This makes sense, while I am having fun with Starfield, no mans sky offers an experience that I felt that Starfield promised and did not provide.
This is exactly what I heard on a podcast today (unfortunately I can’t play starfield) and basically boils down to the fact, that starfield really doesn’t offer anything more than mass effect did like 15 years ago - gameplay wise.
Which for me is absolutely fine. I’d much rather spend my time doing quests in detailed cities and occasionally going out to explore over the painfully empty universe of NMS. And I love NMS just for difference reasons. NMS is like a relaxing sandbox game for me, but Mass Effect and Starfield brings the characters, story, worldbuilding, quests, factions.
I asked the question(last night on Team Fortress 2, the people’s forum), if Starfield isn’t a good space game, is it still a good Bethesda game?
And the answer? Mostly yes. I’ve added it to my wishlist. I’ll get it whenever I can mod in 500 different improvements to shit they’ll never fix.
I mean… I think it’s a pretty good space game too, depending on what you want.
Yesterday I took my custom-built ship to explore an alien world. On my way in, I was hailed by a merchant and warned there were pirates in system. I thanked them, they jumped off, and being me, I decided to go planet hopping until I ran into the pirates. Destroyed two, saw that one had a cool looking ship so I switched to EMP weapons and took out their grav drive and engines. Once those were offline, I boarded them. The damage had taken out their gravity so the whole ship was in zero-g, with pens and junk floating around, obscuring my vision. The firefight against the crew was surprisingly tough, as they had mounted auto-turrets that were at a distinct advantage against me because I was being thrown around by the micrograv, but I did eventually capture the ship. Once I got the gravity on, though, all the stuff in the interior crashed down and was scattered everywhere. I searched around to see if I could find some contraband… but it was too messy, and I guess I missed some, because when I jumped into a more civilized sector the SysDef patrols caught me. Here I am, flying a stolen pirate ship, trying to explain to the cops that the drugs in my hold aren’t mine and I didn’t know they were there. Usually I’d bribe the guy to let me through but that didn’t work out well this time, and the next thing you know I find myself in the brig aboard the UC Vanguard under a bright lamp being interrogated by someone with far too much brass on his chest to be dealing with a reported drug runner. Looks like maybe I got myself in a bit over my head…
Anyway. If that’s not a space game, I don’t know what is. I can’t think of any other space games that would offer that particular mix of space combat and RPG experiences. And that wasn’t really an unusual play story! It’s just that this isn’t NMS, as I think that shows.
Well if you don’t expect much more than previous ganes I guess.
They removed some stuff like the NPCs don’t have schedules so it’s a little bit weird when you get missions of go there and put this documents in there or steal something from that office just to find out they work 365/7/24h… not random NPCs, NPCs with names that live in the office. So that plan of getting in at night or something goes to shit. Or waiting for that specific guy to leave the office… nah not happening.
That said… you can enter a company an walk through it visit the boss office go through it to their back warehousesteal whatever and as long as they don see you directly do something they don’t care one bit, no disguise no tricking them into thinking you are a technician or shit nah, look at me I work here now. Really really dumb. You have to use your imagination of how that actually happen.
The question now is, how does a good Bethesda game compare to all the other games released?
I’ve added it to my wishlist. I’ll get it whenever I can mod in 500 different improvements to shit they’ll never fix.
Same here, but I definitely need to upgrade my PC first haha But by then it should run fine and there should be mod support as well.
starfield really doesn’t offer anything more than mass effect did like 15 years ago - gameplay wise
As a day1 NMS player who is getting a bit bored with the game, if you said to me hey there’s a new game and it’s pretty similar to mass effect… I’d be very interested in that!
Not every game is for everyone, I know quite a few people just don’t seem to get NMS. I often take breaks from it now but each expedition / update brings me back; it’s amazing how far the game has come and it still surprises me how addictive I find it after 7 years. It’s awesome when a game comes out that reinvents the wheel but maybe not every game has to do that, it can just be a decent game to spend some time forgetting about our worries in?
