Why are Starfield's Reviews Trending Downwards?
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- Опубліковано 15 чер 2024
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Review Charts Over Time Site: lorenzostanco.com/lab/steam/ratings
@NakeyJakey "Bethesda's Game Design Was Outdated a Decade Ago" • Bethesda's Game Design... 5:58
Timestamps:
Intro 0:00
Sampling Bias 1:13
Review Bombing? 4:58
Refridgerators??? 7:45
Talking about the Game itself 11:00
First Contact (Spoiler Warning!) 11:56
Initial Issues 13:23
The Deeper "Fridge" problems17:12
Reiterating the Main Issue 22:52
Talking about the Game More Broadly 24:35
Wrapping Up 30:15
Outro 35:00 - Ігри
This is interesting because my own experience reflects this perfectly. 5 hours in I told my friends "I mean it's a little slow but once you get to the lodge, it picks up, I'm loving it so far!" Then the more I played it went from "I mean it's not the best RPG, but it's a Bethesda game and I love that!" All the way to "this is the most phoned in, soulless and uninspired games I've ever played".
And you only started to feel this because you heard the review bombing.
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo oh f off, this video even showed that review bombing wasn't even a major thing for the game, and besides that people can have their own thought process and come to their own conclusions, hell this is the first video i have watched about starfield since before its release and i had a pretty similar opinion of the game before i watched this video, started off thinking, "eh.... its got problems but its a bethesda game and its still enjoyable", then after playing about 20 or 30hrs i was like "there are so many problems with this game, repetitive locations everywhere, phoned in content, stuff that makes no sense (BBQ's in an atmosphere less environment e.t.c), but... eh its still a little fun lets see where it goes, maybe its got some interesting quests and stuff that i haven't seen", 97hrs in i just threw in the towel and was like "this is a terrible game, i don't even know why I'm still playing" and i haven't touched the game since i had that realisation, and all that was without watching videos about the game or really even talking to people about it as none of my friends were really interested in it to begin with and i was in one of my introverted periods where i didn't really want to talk to people anyways.
**Edit** Ahh damn.... just saw you post in other comments, you are a troll, ya got me, good one.
@@Ridiric I'm not the troll for defending something. The troll is the jealous one who attacks. That troll being the 100 million active sony playstation users who are the source of all your complaints. If they had not started such fake complaints you would have never thought of repeating them. Don't lie to me that you thought them up, no you were appeasing the trolls calling it mid, and then you started to reason ways starfield could be better to make it acceptable for those mid claimers, etc etc.
If you don't wake up, you'll have solidified yourself as one of the circle jerkers
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo I read your other comments, if you are not a troll you are delusional, so for your own good I hope you are the first option and are getting a laugh out of your posts.
@@Ridiric stop feeding the trolls! they thrive on attention
the best argument against Starfield is realizing you can't heal on your ship's own medbay
Never realized that.....even after I stopped playing the game continues to render me speechless in a bad way.
Or use the Jail, inside the Armory, for Missions.
okay that is a whole other level of "wtaf? smh"
I knew this game was going to be trash the moment I guessed correctly that the chef job can't actually make original recipes or sell food professionally, you're just a vending machine in this game I swear
What? Then what's the point of it?🤯
Isn't this the quest with the immortal corporate executives?
The one where you can sell colonists into slavery, but can't turn against the corporation?
Yup!
Sure is! Remember when space games were about the horrors of corpo overlords and the little guy fighting back? Pepperidge farm remembers.
Yeah, that quest annoyed me so much... Not only could you not just murder the board and take the planet for yourself, but you couldn't recruit that girl from the colony ship who wanted to explore the galaxy, even asking the player if they have a ship. In any other game she'd make a fun and interesting companion, but Bethesda didn't think so.
The Corp I feel is Bethesda themselves projecting.
after thinking about it too hard- aren’t the colonists armed and sitting on a massive self-sustaining vessel? the game plays it like the colonists don’t have a lot of options or power but if you think about it the corpos are in a far more tenuous position since they’ve gotta protect both their bottom line and their ability to keep wage slaves who’d bolt/defect/whatever given half a chance.
god, it already felt scummy when I was playing it but now it feels even ickier.
the reason people like me havent EVEN TRIED it yet, is because i feel like ive seen EVERYTHING the game has to offer, WITHOUT EVEN PLAYING
Smart move. You didn't waste money on this trash.
I'm waiting for the price to drop. This game clearly isn't worth $70, or even half that. Wait until the price drops closer to $10... and by then hopefully modders have improved the game
@@alangriffith1006a lot of the modding community is jumping ship on this game.
That is the state it's in
I didn't because literally nothing about it looks enticing, from the first to the last footage i ever saw from this game, it never exited me in the least, and no talk from any so called lying influencer or gaming media will ever change my opinion again before or shortly after a release.
I still gave in with Diablo 4 though and fell for it but with this game you had to wait at least a month after release to fully understand it but this was the absolutely last time.
As a person who played it for 17 hours, you’re absolutely right.
It's like... when you notice that the game about exploration, where you're immediately shoehorned into an explorer's club actively punishes you for exploring by just having nothing to find.
OMG I have sooooo many fridge logic moments with Starfield.
-Game about gravity doesn't have bulletdrop but does have gravity effect mines
-Why do you "die" in every universe you travel to, but the Hunter and Emissary never do in each of theirs?
-Why does Vladimir have a special pirate lingo, but no other pirate has that lingo?
Just to name a few of the top of my head. Totally agree about the First Contact episode thing. It's so badly written. Like this would be a historic event to find them and instead the world reacts like it's just Tuesday. 😑
yeah some more I didn't get to in the video:
- Paradiso is built on a high gravity world. Why would people vacation to a world where they might not be able to even walk and their luggage weighs a lot more? Even if we ignore that, it would be woefully more expensive to build anything there.
- If Grav Drives were fixed to stop destroying planets by a simple software patch, that means that anyone could presumably un-patch their grav drive and basically destroy a planet by just flying a few circles around it (not that the way grav drives destroyed earth makes any goddamn sense lol)
And a rare example of Fridge Brilliance:
- A reason for why the Freestar Collective may have won the war is because they grew up on a high gravity world, resulting in naturally stronger basically super soldiers. Tho of course I don't think this is ever mentioned in game so it's probably just a broken clock being right twice a day.
Fr tho there is so much cool stuff they could have done with gravity and how it would affect societies and whatnot. But they just kinda didn't...
@@BlazeMakesGames all of those, absolutely, yes. I have wondered if the Shattered Space DLC is actually going to be tied to the gravdrive thing. Like maybe they fixed it enough that they got off Earth, but now there's a long term cumulative effect that's damaging space, "shattering" it. But again like you said that plot point never made a lot of sense in the first place 😆
@@danteunknown2108
Stellaris DLC-style rift 'dungeons' you can find in space, and exploit or try to close to varying benefits.
I guess that would also be similar to Oblivion gates?
@@danteunknown2108 theres dlc for this pile of crap? Lol
> Why do you "die" in every universe you travel to, but the Hunter and Emissary never do in each of theirs?
If you remember on the first loop when you talk to those two, the Hunter does mention that you surviving is an outcome they never saw before and it was for that reason they are trying something different and want to see what you'd do.
Though things get weird when you try to understand where all those starborns you kill come from XD Infinity is weird so it can be explained but I doubt the writers had a good grasp of those topics. As it could be seen with their rather bad handling on the effect of gravity on the societies (which would have been an amazing topic to explore).
As for bullet curving, I might not care too much because I feel it might just be weird in gameplay to have it happen AND vary a lot between planets. Aren't most games bullets unaffected by gravity all the time anyway? Though I also doubt Bethesda did it for THAT reason and they didn't just think about it.
Rest of the fridge logic in the game is that though: total fridge logic.
Something that doesn't appear to be common knowledge is that the initial reviews for Starfield was heavily skewed positive because Beth did an "early release" (which is different than early access) so people who paid for the early release and refunded prior to the actual launch date were not allowed to leave reviews on Steam.
Which also explains why Suicide Squad, despite having been almost universally thrashed, sits at a "Very Positive" on Steam after over 5K reviews vanished.
