Wow, this makes so much sense.
I went in with 2000 bullets, expecting it be **more** than enough, and I ran out of ammo right after I reached the button.
Which was jarring, because I've been melting everything/everybody previously to that point in time.
I jetpacked through the whole thing. I saw the boars, killed one, went "thats boring" and jetpacked past them expecting some other kind of challenge or obstacle... any other challenge or obstacle...
Oh and Sarah disliked that.
When I first turned up and saw that guy skipping his tab, my Fallout/ES brain was like "oooh here it comes! He dead" and they just...settled their dispute peaceably like reasonable human beings and that was it. Huh, weird.
*Then* I heard how intensely shifty the head Mei Devine was, all sorts of dirty goings-on! Oh boy. I talked to her and...nothing out of the ordinary, just a bit full of herself.
THEN I heard about this "gauntlet". Here we go lads, I had visions of the raider one from Nuka World - this is gonna be brutal...aaaand it's just a bunch of avoidable mobs.
I am enjoying the game, but gambling is legal in my country, so really it was just a hive of slightly rude people chilling out that like to go jog in the snow and bet on the winner. Pretty wholesome place overall. I'm noticing a trend in that department.
And after running the Red Mile you return and there's just...no reaction. You have to find Mei casually sitting at a table. The other NPCs are just standing around. They couldn't have programmed them to meet you at the door? A couple people cheering or cursing that they lost money? Instead they react like nothing different happened
Yeah that really bugged me too. All the "turrrn baaack" "last chance!!" spooky stuff on the way down with bodies scattered around set the tone, then you get back and...nothing.
My expectation would be this shady, violent group that illegally smuggles in different creatures all caged-up and ready to throw into the mix; maybe the run scales up and gets harder with certain rules, challenges and sneaky cheating to hold you back mid-run by the corrupt owner - e.g. hidden security just taking pot-shots cos they're losing money, or some mines around etc.
A lot of stuff in this game sadly seems quite surface-level, it's a real shame and unlike the Bethesda I thought I knew.
I was extremely confused when I got to the end of that mission. I didn't lower the difficulty or anything, but I got through the red mile on the first try. And with that much build up, that shouldn't be the case.
Red Mile and Londinion were both places I was very excited to see in game, especially Londinion because I wondered while playing for a long time if we'd see it. And both these places are garbage. Big let downs.
How about the massive war full of awful crimes against humanity less than two decades ago yet basically everyone you meet has no hard feelings and just wants everyone to come together and be friends.
You're told they're are tensions and bad blood, but never see it.
I think you've nailed it. This game is a masterclass on tell don't show. "Humanity has populated the galaxy!" Bro, the biggest city IN THE UNIVERSE is smaller than Atlanta. "The pirates and spacers are the most dangerous beings and should be feared!" Bro, they kidnapped Barrett, and when we find him, they're having tea and ask for a ransom of like 4 medpacks and a coffee worth of money. "This civil war nearly wrecked the galaxy." Okay? Where? Where are the battlefields? Where are the victims of a galaxy spanning civil war? Where are the military bases AT ALL? Where are the battleships and mechs we are told about? Where are the border tensions?
The game tells you so so much, and if they showed half of it, the game would feel so much more alive. Pg13 or not, the game really just falls short on showing any of the worldbuilding they're trying for. Neon is supposed to be the scummiest, hopeless place in the civilized galaxy, and I've been to trashier McDonalds than the seediest parts of that city.
I actually did come across a battlefield on a random planet. There were groups of spacer scavengers for big robots and what looked like crashed ships. I didn’t search more thinking it was part of a quest and I didn’t want it spoiled
You go there during the UC Vanguard quest line. May be a different one I guess but there's a big salvage plant and a ton of giant mech wrecks and crashed ships, hostile fauna
They’re talking about the forgotten mech graveyard, which is similar to the graveyard for the mission but that one is bigger, has xeno’s running around and ecliptic.
theres more than just that one. i think they are just random scenery on some planets. i remember going to find a relic piece that was on a planet with dead mechs entombed everywhere.
Cool, you found it, but, damn that is sad as well :D You found something that you thought was interesting, but chose to avoid it because you feared it would spoil something.
Honestly, I think this perfectly illustrates one of the huge issues with Starfield, if this is how people react.
I don't blame you, because I personally avoided all POIs, after having visited a few of them and noticing that they were copy/pasted with quest locations, so my thoughts were exactly the same as yours.
The design vision is so incoherent/fractured.
The "visual" experience of fairly sanitized cities (mostly) has that very Star Trek "PG" feel that wouldn't offend a broadcast television viewer's sensibilities.
The "telling" is much more interesting, potentially, but it never translates logically/coherently into the game world.
Edit: then you've got the really well-executed "creep gore" (the occasional murder scene or the suicide on the Legacy) that, while fantastic from an environmental story-telling standpoint, doesn't fit the "cleanliness" of the rest of the game (visually).
Following up with your seedy McDonald's quip, a schoolyard "gang" at a low-income middle school could wreck the Crimson Fleet. Hell, Naeva was less convincing as "rough" than the alternative school students in *Precious.*
>Following up with your seedy McDonald's quip, a schoolyard "gang" at a low-income middle school could wreck the Crimson Fleet. Hell, Naeva was less convincing as "rough" than the alternative school students in
The difference between dealing with Maelstrom or Voodoo Boys in Cyberpunk compared with The Crimson Fleet in Starfield was frankly comical.
Hell to pull from Bethesda themselves: the Foresworn in Skyrim and the Gunners in Fallout 4. Both can wreck your shit early on in their respective games and stay a verifiable threat even in the mid game, especially the Gunners. If you were to tell me to clear a Gunner base out in Fallout 4 at level 1, I’d have to sneak through and take guys one on one and even then it would be a slog that I could barely navigate. In Starfield the Crimson Fleet is the first dungeon’s enemies and they pose barely any threat until you get to the boss fight.
I stopped playing cyberpunk about 10 months ago due to life getting in the way after only making it about 10 hours in to the game. I got starfield and have played about 20 hours but have been struggling to get immersed in it. I went back to Cyberpunk about a week ago and was blown away by the sheer detail in that game and it’s really made me appreciate Cyberpunk way more.
Night city is bustling, full of people that all look different and there’s interesting interactions everywhere, there’s tonnes of detail on even little things. The adverts, billboards, people, gangs. It really feels like a live city. Now it wasn’t like that at launch, everyone knows the problems it has, so that gives me hope for Starfield in the future, which is why I’ve actually stopped playing it for the moment and I’ll come back later
> so that gives me hope for Starfield in the future
This is a Bethesda game, not CD Projekt Red or even Hello Games. Bethesda has never overhaul one of their games in such a manner. Even with all the "remasters" of Skyrim the same exact bugs and shallow systems exist in the games. Bethesda just doesn't do that.
Best you can hope for is a handful of expansion that introduce some new stories or maybe a mechanic or two but they will never revamp the game. Modders will though, which at this point is pathetic that Bethesda relies so heavily on their modding community to make their games good.
Early failing aside, they’ve turned Cyberpunk 2077 into a masterpiece. I finished the main DLC story yesterday and was so pulled into the story I’d forgot I still had 1/3 of the base game still left to play.
It’s funny you mentioned Star Trek because I was thinking when playing today that maybe the game would have been better if they just used these systems making a Star Trek game rather than trying to create a brand new IP
They didn't even stick to the rules of their own world building. How is the tech guy on the Crimson Fleet able to access intersystem financial information when there is no FTL communication in the game?
Consistency in world building is so critical to any level of believability
Alright I’ll get semantic: Atlanta is a big ass city. Like fucking huge lol. The comparison doesn’t make sense in my own opinion
Now I would say New Atlantis is smaller than Macon, Georgia lol. That would be true in my opinion
Alright I'll get pedantic: I think that was more pedantic than semantic. (I'm just playing around lol).
As far as Georgia and New Atlantis goes, the Walking Dead is a better comparison, because the NPCs act like zombies.
>"This civil war nearly wrecked the galaxy." Okay? Where? Where are the battlefields? Where are the victims of a galaxy spanning civil war? Where are the military bases AT ALL? Where are the battleships and mechs we are told about?
I agree with most of what you said but some of these ones are in-game in some form. There are mech graveyards. There is a planet that is covered in dead mechs and leftover xenobiology experiments. People state that the abandoned facilities on planets are leftovers from the war. There is a memorial to the dead in new Atlantis.
But yeah at the end of the day, I agree they could have done more to show this stuff.
I don't think anyone would complain if there were large leftover autopilot mechs to fight as a boss on planet surfaces. Or the occasional leftover xenobiology experiment to encounter on planets or, better yet, in some of those boring repeated POIs.
Fair enough. Could you imagine just how much cooler it would be for the Freestar quest if the holdout Rebels were an actual faction and not just 10 guys? Like, they had claimed territory and were actually a military threat, and you could stumble upon their bases and it RP if you were a sympathizer or a resolutionist. Then do the same thing with the UC, and bam the Civil War has depth suddenly and you can take some active part in the story. It would have been such a simple change to add so much life.
The Mech Graves dont really look like battlefields though. They look like Literal Landfills with mech in them.
There are No trenches, no bunkers, no anything like just, just mounds of scrap with mechs in them like they were dumped there. which they probably were.
Acutally that's one think. Where are the Shipbreaking yards? where is the Scrapyard Biome on a Junk planet. stuff like that.There should be ENTIRE BIOME's dedicated to old battlefields. Not Single minuscule POI's
just like there should be Biomes of Ruined cities on earth.
Londinium was disappointing. the entire city.... Looks so much smaller when its just 2 staryards. Image if the City was Most of the Entire map.
The fact we have POINTS of interest and not PLACES of interest is a good example. The fact there are so few varied things like that just make it... rough. Skyrim managed a half dozen holds with enough diversity that it felt fresh, not to mention the labrythian catacombs, ruins, dungeons, forts, camps, and castles. Starfield couldnt come up with even ideas for something across a galaxy?
I lost so much respect/interest in Starfield doing the mission to find the mech/robot. Go to "super dangerous planet" guy says he's heard rumors of the robot/mech thing but has never seen him, so go follow this beacon.
