I just don’t understand what people were expecting. I expected Skyrim in Space and got that. Expecting a true space sim on top of that? That’s an entirely different ask. I’ve got E:D and NMS if I want to spend hours hopping from one system to the next and deal with space physics. But if I want a story, Starfield is delivering for me.
I think a lot of people that are extremely critical of it weren’t going to buy it anyway and just want to enjoy banding together to shit on it in camaraderie because it’s popular to hate it.
There’s also this sort of awkward dynamic that Bethesda has created with its player base where the extensive amount and kinds of mods their games end up with means people view every small facet of the game that they don’t love as something that they want to change and modify, where a different game that’s bolted down and doesn’t have guaranteed mod support would just never have those little bits talked about at all, and the players would just talk about what they like instead.
If you look at comments about Starfield even from players that enjoy it, you notice that most of the time nobody says anything about what they think it’s doing right, aside from a “and it’s still a good Bethesda RPG”, while also having a small list of things they don’t like or want to change. Just knowing that changing these things is possible makes people fixate on wanting them gone or different.
Over all… I love it.
But it absolutely does need at least one mod. That inventory mod linked a few days ago, for example. That mod is a godsend.
I’d also like to see some sort of automated bulk-selling for outposts… or at least, bulk vendors and the ability to link to landing platforms/warehousing in cities (or some cities.)
And one that lets you create presets for ship power settings.
Hopefully it doesn’t seem like I’m saying the mods aren’t a good thing or that the game is perfectly fine without them, I just believe it creates this strange mindset for players.
I even do this, as I play Bethesda games I make these little mental notes of small mechanics and things as I play and then go look for mods to change them, sometimes even saving and stopping right then to go look, whereas in normal games I’d probably just be like “huh, that’s just okay” or “I don’t care for that much”, but just move on.
I am 30 hours in and can’t begin to imagine what I would ever want an outpost for. It isn’t like resources are expensive.
I wish for a mod that makes it easy to find stuff in space - like do you think i can remember the planet where I have ytterbium marked when I need it? Or even find a named planet without clicking and zooming on every star. Kind of ridiculous it’s not there really.
I actually feel like there’s WAY too much emptiness in Starfield and for its scale, there are very few different types of places to visit.
Bethesda needed to scale down quite a bit to make more meaningful places to visit because as it stands, there’s very little to find through organic exploration.
Article in question: https://www.pcgamesn.com/starfield/death-videogames
It says below that hyperbolic headline: “Starfield is a sweeping, exploration-filled RPG from Bethesda, true to the Skyrim and Fallout model, but there’s nowhere else to go with this kind of videogame.”
Of course there is, the writer of this suffers from extreme lack of imagination. What I wanted in Starfield was a galaxy like Elite Dangerous, management and building like X4 Foundations, and the RPG gameplay and storytelling of Bethesda. Instead we got an attractive space part that really is all smoke and mirrors, but the gameplay is still lots of fun despite not being a good space sim.
You dropped a hyphen. I wondēr where it fell.
The hyperbole is strong with this publication.
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