This game has made me dread what Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout V will be. It seems like Bethesda have lost all of their talented writers and game designers.
Completely agree and is so disheartening. ES in particular is in my top 5 series of all time and ive been on board since Daggerfall. I have zero hopes for it now. BGS has died. If i am proven wrong it will be amazing and i will willingly admit it if that is the case but i doubt it very much.
I agree. The more I think about it the more it feels like they went for size instead of depth. Yes there’s a lot of content but all of it is like 6/10 content. I think in total just for how big the game is is still give it a 7 but yea.
Starfield is so fundamentaly flawed on so many levels. It's plagued with bad game design decisions, half baked systems, bland & uninspired writing and outdated quest design. This ain't Skyrim or Fallout 4 in space. This is a downgraded, mediocre and soulless mixture of Skyrim & Fallout 4, without the free world exploration and the charm of either!
True. It's the best game to start your gaming journey. My kid is going to be blown away once he start to comprehend reality. And then how amazing it will be for him to try good games after!
Starfield is one of those game's that I don't understand the appeal of. Everything this game does, i've seen done way better elsewere. And yet, somehow a lot of people seem to like it. I wonder how much of it is just the hype for a new big Bethesda game clouding their judgement.
Its not a bad game. There are some cool and unique stuff to it. But I agree overall. It just fell flat in alot of areas. Weapons were flat, armor designs were flat. And the starborn gifts for new game plus were actually complete downgrades compared to what you get in regular questlines. Why is the starborn armor losing 6 effects? Why does the ship not get upgrades for just regular interior additions? Or at least built in beds, and crafting. I dont understand why no one pointed that out or called out why NG plus starborn stuff was just wack as hell. And we didnt even get a special starborn weapon that follows you to match the gear and ship. The weapons in the game are all generic and uninteresting for a futuristic game. Melee combat might as well not exist because it's so pathetic. Just enourmous wasted potential areas to reward the player with interesting and powerful stuff
@dr.bherrin Same. I absolutely do not understand how this game has received such glowing reviews from (primarily Bethesda-related) content creators I (once) trusted, namely FudgeMuppet, Gopher, and Zaric Zhakaron. When I started pushing back in the comments on some let's play streams, pointing how everything just looks dull, bland, boring, and gray... man, the Bethesda apologists went scorched earth! Note: I loved Bethesda, with Oblivion being my first foray into The Elder Scrolls (still waiting on Skywind, since I could never really get into Morrowind's mechanics; graphics are less of an issue for me, since I also adore KotOR 1 and 2 and Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight II: Jedi Academy).
@@nelson_rebel3907I agree with everything you said except for one thing, which is that it's not a bad game. A game with these macroscopic problems that also affect the game design it can be considered a terrible or mediocre game at best, especially after Todd Howard's absurd outbursts on space and planetary exploration
Has anyone ever driven home from work or wherever and just ended up at your destination not exactly knowing how you even got there. that's exactly how this game is after 60 hours I can't even remember any main quest or character from them...
How I felt when I reached the end of the main quest I had no clue what was happening why I was here or why I was fighting these two everything just blurred together and I was just glad to finish this mess
Yeah! good point when playing Skyrim you sort of remember of NPCs etc and go "hold on" I remember that name...this game you just want the boring people to die! and sadly you cannot just kill them.. You just get 'into' the game, this you just don't care...
The type of people who thought the story in Starfield and writing in general was any good must have never read any decent books. Because its so glaringly obvious just how bad it is overall. Some of the worst story and writing ive ever seen. It made me sigh multiple times. Not to mention just how Disney it is, with no gore, sexuality being a couple of cheezy lines after you wakeup that just gets so irritating and just stupid. I wish this game didnt exist, because its just so bad its ruined Bethesda for me. I cant take them serious now.
This game could have really used some horror elements. The terrormorphs aren't really scary because there's no build up to them and they bug out when you jump on a high surface. There are no interesting animals/aliens in this game other than them.
@@Neanderthal75I’m convinced they also have never been to a club in their life. That Neon “strip club” was probably the most pathetic display of skin and sexuality I’ve ever seen in a game. Mass Effect 2 did that better a decade ago.
@@ewjimland to add on that pill of crap. How ugly are the costumes dancer. If you tell me thats the futur, then ill try my best to not exist when this come out
Oh man, the Aceles thing got me, too. It just seems like the most logical choice. Proven, effective, and long-term orientated. You introduce not only a natural eradication squad but an on-standby defense force, too. The other annoying this is how they all hate you for keeping the growth acceleration fungus around and making sure both sides know about it. Secrecy and destroying information made the problem possible to begin with, and you want me to solve it that way?
Definitely, the moment i heard, "I can't believe you didn't trust the science!" i was just so fucking enraged. The microbe is a literal fucking bioweapon in the hands of a nation that has tried to weaponize literally everything in the known galaxy. I don't care that it is pointed at the terrormorphs, what happens when someone decides to point it at something else instead? Not to mention the small but very real possibility of the microbe mutating to infect something other than terrormorphs, the possibility that somebody might have missed an equally susceptible species in the hundreds of worlds of the settled systems, or terrormophs developing a resistance to it and us needing the Aceles anyway. Aceles have absolutely no downsides or risks at all. the only thing to be pissed about is the fact that it isn't going to stop the next few terrormorph attacks that everybody was content to let happen *indefinitely* anyway until the MC and Hadrian discovered the true nature of the Terrormorphs. like fucking hell, "You are so worried about these terrormorph attacks all of a sudden science lady who told me to fuck off a month ago? Why don't you go out Terrormorph hunting on your own time instead of riding my coattails? Same goes for you and your two bit explorers Sarah."
