The problems with Starfield aren’t so much the bugs as they are fundamental, often dated, design issues. Here’s a sort of Let’s Play from a podcast I follow with one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy. Around the 10m mark, you can start to see where this sandbox should have accounted for this kind of play. If you can’t simultaneously do that while making a galaxy with 1000 planets, then you should probably scope down until you can. Starfield is not a terrible game, but Bethesda needs to evolve.
The story is bad, the ship’s weapons selection is terrible, the outposts are almost useless, the temples are ridiculous, the powers are mostly unnecessary and soooo mmmaaannnyyy loading screens….
“Starfield is my dream game.”
-Todd Howard“The game is perfect, upgrade your ghetto ass computer.” -Todd Howard
It’s Skyrim with a coat of lead paint.
It’s been clear for over a decade that the Creation Engine (let’s be honest it’s still Gamebryo) has run its course. It is not a viable option for a modern game anymore. It has architectural limitations that simply prevent a modern gaming experience.
There have been so many Creation Engine apologists since Oblivion trying to justify its continued existence through multiple new Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, always trying to say that it’s fine. Starfield was the chance to prove that the limitations aren’t actually architectural and that it could be used for a modern game. Clearly that’s not the case. Taking just about any other modern open world RPG to directly compare, Starfield feels like crap in comparison. Hell, even the launch version of Cyberpunk felt better than Starfield does now.
It’s been clear for over a decade that the Creation Engine (let’s be honest it’s still Gamebryo) has run its course. It is not a viable option for a modern game anymore. It has architectural limitations that simply prevent a modern gaming experience.
And yet, I’m having a blast with Oblivion Remastered. The problem with Starfield is that the writing sucks and the game loops aren’t fun. Because of these things it’s an unforgivable bore. Oblivion proves you’ll trudge back and forth and deal with all the copied and pasted caves in the world if the story is engaging and the gameplay loop is fun. The dated engine has little to do with Starfield’s problems.
The graphics aren’t the problem. The Creation Engine is not just graphics, it handles everything about how the game works. How the AI works and responds to events, how NPCs handle tasks even when not actively interacting with the player, etc. Graphics is only one part of a game, and that’s not the source of the issues.
Oblivion Remastered still uses the Gamebryo engine from Oblivion for everything with one exception, Unreal now handles the graphics. That’s why the game is nearly identical to the original in every way except graphics, it is.
The other person literally said Oblivion is good despite the engine being 80% gamebryo. Don’t write like AI and ignore context. The stuff that is really bad in Starfield is the design philosophy of autogenerated content. This is entirely different from the engine choice.
No it’s exactly the same, you just notice it more because of the different context of a limited fantasy realm versus open stellar exploration.
Oblivion and Skyrim also have a bunch of procedurally generated content. But it is more easily ignored, because these are dungeons and caves and not numerous planets where you are walking for upwards of 15 minutes or more across open terrain to visit the same dozen locations. And having dozens of loading screens to stitch each small segment together.
Starfield as a concept doesn’t work with the engine, because the engine is incapable of adequately creating an open environment at that level. If it could, they would have given it to us instead of Skyrim in space. We got Skyrim in space because that’s the limit of the engine. Bethesda’s insistence of continuing to use it, and claiming that it’s not an issue, despite the clear deficiencies in the released product, is a slap in the face to every player. It’s the definition of “You’ll take what we give you, and like it”.
It works in TES because x, y, z and not in Starfield because x, y, z.
Starfield doesn’t work with [Skyrim engine]
It’s Skyrim in space
Which is it? I’m confused.
But really you could make a fantastic game with the engine they had and starfield could have been good if it had great writing and great characters and quests. If people loved it and had some gripes about technical limitations that would be one thing. It’s an okay game with technical limitations, that makes it a bad game.
one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy
Abby and Vinny from Giant Bomb Beastcast
It’s not that it’s outdated, oblivion does this sort of thing. It’s that starfield just isn’t good, and the older titles are better
It can be both. It was impressive when Oblivion had 7 different interlocking systems but none of them were particularly good, but these days, I think we expect at least one or two of them to be significantly better.