@@humrH2360Well, those reviews were, "less equal than others", if you know what I mean
@@humrH2360no no with Suicide Squad, Sweet Baby Inc had such a bitchfit they blocked negative reviews and critique then had Valve who worship them- erase all negative commentary. Starfield had great reviews because it was places like Windows Central and other Xbox fan or Microsoft-owned outlets so were heavily biased towards it looking good so not to upset the bosses
@@claudijatzandrapova3347 My brother in Christ, Sweet Baby Inc. is a consulting firm. They do not have the power to mess with the game's reviews as they aren't involved with anything post launch. The one that did it was most likely Warner Bros., which is a company that is no stranger to shitty business tactics.
Also those early release players used more money than normal players. They were the most hyped people who waited for the game for years. They were the Bethesda fanboys. That's why it had so many positive reviews. Also many of them were on copium since they had invested a lot of money and time to the game even before early release.
Seeing all the normal graphs at certain points along the spectrum, then seeing BG3 just maxed out the whole way is hilarious.
Bg3 is vile hyper boring trashy trash.
I left a negative review once I figured out how shallow the "random" planets were, and my main plot got totally broken.
yeah that's another good example of something you might not realize for the first few hours, especially if you stick to the main story quests and locations.
I left one on launch for countless reasons and never updated it 😂 🤷♂️
The only aspect I liked was ship building, but paying $60 for a limited lego building game that serves no purpose other than a fancy load screen is not very positive.
This is what killed it for me. I liked the random missions at first but then I realized that the same few basic building layouts were being used over and over again. Different planet, same factory… for the 10th time. Worse still, it became obvious that the same items were often in the same places every time! And, all from the same shallow pool of items, too. Never once some kind of random, interesting, unique, item to add that feeling of “if I keep going this can my reward!”
Thats a great example. A part I was so excited for, but every planet got more and more boring because it all ended up being things I had seen before on previous planets. Like the POIs, the first research center or whatever was fine, but by the 10th I was just like "Seriously? Again?"
@@interstellardave It's so sad too, if only they added proc gen systems to their internal areas, the points of interest would have remained interesting for a lot longer, not the cheap illusion they are now
Glad you talked about gameplay loops and mechanics, since people can put up with boring story and lame themes if the game is good. In my opinion, Starfield being boring to play is the key for that down trend.
it's just too slow and mechanical to be fun. Skyrim had a much faster minute-to-minute gameplay that kept you engaged at all times. Going entire minutes with nothing to do should be a rare occasion, not a constant.
@@mygetawayart Its not "slow and mechanical", it's "tedious and unengaging".
The problem isn't slow gameplay, unless you're a cocomelon-addicted gen alpha or something, the problem is *bad* gameplay. Good gameplay can be slow. Good gameplay can be mechanics-heavy (not sure what you even mean by "mechanical", seeing as the gameplay is extremely simplistic).
Loads of games have slow, mechanical gameplay. Vintage Story, Project Zomboid, Aurora 4x, the Combat Mission series, etc. Those are all very engaging games, and just the ones I happen to be very familiar with.
@@userequaltoNull you explained it better than me. I referred to it as mechanical in the sense that it's not a free-flowing seamless experience. You're always dipping in and out of menus and using fast travel and heaps of loading screens. By slow i mean mostly when exploring and traversing new areas. You'll be forced to walk for several minutes to find another interesting location and many times i just end up returning to the ship just to avoid doing another hike somewhere else. Plus, the points of interest aren't that interesting to begin with, they're very bland and repetitive. I remember then saying: "the more you give to the game, the more it gives back" but to me it feels more like "the more you give to the game, the more you feel like you're going in circles and wasting your time".
@@mygetawayart the mandatory fast travel absolutely devastated Bethesda’s usual exploration loop. also doesn’t help it can only be done via menu :P
@@oscaranderson5719 Starfield should've been a redemption after more than a decade of Bethesda's ever-growing reliance on fast travel as a means to traverse. Instead, it was further confirmation that it's now a core feature of their signature gameplay loop. Now, it's no longer just a means to traverse, but to explore, and that runs contrary to what has made Bethesda games fun all this time, despite their shortcomings and outdatedness.
Every Bethesda game post-Morrowind has had the same writing shortfalls:
Depthless, flat dialogue that makes characters seem like wooden caricatures of people instead of well-rounded, complex individuals with flaws, quirks, and goals (for reference, compare to Baldur's Gate 3, Fallout New Vegas, The Witcher 3, and Cyberpunk).
Shallow plots without any engaging themes or artfully compelling narratives. They come across like amateur improvisations of stories rather than labors of passion forged by an insightful, well-read writer who understands human tragedy and has something interesting to say about the human condition.
A general sense of cartoonish unseriousness, as if the only narrative goal were to entertain children.
A lack (especially in the Fallout games) of logical cohesion in world-building, i.e., nothing makes sense if you think about it. For example, Fallout 3 and 4's worlds don't seem to have coherent socioeconomic systems that explain why people live the way they do, or how they feed and take care of themselves. It seems like these points are glossed over by the team in favor of a freewheeling "The point is to have fun, you guys!" philosophy that disdains the application of logic when telling stories.
However, prior to Starfield, people still generally loved Bethesda games for their well-designed, immersive overworlds that were fun to explore and dungeon dive in. But Starfield threw out that feature in favor of randomly generated gruel peppered with copy-and-paste prefabbed dungeons that run on constant repeat, thereby leaving us with a product that highlights all of Bethesda's flaws without including any of their strengths (barring perhaps art design), which caused us to finally begin fixating on the crap writing and really taking it to task.
it also perfectly corellates with bethesda stopping making their games for PC first, and making them for consoles first instead. perfectly illustrated by the steep downfall of their UI design. it went from terrible to entirely unusable from oblivion to starfield.
Worth noting that post-Morrowind Bethesda stopped using central design documents for their games to help the devs and writers stay focused and work towards a clear goal, instead forcing people to rely on management to keep everything coordinated. This is why their writing has become more and more shallow, game mechanics haven't been fully utilized, and Todd Howard's love of whimsy over realism has more impact as he is far more involved in game dev.
Your comment about Fallout is what really gets me about that series. It's been a long time (hundreds of years?) since the nukes fell, and no one has built anything new that isn't made from pre war scraps? Where are the people who innovate, dream, and build, or just want to keep a tidy house? Major cities shouldn't still look like they were cobbled together a month after the nukes. It's like humanity got stuck in time and forgot it could grow.
Pretty much can be blame on consoles hardware limitations, basically they did planned and implemented many functions and grand scales on the story, but once they hooked up to consoles, based on the generation of hardware, you can see how they cut out all the things they didn't put into the final game.
The problem has only gotten worse despite hardware being less and less limited. It's because Bethesda made the decision to stop using design docs, which has resulted in an unfocused dev team wasting time creating lots of mechanics that get underused or cut, and writers that have to tell shallow stories because there's no central design document for the teams working on different parts of the world to coordinate. You can find videos of Bethesda management bragging about not using design docs after Morrowind.@@Saviliana
Small note, Bethesda hasn't been fixing issues in the core design. They've bugfixed some but that's about all, which means all the dumb gameplay design choices are still there, unchanged, and nothing has been communicated that Bethesda even acknowledges how dumb these choices were. Having said that, here's some of my fridge logic.
Guns in the game make no sense at all. Some use .50 ammo and have no punch, some use much smaller ammo and absolutely murders stuff. That's of course because some guns are early game trash and some are "elite" late game guns, but that's like arguing that your standard 9mm round is what it is when fired from a regular Sig but turns into a .44 Magnum squared when fired from a "legendary Beretta". That's just silly.
And obviously all firearms work perfectly well in space. No heating issues, no problems with vacuum messing with the propellants, nothing. And of course those guns all work just as well in superhot environments. What, you think your super rapid fire machinegun will overheat just because it's well beyond 100 degrees celcius? Nah, air cooling still works just fine. Except on the player's suit, of course.
Speaking of environments, how is it that being "outside" on a deep freeze planet is a climate hazard that has you suffering from frostbite and whatnot, but being "inside" in an ice cave is totally fine? How is it that the player suffers to high heaven when exposed to acidic rain and such like, but weapons left in that rain, and NPCs patrolling, are totally unaffected?
Another environment consideration, why is it that every single space ship is super roomy, with so much underutilized space everywhere? Why is it that every space ship has piles and piles of unsecured junk laying around? Any gravity change or grav drive malfunction and there's an enormous amount of cargo shifting about and pelting everyone and everything onboard. And speaking of ships, why is it that space combat is so common and yet every single space ship has either a cockpit or a bridge on the exterior of the hull?
