you did your life bearing planet calculation backwards by the way, you subtracted 100 from 700 instead of taking 10% of 700 which gives you 70, not 600. You basically said there were 600 planets worth checking out (feature complete, not empty barren rocks) on accident.
Thank you for the correction. I still stand by what I said, regardless of whatever the true number of explorable planets are, they're mostly just boring.
It feels more like there are about 5 or maybe 6 different biome types which cover the entire planet except where they actually put curated content on top. So yes ok you have 1000 planet, but if you can only visit a third of those - even then you are still getting only 6 or 7 types just with varieties. It's all the same to me if the rocks are slightly yellow and shiny or white and matted. Long as they're not cut lol jokes but you get my point. Nevada desert is Nevada desert - whether it is slightly green or has blue daffodils. Calling it 100 desert planets when it's actually 6 squares of desert flavoured flat landscape it's just a bit lame. But I keep thinking they could just do 1000 $25 DLC's one for each planet with a new main quest and a new artifact or whatever.... That would please most of it's players. That is what this will become, Starfield MMO!@@bvvillz1
@@conordyer2307I haven't even played it and I expected exactly what it was. Hype train needs to be unborded. STOP pre ordering STOP getting uour expectations up for new releases. Just stop lol. This is like a child who sticks his fingers in a power outlet over and over again expecting not to get shocked.
They marketed the universe as practically unexplored, like you would discover all kinds of things. But instead you got the “Settled System”. The colony war already happened, every interesting story is in the past, every planet is littered with buildings most of which are occupied and even the empty ones are all so clean it feels like someone just stepped out. Rather than being an explorer the game presents the world to us as if we are late to the party. The game world tells us of all this amazing stuff that already happened, what is the point of exploring the known.
That's a very interesting point. Imagine if the game took place during the colony war. And you the player could influence how the war ends and which side is victorious. Kinda like a galactic size version of the Imperial and Stormcloak war.
Yeah, that was very immersion-killing for me. I felt less like an explorer on new worlds and more like a kid exploring the neighbourhoods back yards. "Let's check out what it looks like behind the grocery store!" It even became outright silly when you are supposedly the first to visit a temple that lies not a kilometer away from a science complex, a military station and/or a settlement. And no one has botherded to visit the clearly built, ancient ruins? Seriously?
Everything worth “discovering” is within view of some sort of human settlement. The only logical possibilities are either that it has been discovered already or that the people in that settlement are literally blind.
I thought u were gonna say something original.....fast travel simulator is a gay thing to say, come up with something urself about this piece of shit game
It tried to be both a space exploration game and a bethesda rpg at the same time and failed at both. Bethesdas engine cant make a seemless galaxy that you can travel through like other space explorer games, but trying to fit a thousand procedurally generated worlds means you dont get a great hancrafted map to explore like in older Bethesda games.
He lied about Fallout 3 too, 200 endings... or maybe youre not old enough to remember... when he did the play by play tru DC with his hunting rifle presenting the game.. Hes always been a lying snake oil peddler.
The dude always overpromises and always under performs. Honestly, if the world was more active in punishing him for his bad practices, he probably wouldn't have a company to this day.
I had similar experiences that left me stunned with how undercooked and brain dead writing, story, and quest design is in Starfield. I randomly came across a ship captain hailing for help. When I accept his hail I hear the captain shout then suddenly a new person comes over the mic to say "everything is fine, go away". BS! I see what's going on, naturally I pick dialogue option to attack and begin tearing through the ships shields so I can board and confront the people who killed the captain. All my companions now suddenly hate me. I think, maybe I need to get farther into the dialogue before I attack and then it will work... Silly me. I reload the auto save from entering the system and accept the hail. The new person again says "go away" I go through dialogue options to interrogate them. Voice lines hit you over the head to make it obvious the situation is not fine. New person "whispers" the loudest whisper ever to her companion to "hurry up". Her companion "whispers" back as if he is closer to the mic than she is "working on weapons systems". I have to go through more dialogue options and hear more of this insultingly obvious "whispering" until they get the ship fully online and the new person says something to the affect of "should have minded your own business" when I am booted out of dialogue and into control of my ship. Combat doesn't trigger. I wait a few seconds thinking it will, it doesn't, so again I initiate combat. All my companions now hate me.... WHY!? Someone is in trouble or murdered! I am trying to get onto the ship to assist or avenge this pilot from the villains who harmed them. THIS SHOULD BE THE GOOD GUY THING MY GOOD GUY COMPANIONS LIKE!? Why am I not rewarded or punished based upon how quickly I pick up that something is off, getting to quickly board an already disabled ship or have to engage in a tough fight if they get the ship operational. Why are the villains voice lines more telegraphed obvious than play along portion of a Dora The Explorer episode, "WhEr iS tHe BaLl? cAn YoU fInD tHe BaLl?!". Why are my companions less aware than my 2 year old niece. I know why, and it's not my companions who are't smarter than a 2 year old. I'm done with this brain dead game. I won't finish its story. There are redeeming qualities to Starfield, it can be fun but its successes live deep in the shadow of its faults. I'm done playing but not done ripping Bethesda for this half baked nonsense. I don't want Elder Scrolls 6 to end up this way.
Yes- the fast travel is not even the worst aspect of Starfield. They could remove all the loading screens tomorrow. And fix every bug. Yet it would still be 99.99% repetitive, with bland writing and dull characters. It's 4 or 5 decent locations, with 4 or 5 interesting quests, drowning in a ton of useless proc gen filler, just acting as busy work. It's a 6 hour game stretched to infinity - no brain engagement required.
I once got attacked by a ship when fast travelling to a planet. I attacked it back, boarded it, and as soon as I killed the last person my companion despised me and left. The crew on the ship were all "security", but they attacked me, shouldn't I be okay to defend myself?? Come on, Bethesda. At least if you're going to make me fast travel to get random encounters, could you at least make it so I don't have to reload and ditch my companion to even be involved in the encounter?🤦♀️
Just an FYI there absolutely is dynamic weather. You may not notice it unless you spend a lot of time in a specific location and it is definitely far less frequent in major hubs like new Atlantis or Akila city. On my outpost however, it's rained, been clear and sunny, foggy.
Correct. There is rain and snow.. it was a blizzard when I landed on one and started to cause damage so I went indoors, later when I emerged it was clear skies. It was great. He should have touched on Vendors barely having any money to deal with
Yeah, balance between fun and realism. Love the fun feature that if you walk around in spacesuit and walkthrough a poison cloud and your lungs take damage, fun indeed.
I have said this elsewhere, but when I compare everything I see in the released game with what was revealed in the Starfield Direct presentation, I see exactly what I expected to see. They SHOWED us what the game was going to be. They showed the loading transitions between locations. Including loading from ground to space. But many of us convinced ourselves that they weren't showing us everything. That we'd be able to fly from ground to space. Or fly in the atmosphere, or seamlessly transition between areas. In spite of what we were shown, we allowed ourselves to be blinded by personal assumption, rather than simply accepting facts in evidence. In the Direct, we were TOLD that the game was going to be a Bethesda game through and through, and yet many of us act surprised that it has the same design style that has defined Bethesda games for two decades.. I paid attention to what I saw in the Direct, and I listened carefully to what was said. And in my mind, I visualized EXACTLY what I see in the released game. What people think ought to be and what is are often two different things. What they showed and told us what IS did not temper many people's idea of what ought to be. And they don't want to admit that their expectations were anything but their own personal assumptions. The facts speak for themselves. But the tantrums I see some people throwing are loud and obnoxious. They chose not to take the Direct at face value, believing that somehow, there was some cryptic implication that the game was going to be more than they were presenting. And here's something else. Just because they were not locking the framerate at 30FPS for the PC version did not mean that it was going to run at extremely high framerates on ULTRA-HIGH graphics settings on current tech. Again, that was an assumption on our part. That is not to say that there were no bugs impacting performance. But I know from 20 years of experience that every BGS RPG to come out has always been massively resource intensive. Even systems with recommended specs struggled, but upgrading to the next new iter of tech often made them run butter smooth. So when they say they optimized for next-gen PCs, they literally mean NEXT GEN. As in not anything available in THIS GEN. That's what Todd meant when he said they did optimize the game for PC, but that we may have to upgrade our PC. See there's results we expect, and results which are. Given time, the results we expect will be the results which are. We can't upgrade consoles like we can our PCs. That's why they locked the framerate for consoles. But since we can upgrade our PCs there is no reason to lock the framerate.
Absolutely. The Starfield direct was what convinced me to pre-order the game, since I felt it did a great job showing the player what they can expect. In retrospect the most you can get angry at is the typical marketing vagueness that allows potential consumers to "draw their own conclusions", but that's commonplace in any industry let alone Bethesda Game Studios' marketing presentations. Angry drama clickbait is what gets churned out by the social media algorithms though so what's true and verifiable doesn't really matter if you can get enough people to ride the hate train.
@@sieda666Agreed honestly, I payed attention to the direct and I pre-ordered the game. I was very satisfied with my purchase. I just wanted something better than the outer worlds, and they delivered. Another reason I pre-ordered the game was because I wanted to build my own spaceship. Now I am playing the game and I built myself 2 fast attack destroyer style ships, one I named Ravager and the other one I named Goliath. I am really enjoying the game.
Its too bad that the younger naive crowd outnumbers the older discerning crowd. More and more young people are gonna keep corrupting the market as the years go on. We basically will have to ignore 80% of AAA releases going forward, only 20% of studios will make less successful but better games that are meant for people with that have two or more brain cells to rub together.
Nah. Brand loyalty is strong. This is the warm up for TES6 on the same engine. They are seeing how little actual game design and creativity they can get away with and still make gazillions. TES6 will have lots of islands you fast travel to in a galleon...filled with pirates and cowboys, I mean bandits. It's going to be Starfield in Tamriel - you heard it here first!
Bethesda has evolved from a AAA developer to essentially a AA developer with a AAA marketing budget. When Oblivion and Skyrim released they were considered cutting edge and even ahead of their time in some regards. Then Bethesda got complacent. The success got to their heads. They thought they could do no wrong. And Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and especially Starfield felt incredibly outdated for the years they released in. In a year where we have games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Armored Core 6, Cyberpunk 2.0, RE4 Remake, Dead Space Remake, Jedi Survivor or Hogwarts Legacy “Skyrim/Fallout in Space” simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
This comment, I like it. I couldn't have said it better myself. You're spot on, this type of game is only tolerated because of nostalgia alone. If it were any other studio this game would not be considered a AAA product.
Nah, to be fair, it started earlier than that. I got to know Bethesda through Morrowind, it was buggy but (for its time) massive. And it was an early game to allow modding openly. This created a blooming modding community that, as far as I know, are still at it to this day. This created a bit of a problem though. Because modders often solved issues better than Bethesda did, people started remembering the modded game, which of course was better and richer than the still good but not flawless original. In later games, Bethesda started relying on the modding community to fix the problems or fill in the gaps for them. This has been true in ever greater scale in every game. Even in ESO, the MMO, a lot of features are perfected and even created by modders. Simple life-hacks that should have been in the game from start have been created by modders, and, on a few occassions, later adopted by the devs as an official patch. Starfield is just a result of this. There are so many things in the game that are missing that modders will probably fix for them - a rudimentary and impractical UI, especially for items. Little or no explenation on how to do things (hence the ridiculous amount of "tips" and "how to"-videos on the gameplay). A settlement system that is clunky, especially when dealing with resource management with other outposts. Big empty worlds oddly full of industrial buildings. Ridiculous environment damage (see my earlier comment on that). Broken quests. And on the first patches, what do they do? Add graphical candy. And I see a lot of people just shrug it off - "nah, the modders will fix it". Yes, they will, but SHOULD they? Is it their (unpaid) job to fix a broken game?
My biggest gripe is that there are human settlements on EVERY planet, due to procedural generation. I wish that some were completely barren from human interaction. Even among planets with life on them.
All the deserted research labs are filled with enemies! It's amazing how little tech has progressed, given all those research labs. Humans seem to have forgotten about the wheel, let alone the radio.
@@OrangeNash Radios have an inlore reason: Radio waves travel at the speed of light, making messages between stars take years and decades. Easier and more effective to gravjump parcels and such. But there are radio communication within the same planetary systems.
The game does go some way to explain this. There is an easy to find audio slate which state this stuff is all remnants of the War and in the same slate it's encouraging pirates to get out there and scavenge all they can from these locations.
That is the problem with procedural generation that people do not or choose not to understand. It is not simple drop this number in and get perfect map out the other end. Starfield fails here in that they have far too few assets and they are functionally divorced from the environment. So no matter what planet they the same basic assets are randomly scattered with zero reason or logic. Star Citizen is trying to create separate procedural tools for planets, biomes, missions, and outposts, with some handcrafted for major set pieces, and as they are discovering it is brutally hard to integrate all of those to get a good final result. When it all comes together it is outstanding, but it is also more than a wee bit buggy
I've see a lot of people say they "lied". They didn't. They built up an imaginary thing in their head and were disappointed when it didn't live up to their fantasy.
In my opinion they lied big time. Let's remember this : when you are marketing a game, you are marketing a product and you start to say all the good things about that product with the intention to sell it. Todd said that we could do whatever we want to from the very beginning of the game : lie ! When we start the game, we are forced to join the Constellation and there is no way that we can skip that part. This is breaking the RPG rule that was supposed to be inherited in this game. That did not happen in Skyrim and Fallout 4 for example. Exploration : why should I explore 1000 empty planets ? But Todd suggested that we should cause we will enjoy that. Where is the joy to explore planets that are practically empty ? He also said that this was Skyrim in space ... well it is not. Just because at the end you are a 'starborn' ( ridiculous ) and you get some power that you cannot use by the way, does not make this game equal to Skyrim and this was the selling point for him : making us believe this was another Skyrim in Space which is not. What does this game brought to the table that we can say it is something completely new and that we never played before ? NOTHING. Foot combat is equal to Fallout 4. Weapons are ridiculous. Only a couple of laser weapons and the legendary weapons are equal to regular with different name and color but exactly the same. Air combat : nothing special there. Other games does it better. Ship building ? For what really ? To show off in UA-cam how expert you are in building ships and start feeding your own ego ? Ships that we cannot fly at all cause everything is fast traveling and 'black-holes' ( aka loading screens ) in abundance to the point that Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined do not get close to the amount of black-holes we have in this game.
There's one thing in this video that I completely disagree. "Only 10% have life so only 10% have something to do" this makes no sense. Not having native life is not the same as not having anything to do, and it amazes me how much people make this completely nonsensical correlation.
The issue of temperature variations is a huge problem, actually. You can get a frostbite on a planet with a temperature of -40, yet can survive on planets with -200. You get burndamage for passing by a hot vent, but can promenade around on a planet with 300 degree temperature. It is just ridiculously inconsistent. And, you can get lung damage from approaching a gas ven - while in your space suit! On a non-oxygen planet! If the toxic gas from the vent got into your suit, lungdamage would be the least of your problems. This is done so mindblowingly stupidly that it kills immersion for me. I would have made it so that different kinds of vents, atmospheres etc would have values, say, a hot vent has a rate of 10, and an inferno planet like Venus a rate of 100, just to say random numbers. Your suit then has different values against these elements (which they already have), and if it matches or is above the rate, you don't take damage. If it is equal to or very near the limit, you slowly take damage. If it is much too low, you take damage fast. But getting frostbite in a space suit at -40 and nothing at -200 is just silly. It makes it feel random and inconsistent.