It was bound to happen, modders can’t fix a soulless game. There’s no interesting characters, factions, or world setting to grab anyone’s interest.
I thought modders would have abandoned it sooner though.
It was incredibly mid. For something Bethesda hyped for over half a decade they sure made a bland game. Throwing aside all of the incredibly dated gameplay, you hit the nail on the head. It was boring
You can tell every faction was decided by a corporate committee inside Bethesda and Microsoft. They couldn’t be too risky, couldn’t come close to possibly offending one person or risk having slightly fewer gamers. That results in a boring as hell game. Everyone was too goddamn nice in the game. No one ever got mad at you. You could punch someone in the face and the response would be “hey, that’s not nice” and then they would continue on. Hold on there don’t want to possibly scare off a potential customer by having a realistic situation there.
Meanwhile a Bethesda game like Fallout 3 had its fair share of flaws, but gave you plenty of opportunity to decide if you wanted to be the good guy or not. Blow up a town? Kill off all residents of Tenpenny Tower, or whack all the ghouls that want to take up residence? Why not all of them? You decide!
It also wasn’t afraid of locking players out of quests if they behaved like an asshole. I liked that, why would somebody try to work with you after you just gave them the proverbial finger?
Far better than ‘oh golly, you just told me that I’m not a nice person. Well, that’s not very neighbourly of you, but I’ll pay you my life-long savings if you hop over to the next hub and return my package that I conveniently know is collecting dust over there, but can’t be bothered to fetch myself’.
In Fallout 3 you can kill the entire BoS faction (minus the essential NPCs, that go unconscious), wait a day, and they’ll be your best pal again.
In Starfield there is the exact same morality system, with lawmen who will attack you if you are evil and some random faction that will attack you because “we hate goody two shoes”, but you are shoehorned into being Jesus at the end of the game with the same issue of the ‘good’ faction having to mandatorily become non hostile to make the final quest work.
The way people feel about Starfield is the way I feel about every Bethesda game since Morrowind.
Yeah, FO3 wasn’t perfect, but at least it had its darker edges. Feel like a slaver? Sure, no problem, you can enslave random wastelanders and sell them for profit. Screw over BoS? Broken Steel let you do that, RIP Citadel. The Pitt gave an antagonist with a motive which turned out to be a bit more nuanced than it initially seemed. You could roleplay a fat-shaming, racist PoS if you wanted to, instead of presenting only safe options.
Modders could fix that, but why bother making it a mod when you could just make a whole new game from scratch for just a little more work?
I am a huge BGS and “game cinema” fan, and Starfield felt so… boring. Both the first bit I played before I dropped it, and YT videos to see what I was missing.
For lack of another explanation, its like all those fun side quests and nooks individual writers went crazy making lost their spark. Even ME Andromeda had more compelling bits.
So I can see modders shying away. Why put all that work into something one has no desire to replay, especially with the alternatives we have these days.
You would have to basically make a whole game and rewrite characters and quests to make it better. But that’s a lot of work for modders especially when they’re not that interested in the game to start with.
This video manages to say everything there is to say about the game in under two minutes 😅
Starfield would be fine if there was a way to get from place to place without constant reloads. This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
The thing is, we already have games like No Man’s Sky which do this very well. Starfield may have been better received if it came out 15 years ago, but against modern space games, it just sucks.
That’s ignoring anything else wrong with the game, of course, and there is plenty. But I could get over a lot if it didn’t feel like I was playing a menu instead of flying a spaceship at every change of scenery.
Freelancer would have been fresher in memory 15 years ago, and that’s one that had seamless intra-system travel. Gameplay in Freelancer even flowed better than NMS for getting from orbit to orbit and having encounters or discoveries along the way. It just didn’t have the on-foot gameplay. I had the same problem with loading screens in Everspace 2. Killed the flow. Whoever tries to do this again is going to have to make sure transitions are minimal.