Another funny one, depending on the order of how one does quests, is that the player might be famous enough for a personal expose and then afterwards selected for a deep undercover mission against some bad dudes. How does that work? And speaking of bad dudes, why is it that pirates and mercs land their damn ships to unload troopers to take you out instead of just hovering above ground and using their ship weapons to sterilize a few square miles os surface? And come to think of it, what exactly are those people even doing with all those bases that they are occupying everywhere? They're not stripping them for parts and they're not using them for science or production. So why are they there? Other than to be lootbags for former miners turned space explorers, of course.
And then there's lockpicking that is also used for hacking, for some reason, and which is actually more aggravating than the old lockpicking game. And there's the base building, which never even tries to make any kind of sense. And there's weapon and armor modding, where each item holds its current mods, but heaven forbid you find an item with a cool mod and want to move it onto a different item. Nope, can't do that. Somehow the trigger for this generic space revolver won't work on other generic space revolvers of the same kind.
Regarding the game world and the premise and everything, if humans went into space like that, and if so many planets out there are in fact teeming with life and a breathable atmosphere then why aren't there a lot more cities around? How come humans are flying everywhere but somehow after 200 years there's still only a handful of major settlements?
But I could probably live with all of this if the gameplay wasn't so damn incoherent and disjointed.
the ice cave- thermodynamics. There's a legit ice hotel that visitors love visiting and does not melt nor is anyone cold despite it being solid ice because of thermodynamics where heat from the earth is conducted through the ice yet not to melt... it's cool if not weird stuff 😋
Bethesda still has no idea how industrious humans are, damning after several Fallout games where human still lives in ruines with trash littered around everywhere 200 years after the fall.
For reference the black plague killed up to 50% of the european populatiin in 1346, it took between 80 and 150 years (depending on the region) to recover back to pre-plague population and economical situation. But with space travel and futuristic medical breakthrough on virgin an habitable planet ? One "city" surrounded by emptiness.
I quite liked the lockpick-hacking minigame, actually. That and ship-building were the only positives I walked away with, though.
There's also the fact that that the earliest reviews had been left by the people who were the most hyped for the game, and therefore were willing to turn a blind eye to a lot of flaws or even just subconsciously blocked them out. I remember so much cope on the Starfield subreddit back when the game had just come out. That's especially the case since those were all the pre-order players who wanted to justify their purchase, but also it's just hard to come to terms with the fact that something you've been waiting to play for years is kinda bad.
It's the same song and dance. Starbound. No Man's Sky. heck, Star Citizen is still dancing gracelessly. At this point, those people oughta know better.
Not to mention that people who paid for the early release and refunded couldn't leave reviews on Steam.
@@sponge1234ify Ah man, I loved Starbound so much in beta. It's such a shame what came of it.
@@sponge1234ify At least No Man's Sky clawed back that respect and actually earned it. Bethesda has done nothing to earn it for over a decade and people still ride that pole.
@@99mage99 you wouldnt believe the amount of shilling ive heard for fallout 76,so the starfield shills dont surprise me as much,since its very similar to the people who shill for cyberpunk
Starfield is uniquely hollow imo. The backrooms of Bethesda’s games almost
Maybe the trend is because people are finally wiping the brown off their noses to realize that starfield is just a below average Bethesda game made on the same tired engine and suffering from the same issues, glitches, and limitations that skyrim dealt with almost a dozen years ago. They made a boring, empty loading screen simulator then tried to justify it by saying "real space is empty"
It's not even fun to watch. No way I'm buying an Xbox to play it.
The hype has died down, and people are coming to terms with reality.
For me it was the realization that the entire game was created to waste the player's time to pad play times. It was around the 23hr mark, I'd had enough.
Dumb stuff like "why do I have to deliver these messages in person? Surely this science fantasy setting has some kind of faster-than-light communication considering all law enforcement across the Galaxy instantly know the moment you get caught doing something illegal", "why don't any of these factions seem to be in any actual conflict with each other?" And "If I can travel to a parallel universe on a whim for a clean slate, why can't I kill plot relevant NPCs and just travel to a new one once I'm ready to take the story seriously?" All add up.
To be fair that is all Bethesda games. In Oblivion your horse would rat you out if it saw you unalive someone.
@@Drak976still do in skyrim
@@Drak976Yeah, but it's a big issue when the best excuse anyone can come up with for most of the issues is "This happens in every Bethesda game". Mostly because it's true, this is the same trash every time.
I wonder if it's all of Todd's years of BSing gamers is finally catching up to Bethesda.
This game is such a curiosity. Why did it take so long to realise how boring this game is?
I wasted money on the "early access" copy, so why did i and all the players take so long to realise this game is boring? Its like this game was mathematically calculated to trick us...
I'd like to know as well. I had negative intention to get this game, let alone another Bethesda game ever again, but I have a very different perspective from most gamers so I have trouble understanding why people still trust such a haphazard and arrogant company. If I knew, maybe I could have saved many people 70 bucks. I hope this game was enough of an eye opener for more people. Bethesda's bad behavior will persist until people do something about it.
Not really. Its called frontloading and its common in games without much depth. They shove the majority of the content in your face early on to hide the fact the entire game is shallow.
@@MorfsPrower frontloading
@KA-vs7nl indeed, yet I've spotted this with other games, why not this one? Maybe I was hoping it would pick up. Self deluding perhaps...
"it's another befesdia game!" TM. meanwhile, Bulders gate 3 shows how real RPG's work lol they aren't all "fetch quest simulator"
Having a giant cylinder full of people would make those persons needs harder to dismiss in your mind. This means drama.
On top of that, it's relatively easy to fix the scale issue. Soon after your introductory guided tour, a massive calamity explodes most of the cylinder. Everyone blames everyone else for the disaster. Factions form. The escapees from the cylinder land on the planet, becoming a perenial problem and sympathetic antagonists.
there you go being creative and thinkin' and shit....you're clearly not Bethesda material.
That would be fun and engaging, and we can't have that. Dismissed
Just having a centuries old ship crash land would've made an easier story to write in my mind. I guess, even that's too much work for the developers. Lol.
I stopped playing at ~20 hours, and almost directly after encountering this "First Contact" mission. I kept playing after the first couple of hours as I hoped that it would get better the more I played (and I've already gone past the point of no return, so I wanted to try and get my money's worth). Yet, it became clear that a continued lack of player agency within the game combined with massive plot holes and weak writing left me, as a huge sci-fi fan, deeply disappointed. There are less-than-100 page Hugo award winning short stories with more world building, more character development, and story conflict than this entire game. And they don't have constant, massive loading times.
The best this game does is reference other sci-fi properties and half-heartedly implement or allude to those plots or concepts. I don't know if Bethesda was hoping that my imagination will fill in the gaps or what... None of it is even into the realm of "oh, that was clever," like Fallout references often are. Instead, I found myself wanting to consume the referenced sci-fi content instead of playing this game. I kept hoping it would get better - it didn't. I read some Jack McDevitt instead.
Your comment is the closest to my own experience. I thought I could squeeze some joy out of space exploration, even if it was bad. I played one decent mission that I can remember that reminded me of a solid Star Trek episode. Everything else was looking for nuggets of cool stuff and never finding any. This was just devoid of fun.
I like that you use quantifiable things and logic in your reviews and don't just throw out platitudes like alot of other creators. Keep it up
Paradiso corp has one two star hotel on the shore of an duck pond and they claim the entire planet, not wanting a very small colony ship there. In real world analogy it would be like a hotel manager in Uganda stopping you settling in Canada. There is no proper sense of huge scale that a science fiction game should have. The only way the game tries to build scale is forcing you to walk over empty landmasses.
Starfield really is a game that gets worse the more you think about anything.
This tends to happen for me in other Bethesda games. As I was playing Oblivion, Fallout 3, and even Skyrim, I quite enjoyed myself. Then, later, I started realizing how flawed they were; at least in terms of writing and quest design.
You say even skyrim like it isn't the worst elders scrolls by far. It wasn't made for elder scrolls fans or rpg fans.
@elvangulley3210 Skyrim is indeed the worst Elder Scrolls game, but it is fun and mods keep it alive.
Base game wise Oblivion is still my favorite.
It's trending downwards because the rose tinted glasses fell off.
I have 500 hours in this game. The fridge logic hit REALLY hard. And i even got the constellation edition and i dont think i'll ever play it again, even for the dlc. It's too fundamentally fucked to want to go back to.