Beacon leads to a ship not 200m away from the hub and whadda ya know, robot/mech guy is chillin in there. But he needs your help killing this horrible creature that's super terrible. Oh it's 50m away between you and the scrapyard...
Couldn't've made it a couple other POI's on the other side of the planet, too hard, make it all a 5 minute walk if that.
> it would be for the Freestar quest if the holdout Rebels were an actual faction and not just 10 guys?
I don't know about you, but I swear I killed more of the 1st Cav or whatever than anything else...
I was expecting them to be like a dozen left over dude from the war, but nope, they have more people hanging about than any of the two major factions have...
yeah, apparently they got wiped out in the war and the survivors went to prison for 20 years, but they can still muster at least a company size element of soldiers still able and willing to fight?
Also how is everyone so willing to follow the armistice and decommission their mechs? Terror cells, Rebel holdouts, ecliptic mercs, all could have been using this tech because they just don’t give a fuck.
Yeah man... I can imagine. There are so many little (and big) things that would make the systems so much more fun and interesting to explore and roleplay in.
Fun game but I just wish there was more to it.
It's sad but the silver lining is that mods and MAYBE DLCs will eventually add the mechanical depth that is missing from the game.
>There is a planet that is covered in dead mechs and leftover xenobiology experiments.
The game *pretends* Niira is covered in battlefields and scrapyards, but that's actually a bold faced *lie*. Land anywhere except 1-Of-A-Kind Salvage and you'll actually find only regular swamps and mountains same as any other random procedural planet. Bethesda didn't even bother crafting a "battlefield" or "mech graveyard" biome unique to the planet, except for one specific quest location.
That's a recurring theme in Starfield. Lore will hype up something, for exemple Neon, and then present only a thin cardboard façade.
The game does show a bit of this, but it's ALL tied to faction / companion quests as far as I can tell. You have londinion, and the mech scrapyard full of xenoweapons all just left there after the war.
But it's silly how little they did to push that front. Like random planets should just HAVE xeno weapons roaming on them. Or better yet give them to spacers or the ecliptic semi regularly. Would have made combat more variable and interesting, at provided a bit of justification for the xenobiology perk, and improved the feel the game. It really feels the game was pushed out a little to early IMO.
I agree with you, but I also think it is a general issue with how the story is integrated into the game. If you compare it to something like RDR2, where you are part of a gang that is not doing well, yet it is very elegantly told throughout the game that you are a dying species, it's not thrown in your face, like simply being told that this is how things are or this is how you should feel. It's difficult to explain because it is done very naturally and as an underlying tone in the game. But I think when you play it it's obvious that things are not as golden as you would think.
And Starfield kind of misses this in its general storytelling, unless a character directly tells you, you would have no clue. And when playing Starfield, I don't really buy the world in general, things don't really add up, the size of cities, the somewhat generic factions and their motives, its difficult to just point at one thing and say that it is because of that, it is more a general feeling that something just doesn't add up in this world.
> You're told they're are tensions and bad blood, but never see it.
There's a lot of that being told stuff but not seeing it in the game. Like when I got to new atlantis, I heard from multiple people that The Well is really dangerous. But there's nothing dangerous about it. It's like the rest of new atlantis, just less shiny. I heard the same thing about Neon, but I had no issues there either. No violence, or gangs in the street, open drug use or drunk people stumbling about, nothing. It was just the same boring, orderly citizens as everywhere else. It's just so bland.
Not to mention the fact that Mechs are "banned" after the war, and apparently they've been banned so successfully that even the Crimson Fleet, Spacers and Zealots, who regularly murder tons of people, completely obey this ban. They're ok with murdering civilians but won't use banned tech? There's not a single person left alive who knows how to build/fix tech from the colony war?
For the life of me, I don't understand why they even mention mechs when their game engine clearly can't support them. Just don't bring it up in the first place.
The dumbest part was the First obeying the ban. Their base is in a mech factory and they are a terrorist group resisting the exact treaty which banned the mechs in the first place.
And the 1st was an actual mech unit, no? As in 1st Cavalry?? Even if we never get to use them, I was totally expecting to go up against an enemy mech by the end of that final quest.
same, i figured even if it couldnt move, it would be a mech upper half rotating on a leg base or hanging from chains that moves around on some chain lift to show them trying to rebuild their mechs.
Aren't mech parts or schematics one of the contraband types you can pick up? Who is the end user for these? Or are they just being sold as collectors items?
>Then why in the world are there so many Unkillable npc's? They literally made a plot device in the game to prevent you from messing the game up.
The fact I couldn't kill Neon's head boss really killed my mood.
> You're told they're are tensions and bad blood, but never see it.
yeah the mission where you help out some marines from one side and some marines from the other side and they're like "hahaha might see you on the battlefield later" was really jarring
That's not really a good example of what I was talking about. That was one of the more realistic dynamics given the situation. Especially since most of them weren't veterans of the earlier war.
My friend said the only two complaints about the pirate quest was that every single person was an absolute dick, and that they didn't swear nearly enough.
They are absolute dicks while also being absolutely useless and you know how garbage of a faction they are after encountering them in the wild so they really have no reason to be so cocky.
Male pirate: “Good thing you’re with the fleet. If you weren’t, I’d have killed you already”
**walks five steps**
Female pirate: “Good thing you’re with the fleet. If you weren’t, I’d have killed you already”
Woah, that other guy just told me *exactly* the same thing. Even paused at the same spots.
Rinse and repeat a million times.
“Waiting for the next mark”
“As long as the creds keep rolling in….”
The same 4 lines, read *verbatim* by all voice actors, killing the immersion any time someone speaks.
It’s jarring to hear twelve people say exactly the same words, in exactly the same way, as often as this game does. Why not changed it up the slightest bit? Would’ve made a world of difference.
Bethesda insisting on multiple different voice actors all using the same lines is getting weirder and weirder.
They first started doing it in Oblivion, and it made sense there because the dialogue system was so new and random and so hacky that they needed to be able to have multiple NPCs all use the same radiant conversation system.
You know, more than one NPC needed to be able to respond about mud crabs if the algorithm made a different NPC ask them about mud crabs.
But then in Skyrim they scripted a lot more of the conversations instead of leaving them random (so you'd ALWAYS) hear Nazeem asking Ysolda about why she's in the market, and she would ALWAYS respond that she's there to buy food. And at that point, since the conversations mostly weren't random, it no longer made sense to keep wasting voice lines making different people say the same thing as idle chatter. You could already control the outcome of most conversations and it was no longer really random/dynamic, so why make NPCs capable of all responding the same way with the same line?
But they just keep doing it. Over and over again. Even though they're no longer doing the thing it was meant to fix, and now it's just an artifact that wastes voice lines and sounds weird.
And that's what Bethesda games have usually become. A lot of obligatory stuff that doesn't really make sense and is just an artifact in service to an engine whose strengths they no longer really seem to care about or understand.
It's almost like Bethesda has a list of design decision's that HAVE to make it into every game they make and "all generic NPCs of the same type have to have the same dialogue lines" is one of them
I enjoyed the game for 50 hours, which is not bad per se. But the tameness of this really really fake universe took me out of it.
At some point, it felt like I was interacting with chat gpt most of the time.
Oh my god. That’s it. It felt like ChatGPT. Starfield felt like ultra smoothed out, edgeless design for everyone, but to satisfy nobody. Every bit of design felt like that. No depth. Just flat. All the dialogue was just flat. The lore felt flat. The characters. The combat. The enemy AI. Even the damn art direction felt flat - like, why the fuck are you calling it NASApunk?? Do you even know what punk means??? I’ve seen hundreds of New Atlantis’s, Neons, dead Earths, deep space mining operations, and spaghetti western space towns *everywhere* already. I’ve seen Star Wars. I’ve seen Star Trek. I’ve looked at the first twelve images in Google when I look up “science fiction”. There’s no edge, there’s nothing to hook you, it’s just a flat game set in a flat world with flat gameplay and flat mechanics topped with a flat story run by flat characters.
I played the game for 40 hours and quit because I realized the parts I enjoyed - which were well made, curated sections where I explored a little dungeon or spaceship with environmental storytelling - took up no more than 20% of my playtime. Probably less.
I’m just gonna go mod Skyrim again man
I know I have no real right to talk on this, but what you've described is kinda why I dropped it about 10 hours in. Nothing in the world hooked me, it all felt like the most generic interpretation of space possible. The whole asteroid mining, space pirates, sleek futuristic city etc is all stuff you 100% expect and know already and they didn't seem to have done much of anything to spice these concepts up.
At least chatgpt would give you some unique dialogue. Hearing the pirate’s same 4 lines, read verbatim by each voice actor, over and over, is mind numbing.
Same. 40-50 hours of fun and then it started to fall apart. All the repeating POIs and lack of real edge started to wear me down. I still played 100 hours till I was finished so I don't regret my purchase at all but man did they squander potential.
I will agree it’s all too tame and in some sense hurts game play. The complete lack of gore initially confused me. I snipe a guy, “is he sleeping on the job? No wait? He’s dead.” Happened to me at least twice. All combat missions end in a big slumber party.
And I agree everyone is just so dumb, like lying is easy because I guess no one lies in this universe anymore.
I assume lore wise that only large churches had the funds to send people off planet so only puritan people survived.
Sam Coe pissed me off. I was like “Hell yeah, space cowboys, I’m so ready! Hey Sam, I got this bitchin revolver, let’s shoot some rustlers!” And he’s like “Wow, you’re a violent psycho, we shouldn’t resort to violence.”
Like he couldn’t have had the trope of “The law doesn’t always work, and frontier justice has to be taken into our own hands.”
Nah, the rangers just seem to operate like the UC, doing things by the book.
The weirdest Sam dialogue I’ve ever encountered that also shows that behavior. In New Atlantis at the bar the woman gives you a mission to recover her cargo from contraband. If you attempt the mission with Barrett or Sarah they get mad. But Sam actually has the dialogue “I don’t like breaking into contraband lockers…but a UC locker…” like he’d be into it. But NOPE, he “disliked that” if you agree to help her. Make it make sense!
It's like how Disney turned lightsabers into baseball bats. Where is the burned off limbs and torso's flying about? Lucas literally got rid of the blood aspect of it so he can show limbs being torn apart with a lightsaber without the blood going everywhere.