And that’s what I don’t get about Starfield, conceptually. With this project scope, you’re not competing well with NMS for ship-to-foot or orbit-to-surface transition, you’re not doing better than Freelancer–a 20+ year old game–for all the in-space stuff, and the procgen hamstrings you with all the “Bethesda magic” their worlds are known for. It’s like someone said “let’s do Daggerfall in space” and went rigid top-down design with it, retrofitting whatever they could along the way to make a functional game around the procgen.
I maintain that if they didn’t bother with the space thing, or abstracted it more to a “blip on a screen” type of topdown play like in mass effect, it would be a better game. They could have spent that time on the shooter gameplay loop not being shit.
This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
Old engine isn’t always bad. It is if you do like Todd and just slap more and more plugins and technology on top and call it a new engine, instead of fixing underlying issues or rewriting/updating old parts.
Which is why Starfield NPCs walk onto tables and become owls when the camera zooms into conversations, etc: It is the same code that is used in Skyrim and partly Oblivion. And Todd Howard doesn’t want devs doing silly things like fixing twenty year old code, he wants new and bigger.
I bought it on confidence when it released. That was the last time I ever did this. I played 25 very boring hours and uninstalled it. It’s very difficult to figure out how you can fail so spectacularly with such a budget, such a long development time, and such a carte blanche with making a new universe from scratch
The thing for me is that it’s a game about a guild of explorers, and the game is all fast travel. The bits you do “explore” were soulless.
As other people have complained, it’s a space exploration game without the space nor the exploration
God how did they fuck that up? Who thought I’d want to fast travel there? Sure sometimes, but honestly I’d love it if it showed how many minutes to destination and then you started jumping.
You’re in the pilots chair, you see 10 minutes to the other side of the galaxy where your mission is. You hesitate because that’s far, but 2 minutes away is your home base anyway so might as well swing through and drop off some stuff, make sure the pumps and extractors are working. 6 minutes past that is that side quest you’ve been putting off, I guess we can do that too. You hit the jump button, stars whizz past. You go talk with your crew, get caught up on conversations. You jump back in the chair when the 20 second warning goes off. You jump out and arrive, but there is a weird signal on a nearby planet in this system…
Now THAT’s the game i wanted. Altering one mechanic right there completely changes the entire style of the game. I will forever be annoyed that everything in the game is instant fast travel. Sure have a button there to skip if people want to, but personally I prefer to lay back and fully immerse myself
It could have been so good and the game genuinely has some cool environments but for the most part there is just nothing to do. I’ve stumbled on some cool places like the Mantis hideout and stuff but the game is so repetitive and 98% of the planets are devoid of life.
And they wanted it that way. They were like well that’s what it’s really like! Which like yeah great, but that’s terribly boring for a game.
Another game like that was Mass Effect 1, where they had the undiscovered worlds, but even those were more entertaining. They gave you a mako, and each planet had at least one faction with at least some backstory to it so it wasn’t a complete waste. Starfield is like, nothing. I encounter the exact same building structure and camps multiple times on my single playthrough. Absolutely uninspired
Yep! When I saw that Todd said that I was kind of dumbfounded. I get that that’s how space is but like, that shits boring. They really could have had something special but they severely missed the mark.
Exactly. What made Morrowind’s sauce was discovering all these places on foot
My main gripe with the universe of starfield is that it works on fallout logic, as in, everyone acts as if telephones and cameras don’t exist, despite being 300 years in our fucking future without any tech loss.
That “don’t you guys have phones?” Blizzard meme is ironically spot on here. They don’t. Communication only happens face to face while out of a ship.
The other thing is how a lot of the game runs on “nobody cares”. Alien ship showing up on orbit? Nobody cares. Another alien ship showing up and attacking you? Nobody saw it, nobody cares. Alien space magic? Nobody cares. Alien space magic being used to wreak havoc in a big city? Not a word on it, instant amnesia after the attack.
It actually makes sense in Fallout since it’s post-apocalyptic. Yes, the apocalypse happened hundreds of years earlier, but most people still live in squalor while only a privileged few have high tech stuff. Starfield, though? The “apocalypse” took like 50 years to happen and everyone escaped Earth. There’s no excuse for widespread telecommunication to not exist.