I’ve not played Starfield yet but looking forward to trying it out, guess I should keep my expectations low then I’ll be less likely to be disappointed.
I’m a Day 1 NMS player too and I’m really glad and impressed how much the turned the ship around. I also come back for the expeditions/updates!
It’s awesome when a game comes out that reinvents the wheel but maybe not every game has to do that, it can just be a decent game to spend some time forgetting about our worries in?
You’re right, nobody excepts a new invention of the wheel every time, but to keep with your analogy, I would be nice if the at least used the newer/updated wheel instead of hanging on to 15 year old ones - sure they still work, but the newer ones offer a lot of things I’ve got used to. Or in other words, the standards have changed quite a bit.
I really don’t want to hate on the game, it’s definitely on my list and if I can justify a small PC upgrade I will definitely play it. But I’m just a bit… disappointed, that Starfield didn’t live up to the hype/promises - this is also on me, I got again caught a bit by the hypetrain.
guess I should keep my expectations low then I’II be less likely to be disappointed.
I really hate that this has become a trend now… I really don’t know why and how, but at least in my opinion, this changed drastically over the last view years. I can remember when I rode the hypetrain until the release and wasn’t disappointed… but nowadays you really have to keep your expectations low to end up not disappointed (there are of course expectations).
I don’t think you need to keep your expectations low, just keep them realistic. It’s a Bethesda game, it plays like their other games… it’s a whole ton of jank muddled up and duct taped until it holds together just enough for launch. This time they raised the bar to what counts as “holding together” to the level of the other major studios, but a lot of the gameplay systems still feel unfinished. In this I actually think it’s a lot like modern NMS, where things like outpost building feel like they’re actively contradictory to things like settlements; outposts in SF feel like someone did them early in the dev cycle and was then pulled off to work somewhere else and the only attention they got from then on was making sure they didn’t crash the game. Then you’ve also got the typical Bethesda game stuff that people are acting surprised Pikachu about. The character animations look weird sometimes, low poly NPCs especially, there are too many load screens in some places, performance is poor considering the level of graphics, etc.
However, as long as you know what you’re getting into, imo it’s a great game. The storyline is interesting enough to be fun, but also manages to skip that annoying thing where you’re off learning to be a space pirate for months while your family is being held hostage or something. Some of the side stories are excellent, and the game rewards you well for just taking your time doing stuff. I got caught with contraband yesterday… usually I hit the grav drive and escape rather than paying the fine, but I decided I didn’t care and suddenly found myself embroiled in a shockingly compelling crime drama scene instead of the usual simple dialogue options. There’s shit like that everywhere. There’s an entire cyberpunk mini city half-hidden beneath the main city that you can just not find for dozens of hours, and when you finally get taken there it’s really cool to realize it was under your feet the whole time. And these aren’t even significant spoilers, there’s more that I could tell you that would wreck the surprise for you.
Basically, go in expecting a game like morrowind/Skyrim/oblivion, where it’s all about a huge breadth of interestint content (and yeah a fair bit of mediocre content because there’s so much of it all) rather than any specific thing being the best in the genre, and you won’t have to keep your expectations low.
I’m not sure how you can argue that. Starfield does have some of mass effect’s fun, but also I can build my own ship, dogfight a group of mercs in it, play house with the parts, disable and board a pirate ship in zero g… mass effect, in turn, has a much tighter story and gameplay loop. The core similarity is, what, that they have a space looter-shooter component?
They’re different games. Starfield is kind of a fusion of mass effect and no man’s sky, there are plenty of similarities between the three but also a lot of differences.
This was more or less the take from a (german) podcast, where they talked about their Starfield impressions.
Unfortunately my PC can’t run the game and I have to find a excuse to finally upgrade some parts to play it, so my impressions only come from other people either playing or talking about it. I will 100% play, because it is right up my ally and there a certainly many cool things to do and stuff to explore.
