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[James Sawyer Ford]

I just returned to Starfield today due to having to wait for Cyberpunk mod updates...and it was roooouuugh. Starfield feels at least a decade old in every respect.

It's crazy to me that a AAA studio with unlimited funds could end up with such amateur writing and voice talent.

It really makes me question Microsoft's move to acquire Bethesda

They've had some really big bombs lately with Redfall....and Starfield makes it seem like the cracks are finally showing. No way is this the outcome they wanted. The studio's quality seems ANCIENT now in 2023 when so many other big studios have raised the bar.

Starfield is infantile in every respect. It's a hard game to take seriously, let alone enjoy.

 

[Soleil rouge]

It really makes me question Microsoft's move to acquire Bethesda

They've had some really big bombs lately with Redfall....and Starfield makes it seem like the cracks are finally showing. No way is this the outcome they wanted. The studio's quality seems ANCIENT now in 2023 when so many other big studios have raised the bar.

Starfield is infantile in every respect. It's a hard game to take seriously, let alone enjoy.

The sad thing is that the game will probably still sell well enough for them to maintain the status quo. I know engagement fell off a cliff after the first week or so. Hopefully it's enough for Xbox to at least start asking some tough questions.

 

[semiconscious]

In a year or two, these are the moments I will actually remember. For all of Starfield's qualities as a meditative exploration game, its dated, clunky storytelling means its universe feels strange and empty. The game does have some good stories to tell - Sam Coe's kid, Cora, is a welcome burst of enthusiasm and it's fun to see CEOs matching wits on the glorified oil rig, Neon. But it's hard to summon up any enthusiasm for the prospect of expansions or sequels when I could be starting another bumbling playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, or wrestling with the growling inner demons of Disco Elysium's broken protagonist. Even the endless misery of Diablo 4's NPCs is preferable to a galaxy populated by witless mannequins...

see, my feeling is that bethesda completely screwed themselves by emphasizing the pointlessly huge scale of starfield's universe over everything else. had they settled for a half-dozen inhabited, interesting planets, & passed on all the bullshit 'space exploration' stuff (which is mostly just time-killing busywork as it is anything else), there would've been time to develop more of these 'good stories', which's something bethesda demonstrated, even occasionally in starfield, that it's capable of...

i think bethesda doing a space game could've worked, & could've allowed bethesda to've made some updated improvements to their 'formula'. but not this kinda space game. attempting to combine no man's sky with mass effect is biting off way, way too much for likely any game studio, & starfield really suffers for this. i still don't feel that it's a bad game. it can be fun. but it's absolutely not a memorable one, which it should've been...

 

[RGB'D]

see, my feeling is that bethesda completely screwed themselves by emphasizing the pointlessly huge scale of starfield's universe over everything else. had they settled for a half-dozen inhabited, interesting planets, & passed on all the bullshit 'space exploration' stuff (which is mostly just time-killing busywork as it is anything else), there would've been time to develop more of these 'good stories', which's something bethesda demonstrated, even occasionally in starfield, that it's capable of...

i think bethesda doing a space game could've worked, & could've allowed bethesda to've made some updated improvements to their 'formula'. but not this kinda space game. attempting to combine no man's sky with mass effect is biting off way, way too much for likely any game studio, & starfield really suffers for this. i still don't feel that it's a bad game. it can be fun. but it's absolutely not a memorable one, which it should've been...

It will be interesting to see the legs and iterative updates. I think it's a pretty great game now, but agree that the scope is a hindrance more than a benefit. A couple years into support and modding will pay enormous dividends. We've seen this work just recently with Phantom Liberty

 

[Bojji]

It will be interesting to see the legs and iterative updates. I think it's a pretty great game now, but agree that the scope is a hindrance more than a benefit. A couple years into support and modding will pay enormous dividends. We've seen this work just recently with Phantom Liberty

Bethesda themselves won't do shit to Starfield, they only do DLCs to their games and nothing else.

People expecting big changes have to wait for mods that may or may not come (this game won't reach Skyrim popularity).

 

[Windom Earle]

This is solid gold:

 

[StueyDuck]

Eh..one has better production values/animations/character models.

But they both pretty dated.

Zoom in to stiff robotic npc, choose one of 3 options, character prattles on for an hour about arbitrary nothing, 3 options pop up. Character prattles on for an hour. 3 choices pop up but one needs a skill check. Character prattles on for an hour. Final choice pops up "leave conversation" but you are too busy sleeping

 

[rkofan87]

How the mighty have fallen?

Or more, just not advanced?

I really like the game but I guess people expected a lot more form them.

well it was made out to be the 2nd coming of games so.

 

[RGB'D]

Bethesda themselves won't do shit to Starfield, they only do DLCs to their games and nothing else.

People expecting big changes have to wait for mods that may or may not come (this game won't reach Skyrim popularity).

There is a ton of potential for modding. I think it will have plenty of mod support. But neither of us know the future, which is why i said it will be interesting to see what happens.