¯\(ツ)/¯ non-FOSS software shouldn’t expect volunteers
Fans patching the Bethesda games is as at least as old as Daggerfall, if not earlier. Daggerfall didn’t have Helseth and Barenziah as Dark Elves until fans fixed it. Pickpocketing in Morrowind is broken unless you use the code patch. The Oblivion leveling problem punishes you for playing the game.
Like every guide for every Bethesda game is going to start with download this unofficial patch, and the unofficial patches for the DLC, and this installer. They’ve relied on fans and treated the community like it’s an FOSS community, without realizing that without good product, the volunteers won’t come.
Yes, but that shouldn’t be the norm, or an expectation, of the developer. “Oh, we don’t need to worry about the game, the fans will just mod it and it’ll bring us lots of money!”
Bethesda is such a garbage company. No idea why people buy these half assed games
I never really understood that. Everyone hyped up skyrim so hard and when i played it it was… Meh? It was all grey and jank that apparently is enjoyable for some people.
I really liked new vegas and when fallout 4 came out, i never watched a trailer or anything, but i was sick on release day, so on that day, i watched the release trailer and thought why not. I was truly shocked how god damn ugly the game was and how shallow and broken it was.
People had high hopes for starfield and i thought i was taking crazy pills. It’s just the same thing again but somehow even worse. I think i just don’t get it.
Lol it’s such a tremendously boring game with dated gameplay. Bless your little heart if you enjoy it, but it’s a bland, middling game at best and flat out bad in many ways.
I hope they do a proper sequel that doesn’t suck. Skyrim in space would be cool if they actually deliver that.
I have almost 6500 hours in FO4, I played today.
I have maybe 300 hours in Starfield, can’t be arsed to look. Haven’t touched it in at least a year.
Bethesda knows how to make great games, but they chose not to. I don’t know why.
That’s my take.
Coming from a long time fan of Bethesda RPGs They have gotten way too comfortable relying on radiant quests and proc gen content. Those aren’t inherently bad, but the way they were implemented in Starfield was. What’s so fun about landing on a planet that appears the same as another a few light years away and seeing the same fucking cryogenics lab with the same layout, items, lore logs, and enemy placement? Chasing the same bounties for a paltry sum of credits (not that you’ll need them it’s easy to break the economy) or legendary loot that you’ll likely just sell (for credits you won’t use)? There are cool things like ship building that could be further fleshed out but so much of the game ended up undercooked and uninspired (space travel with your ship was a glorified screensaver in a game about space traversal for Christ’s sake).
Yes, the second I realized they were actually doing that with literally copy pasted areas and notes and characters it killed the game for me. I can be reasonable for a dungeon having the same layout but not written content and characters. It invalidates the entire experience.
I think if Starfield had come out 10 years ago it would have wowed people and been a classic. But now it just seems dated when you have other games doing RPG better (Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3) and open world space better (No Mans Sky).
Starfield doesnt do RPG as good as those games, nor does it do open world space as well as No Mans Sky. I’ve heard it described as being as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, and that doesnt seem far off to me.
I really hope Bethesda have paid attention and dont make the same kind of mistakes with Elder Scrolls VI. Big and empty is not the way to go.
Damn dude, I’m glad you got so much out of FO4 I did one playthrough when it released and tried to play it again this year, barely got into it.
That’s when Bethesda died for me, didn’t find Skyrims simplifications all that good either but it was still a fun game
Feels like Bethesdas modus operandi is to make a game that appeals to everyone and that’s unfortunately coming at the cost of its established fan base
My Bethesda rant goes something like this: “they think the ideal video game is when you can treat everything like action figures, make anything happen in any combination just to see it happen, bash em together, pull them apart, make them kiss, make them join every team and do every thing, do whatever you want, and then fuck off because it never meant anything”.
There is just so much potential… squandered.
Silly example- why are there elevators and LOADING SCREENS in New Atlantis - if you have enough jetpack or just abuse TCL, you can walk around the entirety of New Atlantis, without a single loading screen.
But for some reason Bethesda decided it needed some loading screens for no good reason whatsoever.
