Starfield's been left out to dry at The Game Awards—and even dedicated fans are 'not terribly surprised'
Shooting short of the stars.
The fact that this game was actually nominated as "best RPG" with the likes of baldurs gate 3 and final fantasy XVI is ludicrous enough.
to be fair, ffxvi is not really an rpg either.
I read a reviewer that said “It’s a beautiful game about space exploration that has no space exploration” and they were completely right. It’s just fallout in space. Who thought Quick Travel the game would be compelling space exploration
But it's not Fallout in Space. I can travel from one edge of the map to the other in Fallout or Skyrim and stumble upon a pitched battle or a cultist ritual or a lost dog or a juicy plot hook. In Starfield I can travel from one interstitial area to the next interstitial area to listen to a bland NPC tell me to go to the next interstitial area.
It's okay. I look forward to mods. Right now it's like somebody reskinned Super Mario Bros from the NES with a generative image AI trained on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day and Mass Effect 1 stills.
That's what I found really interesting about Cyberpunk 2077.
It took me a long time before I even started using fast travel in that game. I actually enjoyed walking through the city. Even on later replays and when I'd finished almost all the side quests.
Far from perfect game even after all the bug fixes, and kinda empty after the end game, but I can't help thinking it illustrates how Bethesda's been left behind in many ways. It'll be interesting to see what the next GTA's like. If they manage to make a more immersive world to explore.
Everything is way better and more detailed in Cyberpunk.
It feels like everybody is so generic in Starfield. They don't feel like they have personalities.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Cyberpunk and you'll be dealing with an entirely new set of gangs with their own slang and their own backgrounds and their own heritage.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Starfield and you'll either find nothing or an entrance to another procgen cave with the same spacers as everywhere else.
No way, Super Mario Bros. has much more fun gameplay.
I didn't think the lack of space exploration would bother me so much.
But after playing the Pirate quest and just fast traveling over and over, my immersion broke and realized how little I'm really traveling.
Empyrion is a way better game about space exploration and i'd never consider it for a GOTY award.
A lot of those physics-y space games like Empyrion and Space Engineers are a way more fun way of interacting with custom ships and space than Starfield is, for sure.
It’s just so bland and formulaic. Against deep RPGs like BG3, it just pales in comparison.
The funny thing is, I think the fact that the RPG mechanics are finally better than the last game developed by Bethesda, instead of worse, highlights just how mediocre Bethesda games are.
I still think once mods and DLCs come out in full force it will be remembered more positively.
If Bethesda games are so mediocre, why are they so popular among players who love to put hundreds of hours into them? I can't imagine them all playing total conversion mods.
It's become such a custom to poop on Bethesda for making "shallow", "uninteresting" games that still everybody talks about. As if there weren't enough real flaws in their games to give them heat for.
The Best RPG list is basically Baldur's Gate 3, and four more games to make it look like it has competition. It doesn't.
I still think TotK is a better game overall than BG3.
For me it came pretty close between the two but eventually BG3 came out on top. Totk was great but after 200+ hours I was done with Totk. I currently have almost 200 hours in BG3 and I feel like there's still so much more to play. I also feel like most of my issues with BG3 (like the poor performance in act 3 and some questlines breaking) are things Larian will fix while the issues with Totk (no rebinds, not being able to infuse weapons from inventory, menus in general, almost everything related to the sage powers) are unlikely to get fixed.
I played 25hrs of Starfield out of which 20 felt the exact same
I will admit to carrying most Koroks for several minutes rather than trying to make another vehicle out of bits that aren't all there.
I can't help but think they wanted me to be a bit more elaborate than just gluing the poor little guy to a horse harness.
BG3 certainly needed a few extra months to bake. There's still a bit where you can get trapped in a conversation with Mol in Act 1 because as soon as you come out of the cutscene, you're instantly in range of her to start the dialogue again.
Apparently they released early to beat Starfield, which is hilarious because I've seen few games so shat on this year.
BG3 was a buggy mess and the story has much to be desired. They should have kept the Chris Avellone writing.