I have 400+ in and feel you ClarkWasHere1. There is no reason to go through all that crap again in the NG+, also pirating ships is broken beyond repair. It's too forced and should be called an adventure action game, there is NO RPG TO BE FOUND in the whole game.
lol, you listened to Todd's sweet little lies
I may go back for dlc/mods but they really really need to fix the game, I'm glad I just played it on gamepass. I was hoping it be good, but after all the problems recently with Bethesda last half decade I felt it was, "Play on gamepass and if I really enjoy it buy it."
You certainly lasted longer than me ClarkWasHere1, I got the constellation edition aswell.
After just shy of 200 hours in the game i realised that i wasnt having fun, i realised that i wasnt having much fun at all over the whole month i'd been playing it.
And that is when i left a negative review.
@@FozzieOscar that's the thing: i started using the game as a podcast game after 40 hours because i had already squeezed the game dry. Then i realized it was so unengaging that i would have just had more fun listening to the podcasts while staring at a blank wall
Ah yes, first contact, the mission that allows you to choose between paying a ton of money or gathering a lot of resources to complete it. If they added more interesting options for completing quests all of the minor inconcluences could be forgiven.
yeah that is another big thing with fridge logic. Often it's a lot easier to overlook it when you're actually enjoying the thing in the first place. But when you already have cracks forming, fridge logic can cause those cracks to burst wide open.
@@BlazeMakesGamesI heard another UA-camr describe it as white health damage. In fighting games, you can take damage that recovers over time while blocking, etc. alone, this damage won't kill you.
A lot of small issues in a game is like white health damage. Alone, it won't sink the game. But when a game is full of small problems, they add up, and one solid hit to your opinion on the game becomes a knockout blow.
I left a positive review 20 hours in. 100 hours in I changed that review to a negative.
Thinking Bethesda could write good storylines is like thinking you can breathe underwater
well if the modders cant fix it...
The modders shouldn't HAVE to fix it.
i just mean, modders do a lot of other stuff of course, for lots of games, like randomizer runs, etc. but its just disappointing that the fundamental core engine and gameplay for Starfield cant be modded into anything like a good game. @@rayveewrites6268
Why would they bother? Modders wan’t to mod great games not mediocre games.
I think the modders are rubbing their hands eagerly for Stellar Blade in a year or two; they just want to get working on nude mods, crazy outfits, giving her the Soul Reaver.. that kind of fun stuff
i was happy with the resident evil 4 remake mods. classy stuff :)@@claudijatzandrapova3347
Every issue the game has can be summed up to the fact it was made with out a design document
Wait really? No design document at all????...in that case it's shocking they even managed to make a game that even runs...
Starfield initially looked good because there was no baseline for a Starfield game. For example Skyrim had 4 other Elder Scrolls games to judge it against, if it was considered a failure or a success would depends on how well it stacked up against those installments.
So when people first started playing Starfield and encountered a discrepancy they could say "well i guess that's how the Starfield universe works", however, eventually those inconsistencies stack up over enough time to the point that the game feels like a bunch of random ideas shoved into a badly organized game, which it infact was.
You needed to play the game over longer period of time to see just how bad it really was.
yeah that's actually a really solid point that I wish I had thought of for the video. Fallout and Elder Scrolls have decades of established conventions and lore. Which can both act as a crutch to help with coming up with ideas, but also let fans know much more quickly how well or poorly they're handling that lore. Starfield didn't have that so there was no preconceived notions beyond just what you would expect from Bethesda in general.
There is a bg Baseline for games like that. Only not by bethesta:
See: Mass Effect, Star Wars KOTOR for example.
Or if you want to concentrate on Space and Planet stuff:
Empyrion, No Mans Sky, Star Citicen, and others.
That is the problem here.
Starfield had (older) competetor that are even better.
It doesn't need a baseline. A boring ass game is boring.
Starfield could have been a great start to a new franchise, after all not even the sky was a limit, but instead it's a lame attempt at recycling.
The main plot should have been the first ever encounter with an Alien civilization in search of new resources, those boring hubs would have become places to fight for these essentials, a race for who can make the bigger guns, that would end up on your home made ship of course. I would not have minded a comparison with Mass Effect at all. a good recipe always make good dishes.
I fought aliens in Fallout 3 as a side quest DLC that had absolutely no impact on the main game but still, it was more fun to me than Starfield. OUCH!
@@piratecat5113 That's the depressing part about the whole thing. They could have made the story literally anything and choose a depressing version of Skyrim.
Imagine saying with a straight face "it gets good after newgame+"
ngl when I first heard fridge logic I expected it to be something to do with checking the fridge for something to eat, finding nothing, only to check the fridge again 20 minutes later, but that wouldn't really explain anything about Starfield's reviews
Explains the game perfectly though
The dirty little secret is that most early reviews are bought, it depends on the marketing budget of course but it's nearly ubiquitous in AAA games. Try finding negative reviews in the first week of release on youtube, it's nearly impossible; critical reviews are shadow banned, it takes weeks for the algorithm levers to drop off to be able to search for those.
Yes, you hit the nail on the head with this one. The whole idea of Starfield is great, and almost all the game systems and initial story lines start out fun and with the promise of good things to come.
Its only after playing for an extended time that you learn that not only do the good things not come, but much of what you thought was good really isn't.
Space Combat: Starts out really fun . . . its exciting and looks great. But eventually you learn how unbalanced it is. Lasers or Balastics, EM weapons, Missles . . how to balance them all? . . . answer just stick the biggest Particle Beam weapons available and call it a day. When one weapon type is better . . . in ALL circumstances, than any of the other weapons, you don't have a game anymore.
Same for regular combat. Lasers, Balistic, energy weapons, melee. Seems deep and fun at first until you discover that there are almost no laser or energy weapons and melee is all the same. The only choice for any variety is to just use ballistic guns. And then you go the whole game wondering when/if they will introduce new enemy types? Nope, just more pirates. . . and a couple of generic alien animals . . . but the boss fights will be different? Nope.
Exploring seems like it might be fun. Before the game released I though that POI would be tied to specific biomes/planets or would be linked in POI chains (clearing a research station would then unlock other POI related to it on other planets or in different biomes). But nope just generic one off POI . . . that duplicate and repeat on every frecken planet. Want to see EVERY random POI . . . just keep landing in different spots on the first planet you come across until you see all of them. I even looked forward to some truly barren worlds . . . but even that isn't possible, every world has scattered ruins/fuel dumps/stacks of crates around (often in visual distance of the 'mysterious' temples . . . so much for exploring the great unknown!
All the basic ideas of Starfield are great . . . just half implemented and they skipped any playtesting to see if they were fun or remotely balanced.
I even love the idea of NG+ being different multiverses . . . but to do this effectively, you need a LOT of change with each new multiverse. A much smaller universe that then changed dramatically each time would have been super exciting with new questlines, cities, etc with each restart. Even better if it actually led to an overall finish (after X number of multiverses).
Such wasted potential 😟
yeah if I didn't know that the game was allegedly made over 7+ years, I'd say it must have been rushed or something to that effect. So many ideas just feel half baked or like they were thrown in at the last minute.
I cannot get over the supposed fact that NG+ was one of the first ideas they had for the game and then they didn't utilize it at all. Like I don't think you even need each new universe to change that dramatically, what they should have done imo is make it so that you have to make a lot of choices that hard-lock you out of a lot of content. Like say you can only join 1 faction and that's it every other faction is locked out. Then each faction could have a much bigger role and effect on the game and you'd be incentivized to go through NG+ multiple times over to try out all the different factions or other potential choices you can make.
But nope, you can basically do everything on one save file with only a handful of actual meaningful choices, just to throw it all away if you choose to go for NG+
Starfields community has been incredibly interesting to follow. During the prelaunch if you said anything negative about it on the subreddit you could get your entire thread removed, so for the ones who immediately saw Starfield for what it was had no way of voicing it, and if you mentioned any criticism you were ridiculed. Once the full launch happened conversation was more balanced but still mostly positive, new Bethesda game, people were excited playing it for the first time. Now after a while almost all discussion about it online is negative, and if you are overly positive about it you can get ridiculed. It's done a complete 180 over a few months.
The conclusion is spot on. It's like the X games - to begin with you might spend hours in your little ship just delivering cargo or mining asteroids, and it can get boring. Hundreds of hours later though, you could be clearing out alien sectors with your own fleet of battleships. While I didn't expect to be doing that in Starfield I did expect a slow unfolding of complexity, depth and variety in its universe. Instead though, it was like you drew the short straw and were given the freedom to explore a business park instead of a theme park: instead of increasing excitement at each new feature, you feel like you've seen enough after the first few premises to know what the rest is going to be like, and aren't that interested in seeing it.