Very good video. And one of the first I’ve seen to expose the real problem. It’s really not that it’s a bad game. Which it is. But it’s not so bad apparently that some people still can’t enjoy it. The REAL problem is that the way they marketed it was almost completely deceptive. I like to think that a huge portion of us were really looking forward to an expansive space exploration game. I mean that is what they really tried to sell us. I love space. I grew up reading books about the planets and all kinds of sci-fi. So to think of a game where I could travel to a thousand planets and do whatever I wanted? But what they gave us was really just some crappy dialogue and fetch quests. No craxy biomes to explore. No amazing and weird expanses. Just rock fields. It’s a shame. Because had they marketed it as a space drama. Where you can be a this or that but didn’t focus on the exploration. We would have had a better picture. They lied. They did. And it was really unethical in my book which I guess is why I’m disappointed with the people trying to hold it up as amazing.
You seem very confused about the game. First off, it’s a roleplaying sandbox game, not an exploration game. If you play it as an exploration game you will be disappointed because everything is procedurally generated. If you play it as a roleplaying sandbox you won’t, because finding new things and drastically different environments won’t be a focus, the focus is roleplaying a character in a sandbox. If you play it like a roleplaying-questing game, you may also be disappointed because some would call the quests mediocre. You’re supposed to create your character and the adventure he/she will go on, then go on the adventure. And the adventure should not include quests if they are not necessary. If you want to be a space ninja grab a katana and shred everyone. If you want to be a top class bounty hunter than grab some sick guns and act like you have aimbot. If you want to be a space cowboy do the same but with a pistol. If you want to be a jedi get the spacebourne powers. If you want to be a farmer you can farm. If you want to build a metropolis download a few mods. If you want massive capital ships download a few more mods to make some. If you want to settle down and live on an isolated planet living a normal life you can. The game is limitless. You can literally roleplay most space characters out there.
Overall I enjoyed the game. But there really isn't any real risk in the game. As a pirate for example, a smuggling mission can be an instant pass, lose everything or kill everyone. The load screen is constant in that process of - go to ship, load screen to destination, load screen to land, load screen back to station etc. It's worth looking back at the direct. Where are the sandwiches? Where is the food they were so passionate about. There's stuff that is missing from that three week period between direct and releasw
The "1000 planets" thing was not a sell pitch used by bethesda, it was only used by Todd in the first Starfield gameplay trailer to describe the size of Starfield, not to make any implication on the amount of content you got in the game. Planets don't need life to be "worth checking out", any planet is worth checking out, what matter are the locations, not the planets
I agree. I've landed on the majority of explorable planets and explored every single star system and space doesn't feel empty and unexplored at all. It feels randomly junked with actual junk, randomly floating in space with no explanation. Was there a space battle around this planet at the farthest reaches of the settled systems? Why is there an abandoned mine on a moon in the middle of nowhere? Why is a planet allegedly untouched by humanity filled with science outposts and refineries and random signs of habitation? And why does every single planet with the exception of the ones with specially curated and sculpted story locations feel **exactly the same**? The game looks and feels old. Even with my computer, which pushes the edge of what was commercially available two years ago, still gets loading screens. They last barely a second or two, but I might run into three of them in rapid succession if I fast travel to my ship, launch into space, and then fast travel to another moon or star system. And none of that includes the cheat screens like the airlock door from Cydonia to the Martian surface, or the typical tram loading screen that is reminiscent of Mass Effect Andromeda. And while I'm on that subject, there's very little to tie the game to the typical signature bombast and sweeping music that covers a multitude of gaming ills in other Bethesda offerings. My main experience with Inon Zur as a composer is his entries in the Dragon Age series, which defined the musical themes for the series from Dragon Age 2 onward. His contribution to Starfield feels uninspired, phoned in, lackluster. The only themes I could really pick out for you are 1-2 bars from the loading screen that occurs during grav jumps which also plays during the boss combats. It's only other notable occurrence is during the overblown "CONGRATS YOU'VE LEVELED UP" audio notification, which is longer and more intrusive on my game experience than just about any other game. The little "ding you leveled!" moment is something you look forward to in most games. I need those skill points, but god forbid I try to listen to dialogue when I suddenly hit a level during space combat or exploration or turn in a quest without the music suddenly swelling for my level up. Meanwhile in exploration of planets, we get occasional themes that feel cribbed from Mass Effect 1 and 3, except they're never strong enough to really make that comparison. Other Bethesda games - most other media in fact - ride on their score and sound signature. Starfield's signature feels like it ran out of ink. Tl;dr, I enjoyed this game, so much so that I have two completionist runs (one during an NG+) over a 350 hour span. I do not want to open it again. At all. Unless future updates include some new story content, I probably won't.
i wanted to build an outpost on a remote barren moon. i found one with aluminum and iron and every single random spot on the moon i landed on, there was the same 3-4 points of interest, and every time i landed a "random" ship just happened to land a few hundred meters away. so i guess this entire random moon is 100% covered in abandoned research outposts and mining stations, and has billions of random ships landing on every square km of it all the time the game is beautiful until the illusion breaks and its so easy to break it. there's all this stuff to do but none of it really means anything or has any point. and the narrative content, while decent, feels extremely dated in its presentation.
But, tbh, as soon as I learned about procedural generation before release, I immediately knew, exploration wouldn‘t be a thing and what to expect. This was and is obvious, just the way this is functioning (wanted to avoid „the way it just works“😛). It is not quite the game I was hoping for, not the best game of the year (this title deservedly goes to BG3), not flawless, rather buggy. But: I like to play it, it‘s fun to build ships, as long as I stay to quests and don‘t explore (there simply is nothing to explore on my own) everything is still new, there are many of fun quests. Game is far less glitchy than Skyrim in 2011 and this is still a game I play. So, is it a good game? Yes, as far and much as FO4. Is it a deep game? No. Could dialogues and AI be better? Hell yes. I see it as a sandbox for us modders to mod the hell out of it over years. It is just fun, a buffet of snacks, no elaborated 5 course meal.
Really great video. I'm sorry it had to be about your disappointment for this game. But I am happy to see how many views it's getting. I'm shocked more people haven't subs after this video. I for one have joined the ranks of your subscribers. Although with this being pretty much your first and only video, I'm confident you'll pick up more along the way. Looking forward to seeing what else you create and wish you luck and good fortune on your channels journey.
I would hope you do more video essays in the future. This was such a well-done critique I assumed it was a long-running channel that's had years of practice.
I had my skepticism about starfield from the very start then when I played it I liked the game far more than I thought I would. However after 70+ hours I haven't even really done any main quests or side quests for that matter, im, still flying the first ship but after upgrading it still can't take on any ships in battle, still have base level weapons and armour, no credits, no decent outposts etc. I got my fun from landing on remote worlds and looking at the vistas and the fauna and some times this game really did give me a sense of awe and wonder but after a while that sense leaves you and your left with what feels like an empty game that somehow feels like it's punishing you with how convoluted it is like the ones writing it don't like the demograph who play the game. I had to stop because I was seeing how many hours of my life I was putting into this game and it wasn't rewarding at all it felt like I got further and further away from myself and my character and felt like the game was stealing my time from me.
This is how all Game Pass titles will be, how they will be designed to be. Time sinks. That's the subscription-model game design at work. There is no hope for The Elder Scrolls VI.
@@HickoryDickory86 so true man. It's gutwrenching but the hope for elder Scrolls vi is out the window at this point it will just be another politically and woke culture motivated crock of shite!
Whats crazy is Bethesda is the studio that got me into gaming..i got into pc gaming to olay modded skyrim, i have years put into that game. The fallout series was my first introduction but somehow i had no idea starfield was even cominf out this year. Completely missed all the hype somehow 😂
I never understood the hype for the game. I feel like I'm the only one who had this idea... Am I the crazy one? The second they mentioned procedurally generated planets, 1,000 to be exact, I knew the game wasn't for me. A Bethesda RPG has always been about high quality, manually created worlds and stories. There are limits to what a programmer can generate procedurally. Saying you have 1,000 planets basically means you have a bunch of highly similar content that likely will grow boring quite fast if not immediately. And from what I saw in reviews on Steam, that is exactly what happened, according to some sane people. You start to notice not just the same compounds filled with the same dudes across the galaxy apparently constructed by different people, but even the way sundry items fill the space starts to feel familiar. I also expected the flora and animal life to be repetitive too, because if it weren't, it would likely fall victim to another procedural nightmare of a game -- Spore. You just can't generate an infinitely large variety of life that satisfies a person using a program. Sorry. Tons of my friends bought the game, and they all disliked it or gave it a meh. I can't comprehend why they would do that after the 1,000 planet reveal. Now, the more optimistic side of me hoped that the huge planet exploration thing might be optional, and perhaps, the parts pieced together by a human could make for a playable, fun game. Unfortunately, according to many on Steam, that just didn't work out. I hear awful claims like the game is boring as shit until you reach the 10 hour mark. Jesus... Let's throw into the mix that this pile of dung delayed Elder Scrolls 6, which we can only hope doesn't get messed up by corporate suits performing studies on your typical gamer in an effort to maximize profits rather than emphasizing the creation of a great game that will dazzle people for a decade to come. When I saw gameplay of Starfield before its launch, it only calcified my understanding that the game would be boring, because every clip looked exactly the same. You had space pirates wearing space suits, you were in a space suit, and everyone was shooting shit at each other. There was a rocket pack. Every damn clip looked exactly the same. Also, the combat always took place in some metal complex. Now, contrast that against something like the Elder Scrolls franchise where you have mushroom trees, elves of a few flavors, orcs, giant rats, Daedric demon gods, murder cults, grand large cities filled with the richest, shanty towns, alchemy, magic, melee weapons, bow and arrow, dragons, hundreds of books filling in the backstory of the world you're in, vampires, ghost things, dwarven constructions, ancient (religious?) tomb areas from a long lost era, thievery, the quests of many different guilds with different aims, politics, real characters you feel you get to know, nobility, murder contracts, regular imperial humans, prophecy, bandits, bears, wolves, giant trolls, religions, destiny, running into random people while travelling, gladiator battles, blind monks guarding shit, reanimated skeletons, dastardly sorcerers, good sorcerers, addictive and illegal drugs (skooma), Nords, Khajiit, goblins, and much much more. So you've got all this cool shit to captivate you as you explore and do shit versus whatever you do on random planets in Starfield... go into a research facility and kill space pirates I guess with 15 loading screens in between travel. And I'm not even remembering all the valid complaints. One person said they basically backstabbed a companion, and in the very next conversation, it was as if nothing had ever happened. The game is just filled with bad design. They bit off more than they can chew -- more than any team of programmers can chew. I think I'd rather play Knights of the Old Republic from the 2000s over this pile of trash if I ever feel like exploring a space-oriented world, and I'd rather not play Starfield than play Starfield. Ouch. It's OK to have a video game that is based on something like just the existence of a regular human race, but Jesus, you do not want a game like that to be 200 hours long like they boasted with 1,000 repetitive planets. The length of prior Bethesda titles had so much variation to justify their length. They weren't perfect, but they were flat out fun. I honestly think the people who got wowed by transparent marketing are the only ones writing positive reviews for the game, because they need to, in their head, not feel like they got duped. You did get duped. You cannot write a positive review that doesn't mention a single bad thing about the game. That's just not an honest review then. That's delusion. That's a person getting tricked and not wanting to think of themselves as a person who can get tricked. Look, maybe one and a half decades ago, I used to watch promotional material and grow so excited for certain games. Let's just say that I actually learn my lesson. After I saw how disconnected the promises of Spore were from the actual game, I never got excited for another game ever again. Each and every game I buy, I wait both for the horrific bugs and performance issues to iron out plus for a group consensus to arise on whether the game is good, decent, or bad. The proof of the pudding is in the eating as Ben Frank used to say. Stop preordering games, especially ones who use dishonest tactics like FOMO or ones that sell the ultimate edition that fundamentally is a company selling to you a few basic cheat codes / a little less of a grind (like "You start with 1,000 currency and level up faster!" Oh really? How about making a singular gaming experience that is fun and balanced, and rather than intentionally making the US$60 version of the game less fun for absolutely no reason, you just have a single version that is the damn game tuned to how the designers meant for you to play it for the best time possible. Seriously, start boycotting companies that treat you like shit. Consumers have all of the power in this relationship, and companies will make public statements promising not to do shit like selling cheat codes and FOMO if people actually notice the disrespect the companies are dishing out to their paying customers and therefore stop buying (or worse preordering) every god damn game that comes out. Stop being a mark, a sucker, a dumbo. God, it is infuriating, because I have to deal with all these horrible tactics since no one seems to respect themselves enough to demand basic human decency from the companies they reward with their dollar.
I'd call it a unhappy median between Outer Worlds and No Man's Sky. Lacks the of the depth of plot, likeable characters, and hand crafted immersive environments of Outer Worlds and lacks the wonder, scope, exploration, and seamless nature of No Man's Sky.
"We want you to feel like an explorer" and "We want you to feel like you have control every step of the way" are two sentences that shouldn't be able to coexist. Venturing into the unknown REQUIRES being able to let go of control and accept whatever happens.
Having watched a number of Starfield and No Man's Sky videos recently, I am amazed at how many (usually American) people don't know the difference between a solar system and a galaxy!
I just realized as soon as I read that what my mistake was, you got me lol. I meant to say our own solar system during that part. Thank you for the correction
@@bvvillz1 Just to be really pedantic, 'our' Solar system is the only solar system as it's the only one with Sol, the others are planetary systems (though calling them star systems will do). Nit-picking, I know, but they are what they are.
Ummmm…. It certainly does have weather changes and a planet made of water? Have you not visited the city Neon? It’s literally a platform city on top of a planet of water. While you certainly have some valid critiques, much of this seems very nitpicky and kind of “you issues.”
1:24 "Where you weren't REALLY limited" Yet another example of classic marketing speak. It's TECHNICALLY correct. It's true. He didn't say we won't be limited AT ALL, he said "weren't really" limited, which is naturally limited wording! But, in the context of that showcase and knowing Bethesda's past games - the wording is clearly designed to make the viewer THINK they heard Todd say you could literally go anywhere, as far as you want. But you can't, and what he meant only truly becomes clear in hindsight.
It seems like they were almost done developing it, and then they realized Todd said you could do what you want in the game, so they frantically created the Walter negotiation in 5 hours and then said good enough.
When I first saw the trailer 1. Did not shown any free ship roaming in-atmo 2. Did not talked about any travelling experience 3. Did not talked about space event behavior & exploration in depth, I knew I'm probably not gonna like a big part of this game
Great video. I was wondering about how the space felt so boring and i realize that they did not use it in crwstive ways with wierd stuff like black holes and other things you mentioned. That was a great point.
honestly beautifully put. lackluster and disappointing is how I would describe 90% of Starfield. I disagree with the ship building portion as well. Clunky, frustrating, and confusing. So many hours spent piecing together my ship to only be met with a module error to ultimately give up and waste hours at a time because it wasn't worth going and interacting with the system to find and correct the error. Ship building worked, but felt like it was held together by duct tape.
Brother the man’s most famous words are “it all just works” said about a game that had a list of bugs so long it would be faster to read a list of things in the game that actually functioned how they were supposed to. Yes he lied. He lied to get your money and every other person who watched him’s money. And it worked. His reputation takes another hit from the people who still buy his broken trash but who cares about reputation when you can swim in money from multiple successful scams? Not Todd Howard, that’s who.
