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Anon is disillusioned about Starfield
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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I mean, I wouldn't put Starfield in the same family as Diablo IV, with most of the game behind a microtransaction wall. Bethesda promised Skyrim in Space. We got Skyrim in Space. Skyrim is a polarizing game (much like Witcher 3 is, often for opposite people/reasons).
I don't think Starfield is "not so bad", I'm having the best gaming experience I've had in a year or two. I think all the critiques are valid, but I don't really care about most of them.
So why should I play a game I don't enjoy to punish the makers of the game I do enjoy? I have a very limited amount of gaming time. It gets the game I'm having the most fun with.
I feel like I'm in some sort of fugue state with everyone comparing this to Skyrim. In what way is this like Skyrim? Skyrim, for all its flaws, at least had hand crafted worlds with interesting things to see and do in them. From what I've seen of Starfield, that has been completely replaced by procedurally generated barren worlds. Like yeah, you can 'explore' them, but for what? What is there even to find?
Virtually 100% of main and faction story arcs are hand-generated content. I would go further and say Starfield used more distinct model-sets than Skyrim did.
For context, Skyrim's map was ALSO procedurally generated, but most (or all) of the content was built on top of it by hand. We have comparable amount of manually generated content in Starfield, and then tons of procedural content allowing for a larger overall world.
Starfield is approximately 100,000x larger than Skyrim. So yeah, a lot of it is going to be procedurally generated. But you follow a general path, and everything along that path is NOT.
So... no fugue there. Both have similar amounts of handmade content, but Skyrim has a lot of filler content, and that filler content is largely barrel worlds, something that works because planets tend to be barren.
Granny Valentine's singing in orbit Mrs. Kurtz school field trip Space pilgrims
Just a few random orbital encounters that I've found. Planet side there are plenty of structures to explore but no real reason to do it; the random loot system ensures you're as likely to find something exploring on your own as you are fulfilling a bounty contract. There is no special reward or motivation to exploring vs finding these structures via a mission.
What part of Diablo 4 is behind a microtransaction wall? Some skins?
The problem with both games is they disrespect the player's time by turning everything into a slog.
That's way more of an issue with modern game design trying to maximize hours played while minimizing actual content than paid skins. Those may suck, but to be fair it was Bethesda who introduced the damn thing in the first place. I'd rather pretend the premium skins don't exist but have a fun game than have no microtransactions and a boring 150+ hours of empty world with a total of 35 hours of interesting beats.
I think it's "Most of the skins".
I can't speak for Diablo 4 on this, but that's not Starfield. Just like other Bethesda games, Starfield clearly gives feedback when you're leaving major storylines and running procedural content. Radiant Quests have mixed reception, but the number of radiant quests you actually need to complete any Bethesda game is in the single-digits.
If you stick to main-story and faction-mainline quests, you touch virtually nothing that wasn't hand-crafted for your pleasure. No slog. No grind. No nothing. And I find it pretty easy to differentiate between the handcrafted side-quests and the procedural side-quests. If you don't, just ignore the more obscure-seeming side quests anyway.
Is this a personal self-discipline problem of yours? A game with 35 hours of great content is worth the price of a game like Starfield, and you can just NOT go out and play the "150+ hours of empty world" if you don't like it. While I haven't beaten Starfield yet (I like procedural content and spend a lot of time in it), that mainline content isn't gated behind doing procedural stuff. That stuff was added on top of the content you directly pay for.
For me, I love going system to system finding ships to pirate. I haven't really gotten into planetary exploration yet. Maybe I won't enjoy that as much, or maybe I will. If I don't enjoy it, I just won't do it and it won't detract from the game.
Really? 35 hours of great content?
Exactly what parts of Starfield struck you as great?
I'll agree that around the 30 hours mark of my playthrough I was thinking the game felt big and expensive and was excited to spend more time in that universe.
But it wasn't long after that even the faction quests ended up just so repetitive in scope and even level design that I was over it.
The number of loading screens just to go from point A to B for a fetch quest is probably the worst of any open world game...ever.
It's like they finally had SSD tech so they just decided to throw any concern over loading out the window in game design.
The story is mediocre, the voice acting is meh, the gameplay loops are extremely repetitive.
The thing you like is the one thing I also enjoyed of ship combat with boarding enemy ships. That was done well, outside of the fact you can't physically go outside your ship.
And "you can play 35 hours without hating it" as the barometer of whether a game is satisfactory sells yourself and your time short. You as a consumer deserve more, and making excuses for outdated and poor game design doesn't do yourself any favors. Legitimate complaints about games getting their fair amount of attention leads to better games, as happened with games like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk. The only way Bethesda's game devs are going to get the appropriate resources from management to focus on making a game that doesn't waste your time with repetition on the next one is if there're enough complaints about the repetition in this one that management is concerned about repeating bad press which might impact sales.
You do yourself and the devs disservice minimizing or dismissing complaints and only do the execs a favor.
That's great if you don't feel that way. I'm guessing that as you put more hours in the title you'll feel different, but hope that's not the case and your enthusiasm remains. But for many players that were quite excited for the game, it ended up being rather disappointing.
I dunno why you're getting downvoted, cause you're completely right. The microtransaction hell in Diablo is all for shit like horse armor. The game plays exactly the same whether or not you've spent an extra dime. With that being said, it is 100% bullshit to have any extra transactions, micro or not, in a $90 game.
He's getting downvoted because despite everything you said, the valid complaints about Diablo 4 are not similar to complaints about Starfield.
It's not the "Diablo 4 microtransactions for skins is OK" (which I disagree with) that got him downvoted, it's "both games disrespect the player's time".