Im a part of the modding community. I saw the excitement for the game and it die over the next couple of weeks as they found out how sht the code is. Then the news there wouldnt be many if at all mods for Starfield filtered out and it crashed the hope people had for it.
Beth is known for its mods making its games great (true or not) their exclusion really hurt attitudes.
I don't know what you mean by "Then the news there wouldnt be many if at all mods for Starfield filtered out and it crashed the hope people had for it."
There literally is no reason to think that, especially considering even without modding tools out, the game already has nearly 7,000 mods. And when the creation kit comes out, that number is going to expand rapidly. Where you heard mods were being excluded... I have no idea.
@@SilvyReactsModders "refused" to develop mods for SF, because the code was so terrible.
And what are these 7000 mods? Loads of them probably just minor tweaks, cheats and memes, as in every other game with mod support.
literally seen modders drop the game because of how shit it is. most prominently the guys behind the multiplayer mod, that made a similar mod for skyrim. most of currently existing mods are just thomas the tank engine-level. @@SilvyReacts
i put 160+ hours into the game, there are perhaps one or two quests i would like to play through again... and a dozen i absolutely don't want to have nothing to do with ever again and so the threat of NG+ becomes just that, a threat to have to go through some extremely annoying people and stories to get to those one or two nuggets of actual good writing and that isn't something i am willing to do...
now i got the game because i love the nasa style, love exploring and love space... and the ship building was a great positive surprise... too bad the style was skin deep and the ship building irrelevant as you never need to do anything on board the ship - repairs are 'push a button' and you can get everything else done outside the ship
It really does feel horribly ironic that they went into this game with NG+ in mind and then seemingly didn’t take advantage of it at all
I came here out of curiosity for the millionth starfield take and I stayed for the statistics.
I have the same feeling of Starfield that I do the Last Jedi, I remember walking out of the theater thinking it wasn’t that bad. But every time I think about it, it get worse as I remember a new flaw that I didn’t notice originally.
For real, its exactly like TLJ
A good way to form an overview of these dwindling reviewscores is that people very positive to Bethesda and their older games are finding their goodwill towards Bethesda rapidly diminishing where they keep hoping the game will become better, that it surely, eventually, will become good- and that never happens. They then realize that in fact, it is a poorly made, old-ideas riddled game that actually isn't fun. That it's been marketed as something akin to Cyberpunk 2077 in space or No Man's Sky meets Cyberpunk, yet it's worse than Skyrim in it's mechanics, RPG and exploration systems, and that "bethesda charm" isn't making up for any of the shortcomings, and it's nothing like their marketing pitched it as.
Basically, what these review scores represent is the public image of Bethesda fully solidify in a negative light from even their most diehard fans. An image that Bethesda is stuck in the past and they didn't bother innovating at all, claiming the fans will simply mod it or fix it.
It's very similar to Game Freak with Nintendo and their games like Arceus on the switch, compared to Palworld which is a barebones pocket-monster adventure sandbox, and that game managed to sway millions of hopeful Nintendo fans, but Game Freak is stuck in the past and hasn't innovated at all.
The competition is charging on while these ancient companies are banking on nostalgia- but forgetting that nostalgia is a vibe, not a 1:1 game mechanic or a blueprint to make their games on the same ancient engine to retain the vibe of them.
To be fair, with Arceus, Gamefreak did innovate.
2D Mario is still a thing and is mostly the same, the real innovation to keep it fresh is the spin offs. Something which Pokemon itself has mostly stopped doing. So you don't burn out on the same exact concept.
We need the side companies to make the spinoffs again, as the one thing Gamefreak was capable of reliably doing is taking the same concept and expanding on it 4-5 times to make a finally good one.
Another thing with review bias is the missing middle. People who had an average experience are less likely to leave a review than people who had a positive or negative one.
Honestly yeah that's a solid point, especially with how Steam's reviews work, you're much more likely to leave a review if you have an extreme emotion with the product, whether it be positive or negative. Though I think that there is some argument to be made that by making it a strict binary system, that can in some ways correct itself as it then becomes more about the aggregate than any one individual review.
@@BlazeMakesGames Personally, I despise binary systems, because it lacks all nuance. I am capable of seeing the flaws in a game I might still enjoy, or to see some good points in a game I don't. That people can only go binary, that they either hate or love... that's something that we really need to work on for the good of society.
That’s true. My view of Starfield is it’s aggressively mediocre and I didn’t even bother leaving a review.
A lot of us only did it after the "astronauts on the moon certainly weren't bored" on steam
the most fun way to play starfield is inebriated or intoxicated in some way. That way you don't actually remember playing all the tedious parts, and you have no idea how you got where you are the next time you boot it up. Which, after about four times, will be the last time you boot it up
The "It gets better after x hours" is wild to me. You know what game is fun from the start? Skyrim. Oblivion. Morrowind. Literally any Fallout.
Morrowind not as much especially if you have no knowledge how the game works. It is my favourite in the ES series but it can be kinda hard to get into it. But overall I agree. A game should hook you from the very beginning. It can be done with different things of course. Morrowind may have a slow start but it hooks you with how interesting Vvardenfell looks like and its steady but solid progression.
i personally wouldnt agree with the fun part. maybe its just how bethesda in general makes games, but all their games were a total slog without the mods - and thats considering i LOVE rpg's, and tried to get into skyrim for about, what, 5-6 times already? and i dont mean lore-wise - because lore in both is fine for the most part, but specifically mechanically.
@@SorarikoMotone I cant play Skyrim even with mods and Oblivion and Morrowind are perfectly playable without them IMO. I do play them with mods but its mostly to change the scenery since I have been playing them for such a long time
All I wanted was to give a little girl some books game. Starfield why are you like this.
That colony ship, I was worried that I would bring diseases and viruses to them that they were not immune to.
Before watching, assuming the reason is that it is wide as an ocean, and knee deep. That and it is like milk, good at first but slowly spoils
I think it boils down to Bethesda not knowing how to craft continuity and game lore. They’re more than capable of expanding on pre-existing concepts which is why they’ve had so much success with Fallout and TES, but fall short when it comes to creating it from the ground up like you need to do with a new IP.
capable is a strong word.
as i tend to say - its easier to write a good-ish fanfic than a good original book. tes's is pretty good because its a DnD derivative that mixes a lot of fantasy stereotypes and whatnot and people behind it had passion for dnd. Fallout is... fine, for the most part, because its a fanfic for the original duology, that wasnt even made by bethesda, but in general its fine. but thats about it - game mechanics never really been all that good in their games since fallout 3, and yes, i dare to say - skyrim is pretty shit if you play vanilla, almost unplayably boring without the mods, and same can be said about fallout 4, and fallout 76 before devs actually started TRYING for once.
The temples and the perk trees killed it for me. I had to cheat with the console to not get bored and put the game down. Then the ending was a total let down and new game plus rubs is an immediate parade of the games worst traits.
All of the individual artists and writers did their craft well, but the Direction is amature.
The temple grind killed it for me too. It takes a solid 8 hours of floating through glowy lights to level everything up. Not including travel time, walking time, loading time, walking time, cutscenes, or walking time, just 8 solid hours of floating from point to point to point. I'm convinced whoever made that tried it once, determined it worked, and then just applied it to every temple without thinking about the consequences.
Re: individuals doing their jobs well, that's my main takeaway-everything individually works, it's just a bunch of very pretty puzzle pieces that don't fit together.
8:42 I have to admit this is the first time I hear about the fridge-logic concept, but it can be used to summarize my experience with Oblivion, FO3, and Skyrim. However not FO4, because by then I had realized how much jankiness I was forgiving of in BGS games, and not at least because I had experienced other games by that time that were better than BGS' games in almost every aspect.
This is probably another thing that can be blamed on the fact that they don’t use development documents for some reason
Citation needed
Todd Howard said ts himself, with pride
@@alexphelps7042 When? Where?