It worked because people who bought starfield are the same type of people that spend 90$ on a game that is available cracked by pirates and entire week before official release, as Bethesda doesn't use anti piracy software. For a single player game. So, morons.
Starfield is clearly the space game with the best proc gen system and the best planet diversity, that's like people expected Starfield to be Star citizen but without the 20 years of devlopment
"Keep your expectations low, boy, and you will never be disappointed" -The Buddha & Kratos I get why people would think it's boring. Although boring in the context of space isn't a bad thing in my book, it's thematic, It's bad in the context of a video game that people expected from an RPG company. More people probably wanted Mass Effect space opera rather than No Man's Sky space wandering It's a video game, throw in some alien hookers and more crazy sci-fi stuff, break the realism some more, it's fine. It's a video game, they didn't have to copy every boring aspect of space trekking But it comes down to "expectations", and besides from perpetual misleading marketing, the gaming community is always perpetually over-hyped and over-expectant for the next best thing But if you expected nothing, and then popped that Starfield up on Xbox gamepass its no doubt a massive space game worth Game Pass money. Between that, No Man's Sky, and Destiny 2, it's a great time to be a space cowboy But rip if you spent $70 expecting Skyrim or Fallout 3 tho. Those were lightnings in a bottle for a different time. Just look at FO4 and FO76 (and now Starfield) and temper yourself. Best RPGs for this year are probably tears of the kingdom or Baldurs gate 3 But Starfield is probably the best space game for 2023 Interesting video bro!
As the first Bethesda game I ever bought it will also be the last one. When the seed sets a structure on one side of the valley , you explore than walk across the canyon to the next structure which is an exact facsimile in every way of the one you just searched through with every "enemy " who are dumber than a bag of rocks and exactly the same finds in exactly the same rooms and places and identical items it ruins any sense of exploratory immersion. Then you go to another planet and its exactly the same, so you cant even recollect is this the same planet or did i travel if you save and come back a couple days later.
Space exploration, being able to do whatever you want. Go wherever you want. Tons of different remote locations you find via planetary traversal. Those are all lies lol.
@@dusermiginte4647 absolutely nothing. Most of the planets in the game have literally nothing to do or see. So yeah the majority of the game is a loading screen. The only good parts of the game are the side quests.
This was like the 3rd game I’ve ever preordered, 1st and 2nd being Elden Ring & Lies of P. The amount of trust and care I lack now for Bethesda is insane. Todd has always been great at selling these games to us and propping them up. Even though this was my first time playing one of their games at launch, I still should’ve just looked at all the previous titles from the last 15 years to see why they wouldn’t have just stopped regressing and dumbing them down all of a sudden. This game was definitely my wake up call that Bethesda is absolutely fine with being average at best and sort of always has for me personally. They took the one best aspect from their games, the big world that felt great to to get lost in and explore, and took that out, so Starfield is just left looking barren and hollow when compared to many of the other amazing titles to drop this year. Can’t wait to watch from a distance how hard they butcher the next Fallout and Elder Scrolls :/
I purchased the game based on the statement from a big name Modder, who i will not name here, stated they were making plans to mod Starfield, so that gives me hope, and i believe the modding community will do wonders with this title, one thing positive about Bethesda is they do give us creator tools to make the game however we want it.
The fact that they had Elon Musk over for a consultation should have told you everything you needed to know. The whole thing was a scam from the start.
The story about Andreja being angry at you for letting go a thief perfectly shows how bethesda writers are a bunch of fuckups. They literally forgot about her back story OR the back story was added in the end as some kind of afterthought
What Starfield gets so wrong about exploration is that exploration isn't about pointing at a spot on a planet in a map and going "I want to go there." and then being teleported there instantly, it's about the journey, travelling from A to B just because, and then seeing C on the horizon and thinking "what is that?" and on the way there, you find D, E and F as well. You can't create that level of real exploration with travel that's dependent on instant teleportation, loading screens and procedurally generated planet surfaces whose landmarks are only determined when and if you decide to land there, not to mention landmarks that instantly show up on your hud as soon as you land. There was basically no cool moments of unexpected discoveries or payoffs into going towards interesting looking scenery. I don't know who at Bethesda needs to hear this, but IT IS NOT exploration if the area you're meant to discover has a giant finger pointing at it the whole time!
I mean, in fairness there are tons of space games like that. The problem is they made people think it would be NMS or Star Citizen with actual story content. When in reality the "space" part is actually just a little more interactive than say Mass Effect or the myriad or a Star Wars story driven game like Jedi Fallen Order or the single player KOTOR games (but no one shits on those games because you can't fly to a planet), mainly because it was marketed as an RPG where space is the back drop, they are not "space exploration games". and that is where BSG dropped the ball, they really hyperfocused on exploration in marketing and what we got is underwhelming. I ultimately think that is what killed it for people. Yeah the stories and characters are bland and uninspired, but that is Bethesda, I expected that. Their writing for stories and characters have always been amateur. If the actual Space sim aspect of the game had real depth. Being able to fly to and take off from a planet, fly in atmosphere of a planet, manually fly anywhere. The bland story telling or repetitive aspects would likely get a pass. Why? Because the games that Starfield is being compared to don't even have that.
@tsdobbi a shame. Looks like we are still years or decades away from the space game we all want. The inspiration and the technology just isn't there yet. Space themepark Fallout is all that Starfield is. And that is perfectly OK for some people, but not me.
@@dimitri1154 I agree with your sentiment but I disagree that we don’t have the tech. We simply lack the will from a studio to actually do it. Now ok maybe not an entire galaxy but hey the game could start with maybe a handful of solar systems. That you could seamlessly pilot craft to and from planets and around the planets. I think we have the tech to do that.
@@davidpramaggiore9281 yes, but it requires time neither consumers nor publishers are willing to give. We're talking about filling entire planets with content! Haha
Well I knew there wouldn’t be planets, there would be loading screens and invisible walls around your ship, because I knew how the game engine works. What I didn’t know is they didn’t manage to have the game load while playing the long landing/takeoff/docking animations.
It's interesting you say that, I played through on PC, and there's a mod which removes the long docking/ unlocking animations. Which makes it instantaneous. So in theory they didn't need to be there, I think really should have made that an accessibility feature to toggle on and off in the settings. I should have made a segment talking about that.
@@bvvillz1 yes the animations don't need to be there because they're not doing anything while the animation plays. I'm sure they don't let you turn it off because it's the ONLY excuse for to claim that you're "flaying the ship" or "exploring the universe" rather than just teleporting from one map to another, which I always thought would 100% be the case since that's how Creation Engine works.
well that's not 100% true, hogwarts legacy does have load screens, but they are cleaverly hidden and are based on location of the player's position of the level design. when the game first came out people noticed these load locked doors as the door to leave hogwarts was delayed, what was happening was the game was loading the next cell and getting rid of the interior cell of the previous cell you were walking away from, and when people complained about this, they fixed the issue by extending the load ahead of time to make it appear seemless to the player. a lot of other games use this cleaver trick and bethesda also used this trick back in FO4, just not in starfield, so it's not that they didn't know how to implement this idea, it's that they chose not to use this trick which is really fucking dumb for the kind of game starfield is. they used this method back in FO4, whenever the player used an elivator, the elivator was a load screen, it was basically loading up the next cell as it simulated that the elivator was moving up or down, so by the time the doors opened, it felt seemless. using this cleaver trick could have helped make this game feel better for most players expectations.
Fair point, but that's exactly why I brought it up, you said it yourself, "cleverly hidden" you're right, all games have them in one way or another, some just do a better job at hiding it. My point was to show how starfield made zero effort
@@bvvillz1 oh i do agree with you on this, they defenatly could have done far better. honestly i don't care that it's roughly a loading cell delay, if it feels seamless to the player because they used this little trick, than so be it, is my opinion on how that system works. the newer tomb raider games did it very cleaveryly as well, they often put these load doors in a section where the player was going through some action in a cave sequence that was collapsing, the player was slowed down but it still felt epic during these obvisly slowed down sequences but they were also very cinemetic transition scenes. but i think in starfield they were focusing more on the fact that they could make the load screens shorter, and the only way they could do this was to make the landscape you were transitioning in or out of was to make the box or cell less populated and less big, but that's also the same reason why people needed the SSD as a requirement, i'm not sure what xbox uses for storage but i assume they use some kind of SSD equivilant to load games, idk, i haven't used anything on the xbox for nearly a full on decade so i have no idea, but even without an SSD the loading times would take less time because bethesda shortend how many assets could be used in any given location and made sure there was lots of empty space in between to give that look that it's endless, unfortunatly that same decision is why there are so many damn load screens on each and every planet location.
@@festersmith8352 yeah star citizen gets away with this simply because you are playing the game with all the game contained within a server space from what i understand, but that also comes with it's own limitations that bottleneck the game when to many people are in a single server and location of the server, so that has to be limited to a degree in order to make that game playable for all playing the game. my sugestion would be to limit how many people are in a single server location, because that might help in making that issue less bad. though i bet star citizen would run so much better if nobody but NPC's and one player were in that server, problem with that is your running a very expensive game as servers cost a lot of money to run per month. i think the least i have seen a server go for as in cost was 2 grand a month, that's quite a lot of money just to run a server for online capability which is why the goal of the game is to get as many players playing the game in the single server, but to many people causes the server to run like shit, so star citizen needs to find that happy medium in order to make it all work like a well oiled machine.
@@5226-p1e And the tech they have been working on to overcome what you have discussed is "server meshing". Tech to pull this off is the reason for the long dev cycle.
I'm not a game designer so I don't know if this game can even be fixed. Opening up the worlds and changing ship traversal seems like it would be a massive undertaking. I didn't play No Mans Sky at launch but I think they already had the basics and worked out from there
Some loading screens could be removed or atleast speed up, but that would only be for specific things, like entering tiny shop/room. But yea, outdated game engine will not allow complete loading screen removal, not happening.
@@Zripas Actually there’s a mod that gets rid of every loading screen besides the loading screen that starts the game. It’s Janky asf but its an absolute game changer and a must have. It makes the game feel so seamless it’s hard to believe it’s the same game
@@jayg.2066 I mean, if you want to go that route then you could force async level loading when you get close to the door, and because level loading usually takes up only few seconds it would create that seamless feeling, you still have loading screens tho, it just shortens those. Tho from videos I just watched, it looks more like it just removed transitional animations... Which had zero effect on actual loading times, it just looks janky asf, in this case I would better stick with vanilla loading screens instead of having that glitchy mess to look at.
@@Zripas I thought the literal exact same thing dude. I thought I’d be much better off playing with loading screens because of how bad it looked. But dude you gotta try it. It really transforms the game and fixes it for me and many, many others. The game is even better than what the direct showed now and everything feels 10x more seamless
@@Zripas I’m not trying to prove you wrong or anything I’m trying to help improve your experience with SF. The mod really makes everything seamless for the people who have it downloaded
My biggest issue is the radiant a.i being removed. Npcs in skyrim/oblivion had schedules and actually interacted with the world. Everyone is a lifeless zombie in starfield
Npcs do have a schedule in starfield, just not all of them. Shop keepers dont have it any more, but most of the other named npcs do have it. For example if you go to new atlantis residential district at 2am you'll find the nat station janitor npc there chilling with her boyfriend.
So if they studied data from nasa, they could've come to the realization, just how massive a planet is, right? Bethesda could easily keep their game scope to within 1 planet its moon and a few nearby asteroids. Might help them bring greater quality, reduce load screens, still keep the diversity of gravity, diversity in biomes (just look at earth's diversity in biomes), etc.
I wonder if the game is loadings fully populated scenes as one level instead of what tears of the kingdom or Elden ring. I Wonder if their engine can do asynchronous loading of scenes based on where you are in the world.
They literally could have just hid the loading screens behind animations. At least in my experience, none of the loading screens are long. However, i agree its immersion breaking with these load screens appearing all the time. They are generally a few seconds at most. I mean just look at grav jumping. Instead of flipping to a black loading screen, just extend the mid grav jump animation until the area loads.... "I wonder if the game is loadings fully populated scenes as one level instead of what tears of the kingdom or Elden ring." At least in space, a mod (that allows you to increase ship speed and manually travel in system). Proved entire systems are actually a single cell. You absolutely can travel from like earth to Pluto without a loading screen (provided you can go fast enough which that mod does). So each system is not unlike the full skyrim map. If you fast travel somewhere, there will be a loading screen, but you can walk there seamlessly. I mean clearly, lore wise ships have to have some sort of "super cruise" speed for getting around solar systems. Even the fastest class A engine ship (which class A's have the highest top speed). It would take DECADES real time to traverse the SOL system from like mercury out to pluto. i.e. the last mars lander that went to mars took 7 months to get there and it was travelling at 24,000mph. A class A engine ship and topped out boost speed only goes around 2000 mph (and only temporarily). It's clearly indicated ships don't grav jump in system, so there has to be a way they are achieving higher speeds than what we experience while in control. What they should do, instead of "fast travelling" you in system, select your destination then have you just go really fast to your next destination eliminating the loading screen.
When Bethesda released Fallout 76, I had no desire to get it. When starfield was coming out, I could feel the hype and a part of me wanted to get it, even after knowing how bad Fallout 76 was from the start. Good thing I was able to resist. Bethesda is my known copy-pasta developer.
how come outer worlds can manage 2 simultaneous companions that you have a bit of control over, including their progression, but Vasco cant navigate an open field without standing directly in front of my fkn gun? this is just one of many minor things that add up to a big issue in the game. Just feel like im constantly fighting the game code lol.
It does seem pretty shady to show the character jump into hyper space without having to fidget with that dang star map. It looks like the character is literally charting a course by interacting with nobs and dials on the ships control console.
Why the 28 dislikes? I'd really like to know why people didn't like the video. Do they disagree with your conclusion? I'd love to hear why they disagree.
Because these kinds of videos are just complaining and don’t really achieve nothing good for gaming. At least starfield gets you thinking about space exploration in a way that’s relatable. Unlike goofy mass effect and halo that kind fall too much into space fantasy.”
