flavor text. Even the most important stuff in the galaxy is basically just flavor text, some crap Emil wrote in an afternoon.

[@Uldihaa]

I've said this elsewhere, but the Outpost building would have made _a lot_ more sense if they had kept the survival elements, especially if those outposts could serve as fuel depots and the foundation of a trading outpost. That would have increased the immersion and given multiple reasons to build them. The most basic would be increasing the range of your ship and the more advanced being making the player feel like they're actually doing _something_ to change their version of Starfield's galaxy. I would have happily invested tens of hours, perhaps even hundreds, in building thriving trading posts. It would have even given them a great update point of turning those outposts into actual colonies; at least ones on habitable planets anyway.

[@skyriminspace]

Survival mode always comes to Bethesda games in later dlc. You're right, it will give outposts purpose beyond roleplaying & resource collection.

[@KA-vs7nl]

You all complained about the "obligation" of settlements in fallout 4 so they abandoned any hard interaction with outposts.

[@Uldihaa]

@@KA-vs7nl Who is this "you all" you are talking about? You better not be lumping me in with your terrible generalities.

[@skyriminspace]

@@KA-vs7nl good point! Settlement building was loved by half the players & seen as a complete waste of time by the others. I think you're right. Bethesda responded & dialled back how important they were going to be.

[@jonny-b4954]

For sure. I was blown away how there wasn't a single inhabited planet. I mean, there'd planets with a city and POI. But there's no planet where like, highways connect towns to the major city etc

[@KamikazeCommie501]

In skyrim, they made every location just a short run from the last and gave every one a unique story to tell. If they had done that with every planet in starfield with a couple of special locations revolving around the story on the planet and some generic dialog about it for all the other locations on the planet, it might've been able to pull off a sense of exploration like skyrim

[@langbj1976]

Better yet, since the main factions are limited to 3 planets anyway, just make six really well-done planets. Then have a smaller and more focused procgen for a few unexplored worlds.

[@TheParagonIsDead]

It would be impossible to do that with 1000 planets.

[@-tera-3345]

@@TheParagonIsDead Why did they need 1000 planets, though?

[@TheParagonIsDead]

@@-tera-3345 they didn’t technically. But it’s good for resource gathering and building stuff.

[@theodorehodbor5080]

I think part of the reason Starfield's story feels so schizophrenic is because it tries to do what Mass Effect does where it has multiple side stories that more-or-less veer into different genres outside of pure sci-fi adventure (crime drama, mysteries, war stories, etc), however that only works when the framework said stories take place in are rock solid. From the get-go Mass Effect had an entire setting that rivals that of some tabletop RPGs written out and thus it is very easy to make these different genre stories still feel like they're in the same connected universe. With Starfield though all of these stories were made in complete isolation to one other for the most part so when they're all taken together like this it feels like they've been made for different games basically.

[@monke9411]

I feel the main issue with starfield is that everything it was trying to do just either was more well executed or just flat out better in other games. Spaceflight- elite dangerous, exploration and survival- no mans sky, combat and simulation- star citizen. Starfield tried getting into a niche genre with three other more proven games already in the ring.

[@ZenGarage]

I have 133 hours into Starfield and I last played it on Oct. 1. I'm a HUGE Bethesda fan and have put in thousands of hours into Fallout and Skyrim. Initially I was holding out for mod support for Starfield but at some point I got sick of being downvoted on reddit for my constructive criticisms of the game and ultimately I just left the sub as I don't want to be seen as a downer (as some people absolutely love the game). To each their own. Happy that some people love it, but personally I'm gutted at what it could have been.

[@ChaosArmoury]

I bought Elite Dangerous last year to scratch my space sim itch. Customizing a shape to deliver a six-star space tourist experience was my favorite part. I don't play it regularly, but it's there when I want it.

[@storm6661]

That kinda comes with the genre though. It's the same enjoyment you get from euro truck simulator.@ULTRAOutdoorsman

[@watchlover7750]

Subtitle could be: Starfield: go everywhere and do nothing

[@DrLazerbeam]

Todd Howard has a kind of likeable but pitiful quality of Michael Scott especially as it often feels like what he's saying are words his brain hasn't caught up to yet and actually to go even further, I think just like Michael Scott, he often is proven to be very good at somethings but not particularly adept at being a manager. Todd has the ambition, he loves games, he wants to do good and make people happy but he has slipped into a role larger in both vision and expectation than his skillset. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out later he was just Tom-Hanks-Bigged and he's been a 14 year old this whole time.