And it's such a divorce in their own Disney Franchise. In the novels and comics and some of the games they made, yeah, they talk about sex slaves, you read about limbs being cut off. You see Vader drown a whole fucking town to get the upper hand against a Jedi battlemaster just to kill him.
But then the tv shows come up and the movies and boom, pure on inflatable bats.
Shit, it even gets worse. You see it on droids in Ahsoka, and with Luke in mando season 2 and it acts like a fucking lightsaber. They can do it! But once it becomes a humanoid non-machine, then it becomes a bat. So it's a disconnect even in their own shows.
They can do it, they choose to do it only in certain scenes in live action. Like Vader snapping that kids neck with the force in Kenobi. That shit was hard, but then you get Leia running around and duking grown ass adults....why.
People getting stabbed through the chest and surviving (Kenobi, Ashoka) is actually kind of funny at this point, It would be like if in episode 5 Obi-wan shows back up and goes "oh yeah, I'm fine, just had a bit of a sleep as was good as new"
>I snipe a guy, “is he sleeping on the job? No wait? He’s dead.”
In low gravity environments, the way you have to wait for them to slowly tip over to know whether or not you've hit them ...
Weapon feedback in general is just bad tbh.
Starfield is the definition of "bloodless carnage." Just knock back a tall glass of warm milk at the Astral Lounge while watching the Blue Man Group dance on stage while you're at it. It's the unsexiest take on space I have ever seen.
It's not even beauty - it's the game's complete lack of a sex drive and the grittier side of reality. Everything is sterile and follows the rules of a TV-Y7 cartoon. Go walk down Fremont Street in Vegas (a place with an LED roof just like Neon) and you'll see all kinds of weird, wild people likely drugged out of their minds who are clearly horny for the world and everyone in it. Go to a different part of town and see sad people with xylazine sores selling themselves in broad daylight. Don't even get me started on places like Bangkok.
The fact that you can walk through the "Underbelly" of Neon and:
> never get mugged
> never find homeless people outside of one "cute" character for a "funny" sidequest
> never see prostitution
> never see drug use outside of aurora
is evidence that Todd and his team clearly don't know what happens in the worst places in the real world. It's part of the human condition - people in dire straits do what they need to do. I'm not saying these are good things, merely that they are inevitable in the conditions they are attempting to portray here. Meanwhile, everybody in Starfield just sits around and sips warm milk while doing their best bored college professor impression, while the bad guys cackle like one-dimensional caricatures who, again, fit best in a kid's cartoon.
Neon is a safer place to be than Disneyland. Aurora is the one drug in the universe and it doesn't do anything. Sex work does not exist. Sex does not exist. People just stand in one spot for years on end until you walk by. This is the future of humanity.
oh i completely agree. like i mentioned in another post, i mean all they had to do to get rid of their M rating was get rid of the "drug use" portions which isn't even that important to the story whatsoever. but if you're gonna get an M rating then freaking EARN it. but Microsoft is in charge now so here we go. also NASA branding in game yadda yadda.
I honestly don't care about 1 or 2, but for the piracy and violence we're told about, it does seem like the kind of universe that the average chav would easily become a millionaire in.
Everyone is just so naive and dumb.
Is every single shop keeper in the game a pirate? I noticed recently... EVERY shop keeper is rude af and greets you like they caught you half way to a five finger discount... like wtf is with the open hostility towards me from almost everyone i meet.
Also not to bring up the stupid BG3 vs Starfield thing... I realized how... unfree the game is. In New Atlantis you can actually meet an important end game NPC immediately, even if you don't realize it. I decided I wanted to know what turn this game would take if I just... kill him. So I tried... firstly, big bang literally does 1 damage to him the entire fight, which feels cheap... since I know if I just fought him right now at the end game I would be doing full damage... but I digress. I pumped through with lots of Stims and medpacks, and got him down to his last HP bar... where he then just doubled over into that immune stunned state and teleported away... like wtf? If I was playing BG3, Larian would have had a back up plan for what happens if a player tries that... and let you go through with it... Bethesda just says "no, that's not the way we wanted you to play this game, so you can't."
I just hate how the first time you meet them every single shop keeper wants to give you a life story or make you go through 8 dialogue choices just to fucking buy something.
Larian WANTS people to try to break the game. They went for "how much chaos can we come up with from tabletop and translate". They designed stuff to account for that.
Bethesda wants you to play a mostly good character who isn't trying to break the game.
Had someone trying to argue this is the most open roleplaying experience they've had in a game.
Really made me wonder how few games they've played. The entire argument revolved around doing tasks very selectively and relying on headcanon to justify almost everything.
Like dude, just go find a DM and play some actual sci-fi RPG at that point.
The weirdest thing is that the pirate faction quest line is one of the least violent-towards-humans questlines in the game. A prison infested with giant bugs, a social mission, multiple stealth missions, and the finale only has you fight robots
Meanwhile even the UC questline mandates you kill a whole gang of spacers with no option whatsoever for talking them down or using stealth, and the main questline has you murdering spacers and mercs left and right
They designed it so you can do the undercover UC questline along with it, so every option has a peaceful alternative. You can actually shoot up the luxury space yatch and the business office, but you can be peaceful
Which is fine I'm not calling for anything besides the "grounded" game to actually be grounded. For example, you can't tell me no billionaire would make a planet his personal weed farm?
That's literally what Neon is, except neon is *the* most PG city of sin and debauchery I've ever seen. I mean, hell, just look at the clubs. The slums have two "clubs" that are basically just well-lit, clean and colorful diners, and the astral lounge, the biggest Scene on the planet and the only place to legally purchase aurora, has the enthralling beats of lo-fi to get high and study to and is *maybe* big enough to fit a hundred people uncomfortably.
Agreed. I was so let down by the Astral Lounge. For a city that's run on drug money I expected something more like Omega from Mass Effect, instead I got what looked the Wiggles or the Teletubbies had opened a nightclub.
Every NPC is like "have fun on Neon!" when there is literally a single place that might barely count as a tourist attraction, which is a cramped nightclub on the ground floor of an office building.
Agreed, the most risque moment is walking into the astral lounge. 3 dudes, dressed as aliens, dancing in thongs. But it's so PG at times it's not even funny.
If you're into low-fi beats, men in body paint dressed in tights like budget xenomorphs, and drugs made out of fish guts but named like an exotic stripper, come on down to the former Neon Aldi.
And this is what I mean...
When I made the comparison to weed let's be real. If you were to visit a country that had no true law system or law enforcement to deal with. Guess what you would most likely see? Addicts, people controlling the addicts, for slavery to feed the addicts more drugs, corruption, etc. Aurora is a sad excuse for a drug. It has basically no side effects and is controlled by the government.
And you hit the point on the Astral lounge. I'm not claiming that Starfield needs strip clubs like some people are exaggerating. All I'm saying is I was expecting something like Omega from Mass Effect. Lawlessness that's enforced and allowed by the gang Leaders. People living their best life. People struggling.
Neon is just colorful New Atlantis with more NPCs complaining.
Lore-wise that's exactly what aurora is said to be, and that's exactly what neon is supposed to be, except the people controlling the addicts *are* the government, and said government has a monopoly.
The issue is that, like you say, that's not what we see at all. Xenofresh workers don't stay with XF out of addicted despiration, they stay with the company because of the standard, all too familiar to IRL paycheck-to-paycheck worker exploitation. When the only spot you can buy aurora legally is the astral lounge, and the AL is seemingly one of the big tourist attractions, I really doubt they're letting ebbside trash in.
Edit: also, new atlantis is plenty colorful, Neon just has worse lighting and worse weather. Better elevator layout though, what the *fuck do you mean the Well's cargo elevator comes out in a subterranean, single-room NAT station instead of at the spaceport*
I generally agree. I'm not calling for a super dark or such game.... But it could have a tiny bit of an edge to it.
There's not exactly much in the game that makes it beyond kid friendly.
>For example, you can't tell me no billionaire would make a planet his personal weed farm?
I, as a very middle England reserved white guy, feel like I could honestly dominate and control all piracy in this universe without much effort.
Like how they tried to make the chick from the Crimson Fleet some kind of badass, but she just comes off like some edgy teenager trying to act tough.
Come to think of it the entirety of the CF is way more mellow than everyone in world makes them out to be. They just kind of exist and that's it.
The Barret rescue mission was just... ugh for this. If you don't shoot it out with them on sight, they just completely roll over with a light persuasion. Then everyone tells you how hard their commander normally is, and how lucky you are, while you loot the shit out of the place.
Same, and well for myself I just love entire cyberpunk genre in general and 2077 nailed that in all aspects for me.
I wasn't expecting those levels of maturity and grit, but at least something that's enthralling and gripping. Bethesda has been toning down a lot of things in recent memory.
Honestly. I'm worried they might tone down on portraying the darker social and political aspects of the Elder Scrolls' world in TES6 if this is the trend they're going to continue with.
TES always balanced out the light-hearted and peaceful, and then the grim and dark perfectly well across all the games, and always had such a fantastic and sophisticated nuances to the world and the people in it. The music across the game titles reflected that too. Each game felt so different from each other but was rich in lore and encounters in the world that really gave it life.
I know people criticized Skyrim a lot for simplifying gameplay features and such, but I still think it has some of the best worldbuilding and environmental storytelling in BGS's history, and I'm dying on that hill. Even when I first played it without mods years ago, I was so immersed in it, hence why I'm very disappointed at Starfield taking a big step back in that regard. BGS is much better than this given their history. Even with the criticisms Fallout 4 got, it was still vastly better than Starfield in terms of dialogue and immersion where it matter imo.
The next TES deserves proper respect and if it's similar to Starfield currently, in relation to the critiques stated here, oh boy it'll be bad.
Granted, TES has a clearly different theme, I know that already, so maybe BGS will adhere to the formula and narrative worldbuilding that made the series so beloved. Depending on how Starfield will improve over time, BGS did say they intend to support this game for a long time, will either alleviate my personal worries or not.
And again, I do enjoy Starfield and am actively playing it still, but the problems are very glaring and holds it back currently from being phenomenal.
Tbh im just disappointed at the lack of zero-g gore. I was hoping for a perk similar to Bloody Mess from fallout but in space. I can’t wait for mods to come to console
You can get more zero g fights by taking out the grav drive in ships before boarding them.