Your take makes me mad. Not because you are wrong or anything, but because you are entirely right and I don’t want you to be lol! I wanted this game to be cool so badly.
The fundamental concept and theme of the game is trash. It literally makes everything you do meaningless, it inevitably leads to you becoming the jaded villain. It would be better if they had an end where you destroyed the universe shifting thing and were locked in one.
Literally just No Man’s Sky but worse.
Hehe. So, I’ve got 243 hours into Starfield. Level 45.
For me, the game is side quests, killing bad guys all over the place, and taking over as many ships as I can.
I’ve completely ignored the main mission. Haven’t really done any crafting other than upgrading weapons. I started a base and forgot where its at.
The companions are all horrid. I hang out with the robot guy. He’s got good guns.
I use Heller’s Cutter, Arc Welder, and Auto-Rivet. Nothing else. Seemed fitting for a miner. And people burn real good.
I mostly don’t use ship storage except for uncommon stuff. I go through the ridiculous torment of tossing all my junk on the ground in a hold of my ship. Silly fun.
I don’t do a lot of space combat. I’ve got a stack of Class C ships whenever I get around to optimizing them. At some point that will be a new piece of the game that I’ll play.I may never pursue the main mission. Looks kinda dumb. Can’t tell you exactly what I’ve found fun in this game where I’ve opted out of most of the game. But … every now and then I quicksave and just start burning down all the civilians. A lot of em won’t die. But I keep trying. And then I load my save, because I want to be able to land there again.
I may never pursue the main mission. Looks kinda dumb.
It very much is, and the ‘ending’ was enough for me to drop the game and uninstall it same day. I barely made it to the end, and goddamn was it not worth it.
I don’t really want any magic powers or some final culmination. If I’ve used the (100 cells!) on my cutter, you get to meet my welder, and if you’re out of reach, eat some rivets. I’m not playing some bad guy, but almost the entire game for me is bloodshed, up close, and hardcore. Ya fuk the main mission.
i don’t even know how you could meaningfully mod Starfield. the game is rotten to the core, you would be better off making your own space rpg
People still care about Starfield in 2025? I thought everyone went back to Skyrim a year ago.
Yes. I enjoy the game. I wasn’t expecting Star Wars, and therefore I was not disappointed. I got a Bethesda style take on Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen, without an always online multiplayer requirement or getting a game still in the alpha stages of development for the last 10 years.
While there are certain elements that I don’t like, they are small issues that mods can easily fix. I cannot do that with Elite or Star Citizen. And unfortunately, this genre of games is incredibly tiny. Like, basically the only other option I haven’t mentioned is EVE Online. No thanks.
I like how you got downvoted for liking it.
Average Lemmy moment, honestly.
Here is a dilemma: If you like getting downvoted for liking something, then do you upvote your own comment or do you downvote it?
Practically I believe up\downvotes are public, so you can’t. Otherwise you look like you’re just a troll if you’re downvoting your own comment.
Your own comments are upvoted automatically, so every new comment starts with 1 point. You can remove your own upvote from your comment, so that it starts at 0 instead.
Yeah, but people can see if you downvote your own comment, right?
Removing an upvote is not the same thing as downvoting
I started playing it again after going back to Elite Dangerous. I’m on an expedition in Elite Dangerous so there is no one around. I’m back in Starfield to try and remember where I left off.
The game isn’t good, but reading how bad it is is a certain entertainment to me, not gonna lie.
Funny thing is that I decided to pirate it around February 2024, after seeing how much people were hating it. “It can’t be that bad, can it?” - my low expectations were disappointed by reality
Ooooo shhhh you didn’t go to the seas for it, I sold you my old copy at a discounted rate. Nothing more to see here big corporations.
I really like it, I’ve got over 1000 hours in it i know its got its problems and I understand why people don’t like it, but none of the things it does wrong are that big of a deal to me and I have fun running around doing little quests. It scratches an itch for me so I keep returning to it. Of course I want tons of support for the game, but if nobody made anything more for it I’d probably still put another 1000hrs in.