[@MassiveKittenFire-vw1cw]

They made the mistake of thinking of that they weren't competing against Skyrim.

[@roberttuttle3029]

I was having a moderate amount of fun with my cyberpunk-esque character, leaning into the Neon Street Rat background (in my head) and pottering through the Crimson Fleet, Ryujin and Main Quests with a nice little roleplay narrative in my head - even dipped on NG+ because it didn't suit my character. I was supressing my distaste for like, 75% of the gameplay, writing, design etc. bc my desire for a good Bethesda game was too damn high. Then I bought that overpriced apartment on Neon expecting a luxury pad with a cool view for me and Andreja to settle down in, and got a empty room with minimal, clunky, ugly, boring, expensive decoration options. It all just came crashing down. I literally said out loud "why am I even playing this?", turned the game off and cancelled my Game Pass.

[@IanDoesMagic]

I had the same basic experience. My ah-ha moment after wrapping up the story stuff (never bothered finishing the main quest to be fair) was finally getting around to the exploration and then realizing that there was nothing. Like, just the same stuff I'd already seen. No interesting hidden stories, no truly new environments, just... nothing.

[@ballisticwaffles]

Based and Andreja pilled.

[@anbuhyuga8299]

55:37 Bro... after watching all that Starfield recording, and then have you switch to Red Dead. Holy mother of god... I'm honesty speechless by how horrible Starfield looks.

[@samuelfawell9159]

Starfield is honestly astonishing, focusing on Bethesdas WEAKNESSES, regressing on their strengths,

[@hermitcard4494]

The better and more detailed the graphics, the more weird and uncanny valleyed will the npcs feel. Skyrim's npcs feel more "natural" than Spacerim.

[@hyperturbotechnomike]

I think it depends on the art style. For games which fully comit to their visual art direction, higher fidelity does not result in uncanny characters, for example Cyberpunk 2077 and the retrofuturist realism. Bethesda tried to smash together a classic cartoon-ish artstyle with futuristic realism, which does not work.

[@Slender_Man_186]

Hard disagree, Half Life 2 came out in 2005 ffs and still has better looking and more realistic animations than modern studios, Bethesda’s likely just been using the same face animation rig since Oblivion, I’m basing that assumption on the fact that the NPCs in every game since use the exact same expressions that scrunch up in the exact same way, and yeah slapping better textures and models on a rig that was designed to barely look passable with clay faces is going to look super uncanny.

[@hana_irl6996]

Baldur's gate 3 fully mo cap face vs starfield you can see the huge difference

[@TheParagonIsDead]

The boys in Starfield are some of the best I’ve ever seen. (Top 5)

[@paulgibbon5991]

@@Slender_Man_186 Been meaning to ask. What's the difference between a disagreement and a "hard" disagreement?

[@ordinaryadonis8711]

Nothing like putting on a fromsoft game, muting it and listening to your vids. Good video sir.

[@PensFan35]

I’d just like to comment on your point about MANY reviews just casually *assuming* that the crafting and outpost systems would be, at minimum, the same as fallout 4. What an absolute gaffe this game has been for the review industry on the whole. Starfields crafting and outpost systems are very clear, distinguishable downgrades from a pretty hefty and fun one introduced in fallout 4. Nobody fuckin caught that.

[@burgerpocalypse]

i wandered around the cowboy town for like 30 minutes searching every building looking for the gun store, and i eventually found it but it didn't sell ammo, so i had to keep searching for the ammo store, which was in a completely different part of town, and when i found that, it didnt have the ammo i needed

[@Orzorn]

Hey PrivateSessions, I really enjoyed your review of this, especially the section at the end that covered the financials, Microsoft's current situation, etc, because I think its something a lot of people leave out of their reviews of the game. Starfield is a really sour look for Bethesda, and I think a lot of people like me were looking at Starfield for how they expect TES6 to go. Well, we got our answer, and it does not look good. Thanks for your hard work, and I'm happy you're doing better mentally. Sitting in the live streams with you and Pat was some of the best fun I've ever had on KZbin or the internet in general and it was genuinely a great experience to be able to actually talk in chat and have both of you respond and talk with everyone about things.