"You can do almost anything." One thing they could have done in spaceflight that would add a lot more sense of choice, and still have been pretty easy to implement? Don't police where you land. How would you feel in a ground-based RPG if the game stopped you from jumping off a cliff? RPGs, even Bethesda RPGs, don't try to prevent you from doing something stupid, even if it results in your death. In Starfield, I found it disappointing that I can't fly my ship into a gas giant or even right into a star. It should let you try to land on the Sun. Doing so should result in a sequence showing your ship being torn apart by arcing plasma, while your crew screams in terror in the background. Trying to land on a gas giant should show it being torn apart in supersonic winds, while your crew screams in terror. Trying to land on a water world should show your ship sinking beneath the water while being torn apart and battered by waves. You might even make this a little mini-game. Maybe if you had a ship with very high level shields, you could "land" on a star, enter the stellar atmosphere, and have very short time to escape. Too low a shield and you're torn apart instantly. But if you have enough shields and hull, you get less than a second to initiate a jump to get you out of there. You might even have an "emergency jump" button, where it just sends you to a random location. Similar challenges could be built for landing on gas giants, water worlds, etc. This would be similar to other RPG mechanics, where you sometimes can actually save yourself from falling off a cliff, if you're able to for example cast a flying spell or similar. Being able to fly to dangerous and even immediately deadly places is one of the fun aspects of a space game. Imagine if there were a few systems that were simply black holes. You could have a fun role-playing element of being able to jettison cargo directly into the black hole. Imagine if you were playing on the SysDef side against the Crimson Fleet. How satisfying would it have been if after the quest line, you could dump Delgado's outfit into a black hole? Maybe when you do so, the black hole lights up in a burst of energy as the objects you jettison are reduced to atoms and then forever swallowed. And if you tried to land on the black hole instead of orbiting it, your ship would meet the same fate. After all the times Sarah yelled at me, I would have loved to be able to just fly her, the ship, and myself into a black hole a few times. I compare this to a very different space game, Kerbal Space Program. Kerbal doesn't hold your hand. It lets you attempt to land on gas giants. You can launch a manned mission to the Sun. Yes, this destroys your ship, but that's what save files are for. It just really breaks the immersion of a game when it just puts up a wall and says, "no, you can't fly here, it's too dangerous." Let me try to land on the Sun. Let me drown my ship in the endless depths of a water world. Let me, out of malice or carelessness, cause my character and all my companions to die horribly in an inescapable death trap. Space is dangerous. The universe is dangerous. Most is vast emptiness, and most matter in the universe is used to build objects and environments that would kill you in an instant. Most of the Solar System's mass is the Sun, with everything else a rounding error. Most of the rest in Jupiter. The universe is not a kind place for life. And the same should even apply to the ship itself. I should be able to airlock myself on accident. I should be able to deliberately open the hatch at any point and just instantly end the game. Maybe doing so requires throwing multiple switches to prevent accidental activation, but it should be possible. How awesome would it be if, while inside your ship, you opened the airlock, and your game ended with a cinematic of you, sans spacesuit, flying off into space as your ship rockets away in the distance? Space is dangerous. Space wants to kill you. The environment itself should be just as much a threat as the random pirates or religious zealots. To do a space RPG right, the environment itself needs to almost be treated as a character, a vicious sociopath who wants nothing more than to kill you as rapidly as possible. But in Starfield, this simply isn't the case. Nothing about space itself can kill you. Only people, ships, and animals present any threat to you as a character. It means that your exploration decisions have little real effect. The game simply won't let me go anywhere dangerous, and that really breaks the immersion. I've been playing computer games for so many years, and have seen such evolution of hardware, that honestly the loading screens don't even usually bother me that much. And even the hard limits on the distance you can travel from your ship could have been handled much better, if there was an in game reason for it. Maybe the reason you can't go more than a few kilometers from your ship is that your suit simply doesn't have a sufficient air supply. Maybe the max radius is the maximum distance you can go, even after several suit upgrades. In a way, that would be cool. It's not like the Apollo astronauts could freely walk a hundred miles across the lunar surface. But flat-out stopping me from flying somewhere dangerous? That really does break the immersion. Let me jump off a cliff. Don't hold my hand. Let me try to land somewhere instantly lethal. That's what save games are for. What we have in Starfield is instead a Fisher Price version of space, where all the real hazards are locked behind walls and your freedom is completely taken away.
The hate for Starfield is ridiculous and I think at least half of it comes from PlayStation fanboys disappointed it’s not on the PS5. This games level of customization is staggering, the space combat is great if you build your ship correctly and the planetary exploration is good enough for the initial launch of the game. The game is incredible and they’ll build on it just like every single other game that’s come out in the last decade, that is like it! If you don’t like it…I guess boohoo?
I can't imagine making an AAA Bethesda-style space exploration with sandbox open universe elements &...not bother programming First Contact gameplay??? Like did they not get what is exciting about being a space explorer?
Interestingly, the only criticism I have on the suggestions of exploration is the idea of a few hand-crafted planets to explore instead of what space exploration games provide. There is a reason why not one single game comes close to even allowing one planet of realistic size to be fully explored without having the points of interest quickly becoming repetitive. It's just not realistic. The same is unfortunately true of No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, Spacebourne 2, the Evochron series, etc... At the end of the day, exploration in games is either to find beauty in what was procedurally generates or to serve another game mechanic, such as resource gathering. My understanding of that probably saved me from disappointment on that front. I knew pretty much exactly what to expect. Knowing this was an RPG to begin with, and knowing the scope of the assets that would need to exist to cover it all, I was pretty sure that loading screens were inevitable. The loading screens I notice in every game. They are more more annoying in Starfield because they are front and center, rather than being hidden. It does say something that fast travel in Starfield is much less immersive than the long travel times in other games, testing our patience more despite being significantly faster to get us to our destination. To be fair, entering and exiting the ship takes as long as the auto-save. They could have just auto-saved without giving us a loading screen for the trouble. At the end of the day, however, I still love the game and will likely spend hundreds of hours playing it. It is, as with most Bethesda games, somehow much greater than the sum of its parts.
If they could have made exploration like No Man's Sky I think the amount of hate would be greatly diminished. Sure, there would still be problems with writing, companions, etc., but at least that environmental aspect that people play Bethesda games for would be somewhat in tact.
For me, my disappointment with Starfield is broken down into a few categories: Performance: I'll get this one out of the way quickly. The performance of the game is poor considering what we're getting in return. If the graphics were mind-blowing, the maps were gigantic, there were thousands of NPCs walking around, there were hundreds of ships in battles or whatever, then fine, I accept low FPS because I'm getting something incredible in return. In truth, we need really good hardware to get good FPS because we, the customer, have to cover for their ancient game engine. It's like buying a brand new car - is it better? Is it faster? Is it nicer? No... it's just we're not bothering to fix potholes in the roads anymore so you need something with better suspension in order to get a similar ride to what you had previously. Oh..... It came out immediately after Baldur's Gate 3: There are so many systems in Starfield that are very similar to Baldur's Gate 3 and where one game was a 10/10 in these aspects, Starfield was a 6/10. Moving away from brilliant dialogue presented in a very similar way, choices that dramatically affect the playthrough, interesting companions who have a diverse range of thoughts and beliefs and so on to what Starfield offers was really jarring. It was far too similar in what it set out to do with far too large a gap in quality. I remember seeing developers panicking, desperately telling people "don't expect our game to be like BG3" and I can see their point to an extent but if you look at something like the dialogue, why couldn't Starfield have lines that sound like they were written by a human instead of AI? It's just too dated: Bethesda are in a tough position here. They make a very specific game and then tweak it so that it becomes Fallout, Starfield or Elder Scrolls. The underlying mechanics in this game are the same as they were in Skyrim - a game that in some ways, already felt a bit dated when it launched! The way characters move, they way they look, they way they interact with the world and so on.... it's just like playing Skyrim again. I don't know exactly how they build their games but it feels to me like they have a template that provides a functioning, empty Bethesda RPG game with a skill tree, animations, a set of companions, some powers, a set of generic enemies etc and they go from there. That means you're always playing the same game - just with different skins and different maps... What was the last big, genuine innovation Bethesda had in one of their RPGs? Exploration - going off the beaten path: This has always been my favourite thing about Bethesda RPGs. I'd set off to do a quest and 3 hours later, I'd remember I was supposed to be doing the quest I'd set out to do before I got distracted by all the cool stuff I found. That doesn't happen in this game. For me, that's what people talk about when they say "Bethesda Magic" and it's entirely missing in Starfield. Without that, you're missing the key thing that makes Bethesda games unique - the thing that makes us overlook all of the 6/10 stuff. If you played Skyrim but there were no caves or buildings - it was just empty fields wherever you went, you'd stick to the main storyline and would get bored pretty quickly. That's what we have with Starfield.
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There are many times that you know of abandoned mines before you land on a planet and you CAN land next to one, did that a few times
The organic player generated hype around starfield pre lauch was the most braindead thing i have ever seen. like weve gone well beyond "fool me once, fool me twice" and gotten into "fool me again, and again and again and again and again and again!". At this point the people who legitimately actually got hype for starfield (and are old enough to remember Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and 76) have only themselves to blame. They are legitimately cognitively impaired.
I was quite saddened by how boring the worlds were among other things. Space as we know it is more boring than fiction; however, I've read NASA and other programs' stuff on various exoplanets and the planets/moons of our own system and I must say there are some neat things out there they didn't depict. A few moons in our own Solar System are featureless, gray rocks in the game despite probes showing a more interesting environment (mountains, more color, etc.). And no waterworld exoplanets (although they had no underwater exploration so inevitable I guess) or lava exoplanets was another shame since such things likely do exist.
I dont know why people are surprised by Todds actions. He has a track record for lying about his products. He's a marketing master and successfully builds up the hype to fever point then sits back and counts the cash that these poor people have shelled out on his mediocre products. Sad really because the potential for Starfield was huge but they chose quantity over quality. We all wanted a King Tiger but got a Sherman......😢
I think they should have done the Jedi survivor/outcast space travel mechanics when warping to a new system You can build these enormous intricate spaceships that have all of these different modules inside and you can have a crew of like 10 people The game allows you to at any point leave the pilots chair in space and go explore your ship. But as far as actual space travel goes there's never really a reason to do that cuz you're always just going to instantly load into your next objective / destination If they made more things to do on the ship it would be fun to kind of hit the gravity drive and then have the option to hang out on your ship. Make it really feel like a mobile base for you I don't know ultimately I have accepted what Starfield is and I've had a good time with a lot of it, but I do think it has a lot of flaws and it definitely was misleading pre-release. But it's going to be one of those games that I don't uninstall for a long time. Excited to see what mods will do for it
@@ertymexx Yeah my current ship has an engineering room and a captain's quarters and all of these things that ultimately serve no purpose. Otherwise it's only as big as it is because I'm jamming enough beds in there to have a big crew on it...
It tried to be both a space exploration game and a bethesda rpg at the same time and failed at both. Bethesdas engine cant make a seemless galaxy that you can travel through like other space explorer games, but trying to fit a thousand procedurally generated worlds means you dont get a great hancrafted map to explore like in older Bethesda games If it had just dumped the space explorer aspect and marked itself as a new classic bethesda rpg with fully handcrafted maps it would have been a lot more enjoyable to explore.
The followers are pretty much baby sitters like when a DM in a pen and paper RPG puts a lawful good NPC with the party to keep them behaving themselves.
I think the biggest thing for me regarding Starfield's quality is that this is supposed to be Todd Howard's baby. His passion project that he wanted to make for over 20 years, and it was all backed by Xbox's budget. And what do we get? A cookie-cutter Bethesda game we've already played, but set in space. This doesn't give me faith for what Elder Scrolls VI is going to be.
Well, none of this in unexpected. Bethesda have made a game like this before - called Daggerfall. Massive open world, biggest ever created probably. Almost all of it procedurally generated. It didn't really work for the same reasons folks find the planets in Starfield boring after the first couple. So what did Bethesda do about that? They made Morrowind which instead was a vastly smaller but immensely detailed hand-crafted island packed full of hand-crafted life and stories.Morrowind worked far better than Daggerfall. Since Morrowind Bethesda have game by game swung around from the procedural generation found in Daggerfall to the the hand-crafted content found in Morriwind and back again. Oblivion veering towards Daggerfall a bit with the endlessly repeating Oblivion gate sequences and level matching, then FO3 and Skyrim going back to Morrowind with almost exclusively hand-crafted content, then FO4 putting a lot more procedurally generated stuff back and now Starfield going full on Daggerfall. The reputation of Bethesda games is almost always in inverse proportion to the % of procedural content in them, so Morrowind, FO3 and Skyrim have the highest reputation. Basically folks play RPGs because of story and at this time you cannot generate satisfying stories procedurally. Starfield also has the disadvantage of being a space game and the problem with space is...space. Space = nothing by definition so it's very difficult to generate compelling content in space outside of occasional incidents. Almost everything in space is endless sameness and boredom as everyone who takes a trip to Mars in the future will come to realise only too well. This means the more realistic you make a space game the less entertaining it will be. And nowhere is this more obvious than with Chris Robert's game Star Citizen. He's spent 12 years and $700m on it and so far produced just one out of the promised 100 solar systems to explore and even that one isn't completely finished yet. Roberts may be trying to avoid the Starfield problem by hand-crafting every corner of every planet but so far he hasn't succeeded and I'm not going to holding my breath over whether he actually will succeed. It looks to me as though he will probably run out of whales to fund actually fund finishing it and it will eventually get released in some half-baked form far short of expectations. Basically space games are very difficult to make entertaining unless you concentrate on a very specific aspect of life in space. The three aspects that that are known to work the Stellaris model of 4X game, the Wing Commander model of mission based space shooter (Elite Dangerous for example) and the space economy simulation exemplified by X4: Foundations. The one big open world space game that does work is Eve Online and that works because its an MMO and the players are constantly writing their own stories. So it's no surprise to me that Starfield has worked out the way it has. Decent main plot line, a few good side quest lines, the rest distinctly meh. That's why I've been playing BG3 instead.
as soon as they confirmed that no seamless landings and take off are loading screens i knew it would be held back by their anciebt game engine and all was just empty talks.
you did your life bearing planet calculation backwards by the way, you subtracted 100 from 700 instead of taking 10% of 700 which gives you 70, not 600. You basically said there were 600 planets worth checking out (feature complete, not empty barren rocks) on accident.
Thank you for the correction. I still stand by what I said, regardless of whatever the true number of explorable planets are, they're mostly just boring.
It feels more like there are about 5 or maybe 6 different biome types which cover the entire planet except where they actually put curated content on top.
So yes ok you have 1000 planet, but if you can only visit a third of those - even then you are still getting only 6 or 7 types just with varieties.
It's all the same to me if the rocks are slightly yellow and shiny or white and matted. Long as they're not cut lol jokes but you get my point.
Nevada desert is Nevada desert - whether it is slightly green or has blue daffodils. Calling it 100 desert planets when it's actually 6 squares of desert flavoured flat landscape it's just a bit lame.
But I keep thinking they could just do 1000 $25 DLC's one for each planet with a new main quest and a new artifact or whatever.... That would please most of it's players.
That is what this will become, Starfield MMO!@@bvvillz1
@@bvvillz1 what did you expect? They are glorified resource hubs, like mines in skyrim
@@conordyer2307I haven't even played it and I expected exactly what it was. Hype train needs to be unborded. STOP pre ordering STOP getting uour expectations up for new releases. Just stop lol. This is like a child who sticks his fingers in a power outlet over and over again expecting not to get shocked.
Then tell then to stop deceiving there consumers too
They marketed the universe as practically unexplored, like you would discover all kinds of things. But instead you got the “Settled System”. The colony war already happened, every interesting story is in the past, every planet is littered with buildings most of which are occupied and even the empty ones are all so clean it feels like someone just stepped out. Rather than being an explorer the game presents the world to us as if we are late to the party. The game world tells us of all this amazing stuff that already happened, what is the point of exploring the known.
That's a very interesting point. Imagine if the game took place during the colony war. And you the player could influence how the war ends and which side is victorious. Kinda like a galactic size version of the Imperial and Stormcloak war.
Yeah, that was very immersion-killing for me. I felt less like an explorer on new worlds and more like a kid exploring the neighbourhoods back yards. "Let's check out what it looks like behind the grocery store!" It even became outright silly when you are supposedly the first to visit a temple that lies not a kilometer away from a science complex, a military station and/or a settlement. And no one has botherded to visit the clearly built, ancient ruins? Seriously?
Everything worth “discovering” is within view of some sort of human settlement. The only logical possibilities are either that it has been discovered already or that the people in that settlement are literally blind.
Having to choose sides in the civil colony war and fighting against mechs and xenos sound just like too much fun for Bethesda.
@@vincer7824 They stole being the Dragonborn from Skyrim, why not the Civil War too?
