I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.
While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you’d expect.
Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.
In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today’s game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don’t scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.
The “Its a Bethesda RPG” excuse doesnt cut it this time. at least with their previous games, they managed some kind of improvement over the previous games.
Starfield is a straight regression.
it is actively, mechanically worse than previous games. The perk system and the settlement building is actively worse than Fallout 4. The exploration and inventory management of Skyrim and Fallout 4 are actively worse in Starfield. The Menus are actively worse. The faces and facial animation are actively worse.
and I don’t say this to heap mindless hate on the popular thing. I say this because I want it to be better. It had so much potential to be better. But they got within like 5 feet of the finish line and just… stopped, and said good enough, for some bizarre frustrating reason.
Have you recently played fully vanilla fallout 4 or Skyrim? Because without a doubt the menus are exactly as bad as those games, but mods like FallUI and SkyUI make them amazing.
Faces and face animations are definitely improved, I have no idea how you could say they’re worse, much more fluid and much less jarring generally (again unless you’re mistaking heavily modded fo4 and Skyrim, which both have mods that improve all of this)
Settlement building does seem to be a regression, but I have only put in like an hour on it, and again vanilla Fallout 4 is VERY limited compared to modded.
Perks eh, I do like the more detailed Skyrim and fallout styles (I think skyrims was better overall but they’re intentionally different) while Starfield feels much more basic on that aspect, but I don’t really feel like it “needs” a whole lot more on that aspect, it works but I’m sure a perk overhaul mod will come through.
Except the core isnt alright.
People need to stop treating bethesda like its some poor indie dev that did its best. its a multi billion dollar company, owned by a multi billion dollar company. They have the resources, time, and access to expertise to be better than this.
And these low, handwaved low standards of “Its just bethesda, what do you expect”, are exactly why Starfield is worse than previous games. And future cames will be worse still. Why put in effort when people like you just shrug and go and give them a free pass with comments like “what do you expect, its bethesda”.