I am done with this company. With today’s tech this is a piece of dung. Games like cyberpunk Baldurs gate 3 and red dead redemption 2 have shown what real games are.
Yep Bethesda need to wake up and realize it’s not 2011 anymore this mediocre shit isint going to cut it anymore espicially with much better games that have released BG3,Cyberpunk,RD2
You give CP77 too much credit given the state it was released in and studio shady practices prior to said release. RDR2 & BG3, yes. CP77 - no. Collectively 13 years of development to make it more or less serviceable after a crap launch is nothing to celebrate, imo. And before you say “redemption story”, that goes to NMS & FF14 that CP77 doesn’t come close to. CDPR has a lot to prove given how low they have fallen after a very high regard they were given.
@@CammyWINS owning CP2077 on PC my experience with the game was nowhere near as bad as what console had but your right people shouldn’t forget how badly CDPR fumbled CP2077s launch. But then what’s Bethesda’s excuse? It’s not 2011 anymore and yet Starfield feels like an early Bethesda game down to its janky as hell animations say what you want about CP2077 and CDPR but one thing you have to agree is that there animations/presentation is LEAGUES ahead of anything Bethesda seems capable off.
@@CammyWINS also I disagree on Cyberpunk not earning a “redemption story” CDPR has fixed most of the issues with the game including doing a whole rework of the level up system and cyberwear should the game have launched like this? Yes but to say that CDPR haven’t at least earned a tiny bit of good faith back is slightly unfair. And you wanna know why? Because the only way that Starfield is getting anything close to a redemption is if unpaid modders decide to fix major bugs/add stuff because if we look at Bethesdas history this is pretty much how all there games go. So I can at least commend CDPR for taking feedback and fixing/adding things and not solely relying on there modding community to fix everything for them with fan patches.
@@CammyWINSWtf do you mean Cyberpunk doesn’t even come close? NMS came in 2016 and took 5 years for it to become serviceable. Cyberpunk had a fantastic city, graphics and a great foundation. The systems all just sucked but they are all completely fixed. Phantom Liberty is one of the best DLcs to come out. Have u even played Cyberpunk?
I'll never forget the absolutely surreal feeling I got when I reached the end of Starfield. I killed both the Hunter and the Emissary. I rejected the Starborn philosophy left and right. I was hated by the entirety of Constellation due to my choices, and gave up on their romance options, side quests, and back stories. I kicked them off my ship for 90% of the game. I got to the end of the game and they were all like. "Lets jump head first into the multiverse!" I made it clear I had no intention of passing through the unity. They all single mindedly wanted to go, so i thought to myself. Wait this is perfect! Ill let these morons go through the unity while i get to chill here with my awesome space ship and crimson fleet buddies. I did the thing, then turned around and returned to my universe only for the entirety of Constellation to still be on my fucking ship. "I came back in case someone changed their mind..." Sarah said. I got so enraged at the game I screamed out irl. "Why can't i be rid of you assholes?!" Since then i put Starfield down and have no desire for a new game or a new game plus. First Bethesda game ever where I did only half the content and have no desire to return.
omg that's awesome!, I didn't think about that option, and clearly, neither did the developers XD. It would've been interesting to get rid of them that way.
@@efxnews4776 Exactly Johnny knows he’s an asshole and he owns it that’s what makes him such a likable character. Being played by Keanu doesn’t hurt either
I absolutely despise the "legendary weapons" system. It completely devalues uniques since by the time you get them you probably have a handful of better weapons already. What's even the point in uniques then?
Fallout 4 completely destroyed weapons for me. Unique weapons are worthless if there are even ANY notable ones (I can remember a single one). You HAVE to craft every single weapon yourself painstakingly. Waste tons of perk points on crafting skills. Then collect "JUNK" for hours and manage your junk stash (doesn't that sound fun?". Be forced to set up soulles junk farming settlements with unnamed settlers you don't care about just to be able to get your weapons into a useable state. You are handed power armor and a minigun in the first 30 minutes but the minigun SUCKS for the entire game. Rocketlaunchers exist but they are extremely weak?! What is this? Just let me have a cool adventure and let me earn an epic weapon at the end without all these unrealistic un-fun hoops to jump through. Weapon customization is very cool if optional, but it was mandatory and completely replaced fun guns.
Totally disagree the town's are large or huge - boosted to the top of the Rock in Akila city the other day to have a good look at the view. And realised the capital "city" of the Freestar Collective is the size of a village. A few hundred people max.
Im constantly amazed how the world saw Redfall and said "the enemy combat AI is unacceptable". Then Starfield releases the same enemy AI but almost no one will admit this is also unacceptable. Were u all abused as younglings ?
Even in a vacuum the game would be disappointing because it lacks all the good stuff that made the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games so great, and left only the guff and severely outdated engine. However, as per the vid, when you then factor in the unfortunate timing of BG3 (and even the stellar repair job of Cyberpunk), a game clearly crafted every step of the way with care and passion, and it only makes Starfield feel all the more hollow. It says something that BG3's completely non human characters (at times not even physically resembling a person) within a fantasy universe no less, actually feel far more human and far more real than any actual human character in Starfield...
The most interesting and sympathetic character in Starfield is Vasco, the emotionless robot. That's really saying something about Bethesda's writing ability.
