Agreed, at first I wasn't excited about it but as the quests opened up I was in. I'm on the "new game+" right now and seeing what else I can mess up lol.

My quests tend to end in a lot of shooting innocents... I don't know why that keeps happening. It can't be anything I'm doing...

Same. I've got thousands of hours in Skyrim. It's my favourite game of all time. But I'm more into sci fi than fantasy generally and Starfield is shaping up to be everything I would've asked for. It's taken over my life and I have no regrets. Bethesda smashed it again.

I didn't expect the game to be the best thing since sliced bread. I expected it to be a Bethesda game in space. That's exactly what I got and I've enjoyed every minute of it.

Once I changed my mindset to "this map of the solar system is really just like a flat plane in Fallout New Vegas, except with extra steps" then I was able to enjoy it more. I think games like No Mans Sky spoiled people in terms of an engaging space travel mechanic, even though Bethesda was honest from the beginning about there not being transitions into/out of planet atmospheres.

The opening story about joining Constellation was pretty weak though.

A lot of folks just got hyped up because hype and didn't understand that this was a Bethesda game and was always going to be a Bethesda game.

Anyone who understood it was a Bethesda game, seems quite happy with the product.

I'm over 100 hours into it and have enjoyed every minute. I had to use mods though to make some aspects manageable tho. Like the UI and some bat files to increase merchants money. Little personal tweaks. Well.. A lot of personal tweaks lol

It's been out longer and has improved over time. I'd wait until Starfield has been out for about the same length of time, see if things even out or continue to trend down.

What needs improvement in Starfield, though, isn't likely to actually be improved. Can't even think of a time where a game's story was re-written over time to be better.

My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don't do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.

They haven't done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they've added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they're adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building... the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.

The problem for me is, it's not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you're free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.

I believe it amplifies some of the worst aspects of their games. If I think back to what I liked about Oblivion, it was a world that felt lived in. Objects had purpose, characters had homes, content was discovered. It relied a lot on procedural content, but it felt like there was a strong level of cohesion between the procedural elements and mechanics. The disparate aspects of the game fed into one another. With Starfield, you get this huge increase in scope, but each individual part feels kind of empty and boring and clunky and slow.

Here's a contrasting example:

In Oblivion, imagine if you wanted to steal something from a vendor. You have to wait for night, you have to pick the lock, items have actual value, you have to stealth in case they catch you, you know if they can see you, there are other things to do in the city in the meantime, and during all this you might find something unexpected along the way that completely tangents you off into a different direction. All these elements come together to create interesting player stories, and none if it needs to be tied to any guided narrative.

In Starfield, all of these elements fall apart. The scope of the game means you're constantly fast travelling from location to location. No single location has too much going on, and half the time what is there is sending you back out to space anyway, so you never really feel much connection to any physical place. The relative value of items is totally skewed because of the scale of ship related expenses compared to anything else, so what's the value of stealing a cool rock? It's also very difficult to tell relative weapon/item quality at a glance. I know that a steel sword is better than an iron sword; I have no clue why a Reflective Terrablazer is better than a Targeted Blurgun - and the default weapons usually don't matter anyway because I would much rather have cool modifiers. The stealth and lockpick mechanics are both behind skill tree unlocks, so you're far less likely to engage with those mechanics in the first place. The shops are all open 24/7 (I think? honestly don't even know) so the day/night cycle seems irrelevant, so sneaking in to the shop is a no go, and I feel pretty limited in lockpicks and don't really know where to reliably buy than a few at a time. And you never, ever, find anything surprising or compelling, and if you did it would be reduced to a quest checkbox.

So to summarize: I don't know who I'm stealing from, I don't know why I would care to steal anything, it's not obvious how stealthy anyway I am unless I skill into it, it's not worth using my lockpicks, I'll never be caught, and their door is always open. There's zero motivation to actually engage with the world in a way that makes it feel alive. But it's critical to note: all those systems are still there! You can do all this stuff in the game! But because of how things are structured, even though the game on a fundamental level is extremely similar, the way you interact with it is totally removed from the kind of emergent fun that makes exploring those worlds so fun. It's just a smooth path of monotony to the next thing. The systems often amount to less than the sum of their parts.

Now I'll admit, some of this could be on me. Maybe I've changed. It's possible. But man, I tried. Hey, what's that cool cave on this planet? I'll go check it out! Oh uhh, it's nothing? There's... a dead crab and a box with some old glue? Okay I guess?