Todd Howard marketed it as a space exploration game… but in reality it’s just a fast travel simulator lol
Buggy fast travel ourdated lazy soul less simulator.😀
It's a casual shooter with a lite space theme.
Amen to that.
I thought u were gonna say something original.....fast travel simulator is a gay thing to say, come up with something urself about this piece of shit game
It tried to be both a space exploration game and a bethesda rpg at the same time and failed at both.
Bethesdas engine cant make a seemless galaxy that you can travel through like other space explorer games, but trying to fit a thousand procedurally generated worlds means you dont get a great hancrafted map to explore like in older Bethesda games.
Todd is the new Peter Molyneux.
The fact people are surprised after he did the same thing with 4 and 76 is hilarious
He lied about Fallout 3 too, 200 endings... or maybe youre not old enough to remember... when he did the play by play tru DC with his hunting rifle presenting the game.. Hes always been a lying snake oil peddler.
Yeah, the dude is like a politician. Flip-flops like no tomorrow
The dude always overpromises and always under performs. Honestly, if the world was more active in punishing him for his bad practices, he probably wouldn't have a company to this day.
No one was suprised. Todd was a meme for years now. He's been lying since Oblivion.
I had similar experiences that left me stunned with how undercooked and brain dead writing, story, and quest design is in Starfield. I randomly came across a ship captain hailing for help. When I accept his hail I hear the captain shout then suddenly a new person comes over the mic to say "everything is fine, go away". BS! I see what's going on, naturally I pick dialogue option to attack and begin tearing through the ships shields so I can board and confront the people who killed the captain. All my companions now suddenly hate me.
I think, maybe I need to get farther into the dialogue before I attack and then it will work... Silly me. I reload the auto save from entering the system and accept the hail. The new person again says "go away" I go through dialogue options to interrogate them. Voice lines hit you over the head to make it obvious the situation is not fine.
New person "whispers" the loudest whisper ever to her companion to "hurry up". Her companion "whispers" back as if he is closer to the mic than she is "working on weapons systems". I have to go through more dialogue options and hear more of this insultingly obvious "whispering" until they get the ship fully online and the new person says something to the affect of "should have minded your own business" when I am booted out of dialogue and into control of my ship.
Combat doesn't trigger. I wait a few seconds thinking it will, it doesn't, so again I initiate combat. All my companions now hate me....
WHY!?
Someone is in trouble or murdered! I am trying to get onto the ship to assist or avenge this pilot from the villains who harmed them. THIS SHOULD BE THE GOOD GUY THING MY GOOD GUY COMPANIONS LIKE!?
Why am I not rewarded or punished based upon how quickly I pick up that something is off, getting to quickly board an already disabled ship or have to engage in a tough fight if they get the ship operational. Why are the villains voice lines more telegraphed obvious than play along portion of a Dora The Explorer episode, "WhEr iS tHe BaLl? cAn YoU fInD tHe BaLl?!". Why are my companions less aware than my 2 year old niece.
I know why, and it's not my companions who are't smarter than a 2 year old. I'm done with this brain dead game. I won't finish its story. There are redeeming qualities to Starfield, it can be fun but its successes live deep in the shadow of its faults. I'm done playing but not done ripping Bethesda for this half baked nonsense. I don't want Elder Scrolls 6 to end up this way.
Yes- the fast travel is not even the worst aspect of Starfield. They could remove all the loading screens tomorrow. And fix every bug. Yet it would still be 99.99% repetitive, with bland writing and dull characters. It's 4 or 5 decent locations, with 4 or 5 interesting quests, drowning in a ton of useless proc gen filler, just acting as busy work. It's a 6 hour game stretched to infinity - no brain engagement required.
I once got attacked by a ship when fast travelling to a planet. I attacked it back, boarded it, and as soon as I killed the last person my companion despised me and left. The crew on the ship were all "security", but they attacked me, shouldn't I be okay to defend myself?? Come on, Bethesda. At least if you're going to make me fast travel to get random encounters, could you at least make it so I don't have to reload and ditch my companion to even be involved in the encounter?🤦♀️
The ending will make you feel like nothing you did the entire time was worth it at all
Do not create expectations for TES VI, boy. Never trust Bethesda
Success deep in shadows of fault
I’d love for this to be a series on games that betray their marketing. Great work and I hope that you keep it up 😌
Possible title: "Are We Talking About the Same Game?"
Just an FYI there absolutely is dynamic weather. You may not notice it unless you spend a lot of time in a specific location and it is definitely far less frequent in major hubs like new Atlantis or Akila city. On my outpost however, it's rained, been clear and sunny, foggy.
it definitely snows on the right planets too.
New Atlantis was storming with lightning strikes last night in my game.
The Dynamic weather is very very random - it seems to more common on some worlds than others.
Correct. There is rain and snow.. it was a blizzard when I landed on one and started to cause damage so I went indoors, later when I emerged it was clear skies. It was great. He should have touched on Vendors barely having any money to deal with
The problem is its so spread out and random it never feels like its there
Yeah, balance between fun and realism. Love the fun feature that if you walk around in spacesuit and walkthrough a poison cloud and your lungs take damage, fun indeed.
1441 planets can be landed on, 1695 can be scanned.
There was a guy on Reddit that attempted to survey every planet, and 2 were bugged.
I have said this elsewhere, but when I compare everything I see in the released game with what was revealed in the Starfield Direct presentation, I see exactly what I expected to see.
They SHOWED us what the game was going to be. They showed the loading transitions between locations. Including loading from ground to space. But many of us convinced ourselves that they weren't showing us everything. That we'd be able to fly from ground to space. Or fly in the atmosphere, or seamlessly transition between areas. In spite of what we were shown, we allowed ourselves to be blinded by personal assumption, rather than simply accepting facts in evidence.
In the Direct, we were TOLD that the game was going to be a Bethesda game through and through, and yet many of us act surprised that it has the same design style that has defined Bethesda games for two decades.. I paid attention to what I saw in the Direct, and I listened carefully to what was said. And in my mind, I visualized EXACTLY what I see in the released game.
What people think ought to be and what is are often two different things. What they showed and told us what IS did not temper many people's idea of what ought to be. And they don't want to admit that their expectations were anything but their own personal assumptions. The facts speak for themselves. But the tantrums I see some people throwing are loud and obnoxious. They chose not to take the Direct at face value, believing that somehow, there was some cryptic implication that the game was going to be more than they were presenting.
And here's something else. Just because they were not locking the framerate at 30FPS for the PC version did not mean that it was going to run at extremely high framerates on ULTRA-HIGH graphics settings on current tech. Again, that was an assumption on our part. That is not to say that there were no bugs impacting performance. But I know from 20 years of experience that every BGS RPG to come out has always been massively resource intensive. Even systems with recommended specs struggled, but upgrading to the next new iter of tech often made them run butter smooth. So when they say they optimized for next-gen PCs, they literally mean NEXT GEN. As in not anything available in THIS GEN. That's what Todd meant when he said they did optimize the game for PC, but that we may have to upgrade our PC.
See there's results we expect, and results which are. Given time, the results we expect will be the results which are.
We can't upgrade consoles like we can our PCs. That's why they locked the framerate for consoles. But since we can upgrade our PCs there is no reason to lock the framerate.
Absolutely. The Starfield direct was what convinced me to pre-order the game, since I felt it did a great job showing the player what they can expect. In retrospect the most you can get angry at is the typical marketing vagueness that allows potential consumers to "draw their own conclusions", but that's commonplace in any industry let alone Bethesda Game Studios' marketing presentations.
Angry drama clickbait is what gets churned out by the social media algorithms though so what's true and verifiable doesn't really matter if you can get enough people to ride the hate train.
@@sieda666Agreed honestly, I payed attention to the direct and I pre-ordered the game. I was very satisfied with my purchase. I just wanted something better than the outer worlds, and they delivered. Another reason I pre-ordered the game was because I wanted to build my own spaceship. Now I am playing the game and I built myself 2 fast attack destroyer style ships, one I named Ravager and the other one I named Goliath. I am really enjoying the game.
Bethesda deserves to be taken to task and ultimately exposed. No more messing around, no more making excuses.
Its too bad that the younger naive crowd outnumbers the older discerning crowd. More and more young people are gonna keep corrupting the market as the years go on. We basically will have to ignore 80% of AAA releases going forward, only 20% of studios will make less successful but better games that are meant for people with that have two or more brain cells to rub together.
Like they should get sued or what?
Nah. Brand loyalty is strong. This is the warm up for TES6 on the same engine. They are seeing how little actual game design and creativity they can get away with and still make gazillions. TES6 will have lots of islands you fast travel to in a galleon...filled with pirates and cowboys, I mean bandits. It's going to be Starfield in Tamriel - you heard it here first!
This makes no sense just some nerd whining about a company
@smokenweasel420 just by your name, we can safely assume "this makes no sense" is your natural state.
the funniest bit about this game is how badly it exposed the mainstream gaming press
What do you mean?
@@ertymexx i mean the early glowing reviews were bought and paid for
@@numberonedad Exactly!!!!Great comment
This video is well made, thank you for the critical and yet still balanced review
Bethesda has evolved from a AAA developer to essentially a AA developer with a AAA marketing budget.
When Oblivion and Skyrim released they were considered cutting edge and even ahead of their time in some regards. Then Bethesda got
complacent. The success got to their heads. They thought they could do no wrong. And Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and especially Starfield felt incredibly outdated for the years they released in.
In a year where we have games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Armored Core 6, Cyberpunk 2.0, RE4 Remake, Dead Space Remake, Jedi Survivor or Hogwarts Legacy “Skyrim/Fallout in Space” simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
This comment, I like it. I couldn't have said it better myself. You're spot on, this type of game is only tolerated because of nostalgia alone. If it were any other studio this game would not be considered a AAA product.
Nah, to be fair, it started earlier than that. I got to know Bethesda through Morrowind, it was buggy but (for its time) massive. And it was an early game to allow modding openly. This created a blooming modding community that, as far as I know, are still at it to this day. This created a bit of a problem though. Because modders often solved issues better than Bethesda did, people started remembering the modded game, which of course was better and richer than the still good but not flawless original. In later games, Bethesda started relying on the modding community to fix the problems or fill in the gaps for them. This has been true in ever greater scale in every game. Even in ESO, the MMO, a lot of features are perfected and even created by modders. Simple life-hacks that should have been in the game from start have been created by modders, and, on a few occassions, later adopted by the devs as an official patch.
Starfield is just a result of this. There are so many things in the game that are missing that modders will probably fix for them - a rudimentary and impractical UI, especially for items. Little or no explenation on how to do things (hence the ridiculous amount of "tips" and "how to"-videos on the gameplay). A settlement system that is clunky, especially when dealing with resource management with other outposts. Big empty worlds oddly full of industrial buildings. Ridiculous environment damage (see my earlier comment on that). Broken quests. And on the first patches, what do they do? Add graphical candy. And I see a lot of people just shrug it off - "nah, the modders will fix it". Yes, they will, but SHOULD they? Is it their (unpaid) job to fix a broken game?
My biggest gripe is that there are human settlements on EVERY planet, due to procedural generation. I wish that some were completely barren from human interaction. Even among planets with life on them.
All the deserted research labs are filled with enemies! It's amazing how little tech has progressed, given all those research labs. Humans seem to have forgotten about the wheel, let alone the radio.
@@OrangeNash Radios have an inlore reason: Radio waves travel at the speed of light, making messages between stars take years and decades. Easier and more effective to gravjump parcels and such. But there are radio communication within the same planetary systems.
The game does go some way to explain this. There is an easy to find audio slate which state this stuff is all remnants of the War and in the same slate it's encouraging pirates to get out there and scavenge all they can from these locations.
That is the problem with procedural generation that people do not or choose not to understand. It is not simple drop this number in and get perfect map out the other end.
Starfield fails here in that they have far too few assets and they are functionally divorced from the environment. So no matter what planet they the same basic assets are randomly scattered with zero reason or logic.
Star Citizen is trying to create separate procedural tools for planets, biomes, missions, and outposts, with some handcrafted for major set pieces, and as they are discovering it is brutally hard to integrate all of those to get a good final result. When it all comes together it is outstanding, but it is also more than a wee bit buggy
I've see a lot of people say they "lied". They didn't. They built up an imaginary thing in their head and were disappointed when it didn't live up to their fantasy.
except that they lied of course
@@Soapy-chan Okay, what did they lie about? I'll wait.
The best description I've heard of this game is "As wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle."
In my opinion they lied big time. Let's remember this : when you are marketing a game, you are marketing a product and you start to say all the good things about that product with the intention to sell it. Todd said that we could do whatever we want to from the very beginning of the game : lie ! When we start the game, we are forced to join the Constellation and there is no way that we can skip that part. This is breaking the RPG rule that was supposed to be inherited in this game. That did not happen in Skyrim and Fallout 4 for example.
Exploration : why should I explore 1000 empty planets ? But Todd suggested that we should cause we will enjoy that. Where is the joy to explore planets that are practically empty ? He also said that this was Skyrim in space ... well it is not. Just because at the end you are a 'starborn' ( ridiculous ) and you get some power that you cannot use by the way, does not make this game equal to Skyrim and this was the selling point for him : making us believe this was another Skyrim in Space which is not.
What does this game brought to the table that we can say it is something completely new and that we never played before ? NOTHING. Foot combat is equal to Fallout 4.
Weapons are ridiculous. Only a couple of laser weapons and the legendary weapons are equal to regular with different name and color but exactly the same.
Air combat : nothing special there. Other games does it better. Ship building ? For what really ? To show off in UA-cam how expert you are in building ships and start feeding your own ego ? Ships that we cannot fly at all cause everything is fast traveling and 'black-holes' ( aka loading screens ) in abundance to the point that Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined do not get close to the amount of black-holes we have in this game.
Imagine if Bethesda gave this idea and resources to BioWare. If this was set in the mass effect universe it would be an instant hit
There's one thing in this video that I completely disagree. "Only 10% have life so only 10% have something to do" this makes no sense. Not having native life is not the same as not having anything to do, and it amazes me how much people make this completely nonsensical correlation.
The issue of temperature variations is a huge problem, actually. You can get a frostbite on a planet with a temperature of -40, yet can survive on planets with -200. You get burndamage for passing by a hot vent, but can promenade around on a planet with 300 degree temperature. It is just ridiculously inconsistent. And, you can get lung damage from approaching a gas ven - while in your space suit! On a non-oxygen planet! If the toxic gas from the vent got into your suit, lungdamage would be the least of your problems. This is done so mindblowingly stupidly that it kills immersion for me.
I would have made it so that different kinds of vents, atmospheres etc would have values, say, a hot vent has a rate of 10, and an inferno planet like Venus a rate of 100, just to say random numbers. Your suit then has different values against these elements (which they already have), and if it matches or is above the rate, you don't take damage. If it is equal to or very near the limit, you slowly take damage. If it is much too low, you take damage fast. But getting frostbite in a space suit at -40 and nothing at -200 is just silly. It makes it feel random and inconsistent.
I wish I had a Time Machine, then I could go back 3 months and cancel my preorder.
Very good video.
And one of the first I’ve seen to expose the real problem.
It’s really not that it’s a bad game. Which it is. But it’s not so bad apparently that some people still can’t enjoy it.
The REAL problem is that the way they marketed it was almost completely deceptive.
I like to think that a huge portion of us were really looking forward to an expansive space exploration game. I mean that is what they really tried to sell us.
I love space. I grew up reading books about the planets and all kinds of sci-fi. So to think of a game where I could travel to a thousand planets and do whatever I wanted?