I'm curious what the design, and reaction to, of Starfield might say about what we'll expect from ES6. For three games now (Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield), have been marked by Settlement building and Radiant quests.
While radiant quests were there in Skyrim, in these later games it felt a lot like Bethesda were making it a core part of the mission design structure. There are a lot of blurred lines in Starfield that make it difficult to tell them apart. (That's more a comment on main missions being so generic than the radiant quests being so good, unfortunately).
Settlement building seems to be a core part of Bethesda's DNA now, and I wouldn't be surprised if the narrative follows a Kingmaker style where you build up a settlement of rebels over time or similar. I imagine the other ES staples will be tied to this too, Thieves Guild = establishing a branch within your new settlement to attack Big Bad Evil Vs joining an established one etc.
I really wonder how much of this poor reaction to Starfield makes its way through to actual change, but my feeling is ES6 will have a lot of hype, but similar feelings of disappointment. I hope I'm proved wrong.
Ultimately, unless they deviate from the formulaic structure (follow arrow on compass to have awkward uncanny conversation with a mannequin who tells you to go to copy and paste dungeon where you have asynchronous combat against copy and pasted enemies) eventually, people will have the same gripes with ES6 that they didn't know they had with Skyrim. At this point, Creation Engine games are nostalgic, but Bethesda thinks they're still the future.
I don't see settlement building as a core part of Starfield, I am 160h in (NG+3) and have not touched settlement building at all. It is a feature of the game, but it is completely optional.
Bethesda did not over promise anything, didn't over hype. They said they wanted to create Skyrim in space, and that is exactly what Starfield is. For better or for worse.
Starfield being a disappointment to some is only because those players over hyped themselves.
I have not played it. I love scifi and open world games, but the trailers never spoke to me.
The universe looked so generic. I know Bethesda tried to force the label of “NASApunk” (whatever that means) but it just ended up with the same aesthetic of all those DeviantArt pages where people draw angular, scalloped metal scifi greeble over modern pictures. I didn’t feel any kind of vision coming out and grabbing me.
That’s aside from all the optimization and technical issues that I hear are bad even by Bethesda standards.
I watched part one of a play through. The moment I heard United colonies and Freestar Collective. I knew it was going to be the most generic space setting possible.
I'm a huge Bethesda fan and I absolutely love everything bethesda.
I can unfortunately say that many people will not be impressed with this showing. Outside of a few key characters, most NPCs are forgettable. Most quest designs are basic, and some are outright stupid - like some stranger just giving you the keys to unlock everything.
Skyrim has so much storytelling and "oh wow" moments.
You might find 5-6 of them in the 100+ hours you play. Not to say that won't change in the future.
Skyrim also had immediate recognition, spun off memes, and people were riffing on it from day 1.
Who is Starfield's best girl? Everybody basically crushed on Aella and Lydia.
What's the most gimmicky saying? Arrow to the knee, you're finally awake, etc
Starfield just has no life, no joie de vivre - wide as a lake but shallow as a puddle.
Starfield was 60 pretty ok hours on game pass, I personally have nothing against it, don't care about it much. But those who actually give a shit about The Game Awards: why? Slim list of nominees, several categories total bollocks anyway, judges vote worth 90% against 10% crumbs to the public vote ( see 'how are winners selected' https://thegameawards.com/faq )
Why would you want extensive public participation in an award ceremony? If you want a popularity contest just look at sales numbers. What purpose do awards even serve if they aren't curated beyond validating your own preferences?
Nicely said! I had the same feeling but just didn't know how to put it into words.
Awards are purchased
I mean Blades Gate 3 has all rights to be GOTY of the year, everyone has been calling it since it got out, but I'm 100% certain that less than 20% of the voters will have players all GOTY nomeene's. Hell Alan Wake got out two weeks ago. What I care a bit more is for things me coach's. I'm a CS2 player and I'm sincerely hoping Christine "Potter" Chi will win it, she was so dedicated, and gave her true best, I'm truly happy her team win and J don't even follow Valorant
It's an excuse for me and some buddies to get drunk and yell at Geoff keighly for a couple hours.