I did actually enjoy starfield (it wasn't amazing or anything, but I don't regret my purchase), but I have to say, I hate this argument.

For one thing, being a Bethesda game doesn't just immediately grant a pass for being bad in all the ways Bethesda games are generally always bad (bugs, bad facial animations, outdated mechanics, etc). Each game should be judged for how good of a game it is, not how good a " Bethesda game" it is.

Secondly, and more importantly, the fact is that this time around is especially bad simply because all the typical "Bethesda" issues are just starting to become more and more egregious as time goes on. The fact is that if you handed me this game and told me that it was a heavily modded copy of FO4 I'd 100% believe you. Nothing in this game really shows a meaningful step forward either in tech or gameplay from what we've seen before. The only real "new" thing is ship to ship combat, which is frankly very lackluster.

As for what people expected? Better. That's pretty much the long and the short of it. They expected it to feel less clunky than FO4, they expected space travel mechanics that weren't just glorified fast travel menus, and new gameplay that doesn't just feel like the same shit Bethesda has been doing since Morrowind.

That being said, the worldbuilding is phenomenal, as is typical of Bethesda, and at least for me, that's where most of the fun came in, just wandering around and doing side quests to explore more of the world. But once you've more or less explored the world, there's not much left to draw you in. The gameplay itself certainly hasn't been fun enough to make me seriously consider a newgame+ any time soon.

Their biggest, most consistent fault isn't bugs orjank, it's the stale as fuck writing. They desperately need the hand the reigns to some new talent in that area.

It feels like they've been incapable of writing a compelling narrative with interesting characters for decades now.

I don't think it's a bad game at all. But the Bethesda formula is definitely showing its age and the muted tone and presentation of Starfield, compared to Elder Scrolls and Fallout, accentuates this. I have like a dozen other games vying for my attention and a huge backlog of other titles, and I've been struggling to find motivation to play Starfield as a result. If I'd paid CDN$90 for the privilege I'd probably feel more strongly about it either way.

It doesn't have the same impact from the world design or story telling. It's generic. It's boring. It's bland. The game play is exactly the same, but the motivation to give a shit about anything is gone because nothing about the world is very interesting aside from the aesthetics.

Shit, man, even the books in the game are just excerpts from real books. Like... humans haven't written anything new in the 200 something years since Earth's exodus? Cmon.

Skyrim was one of my favorite games for several years.

I tried watching my husband play Starfield but I kept zoning out, using my phone, or getting up to do something else. I'd rather do laundry. Starfield is boring A.F to watch, and I have zero interest in playing it

I bought after it released.

So far I've seen a lot of Bethesda typical bugs, but nothing game breaking yet.

Yes the first few hours of a play through are a slog, after it opens up more it becomes much more enjoyable. A live another life type mod would make me immensely happy.

That being said, Bethesda does a good job of making a platform for modding, and thats the KEY thing that keeps me buying, and playing again and again, Bethesda games.

For that reason ESO just never had the magic to me, I understand a lot of mods found for single player games would be highly unbalanced and its not an option for an MMO. That said, without mods Bethesda games are lackluster and I quickly lost interest despite trying to enjoy it a few times. I like MMOs too, don't get me wrong, I'm not someone who only plays shooters being introduced to an MMO.

I'm excited to see what the modding community can do once the tools are released in 2024.

What? The developer whose UI has been consistently shite from game to game, only for mods to come to the rescue, has released yet another obnoxious UI? Whose games are pretty much universally "great with mods", is meh right out the gate? Colour me shocked!

Funny, that's the exact mission that made me lose interest in the game as well. >!I hopped on that day for the base building and eventually ship building but I guess I had a stolen item on me and triggered the mission. I don't want to be forced to do this mission or pay the fine when all I wanted to do was play a different portion of the game that was available to me.!<

I play on medium settings. Some scenes look borderline photorealistic. Other scene and lighting combinations looks worse than 2005 Battlefront 2.

I've been playing on minimum graphics, and it looks much better than any previous Bethesda game. The performance isn't too great, and the TAA is a bit blurry, but it's tolerable.

I’ll need to double check if it looks like this outside of conversations, but I certainly feel like I’ve been playing a much better looking game than this.

Looks to me like this was cranked to low. About as honest as using a Mortal Kombat 1 screenshot from the Switch, but I guess it’s their fault for allowing people to lower their graphics like this.

New Vegas uses Bethesda's Fallout 3 engine, but it was made by Obsidian. It's not the most representative of what Bethesda does (well, except the part where it's very buggy, I guess. That part mostly comes with the engine).