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Anon is disillusioned about Starfield
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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That's also all we were promised. No false advertising here. Bethesda knows what Bethesda fans want, and they make the game Bethesda fans want. It's literally the only gaming experience left where I don't feel like I have to over-research and pirate-demo to figure out if I should buy a game.
Yeah. But I love that about CP. I got it dirt cheap when everyone was bitching, and just waited for them to fix it before I started playing. Best $17 I ever spent for a new AAA game! I can be patient.
You're sensing a bit of bias? Because they're telling you that they like the game?
I'm sensing a bit of bias from you, being completely unable to understand someone else's point of view once you've made your mind up
Right, but the problem with your logic is in thinking your viewpoint is concrete and everyone else's is wrong. Fun is subjective, you can't tell people they didn't have fun with the game
What about the people who played it on Game Pass and still enjoyed it.
I didn't buy the game, and I am enjoying it immensely.
I agree with all your points but cannot disagree more on the inclusion of a difficulty slider for Souls games. I have been very adamant about a difficulty slider "cheapening the experience" or "jeopardising the artistic intent", but it really doesn't make a difference - at all.
If your enjoyment of the game stems from the fact that the game is difficult and the inclusion of a difficulty slider cheapens your "sense of accomplishment", then you might have to reevaluate your priorities.
Consider people with disabilities, for example, who are interested in the lore of Souls games and want to experience them themselves but can't because the games present themselves to be too difficult (for example in the way some bosses in Elden Ring have seemingly endless attack chains that give you no breathing room at all, requiring very precise input on the player's side), thus gatekeeping the experience from a potentially enthusiastic and interested player.
Or consider people who are just not interested in a hyper tense and difficult time and just want to experience the story and atmosphere of the game. What's wrong with that? How does that impact your enjoyment of the game if their experience is completely separate from yours?
For reference, I have platinumed numerous FromSoft Souls games and would not feel any less "proud" of that if the games had difficulty settings.
Nailed Souls on the head. I'm an older gamer and my reflexes are dead. I never really liked hard games. I like the story. I bought Bloodborne for the lore, and fully regret it. Hours of fighting the same area with zero progress is NOT why I wanted to play it. I bought Elden Ring after I found out there were cheat mods, tried to play it without them and enjoyed nothing, so added the Easy mod knowing I risked screwing up my Elden Ring account (whatever that means to me), having to play offline the whole time.
I regret buying Elden Ring because I don't want to have to almost pirate the game I bought just to play it because they want to make it hard.
Thing is you're trying to compare two different things, one is the (lack of) quality of the product in general compared to what was promised, the other is a design choice.
The irony is, I feel that sentence is more applicable if "lack of quality" is assigned to Soulslike games and "Design Choice" to Bethesda games.
I get it for "free" because I sub to xbox service. I'd have paid $70 for it, though. As for time, I could have spent it in other games, but it's the first really fun gaming experience I've had in quite a while.
It's easy to make accusations against Bethesda fans like this, but they're unfalsifiable. You could make the same accusations of people enjoying any other game and there's nothing they could do to prove they actually enjoy the game. Except that they DO actually enjoy the game.
I've played about 20 games this year. If I had to pick only 1 to play (which isn't far from the truth anymore with my second job), it would be Starfield. And you might be surprised at the names of games that rank below it on the list. Like Elden Ring (which I will never touch again after my cheat-easy-mode run), Hitman WoA, etc. Maybe I won't be playing it in a year, or two years. Maybe I will.
I think it's interesting you brought up Souls Games. Quite literally your first paragraph, I feel about them. I have 100% buyer's remorse about Bloodborne, and lesser buyer's remorse about Elden Ring. Neither will I ever touch again. To some extent, I kept trying to convince myself the story is worth their unwillingness to give gamers the controls that would actually make the game fun... and I gave up trying to have fun playing it.
I always find it funny that Hello Games over promised and the backlash was such that GOG extended its refund policy, but Bethesda does the same thing every time they release a game and gamers just call it a Bethesda game and that's the end of it or "modders will fix it"...
No Mans Sky was nothing like what Hello Games promised.
Starfield is exactly what Bethesda promised.
I don't see the discrepancy.