@@amysteriousviewer3772Thought i was the only one lol Vasko is the only npc i dont want to either punch in the face as my character or never speak to again lmao. Complete waste of time the lot of em.
The Myconid Colony felt more lifelike than every npc in Starfield. All of the voice actors (excluding the two from Oblivion) give flat, narcoleptic deliveries. Sam Coe and Sarah Morgan put me to sleep after a conversation.
@@j.c.denton2060 Sarah Morgan has got to be one of the dullest characters ever in a video game. It’s almost impressive. I think most professional writers could not write a character that boring if they tried. At least Sam Coe has Adam Jensen’s voice.
Bethesda has a really weird way of writing characters, the very first face you see is a tough as nail female boss who is right in your face repeating "safety first" until you almost want to punch her, then 1 minute later she's all "hey new guy go and touch that piece of metal with dangerous unknown properties". Or the fact there's several parts in many questlines you get threatened by characters and if you call them out and accept their challenges they do absolutely nothing because Bethesda just assumed you wouldn't want to fight anyone who threatened you over the most mundane things. My favorite the the entire Aurora questline where several of the drug dealers will threaten you giving you the option to select (attack) and if you do the NPC just stands there and if you take the initiative to attack first you find out they're essential and can't be killed. I honestly wonder if they even bothered to playtest the game at all.
Lin in the beginning: Safety above all else Lin 5 min later: go alone into that cave that is having gravity anomalies and touch the weird peice of metal
"reviews shitting on starfield for being such a boring, lifeless mess" is my new favorite subgenre of youtube videos. from the bottom of my heart, thank you for saving me $70. i just went the high seas route and uninstalled after like 20ish hours. i didn't even pay and i want my money back
i'm so glad i'm not the only one who picked the Aceles first time and was absolutely baffled that picking the safer natural option made all the goody-two-shoes b*tch babies scold me like i didn't finish my math homework. The end of that questline actually motivated me to commit more acts of piracy and attack random settlers just to make my companions angrier and listen to them freak out and cry every time i did something evil just out of pure spite for those whiny nuisances.
Hahahaha!!! 100% my experience. They are all acting like the terrormorph threat was way higher than actually presented. If the terrormorph has attacked a dozen planets already, it would'be made more sense, but then, we already know the on the city was manufactured.
Same here. This is what ruined this for me. The "telling me off" happened just as I left my first Temple. I was so excited back then to see what all this set-up meant, then as I exit the Temple, "I need to to dicuss something with you" from my companion Sarah, and the belittling began! And this basically is the entire "game". 'My World View', disguised as fun entertainment. "Trust the Science..." I just can't believe how much of this 'Directed Thinking' has been forced into this 'Product'.
In CP77 the closest that you has as companion is Jhonny, but Jhonny is a ghost and can't do shit... AaJhonny as a companion in the sense we know doesn't help at all in combat... But somehow i prefer Jhonny even if it is to hate him, he is a better companion than all companions in Starfield.
Funny story, but when BG3 first released in Early Access, I recall a lot of people complaining about how "unlikeable" the characters were. Then, when the full game released & we got a full 3 acts to interact with them, we learned just how complex & multi-faceted all the companions are. Now everyone loves them for their amazing character arcs. Which just highlights how bland the companions in Starfield are. My advice is, if you want a space game with really diverse & interesting companions, then go play The Outer Worlds instead. Much cheaper too.
My only complaint about The Outer Worlds is that it doesn't feature a 3rd person pov. And that is, at most, a nitpick and just a personal gripe: I like to switch between 1st person for combat, and 3rd person for sneaking and exploration.
It’s honestly insane how Bethesda conceptualised those power temples, designed them, built it, playtested, and thought “yea this is good, ship it” I would say alongside the skill requirements for modding, the other big problem is inventory management, and if you want to mod or craft the only viable option you have is to make a ship with massive cargo space because its the only central place you can store a large amount of resources and have crafting benches pull in the resources automatically.
It's like Bethesda is actively mocking their customers, shining a laser pointer around the temple so players can mindlessly chase shiny things like confused cats. Do this 24 times with ZERO variation whatsoever, 240 times if you want to max out all your powers! And that's only if you get lucky and avoid the most common game-breaker bugs with the "Power from Beyond" quest that BGS can't be bothered to fix.
I wonder how people manage to defend a game like Starfield which has macroscopic problems especially in terms of design while also underestimating these same problems? It seems to me that a lot of people play video games with slices of ham over their eyes
@@Dr_Piscatella from what I've seen the defenders of such titles have this weird vibe like "if we don't appease the creators they'll stop making things for us". Maybe peeps just count on being the voice that gets a free copy of the next slop
Mass Effect shooting mechanics were crappy. If I remember right, you either couldn't jump/climb or couldn't run. When ME2 started and you got those functions, it was where it needed to be.
The thing that annoyed me with the questioning of choosing the Aceles...is that with the rapid growth plant destroyed there is little risk from terrormorphs now we know heatleeches are their larvae. All we have to do is be vigilant with heatleeches and terrormorph activity will be kept to a manageable level. There is no rush to risk the microorganism route.
Or anything actually. If you introduce a new animal in the hope it will eat another animal. You might just end up in a situation where doesn't do anything you want. Like the cane toads in Australia. The cane toad was introduced in Australia in the hope it will control the pest beetles in the sugar cane industry. It turned out it didn't really discriminate what it ate and found better pray than the pest beetles. Now there is a massive cane toad problem which was far worse than the beetle problem. There is no reason to either side. Both have a proven track record of being one of the worst things you can do.