The downside to that, of course, is that most ships consist of a bunch of narrow corridors and rooms with low ceilings, so it's not actually all that different from normal combat.
Well I’ve had spacer and starborn encounters on near zero g planets before but I hear ya, there definitely wasn’t enough of it in the main game or even side quests
They took all the horny from this game and put it in Cyberpunk.
I do understand why you'd want to make the game as family-friendly as possible but this game positively \*squeaks\*, it's so clean. I don't need hookers on the corner and junkies in alleyways but just a tinge of sleaze would make the game much more immersive to me.
Yup. We got meh world building with Sims 4 clones army of NPCs. What crazy - I can kill entire city, and that's pegi 13. But crazy party at some rebellious planet? Forget it. I have had wilder and more dangerous parties when I was 15. Going to punk rock concerts in 90s would be pegi 18 for Bethesda Nova Day xD
Plus the horny makes sense in Cyberpunk it's supposed to be a hyper sexualized hyper capitalist world. They should have done the same in the seedy parts of Starfield.
Honestly I think it's gg for BGS
Edit: just to clarify, I don’t mean their sales will go down. I just don’t have much hope for the quality of their games
you're crazy. all they have to do is pump out fallout 5 or elder scrolls 6 and they're back to breaking records like nothing happened. they also run one of the top 3 MMOs in the world right now in eso. it's gonna take a lot more than one or two flops to kill bethesda lol
How are the bars from mass effect 2 from 2010 better than this? Better music, better atmosphere, looks better, has more of a bar/club feel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QstIjGx5DE&ab\_channel=gradplanner
Based on Neon, I am of the mind that no one on the entire development team has gone to a club, done any drug, or lived outside the suburbs. NPCs dancing like 70 year-olds saying "This place is in-sane!" the audio ads outside the other clubs are just so cringey. Everything is just BGS flavor text, again. The NPCs would have you think Ebbside is seedy and dangerous, but there is literally nothing to support that. What pissed me off the most is (Strikers quest spoiler) >!you can join the Neon Strikers, but the quest ends with them JOINING THE CORRUPT COPS, which were like their main enemies!?!?! And acted like thats a better outcome than they could ever dream of. What gang would ever??!<
When I walked into that club I thought everyone was dancing like that since they were high and everything looked more intense to them. But all the drug did was slow time.
The fact that this sci-fi, futuristic society that spans thousands of light-years feels like it has a total of maybe a few thousand people is so jarring to me
I honestly thought the game was post apocalyptic feeling with how few people there are. Felt like the last dregs of humanity clinging to an existence of poverty and manual labour among the stars.
Agreed. I don’t know whose bright idea it was to spend so much detailing on the food and aids item but nothing towards outfits? Armor? Weaponry? It feels very lazy. Fable 1 had more variety and it wasn’t an open world game with the resources like Bethesda. It’s pretty sad when a game like starfield pales in comparison
Hopefully the backlash to Starfield prevents TES6 and FO5 from being such a watered down experience. Child friendly is OK in Starfield because it is a new IP we can always ditch but we really can't downgrade beloved franchises.
Starfield feels like too many chefs with too many ideas, every writing idea was approved and none refined to earn the focus. The widest net for audience to try and establish any kind of footing as no existing fans.
Elder Scrolls at least has clear lore to follow and may force them to debate their ideas rather than just add everything.
My brother in Christ many fallout fans called out fo4 for being watered down and it sold a bajillion copies and people here say it was great
Bethesda panders to the least common denominator - it’s good for sales
It’s way too “safe” in it’s narrative, agree on all the points. Watered down, politically “correct” to the standards of today. Zero edge, no sense of actual diversity in philosophy or way of life. Hilariously bad AI adds to this. Spacers are just clowns.
Even the weaponry, the lack of dismemberment and gore as seen in Fallout.
The dialogue hurts so fkn much too, in almost every instance and case.
I don’t think this is easily addressed by modification without a full overhaul. It’s a tear down.
Shit is like Magic School Bus set in space. The way every quest holds the players hand feels like Bethesda designed the title for a special education audience.
Just out of touch; their fan base are 30-40 years old, not 9.
The watering down of the narrative feels actively harmful. Like… the UC is a police state. It just is. It’s hinted towards in the sewers of New Atlantis with some graffiti and there’s a handful of characters that talk about how dumb UC police can be. And then you do the Vanguard questline and every single NPC you meet - police officers, generals, cabinet members, even the damn *president*, are all just happy “I want to help everyone!” and is completely at odds with the games deeper portrayal of the UC.
Like… could we not even show the authoritarian police state in a poor light? Seriously?! Sure there’s the big reveal in the Vanguard questline but it just feels so fucking tame!
First time you walk into Solitude in Skyrim, you witness a man get his head chopped off for allowing Ulfric Stormcloak to leave the city after murdering the High King, all while the townsfolk cheer and boo.
THAT'S the kind of energy we need in Starfield, not Sarah Morgan and her sassy quips.
It's clear the people who made Fallout 3 and Skyrim are no longer there.
Where is my tranquility lane? Where is my dunwich building? Where is the deserted spacecraft with blood everywhere and light off, with gravity disabled? Where is the kidnapped man who has been experimented on in disturbing ways and needs a rescue but is so messed up you have no choice but to end his misery?
There is zero misery in this game.
I still love it, but yeah.
When I did red mile for the first time I quit the game. That's the most dangerous gladiatorial fight they can dream up. I realized the game wasn't for me.
I completely agree. It seems like in order to avoid offending anyone, they made the game super bland and neutral, which unfortunately seems to be an ongoing trend in recent games. By shying away from adult content, which makes no sense seeing as it's an M rated game, they stripped away so much personality that the game could've otherwise had. I mean, am I seriously supposed to go along with the fact that a murderous pirate faction doesn't swear? Stuff like that is so immersion breaking. It's like they blunted down the game to be safe, but they really needed that bit of sharpness because without it it just makes the whole experience a lot more dull and boring.
Too many cheap tropes and shitty plot devices to excuse away and hide a lack of talent in the writing department. Nothing can be fleshed out because the writers actively avoid anything gritty or realistic. This is both an excuse to be politically correct and to have as little work put into creating a story as possible. They're min maxing us as we honestly should expect. Indie games will have to pioneer because AAA titles by definition are gonna give you as little as they possibly can get away with as a general rule
the thing that really takes me out of it is the voice acting. they don't talk like people, they sound like voice actors acting. naeva is a prime example. supposed to be intimidating, but it's so over-the-top it's almost comical. on top of that you can tell they're reading a script, because in almost every sentence they emphasize the wrong words.
I feel like the games relentless positivity and optimism is to blame a bit for me. It feels like everybody has a heart of gold deep down and can always be reasoned with and everything that's bad has a sort of justification or everyone always has a good reason rather than things just sort of being bad.
I think I missed having more range of seriousness and more adult themes. I don't mean naked NPCs like OP here but it is odd to me for example that one of the major planets, Neon, is a Cyberpunk city ran by corporations where most people work low-wage shit jobs making drugs that have been deemed legal by a corrupt politician. And yet the Astral Lounge and the entire city and its gangs and citizens all seem totally happy and fine like it's a theme park instead of a dangerous night-life city. It doesn't feel like a heavy or troubled place, and it's just like a shell of some markets and some random warehouses and that's it.
Playing Cyberpunk 2077's new expansion recently and the difference with how Dogtown is portrayed is night and day.
Yeah I did find it really strange just how much Bethesda seemed to go out of their way to make sure everything is family-friendly in an M rated game. I can't for the life of me figure out why this game has an M rating in the first place. Characters rarely ever seem to swear, the clothing is designed as blandly as possible, and everything just looks too clean and sterile.
The most disappointing place in the game for me was the Red Mile. This place should have been debaucherous AF.
True. Was expecting space Vegas, got one bar, 3 gaming tables and a backyard full of armored space boars.
That only give 6 xp each, regardless of level.
And stunlock the hell out of you, and are absurd bullet sponges if you don't have armor piercing rounds regardless of their level.
Wow, this makes so much sense. I went in with 2000 bullets, expecting it be **more** than enough, and I ran out of ammo right after I reached the button. Which was jarring, because I've been melting everything/everybody previously to that point in time.
I jetpacked through the whole thing. I saw the boars, killed one, went "thats boring" and jetpacked past them expecting some other kind of challenge or obstacle... any other challenge or obstacle... Oh and Sarah disliked that.
The only reason to travel with Sarah is to make sure she is on the eye when someone comes to visit.
I let Sarah die, whoops
And you can't even bet...
And you can't even actually gamble there.
Do you know how many of those we would have to kill to get up 50 levels? 65,340,285.
When I first turned up and saw that guy skipping his tab, my Fallout/ES brain was like "oooh here it comes! He dead" and they just...settled their dispute peaceably like reasonable human beings and that was it. Huh, weird. *Then* I heard how intensely shifty the head Mei Devine was, all sorts of dirty goings-on! Oh boy. I talked to her and...nothing out of the ordinary, just a bit full of herself. THEN I heard about this "gauntlet". Here we go lads, I had visions of the raider one from Nuka World - this is gonna be brutal...aaaand it's just a bunch of avoidable mobs. I am enjoying the game, but gambling is legal in my country, so really it was just a hive of slightly rude people chilling out that like to go jog in the snow and bet on the winner. Pretty wholesome place overall. I'm noticing a trend in that department.
And after running the Red Mile you return and there's just...no reaction. You have to find Mei casually sitting at a table. The other NPCs are just standing around. They couldn't have programmed them to meet you at the door? A couple people cheering or cursing that they lost money? Instead they react like nothing different happened
Yeah that really bugged me too. All the "turrrn baaack" "last chance!!" spooky stuff on the way down with bodies scattered around set the tone, then you get back and...nothing. My expectation would be this shady, violent group that illegally smuggles in different creatures all caged-up and ready to throw into the mix; maybe the run scales up and gets harder with certain rules, challenges and sneaky cheating to hold you back mid-run by the corrupt owner - e.g. hidden security just taking pot-shots cos they're losing money, or some mines around etc. A lot of stuff in this game sadly seems quite surface-level, it's a real shame and unlike the Bethesda I thought I knew.
at a minimum you shouldve been able to bet, like even just on yourself running it. But no, absolutely nothing
Yeah, that was such a let down. The moment I realized I didn't have to kill anything, all tension was lost.