I put very little stock in them as a true reflection of quality in the industry, though it's occasionally nice to see Indies and smaller devs get some recognition.
Don't worry Bethesda, you can try again at next year's game awards after you've fixed the bugs and modders have added the features!
Let's not give developers the habit of relying on modders to finish their games. I'm tired of studios releasing half ass games
From what I understand they even fucked with the engine so much that they made modding even harder now and for whatever reason they're not releasing the mod tools any time soon so the big names aren't even trying to mod the game...
It's like they looked at what made all their previous titles popular, looked at the community, and said "nah, fuck that. What the people really want is no mod support, 6 distinct POIs, and TONS of loading screens."
after you’ve the modders have fixed the bugs
And year after that, and the year after that, and so on for the next 15 years as they re-release it.
They don't need to rerelease it.
Skyrim Special edition released in 2016 and is still one of the most played games on Steam. (place 69, nice)
I really regret thinking the extra time to polish would result in a game where we don't need modders to make things decent. The mod tools aren't even out and people have rebalanced multiple systems to be way better than Bethesda came up with.
Painfully average is how I'd describe it. There's games with better graphics, better RPG elements, better open world, better space sim, better procedural generation use, better writing, better any one thing (except maybe ship building?). For a game that promised it all it's turned out to be your average jack of all trades, master of none.
It still strikes all the checks I was looking for, whereas the alternatives might be better in some ways but flunk or are completely absent in others. I'm never gonna let GOTY tags determine what I enjoy.
So, The Outer Worlds of 2023?
Played both, and I'd argue that Outer World's is significantly stronger if only for its companions. Starfield I sunk a good few hours into and I struggle to remember one name. Starfield made me the Main Character and there wasn't much room for anyone else. Outer Worlds has some pretty fun companion side-quests.
Starfield wins at the sheer quantity of ideas it threw at the wall, Outer Worlds for the decent to good quality of the ideas it threw at the wall. Neither was brilliant, but on my personal preference Outer Worlds has way stronger bones leading into the sequel.
Nah, Outer Worlds was pretty good. Writing and freedom of choice were stellar, RPG aspects were also really well done, the game was just short and felt small. Starfield doesn't have any aspects that were actually good, everything is average at best.
Played my full version demo before purchasing. Was bored on day one. None of this surprises me.
Yeah, it isn't the best game, so it doesn't belong between the nominations.
Also because so many amazing games came out this year.
But that doesn't make it a bad game though. Had plenty of fun with it.
What's the point in making a game "as stable as possible",
when it's not even fun?
Aren't you just polishing shit at that point?
It is more stable than their other releases, but that's a very low bar.
I'd never call it stable without that very important context.
Plus, it doesn't pass that bar by more than a few inches.
It got a best audio nominee at the golden joysticks and a best rpg at the game awards. Taking up air that could have been used for actual worthy contenders but big money's get the auto nomination
It definitely doesn't deserve best RPG.
It might win the most "it's alright I guess", game of the year award.
Yeah. It's a good game. That's all. Pretty formulaic and not Bethesda's finest work. Good, but nothing award worthy.
Both spider man 2, re4, and tears of the kingdom are just as formulaic if not more, yet there they are. And SM Wonders is somehow super innovative, just because it is not the exact same formula of all marios but the exact same formula "a little bit harder"
I enjoyed it for about 70h, then i got sick of all the loading.
I just need properly updated skyrim. Better graphics, similar amount of loading screens, better npc's, better mechanics but the same old fantasy setting.
Oh and all the mods, something about sculpting my own vuloptuous barbie doll character to turn into the ultimate killing machine.
What I don't understand is why it even has loading screens. Surely it would be possible for them to level stream that stuff, after all the actual handcrafted environments are not that big, The rest of the planet is procedurally generated.
Partly the engine.
Consoles. I blame most of starfields issues on Microsoft and the need to have it work on garbage Xbox. I just wish we could get a game like this without having to cripple the shit out of it so it will work on some shit hardware console.... But I get it, most people don't have a PC that can play most games if they even have a PC at all...