@@alexphelps7042howard didn't, hines did
There is always a chance with any reviews that they will move from where they where initially, especially when the hype wears down and ppl have time to ruminate. The scores can go up as well when ppl start to engage more whith the game and the initial shallow impressions give way to a deeper understanding of it.
of course, that is basically what I end up saying and it still holds true for starfield. The reason why I think it's interesting though is that this trend is almost universally positive. Whether the game launches to insanely negative reviews like Redfall or Golum or if it launches to high praise like BG3. They almost always trend upwards after launch due to the sampling bias reasons I mentioned near the beginning. So Starfield really stands out for having such a clear and distinct Negative Trend instead.
normally a big release game like starfield starts with an overbroad advertising target, leading to a slightly lower review score from people who thought it was something elts, and then goes up to about where it is relative quality wise, them after a really long time (usually at least 5-10 years, depending on how dependent on hardware it is internally, and how much the genre changed) it starts to drop again as it either gets overshadowed, or just stop working as intended on newer systems.
the pattern starfield is showing is extremely rare, something i would expect to see in early dokidoki reviews, before the gimmick was well known, and not on this timescale. not on a well documented game where there is all the info needed to know if you will like it or not everywhere
Imagine you thought you were starting the lift hill of a roller-coaster. The excitement and anticipation of the drop is part of the experience. Few people thinks the lift hill is itself all that exciting, but we're exited for it and enjoying the moment. If you're a fan of the BGS formula, the trick of Starfield is that you won't realize this coaster has no drop until you're about 60 hours in. Eventually, there is this moment where you suddenly understand this ride is building to nowhere. You can keep riding but what's the point? It's honestly a bitter moment.
that's such a great analogy, especially since I love roller coasters lol. I might have to steal that if I end up talking about this concept again
4:04 Geeze that Baldurs Gate 3 graph. It might literally be off the chart
For me Starfield started strong but the more i played it the more flaws appeared in the game with its mechanics and the gameplay in general. After 55+ hours i just decided to concentrate on the main story since everything else started to feel pretty repetitive. There is only so many times you can do the exact same missions on those 1600+ planets that the game claims it has.
Yeah, that was basically it for me. I did the sidequests that interested me, leveled a bit for some skills, but then focused on the main story and getting all the powers. And once the temples broke, so that I couldn't find anymore, I hopped to a NG+, then quit playing and a while later, uninstalled.
Started strong? What part of the intro was strong? The part where you walk and mine 3 pieces of ore? The miserable dialog between the constellation dude and the mine Forman? The hand holding starting mission you can just let the robot do for you with no options to do anything else?
Skyrim's opening tutorial is more suitable by miles.
@@lolbuster01 At start it seemed to offer so many possbilities in exploring the universe with a ship that you can customise yourself and with many different planets to explore kinda like for example Skyrim did. But it turned out that most missions were repetitive in their structure and even the main plot consisted mostly of repetitive fetch quests.
@@sliceofheaven3026 yeah but that doesn't happen for nearly 20 minutes. Until you drop off the robot at the constellation headquarters, you are essentially on rails.
For the colony ship, they could use stored samples of genetic material such as sperm, eggs, embryos, digitized genome sequences, or so on to provide the genetic diversity.
The colonists would mix this reservoir of genetic diversity in as they have children such that genetic constriction issues are minimized or averted.
The same would be done for basically all the livestock, viruses, bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals - as minimal live population as you can manage and use extensive stocks of genetic material to expand the population. (Remember that if you're colonizing a world you're likely to need to provide the ecosystem from scratch.)
This gets you greater genetic diversity at such a small fraction of the mass and volume requirements that it becomes a near negligible amount of the overall ship's composition.
This is not done in real life because people don't like selectively breeding humans and thus far there have not been any situations such as interplanetary or interstellar colonization to necessitate it.
It all comes down to mass, just like most things related to space travel.
For the oxygenation they might use something like engineered algae to provide a staple food as well as act as a carbon sink - air bubbled through bioreactors the algae would have the carbon dioxide photosynthesized into oxygen and more algae.
(A bioreactor is basically just a container your organism is grown in; typically fitted with ports for pumping things in and out, filled with water and if applicable given illumination for photosynthesis.)
The rest of how garbage their ship design was is still valid though.
I think there are people like me who figured there would be some DLC announcements- maybe some fixes that would make the game better, but it feels like it’s been abandoned.
“we shaved ten years off our journey.” this doesn’t mean they launched ten years later. it means they got to their destination ten years earlier than they thought they would. the tragedy is that they left RIGHT BEFORE gravity drives were perfected.
Its stupid though. Why didn't anyone try to contact them and retrofit their ship with a grav drive? There should've been some way to contact and catch up with them...
If your predicted journey time is 100 years, and you shave 10 years off, your actual journey time is 90 years. If you arrive NOW, you left 90 years ago, not 100 years ago. You SHOULD arrive in 10 years time according to your original journey time predictions.
It's not only boring, but takes forever for Bethesda to fix anything if they ever do to begin with.
Not only that but making the changes needed for the game to eliminate that monotonous gameplay will likely not happen until the creation kit is released and non employees fix it as per usual.
Have you played Starfield? If so, you would understand why.
I fully agree with the premise of this Video, the more your learn Starfield, the more you realize its a sub optimal game in every respect. The only thing it did realy well is create hype and sell itself commercially, at least initialy but in contrast to Skyrim which despite it flaws people love, Starfield will on the other hand slowly die and be forgotten as a bad dream
I remember being surprised by how small the colony ship really was. I get machine limitations and stuff, but wow that was a huge let down. They should have made it massive, and then could have gated off passages implying a deeper infrastructure inside the vessel (doors with labels like "habitat deck B" or something that are locked because of course the PC doesn't need to go there to do the mission).
Are you a statistical psychologist, by chance? This would make an interesting paper.
heh can't say that I am nearly that qualified. In fact I flunked statistics the first time I took it at college. It was only later (when I had a much *much* better professor) that I got any grasp on the subject. Also playing D&D constantly helped me learn how to calculate probabilities lol
i think your analysis is spot on. The more i played Starfield the more boring it became. The more i wanted to like it the more disappointed i became. The more lore i consumed the more confused i became. And after 300 hours i gave up on the game.
i think most people will be sucked in by the absolutely interesting premise, and then slowly disillusioned by the contradicting lore and boring gameplay. so, what we see now are the people who wanted to like Starfield, but found not a single aspect to like. the overwhelming positive reviews we saw at the beginning were from the people who got overwhelmed by the premise.
the one thing i can't agree with you is that the review score will go up again somewhere in the future. People who could be blinded by a premise alone, already left their thumbs up.
All true. I left a fairly positive Steam review after 84 hours. 140 hours later I edited that review to "not recommended" as I grew completely tired of the asinine game. The biggest disappointment of last 10 years, trumping Fo4 and even Cyberpunk.
My take is the lack of replayability. If a game is not especially interesting on the first playthrough, what incentive is there to play it again?
I think there’s also a bit of a Streisand effect going on. Some people get into it, have a positive first impression, get a few dozen hours into it and their feelings start to go down. So they stop playing, but they don’t leave a review because they don’t like it enough to recommend it, but they’re not hating on it either. But then they see that Bethesda is going into the Steam reviews and leaving obnoxious responses to negative reviews, and Emil Pagliarulo did a bitchy Twitter thread. So now all the people who think the game is meh see this behavior and speak up.
I will admit that the way they were responding to reviews was one of the first inspirations for me to keep making more videos on this game lol
I never got Starfield. The way Todd talked about it on Lex Friedman’s podcast didn’t sound great to me. Plus if there’s one thing FO76 should have taught people is don’t buy games on release. But Bethesda hyped this game up so much. It’s been interesting watching the whole thing go down. People getting on the hype train and discovering they got a ticket to slop city, people coping, and Bethesda demonstrating how not to handle criticism.
I saw an interview that said - in the finest traditions of Principle Skinner - that Gamers don't understand the story. That it is about religion, and faith, and the unknown.
Cool, so was Carl Sagan's Contact - but that still had definitive answers in the narrative. You still know what Ellie experienced. You know the truth. The revelation is the way it effects her and her relationships, and some of the ancillary implications are presented in the denouement.
They will say that the world is intentionally left empty for realism. But they also have a total galactic human population in the low 5 digits at best, and I cannot walk ten minutes without finding a heavy industrial outpost or covert lab in the middle of all that barren nothing.
They give us crafting, but there is no actual industrial progression. They give us a ship, but it's basically cosmetic because we can't turn it into a settlement. They give us settlements, but they only work in the most uninteresting locations.
