Games

and modders.

One of the games of the year!

At the end of the day, people don't want to work really hard to polish a turd when they could be working on improving a flawed gem instead. New Vegas has much better meat on it's bones even if it's the same bones as 3 and 4. Starfield is like someone put a bunch of unflavored tofu on all those bones and tried to sell it as premium ribs.

As I understand it: the main issue with fallout 4 from a modding pov is that they reworked the entire engine twice between FONV and FO4. Once for Skyrim, which made it much easier to make mods, and then again for FO4 which made modding some things much harder, if not impossible without workarounds.

Modders will fix it.

I don't think making the parents Polish will help anything.

I've sunk more time into it than it deserves and I think maybe 50% of the content that feels unfinished or half baked might have been gutted. It feels like there was more there at one point and it got hacked off and spackled over.

Sticking with an old engine can also lose you a lot of time. Particularly, I suspect, when it's this one. Same piece of shit with the same limitations and issues as every Bethesda game, saddled with massive technical debt from the first instant. This thing was made with sword-and-horse CRPGs in mind - not at a huge scale, either - and works sorta OK-ish for Fallout... and now they wanted to tack on space flight, too.

The metro in one of the Fallout 3 expansions was famously basically... a hat, on an NPC. That's the sort of stuff you can end up doing if trying to do new/unsupported shit in old engines - and this is not getting any younger. Working out bugs, missing features, odd edge cases, old hacks that "just fixed something real quick" 15 years ago, trying to dig up old documentation...

Time adds up fast, those sunk costs are gonna fuck you up. And then you end up releasing Starfield.

Still don't know exactly how that translates into "we could only make one interior and copy-pasted it a hundred times" though.

I really don't understand the dog pile this game has gotten.

It's similar to the situation Cyberpunk 2077 faced. When expectations are set extremely high, nothing can meet them, and Starfield fell far short of the immense hype it generated. And frankly, the mistakes Starfield made are the same issues people have been criticizing Bethesda for since Fallout 3, and even earlier with Oblivion, depending on who you ask. Combined with Fallout 76's disastrous PR and release, this has left many people frustrated with Bethesda. Consequently, there's a strong wave of negativity surrounding the game.

For what it's worth, I'm a big fan of Bethesda's formula, and I genuinely enjoyed Starfield. However, I'm not surprised by the negative reactions. In fact, I'm somewhat glad that people are expressing their disappointment because Bethesda has a unique style, and I don't want to see them stay stuck in this creative rut. If they finally genuinely listen to the complaints, there are a lot of valuable suggestions they could benefit from.

This will sound weird, but I believe these complaints stem from a place of love for Bethesda's games. People know that Bethesda is capable of so much more, and that's why they are so passionate. Other game companies don't inspire this level of passion. Hence why I feel it is reminiscent of the negativity that surrounded Cyberpunk 2077. Both games were genuinely good, but they felt generic, safe, and they were overhyped and well below the potential of their respective developers.

The negativity doesn't make it a bad game, it really is a lot of fun. But it is warrented all the same.

P.S. I agree that some of the story lines in Starfield were fantastic, especially the faction quest lines.

Edit: Someone replied to this and then deleted it saying something to the effect of, "Cyberpunk's biggest issue is that it tried to run on old consoles, while Starfield's biggest issue is that it feels old and outdated".

Which in a lot of ways is very true. In adding my 2 cents regarding the "complaint dog pile" on Starfield, I only intended to compare the two games hype and lack of quality compared to what fans expect from their respective publishers as a way to explain why Starfield (and Cyberpunk) got more vocal hate than worse games.

I realize that my comment makes it sound like I'm saying both games have similar design issues, which I do not believe to be the case. Fwiw, I think Cyberpunk was a much more enjoyable and polished game than Starfield.

Man flying my ship has been a massive disappointment. I did not expect NMS, but it is truly soulless and seemingly pointless. The only positive thing I can say about it is sitting in your cockpit floating around is incredibly eerie and the sound design is cool. That’s about 60 to 90 seconds of entertainment.

A buddy of mine on a gaming discord also put it really well: The game has little to no culture. Cyberpunk, for all of its flaws, drips with culture. There’s language, fashion, architecture, just so much style and feel. Starfield is very same-y outside of 1 or 2 locations. Very little variety.

Character models are also a little iffy. The look and the changes in expressions/movements are not on the same level. You get some really uncanny valley moments

I am fine with most of the game. It's basically what I expected from a Bethesda game.

Two things stand out for me in different ways:

1. The space travel feels implemented in a way that seems to show their helplessness in getting it right. It ends up with a weird mix of Freelancer and just lazy fast travel and the game doesn't portrait a clear line for me what it would actually expect me to do with it and how they would like me to travel. Especially since even the "manual" travel involves a lot of kinda-fast-travel steps. It's just weird.
2. No maps in cities. It's the damn future with space travel across the universe and they forgot how to cartograph cities or planets? Come on!