I honestly can't understand how Starfield was so boring. I played it a bit waiting for the fun to start and it just never did. Such a weird game
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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First new IP in 25 years and this time they don't have decades' worth of other people's writing to build lore off of. Their failures of imagination are front and center now.
It’s because it’s unironically just Skyrim with spaceships, but it’s not even good because like @[email protected] said, they don’t have much material to go off of.
They also expect modders to fix everything and I imagine most of them are content with making stuff for fallout and elder scrolls instead.
unironically just Skyrim with spaceships,
hell it's worse because of all the mandatory loads. somebody made open cities skyrim but i doubt there's going to be a mod letting you manually fly between planets and even if that did exist it would be boring af instead of interesting.
This "they expect modders to fix everything" thing isn't even true because the vast majority of their sales are on consoles, where mods can't even do much.
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waiting for the fun to start and it just never did.
fallout 4 was that for a lot of people.
I'm doing all the main and side missions while ignoring radiant or filler stuff and it fuckin' sucks. I played Fallout 4, which I consider mediocre at best, the same way and remember having a MUCH better time. Starfield is so utterly boring that I'm actually kind of fascinated by it. It's immediately obvious the first time you set foot on an "unexplored" planet that the entire allure of Bethesda games since at least Oblivion has been abandoned. There is no intricately designed open world here, just copy-pasted garbage.
Never mind how the world feels even more disjointed than ever. There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
Even that could have been done ok if the factions weren't both garbage self-defeatingly stupid fascist shitholes. Like if the UC was a socialist state that had tacitly tolerated/been unable to stop capitalist colonists from establishing corporate powers and so found itself effectively in a permanent low-intensity conflict with itself as the central party tried to keep control over these large parallel power structures, while the FC was a coalition of breakaway fascist corpo-states that were actively trying to encircle and undermine the UC.
But as it is the two factions are "the fascists from Starship Troopers" and "the Confederacy but it's constituent parts are feudal corpo-states" and they're both stagnating and rotting away and being chipped away at by petty warlords in a universe where the literal only hope is that maybe the reform Serpent cult might have a not-dogshit ideology and they successfully wipe out all the fascists and ancaps, but we don't know anything about them because they're almost completely absent from the story as it is. And the Bethesda execs and a terrifying chunk of their fans think it's a good, aspirational setting full of hope.
I think the real problem is that they wanted to have both a well-established space-faring society but also an american frontier settler-brainworm aesthetic, when the two are clearly mismatched. The FC makes sense if the grav drive has only been around for a single generation or something, not the 200+ years as depicted in-game.
maybe the reform Serpent cult might have a not-dogshit ideology [...], but we don't know anything about them because they're almost completely absent from the story as it is
:todd: had to remove any content involving House Varuun so that it could be made into a $30 DLC later.
The FC makes sense if the grave drive has only been around for a single generation or something, not the 200+ years as depicted in-game.
Having watched a bunch of Bethesda game analysis essays, this is a problem that is consistent with their writers. Bethesda doesn't really seem to understand time spans.
Aside from the obvious issue of Fallout 3 where 200 years later everything is still a wasteland and unlooted, the same problem is present in Skyrim. For instance, Esbern, one of the last remnants of the Blades, somehow manages to live in hiding for 25 years in a sewer, without any way to earn money and buy food, and while avoiding detection.
The Thieves Guild questline is also made substantially worse by a 25 year gap in the backstory.
Like DAMN Karliah, you were working on this revenge plan for 25 years and this is all you have? A stupid mead business scheme and one single dose of the poison everything hinges on?
Of course, the fact that the writers keep patting themselves on the back by having every other character comment on how genius her plan is doesn't help
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if the grave drive
I'm imagining a setting where Starfield's early designers made that same typo and just rolled with it instead of admitting their mistake to tod, and how much more interesting of a setting it would be if their FTL tech was some weird necromantic bullshit.
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they wanted to have both a well-established space-faring society but also an american frontier settler-brainworm aesthetic
I'm glad I'm not the only one that picked up on that. In that "making of" video, Bethesda made a huge deal about wanting to capture "the wonder of space flight and exploration", but at the same time having space travel be routine. It'd be like getting excited by driving down the highway.
Even that could have been done ok if the factions weren't both garbage self-defeatingly stupid fascist shitholes. Like if the UC was a socialist state that had tacitly tolerated/been unable to stop capitalist colonists from establishing corporate powers and so found itself effectively in a permanent low-intensity conflict with itself as the central party tried to keep control over these large parallel power structures, while the FC was a coalition of breakaway fascist corpo-states that were actively trying to encircle and undermine the UC.
Capitalist realism ideology requires there to be no future possible without capitalism dominating everything. 
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My favorite bit is what Sseth's review pointed out: you can literally kill the last practicing Jew in the universe as a side effect of choosing the "evil" choice in the resort planet quest. One of the unfrozen colonists has kept up all the rabbinical traditions and is implied to be the last living example of his religion in a setting that has largely allowed religion to die out because it doesn't serve corporate interests. What the Austrian painter started, Todd will make you finish 
Holy fuck... How the? What the what?
You WILL carry out Todd's final solution
The thought that had to go into this detail... That's fucking intentional, it has to be, right?