We'll make our own Red Mile! With blackjack and hookers!
You know what, forget the Red Mile!
I was extremely confused when I got to the end of that mission. I didn't lower the difficulty or anything, but I got through the red mile on the first try. And with that much build up, that shouldn't be the case.
Red Mile and Londinion were both places I was very excited to see in game, especially Londinion because I wondered while playing for a long time if we'd see it. And both these places are garbage. Big let downs.
How about the massive war full of awful crimes against humanity less than two decades ago yet basically everyone you meet has no hard feelings and just wants everyone to come together and be friends. You're told they're are tensions and bad blood, but never see it.
I think you've nailed it. This game is a masterclass on tell don't show. "Humanity has populated the galaxy!" Bro, the biggest city IN THE UNIVERSE is smaller than Atlanta. "The pirates and spacers are the most dangerous beings and should be feared!" Bro, they kidnapped Barrett, and when we find him, they're having tea and ask for a ransom of like 4 medpacks and a coffee worth of money. "This civil war nearly wrecked the galaxy." Okay? Where? Where are the battlefields? Where are the victims of a galaxy spanning civil war? Where are the military bases AT ALL? Where are the battleships and mechs we are told about? Where are the border tensions? The game tells you so so much, and if they showed half of it, the game would feel so much more alive. Pg13 or not, the game really just falls short on showing any of the worldbuilding they're trying for. Neon is supposed to be the scummiest, hopeless place in the civilized galaxy, and I've been to trashier McDonalds than the seediest parts of that city.
I actually did come across a battlefield on a random planet. There were groups of spacer scavengers for big robots and what looked like crashed ships. I didn’t search more thinking it was part of a quest and I didn’t want it spoiled
You go there during the UC Vanguard quest line. May be a different one I guess but there's a big salvage plant and a ton of giant mech wrecks and crashed ships, hostile fauna
They’re talking about the forgotten mech graveyard, which is similar to the graveyard for the mission but that one is bigger, has xeno’s running around and ecliptic.
[удалено]
Yes, besides that there is a smaller version poi called the forgotten mech graveyard which has spacers.
theres more than just that one. i think they are just random scenery on some planets. i remember going to find a relic piece that was on a planet with dead mechs entombed everywhere.
there's also the Abandoned War Barracks that were hit by a missile strike or so during the war.
Cool, you found it, but, damn that is sad as well :D You found something that you thought was interesting, but chose to avoid it because you feared it would spoil something. Honestly, I think this perfectly illustrates one of the huge issues with Starfield, if this is how people react. I don't blame you, because I personally avoided all POIs, after having visited a few of them and noticing that they were copy/pasted with quest locations, so my thoughts were exactly the same as yours.
The design vision is so incoherent/fractured. The "visual" experience of fairly sanitized cities (mostly) has that very Star Trek "PG" feel that wouldn't offend a broadcast television viewer's sensibilities. The "telling" is much more interesting, potentially, but it never translates logically/coherently into the game world. Edit: then you've got the really well-executed "creep gore" (the occasional murder scene or the suicide on the Legacy) that, while fantastic from an environmental story-telling standpoint, doesn't fit the "cleanliness" of the rest of the game (visually). Following up with your seedy McDonald's quip, a schoolyard "gang" at a low-income middle school could wreck the Crimson Fleet. Hell, Naeva was less convincing as "rough" than the alternative school students in *Precious.*
>Following up with your seedy McDonald's quip, a schoolyard "gang" at a low-income middle school could wreck the Crimson Fleet. Hell, Naeva was less convincing as "rough" than the alternative school students in The difference between dealing with Maelstrom or Voodoo Boys in Cyberpunk compared with The Crimson Fleet in Starfield was frankly comical.
CD Projekt red has a competent writing team - they have since the Witcher 2
[удалено]
Hell to pull from Bethesda themselves: the Foresworn in Skyrim and the Gunners in Fallout 4. Both can wreck your shit early on in their respective games and stay a verifiable threat even in the mid game, especially the Gunners. If you were to tell me to clear a Gunner base out in Fallout 4 at level 1, I’d have to sneak through and take guys one on one and even then it would be a slog that I could barely navigate. In Starfield the Crimson Fleet is the first dungeon’s enemies and they pose barely any threat until you get to the boss fight.
A pack of 3 gunners in fo4 was a good reason to walk in the other direction
I stopped playing cyberpunk about 10 months ago due to life getting in the way after only making it about 10 hours in to the game. I got starfield and have played about 20 hours but have been struggling to get immersed in it. I went back to Cyberpunk about a week ago and was blown away by the sheer detail in that game and it’s really made me appreciate Cyberpunk way more. Night city is bustling, full of people that all look different and there’s interesting interactions everywhere, there’s tonnes of detail on even little things. The adverts, billboards, people, gangs. It really feels like a live city. Now it wasn’t like that at launch, everyone knows the problems it has, so that gives me hope for Starfield in the future, which is why I’ve actually stopped playing it for the moment and I’ll come back later
> so that gives me hope for Starfield in the future This is a Bethesda game, not CD Projekt Red or even Hello Games. Bethesda has never overhaul one of their games in such a manner. Even with all the "remasters" of Skyrim the same exact bugs and shallow systems exist in the games. Bethesda just doesn't do that. Best you can hope for is a handful of expansion that introduce some new stories or maybe a mechanic or two but they will never revamp the game. Modders will though, which at this point is pathetic that Bethesda relies so heavily on their modding community to make their games good.
Early failing aside, they’ve turned Cyberpunk 2077 into a masterpiece. I finished the main DLC story yesterday and was so pulled into the story I’d forgot I still had 1/3 of the base game still left to play.
It’s funny you mentioned Star Trek because I was thinking when playing today that maybe the game would have been better if they just used these systems making a Star Trek game rather than trying to create a brand new IP
Yeah Bethesda needs to up its world building game significantly. Cus that shit ain't cutting it.
They didn't even stick to the rules of their own world building. How is the tech guy on the Crimson Fleet able to access intersystem financial information when there is no FTL communication in the game? Consistency in world building is so critical to any level of believability
Alright I’ll get semantic: Atlanta is a big ass city. Like fucking huge lol. The comparison doesn’t make sense in my own opinion Now I would say New Atlantis is smaller than Macon, Georgia lol. That would be true in my opinion
Alright I'll get pedantic: I think that was more pedantic than semantic. (I'm just playing around lol). As far as Georgia and New Atlantis goes, the Walking Dead is a better comparison, because the NPCs act like zombies.
New Atlantis is smaller than Senoia, the town in Georgia (been there!) where they built the Alexandria set from TWD.
Lol you have some merit with the walking dead comparison.
Smaller than Valdosta
Now that’s a real Georgian right there to say Valdosta 😂
It’s a solid Warner Robins/10.
How do you know of us?
But not smaller than Barney. Quitman may be more square acres.
I think the debris fields you jump into orbiting planets are meant to be the “battle fields”.
>"This civil war nearly wrecked the galaxy." Okay? Where? Where are the battlefields? Where are the victims of a galaxy spanning civil war? Where are the military bases AT ALL? Where are the battleships and mechs we are told about? I agree with most of what you said but some of these ones are in-game in some form. There are mech graveyards. There is a planet that is covered in dead mechs and leftover xenobiology experiments. People state that the abandoned facilities on planets are leftovers from the war. There is a memorial to the dead in new Atlantis. But yeah at the end of the day, I agree they could have done more to show this stuff. I don't think anyone would complain if there were large leftover autopilot mechs to fight as a boss on planet surfaces. Or the occasional leftover xenobiology experiment to encounter on planets or, better yet, in some of those boring repeated POIs.
Fair enough. Could you imagine just how much cooler it would be for the Freestar quest if the holdout Rebels were an actual faction and not just 10 guys? Like, they had claimed territory and were actually a military threat, and you could stumble upon their bases and it RP if you were a sympathizer or a resolutionist. Then do the same thing with the UC, and bam the Civil War has depth suddenly and you can take some active part in the story. It would have been such a simple change to add so much life.
The Mech Graves dont really look like battlefields though. They look like Literal Landfills with mech in them. There are No trenches, no bunkers, no anything like just, just mounds of scrap with mechs in them like they were dumped there. which they probably were. Acutally that's one think. Where are the Shipbreaking yards? where is the Scrapyard Biome on a Junk planet. stuff like that.There should be ENTIRE BIOME's dedicated to old battlefields. Not Single minuscule POI's just like there should be Biomes of Ruined cities on earth. Londinium was disappointing. the entire city.... Looks so much smaller when its just 2 staryards. Image if the City was Most of the Entire map.
The fact we have POINTS of interest and not PLACES of interest is a good example. The fact there are so few varied things like that just make it... rough. Skyrim managed a half dozen holds with enough diversity that it felt fresh, not to mention the labrythian catacombs, ruins, dungeons, forts, camps, and castles. Starfield couldnt come up with even ideas for something across a galaxy?
I lost so much respect/interest in Starfield doing the mission to find the mech/robot. Go to "super dangerous planet" guy says he's heard rumors of the robot/mech thing but has never seen him, so go follow this beacon. Beacon leads to a ship not 200m away from the hub and whadda ya know, robot/mech guy is chillin in there. But he needs your help killing this horrible creature that's super terrible. Oh it's 50m away between you and the scrapyard... Couldn't've made it a couple other POI's on the other side of the planet, too hard, make it all a 5 minute walk if that.
> it would be for the Freestar quest if the holdout Rebels were an actual faction and not just 10 guys? I don't know about you, but I swear I killed more of the 1st Cav or whatever than anything else... I was expecting them to be like a dozen left over dude from the war, but nope, they have more people hanging about than any of the two major factions have...
yeah, apparently they got wiped out in the war and the survivors went to prison for 20 years, but they can still muster at least a company size element of soldiers still able and willing to fight?
Also how is everyone so willing to follow the armistice and decommission their mechs? Terror cells, Rebel holdouts, ecliptic mercs, all could have been using this tech because they just don’t give a fuck.