This review is spot on. I had the exact same experience with the United Colonies questline. The review even could've gone deeper into some more complaining about its annoyances but I think it's pretty clear as it is. I'm having a blast with Cyberpunk now though. Starfield made me appreciate how much better Cyberpunk is than Starfield.
In many ways Star Citizen alpha in its poor state offers more immersion, and so does Elite: Dangerous. BTW Starfield's engine sounds ripped right out from E: Dangerous and the New Atlantis city design with the train looking thing (which is a loading screen entry in SF) and store/building designs are copied from Star Citizen.
Perfect review. Companions were my biggest letdown, only four and they're pretty dull. And why no faction companions? Fallout 4 has over a dozen. You also had dozens of interesting settlements with quests. Fartfield gave us resource farms that we have to start from scratch, hidden behind huge requirements and achievements, I never bothered since I had enough cash to buy anything I wanted.
The "trust the science" is a not so subtle jab at the whole pandemic/ vaccine debate...ridiculous that they would shoehorn that in especially the way they did when it's clearly the wrong choice in game Edit - ya,you saw the same thing I did
Starfield was released in a state, which is more like just a bunch of ideas on paper, but never truly connected or worked on to be a seamless experience. It's like they started working on this and then No Man's Sky gets released, so they took some ideas from there, the whole scanning rocks and mining and the procedural world and animals. Then we go a more updated Star Citizen (which seems like stuck in alpha stage forever) , so they took ideas from Star citizen, but in a childish way, like the train ride and the buildings and stores and so on. Then of course there was Mass Effect games and they took some of those ideas, with digging out a piece of rock or metal which triggers a dream or hallucination which would supposed to make you amazed or curious about WTF is going on. On the other hand ME despite being older was far superior in animation and facial expressions and even story if you ask me. NMS does better with the procedurally generated worlds, although still boring but at least there are no loading screens and traveling from space to planets are seamless and there are a shit ton of mission of all kinds and offers undoubtfully better base building experience. So Bethesda pretty much just copy pasted a bunch of ideas that others came up with and tried to form it into their own game in a copycat way, but with an obviously outdated game engine and script writers who seems like they were writing Teletubbi episodes before trying to make a video game storyline and character conversations. And the final nail in the coffin has to be all the loading screens so all we got at the end is a some interactive 3d -slide show or presentation, which just takes the player from one game instance to the next while all the loading just makes me completely disconnect and lose my immersion from the game, whatever little I had previously.
I would be totally fine with the game if there were other intelligent alien races/species to interact with, engaging stories, actual conflict (Not just against one pirate faction), and a feeling that what I did in the world mattered. This game is like giving you the keys to a Ferrari and then locking you on cruise control. It had so much potential to be good but it limits itself to the safest, most inoffensive speed limit possible.
EXACTLY I’m sorry but a whole galaxy of just humans is boring af. What made Mass effect so memorable? All the different alien companions. Why is the elder scrolls so fun? All the diffrent races and there history’s and in Starfield? Just humans….wow so fun yay 🎉
28:58 as you were saying that you flew near a vehicle. Numerous of those can be found in structures. Modders will make em functional as time goes and Bethesda will package them in a bundle to buy in some creation store variant.
At what point will people realise that every Bethesda game since Morrowind (not inclusive) has failed to live up to expectations? It’s a rinse and repeat formula, all the games are the same, just re-skinned. When something crappy keeps getting sold to you over and over, one must question whether it’s the fault of the developer, or that of the idiots who keep enabling it by buying into the marketing.
Except that's not quite right; if every game was the same as Morrowind with a new skin, I'd be quite happy. It's what I want, in fact. The reason every game is a disappointment is because every game is worse than the last one.
Morrowind is by far thyre Magnus opum but I really liked oblivion, I thought Skyrim was good enough to put a couple hundred hours in and I really enjoyed fallout 3, new Vegas and even 4 despite all it's flaws. Starfield is the first game from bathesda I didn't like.
I think part of the problem is that Bethesda's drop in quality has been a gradual process; it's basically the "boiling frog" scenario. We were put in the pleasant temperate water of Morrowind, and with each new game the temperature rose a little bit. Now we're boiling alive in a sludge of mediocre, uninspired blandness, and didn't even feel it happening.
Thank you for making this, the game is such a disappointment on every level. With how long it took it to make it should have been a masterpiece but it’s so obvious how lazy everything is. It’s like they don’t even play their own game or have anyone there to tell them hard truths.
On the subject of vehicles I had to wonder how, when they show you a replica of the battery powered rover astronauts actually used on the Moon, that CENTURIES LATER we don't have it's much better equivalent for use. Like how?
CP2077 was a game i was more hyped for than anything in years.... Disappointment and dumpster fire is an understatment at release and soured me so badly on not just CDPR but the AAA industry as a whole.... Fastforward to Sep 2023 and Starfield a game that finally after a few years had my hopes kind of returning thinking its BGS aside from FO4 and 76 they really dont miss or at least to me hadnt and they could nail this if they truly cared.... Even worse disappointment than CP2077 because BGS is a studio ive loved for so very long and this is the lowest they have ever succumbed. The most boring uninspired time wasting outdated piece of garbage i could ever have imagined they would even be capable of letalone release.... But i couldnt thank more for it now.... That stab in the heart forced me to scramble for something that would alleviate the depression that this caused..... Enter CP2077 2.0/Phantom Liberty..... CDPR has finally for the most part delivered what was promised and im finally playing and loving it and honestly might place it at least in my top 15 games ever. Id never have imagined this being the case. Does it still have issues?? Yeah it does and sometimes its beyond irritating.... However the world characters and story are so strong and immersing that i can get past the occassional jank and bugs.... They really have tried to fix their mistake and have for the most part done just that. Not a thing could save SF..... Its a game that is in spirit years and years in the past yet set in the future lol. Bethesda needs a wakeup call.
