Damn it, “losing steam” was right there to make a great headline pun
The state of journalism today… smh
I’ve never understood why that matters for anything other than purely multiplayer games.
People finish games and move on. It’s not some GaaS bollocks.
Skyrim is 13 years old and has many more players. It says “Starfield was not a return to form for Bethesda.”
Is it something to do with modding-community?
If that generates a load of free cool stuff people may play more for longer.
The main IP rights owner probably doesn’t really want this, they want to develop and sell a new game or expansion.
Nah, it’s just Todd Howard. His priorities are weird as hell when it comes to games.
Like, dialog and story is not prioritized.
While map size is highly prioritized.
It’s a bit backwards when the games in question are supposed to be RPGs.
To some degree, yes. Very few people are playing Skyrim in it’s vanilla format, these days. The same is likely true of Fallout 4.
I enjoyed Starfield but it’s definitely missing something Skyrim had which made me continue playing after I completed the MSQ.
I’ve put close to 500 hours into vanilla Cyberpunk but only around 80 into Starfield. My classic Skyrim, which I did play mostly vanilla, was roughly 250 hours. Where special edition is around 1500 hours purely due to mods.
But I already know I’m not chomping at the bit to mod Starfield like I was other games.
I’m waiting on more world shit mods to play it again, recently saw a house building mod on any planet and have my hopes up more will come. Granted Bethesda might actually want this engagement so they can release a definitive edition with hella mods, to bridge their own technical gaps again lol.
Vanilla Skyrim < Vanilla Starfield
Modded Skyrim >>> Vanilla Starfield
Simple as. I went back and replayed Vanilla Skyrim this year, and let me be the first to tell you that Starfield is legitimately a better game when it comes to roleplaying, choices, and quest design. Skyrim has a far more interactive and immersive world design, but to me that falls flat when the game is so fucking boring to interact with (hot take, I know).
Mods fix all of those problems with Skyrim, and that’s what people are playing now.
I dunno, I played Skyrim through once, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of replay value to me.
It’s very long, and you can do everything in one playthrough. The only difference is which army you want to win, and you make that choice right at the end.
You can even take control of the magic guild even though you know no magic. I honestly don’t know what other people see in it. Modding maybe? Not something that interests me. New Vegas was a lot more interesting.
Yeah I never valued skyrim for replayability… I replayed oblivion a lot (maybe because I was younger), and replayed FO3/NV a bit. But even with mods, I could never get myself to replay skyrim more than a couple hours in.
Just felt so repetitive with boring dungeons and drauger. Stumbling into Blackreach was one of my favorite Bethesda experiences tho. But the gameplay felt stale halfway through my first playthrough. Felt like a chore to finish the story.
I liked living Skyrim 4 from wabbajack but yeah the base game isn’t really that special and I haven’t replayed it without mods
Modding for me. Whenever I’ve loaded it up again, it’s been with immersion mods that make stuff like weather exposure, food, and travelling things you have to manage. It’s a different game and you do things differently, like, you’re not getting to High Hrothgar until you hunt some furs to wear and have a good tent to shelter from blizzards on the way up. Many mods also bring in entirely new content.
New Vegas was definitely a treat, though. I found Fallout 3 quite mediocre and never ended up finishing it. Skyrim sort of falls in the middle there somewhere.
Skyrim’s true power is that it’s excellent for single-player roleplay. The game is very immersive, the universe feels extremely vast, and the gameplay allows for extremely varied play styles.
The end result is that the game is very replayable if your thing is building a consistent and unique (head)cannon for your character. If you don’t focus the main quest, you can put in hundreds of hours across multiple characters before things get stale. Even the quests that you follow multiple times, you might approach from very different angles.
It’s not really a great sign for the developers if their game doesn’t have a ton of replay value I imagine. Consider Skyrim, it’s the same general type of game, but people play that game over and over and make modifications to it to keep it fresh and enjoyable even now, and as a result Bethesda has been able to resell it for other platforms or with extra content or related merch for years, because people like it enough to keep coming back. If Starfield isn’t managing the same despite being the same sort of game from the same company, then that both serves as a warning to those who haven’t gotten it yet that the game probably isn’t as enjoyable by comparison, and also doesn’t give the devs as much incentive to keep making any improvements to it.
I mean, Harry Potter was the biggest selling game last year, and that has also lost 97% of it’s players.
Not everything is meant to be played forever. I think Skyrim was a one-off tbh.
That’s another exceptionally boring game, though.