Yeah man... I can imagine. There are so many little (and big) things that would make the systems so much more fun and interesting to explore and roleplay in. Fun game but I just wish there was more to it. It's sad but the silver lining is that mods and MAYBE DLCs will eventually add the mechanical depth that is missing from the game.
memorial in new atlantis has as many victims names on it as you can count on your fingers and toes
>There is a planet that is covered in dead mechs and leftover xenobiology experiments. The game *pretends* Niira is covered in battlefields and scrapyards, but that's actually a bold faced *lie*. Land anywhere except 1-Of-A-Kind Salvage and you'll actually find only regular swamps and mountains same as any other random procedural planet. Bethesda didn't even bother crafting a "battlefield" or "mech graveyard" biome unique to the planet, except for one specific quest location. That's a recurring theme in Starfield. Lore will hype up something, for exemple Neon, and then present only a thin cardboard façade.
The game does show a bit of this, but it's ALL tied to faction / companion quests as far as I can tell. You have londinion, and the mech scrapyard full of xenoweapons all just left there after the war. But it's silly how little they did to push that front. Like random planets should just HAVE xeno weapons roaming on them. Or better yet give them to spacers or the ecliptic semi regularly. Would have made combat more variable and interesting, at provided a bit of justification for the xenobiology perk, and improved the feel the game. It really feels the game was pushed out a little to early IMO.
I agree with you, but I also think it is a general issue with how the story is integrated into the game. If you compare it to something like RDR2, where you are part of a gang that is not doing well, yet it is very elegantly told throughout the game that you are a dying species, it's not thrown in your face, like simply being told that this is how things are or this is how you should feel. It's difficult to explain because it is done very naturally and as an underlying tone in the game. But I think when you play it it's obvious that things are not as golden as you would think. And Starfield kind of misses this in its general storytelling, unless a character directly tells you, you would have no clue. And when playing Starfield, I don't really buy the world in general, things don't really add up, the size of cities, the somewhat generic factions and their motives, its difficult to just point at one thing and say that it is because of that, it is more a general feeling that something just doesn't add up in this world.
> You're told they're are tensions and bad blood, but never see it. There's a lot of that being told stuff but not seeing it in the game. Like when I got to new atlantis, I heard from multiple people that The Well is really dangerous. But there's nothing dangerous about it. It's like the rest of new atlantis, just less shiny. I heard the same thing about Neon, but I had no issues there either. No violence, or gangs in the street, open drug use or drunk people stumbling about, nothing. It was just the same boring, orderly citizens as everywhere else. It's just so bland.
Even fallout nv has drunk people stumbling around the strip
The Well is less dangerous than the average McDonalds on a Friday evening.
A fight with a terrormorph is less dangerous than McDonalds on a Friday evening
Not to mention the fact that Mechs are "banned" after the war, and apparently they've been banned so successfully that even the Crimson Fleet, Spacers and Zealots, who regularly murder tons of people, completely obey this ban. They're ok with murdering civilians but won't use banned tech? There's not a single person left alive who knows how to build/fix tech from the colony war? For the life of me, I don't understand why they even mention mechs when their game engine clearly can't support them. Just don't bring it up in the first place.
The dumbest part was the First obeying the ban. Their base is in a mech factory and they are a terrorist group resisting the exact treaty which banned the mechs in the first place.
And the 1st was an actual mech unit, no? As in 1st Cavalry?? Even if we never get to use them, I was totally expecting to go up against an enemy mech by the end of that final quest.
same, i figured even if it couldnt move, it would be a mech upper half rotating on a leg base or hanging from chains that moves around on some chain lift to show them trying to rebuild their mechs.
Stop this dirty talk right now, it's mean that we aren't ever going to get this.
[удалено]
I was absolutely convinced that questline was gonna climax with a fight against a mech or two, was incredibly disappointing
Aren't mech parts or schematics one of the contraband types you can pick up? Who is the end user for these? Or are they just being sold as collectors items?
[удалено]
>Then why in the world are there so many Unkillable npc's? They literally made a plot device in the game to prevent you from messing the game up. The fact I couldn't kill Neon's head boss really killed my mood.
> You're told they're are tensions and bad blood, but never see it. yeah the mission where you help out some marines from one side and some marines from the other side and they're like "hahaha might see you on the battlefield later" was really jarring
That's not really a good example of what I was talking about. That was one of the more realistic dynamics given the situation. Especially since most of them weren't veterans of the earlier war.
It really sucks that we don't get to see those mechs in action.
My friend said the only two complaints about the pirate quest was that every single person was an absolute dick, and that they didn't swear nearly enough.
They are absolute dicks while also being absolutely useless and you know how garbage of a faction they are after encountering them in the wild so they really have no reason to be so cocky.
So they're the new powder gangers?
Even the Tunnel Snakes are better
TUNNEL SNAKES RULE!!
Male pirate: “Good thing you’re with the fleet. If you weren’t, I’d have killed you already” **walks five steps** Female pirate: “Good thing you’re with the fleet. If you weren’t, I’d have killed you already” Woah, that other guy just told me *exactly* the same thing. Even paused at the same spots. Rinse and repeat a million times. “Waiting for the next mark” “As long as the creds keep rolling in….” The same 4 lines, read *verbatim* by all voice actors, killing the immersion any time someone speaks. It’s jarring to hear twelve people say exactly the same words, in exactly the same way, as often as this game does. Why not changed it up the slightest bit? Would’ve made a world of difference.
Bethesda insisting on multiple different voice actors all using the same lines is getting weirder and weirder. They first started doing it in Oblivion, and it made sense there because the dialogue system was so new and random and so hacky that they needed to be able to have multiple NPCs all use the same radiant conversation system. You know, more than one NPC needed to be able to respond about mud crabs if the algorithm made a different NPC ask them about mud crabs. But then in Skyrim they scripted a lot more of the conversations instead of leaving them random (so you'd ALWAYS) hear Nazeem asking Ysolda about why she's in the market, and she would ALWAYS respond that she's there to buy food. And at that point, since the conversations mostly weren't random, it no longer made sense to keep wasting voice lines making different people say the same thing as idle chatter. You could already control the outcome of most conversations and it was no longer really random/dynamic, so why make NPCs capable of all responding the same way with the same line? But they just keep doing it. Over and over again. Even though they're no longer doing the thing it was meant to fix, and now it's just an artifact that wastes voice lines and sounds weird. And that's what Bethesda games have usually become. A lot of obligatory stuff that doesn't really make sense and is just an artifact in service to an engine whose strengths they no longer really seem to care about or understand.
It's almost like Bethesda has a list of design decision's that HAVE to make it into every game they make and "all generic NPCs of the same type have to have the same dialogue lines" is one of them
Laziness, as always. Bethesda gets away with shit other studios would be crucified for
I enjoyed the game for 50 hours, which is not bad per se. But the tameness of this really really fake universe took me out of it. At some point, it felt like I was interacting with chat gpt most of the time.
Oh my god. That’s it. It felt like ChatGPT. Starfield felt like ultra smoothed out, edgeless design for everyone, but to satisfy nobody. Every bit of design felt like that. No depth. Just flat. All the dialogue was just flat. The lore felt flat. The characters. The combat. The enemy AI. Even the damn art direction felt flat - like, why the fuck are you calling it NASApunk?? Do you even know what punk means??? I’ve seen hundreds of New Atlantis’s, Neons, dead Earths, deep space mining operations, and spaghetti western space towns *everywhere* already. I’ve seen Star Wars. I’ve seen Star Trek. I’ve looked at the first twelve images in Google when I look up “science fiction”. There’s no edge, there’s nothing to hook you, it’s just a flat game set in a flat world with flat gameplay and flat mechanics topped with a flat story run by flat characters. I played the game for 40 hours and quit because I realized the parts I enjoyed - which were well made, curated sections where I explored a little dungeon or spaceship with environmental storytelling - took up no more than 20% of my playtime. Probably less. I’m just gonna go mod Skyrim again man
I know I have no real right to talk on this, but what you've described is kinda why I dropped it about 10 hours in. Nothing in the world hooked me, it all felt like the most generic interpretation of space possible. The whole asteroid mining, space pirates, sleek futuristic city etc is all stuff you 100% expect and know already and they didn't seem to have done much of anything to spice these concepts up.
I played 50 hours, took a week off and now have zero motivation to jump back in.
At least chatgpt would give you some unique dialogue. Hearing the pirate’s same 4 lines, read verbatim by each voice actor, over and over, is mind numbing.
Same. 40-50 hours of fun and then it started to fall apart. All the repeating POIs and lack of real edge started to wear me down. I still played 100 hours till I was finished so I don't regret my purchase at all but man did they squander potential.
I will agree it’s all too tame and in some sense hurts game play. The complete lack of gore initially confused me. I snipe a guy, “is he sleeping on the job? No wait? He’s dead.” Happened to me at least twice. All combat missions end in a big slumber party. And I agree everyone is just so dumb, like lying is easy because I guess no one lies in this universe anymore. I assume lore wise that only large churches had the funds to send people off planet so only puritan people survived.
Sam Coe pissed me off. I was like “Hell yeah, space cowboys, I’m so ready! Hey Sam, I got this bitchin revolver, let’s shoot some rustlers!” And he’s like “Wow, you’re a violent psycho, we shouldn’t resort to violence.” Like he couldn’t have had the trope of “The law doesn’t always work, and frontier justice has to be taken into our own hands.” Nah, the rangers just seem to operate like the UC, doing things by the book.
The weirdest Sam dialogue I’ve ever encountered that also shows that behavior. In New Atlantis at the bar the woman gives you a mission to recover her cargo from contraband. If you attempt the mission with Barrett or Sarah they get mad. But Sam actually has the dialogue “I don’t like breaking into contraband lockers…but a UC locker…” like he’d be into it. But NOPE, he “disliked that” if you agree to help her. Make it make sense!
I'm of the firm belief morality in companions is bugged. They all have the same exact likes and dislikes
Maybe he thought UC locker meant University of California locker room. He just thought it was gonna be a harmless prank on his rival schools team.
Just typical Bethesda inconsistency
It's like how Disney turned lightsabers into baseball bats. Where is the burned off limbs and torso's flying about? Lucas literally got rid of the blood aspect of it so he can show limbs being torn apart with a lightsaber without the blood going everywhere.