I felt like I got gaslit when I heard all these people screaming about how Starfield's NG+ was amazing and elevates the game and then I actually looked at what NG+ was Really, guys?
I think the load screens are easy to point to but for me it's the total lack of economy. Crafting for no purpose since you get drops very early that will work through the whole game. Ship building is cool but but again you are handed a ship after the ranger quest that carries you through the whole game making the ship building useless. Venders all have the same stuff for the most part and not enough cash to buy the loot you pick up. Contraband pays the same no matter where you sell it. The load screens suck but it's the lack of game that works together that kill it for me. There's just no reason to do anything but the quests. Then you throw the ridiculously bad AI on top and aside from the quests there's just nothing to do. You are basically done with the game long before you finish it
For NG+ you should get the ship you used to jump through the Unity. Or at least a blueprint of it or something. Or you just get to keep what was in the captains locker, and or, on your person when you jumped. Or there is a vendor or an outpost somewhere with a shipyard that somehow sells you the ships you previously had. (I know there is apparently a Starborn vendor but I don't think they sell you any of your old stuff.) Just any one of many options would have been nice, and a character reroll of course, then maybe grinding for hours through to ng+10 to max everything could be bearable.
Thanks for giving one of the best and most accurate review of this game I’ve come across. In addition to all that you’ve mentioned I would like to also add all of the numerous game breaking quest bugs which Bethesda has yet to address and probably won’t for a very long time. One of these bug made me eventually quit this game entirely.
I stucked in the Crimson Fleet Questline, because the Eclipse Ships didnt spawn… and the First Patch Bethesda give us, is a FOV- Slider . Bethesda Never changes. Im done with this, and I Play Cyberpunk and BG3. Bethesda = ignorant/arrogant.
Not only do the companions inhibit bad-guy characters, so do the dialogue choices. Sometimes there's nothing but positive, supportive options, and the truly obnoxious replies don't carry consequences
I haven't played the game yet (and will probably forget it exists before I do), but from what I've heard in other reviews, even the "good guy" options are really bad - The example coming to mind being the Paradiso questline (I think?) where the "good guy" choice is to manipulate a bunch of refugees from Earth into becoming indentured servants on a resort planet (did I understand that right?), or pay out of pocket to send them on their way to the vast unknown with no idea where they are supposed to settle (someone correct me please?), and you don't even get the option to depose the corporate powers running Paradiso so the refugees can settle safely on the planet they had legal right to settle on (seriously, will someone please tell me that this was a fever dream, and not actually supposed to be the "good guy" route for this quest?)
Fallout 5 has to be given to Obsidian and Tim Cain. Bethesda is becoming Blizzard, an empty shell. At this point I'm starting to think that Todd Howard might be the problem. Maybe changing the top management is what needs to happen.
I think at this point it would be better to just give up on any hopes for Fallout or Elder Scrolls entirely. It's not worth the heartache. Just accept that the "good old days" are gone, and move on. There are other game studios and other games to play - the soul of video game development never rested in the company names anyway, it was in the people who cared about the art and had the passion to make it happen. And those people will always exist, they just don't always stay in the same studio - or even always remain the same people.
This review sums up Starfield and Bethesda's flaws so very well. I personally think Bethesda has been creatively bankrupt for many years, only able to make something "new" by buying it from someone else ...franchises from interplay, human head, ID software etc, and in plenty of cases they failed to live up to the original legacy. Starfield perfectly represents Bethesda.
26:27 I probably don't have to tell you, that a game with procedural generation CAN be a great one. But... the AMOUNT of things that can appear has to be adequate. If you see the same cave/base multiple times in a 3 hour play-session... then there is clearly not enough things from which the game can generate stuff from the list of available things. A friend of mine, likes to say that if you make a procedural game you need to create 4 to 5 times as much things that can spawn, compared to if you hand-craft and place stuff. I am not a xbox fanboy or a playstation one... and I didn't get far in Starfield. Combat is bare-bones, far worse then in Far Cry 6 with a enemy AI that rivals humans with a single digit IQ. Space combat felt slow and uninteresting... compared to Everspace 2... and the game bored me so I stopped. But... great video, it reaffirmed me what I already thought after playing for 4 hours!
The entire concept behind Procedurally-Generated Loadingfield makes ZERO sense to me.. I'd 100% prefer a game w/ just 10 highly-detailed, curated planets (and maybe another 30 w/ resources/a few outposts sprinkled in) than this *EDIT: realize you said almost this same thing a I continued watching the video! hah
Starfield is so mid in many ways. I'm still playing it because soon as I put it down, I'll probably never play it again, so I'm just getting it out of my system. It's even more disappointing because there are so many amazing games that came out this year ... So I'm going to use this game as a litmus test. Any outlet that gives Starfield a GOTY award has the integrity of wet toilet paper, and should never be trusted by anyone, ever again.