I'm not bitter, you're bitter! :P
Bloody hell. I don't even think i have that many hours in most of the games i consider my favourites
I finished the story and did some sight seeing and tried to build an outpost to make fat stacks but somehow i couldn't find the right location after 4 hours of searching and that's when i ditched the game.
I enjoyed it for 3-5 minutes and then it crashed before hitting a save point.
When a game like Hardspace has better writing than your game, you fucked up.
Which is not a knock on Hardspace by-the-by. It's just that writing isn't the focus of that game, and even Blackbird said, "let's take a big swing at this anyways".
And the early access people hated the plot too.
Yeah, I played it back to back with cyberpunk TPL and it felt pretty sterile and soulless by comparison.
I wish Hardspace would work again. It had lots of potential before they crippled it.
Jankfield's poor technical and creative debt have come full circle.
I played it for 30 min and did not enjoy it past the first 10.
Same with me. As soon as I realized that there is no sane way to travel from planet to planet even within the same system without fast travel, I stopped playing the game. Starfield literally made space boring.
Fast travel is the only sane way, without changing the lore and setting of the world, to travel from planet to planet inside of a system. Space is gigantic and even the distance between planets in a system are huge. Travel between planets, without having to wait real time hours or days to arrive, would need some kind of faster than light propulsion, but the only way to travel faster then light in the lore and world setting is with gravjumps.
The only thing I would change with the current space travel is using micro gravjumps animation between planets instead of the normal fly sequence shown when travelling inside of a system.
Can't really form an opinion about an RPG in 30 minutes playtime. Hell, I doubt you even know Starfield has magic powers.
It was influenced by the internet calling it bad, you are allowed to admit it.
Just don't call it your opinion.
Starfield bad
Okay, who downvoted this? Come clean, buster. My opinion about a video game is objective fact and you must agree with it.
Bought Starfield, still can't play it. Linux, nvidia no MUX switch. Starfield won't use the discrete GPU. Doesn't even know its there. Thrown every launch option I could find at it. Uninstalled and hidden now. Worst purchases I ever made on a game.
Oldrim and Starfield are the only bethesda games I didn't buy on super sale. I'll never make that mistake again. I even purposefully bought it without waiting for sales to throw some support to the devs for building the majority of my favorite games I've ever played.
The up side is that after about two weeks of tinkering I bought Baldurs Gate 3 on a whim. Been playing it non stop ever since. I might not have bought BG3 if bethesdas didn't have such a shity unpayable game at launch, so in a way I thank them. BG3 has far exceeded my every expectation. What I thought would be a mediocre time waster turned out to be the best game I've ever played.
That sounds more like a issue with your proton configuration then a fault of the game.
Have you tried to change the proton configuration, to force it to use the discrete GPU?
Nvidia GPUs are known to be problematic in Linux, not only with Wine/Proton
Yes I've done so much tinkering to everything I can possibly do. Like 5 hours of 2 minute game time testing. Enough to negate a steam refund!
Telling proton to use prime-run. Custom protons, every launch option that matched my specs on protondb.
__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia %command% doesn't work at all.
It's not just a Linux issue. I read on steam, a guy only got Starfield to launch in windows after disabling his primary GPU in bios via MUX which sadly isn't an option for me.
I've tried everything but Wayland. If you've got some magic to try I'm all ears.
....why didn't you just refund it?
Even if you passed the 2h window because of troubleshooting, Steam Support would probably still allow it if you explained you couldn't get it to work at all
I tried, steam said NO!
I like it 🤷♂️
congratz
Thanks!
I played it and really liked it. I did everything I could do with my first playthrough. I started ng+ but just couldn't continue. A bunch of cool systems in theory but just not enough substance. The copy and paste assets gave me fatigue. It scratched that Bethesda game but I am a bit disappointed. I really wonder why it took so long. It sorta feels like a bunch of reused elements from fallout. Like did they scrap a bunch? I've seen many more in depth games from smaller studies lately. On a side note I started playing Cyberpunk with new dlc afterwards and damn I really like that game
It's real nova, choom.
Feel like this games gonna get the NMS treatment and be relatively playable maybe 3 years down the line..