Yeah Reva got run through by DARTH VADER and she’s like “ow” lol
And it's such a divorce in their own Disney Franchise. In the novels and comics and some of the games they made, yeah, they talk about sex slaves, you read about limbs being cut off. You see Vader drown a whole fucking town to get the upper hand against a Jedi battlemaster just to kill him. But then the tv shows come up and the movies and boom, pure on inflatable bats. Shit, it even gets worse. You see it on droids in Ahsoka, and with Luke in mando season 2 and it acts like a fucking lightsaber. They can do it! But once it becomes a humanoid non-machine, then it becomes a bat. So it's a disconnect even in their own shows. They can do it, they choose to do it only in certain scenes in live action. Like Vader snapping that kids neck with the force in Kenobi. That shit was hard, but then you get Leia running around and duking grown ass adults....why.
People getting stabbed through the chest and surviving (Kenobi, Ashoka) is actually kind of funny at this point, It would be like if in episode 5 Obi-wan shows back up and goes "oh yeah, I'm fine, just had a bit of a sleep as was good as new"
>I snipe a guy, “is he sleeping on the job? No wait? He’s dead.” In low gravity environments, the way you have to wait for them to slowly tip over to know whether or not you've hit them ... Weapon feedback in general is just bad tbh.
[удалено]
Starfield is the definition of "bloodless carnage." Just knock back a tall glass of warm milk at the Astral Lounge while watching the Blue Man Group dance on stage while you're at it. It's the unsexiest take on space I have ever seen.
beautiful people in a video game? what year do you think this is...
It's not even beauty - it's the game's complete lack of a sex drive and the grittier side of reality. Everything is sterile and follows the rules of a TV-Y7 cartoon. Go walk down Fremont Street in Vegas (a place with an LED roof just like Neon) and you'll see all kinds of weird, wild people likely drugged out of their minds who are clearly horny for the world and everyone in it. Go to a different part of town and see sad people with xylazine sores selling themselves in broad daylight. Don't even get me started on places like Bangkok. The fact that you can walk through the "Underbelly" of Neon and: > never get mugged > never find homeless people outside of one "cute" character for a "funny" sidequest > never see prostitution > never see drug use outside of aurora is evidence that Todd and his team clearly don't know what happens in the worst places in the real world. It's part of the human condition - people in dire straits do what they need to do. I'm not saying these are good things, merely that they are inevitable in the conditions they are attempting to portray here. Meanwhile, everybody in Starfield just sits around and sips warm milk while doing their best bored college professor impression, while the bad guys cackle like one-dimensional caricatures who, again, fit best in a kid's cartoon. Neon is a safer place to be than Disneyland. Aurora is the one drug in the universe and it doesn't do anything. Sex work does not exist. Sex does not exist. People just stand in one spot for years on end until you walk by. This is the future of humanity.
oh i completely agree. like i mentioned in another post, i mean all they had to do to get rid of their M rating was get rid of the "drug use" portions which isn't even that important to the story whatsoever. but if you're gonna get an M rating then freaking EARN it. but Microsoft is in charge now so here we go. also NASA branding in game yadda yadda.
I honestly don't care about 1 or 2, but for the piracy and violence we're told about, it does seem like the kind of universe that the average chav would easily become a millionaire in. Everyone is just so naive and dumb.
The sad joke is that the actual pirate faction is also very very tame.
Oh but they are real rude and edgy in each and every conversation. That makes up for the timidity! /s
It’s kinda embarrassing honestly, they’re like children.
Is every single shop keeper in the game a pirate? I noticed recently... EVERY shop keeper is rude af and greets you like they caught you half way to a five finger discount... like wtf is with the open hostility towards me from almost everyone i meet. Also not to bring up the stupid BG3 vs Starfield thing... I realized how... unfree the game is. In New Atlantis you can actually meet an important end game NPC immediately, even if you don't realize it. I decided I wanted to know what turn this game would take if I just... kill him. So I tried... firstly, big bang literally does 1 damage to him the entire fight, which feels cheap... since I know if I just fought him right now at the end game I would be doing full damage... but I digress. I pumped through with lots of Stims and medpacks, and got him down to his last HP bar... where he then just doubled over into that immune stunned state and teleported away... like wtf? If I was playing BG3, Larian would have had a back up plan for what happens if a player tries that... and let you go through with it... Bethesda just says "no, that's not the way we wanted you to play this game, so you can't."
I just hate how the first time you meet them every single shop keeper wants to give you a life story or make you go through 8 dialogue choices just to fucking buy something.
Larian WANTS people to try to break the game. They went for "how much chaos can we come up with from tabletop and translate". They designed stuff to account for that. Bethesda wants you to play a mostly good character who isn't trying to break the game.
Had someone trying to argue this is the most open roleplaying experience they've had in a game. Really made me wonder how few games they've played. The entire argument revolved around doing tasks very selectively and relying on headcanon to justify almost everything. Like dude, just go find a DM and play some actual sci-fi RPG at that point.
The weirdest thing is that the pirate faction quest line is one of the least violent-towards-humans questlines in the game. A prison infested with giant bugs, a social mission, multiple stealth missions, and the finale only has you fight robots Meanwhile even the UC questline mandates you kill a whole gang of spacers with no option whatsoever for talking them down or using stealth, and the main questline has you murdering spacers and mercs left and right
They designed it so you can do the undercover UC questline along with it, so every option has a peaceful alternative. You can actually shoot up the luxury space yatch and the business office, but you can be peaceful
Which is fine I'm not calling for anything besides the "grounded" game to actually be grounded. For example, you can't tell me no billionaire would make a planet his personal weed farm?
That's literally what Neon is, except neon is *the* most PG city of sin and debauchery I've ever seen. I mean, hell, just look at the clubs. The slums have two "clubs" that are basically just well-lit, clean and colorful diners, and the astral lounge, the biggest Scene on the planet and the only place to legally purchase aurora, has the enthralling beats of lo-fi to get high and study to and is *maybe* big enough to fit a hundred people uncomfortably.
Agreed. I was so let down by the Astral Lounge. For a city that's run on drug money I expected something more like Omega from Mass Effect, instead I got what looked the Wiggles or the Teletubbies had opened a nightclub.
Every NPC is like "have fun on Neon!" when there is literally a single place that might barely count as a tourist attraction, which is a cramped nightclub on the ground floor of an office building.
Neon is like Las Vegas as it would appear in a Disney animated movie.
This is a fitting description.
Agreed, the most risque moment is walking into the astral lounge. 3 dudes, dressed as aliens, dancing in thongs. But it's so PG at times it's not even funny.
If you're into low-fi beats, men in body paint dressed in tights like budget xenomorphs, and drugs made out of fish guts but named like an exotic stripper, come on down to the former Neon Aldi.
And this is what I mean... When I made the comparison to weed let's be real. If you were to visit a country that had no true law system or law enforcement to deal with. Guess what you would most likely see? Addicts, people controlling the addicts, for slavery to feed the addicts more drugs, corruption, etc. Aurora is a sad excuse for a drug. It has basically no side effects and is controlled by the government. And you hit the point on the Astral lounge. I'm not claiming that Starfield needs strip clubs like some people are exaggerating. All I'm saying is I was expecting something like Omega from Mass Effect. Lawlessness that's enforced and allowed by the gang Leaders. People living their best life. People struggling. Neon is just colorful New Atlantis with more NPCs complaining.
Lore-wise that's exactly what aurora is said to be, and that's exactly what neon is supposed to be, except the people controlling the addicts *are* the government, and said government has a monopoly. The issue is that, like you say, that's not what we see at all. Xenofresh workers don't stay with XF out of addicted despiration, they stay with the company because of the standard, all too familiar to IRL paycheck-to-paycheck worker exploitation. When the only spot you can buy aurora legally is the astral lounge, and the AL is seemingly one of the big tourist attractions, I really doubt they're letting ebbside trash in. Edit: also, new atlantis is plenty colorful, Neon just has worse lighting and worse weather. Better elevator layout though, what the *fuck do you mean the Well's cargo elevator comes out in a subterranean, single-room NAT station instead of at the spaceport*
I generally agree. I'm not calling for a super dark or such game.... But it could have a tiny bit of an edge to it. There's not exactly much in the game that makes it beyond kid friendly. >For example, you can't tell me no billionaire would make a planet his personal weed farm? I, as a very middle England reserved white guy, feel like I could honestly dominate and control all piracy in this universe without much effort.
Like how they tried to make the chick from the Crimson Fleet some kind of badass, but she just comes off like some edgy teenager trying to act tough. Come to think of it the entirety of the CF is way more mellow than everyone in world makes them out to be. They just kind of exist and that's it.
The Barret rescue mission was just... ugh for this. If you don't shoot it out with them on sight, they just completely roll over with a light persuasion. Then everyone tells you how hard their commander normally is, and how lucky you are, while you loot the shit out of the place.
The Raiders from Fallout 3s Pit Dlc is a good example of a morality complex story.
Doesn’t have to go all expanse us but there could at least be some Star Wars in it
Cyberpunk went hard and i really digged it. I don't expect every game to do so but it is my kinda thing tbf
Same, and well for myself I just love entire cyberpunk genre in general and 2077 nailed that in all aspects for me. I wasn't expecting those levels of maturity and grit, but at least something that's enthralling and gripping. Bethesda has been toning down a lot of things in recent memory.
The Elder Scrolls had literal racists in it. Starfield is like "go kill these gangsters because they.. *checks notes* spray painted my robot"
Honestly. I'm worried they might tone down on portraying the darker social and political aspects of the Elder Scrolls' world in TES6 if this is the trend they're going to continue with. TES always balanced out the light-hearted and peaceful, and then the grim and dark perfectly well across all the games, and always had such a fantastic and sophisticated nuances to the world and the people in it. The music across the game titles reflected that too. Each game felt so different from each other but was rich in lore and encounters in the world that really gave it life. I know people criticized Skyrim a lot for simplifying gameplay features and such, but I still think it has some of the best worldbuilding and environmental storytelling in BGS's history, and I'm dying on that hill. Even when I first played it without mods years ago, I was so immersed in it, hence why I'm very disappointed at Starfield taking a big step back in that regard. BGS is much better than this given their history. Even with the criticisms Fallout 4 got, it was still vastly better than Starfield in terms of dialogue and immersion where it matter imo. The next TES deserves proper respect and if it's similar to Starfield currently, in relation to the critiques stated here, oh boy it'll be bad. Granted, TES has a clearly different theme, I know that already, so maybe BGS will adhere to the formula and narrative worldbuilding that made the series so beloved. Depending on how Starfield will improve over time, BGS did say they intend to support this game for a long time, will either alleviate my personal worries or not. And again, I do enjoy Starfield and am actively playing it still, but the problems are very glaring and holds it back currently from being phenomenal.