Just checking some random games:
Sekiro is currently sitting at 92% players lost from its peak after five years
Spiritfarer is at 80%
Hollow Knight has only lost 63% of players
Witcher 3 also lost 80%, and actually has a larger active player base (in number of players, not proportionally) right at this moment than HL, despite being years older and peaking significantly lower
Starfield was very bland and had very limited dialogue/storyline in comparison to skyrim, but skyrim was so repetitive and boring with so much of the game being spent in similar looking dungeons fighting drauger…
Even with mods, I never made it through a second playthrough because the gameplay just fizzled with the boring dungeon-crawling required for so many questlines/words of power.
At least in oblivion, most of the caves/oblivion gates were totally optional. So much of skyrim is spent in boring ass dungeons…
This isn’t an argument for Starfield replayability tho. Starfield doesn’t have enough storyline for much replayability. Felt so bare bones in comparison to skyrim or any other Bethesda game.
I mostly agree, but I can guess one reason why it’s useful. With a game that’s not that old, but well received, I’d expect new players to keep coming in for a while. Not to the degree of when it first came out, but someone like me will wishlist a game and wait until there’s a sale or I have time to play it to buy and play. If the drop off is huge, and sales don’t help much, it does reflect on the game somewhat.
I love Bethesda, but putting TES6 on the back burner to make Starfield for eight years was an idiotic decision. They also took the wrong lesson from Skyrim, believing that streamlining the game through stripping of features was the reason for its success. They’ve done this same with each successive game since, and each has been more poorly received than the last. Go back to your roots and make a good, deep Elder Scrolls game. Continue to leave the shitty +5 modifier leveling system out, but at the very least restore attributes and birthsigns. Restore spellmaking. STOP FUCKING IT UP. You’re on your last strike here and I don’t have a lot of faith that you’re going to make the right call.
Hard disagree that taking the chance on a new IP was a bad call. It didn’t work out, but more of the same thing forever would be worse.
New IP would have been fine if they didn’t drag Gamebryo’s corpse into it, as well as the worst part of Fallout 4’s perks, “+5% pistol damage at night” and adding requirements onto those like it made them special. Almost every RPG part of this game is bland and uninteresting and it’s so fucking unfortunate. Star Citizen might be taking a dozen years to complete but at least they’re using Unreal Engine and actually adding some fucking depth to their shit.
Did Star Citizen change engine? I thought they used a modified CryEngine. Just checked, they now use Lumberyard, which is based on CryEngine.
If they wanted to create something fresh then sure, but the end result was the same game they’ve released multiple times, except this time it’s with a new coat of paint.
They could’ve spent that time adding to an existing IP instead of creating a new IP to make the same thing again.
I don’t even know, if I would normally truly agree that simplification isn’t at least aiding their mass appeal, but Starfield did get absolutely stumped by a traditionally complex RPG (Baldur’s Gate 3)…
I think the sweet spot is finding a way to make tradition mechanics a bit more casual friendly without removing them outright. I don’t think Morrowind or Oblivion’s attribute and skill system was difficult to grasp, but the leveling system was pretty bad. You either played the way you wanted to, using the skills you believed your character should be using, and received low modifiers as a result, or you meticulously selected and planned out major/minor skills that weren’t reflective of your actual playstle, just so you wouldn’t blow your chance at earning +5 modifiers.
You couldn’t just comfortably advance to the next level. You had this paranoia that it would be a weak and wasted level-up because you didn’t spend enough time jumping or something. It poisoned the gameplay with this annoying meta that was purely about exploiting the leveling mechanics so you wouldn’t be at a huge disadvantage. They remedied this in Skyrim, but at the cost of making all characters feel generic. The heart was taken out of your character and who they were. You no longer had a class identity. Everything was just kind of same-ey.
If they could at least restore attribute points so I could give my character a deeper identity and allow more dialogue checks related to said attributes so these identities mattered, we’d be heading in the right direction. They don’t have to be so impactful that casual players are put off by them, but c’mon, man… I want to feel like there’s a deeper system at work here. I want to measure my character in more ways than “Good with sword” and “Good with heavy armor”.