 

[WildBoy]

I'm 200 hours in to Starfield coming off 400 plus hours in Tears of the kingdom. But I'm not focused on what it doesn't do better than tears. I'm focused on what it does better. The game is immersive, fun and deep. But somehow appears it isn't that complex. I find that it is great at seeming simpler than it is on the surface. I would agree lots of people didn't play Starfield or went in with a mindset to hate it.

Is it better story telling than Cyberpunk? I would say yes. It's restrained in its approach. Cyberpunk is over the top and exaggerated to the point of nausea at times and I enjoyed that game at launch. The menus in cyberpunk are HORRIBLE! and that still hasn't been fixed. Starfield is a game of varying enjoyment due to so much different areas you can settle into for hours at a time. I can see why people dislike it and also see why people love it. It's not perfect. But I've played more of this than the Witcher, Horizon (finished) or Cyberpunk (finished) the latter felt like a slog to finish at around 215 hours clocked. But starfield isn't feeling that at all. It's getting a bad wrap cos it's on Xbox and not PS5. It's so obvious. Expected when ps fans are used to winning and won't accept any other outcome.

 

[JackMcGunns]

Did this ever happen before, like other Bethesda games being compared or other games completely unrelated? Cyberpunk was a hot mess when it released, it needed more time to cook maybe precisely because too much time and resources were spent elsewhere. It took a long time and several patches later get it to acceptable conditions and now we’re trying to compare to a game that just released, which btw was light years ahead in readiness.

Cyberpunk was the first game in history to be recalled and refunds sent to gamers, I don’t think that even happened with E.T. for Atari, but no one is talking about that.

 

[The_Verecocha]

There’s no comparison really, one is light years beyond the other. How the hell I’m going to go back to Starfield after PL I don’t know.

 

[Dazraell]

Did this ever happen before, like other Bethesda games being compared or other games completely unrelated? Cyberpunk was a hot mess when it released, it needed more time to cook maybe precisely because too much time and resources were spent elsewhere. It took a long time and several patches later get it to acceptable conditions and now we’re trying to compare to a game that just released, which btw was light years ahead in readiness.

Cyberpunk was the first game in history to be recalled and refunds sent to gamers, I don’t think that even happened with E.T. for Atari, but no one is talking about that.

I think it's worth to take a look at how devs approach their games and how they learn and apply these lessons to the future projects

Cyberpunk had a messy launch and it was in awful state, but it's worth to take in mind that it was plagued by issues that you could label as technical and system-oriented. The game we're experiencing right now was there even 3 years ago - story, memorable characters, interesting quests, impressive first person dialogue system, level design, etc - these things weren't patched. They were always there. To my understanding, what they changed was fixing stability, performance, reworking gameplay systems, etc. Under that large pile of mess there was always a competent game. A game that needed more time in the oven and was released way too early

Starfield isn't criticized for its technical state (quite contrary, the general narrative about it is that its the most polished Bethesda game up to date), but for all of things like the archaic modular-based world design, stiff conversations, weak writing, unmemorable quests, and so on. What it would need is a fundamental rework and I just can't see a scenario where Bethesda would pull a 2.0 that fundamentally overhauls the game. The best they will do is adding some extra content via DLC and trying to address some of the minor gripes. You can say a lot about CDPR, but there is no way to deny that they try to evolve, learn from past mistakes and are very focused on taking their projects to the next level without cutting corners

Just a simple example. Witcher 1 had a lot of issues at launch, and one of these issues were loading screens. The game had a similar modular-based level design as current Bethesda games. That was 15 years ago. They could just ignore these complaints and build Witcher 2 around similar structure, but they instead took a leap and created their own engine with unique locations for each act that removed these loading screens. The downside of this was that locations weren't as big as all of the locations in Witcher 1 combined, which was of course noticed by players. So what they did next? They took that tech to another level and created all of these large open areas for The Witcher 3. One of these areas had a huge city and smaller town within a single worldspace. And that smaller town was similar size to Bethesda's larger cities that to this day occupy separate landmasses

The point is that you achieve these type of things with improving your tech and constantly pushing forward. Witcher 2, Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk shared the same engine and every time they did something new with it, while Bethesda clinges to the same solutions that worked for them ever since Oblivion and unfortunately they don't seem to have any interest to iterate on shortcomings caused by their tech. And it's hard to disagree with people who are noticing it. Starfield with having a galaxy with so many planets feels like a perfect opportunity to explore how to reduce these loading screens. They opted to add more of these loading screens instead

 

[Bojji]

I think it's worth to take a look at how devs approach their games and how they learn and apply these lessons to the future projects

Cyberpunk had a messy launch and it was in awful state, but it's worth to take in mind that it was plagued by issues that you could label as technical and system-oriented. The game we're experiencing right now was there even 3 years ago - story, memorable characters, interesting quests, impressive first person dialogue system, level design, etc - these things weren't patched. They were always there. To my understanding, what they changed was fixing stability, performance, reworking gameplay systems, etc. Under that large pile of mess there was always a competent game. A game that needed more time in the oven and was released way too early