But what they gave us was really just some crappy dialogue and fetch quests.
No craxy biomes to explore. No amazing and weird expanses.
Just rock fields.
It’s a shame.
Because had they marketed it as a space drama. Where you can be a this or that but didn’t focus on the exploration.
We would have had a better picture.
They lied.
They did.
And it was really unethical in my book which I guess is why I’m disappointed with the people trying to hold it up as amazing.
Yeah, 100% what you said. Next game I won't even consider buying.
Hype = sells = profits. If it is all a lie (or a "non-corrected missconception"), so be it. Profits are what matters.
If you haven't seen anything on the dev of Star Citizen, you might check that out.
Happy to answer any questions about it.
No crazy biomes. I've seen quite a few different "crazy biomes"
You seem very confused about the game. First off, it’s a roleplaying sandbox game, not an exploration game. If you play it as an exploration game you will be disappointed because everything is procedurally generated. If you play it as a roleplaying sandbox you won’t, because finding new things and drastically different environments won’t be a focus, the focus is roleplaying a character in a sandbox.
If you play it like a roleplaying-questing game, you may also be disappointed because some would call the quests mediocre.
You’re supposed to create your character and the adventure he/she will go on, then go on the adventure. And the adventure should not include quests if they are not necessary.
If you want to be a space ninja grab a katana and shred everyone. If you want to be a top class bounty hunter than grab some sick guns and act like you have aimbot. If you want to be a space cowboy do the same but with a pistol. If you want to be a jedi get the spacebourne powers. If you want to be a farmer you can farm. If you want to build a metropolis download a few mods. If you want massive capital ships download a few more mods to make some. If you want to settle down and live on an isolated planet living a normal life you can. The game is limitless. You can literally roleplay most space characters out there.
Absolutely manipulated the marketing in this game..
Overall I enjoyed the game. But there really isn't any real risk in the game. As a pirate for example, a smuggling mission can be an instant pass, lose everything or kill everyone. The load screen is constant in that process of - go to ship, load screen to destination, load screen to land, load screen back to station etc.
It's worth looking back at the direct. Where are the sandwiches? Where is the food they were so passionate about. There's stuff that is missing from that three week period between direct and releasw
The "1000 planets" thing was not a sell pitch used by bethesda, it was only used by Todd in the first Starfield gameplay trailer to describe the size of Starfield, not to make any implication on the amount of content you got in the game.
Planets don't need life to be "worth checking out", any planet is worth checking out, what matter are the locations, not the planets
I agree. I've landed on the majority of explorable planets and explored every single star system and space doesn't feel empty and unexplored at all. It feels randomly junked with actual junk, randomly floating in space with no explanation. Was there a space battle around this planet at the farthest reaches of the settled systems? Why is there an abandoned mine on a moon in the middle of nowhere? Why is a planet allegedly untouched by humanity filled with science outposts and refineries and random signs of habitation? And why does every single planet with the exception of the ones with specially curated and sculpted story locations feel **exactly the same**? The game looks and feels old. Even with my computer, which pushes the edge of what was commercially available two years ago, still gets loading screens. They last barely a second or two, but I might run into three of them in rapid succession if I fast travel to my ship, launch into space, and then fast travel to another moon or star system. And none of that includes the cheat screens like the airlock door from Cydonia to the Martian surface, or the typical tram loading screen that is reminiscent of Mass Effect Andromeda. And while I'm on that subject, there's very little to tie the game to the typical signature bombast and sweeping music that covers a multitude of gaming ills in other Bethesda offerings. My main experience with Inon Zur as a composer is his entries in the Dragon Age series, which defined the musical themes for the series from Dragon Age 2 onward. His contribution to Starfield feels uninspired, phoned in, lackluster. The only themes I could really pick out for you are 1-2 bars from the loading screen that occurs during grav jumps which also plays during the boss combats. It's only other notable occurrence is during the overblown "CONGRATS YOU'VE LEVELED UP" audio notification, which is longer and more intrusive on my game experience than just about any other game. The little "ding you leveled!" moment is something you look forward to in most games. I need those skill points, but god forbid I try to listen to dialogue when I suddenly hit a level during space combat or exploration or turn in a quest without the music suddenly swelling for my level up. Meanwhile in exploration of planets, we get occasional themes that feel cribbed from Mass Effect 1 and 3, except they're never strong enough to really make that comparison. Other Bethesda games - most other media in fact - ride on their score and sound signature. Starfield's signature feels like it ran out of ink.
Tl;dr, I enjoyed this game, so much so that I have two completionist runs (one during an NG+) over a 350 hour span. I do not want to open it again. At all. Unless future updates include some new story content, I probably won't.
i wanted to build an outpost on a remote barren moon. i found one with aluminum and iron and every single random spot on the moon i landed on, there was the same 3-4 points of interest, and every time i landed a "random" ship just happened to land a few hundred meters away.
so i guess this entire random moon is 100% covered in abandoned research outposts and mining stations, and has billions of random ships landing on every square km of it all the time
the game is beautiful until the illusion breaks and its so easy to break it. there's all this stuff to do but none of it really means anything or has any point. and the narrative content, while decent, feels extremely dated in its presentation.
But, tbh, as soon as I learned about procedural generation before release, I immediately knew, exploration wouldn‘t be a thing and what to expect. This was and is obvious, just the way this is functioning (wanted to avoid „the way it just works“😛). It is not quite the game I was hoping for, not the best game of the year (this title deservedly goes to BG3), not flawless, rather buggy. But: I like to play it, it‘s fun to build ships, as long as I stay to quests and don‘t explore (there simply is nothing to explore on my own) everything is still new, there are many of fun quests. Game is far less glitchy than Skyrim in 2011 and this is still a game I play.
So, is it a good game? Yes, as far and much as FO4. Is it a deep game? No. Could dialogues and AI be better? Hell yes. I see it as a sandbox for us modders to mod the hell out of it over years. It is just fun, a buffet of snacks, no elaborated 5 course meal.
Really great video. I'm sorry it had to be about your disappointment for this game. But I am happy to see how many views it's getting. I'm shocked more people haven't subs after this video. I for one have joined the ranks of your subscribers. Although with this being pretty much your first and only video, I'm confident you'll pick up more along the way. Looking forward to seeing what else you create and wish you luck and good fortune on your channels journey.
I would hope you do more video essays in the future. This was such a well-done critique I assumed it was a long-running channel that's had years of practice.
I really appreciate that, thank you
I did get dynamic weather. It was pouring rain when i landed, but cleared up towards the end of the mission.
I had my skepticism about starfield from the very start then when I played it I liked the game far more than I thought I would.
However after 70+ hours I haven't even really done any main quests or side quests for that matter, im, still flying the first ship but after upgrading it still can't take on any ships in battle, still have base level weapons and armour, no credits, no decent outposts etc.
I got my fun from landing on remote worlds and looking at the vistas and the fauna and some times this game really did give me a sense of awe and wonder but after a while that sense leaves you and your left with what feels like an empty game that somehow feels like it's punishing you with how convoluted it is like the ones writing it don't like the demograph who play the game.
I had to stop because I was seeing how many hours of my life I was putting into this game and it wasn't rewarding at all it felt like I got further and further away from myself and my character and felt like the game was stealing my time from me.
This is how all Game Pass titles will be, how they will be designed to be. Time sinks. That's the subscription-model game design at work.
There is no hope for The Elder Scrolls VI.
@@HickoryDickory86 so true man. It's gutwrenching but the hope for elder Scrolls vi is out the window at this point it will just be another politically and woke culture motivated crock of shite!
There’s always hope. Just no need for it to be blind
Also guy above me left a great comment. Shit got me gigglin
Whats crazy is Bethesda is the studio that got me into gaming..i got into pc gaming to olay modded skyrim, i have years put into that game. The fallout series was my first introduction but somehow i had no idea starfield was even cominf out this year. Completely missed all the hype somehow 😂
I never understood the hype for the game. I feel like I'm the only one who had this idea... Am I the crazy one? The second they mentioned procedurally generated planets, 1,000 to be exact, I knew the game wasn't for me. A Bethesda RPG has always been about high quality, manually created worlds and stories. There are limits to what a programmer can generate procedurally. Saying you have 1,000 planets basically means you have a bunch of highly similar content that likely will grow boring quite fast if not immediately. And from what I saw in reviews on Steam, that is exactly what happened, according to some sane people. You start to notice not just the same compounds filled with the same dudes across the galaxy apparently constructed by different people, but even the way sundry items fill the space starts to feel familiar. I also expected the flora and animal life to be repetitive too, because if it weren't, it would likely fall victim to another procedural nightmare of a game -- Spore. You just can't generate an infinitely large variety of life that satisfies a person using a program. Sorry. Tons of my friends bought the game, and they all disliked it or gave it a meh. I can't comprehend why they would do that after the 1,000 planet reveal. Now, the more optimistic side of me hoped that the huge planet exploration thing might be optional, and perhaps, the parts pieced together by a human could make for a playable, fun game. Unfortunately, according to many on Steam, that just didn't work out. I hear awful claims like the game is boring as shit until you reach the 10 hour mark. Jesus...
Let's throw into the mix that this pile of dung delayed Elder Scrolls 6, which we can only hope doesn't get messed up by corporate suits performing studies on your typical gamer in an effort to maximize profits rather than emphasizing the creation of a great game that will dazzle people for a decade to come. When I saw gameplay of Starfield before its launch, it only calcified my understanding that the game would be boring, because every clip looked exactly the same. You had space pirates wearing space suits, you were in a space suit, and everyone was shooting shit at each other. There was a rocket pack. Every damn clip looked exactly the same. Also, the combat always took place in some metal complex. Now, contrast that against something like the Elder Scrolls franchise where you have mushroom trees, elves of a few flavors, orcs, giant rats, Daedric demon gods, murder cults, grand large cities filled with the richest, shanty towns, alchemy, magic, melee weapons, bow and arrow, dragons, hundreds of books filling in the backstory of the world you're in, vampires, ghost things, dwarven constructions, ancient (religious?) tomb areas from a long lost era, thievery, the quests of many different guilds with different aims, politics, real characters you feel you get to know, nobility, murder contracts, regular imperial humans, prophecy, bandits, bears, wolves, giant trolls, religions, destiny, running into random people while travelling, gladiator battles, blind monks guarding shit, reanimated skeletons, dastardly sorcerers, good sorcerers, addictive and illegal drugs (skooma), Nords, Khajiit, goblins, and much much more. So you've got all this cool shit to captivate you as you explore and do shit versus whatever you do on random planets in Starfield... go into a research facility and kill space pirates I guess with 15 loading screens in between travel. And I'm not even remembering all the valid complaints. One person said they basically backstabbed a companion, and in the very next conversation, it was as if nothing had ever happened. The game is just filled with bad design. They bit off more than they can chew -- more than any team of programmers can chew. I think I'd rather play Knights of the Old Republic from the 2000s over this pile of trash if I ever feel like exploring a space-oriented world, and I'd rather not play Starfield than play Starfield. Ouch.
It's OK to have a video game that is based on something like just the existence of a regular human race, but Jesus, you do not want a game like that to be 200 hours long like they boasted with 1,000 repetitive planets. The length of prior Bethesda titles had so much variation to justify their length. They weren't perfect, but they were flat out fun. I honestly think the people who got wowed by transparent marketing are the only ones writing positive reviews for the game, because they need to, in their head, not feel like they got duped. You did get duped. You cannot write a positive review that doesn't mention a single bad thing about the game. That's just not an honest review then. That's delusion. That's a person getting tricked and not wanting to think of themselves as a person who can get tricked. Look, maybe one and a half decades ago, I used to watch promotional material and grow so excited for certain games. Let's just say that I actually learn my lesson. After I saw how disconnected the promises of Spore were from the actual game, I never got excited for another game ever again. Each and every game I buy, I wait both for the horrific bugs and performance issues to iron out plus for a group consensus to arise on whether the game is good, decent, or bad. The proof of the pudding is in the eating as Ben Frank used to say. Stop preordering games, especially ones who use dishonest tactics like FOMO or ones that sell the ultimate edition that fundamentally is a company selling to you a few basic cheat codes / a little less of a grind (like "You start with 1,000 currency and level up faster!" Oh really? How about making a singular gaming experience that is fun and balanced, and rather than intentionally making the US$60 version of the game less fun for absolutely no reason, you just have a single version that is the damn game tuned to how the designers meant for you to play it for the best time possible. Seriously, start boycotting companies that treat you like shit. Consumers have all of the power in this relationship, and companies will make public statements promising not to do shit like selling cheat codes and FOMO if people actually notice the disrespect the companies are dishing out to their paying customers and therefore stop buying (or worse preordering) every god damn game that comes out. Stop being a mark, a sucker, a dumbo. God, it is infuriating, because I have to deal with all these horrible tactics since no one seems to respect themselves enough to demand basic human decency from the companies they reward with their dollar.
I just want to come across quirky quests and unique feeling situations as a reward for my exploration but it never really happens
I'd call it a unhappy median between Outer Worlds and No Man's Sky. Lacks the of the depth of plot, likeable characters, and hand crafted immersive environments of Outer Worlds and lacks the wonder, scope, exploration, and seamless nature of No Man's Sky.
this is the most eloquent description of Starfield I've seen anyone comment to date, a good but not great game
I agree with you 100%. I've played both of those games and you summed up Starfield perfectly.
"We want you to feel like an explorer" and "We want you to feel like you have control every step of the way" are two sentences that shouldn't be able to coexist. Venturing into the unknown REQUIRES being able to let go of control and accept whatever happens.
Bethesda just didn't know what made exploring the worlds of the elder scrolls and/or fallout good
Having watched a number of Starfield and No Man's Sky videos recently, I am amazed at how many (usually American) people don't know the difference between a solar system and a galaxy!
I just realized as soon as I read that what my mistake was, you got me lol. I meant to say our own solar system during that part. Thank you for the correction
@@bvvillz1 Just to be really pedantic, 'our' Solar system is the only solar system as it's the only one with Sol, the others are planetary systems (though calling them star systems will do). Nit-picking, I know, but they are what they are.
“Nitpicking, I know”. Hey, long as you know that you’re no fun lol
@@zenayurvedic lol Nitpicker gets nitpicked! You win!
Or the diff of planets and moons.
Ummmm…. It certainly does have weather changes and a planet made of water? Have you not visited the city Neon? It’s literally a platform city on top of a planet of water.
While you certainly have some valid critiques, much of this seems very nitpicky and kind of “you issues.”
1:24 "Where you weren't REALLY limited" Yet another example of classic marketing speak. It's TECHNICALLY correct. It's true. He didn't say we won't be limited AT ALL, he said "weren't really" limited, which is naturally limited wording!
But, in the context of that showcase and knowing Bethesda's past games - the wording is clearly designed to make the viewer THINK they heard Todd say you could literally go anywhere, as far as you want. But you can't, and what he meant only truly becomes clear in hindsight.
It seems like they were almost done developing it, and then they realized Todd said you could do what you want in the game, so they frantically created the Walter negotiation in 5 hours and then said good enough.
Even as a massive Starfield fan, I can respect this video
Ive come across dynamic weather a few times... Have set up an outpost on a bright sunny day, and then came back to it in a full lightning storm.
When I first saw the trailer 1. Did not shown any free ship roaming in-atmo 2. Did not talked about any travelling experience 3. Did not talked about space event behavior & exploration in depth, I knew I'm probably not gonna like a big part of this game
Explore a "small confined bubble"? I've never hit the edge yet
Great video. I was wondering about how the space felt so boring and i realize that they did not use it in crwstive ways with wierd stuff like black holes and other things you mentioned.