As it stands the game has some merits (tons of planets, dungeons are compelling enough while you’re still seeing new ones) but it feels like the size of the world really caused the world design overall to suffer.
I'm sorry but Bethesda doesn't deserve three years to make a game work. They should make it work on launch and delay it until it's worth launching. They have billions of dollars and ownership from a major tech conglomerate. It's entirely unacceptable for them to release an unfinished product.
Games are never finished now with the internet. The whole industry has agreed to say "fuck it, we'll fix it in post" for basically every single project.
Yeah Bethesda doesn't get the same amount of leeway that a small dev that was clearly way in over their heads gets
They'd have to rip out and replace the entire plot, which I don't think they would do
I honestly don't think so. NMS sky started from a rock solid space exploration engine, but that was basically it, and has then layered on most of the other parts of a space sim on top since then, but most of Starfield's biggest issues seem to be because their game engine can't handle the scales needed for seamless space exploration.
So at this point Starfield devs have spent a ton of time and effort building a space sim game on an engine not suited for it, and that means that every cut scene and animation and scripted event is built around this engine, making it really time consuming just to bug test, let alone fix any problems that arise from changing or upgrading that engine, let alone designing the old missions and stuff to work with more continuous travel.
I have more faith that 5 years from now NMS will be fleshed out into a really rich and full story driven game, then that Starfield will have fixed it's fundamental exploration / loading screen problems.
NMS was purpose-built to be a space game.
Starfield was built on an ancient engine that's always been for ground-based games.
It's such a huge sunk cost fallacy that keeps Bethesda using the same dogshit engine. "We've used it for years!" Yeah but it's been fucking garbage for years too.
stuff to work with more continuous travel.
I bet you would be surprised if you were to find out that it is possible already. In space one can already move from one planet to another, only thing that is missing is the loading of new space "map" on demand. And more importantly move from one planet to another and then dock with spacestation. As shown by https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/3541.
And on planets the landing zones aren't placed in a vacuum, topological details like mountains are visible from adjacent zones. As shown by https://youtu.be/Fy0eG7MFSTM?si=ZwaE3OzmEf9IxbwZ&t=841 by 2kliksphilip.
Now you might ask the very obvious question: why isn't this correctly implemented to allow seamless travel in both space and on planets in vanilla Starfield? We may know only after someone does full introspection what happened during development but my speculative guess is that Xbox Series S which is much weaker than X is the primary reason for all this segmentation in all aspects of Starfield.
The sad part is that Microsoft pulled the original 2022 release to fix a lot of the bugs.
So really the updates have to be pretty impactful.
I'm still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!
I’m still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!
This is sarcasm, right?
It really got nowhere, and then started charging premium subscriptions to cover most of the mechanics that have sucked since day 1. Repair kits? You got em. You're not constantly locked in the treadmill of deciding to do something and giving up halfway to go farm screws from office fans because your weapons have degraded to useless conditions. You pay to avoid bullshit like that.
Doesn't sound like it got there, sounds like they might have improved their netcode, which was spaghetti to be perfectly honest so easy to have improved upon, and maybe the engine use for things not T-posing and floating around. I'm sure those bat fuckers are technically internally still dragons though. The core gameplay loop still sucks. Pick a direction, veer off to fix your shit, and ultimately get annoyed because there's only so many fucking times I can go to the adhesive shed or the fucking office with all the fans before I'm just done with the worst mechanic ever invented.
Everyone loves to hate Bethesda
I love Starfield, not as much as I love Skyrim or even Morrowind, but I really love it.
I am at 160ish hours and have seen only a small amount of the quests and barely touched the base or ship building part. There is so much in the game and with the innovative spin on new game plus I am able to build my own narrative again and again. I can play the perfect angle in one NG+ and a devil in another, I can be the freedom loving Ranger in the next, a mad loner who only interacts with others as much as needed to finish his perfect planetary base, or a starship fanatic who wants to collect and/or build the best ships.
You don't have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can't really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.
Starfields quests are fun, yes they are all separate from each other but that is in my eyes a good thing in this case as it allows to play the game as you like.