Starfield isn't criticized for its technical state (quite contrary, the general narrative about it is that its the most polished Bethesda game up to date), but for all of things like the archaic modular-based world design, stiff conversations, weak writing, unmemorable quests, and so on. What it would need is a fundamental rework and I just can't see a scenario where Bethesda would pull a 2.0 that fundamentally overhauls the game. The best they will do is adding some extra content via DLC and trying to address some of the minor gripes. You can say a lot about CDPR, but there is no way to deny that they try to evolve, learn from past mistakes and are very focused on taking their projects to the next level without cutting corners

Just a simple example. Witcher 1 had a lot of issues at launch, and one of these issues were loading screens. The game had a similar modular-based level design as current Bethesda games. That was 15 years ago. They could just ignore these complaints and build Witcher 2 around similar structure, but they instead took a leap and created their own engine with unique locations for each act that removed these loading screens. The downside of this was that locations weren't as big as all of the locations in Witcher 1 combined, which was of course noticed by players. So what they did next? They took that tech to another level and created all of these large open areas for The Witcher 3. One of these areas had a huge city and smaller town within a single worldspace. And that smaller town was similar size to Bethesda's larger cities that to this day occupy separate landmasses

The point is that you achieve these type of things with improving your tech and constantly pushing forward. Witcher 2, Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk shared the same engine and every time they did something new with it, while Bethesda clinges to the same solutions that worked for them ever since Oblivion and unfortunately they don't seem to have any interest to iterate on shortcomings caused by their tech. And it's hard to disagree with people who are noticing it. Starfield with having a galaxy with so many planets feels like a perfect opportunity to explore how to reduce these loading screens. They opted to add more of these loading screens instead

That's great answer but I think you may be wasting your time on people that just like to hate CP no matter how many patches and fixes are there. I have seen brilliance in this game since day 1, I waited few months and completed in on pc and had a blast, one of the best games every, now it's even better.

Funnily enough I had SEVERAL and potentially game breaking big bugs in Starfield when important characters lifted themselves into space or inaccessible rooms above. I had to use older saves to complete some quests, never had problems like that in CP.

 

[gaming_again]

Did this ever happen before, like other Bethesda games being compared or other games completely unrelated? Cyberpunk was a hot mess when it released, it needed more time to cook maybe precisely because too much time and resources were spent elsewhere. It took a long time and several patches later get it to acceptable conditions and now we’re trying to compare to a game that just released, which btw was light years ahead in readiness.

Cyberpunk was the first game in history to be recalled and refunds sent to gamers, I don’t think that even happened with E.T. for Atari, but no one is talking about that.

What should it be compared to? The point is that immersive action RPGs have moved on and left Bethesda games behind. Should it be compared to... other bad games?

 

[Hudo]

This is solid gold:

again, technical limitations of Bethesda's tech stack in full display. This game is so full of really obvious technical limitations and game design techniques first used in Oblivion that they really need to think about their tech stack. And I mean really think about it whether its really worth keeping...

 

[Singular7]

Cyberpunk 2023 is GOAT and needs a thread making that case

 

[damidu]

What should it be compared to? The point is that immersive action RPGs have moved on and left Bethesda games behind. Should it be compared to... other bad games?

it should only be compared to 15-20 years old bethesda games i guess.
though one can argue it’s still two steps back in areas like exploration etc

 

[reinking]

I am currently playing a NG+ game on Starfield. IMO, Starfield makes Starfield seem ancient. It doesn't need help in that regard. I'm still having fun. I think. If nothing else, it is a good time-killing grind game.

 

[PixelatedBeast]

Side by side they're generations apart. It's not even a comparison.

Honestly, most people didnt need a comparison video. You could tell from gameplay trailers and reviews this game looked boring as shit.

Motion matching, facial animations, narrative storytelling, voice acting and performance capture......its all expected from AAA games now.

 

[simpatico]

I'm wrapping up a back to back Fallout 4 and New Vegas play through and the difference is staggering. It's crucial Bethesda does not change engines if we want TES6 to have any value at all. Many mods will be needed to fix it, and the advent of AI voice acting could be it's saving grace.

 

[Dazraell]

That's great answer but I think you may be wasting your time on people that just like to hate CP no matter how many patches and fixes are there. I have seen brilliance in this game since day 1, I waited few months and completed in on pc and had a blast, one of the best games every, now it's even better.

Funnily enough I had SEVERAL and potentially game breaking big bugs in Starfield when important characters lifted themselves into space or inaccessible rooms above. I had to use older saves to complete some quests, never had problems like that in CP.

I personally decided to wait with Cyberpunk until the final rework. I knew my pc wouldn't handle it back in 2020 and I only bought ps5 last year. I don't have any regrets as honestly the game is great to experience in this form. I still stumbled some minor glitches and errors (npc going through objects, flickering after loading save)