That was a great point.
honestly beautifully put. lackluster and disappointing is how I would describe 90% of Starfield. I disagree with the ship building portion as well.
Clunky, frustrating, and confusing. So many hours spent piecing together my ship to only be met with a module error to ultimately give up and waste hours at a time because it wasn't worth going and interacting with the system to find and correct the error. Ship building worked, but felt like it was held together by duct tape.
Brother the man’s most famous words are “it all just works” said about a game that had a list of bugs so long it would be faster to read a list of things in the game that actually functioned how they were supposed to.
Yes he lied. He lied to get your money and every other person who watched him’s money. And it worked. His reputation takes another hit from the people who still buy his broken trash but who cares about reputation when you can swim in money from multiple successful scams? Not Todd Howard, that’s who.
It worked because people who bought starfield are the same type of people that spend 90$ on a game that is available cracked by pirates and entire week before official release, as Bethesda doesn't use anti piracy software. For a single player game.
So, morons.
There is like 3 different planet biome in Jedi survivor, how is that better than the 30+ biome you get in Starfield ?
Starfield is clearly the space game with the best proc gen system and the best planet diversity, that's like people expected Starfield to be Star citizen but without the 20 years of devlopment
"Keep your expectations low, boy, and you will never be disappointed" -The Buddha & Kratos
I get why people would think it's boring. Although boring in the context of space isn't a bad thing in my book, it's thematic,
It's bad in the context of a video game that people expected from an RPG company. More people probably wanted Mass Effect space opera rather than No Man's Sky space wandering
It's a video game, throw in some alien hookers and more crazy sci-fi stuff, break the realism some more, it's fine. It's a video game, they didn't have to copy every boring aspect of space trekking
But it comes down to "expectations", and besides from perpetual misleading marketing, the gaming community is always perpetually over-hyped and over-expectant for the next best thing
But if you expected nothing, and then popped that Starfield up on Xbox gamepass its no doubt a massive space game worth Game Pass money. Between that, No Man's Sky, and Destiny 2, it's a great time to be a space cowboy
But rip if you spent $70 expecting Skyrim or Fallout 3 tho. Those were lightnings in a bottle for a different time. Just look at FO4 and FO76 (and now Starfield) and temper yourself. Best RPGs for this year are probably tears of the kingdom or Baldurs gate 3
But Starfield is probably the best space game for 2023
Interesting video bro!
As the first Bethesda game I ever bought it will also be the last one. When the seed sets a structure on one side of the valley , you explore than walk across the canyon to the next structure which is an exact facsimile in every way of the one you just searched through with every "enemy " who are dumber than a bag of rocks and exactly the same finds in exactly the same rooms and places and identical items it ruins any sense of exploratory immersion. Then you go to another planet and its exactly the same, so you cant even recollect is this the same planet or did i travel if you save and come back a couple days later.
Short answer: Yes they lied and manipulated tons and gamers fell for it
Great video man! Liked and subbed keep em coming
Lied about
Space exploration, being able to do whatever you want. Go wherever you want. Tons of different remote locations you find via planetary traversal.
Those are all lies lol.
@@GDKF0238 it just works
@@GDKF0238 those are most definitly not lies
This is a bigger lie than anything Bethesda claimed.
Board your ship? Loading screen
Travel to a planet? Loading screen
Land on a planet? Loading screen
Exit your ship? Loading screen
And?
You do nothing inbetween at all?
@@dusermiginte4647 absolutely nothing. Most of the planets in the game have literally nothing to do or see. So yeah the majority of the game is a loading screen. The only good parts of the game are the side quests.
This was like the 3rd game I’ve ever preordered, 1st and 2nd being Elden Ring & Lies of P. The amount of trust and care I lack now for Bethesda is insane. Todd has always been great at selling these games to us and propping them up. Even though this was my first time playing one of their games at launch, I still should’ve just looked at all the previous titles from the last 15 years to see why they wouldn’t have just stopped regressing and dumbing them down all of a sudden. This game was definitely my wake up call that Bethesda is absolutely fine with being average at best and sort of always has for me personally. They took the one best aspect from their games, the big world that felt great to to get lost in and explore, and took that out, so Starfield is just left looking barren and hollow when compared to many of the other amazing titles to drop this year. Can’t wait to watch from a distance how hard they butcher the next Fallout and Elder Scrolls :/
I purchased the game based on the statement from a big name Modder, who i will not name here, stated they were making plans to mod Starfield, so that gives me hope, and i believe the modding community will do wonders with this title, one thing positive about Bethesda is they do give us creator tools to make the game however we want it.
So, it's a bad take on the concept that "No man's sky" does better?
The fact that they had Elon Musk over for a consultation should have told you everything you needed to know. The whole thing was a scam from the start.
The story about Andreja being angry at you for letting go a thief perfectly shows how bethesda writers are a bunch of fuckups. They literally forgot about her back story OR the back story was added in the end as some kind of afterthought
What Starfield gets so wrong about exploration is that exploration isn't about pointing at a spot on a planet in a map and going "I want to go there." and then being teleported there instantly, it's about the journey, travelling from A to B just because, and then seeing C on the horizon and thinking "what is that?" and on the way there, you find D, E and F as well. You can't create that level of real exploration with travel that's dependent on instant teleportation, loading screens and procedurally generated planet surfaces whose landmarks are only determined when and if you decide to land there, not to mention landmarks that instantly show up on your hud as soon as you land. There was basically no cool moments of unexpected discoveries or payoffs into going towards interesting looking scenery.
I don't know who at Bethesda needs to hear this, but IT IS NOT exploration if the area you're meant to discover has a giant finger pointing at it the whole time!
The space flight was what broke it for me.
A space game where you can not actually fly to a planet. You just spin.
I mean, in fairness there are tons of space games like that. The problem is they made people think it would be NMS or Star Citizen with actual story content. When in reality the "space" part is actually just a little more interactive than say Mass Effect or the myriad or a Star Wars story driven game like Jedi Fallen Order or the single player KOTOR games (but no one shits on those games because you can't fly to a planet), mainly because it was marketed as an RPG where space is the back drop, they are not "space exploration games".
and that is where BSG dropped the ball, they really hyperfocused on exploration in marketing and what we got is underwhelming.
I ultimately think that is what killed it for people. Yeah the stories and characters are bland and uninspired, but that is Bethesda, I expected that. Their writing for stories and characters have always been amateur. If the actual Space sim aspect of the game had real depth. Being able to fly to and take off from a planet, fly in atmosphere of a planet, manually fly anywhere. The bland story telling or repetitive aspects would likely get a pass. Why? Because the games that Starfield is being compared to don't even have that.
@tsdobbi a shame. Looks like we are still years or decades away from the space game we all want. The inspiration and the technology just isn't there yet.
Space themepark Fallout is all that Starfield is. And that is perfectly OK for some people, but not me.
@@dimitri1154 I agree with your sentiment but I disagree that we don’t have the tech.
We simply lack the will from a studio to actually do it.
Now ok maybe not an entire galaxy but hey the game could start with maybe a handful of solar systems.
That you could seamlessly pilot craft to and from planets and around the planets.
I think we have the tech to do that.
@@davidpramaggiore9281 yes, but it requires time neither consumers nor publishers are willing to give. We're talking about filling entire planets with content! Haha
Well I knew there wouldn’t be planets, there would be loading screens and invisible walls around your ship, because I knew how the game engine works. What I didn’t know is they didn’t manage to have the game load while playing the long landing/takeoff/docking animations.
It's interesting you say that, I played through on PC, and there's a mod which removes the long docking/ unlocking animations. Which makes it instantaneous. So in theory they didn't need to be there, I think really should have made that an accessibility feature to toggle on and off in the settings. I should have made a segment talking about that.
@@bvvillz1 yes the animations don't need to be there because they're not doing anything while the animation plays. I'm sure they don't let you turn it off because it's the ONLY excuse for to claim that you're "flaying the ship" or "exploring the universe" rather than just teleporting from one map to another, which I always thought would 100% be the case since that's how Creation Engine works.
So will atmospheric flight be implemented in a future patch?
well that's not 100% true, hogwarts legacy does have load screens, but they are cleaverly hidden and are based on location of the player's position of the level design.
when the game first came out people noticed these load locked doors as the door to leave hogwarts was delayed, what was happening was the game was loading the next cell and getting rid of the interior cell of the previous cell you were walking away from, and when people complained about this, they fixed the issue by extending the load ahead of time to make it appear seemless to the player.
a lot of other games use this cleaver trick and bethesda also used this trick back in FO4, just not in starfield, so it's not that they didn't know how to implement this idea, it's that they chose not to use this trick which is really fucking dumb for the kind of game starfield is.
they used this method back in FO4, whenever the player used an elivator, the elivator was a load screen, it was basically loading up the next cell as it simulated that the elivator was moving up or down, so by the time the doors opened, it felt seemless.
using this cleaver trick could have helped make this game feel better for most players expectations.
Fair point, but that's exactly why I brought it up, you said it yourself, "cleverly hidden" you're right, all games have them in one way or another, some just do a better job at hiding it. My point was to show how starfield made zero effort
@@bvvillz1
oh i do agree with you on this, they defenatly could have done far better.
honestly i don't care that it's roughly a loading cell delay, if it feels seamless to the player because they used this little trick, than so be it, is my opinion on how that system works.
the newer tomb raider games did it very cleaveryly as well, they often put these load doors in a section where the player was going through some action in a cave sequence that was collapsing, the player was slowed down but it still felt epic during these obvisly slowed down sequences but they were also very cinemetic transition scenes.
but i think in starfield they were focusing more on the fact that they could make the load screens shorter, and the only way they could do this was to make the landscape you were transitioning in or out of was to make the box or cell less populated and less big, but that's also the same reason why people needed the SSD as a requirement, i'm not sure what xbox uses for storage but i assume they use some kind of SSD equivilant to load games, idk, i haven't used anything on the xbox for nearly a full on decade so i have no idea, but even without an SSD the loading times would take less time because bethesda shortend how many assets could be used in any given location and made sure there was lots of empty space in between to give that look that it's endless, unfortunatly that same decision is why there are so many damn load screens on each and every planet location.
Star Citizen calls their system Object Container Streaming. Its so unnoticable that you can still interact with your environment as its happening.
@@festersmith8352
yeah star citizen gets away with this simply because you are playing the game with all the game contained within a server space from what i understand, but that also comes with it's own limitations that bottleneck the game when to many people are in a single server and location of the server, so that has to be limited to a degree in order to make that game playable for all playing the game.
my sugestion would be to limit how many people are in a single server location, because that might help in making that issue less bad.
though i bet star citizen would run so much better if nobody but NPC's and one player were in that server, problem with that is your running a very expensive game as servers cost a lot of money to run per month.
i think the least i have seen a server go for as in cost was 2 grand a month, that's quite a lot of money just to run a server for online capability which is why the goal of the game is to get as many players playing the game in the single server, but to many people causes the server to run like shit, so star citizen needs to find that happy medium in order to make it all work like a well oiled machine.
@@5226-p1e And the tech they have been working on to overcome what you have discussed is "server meshing".
Tech to pull this off is the reason for the long dev cycle.
I'm not a game designer so I don't know if this game can even be fixed. Opening up the worlds and changing ship traversal seems like it would be a massive undertaking. I didn't play No Mans Sky at launch but I think they already had the basics and worked out from there
Some loading screens could be removed or atleast speed up, but that would only be for specific things, like entering tiny shop/room. But yea, outdated game engine will not allow complete loading screen removal, not happening.
@@Zripas Actually there’s a mod that gets rid of every loading screen besides the loading screen that starts the game. It’s Janky asf but its an absolute game changer and a must have. It makes the game feel so seamless it’s hard to believe it’s the same game
@@jayg.2066
I mean, if you want to go that route then you could force async level loading when you get close to the door, and because level loading usually takes up only few seconds it would create that seamless feeling, you still have loading screens tho, it just shortens those. Tho from videos I just watched, it looks more like it just removed transitional animations... Which had zero effect on actual loading times, it just looks janky asf, in this case I would better stick with vanilla loading screens instead of having that glitchy mess to look at.
@@Zripas I thought the literal exact same thing dude. I thought I’d be much better off playing with loading screens because of how bad it looked.
But dude you gotta try it. It really transforms the game and fixes it for me and many, many others. The game is even better than what the direct showed now and everything feels 10x more seamless
@@Zripas I’m not trying to prove you wrong or anything I’m trying to help improve your experience with SF. The mod really makes everything seamless for the people who have it downloaded
My biggest issue is the radiant a.i being removed. Npcs in skyrim/oblivion had schedules and actually interacted with the world. Everyone is a lifeless zombie in starfield
Npcs do have a schedule in starfield, just not all of them. Shop keepers dont have it any more, but most of the other named npcs do have it. For example if you go to new atlantis residential district at 2am you'll find the nat station janitor npc there chilling with her boyfriend.
The creation engine is still using cells for the locations?
🎶 Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies 🎶
So if they studied data from nasa, they could've come to the realization, just how massive a planet is, right?
Bethesda could easily keep their game scope to within 1 planet its moon and a few nearby asteroids. Might help them bring greater quality, reduce load screens, still keep the diversity of gravity, diversity in biomes (just look at earth's diversity in biomes), etc.
I wonder if the game is loadings fully populated scenes as one level instead of what tears of the kingdom or Elden ring. I Wonder if their engine can do asynchronous loading of scenes based on where you are in the world.
They literally could have just hid the loading screens behind animations. At least in my experience, none of the loading screens are long. However, i agree its immersion breaking with these load screens appearing all the time. They are generally a few seconds at most.
I mean just look at grav jumping. Instead of flipping to a black loading screen, just extend the mid grav jump animation until the area loads....
"I wonder if the game is loadings fully populated scenes as one level instead of what tears of the kingdom or Elden ring."
At least in space, a mod (that allows you to increase ship speed and manually travel in system). Proved entire systems are actually a single cell. You absolutely can travel from like earth to Pluto without a loading screen (provided you can go fast enough which that mod does).
So each system is not unlike the full skyrim map. If you fast travel somewhere, there will be a loading screen, but you can walk there seamlessly. I mean clearly, lore wise ships have to have some sort of "super cruise" speed for getting around solar systems. Even the fastest class A engine ship (which class A's have the highest top speed). It would take DECADES real time to traverse the SOL system from like mercury out to pluto. i.e. the last mars lander that went to mars took 7 months to get there and it was travelling at 24,000mph. A class A engine ship and topped out boost speed only goes around 2000 mph (and only temporarily).
It's clearly indicated ships don't grav jump in system, so there has to be a way they are achieving higher speeds than what we experience while in control.
What they should do, instead of "fast travelling" you in system, select your destination then have you just go really fast to your next destination eliminating the loading screen.
When Bethesda released Fallout 76, I had no desire to get it. When starfield was coming out, I could feel the hype and a part of me wanted to get it, even after knowing how bad Fallout 76 was from the start.
Good thing I was able to resist. Bethesda is my known copy-pasta developer.
Definitely isn't going to stay relevant like Skyrim did.
Is it really space exploration if there’s no space exploration , and nothing to explore on the planets ?
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how come outer worlds can manage 2 simultaneous companions that you have a bit of control over, including their progression, but Vasco cant navigate an open field without standing directly in front of my fkn gun? this is just one of many minor things that add up to a big issue in the game. Just feel like im constantly fighting the game code lol.