All the quests are like basic Lego blocks, you can connect them together in any way you want but they don't change each other but that's not needed as I have my own narrative and stories in my mind for this run or character.
Sure, games like Baldurs Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2.0 have better storytelling, better NPCs, but they are at the same time extremely limited and narrow experiences, sure you have side quests and all but once played the game that's mostly it.
Starfields freedoms come with limits like the loading screens sure, but that is a price I am willing to pay for having a sandbox like universe to explore and roleplay in.
As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that's where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
But as a end note: What have the Starfield developers consumed when they created the utterly bad and boring temple "puzzles". In Todd's name WHY????
You clearly haven't played baldur's gate and shouldn't make comparisons based on your limited experience with it.
I have played and completed it, very recently, and I stand to my words. BG3 has a great story and it was fun to play once. But it is not a game I will play again, at least not for years. BG3 is like a good movie, impressive and great story telling but after I seen it once it is done and will go on the shelf.
That's where Starfield differs, in BG3 I command great written characters through adventures, in Starfield I play more or less an avatar of myself but on a Spaceship. And that is something I come back to again and again, just like I go back to Skyrim, Morrowind or Fallout for years now.
Your love for the game is valid but criticisms of the game are also valid. The biggest flaw starfield has is the massive amount of gameworld it provides. In skyrim, CP2077, BG3, Morrowind, Zelda, and whatever else you want to think of, you can pick a direction and go.
In nearly every case, the game is designed to take you somewhere, give you something, reward you for straying off the main path. In Starfield, both space and planet side, youre likely to run into a whole lot of nothing. Which is realistically fine, the universe is already a vast amount of nothing, but in game design that makes for a boring and lackluster RPG and that is the biggest problem SF has. That doesnt take away from the players like you who want this experience though, but thats kind of why Space Sim games are a niche experience.
As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that’s where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
You should seriously, seriously go play BG3.
You don’t have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can’t really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.
Seriously, BG3. (Between Dark Urge, custom character choices, etc, go.)
I have played it and I liked it. But after completing it with one character I have no intention of doing another play through anytime soon.
Yes you have different character choices but in the end it is always the same linear story. Yes, you could say the same about Starfield but it is not. In Starfield if I want I can ignore the main quest more or less completely and play a bounty hunter who only builds his base to have a place for his collection of coffee cups he takes from every place he goes.
In BG3 they give you predefined experience (now in Dark Urge flavour) which is great for telling a story but not so great for creating a world to really roleplay in.
Both games are fun for what they are, they are just not fun in the same way for everyone.
The problem is how disjointed everything is. Skyrim and Fallout, I can literally walk across the entire map. I can run into a random plot, some fun environmental storytelling, anything really - there's no sense of discovery for a game so vast as Starfield. Everything is a known quantity which is why you can fast travel to and from basically every area.
All these other functions built into the game are superficial and/or incomplete at best. Ship building is basically pointless, as you can carry a massive crew in a tiny freighter, regardless of crew capacity or passenger capacity of your vessel. Modding weapons is more or less the same as it was in Fallout 4. The environments that are available to explore are all dead with fuck all, and all the tunnels and mines are filled with the same bullet-sponge spacer enemies. You would think with smaller, chunked zones we'd have some very detailed environments that make use of the fact that they are relatively small spaces, but instead everything is truncated with a loading screen and entirely lacking in depth.
I am at 160ish hours and have seen only a small amount of the quests
So you've just been having fun with the most basic of systems that are not much different from all previous games, while barely having touched the things most people are complaining about? The mechanics and stability are pretty good. It's the bland stories within the uninspired quests that are a major source of disappointment.
And to say only a Bethesda RPG does while BG3 doesn't have the kinds of roleplaying you're describing tells me you haven't actually played BG3. Or any actually good RPG for that matter.
What you are trying to say is that Starfield is a sandbox RPG, while BG3 is a Linear Story RPG.
Both are fun in their own ways. You just vibe more with the sandbox aspect.
I bet you also enjoy Minecraft for the same reasons.
Yeah, I like Minecraft 🤣