It's driving me crazy how many people are claiming Bethesda overpromised. I could have written an accurate review (critiques and all) of the game based upon what I saw/heard before its release.
What did Starfield overpromise that we didn't get? As far as I can tell, we got exactly what we expected - Skyrim in Space.
Take my money, Bethesda, and give me more Skyrim in Space please.
Huh? Starfield is the best RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind, because it's an actual RPG. It has the best quest design since Oblivion, with almost none of the quests boiling down to "Go there, kill guys", but actually needing to talk to people, pay attention to the environment, interact with the world and make choices (and your Background, Traits, Skills and faction membership all add new ways for you to go about a quest.) The weapon design is an incredible improvement over Fallout 4. Almost everything in Starfield is either a massive step up or a return to form compared to their previous work and you don't actually know what you're talking about.
And that's not even to mention things like the ship building system, which is genuinely extremely impressive.
We must be playing different games. Every storyline quest I've done has been:
It's nothing but, "Go there, kill guys," as you call it. Everything is a fetch quest with faceless mooks between me and whatever fifth turn I need to take to get to the end of the corridors in the space dungeon.
And comparing the game to Morrowind is laughable. Morrowind was an amazing feat of world building based on actual player choice. Starfield is a bunch of boxes to tick to see the next space cliche.
Yeah, that happens when you just skip dialogue
Half the damn quests don't even require me to leave the city they started in. Maybe you just had bad luck picking all of the quests that are like that and none of the others and I had the opposite. Or maybe you did 3 quests and are talking out of your ass. I don't know, I wasn't there when you played the game. I mean, did you even do anything other than main story? Join a faction, do sidequests, anything? Because I could point you to half a dozen quests just in early game New Atlantis that are entirely reliant on dialogue, choices etc. without any killing and that do not give you a mandatory companion. Like, do the UC Security quests, investigate the brownouts in the well, talk to the preacher guy, the art guy in Jemison Mercantile, the collector guys in Terrabrew, the bartender at Viewport, the scientist by the tree. The game will literally put half of these quests in the quest log from ambient dialogue, and the other half you get from just engaging with the world and talking to NPCs in the first city you visit. It's not like these are incredibly hidden quests you have to go out of your way to find. Hell, when you go to Akila the game just plops a hostage negotiation right in your face. I mean, come on, you're either being wilfully disingenuous or you played that game blind as a bat.
And if you don't believe me and don't want to bother playing the game yourself again, just look at the playthrough of somebody like Many A True Nerd. He did a lot of the quests I just mentioned.
To me this reads like you havent done the Ryujin plotline which has a lot of stealth involved, and the UC/Crimson Fleet one that has some detective work/stealth
So tell your mandatory companion to "wait here" when you plan to Stealth Archer. Or give her a chameleon suit. Ironically, the "stealth archer" meme is the most valid critique of Bethesda games, and you're complaining because it isn't working well for you.
I mean, I wouldn't put Starfield in the same family as Diablo IV, with most of the game behind a microtransaction wall. Bethesda promised Skyrim in Space. We got Skyrim in Space. Skyrim is a polarizing game (much like Witcher 3 is, often for opposite people/reasons).
I don't think Starfield is "not so bad", I'm having the best gaming experience I've had in a year or two. I think all the critiques are valid, but I don't really care about most of them.
So why should I play a game I don't enjoy to punish the makers of the game I do enjoy? I have a very limited amount of gaming time. It gets the game I'm having the most fun with.
I feel like I'm in some sort of fugue state with everyone comparing this to Skyrim. In what way is this like Skyrim? Skyrim, for all its flaws, at least had hand crafted worlds with interesting things to see and do in them. From what I've seen of Starfield, that has been completely replaced by procedurally generated barren worlds. Like yeah, you can 'explore' them, but for what? What is there even to find?
Virtually 100% of main and faction story arcs are hand-generated content. I would go further and say Starfield used more distinct model-sets than Skyrim did.
For context, Skyrim's map was ALSO procedurally generated, but most (or all) of the content was built on top of it by hand. We have comparable amount of manually generated content in Starfield, and then tons of procedural content allowing for a larger overall world.
Starfield is approximately 100,000x larger than Skyrim. So yeah, a lot of it is going to be procedurally generated. But you follow a general path, and everything along that path is NOT.