And then there are the ancillary plots. With the UC, we're supposed to blindly trust technology to fix the terrormorphs, but with the main quest we discover that earth was destroyed by a transfimensional whackjob with ground breaking tech. With the free star collective, we're notionally supposed to struggle with a very Ayn Randian notion that an industrialist is essential to their company town even though he's engaged in a murderous conspiracy, only to turn around and have gun battles and industrial espionage on behalf of *Our* great-man industrialist.
We get handed a ship and a robot in the first 30 minutes of a game in which cyclical time is the New-Game+ mechanic, but instead of killing that person off and then letting us save them the next time, you know, giving us reasons to have the access to the ship, nope, nothing.
It is a half baked, narratively incompetent mess with deep flaws in game design.
God don’t get me started on contact. “18 hours of static? Meh bury it”
Well, according to this video, the colonies quest just keeps reminding me making games quests can be creatively challenging. Great writing, interesting story line and thoroughly connecting the dots can be even more challenging. Looks like Bethesda writing wasn't flesh out and executed as good as they thought it could've been for Starfield. Lol.
I have heard a somewhat popular debate about whether or not Bethesda's "formula" is outdated or not. It is my personal belief that the formula is not broken. Bethesda has simply gone creatively bankrupt. They have essentially replaced their formula for a good gaming experience with that of a formula that only keeps the player playing by implementing radiant quests, tedious crafting mechanics and the like. I first began to take notice of some signs of the bankruptcy when I first saw Whiterun in "Skyrim" and thought to myself, "WTF, this is practically a copy and paste version of Rohan from "Lord of the Rings". Now we see the city Neon in Starfield as just a cheaper version of Night City from "Cyberpunk". The fact that they have refused to put any effort whatsoever on updating their inventory management system is a telltale sign to me that they are just getting lazy and are now relying on their old reputation and loyal fanbase. The blandness of ALL of the menu screen interfaces scream out to me that Bethesda no longer has ANY passion for their games. It seems to me that Bethesda has absolutely ZERO respect for their customers and basically treat their customers as a drug dealer does to their addicted customer base. So please keep this concept in mind when they release the DLC for their latest drug, errr, game,
this is exactly how i felt playing this game
The kind of scope a space exploration game demands was probably too ambitious for the resources they had available. I also found the game quite dull after a dozen hours of playing...there are better RPGs and there are better space games...I regrettably played this game straight after finishing Baldurs Gate 3 which was a mistake, the first few hours were painful - every conversation option seemed to have the same outcome. It's a shame that Bethesda always seems to have a stubborn attitude to criticism at times.
Personally, I think a little bit of the bandwagon effect happened. Before and on release there was too much hype, it was unpopular to say anything bad about Starfield on UA-cam. Over time the negative resentment grew like a snowball, the more people criticized the game and pointed out its flaws, the more people jumped on the bandwagon. There were likely many reasons.
they have virtually unlimited resources. no mans sky is still a shitty boring game but 12 people did more than the entire bethesda game studio staff could put together in 8 years.
It’s also interesting that Starfield left out a calendar system with the day, date and year like every other BGS game had since the 90s with the likes of Daggerfall. It is such a basic RPG feature for sandboxy real time games, that the exclusion of the feature makes it seem like they were trying to obfuscate plot holes.
The whole logic behind the "the ship can't communicate because its system are out of date," really annoys me. Any space ship that doesn't have radio transmission as a backup system is a piss poor designed ship. You don't need a super duper complex computer system to receive a radio transmission. Hell, when I was in Boy Scouts, I built a radio receiver out of a coper wire, battery, and speaker. If I could do that with a box of scraps in a garage, people who have mastered FTL travel hundreds of years into the future should be able to easily.
If the colony ship were a coldsleep ship its size would make perfect sense, and it's not like BGS doesn't have sleep pod assets from either FO4 or '76. I could believe not seeing other ships in space though, outer space is mind-bogglingly huge. The point about artificial gravity is great though, they should have ziplines like in Gundam or magboots like in The Expanse.
to be fair, while space is big, they would presumably be picking up on all the radio waves still. It doesn't matter if your software can't translate them, radio waves are radio waves which is still a clear sign of intelligence. Both the Colony ship, paradiso, and every other ship flying through space should be emitting tons of them which would provide obvious signs of life to anyone. When I say "see" each other, I more mean picking up signs that a ship is clearly in the area, which again they would have had Months at the least to do
@@BlazeMakesGames Yup, space is big but also very empty, so any colony ship should be easily apparent even to us with out current level of technology. Not just radio emmisions, but simple passive heat signatures should give away anything made by humans, let alone sustaining live ones.
@@userequaltoNull I am pretty sure the whole solar system could see that ships main drive during its exit from the solar system. Definitely while it was inside the asteroid belt. A few hundred terrawatts is very noticeable.
This whole video makes me think about how it can end up being the people who are the most invested in a game can end up being the ones who don't have the worst opinion about the game but start to see the flaws other people will just not notice. The people who are most invested, one way or another, are more likely to express that they are frustrated by the flaws in a game. So if you have a lot of people, who don't have all the time in the world to play a game, being invested in the idea of what a game like Starfield could be, all coming to notice its flaws at different rates you might get a gradually more negative trend.
I've played games and gotten invested in them and thought they were great but then as I sat and thought about it one or two thing, typically just one thing would really bug me because it could have been, should have been so much better and that can leave a real sour taste in the mouth.
Yeah I like the example I brought up near the end which is stuff like the nuances of Balance in a multiplayer focused game. Often times when you first start playing a game you might have no idea that XYZ ability is under or over powered because you simply don't have a good enough frame of reference to realize the depth of why such an ability is so strong or weak in the right context. But people often don't think about how such a phenomenon can apply to all kinds of different elements of a game. Though I guess a relatively common version of this is the idea of "Trap Abilities" that sound good on paper to a novice player, only to realize that it's actually useless or just not worth taking for a more experienced player.
@@BlazeMakesGames "Optimal Strategies" can also have as much of a negative effect as "Trap/Reverse Trap Abilities" If only one build, move or team is viable or exceptionally more useful, then the game can move from playing adaptively to playing repetitively.
The Constant quest didn't bother me much because I had remedied it in my head as "they must have generated a weaker form of artificial gravity that only works on a local scale".
Granted this isn't fully logical, but it's never said that gravdrives are the _only_ way to generate gravity.
Then again, this was the initial problem I've seen a lot of people bring up.
I hadn't even considered how the tech looks or the lack of people on the ship.
28:46 had it. The game is all a fridge effect. So many things that look like they might be fun; colony building, exploring, getting at the stories of your chosen companion, upgrading, ship building. All of them locked behind atrocious grindwalls and pieced out bit by bit. Like boiling a frog, you don't realize until you've actually managed to get enough stuff to really start building a colony, and you've been building colonies for ten, twenty, thirty hours, that there WASN'T something fun and wonderful waiting after all. It just stays the same grind it has always been.
This game definitely opens up after morbillion hours, you guys!
Subbed. I really appreciate the careful analysis & commentary over yet another internet hot take.
I mean lets be real, it's hard to find something to say about starfield that hasn't been said before lol. But I noticed this whole thing and how nobody has talked about it so I figured I'd try to do some analysis and I'm glad you all are enjoying it!
Yep.. You hit the nail on the head. I played SF for over 110 hours in the vain hope that it would get better. It never did.. Thank god Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty gave me back the will to live.
I think this game makes the player more aware of bad writing and game systems in a general sense because of the very specific ways its bad. I think that is leading to a increase in this fridge moments phenomenon in this games case. I hope it raises the standard for some players.
Another huge problem with the colony ship quest is this: They say the original inhabitants were the Earth's "best and brightest" and also the richest, therefore WHO THE HECK just forgot about the colony ship and its journey? Surely it would be one of Earth's top priorities to track its literal first interstellar colony ship, especially considering all these rich elites are occupying it. They would either prepare for its arrival OR more logically, INTERCEPT IT and upgrade its technology/transfer the occupants to a faster ship.
Additionally, surely the newer communication systems would be made with backwards-compatibility in mind? Did these astrophysicists and rocket scientists just forget about time dilation altogether? No one foresaw the possibility of this well-known hypothetical scenario becoming reality, and preparing for it?
The whole quest is just ridiculous on the surface, it was completely unbelievable and I wish Genghis Kahn would pillage them.
Well, the Earth was in the midst of dying at the time, so no, chasing after a bunch of rich guys that hightailed it out of there, not a priority, I'd imagine. And no doubt there were other ships that took off and never appeared again. Really, only archeologists, historians, and maybe treasure hunters would be really care about that ship.