Why can't we have both and the people who want to play each type of game enjoy what they like.
I personally haven't found SF or D4 to be a slog. D4 remained fun for me though the story and clearing the map which took me up to lv60 and then I put it down to pick up again later, SF is a long game but I haven't felt like I've had to grind or repeat content to keep up, everything I've done is a bespoke quest and that's given me enough experience and cash to level up what I want and buy a top level ship, etc
If you don't like long games you may well find those games a slog but then you have games like the new Assassin Creed focused at people who want shorter games.
We can. But they're different. I have a problem with microtransaction-driven games, even if it's skins. I won't fault you if you like D4, but D4 is the first (second if you count the mobile shit) Diablo game that I haven't put 100 hours into, or even played. The complaint about microtransactions is valid and objective however, and there have been criticisms on cosmetic-microtransactions for almost a decade now. It's not a feature by any stretch of the imagination, and nobody who plays the game seriously prefers "$25 armor set" to "customizable armor set"
Nobody "has to enjoy" Starfield. But the topic of the hour is whether Starfield was overhyped or (imo) whether Starfield is a valid target for the kind of criticism that came up when BG3 came out and other game studies complained it was too well-polished.
There are objective complaints and subjective ones. I don't care about the subjective ones. You don't want base-builders, so be it. You don't want procedural quests, whatever. Sometimes I play games with a playtime of 30 minutes because I don't want a long game. But Starfield was not misleadingly advertised or a bug-riddled mess. We got Skyrim in Space, and that's what we were promised.
That's a breath of fresh air. I'd appreciate that even if I didn't want to play Skyrim in Space. If someone comes out with a game and says "It's just like Witcher 3", I'll thank them and never touch it. I won't fault the game for being like another popular game I happen to hate.
I only brought up D4 here because people are saying Starfield is "just like D4"
Oh maybe those who didn't like it far whatever reason accept that things are subjective and their experience is not universal. Plenty of people have enjoyed this game and found things to like even if it's not perfect. You don't like it, that's also a valid point of view, but you can't dictate to other people that they also shouldn't enjoy it.
Because a lot of gamers don't feel fooled. They expected a Bethesda game and got a Bethesda game for all the good and ill that entails.
You're entitled to dislike the game, but complaining that it's not something else is silly. It's like the people who complain about a lack of easy mode in Dark Souls. Sometimes a game isn't for you and it's ok to move on and play something else, but trying to convince other people they're wrong for enjoying it is a fools errand.
That's also all we were promised. No false advertising here. Bethesda knows what Bethesda fans want, and they make the game Bethesda fans want. It's literally the only gaming experience left where I don't feel like I have to over-research and pirate-demo to figure out if I should buy a game.
Huh? Starfield is the best RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind, because it's an actual RPG. It has the best quest design since Oblivion, with almost none of the quests boiling down to "Go there, kill guys", but actually needing to talk to people, pay attention to the environment, interact with the world and make choices (and your Background, Traits, Skills and faction membership all add new ways for you to go about a quest.) The weapon design is an incredible improvement over Fallout 4. Almost everything in Starfield is either a massive step up or a return to form compared to their previous work and you don't actually know what you're talking about.
And that's not even to mention things like the ship building system, which is genuinely extremely impressive.
We must be playing different games. Every storyline quest I've done has been:
It's nothing but, "Go there, kill guys," as you call it. Everything is a fetch quest with faceless mooks between me and whatever fifth turn I need to take to get to the end of the corridors in the space dungeon.
And comparing the game to Morrowind is laughable. Morrowind was an amazing feat of world building based on actual player choice. Starfield is a bunch of boxes to tick to see the next space cliche.
Half the damn quests don't even require me to leave the city they started in. Maybe you just had bad luck picking all of the quests that are like that and none of the others and I had the opposite. Or maybe you did 3 quests and are talking out of your ass. I don't know, I wasn't there when you played the game. I mean, did you even do anything other than main story? Join a faction, do sidequests, anything? Because I could point you to half a dozen quests just in early game New Atlantis that are entirely reliant on dialogue, choices etc. without any killing and that do not give you a mandatory companion. Like, do the UC Security quests, investigate the brownouts in the well, talk to the preacher guy, the art guy in Jemison Mercantile, the collector guys in Terrabrew, the bartender at Viewport, the scientist by the tree. The game will literally put half of these quests in the quest log from ambient dialogue, and the other half you get from just engaging with the world and talking to NPCs in the first city you visit. It's not like these are incredibly hidden quests you have to go out of your way to find. Hell, when you go to Akila the game just plops a hostage negotiation right in your face. I mean, come on, you're either being wilfully disingenuous or you played that game blind as a bat.
And if you don't believe me and don't want to bother playing the game yourself again, just look at the playthrough of somebody like Many A True Nerd. He did a lot of the quests I just mentioned.
To me this reads like you havent done the Ryujin plotline which has a lot of stealth involved, and the UC/Crimson Fleet one that has some detective work/stealth
Yeah, that happens when you just skip dialogue
I haven't skipped any dialogue and I agree with them completely.
So tell your mandatory companion to "wait here" when you plan to Stealth Archer. Or give her a chameleon suit. Ironically, the "stealth archer" meme is the most valid critique of Bethesda games, and you're complaining because it isn't working well for you.
what I find more wild is as usual the toxic gaming community can't handle opinions. I like the game, I don't care if others don't, but acting like I don't have "standards" cause you don't like it is rediculous. Likewise, I got bored so fast of baulders gate 3 but apparently it's the second coming of christ and I must be wrong. No, I get why people love it, it just wasn't my jam. Starfield is