It does seem pretty shady to show the character jump into hyper space without having to fidget with that dang star map. It looks like the character is literally charting a course by interacting with nobs and dials on the ships control console.
Why the 28 dislikes? I'd really like to know why people didn't like the video. Do they disagree with your conclusion? I'd love to hear why they disagree.
Because these kinds of videos are just complaining and don’t really achieve nothing good for gaming. At least starfield gets you thinking about space exploration in a way that’s relatable. Unlike goofy mass effect and halo that kind fall too much into space fantasy.”
"You can do almost anything." One thing they could have done in spaceflight that would add a lot more sense of choice, and still have been pretty easy to implement? Don't police where you land. How would you feel in a ground-based RPG if the game stopped you from jumping off a cliff? RPGs, even Bethesda RPGs, don't try to prevent you from doing something stupid, even if it results in your death. In Starfield, I found it disappointing that I can't fly my ship into a gas giant or even right into a star.
It should let you try to land on the Sun. Doing so should result in a sequence showing your ship being torn apart by arcing plasma, while your crew screams in terror in the background. Trying to land on a gas giant should show it being torn apart in supersonic winds, while your crew screams in terror. Trying to land on a water world should show your ship sinking beneath the water while being torn apart and battered by waves.
You might even make this a little mini-game. Maybe if you had a ship with very high level shields, you could "land" on a star, enter the stellar atmosphere, and have very short time to escape. Too low a shield and you're torn apart instantly. But if you have enough shields and hull, you get less than a second to initiate a jump to get you out of there. You might even have an "emergency jump" button, where it just sends you to a random location. Similar challenges could be built for landing on gas giants, water worlds, etc. This would be similar to other RPG mechanics, where you sometimes can actually save yourself from falling off a cliff, if you're able to for example cast a flying spell or similar.
Being able to fly to dangerous and even immediately deadly places is one of the fun aspects of a space game. Imagine if there were a few systems that were simply black holes. You could have a fun role-playing element of being able to jettison cargo directly into the black hole. Imagine if you were playing on the SysDef side against the Crimson Fleet. How satisfying would it have been if after the quest line, you could dump Delgado's outfit into a black hole? Maybe when you do so, the black hole lights up in a burst of energy as the objects you jettison are reduced to atoms and then forever swallowed. And if you tried to land on the black hole instead of orbiting it, your ship would meet the same fate. After all the times Sarah yelled at me, I would have loved to be able to just fly her, the ship, and myself into a black hole a few times.
I compare this to a very different space game, Kerbal Space Program. Kerbal doesn't hold your hand. It lets you attempt to land on gas giants. You can launch a manned mission to the Sun. Yes, this destroys your ship, but that's what save files are for. It just really breaks the immersion of a game when it just puts up a wall and says, "no, you can't fly here, it's too dangerous." Let me try to land on the Sun. Let me drown my ship in the endless depths of a water world. Let me, out of malice or carelessness, cause my character and all my companions to die horribly in an inescapable death trap. Space is dangerous. The universe is dangerous. Most is vast emptiness, and most matter in the universe is used to build objects and environments that would kill you in an instant. Most of the Solar System's mass is the Sun, with everything else a rounding error. Most of the rest in Jupiter. The universe is not a kind place for life.
And the same should even apply to the ship itself. I should be able to airlock myself on accident. I should be able to deliberately open the hatch at any point and just instantly end the game. Maybe doing so requires throwing multiple switches to prevent accidental activation, but it should be possible. How awesome would it be if, while inside your ship, you opened the airlock, and your game ended with a cinematic of you, sans spacesuit, flying off into space as your ship rockets away in the distance?
Space is dangerous. Space wants to kill you. The environment itself should be just as much a threat as the random pirates or religious zealots. To do a space RPG right, the environment itself needs to almost be treated as a character, a vicious sociopath who wants nothing more than to kill you as rapidly as possible. But in Starfield, this simply isn't the case. Nothing about space itself can kill you. Only people, ships, and animals present any threat to you as a character. It means that your exploration decisions have little real effect. The game simply won't let me go anywhere dangerous, and that really breaks the immersion.
I've been playing computer games for so many years, and have seen such evolution of hardware, that honestly the loading screens don't even usually bother me that much. And even the hard limits on the distance you can travel from your ship could have been handled much better, if there was an in game reason for it. Maybe the reason you can't go more than a few kilometers from your ship is that your suit simply doesn't have a sufficient air supply. Maybe the max radius is the maximum distance you can go, even after several suit upgrades. In a way, that would be cool. It's not like the Apollo astronauts could freely walk a hundred miles across the lunar surface. But flat-out stopping me from flying somewhere dangerous? That really does break the immersion. Let me jump off a cliff. Don't hold my hand. Let me try to land somewhere instantly lethal. That's what save games are for. What we have in Starfield is instead a Fisher Price version of space, where all the real hazards are locked behind walls and your freedom is completely taken away.
The hate for Starfield is ridiculous and I think at least half of it comes from PlayStation fanboys disappointed it’s not on the PS5. This games level of customization is staggering, the space combat is great if you build your ship correctly and the planetary exploration is good enough for the initial launch of the game. The game is incredible and they’ll build on it just like every single other game that’s come out in the last decade, that is like it! If you don’t like it…I guess boohoo?
Yup, they reportertly also down voted it on metascore
The creation wngine is still using cells for the locations?
I can't imagine making an AAA Bethesda-style space exploration with sandbox open universe elements &...not bother programming First Contact gameplay??? Like did they not get what is exciting about being a space explorer?
Interestingly, the only criticism I have on the suggestions of exploration is the idea of a few hand-crafted planets to explore instead of what space exploration games provide. There is a reason why not one single game comes close to even allowing one planet of realistic size to be fully explored without having the points of interest quickly becoming repetitive. It's just not realistic. The same is unfortunately true of No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, Spacebourne 2, the Evochron series, etc... At the end of the day, exploration in games is either to find beauty in what was procedurally generates or to serve another game mechanic, such as resource gathering.
My understanding of that probably saved me from disappointment on that front. I knew pretty much exactly what to expect. Knowing this was an RPG to begin with, and knowing the scope of the assets that would need to exist to cover it all, I was pretty sure that loading screens were inevitable. The loading screens I notice in every game. They are more more annoying in Starfield because they are front and center, rather than being hidden. It does say something that fast travel in Starfield is much less immersive than the long travel times in other games, testing our patience more despite being significantly faster to get us to our destination. To be fair, entering and exiting the ship takes as long as the auto-save. They could have just auto-saved without giving us a loading screen for the trouble.
At the end of the day, however, I still love the game and will likely spend hundreds of hours playing it. It is, as with most Bethesda games, somehow much greater than the sum of its parts.
If they could have made exploration like No Man's Sky I think the amount of hate would be greatly diminished. Sure, there would still be problems with writing, companions, etc., but at least that environmental aspect that people play Bethesda games for would be somewhat in tact.
For me, my disappointment with Starfield is broken down into a few categories:
Performance: I'll get this one out of the way quickly. The performance of the game is poor considering what we're getting in return. If the graphics were mind-blowing, the maps were gigantic, there were thousands of NPCs walking around, there were hundreds of ships in battles or whatever, then fine, I accept low FPS because I'm getting something incredible in return. In truth, we need really good hardware to get good FPS because we, the customer, have to cover for their ancient game engine. It's like buying a brand new car - is it better? Is it faster? Is it nicer? No... it's just we're not bothering to fix potholes in the roads anymore so you need something with better suspension in order to get a similar ride to what you had previously. Oh.....
It came out immediately after Baldur's Gate 3: There are so many systems in Starfield that are very similar to Baldur's Gate 3 and where one game was a 10/10 in these aspects, Starfield was a 6/10. Moving away from brilliant dialogue presented in a very similar way, choices that dramatically affect the playthrough, interesting companions who have a diverse range of thoughts and beliefs and so on to what Starfield offers was really jarring. It was far too similar in what it set out to do with far too large a gap in quality. I remember seeing developers panicking, desperately telling people "don't expect our game to be like BG3" and I can see their point to an extent but if you look at something like the dialogue, why couldn't Starfield have lines that sound like they were written by a human instead of AI?
It's just too dated: Bethesda are in a tough position here. They make a very specific game and then tweak it so that it becomes Fallout, Starfield or Elder Scrolls. The underlying mechanics in this game are the same as they were in Skyrim - a game that in some ways, already felt a bit dated when it launched! The way characters move, they way they look, they way they interact with the world and so on.... it's just like playing Skyrim again. I don't know exactly how they build their games but it feels to me like they have a template that provides a functioning, empty Bethesda RPG game with a skill tree, animations, a set of companions, some powers, a set of generic enemies etc and they go from there. That means you're always playing the same game - just with different skins and different maps... What was the last big, genuine innovation Bethesda had in one of their RPGs?
Exploration - going off the beaten path: This has always been my favourite thing about Bethesda RPGs. I'd set off to do a quest and 3 hours later, I'd remember I was supposed to be doing the quest I'd set out to do before I got distracted by all the cool stuff I found. That doesn't happen in this game. For me, that's what people talk about when they say "Bethesda Magic" and it's entirely missing in Starfield. Without that, you're missing the key thing that makes Bethesda games unique - the thing that makes us overlook all of the 6/10 stuff. If you played Skyrim but there were no caves or buildings - it was just empty fields wherever you went, you'd stick to the main storyline and would get bored pretty quickly. That's what we have with Starfield.
There are many times that you know of abandoned mines before you land on a planet and you CAN land next to one, did that a few times
I called literally everything, all the promotions were super fishy. Shocked how many people fell for Todd's tricks again.
"..but space was made in a Hollywood basement"
RHCP
or at some game studios nowadays.
This is best Star field reviews have seen
The organic player generated hype around starfield pre lauch was the most braindead thing i have ever seen. like weve gone well beyond "fool me once, fool me twice" and gotten into "fool me again, and again and again and again and again and again!". At this point the people who legitimately actually got hype for starfield (and are old enough to remember Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and 76) have only themselves to blame. They are legitimately cognitively impaired.
Dude those bubbles are actually quite freaking large tbh.
I was quite saddened by how boring the worlds were among other things. Space as we know it is more boring than fiction; however, I've read NASA and other programs' stuff on various exoplanets and the planets/moons of our own system and I must say there are some neat things out there they didn't depict.
A few moons in our own Solar System are featureless, gray rocks in the game despite probes showing a more interesting environment (mountains, more color, etc.). And no waterworld exoplanets (although they had no underwater exploration so inevitable I guess) or lava exoplanets was another shame since such things likely do exist.
I dont know why people are surprised by Todds actions. He has a track record for lying about his products. He's a marketing master and successfully builds up the hype to fever point then sits back and counts the cash that these poor people have shelled out on his mediocre products. Sad really because the potential for Starfield was huge but they chose quantity over quality. We all wanted a King Tiger but got a Sherman......😢
I think they should have done the Jedi survivor/outcast space travel mechanics when warping to a new system
You can build these enormous intricate spaceships that have all of these different modules inside and you can have a crew of like 10 people
The game allows you to at any point leave the pilots chair in space and go explore your ship. But as far as actual space travel goes there's never really a reason to do that cuz you're always just going to instantly load into your next objective / destination
If they made more things to do on the ship it would be fun to kind of hit the gravity drive and then have the option to hang out on your ship. Make it really feel like a mobile base for you
I don't know ultimately I have accepted what Starfield is and I've had a good time with a lot of it, but I do think it has a lot of flaws and it definitely was misleading pre-release.
But it's going to be one of those games that I don't uninstall for a long time. Excited to see what mods will do for it
Also, the only real modules worth having are the crafting ones and the ones with beds for sleeping. The rest is just eye-candy. 😞
@@ertymexx Yeah my current ship has an engineering room and a captain's quarters and all of these things that ultimately serve no purpose. Otherwise it's only as big as it is because I'm jamming enough beds in there to have a big crew on it...
It tried to be both a space exploration game and a bethesda rpg at the same time and failed at both.
Bethesdas engine cant make a seemless galaxy that you can travel through like other space explorer games, but trying to fit a thousand procedurally generated worlds means you dont get a great hancrafted map to explore like in older Bethesda games
If it had just dumped the space explorer aspect and marked itself as a new classic bethesda rpg with fully handcrafted maps it would have been a lot more enjoyable to explore.
The followers are pretty much baby sitters like when a DM in a pen and paper RPG puts a lawful good NPC with the party to keep them behaving themselves.
I think the biggest thing for me regarding Starfield's quality is that this is supposed to be Todd Howard's baby. His passion project that he wanted to make for over 20 years, and it was all backed by Xbox's budget.
And what do we get? A cookie-cutter Bethesda game we've already played, but set in space.
This doesn't give me faith for what Elder Scrolls VI is going to be.
Why did you skip where Todd said barren planets have nothing but resources? What did you expect tbh
Wtf you mean !?!?! 7:20 they made elevators in fo4 a hidden loading screen and the ones that weren't elevators, you had interactible 3d models.
Well, none of this in unexpected. Bethesda have made a game like this before - called Daggerfall. Massive open world, biggest ever created probably. Almost all of it procedurally generated. It didn't really work for the same reasons folks find the planets in Starfield boring after the first couple. So what did Bethesda do about that? They made Morrowind which instead was a vastly smaller but immensely detailed hand-crafted island packed full of hand-crafted life and stories.Morrowind worked far better than Daggerfall.
Since Morrowind Bethesda have game by game swung around from the procedural generation found in Daggerfall to the the hand-crafted content found in Morriwind and back again. Oblivion veering towards Daggerfall a bit with the endlessly repeating Oblivion gate sequences and level matching, then FO3 and Skyrim going back to Morrowind with almost exclusively hand-crafted content, then FO4 putting a lot more procedurally generated stuff back and now Starfield going full on Daggerfall. The reputation of Bethesda games is almost always in inverse proportion to the % of procedural content in them, so Morrowind, FO3 and Skyrim have the highest reputation.
Basically folks play RPGs because of story and at this time you cannot generate satisfying stories procedurally. Starfield also has the disadvantage of being a space game and the problem with space is...space. Space = nothing by definition so it's very difficult to generate compelling content in space outside of occasional incidents. Almost everything in space is endless sameness and boredom as everyone who takes a trip to Mars in the future will come to realise only too well. This means the more realistic you make a space game the less entertaining it will be.
And nowhere is this more obvious than with Chris Robert's game Star Citizen. He's spent 12 years and $700m on it and so far produced just one out of the promised 100 solar systems to explore and even that one isn't completely finished yet. Roberts may be trying to avoid the Starfield problem by hand-crafting every corner of every planet but so far he hasn't succeeded and I'm not going to holding my breath over whether he actually will succeed. It looks to me as though he will probably run out of whales to fund actually fund finishing it and it will eventually get released in some half-baked form far short of expectations.
Basically space games are very difficult to make entertaining unless you concentrate on a very specific aspect of life in space. The three aspects that that are known to work the Stellaris model of 4X game, the Wing Commander model of mission based space shooter (Elite Dangerous for example) and the space economy simulation exemplified by X4: Foundations. The one big open world space game that does work is Eve Online and that works because its an MMO and the players are constantly writing their own stories.
So it's no surprise to me that Starfield has worked out the way it has. Decent main plot line, a few good side quest lines, the rest distinctly meh. That's why I've been playing BG3 instead.
as soon as they confirmed that no seamless landings and take off are loading screens i knew it would be held back by their anciebt game engine and all was just empty talks.