But for some reason I didn’t quite turned out to be THE game to play, if you know what I mean?
I don’t understand where they promised space sim. I think people are getting confused with what was promised and what was hoped for.
Probably because it was compared with Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen a lot. I saw a lot of talk about it in those communities. And the YouTubers who cover those games posted a lot of videos about Starfield too. So at least from that perspective, I can understand why folks would. I certainly thought there was going to be some element of space sim in it.
NMS is one of my most played games with over 500hours. What experience does it offer better than Starfield? Outside of seamless planet travel, NMS is a lot less compared to Starfield. Everything is proc gen, the variety is pretty low.
Your first 100 hours in No Man’s Sky will be packed to the brim with discovery, holy shit, random thing, stuff you didn’t even know existed, three or four ships you didn’t even know you could get, giant space cruisers, black holes on an almost never repeating dispense to your face.
Generative Aliens and planets aside, NMS is full of surprises.
True, but once I went through my first black hole, I came out somewhere in the middle of the great unknown, and I thought ok, now what? Do I just go back and diddle around in my own area, or what is this endless vast space even for? I kind of had an existential crisis making me wonder why I was doing anything in the game at all, why did anything I do matter? Never felt that one on a game before, haven’t gone back yet because I’m not sure what to do.
That is pretty much what my first hundred hours of starfield have been like as well, though, except Starfield has some story, and fewer of the systems seem to contradict each other.
Mostly I don’t think it’s fair to either game to compare them. They’re trying to do different things for different audiences on different budgets and different timescales.
Jokes on you guys… I expected dogshit from Bethesda. So a half baked space skyrim is actually more than I expected. 22 hrs in and I’m enjoying it. Solid 7/10 if you weren’t over hyped
I have a backlog full of 7/10 that are left untouched in my library. I’m not paying 70€ for 7/10 that i have to manage expectations. In fact, i’d rather buy outer wilds for a second time.
I expected better from the hype, but early reviews made it clear it was just another Bethesda game and I adjusted my expectations accordingly. I’d say 7 or 8/10 depending on how much you like Bethesda’s style.
It’s honestly 8.5 for me but I didn’t want to get ripped to shreds for saying I’m a fan of Bethesdas half assed rpgs
I’d also give it an 8 or so and I haven’t liked anything they’ve done since Morrowind. I think the internet hate-train has its fangs in this one now, and it’ll be a while before a lot of folks can give it an unbiased chance.
The modders are working feverish to get it up to speed at least. So many QoL mods are being pushed out it’s hard to keep up. It might be a slow process for Bethesda, but I don’t think it’ll take that long for the game to reach some better standard of quality.
It’s just a shame it’s down to modders to do what Bethesda couldn’t.
I hate typing this ugh… in bethesda’s defense they’ve already started releasing key patches and announced further changes based on feedback. Here in the NMS forum I’d say people should be more sympathetic to that than usual. I don’t have a lot of faith, because of who it is, but then… I knew what I was paying for, and I think most other people did too.
That was also the case with Cities Skylines and Paradox. They never fixed the one-lane-only bug, or the one where hospitals kill patients sending ambulances to a home on the other side of the city that’s up a steep hill 6 map tiles away, having to go through downtown intersections that cycle 2 ambulances per green.
Can confirm, I bought No Man’s Sky the day of the Starfield launch. I’m a patient gamer, I don’t pre-order, I don’t play anything on launch, I don’t buy microtransactions, I don’t buy season -passes. It’s the most healthy and fun my relationship with video games has ever been. I haven’t payed full price for a game in years. Somehow publishers keep throwing free games at me, I now have way more entertainment that I could enjoy for the rest of my life.
It’s a hell of a lot more polished now. I enjoyed it quite a bit for the 40 or so hours I played. I will probably be back at some point considering they have added a ton of content since I stopped playing. They should probably just work on a DLC at this point. I appreciate the hell out of them for making the game a lot deeper than what was initially promised but I also want to see them make some money for doing so.