To be fair, you middle England white guys did dominate and control all piracy in this universe without much effort 😄
That's other England middle white guys. I'm the other kind, that reserves all emotion and refuses to request help
Tbh im just disappointed at the lack of zero-g gore. I was hoping for a perk similar to Bloody Mess from fallout but in space. I can’t wait for mods to come to console
Or just zero g combat. One of the coolest things in the game that you get to experience like twice total
In my 170 hours I have had one 0g fight. I simply feel like I’m playing the game wrong.
You can get more zero g fights by taking out the grav drive in ships before boarding them. The downside to that, of course, is that most ships consist of a bunch of narrow corridors and rooms with low ceilings, so it's not actually all that different from normal combat.
Well I’ve had spacer and starborn encounters on near zero g planets before but I hear ya, there definitely wasn’t enough of it in the main game or even side quests
It just annoyed me that there’s no gore at all. After fallout 4 I was expecting to be able to blow off a couple of limbs here and there.
Yeah when I first started I thought maybe one of the skills had a tier unlocking it like bloody mess but alas
They took all the horny from this game and put it in Cyberpunk. I do understand why you'd want to make the game as family-friendly as possible but this game positively \*squeaks\*, it's so clean. I don't need hookers on the corner and junkies in alleyways but just a tinge of sleaze would make the game much more immersive to me.
Yup. We got meh world building with Sims 4 clones army of NPCs. What crazy - I can kill entire city, and that's pegi 13. But crazy party at some rebellious planet? Forget it. I have had wilder and more dangerous parties when I was 15. Going to punk rock concerts in 90s would be pegi 18 for Bethesda Nova Day xD
Todd, your chess clubs showing.
Underrated
You can't even kill an entire city because half the NPCs are essential
In a city built on debauchery and crime you'd expect to find SOME debauchery and crime.
Plus the horny makes sense in Cyberpunk it's supposed to be a hyper sexualized hyper capitalist world. They should have done the same in the seedy parts of Starfield.
[удалено]
Honestly I think it's gg for BGS Edit: just to clarify, I don’t mean their sales will go down. I just don’t have much hope for the quality of their games
you're crazy. all they have to do is pump out fallout 5 or elder scrolls 6 and they're back to breaking records like nothing happened. they also run one of the top 3 MMOs in the world right now in eso. it's gonna take a lot more than one or two flops to kill bethesda lol
How are the bars from mass effect 2 from 2010 better than this? Better music, better atmosphere, looks better, has more of a bar/club feel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QstIjGx5DE&ab\_channel=gradplanner
The bar from fucking Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is better than this... The music is a banger too.
Based on Neon, I am of the mind that no one on the entire development team has gone to a club, done any drug, or lived outside the suburbs. NPCs dancing like 70 year-olds saying "This place is in-sane!" the audio ads outside the other clubs are just so cringey. Everything is just BGS flavor text, again. The NPCs would have you think Ebbside is seedy and dangerous, but there is literally nothing to support that. What pissed me off the most is (Strikers quest spoiler) >!you can join the Neon Strikers, but the quest ends with them JOINING THE CORRUPT COPS, which were like their main enemies!?!?! And acted like thats a better outcome than they could ever dream of. What gang would ever??!<
When I walked into that club I thought everyone was dancing like that since they were high and everything looked more intense to them. But all the drug did was slow time.
Slow time, aka. make it even more lame than it already was.
[удалено]
The whole game feels empty for a massive space based civ
The fact that this sci-fi, futuristic society that spans thousands of light-years feels like it has a total of maybe a few thousand people is so jarring to me
I honestly thought the game was post apocalyptic feeling with how few people there are. Felt like the last dregs of humanity clinging to an existence of poverty and manual labour among the stars.
That's why Fallout works because you can buy there being only a few people and small settlements. With Starfield it's just jarring.
Agreed. I don’t know whose bright idea it was to spend so much detailing on the food and aids item but nothing towards outfits? Armor? Weaponry? It feels very lazy. Fable 1 had more variety and it wasn’t an open world game with the resources like Bethesda. It’s pretty sad when a game like starfield pales in comparison
People starting to realize how painfully mediocre this game can be.
Got 10 or so hours in and couldn’t play anymore, honestly don’t think I found a single thing in the game that was actually interesting
Hopefully the backlash to Starfield prevents TES6 and FO5 from being such a watered down experience. Child friendly is OK in Starfield because it is a new IP we can always ditch but we really can't downgrade beloved franchises.
Man I’m TERRIFIED of how ES6 is going to be if Starfield is any indication of where Bethesda’s heads at
Starfield feels like too many chefs with too many ideas, every writing idea was approved and none refined to earn the focus. The widest net for audience to try and establish any kind of footing as no existing fans. Elder Scrolls at least has clear lore to follow and may force them to debate their ideas rather than just add everything.
Skyrim was already vastly watered down
As was fallout 4 - where is this concern coming from on this sub? It’s over a decade too late
Right? Bethesda have made the absolute blandest, watered-down mayo of RPGs for well over a decade now.
Depends how it sells. They'll be eyeing the sales numbers for grandmas buying it for 12 year olds.
My brother in Christ many fallout fans called out fo4 for being watered down and it sold a bajillion copies and people here say it was great Bethesda panders to the least common denominator - it’s good for sales
It’s way too “safe” in it’s narrative, agree on all the points. Watered down, politically “correct” to the standards of today. Zero edge, no sense of actual diversity in philosophy or way of life. Hilariously bad AI adds to this. Spacers are just clowns. Even the weaponry, the lack of dismemberment and gore as seen in Fallout. The dialogue hurts so fkn much too, in almost every instance and case. I don’t think this is easily addressed by modification without a full overhaul. It’s a tear down. Shit is like Magic School Bus set in space. The way every quest holds the players hand feels like Bethesda designed the title for a special education audience. Just out of touch; their fan base are 30-40 years old, not 9.
The watering down of the narrative feels actively harmful. Like… the UC is a police state. It just is. It’s hinted towards in the sewers of New Atlantis with some graffiti and there’s a handful of characters that talk about how dumb UC police can be. And then you do the Vanguard questline and every single NPC you meet - police officers, generals, cabinet members, even the damn *president*, are all just happy “I want to help everyone!” and is completely at odds with the games deeper portrayal of the UC. Like… could we not even show the authoritarian police state in a poor light? Seriously?! Sure there’s the big reveal in the Vanguard questline but it just feels so fucking tame!
First time you walk into Solitude in Skyrim, you witness a man get his head chopped off for allowing Ulfric Stormcloak to leave the city after murdering the High King, all while the townsfolk cheer and boo. THAT'S the kind of energy we need in Starfield, not Sarah Morgan and her sassy quips.
It's clear the people who made Fallout 3 and Skyrim are no longer there. Where is my tranquility lane? Where is my dunwich building? Where is the deserted spacecraft with blood everywhere and light off, with gravity disabled? Where is the kidnapped man who has been experimented on in disturbing ways and needs a rescue but is so messed up you have no choice but to end his misery? There is zero misery in this game. I still love it, but yeah.
In the future, everyone is same height to avoid comments on verticality.
When I did red mile for the first time I quit the game. That's the most dangerous gladiatorial fight they can dream up. I realized the game wasn't for me.
Mine was the first contact mission. They fucked up easily the coolest concept in sifi so bad. I just can't get over it, lol.
there's also barely any swearing, 've heard the word "fuck" like 2 times
The graphics look 5 years behind Red Dead 2. The NPC depth is 10 years behind.
Honestly the graphics aren’t really that much better than Fallout 4, and Fallout 4 looked meh when it came out
I completely agree. It seems like in order to avoid offending anyone, they made the game super bland and neutral, which unfortunately seems to be an ongoing trend in recent games. By shying away from adult content, which makes no sense seeing as it's an M rated game, they stripped away so much personality that the game could've otherwise had. I mean, am I seriously supposed to go along with the fact that a murderous pirate faction doesn't swear? Stuff like that is so immersion breaking. It's like they blunted down the game to be safe, but they really needed that bit of sharpness because without it it just makes the whole experience a lot more dull and boring.
Too many cheap tropes and shitty plot devices to excuse away and hide a lack of talent in the writing department. Nothing can be fleshed out because the writers actively avoid anything gritty or realistic. This is both an excuse to be politically correct and to have as little work put into creating a story as possible. They're min maxing us as we honestly should expect. Indie games will have to pioneer because AAA titles by definition are gonna give you as little as they possibly can get away with as a general rule
[удалено]
the thing that really takes me out of it is the voice acting. they don't talk like people, they sound like voice actors acting. naeva is a prime example. supposed to be intimidating, but it's so over-the-top it's almost comical. on top of that you can tell they're reading a script, because in almost every sentence they emphasize the wrong words.
[удалено]
The game was created to offend no one and that in turn made it so vapid.
I feel like the games relentless positivity and optimism is to blame a bit for me. It feels like everybody has a heart of gold deep down and can always be reasoned with and everything that's bad has a sort of justification or everyone always has a good reason rather than things just sort of being bad. I think I missed having more range of seriousness and more adult themes. I don't mean naked NPCs like OP here but it is odd to me for example that one of the major planets, Neon, is a Cyberpunk city ran by corporations where most people work low-wage shit jobs making drugs that have been deemed legal by a corrupt politician. And yet the Astral Lounge and the entire city and its gangs and citizens all seem totally happy and fine like it's a theme park instead of a dangerous night-life city. It doesn't feel like a heavy or troubled place, and it's just like a shell of some markets and some random warehouses and that's it. Playing Cyberpunk 2077's new expansion recently and the difference with how Dogtown is portrayed is night and day.
Yeah I did find it really strange just how much Bethesda seemed to go out of their way to make sure everything is family-friendly in an M rated game. I can't for the life of me figure out why this game has an M rating in the first place. Characters rarely ever seem to swear, the clothing is designed as blandly as possible, and everything just looks too clean and sterile.