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
It’s because it’s unironically just Skyrim with spaceships, but it’s not even good because like @FourteenEyes@hexbear.net 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
You WILL carry out Todd’s final solution
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?
There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
Isn’t that what happened in Firefly
You’re probably right that’s where they got it from, though I think it’s kept deliberately vague there because they didn’t care about the war itself and it was just a way to justify it being a western in space.
Perhaps part of it is that the writers at Bethesda thought they had to provide sufficient backstory because players would be interested. The colony war in Starfield is supposedly a peer-to-peer war of two stellar nations started over the dumbest shit imaginable: there was a law saying no nation could officially control more than 3 star systems. Also the cowboys won.
there was a law saying no nation could officially control more than 3 star systems
That’s honestly a very funny way to justify why there are only 6 cities in the game when humanity has supposedly explored like 200+ systems (many of which are habitable). Like its not that we are lazy or went way overboard with the procedurally generated planets, it’s becuase of space law.
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.
This brought to you by every video game adaptation ever lol and to be clear I agree with the sentiment, its hard NOT to like bebop but being simple is exactly the same trope perpetuated by people at the top in hollywood/sillicon valley.
The bebop setting you describe is just a very rough outline of what the game would look like, it is by far not enough to build around it. Imagine for a moment once you get past the novelty and somehow ignore the blatant “cultural influence”(read: ripoff) you’d be left with the same fundamental problem with Bethesda games.
The problem is they have a very basic formula for the game loop, their engine is a literal monster from 15 years ago or something and ultimately they must go down the corporate checklist of things “marketing” says must be in the game because how else do you justify the budget?
You’re basicaly doing the same thing as telling a blind person to draw a Mona Lisa, even telling them its ok to copy is not the point at all.
I got one better, take Cowboy Bebop then combine it with what’s been done in Red Dead Redemption 2, and probably for shits’n’giggles throw in a bunch of other random shit a la Yakuza/Like A Dragon in terms of making games within games - I want to play VA-11 Hall-A but Bebop style when I want to chill out between missions.
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.
Idk when the last time you tried to play it, but it’s pretty well optimized. My cousin was able to play it on a very mediocre laptop.
I’m pretty sure more people are playing Skyrim than Starfield.