The word you are looking for is LAZY… Starfield is overwhelming at first(for a casual gamer) and then (couple of hours in) its just repetitive…. Just uninspiring and LAZY development.
If this is what their vision is for a spacefaring race then it's pretty lame tbh. No prosthetics, no visible deformity or medical conditions or simply variation of how humans will look due to different living conditions, no creative rust bucket ships, no cultist who worships either alien life forms or rogue AI who are batshit crazy who massacres and raids planets, ships with integrated AI or maybe a humans like in Outlaw stars, collapsing planets or star? or maybe an artifact that is not in the surface of the planet? A lot of these concepts has been explored with other mediums or maybe with other games. And don't come at me with realism when the game includes space magic.
I'm sorry but the art team is getting no praise, every single asset in the game is the most bland and generic scifi I have ever seen, for fucks sakes I could pull up an AI art bot and just give it the word scifi and get better results
Excellent review, very analytical and profound but you forgot to talk about the moral choices which have no impact on the game and the very little player agency, very serious defects for an RPG. I recommend everyone to watch three videos of three RU-vid channels that go into these two aspects: one is by a certain Doktor Skipper where he reviews the game, another is by a certain Veritas and the video is titled You are not allowed to compare Starfield & Baldur's Gate 3, the third is by a certain MarcoStyle and the video is titled Starfield isn't the RPG you think it is
This game has been really helpful! It showed me that i dont like Bethesda games i only like New Vegas and they didnt have any creative control over it... Elder Scrolls VI is doomed lads
Don't insult walking simulators, please. The good ones at least will have a compelling narrative and secrets to unearth about the world you are walking through.
I dont understand how people can play this game without console commands. 30 mins in I had to player.setav carryweight 10000 because I was already raging about the encumbrance and UI. And knowing there is infinite storage space in your room in the lodge I dont even consider it cheating. its just eliminating annoying busywork.
I wouldn't mind it if your GALACTIC SPACE SHIP wasn't capped at a few hundred pounds. WTF? I can carry 10 times more weight in the form of crew members than I can in cargo?
The other problem with New Game Plus is that all the potentially cool new universe changes (like new people or same people with different personalities) are locked behind later and later NG+. So you have to beat the main quest multiple times just to get to see some minor universe changes. A complete time waste.
yeah its pretty bad, the biggest issue is Bethesda themselves - they don't want you to have choice, they want you to be ON RAILS, to NOT have any freedom, they begrudgently had to after FO 3 but that's it, this game wants to hold you're hand at every turn and no amount of modding is going to save this game
The Terrormorph quest thing is inflexible because it's supposed to be subliminal messaging for _"Trust the Scoience!"_ It's meant to force the player into accepting and taking it at face value that only accepting the experimental drug/virus is _the right thing to do_ because the so-called *"Experts"* and everybody else around you tells you it is. This game is filled with a lot of that, basically, ESG-DEI stuff. If you haven't noticed/encountered them yet, majority of the ambient NPC _families_ in this game that have unique mostly-world-building dialogue suspiciously all seem to be of the _alphabet_ variety with two parents of the same sex. I would go so far as to say the only instances of traditional "nuclear families" among NPCs in the environment that I've encountered actually end up being single-parent households (the spouse is dead), or that one annoying encounter with the "smarter than adult" kid who almost gets taken away from his white parents and nearly gets given to some random adoptive parents. There's also a multitude of ambient NPC romance encounters that play out in the same "alphabet people" subliminal messaging manner. Oh, and the whole thing with NPCs who are there just to scream the "We protest because we don't want to move on. We want to be angry! And we want them to be gone/removed!" theme. If you look at the shops, all "service industry" shops end up having white soul-less sounding employees, while the self-employed shops are of the _racial minority_ contrary to that. There are encounters made just to show to you entitled behavior or "Karen" behaviors all of which seem to be centered around light-skinned NPCs. The bourgeois type of shops also often seem to end up being owned by less melanated NPCs. This game is chock full of subliminal programming it's blatant at this point IMO. And if you think about it, they spent all that time, effort, and money, just to put all of these useless things into the game instead of actually focusing on better storytelling and questing. The priorities are wrong from the very beginning, hence we get this product.
Here in Australia, Starfield is selling for $120, whilst BG3 & CP2077 are selling for under $90. Yet the latter games look & play like true Next Gen games......where as Starfield looks like a game from the early PS4 era.
One center piece of the game are Powers, this makes it a Fantasy game. Not even the premise is SciFi as these artifacts nobody understands but somehow enable FTL travel are the foundation of the whole narrative. It is Fantasy in space with SciFi elements. And SciFi elements that are essentially side notes not taken seriously. I love hard core SciFi and calling everything SciFi that has space ships is offensive! 😆
How the fuck can you ever achieve FTL without fantasy? FTL is literally impossible. I don't disagree with the rest, but real SciFi would never have FTL, and would, instead, use something like cryosleep, which *is* possible.
