REPOST
Starfield is in the top 3 Bethesda games for me. I know, I’m weird, let’s not discuss it further. And even though I love the game, I can acknowledge that it has a pretty negative reputation. Some of it is deserved, a lot of it is also - i feel - is being hit by the online discourse, which isn’t exclusive to Starfield at all.
I think it doesn’t make financial sense to develop Starfield further. People don’t seem as interested, modding is mostly via paid mods, this sub is all ship screenshots. The interest isn’t there. Only time when people want to talk about Starfield is when they want, for umpteenth time, to express how disappointed they are.
This radio silence right now is, i feel, good indication. Bethesda sees it’s not worth it loud and clear. They might release one more half-assed DLC, and then I feel they’ll bow out. A shame, I would’ve liked to see this game prosper, but it just doesn’t seem to be in the stars.
permalink by Helios_Exousia
It’s such a shame. I like it too. When I play it, I can see a great game hidden behind a couple poor focus decisions. I honestly think the majority of Star Field’s issues are solvable, even post-launch.
Bethesda’s greatest sin with Starfield was thinking that modders were going to somehow create a game from the glorified tech demo they released. The bones were there. They made a bunch of stuff procedurally generated; fine. I’m not all that bothered by that. You’d think with so much being randomly generated, they’d be able to spend their time creating interesting things to generate. As it stands right now, you land on one of four types of planets, go to one of six POIs, and fight one four enemy types. It’s clear they thought it would be super easy for everyone to create new enemy factions, buildings, loot. But they don’t understand that people dont invest their free time developing content for a game that sucks. I had fun with it, but a game that lives and dies on “finding cool stuff” theres an appalling lack of “stuff”.
They also put little effort into this strategy (if this even was their strategy). Weeks until mods kit was released. No tutorials on how to make easy POIs so less technical creative people could start adding stories etc. Going for the attitude of “we barely thought about mod support for skyrim and it worked out”.
This game had a lot of promise, but the hype could never be lived up to and on top of that they chose to use it as an experiment with the procgen stuff.
I think they have some good bones to work with going forward, seeing as it was Fallout 4 in Space, but they need a team to flesh out and then write a mountain of lore to go with it in the future. Elder Scrolls and Fallout tend to have excellent game lore that comes with their IP, something Bethesda at least in part inherited from the original creators of those games. Not realizing a lot of that is what makes their games special really hurt Starfield.
Other things that I didn’t like was they were too busy saying can we do this, instead of should, when it comes to the procgen systems. It was too ambitious for their first time out especially when their other games have well fleshed out worlds, yes I know Skyrim caves were similarish, but they weren’t the exact same thing every single time. Then to top it off, barely anything came from the Unity, they basically wanted you to play this game 10 times in a row to get all the achievements, which I did, but it ruined my want to play it again for a long time. Then you have the space aspect, sounded super cool, then it wasn’t, go to location, load screen, enter ship, load screen, go to space, load screen, map, find world you want, load screen, maybe have a battle, open map, choose planet, choose landing location, load screen… it was very repetitive and not always in a fun way.
In future games I think it would be way better if they focused on a core group of systems, IMO 5-6 would be best, if they want to actually keep most planets empty, which they claim was on purpose, then pump it up to about 10. Set a cool story in that area, then in Starfield 3, do another 5-6 new ones but only keep 2-3 from the game before. IMO, that would give them more longevity in the series and allow them time to build that lore and flesh out some stories. Think Elder Scrolls and how most games focus on a different region of the Tamriel.
Obviously this is just like my opinion, but man Starfield has a good idea with an overly ambitious and ultimately poor execution.
there will be at least one more dlc this year
It was pretty cool the first few times through the Unity.
But it just doesn’t have the variation it should. I know asking for 10 wildly different game world states is a big ask. But they could have gotten 3 or 4 if they hadn’t made the game universe so massive. Maybe 10 systems instead of 100.
All in all I think Starfield would have made a better novel than game.
And the dlc while visually impressive was narratively disappointing. I was expecting more answers about the Starborn and the people who built the Temples. That’s what I wanted anyway.
Honestly, the entire Unity system felt… wrong. Your character spends a lot of time making friends and can potentially get married and then just decides to throw all that away? Doesn’t make sense to me. If you know the plot ahead and are willing to metagame you can set it up so that your love interest dies and you have motivation to “set things right” and go through the Unity once, but the endless NG+ cycles the game wants you to do can’t really be justified in character.
The fumbled big time with support for mods. You’d have a hard time making enough content for just the main game, no way you’d have the resources for more content in the multiple universes.
There should have been a mod framework from the beginning, and a developer tutorial for how to add mods into the multiple universes and Bethesda guidelines on how to make your mod match the Unity system. So characters and faces can change every Unity at a minimum.
And settler system was also a failure. Can’t have a living outpost if people can’t just show up Fallout 4 style.