Did I mention how much I miss skill checks too? Fallout 3 and New Vegas handled these superbly.
baldur’s gate was incredible at this. i think part of that was their mindset wasn’t “how do we make this more accessible to casual players?” they’re mindset was more “how do we make this less tedious and/or annoying for everyone?” like the quick select buffs ui that comes up with every roll. in early access, and other larian games it was still possible to add buffs mid dialogue, but you’d have to like ungroup the buffer, sit then outside, start the dialogue, then sneak them in to hit you with the buff, which might not work right if you already opened the roll interface…
they’ve even added a custom difficulty mode where you can turn off more of their ease of use features. for example, i personally believe the game is better with the “perception check failed” notifications removed. if your whole party fails the perception check, you still know the trap is there… it makes the whole mechanic a bit pointless at times. with it turned off you’ll still do the check, and it’ll still show you if you succeed, it just hides the rolls from you until then.
I agree with you but the silliness of the leveling system did have its own charm. As a kid I spent so much time jumping around and putting points into getting those athletics skills high enough that it became a bit game breaking.
There’s a certainly a balance somewhere in there but I don’t think the game was ever difficult enough, playing on medium difficulty, to feel like you’ve fallen too far behind the curve. For context I’m thinking mostly about oblivion.
I probably played through oblivion more times making builds that weren’t optimal and had weird stats than I did trying to min/max my attributes. I think, for me, leaving room for that kind of gameplay is part of what made the older games so special.
Basically give us a Morrowind clone with a better leveling system, remove the hit rolls, and updated visuals.
OH, and voice acting. Nit because it’s better than text, but because the writing on Morrowind was way too verbose. I don’t need to read a 30-page essay on the history of the history of a family whose servants once believed they spotted a mythical ring that culminate in a fetch quest.
I want the Morrowind levels of text, but let it be optional for those who want to delve into those branches of dialogue, and feel free to use splicing/AI to voice the extended options.
You speak to an NPC and it comes up with a few options like Skyrim, but included [More] at the bottom with far more topics.
That works too. I loved diving through books and stuff, but sometimes the quest dialogs just got too wordy.
I’d kill for a Daggerfall remake. That was my first TES experience and I still remember staying up all night to play it in highschool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXOWKABmxCQ
Theres never been a more perfect time! This project recently reached 1.0 converting it over to Unity and is supported by mods!
I disagree that they took the lesson that streamlining was the reason for Skyrim’s success, because Starfield is not streamlined in the least. It’s a complex series of menus and loading screens that lead to empty planets and probably other types of content, I’m not sure, because I hated navigating the menus and loading screens.
The lesson they should have taken from Skyrim is that the more immersive the game feels the more popular it will be. Immersion doesn’t require streamlining, and features like spellcrafting would be hugely welcome back for ES6, IMO.
But there’s no way to enjoy a space exploration game where the space exploration is handled so incredibly clunkily.
I think the number one rule of space exploration is “players must be able to fly wherever the fuck they want in their spaceship.” Their engine couldn’t handle that so they were hobbled from day one. All the design decisions were working back from that catastrophic mistake. They should have used Unreal or built a new engine or radically overhauled Gamebryo.
Very well said. Skyrim is incredibly immersive. Vanilla would be difficult for me to feel the same way about it I went back to it now, but with flora mods like Nature of the Wild Lands, grass mods, and environmental audio overhauls like Sounds of Skyrim, the game continues to draw me in like never before. I play the game much more slowly now, and spend more time walking and taking in the sights and sounds. I hope Bethesda can match this on their next title.
I have a hard time believing they spent one year on this game, let alone eight. Half of it, including the game’s engine, the leveling system, and the fucking dragonshouts in space, is pulled from existing sources, the writing sucks, the base building is a pointless perk sink, there’s maybe three dozen unique structures copy-pasted again and again, the enemies are spongy and boring as hell, and despite being Bethesda’s “Least Buggy” work to date, it’s still chock-a-block with bugs.
You know what I think? I think they jerked around exactly like Randy Pitchford did with DNF and they’re trying to pretend they didn’t.
To play devil’s advocate, Starfield is absolutely a better RPG than Skyrim when it comes to roleplaying, quest design, and more. They made huge improvements to complexity and options for the player.
They just also paired that with awful world design, and could no longer rely on lore written by GOATs no longer working for the company.
No way but it won Steam’s most innovative gameplay award for 2023.
The problem with joke votes is that it really corrupts the entire thing. RDR2 getting “most loving updates” or whatever it was called after it was shut down is a middle finger to the devs who actually keep up with their games.
Considering the awards are nigh-useless anyway, sacrificing some “credibility” to call out shitty business seems worth it imo.
It’s not like it’s a “haha look how silly this is” joke–it’s a “you all fucked this up though for the public to hate you, do better” joke.
That game was dead on arrival for me, everything from gameplay to story was absolutely outdated and not interesting.