@@GrammarNaziAUS The alcubierre (warp) drive is subject of science, it is Science Fiction. Not everything in SciFi is based on a grounded theory. But that is not fantasy, fantasy is something you just pull out of your ass with no consideration how it could actually work. Exobiology is a flield in science too despite the fact we have not even found microbes on other celestial bodies. There are so many good ideas to make FTL possible. Even the Starfield approach basically only needs some adjustment and some better explanation than this mystical scrap metal nobody actually ever finds out how it works. Think about the movie Interstellar, this is SciFi at its best, there is a mystery too but in the end the pieces of the puzzle come together and it makes sense. Even though the idea to jump into a black hole and travel through time is almost overstretching the good will of a SciFi nerd... 😄
And the worst part? They expect modders to fix and finish all there games. Why do you think so many planets are empty? They expect modders to add stuff
I first thought I like the lock picking game, it was clever and unique. But a few hours in, it became even more tedious than the much simpler lock picking games in Fallout or Skyrim. For exactly this reason, they were much simpler and faster to do if you got the gist of it. And the difficulty in FO/Skyrim was more of an indicator of how good tje reward might be, while in Starfield you can hit Jackpot on a novice lock and just Chunks on a master lock. So my time spending unlocking was most often not rewarded and I just skiped them. I always did open locks in FO/Skyrim, because I became good at this minigame and it only took 5-20 secs to pick one
This review perfectly encapsulated everything I felt about the game. I wanted to love it but after about 20 hours the realisation set in that it was a bad game. I forced myself to put over 100 hours in hoping it would improve. But the more I played, the worse it got. Such a shame.
The game's writers actually shoved an analogue of Covid into the game? AND there is only one "right" answer? This has to be about the 45th reason for me to never ever buy this game. Thank you for pointing that out.
*Your companion robot... the most GENERIC robot Ive ever seen...* I miss Victor or Yes Man... when robots from am decade ago game have MORE PERSONALITY AND DEVELOPMENT THAN COMPANIONS FROM STARFIELD.
Im 40. Played Beth games since 1996 Daggerfall. I have NEVER been so utterly and deeply disapointed by a game - ever. Till this day (weeks after deleting the game after spending 25 hours in it) I feel this disgust and roam vids from time to time, to see if anyone is able to put it in words and u did it here. This game - for me - is ZERO/10. Because TO ME, it brought only pain and disapointment. PS: I wasnt even hyped for the game. So its not like Im a super fan who dreamed of a game for 5 years, waiting for a Starfield salvation. No. I was accutely aware of how Bethesda works in recent decade. Yet, even with this mindset and knowledge, they just KILLED ME. For me, the company is Dead. They dont have it anymore. And if u still believe, this husk of a company, will be able to pull "Skyrim" again, think twice. Dont hold your breath for TES6... they just cant do it anymore. TOAD Howard will tell u otherwise. Hype u up for another giant shit. Beth, is ded. Same as Blizz. Same as other companies which used to be the best. Hard pill to swallow.
This game REALLY disappointed me. Not because I believed the hype but I never thought that Bethesda would "forget" ALL the great features their previous games had. The procedural generation sounds great and it COULD have been great but they did it in the laziest, brain-dead way I've ever seen. They didn't even bother to create multiple versions of a same POI. Exploration in Bethesda games always has been my favourite feature but here it is absent because nearly nothing is handcrafted and just randomly thrown together. And the main story... dear god. How you can release such a shitfest of a story in the same year as BG 3 is baffling.
29:20 REMINDER: Elite:Dangerous lets you seamlessly land on any planet and disembark on foot or a small Mars rover. E:D was made from ~1/50th of the budget of Starflop (~3-7M$)
i like the setting and the feel... but BY GOD WTF was this campaign story? it seriously showed no effort. everything was sshallow and poorly scripted. no emotrion in characters, boring af... so much running around so many load games... what a shame. 10 years of development... for absolutely no story whatsoever
What intellectually inhibited reviewer compared Starfield to the Nier series!? It just comes across as someone that never actually played any Nier game beyond one ending. Honestly, Starfield sounds like what YoshiP encountered when he initially evaluated the viability of FFXIV. The NoClip documentary has an interview with him saying that the FFXIV 1.0 teams had gotten arrogant. None of the teams had played any other MMO except possibly FFXI, so they were completely dismissive of the advances World of Warcraft had kicked off in MMOs; it's why FFXIV 1.0 was so dated gameplay-wise at launch. I suspect that this arrogant "We did these kinds of RPGs the best in the past, and we see no reason to change now" played a large role in just why this game feels like it's a graphics and textures mod-enhanced game from 10 years ago. You want to know what I'd like to see? Something that could honestly make this much more interesting to me: allow you to turn your outposts into trading stations that sell the items you supply it. It could take longer than selling it to a vendor, but you make a lot more too. They already let you recruit non-Companion NPCs for your ship, it would be damn simple to expand that to hiring a shopkeeper NPC. If you pick a good spot to set up, they could allow you to expand it into a proper waystation, with NPCs coming and going and with shops of their own you could place.
The reason why people want you to go through ng+ quickly is exactly because it changes basically nothing for the side quest. Meaning if you did them before, your ng+ is going to lack that much content.
Gave up after 120 hours hoping this would get better. Its boring, bland and character interaction (which should be great in an RPG) was horrid. I've gone back to playing New Vegas instead
19:35 you're talking about the terrormorph quest and I wanted to point out that your choices in quests do not in any way have an effect on the game world. You can choose the pathogen and there will be no decrease in terrormorphs. Comparably if you choose those giraffe things, they won't spawn or fight existing terrormorphs. The only thing quests seem to affect are your companions affinity. This has got to be the least RPG like game that is an RPG. Your choices simply do not matter.
I just can't believe that people at Bethesda played the final product before release and think that people were going to love it. This game doesn't have a single redeeming quality. Out of 40 hours, I had fun for less than 1 total hour.