So... no fugue there. Both have similar amounts of handmade content, but Skyrim has a lot of filler content, and that filler content is largely barrel worlds, something that works because planets tend to be barren.
What part of Diablo 4 is behind a microtransaction wall? Some skins?
The problem with both games is they disrespect the player's time by turning everything into a slog.
That's way more of an issue with modern game design trying to maximize hours played while minimizing actual content than paid skins. Those may suck, but to be fair it was Bethesda who introduced the damn thing in the first place. I'd rather pretend the premium skins don't exist but have a fun game than have no microtransactions and a boring 150+ hours of empty world with a total of 35 hours of interesting beats.
I think it's "Most of the skins".
I can't speak for Diablo 4 on this, but that's not Starfield. Just like other Bethesda games, Starfield clearly gives feedback when you're leaving major storylines and running procedural content. Radiant Quests have mixed reception, but the number of radiant quests you actually need to complete any Bethesda game is in the single-digits.
If you stick to main-story and faction-mainline quests, you touch virtually nothing that wasn't hand-crafted for your pleasure. No slog. No grind. No nothing. And I find it pretty easy to differentiate between the handcrafted side-quests and the procedural side-quests. If you don't, just ignore the more obscure-seeming side quests anyway.
Is this a personal self-discipline problem of yours? A game with 35 hours of great content is worth the price of a game like Starfield, and you can just NOT go out and play the "150+ hours of empty world" if you don't like it. While I haven't beaten Starfield yet (I like procedural content and spend a lot of time in it), that mainline content isn't gated behind doing procedural stuff. That stuff was added on top of the content you directly pay for.
For me, I love going system to system finding ships to pirate. I haven't really gotten into planetary exploration yet. Maybe I won't enjoy that as much, or maybe I will. If I don't enjoy it, I just won't do it and it won't detract from the game.
Really? 35 hours of great content?
Exactly what parts of Starfield struck you as great?
I'll agree that around the 30 hours mark of my playthrough I was thinking the game felt big and expensive and was excited to spend more time in that universe.
But it wasn't long after that even the faction quests ended up just so repetitive in scope and even level design that I was over it.
The number of loading screens just to go from point A to B for a fetch quest is probably the worst of any open world game...ever.
It's like they finally had SSD tech so they just decided to throw any concern over loading out the window in game design.
The story is mediocre, the voice acting is meh, the gameplay loops are extremely repetitive.
The thing you like is the one thing I also enjoyed of ship combat with boarding enemy ships. That was done well, outside of the fact you can't physically go outside your ship.
And "you can play 35 hours without hating it" as the barometer of whether a game is satisfactory sells yourself and your time short. You as a consumer deserve more, and making excuses for outdated and poor game design doesn't do yourself any favors. Legitimate complaints about games getting their fair amount of attention leads to better games, as happened with games like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk. The only way Bethesda's game devs are going to get the appropriate resources from management to focus on making a game that doesn't waste your time with repetition on the next one is if there're enough complaints about the repetition in this one that management is concerned about repeating bad press which might impact sales.
You do yourself and the devs disservice minimizing or dismissing complaints and only do the execs a favor.
That's great if you don't feel that way. I'm guessing that as you put more hours in the title you'll feel different, but hope that's not the case and your enthusiasm remains. But for many players that were quite excited for the game, it ended up being rather disappointing.
I dunno why you're getting downvoted, cause you're completely right. The microtransaction hell in Diablo is all for shit like horse armor. The game plays exactly the same whether or not you've spent an extra dime. With that being said, it is 100% bullshit to have any extra transactions, micro or not, in a $90 game.
He's getting downvoted because despite everything you said, the valid complaints about Diablo 4 are not similar to complaints about Starfield.
It's not the "Diablo 4 microtransactions for skins is OK" (which I disagree with) that got him downvoted, it's "both games disrespect the player's time".
what I find more wild is as usual the toxic gaming community can't handle opinions. I like the game, I don't care if others don't, but acting like I don't have "standards" cause you don't like it is rediculous. Likewise, I got bored so fast of baulders gate 3 but apparently it's the second coming of christ and I must be wrong. No, I get why people love it, it just wasn't my jam. Starfield is
its so depressing that people still seethe this much over others liking a game they didnt