But yeah, they should be able to identify it as an Earth made ship. And they should be able to use some older tech to communicate with it. And they could have had any other ship do what they had our ship do. No point in waiting for us.
They don't even need to track it, they would just know where about it would be during its journey and intercept it fairly soon after grav drives were invented. None of their elite family members remembered them? Huge journeys like this are planned well in advance and there would certainly be people interested in following up with the most expensive project in history at that point.
@@PetrusEksteen Since they were leaving a dying Earth it would not be strange to not leave behind any of that information.
yea, basically, the game has some, or you could even say, many good systems. But the writing is no doubt the worst, and writing is what you notice the most when thinking back on it.
Sadly, I can't say that the game has many good systems. I think it has many systems, and that if those systems were better polished, better implemented, or bigger in scope/depth, they'd be good systems. But they aren't. Which is part of why Starfield is frustrating and grows worse the longer you play. The potential is there, but the execution is sorely lacking.
This really sums up how I feel about Starfield even as someone who enjoyed the game enough that I would give it a positive review. In so many ways it falls short of being the game it could have been, some of that was due to technical constraints of Bethesda's ancient engine but a lot of it was just due to them not being thoughtful enough.
Instructions unclear, i bought 10 fridges
The colony ship quest, Emil P’s finest work 😂
Don't worry, he'll say it was someone else. Emil is perfect(ly mediocre).
To be honest, I do think it is one of the better quests in the game. It actually has three different ways it can turn out, with destruction, them leaving, and the servitude. Whoever did the quest, put in effort (so it probably wasn't Emil). There are only three other quests that try as hard... the pirate one, the clones of the dead, and the dimension hopping one.
Of course, it is lacking the other endings it should have. You can't turn the resort over to the colonists. You can't have them found their own colony on another part of the planet. And my guess is that the guy who implemented the quest would have liked to do at least one of those things, but couldn't, because the functionality wasn't there. And that's on the lead people in charge... they decided to make the main story to set up NG+... and then utterly failed to consider that being able to change the universe in meaningful ways, to be locked out of content so you have incentive to not be locked out the next time around, would be crucial to this idea.
And it has other flaws, like it doesn't feel old. It doesn't feel a couple of hundred years out of date. They didn't put the effort into the setting here that they did with that collector guy. And no matter what you choose, it doesn't create ripples or a real notable lasting effect on the universe.
Note that the pirate quest line was probably very lucky to not turn out as badly. The reputation/bounty system meant they had implemented the ability to turn on and off a faction's hostility. So it is able to use that. But on the whole, they just didn't think to incorporate the things needed for replayability.
I think you're wrong about the dates, which unfortunately makes like a full couple minutes of your criticism useless. When they say they've been on a 200 year journery, they mean they left 200 years ago, so before the grav drive. When they say the shaved a decade of travel time off, they don't mean it was 200 - 10 years, but that it would have otherwise taken 10 more years for them to get there. The quest is shit for other reasons, just not that one.
I'll admit that is a little ambiguous so I can give you that. I tried to double check my sources and from what I can find it seems like the consensus is that the ship launched in 2140, at least according to the starfield wiki and some people who care far more about the game than me discussing it on line. But like I said I'll admit I could be wrong and maybe it's ambiguous.
That said I still don't think the timeline for the quest makes any sense because at best they still only left a few years before the invention of the grav Drive. And there were still a solid 12 years between the invention and the announcement that earth was doomed. And during that time literally nobody ever thought to maybe ring up this ship that at best would have been only a few light-months away to offer them an upgrade? they could have easily said the ship left like 50+ years before the grav drive was invented and it would have felt at least a little more plausible imo.
Also some more Fridge Logic I literally just realized right now: The Nav officer mentions slingshotting around multiple stars that they didn't expect to be there in order to save this time.
First of all, how did they not know that the stars were there? Stars are one of the few things we're pretty good at tracking with even modern day tech. Let alone tech from 100+ years in the future. A star does not simply "Sneak up" on you. Secondly, again, this is a sub-light vessel. the journey between each star would have taken decades. (the total distance from earth to the real life version of this star system is only 38 light-years. So they were travelling at around 0.14 c on average. I assume the star they were going to isn't the one that snuck up on them, so that means that they woulda been travelling for around 35 years between each star give or take a few.) And frankly the Nav Officer doesn't look to be someone who was in their prime pulling a maneuver like this 3-4 decades ago. Not that there are even that many stars between Sol and Porrima to begin with.
This and talking about cutting off decades from their trip are clearly just such a throwaway line that was written to just give her something to say without really thinking much about what they really meant. Despite their attempts at making a much more grounded space game, They seemingly just wanted to throw around some vaguely sci-fi words and be done with it.
@@BlazeMakesGames No, your criticism gets even better because the colony ship was maybe a few light years away from earth even if it launched a decade before the gravity drive was invented. Unless it also had the current magic fusion thrusters used by ships in the 2300s.
Oh I forgot to mention the ship would be been great to have something like the Citadel In Masseffect. In fact you could say the ship becomes a permanent space station there and you could help build up its resources and make it lovely.
I also think exploring in micro gravity would be a hoot even if its just a ship.
As vast as an ocean, as shallow as a puddle.
Cos it crap
Short and to the point. I like it.
You know in my own time playing this game and hearing this video I just had a thought. Starfield is a single player MMO. Prove me wrong. No seriously prove me wrong and no saying it's not an MMO because it's single player doesn't count. You know what I mean.
For me, the game had a lot of promise and looked and played better than previous Bethesda games. It soured over time, as I experienced the actual content... and found most of it dumbed down and shallow. I put a lot of effort into lockpicking from the start, but half way through the game, I stopped using it because it was not worth bothering with just for 30 credits and some food I was not going to pick up.
I purchased the game on Steam, and honestly it felt like a decent 7/10 game at first, and the "it really gets good after eight hours" narrative was already there at the start. Ha ha For me, the best part was the first eight hours, as I was still finding unique locations to explore.
exactly the same issue with outpost building. At first glance, many improvements have been made, compared to Fallout 4 outpost building. But the deeper you go, the more frustrating it gets. The thing that broke me, when I just abandoned the outpost system, was when I realized a cargo terminal cannot service more than one ship (one link to another terminal), and they take a lot of space, so making a main base, central hub, where all the resources are is going to be almost impossible. Not even considering the storage, just the linking outposts part. In FO4 you just make a brahmin caravan stop and it links to another outpost, you make a network of links and all your resources get shared among the outposts. Starfield needlessly overcomplicates it by having this shitty linking, and on top of that having planets with like 4 resources on them, so an average outpost is gonna mine 2 resources and then have a huge cargo link barely fitting in it. Just so you understand, I had to build an outpost on a nonatmo moon just so I could mine Helium-3, have 2 cargo links that receive 4 metals and 1 interstellar cargo link to output these 4 metals, powered by said He3. So the cargo links took about a half of the buildable space. It's dumb. And what's the point? If settlements are about as disconnected from all of the other systems of the game, as playing Satisfactory in one window and Skyrim in another, well guess what, I'd rather do that and have a better experience. It's much more viable to buy all the crafting resources from vendors and craft what you need when you need it.
I think I played about 100 hours. I've completed several quest lines, reached like Lv50+, visited multiple artifact temples (each one exactly like the one before it). In the main quest, I reached the point after the dialog with the dudes from another universe on their ship, and I dropped it. I played on windows store/game pass, so I obviously haven't left negative review on Steam. But I would. I had low expectations for Starfield, but holy shit.
Because it's getting past the honeymoon period and people are tired of the novelty.
Roleplaying scenarios is never smarter than their writers. I just leave it at that.
The whole process of a game releasing, having "good" reception at first, only to have that warmth cool off as time goes on. And statistics are very cool and not boring 🤓
I think a big part for why the negative reviews are flowing in late is that the "conditioning" is breaking.
Bethesda has LONG been seen as a "can do no wrong, always a hit" company, despite their games having gotten progressively worse. A lot of people still held on to them being like that, even if their view had been somewhat "tainted" already by mediocre releases.
But now you have Starfield which is a clunker AND it has no previously established lore or fanbase to actually carry it. So when the previous "super fans" come in this might be the point hat finally sways them to say "you know what... this is bad... a BAD Bethesda game... have their previous games actually been good?". And depending just how invested they were coming to that realization might take a while. The fridge logic quests you mentioned also can be quite a reason for that realization coming late, really letting the plotholes and bad game design decisions sink in before realizing them.