This game is such a massive disappointment. How did they pass this? I think Todd needs to go if Bethesda has any hope of making another good game. He's stuck in an outdated way of game dev. Todd said that when the astronauts got to the moon, it was barren, and they weren't bored. Just think about that for 2 seconds. Now go take an advil. I'm sorry.
Starfield was for me, similar to going to a fancy restaurant and buying a 100$ meal that looks amazing on the menu but taste bland looks like mud in the plate and served by a rude waiter.
For suit modding, you only need the first 3 skills. The 4th just cuts down the resource requirement. But you did miss that for some of the later mod parts require special projects which is a master tier skill. The amount of stuff locked behind needing a skill point in this game is ridiculous. Not to mention theres quite a few useless skills and some of the skills tier 4 are terrible. They don't include an extra thing for maxing out the skill. Some do but there's a lot that don't. They didn't exactly expand their mind when coming up with these skills and the bonuses associated with them.
Yup. Remember in Skyrim the high-level Perks in Speech allowed you to invest money into vendors who would then and forever more have a deeper pool of $ in their inventories? I was floored when I went through the Social tree and did not find that, especially considering the pitiful amount the game gives to its vendors.
So you are saying they are the Master level spells from Skyrim. The “best” spells in the game. But they require extra quests to get and they are so bad “worse” spells are better than them.
@jspotter89 Yeah. Skyrim speech. Where you get perks to help you with speech, but by the time you get them. You can just pass any speech check you might have been helped by anyway. And there is only 1 check they actually require the high speech anyway. And that check is trivial to pass without the speech.
@@Cloud_Seeker I legit have no idea what you are talking about. The choice in having vendors with only $5,000 on hand is specifically designed to waste players’ time. It is a widespread complaint, even from people who enjoy the game.
Very good review.. I think you nailed it. I was okay playing Starfield until I got Cyberpunk 2077 (never played it before 2.0).. and understood why so many people compared the two games. After playing Cyberpunk I became actively angry at Starfield as it was clear to me then how bad it was.
Cyberpunk was good during the release, the story, characters, world building, city itself, gunplay were all there. It lacked stability and polish. Its now a polished and overhauled gem of a game. Starfield however is fundamentally flawed, boring, and uninspiring. Makes me think if Skyrim was an accidental success given they never had a good game after that. It clearly shows how their writing department fell after Morrowind.
As the start of hte video indicated the game has potential, but the execution is catastrophic, what it needs is a full remake with a new team at the helm, pity that's not likely going to happen.
When you realize the game is rigged from the start to bloat your hours of gameplay with no content or repetition and an assault of loading screens and menu screens. The last straw for me was when opening a locked door with high difficulty only to open it with a weapon case with nothing in it and a heal
Step 1: Design a game that looks good in trailers so I can sell the dream on stage. Step 2: profit off the dream Step 3: go silent and prepare to repeat step 1
I think the most damning thing is that this game hasn't entered the Zeitgeist at all, i don't see any spicy starfield memes and i don't think i ever will.
With all the lack of QoL, the time sinks & frankly mobile game inserts into Starfield it really does feel like a GAAS game quite a bit. Could it have been a Live Service Game repurposed into a SP mess?
Todd Howard wants you to dedicate years of your life to playing Starfield. The leveling system reflects that. Here's what I don't understand: How does Bethesda benefit from players sending grinding away for countless hours? Does Game Pass reward developers based on hours played?
This is what happens when you get rid of all the people that were willing to push boundaries to make a game fun and exciting. You're left with nothing but a empty "woke" shell. Bethesda and Disney are on a fast track to destroy themselves and they're doing a fine job.
You can reroll legendary effects, but you need to save-scum before killing that enemy or looting that container/rack to get different effects. I don't think I've played a game that has rerolling mechanics in place aside from Fallout 76, of all games.
I hated every single companion. They're literal copy paste. After maxing out affinity w/ all 4 I never traveled w/ them again. Being evil or even simply morally gray is so obviously frowned upon in this game. I've never played a game claiming to be an RPG with this amount of limitation in my life. Lets just be honest with ourselves and call Starfield what it actually is, an action/adventure game. I couldn't believe when I was undercover in the crimson fleet that it destroyed so many side quests and even some main quests. They populate so many places with crimson fleet so if your in the fleet you can literally just walk passed all of them to your objective. How BGS thought this was a good idea is absolutely mind boggling to me.
the only one that is anything less that hard good is Andreja, who is down with you slaughtering the entire crew of The Scow (the shady "salvage" ship barely a step up from spacers) so as to not leave witnesses after the captain outright says he is going to put a bounty on your head. at least, she didn't disapprove of me choosing that option at the time and said, "So be it." personally i reloaded.
About the Aceles vs Microbe in the UC Vanguard questline. The amount of patronization towards your decision of choosing Aceles is the most loud moment in the game where you can experience the awful writers behind all the Constellation characters lines, because they were written to lecture you about their personal point of view into what science stands for, and by doing that, destroying the characters believability, and your immersion, as they were essentially breaking the fourth wall. The quest itself was going fine for me until that moment, and everything made sense. The game's tone being very light hearted, for an M Rated piece, stinks of modern agendas, the nail in the coffin was your interaction with Constellation after you've finisehd UC Vanguard quest and chose Aceles.
and it made me love Hadrian as a character all the more because she, a specialist, was legitimately conflicted on what to do and accepted your decision with no complaint. and then immediately after that she was demoted to Skyrim follower level of character. i honestly wanted to just drop the game because i didn't give a shit about any of the constellation companions compared to her.