Considering they bullied a transwoman into quitting the company maybe
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a setting that has largely allowed religion to die out because it doesn't serve corporate interests
zero historical materialism mfs
Never mind how the world feels even more disjointed than ever. There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
How is this a background tidbit and not the actual plot of the game? 
Well this is Bethesda so the game had to be about you becoming the ~~dragonborn~~ starborn and learning the ~~dragon shouts~~ star powers.
You left out the (CW: lazy ending)
spoiler
wholesome chungus multiverse cliche! 
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Literally just make Cowboy Bebop The Game. Cowboy aesthetics on other planets, real guns, a variety of jazz genres. It’s so god damn simple.
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Played it for like four hours and moved on, and I'm a big space travel sci-fi buff.... Boring.
Edit: I'm glad I pirated it. I'll probs uninstall it.
You won't be missing anything. The game does not get better. If you are feeling any FOMO you can toss it out of the window.
It doesn't? I was kinda hoping that if I played it a little deeper I'd encounter at least a few interesting side quests. Like everybody knows the main story in Skyrim is ass, but there's some good side stuff in there, so I was planning to return to Starfield to seek some out sooner or later.
Nah, it's basically all fetch quests and empty radiant quests.
There's a quest where a generation ship arrives at a resort planet, and the resort CEO wants you to destroy the generation ship so the people aboard can't gross up the planet. The only other solution other than killing everyone on the ship is to go buy an FTL drive, with your own money, to retrofit the generation ship to go find another planet but faster. The resort CEO is an essential NPC and can't be killed.
The only other solution other than killing everyone on the ship is to go buy an FTL drive
You're forgetting one: convince the colonists to accept being enslaved by the resort company, and then provide the materials to build their housing yourself.
The whole quest is the absolute worst, it's literally just "remember Tenpenny Tower from FO3, and the plots with Megaton and the ghouls? So do we, so here it is again but you can only side with what Tod thinks the right faction is (the rich guys) this time."
convince the colonists to accept being enslaved by the resort company, and then provide the materials to build their housing yourself
Wtf
Yeah it's completely fucked, and the whole thing just kind of trails off after you meet the resort company board like the writers literally lost interest and phoned in the rest because the ship captain who starts out bombastic and demanding will just eagerly submit to whatever capitulation you choose for them and that's it that's the whole story.
One could almost imagine the writers outlined a plot where you help the colonists seize power over the corporation and either Tod or the hack lead writer shot it down and insisted it be resolved in the corporation's favor, so the actual writer just gave up and gave them the bare minimum after that.
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Im about to download Enderalgod I miss the days of HL and HL2
Same. I used to be knee deep into making maps in Hammer Editor and playing mods back in those days. HL and HL2 were more than just games, they were platforms people would build amazing stuff on.
You had the patience to use hammer, which is respect. Getting doors to work in that piece of shit is hard enough, im surprised valve managed to make this many games using hammer, hell im impressed they managed to make their games that good looking with hammer. In fact I think its hilarious that any time some new user waddles in forums whining about hammer and how shitty it is, everyone just replies “yep its utter shit”.
This was my unprompted rant about a very bad no good doodoo editor, thank you.
Thanks for reminding me to download some of those scarily good horror games people have made with Half Life.
almost all the tropes I have seen from that game only work well in horror and B-rating-ethesda can't do horror imo
It has a few good sci-fi tropes that could work well, like the generation ship concept. They just can't write in a way that is outside of the system they are in. The only solutions are extremely capitalist and also extremely stupid. There are very few concepts executed well or interestingly, despite the insane amount of sci-fi out there to copy from.
How tf has Bethesda not fallen on their ass yet? Oblivion is the last decent thing they did.
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Valve didnt update tf2 so valve still bad.
Valve would rather update rage simulator (Dota 2) which is kept alive by a Saudi prince buying battlepass every year than updating tf2
Giving TF2 the love and respect it deserves is basically the only thing that could turn around my opinion of Valve at this point. Hell maybe its time for a sequel.
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Dota 2) which is kept alive by a Saudi prince buying battlepass every year
Which most likely brings Blizzard no end of rage, lol
Maybe an unfair comparison. Half-Life is one of the greatest games of all time.
But my hot take is that I'm glad Starfield was made and released before ES6. If they hadn't then maybe they would be riding too high from making Skyrim and all the other money they made just releasing it and assumed if they made anything similar that it would be successful so they might have made ES6 as well as they made Starfield. Now I just hope Bethesda listens to the critiques and complaints people have of Starfield so that they take it into account when creating ES6 and make it better.
hope Bethesda listens to the critiques and complaints
Skyrim is better than fallout 3 tho. Es 6 will be better than starfield 
it'll be better in that it will be wearing a franchise people like's clothes, making whatever horrible decisions they made seem more tolerable 
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Only played starfield from gamepass (lies of p and hifi rush are pretty good) and besides the sterile feeling of the game, fuck bethesda for making melee useless. Why tf a knife and axe has the same swing speed? Why the guns with 0 perks outdamages melee with a full specced melee char.
"Its supposed to be realistic" well fuck realism then. Honestly with the low weight limits and annoying onjuries systsem, i think Starfield was originally a survival space game that bethesda rescapped into RPG today
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