It’s just so bland and formulaic. Against deep RPGs like BG3, it just pales in comparison.
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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The funny thing is, I think the fact that the RPG mechanics are finally better than the last game developed by Bethesda, instead of worse, highlights just how mediocre Bethesda games are.
I still think once mods and DLCs come out in full force it will be remembered more positively.
If Bethesda games are so mediocre, why are they so popular among players who love to put hundreds of hours into them? I can't imagine them all playing total conversion mods.
It's become such a custom to poop on Bethesda for making "shallow", "uninteresting" games that still everybody talks about. As if there weren't enough real flaws in their games to give them heat for.
Because mediocrity and popularity go hand in hand, it's the profit motive at work. Being largely inoffensive and generally palatable is profitable.
That's not the definition of mediocrity. Trying to appeal to a bigger audience doesn't make a game mediocre in the same way not every niche game has the potential of being a masterpiece just by not being that much likeable.
Some games are popular and good.
What's good and what's popular do not necessarily align. Removing "complicated" features for the sake of mass appeal makes the game worse, but more profitable, much of the time.
Also not true. Complexity alone doesn't make a good game / movie / book / piece of art. And lack thereof doesn't make anything worse.
Why is it that when many people like a thing because that thing appeals to masses, it's automatically categorised as lower quality?
Nobody seriously claimed Starfield to be the game of all games. It's good. It's fine. It's not perfect. So what?
I love Starfield, not as much as I love Skyrim or even Morrowind, but I really love it.
I am at 160ish hours and have seen only a small amount of the quests and barely touched the base or ship building part. There is so much in the game and with the innovative spin on new game plus I am able to build my own narrative again and again. I can play the perfect angle in one NG+ and a devil in another, I can be the freedom loving Ranger in the next, a mad loner who only interacts with others as much as needed to finish his perfect planetary base, or a starship fanatic who wants to collect and/or build the best ships.
You don't have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can't really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.
Starfields quests are fun, yes they are all separate from each other but that is in my eyes a good thing in this case as it allows to play the game as you like.
All the quests are like basic Lego blocks, you can connect them together in any way you want but they don't change each other but that's not needed as I have my own narrative and stories in my mind for this run or character.
Sure, games like Baldurs Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2.0 have better storytelling, better NPCs, but they are at the same time extremely limited and narrow experiences, sure you have side quests and all but once played the game that's mostly it.
Starfields freedoms come with limits like the loading screens sure, but that is a price I am willing to pay for having a sandbox like universe to explore and roleplay in.
As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that's where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
But as a end note: What have the Starfield developers consumed when they created the utterly bad and boring temple "puzzles". In Todd's name WHY????
You clearly haven't played baldur's gate and shouldn't make comparisons based on your limited experience with it.
I have played and completed it, very recently, and I stand to my words. BG3 has a great story and it was fun to play once. But it is not a game I will play again, at least not for years. BG3 is like a good movie, impressive and great story telling but after I seen it once it is done and will go on the shelf.
That's where Starfield differs, in BG3 I command great written characters through adventures, in Starfield I play more or less an avatar of myself but on a Spaceship. And that is something I come back to again and again, just like I go back to Skyrim, Morrowind or Fallout for years now.
Maybe you have Not realized just how much your choices affect the "linear Story" and how much permutation there is in follow up quests or alternate pathways through the same quest. I guess thats the beauty of it. Most of the quests an Narrative fit into each other so neat One might suspect this way was the only possible way, just because of how good it is presented.
Yes, but that still is like reading the same book but with a few pages changed. I am still only moving characters through a stage play, not roleplaying.
I can't have a completely changed or different way to play the game or be myself/anything in the world of the game.
Both games are great but they can't really be compared, not much more as you could compare a high budget musical with a high budget improv theatre play. Sure both are plays on a theatre stage (or RPG in case of the games) but beside that they don't have really much in common.
But maybe it is just to complicated for me to fully express or explain what I mean as I am not a native speaker and I am therefore limited in my words and formulations.
What you are trying to say is that Starfield is a sandbox RPG, while BG3 is a Linear Story RPG.
Both are fun in their own ways. You just vibe more with the sandbox aspect.
I bet you also enjoy Minecraft for the same reasons.
Yeah, I like Minecraft 🤣
As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that’s where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
You should seriously, seriously go play BG3.
You don’t have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can’t really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.
Seriously, BG3. (Between Dark Urge, custom character choices, etc, go.)
I have played it and I liked it. But after completing it with one character I have no intention of doing another play through anytime soon.
Yes you have different character choices but in the end it is always the same linear story. Yes, you could say the same about Starfield but it is not. In Starfield if I want I can ignore the main quest more or less completely and play a bounty hunter who only builds his base to have a place for his collection of coffee cups he takes from every place he goes.
In BG3 they give you predefined experience (now in Dark Urge flavour) which is great for telling a story but not so great for creating a world to really roleplay in.
Both games are fun for what they are, they are just not fun in the same way for everyone.
I think i See your point now with the example of the bounty hunter. The point that most People are making is thta starfield is a really blank canvas where you can Insert your own Narrative into a lot of Actions but the game does Not react towards that Narrative, while BG3 does react to some of your RP reasons and all the other reasons for your RP that the game cannot predict, it cannot react to and therefore feel unsupported.
That is a valid Take that Bethesda games have Solid setting in which People can choose internal Roleplay but this does Not meant other games where the game also gives you external Stimulation to Roleplay certain aspects Limit your creativity. For my playtrough there were several decisions which where reflected in the World but also other principles that i made up, that only influenced my decisions passivly without beeing spelled out in the Texts. For example i choose a knowdledge hungry Wizard which made me Do queationable choice s with devils even tho 2 People of my Party already suffered under devils. No choice spelled out "Gimme All knowledge of the Planes what ever the Cost" but thats where my own internal RP made the choice more fitting than other.
Man its really Hard to express my thoughts on this using a foreign languages. I hope my point comes across
Yes, I can grasp what you mean.
It is a role-playing on a different level, and with that it has its own merits and shortcomings.
Baldurs Gate 3 is a role play on a lower, more character centric, level which limits the freedom of the player but allows for the game to have a tighter, more interconnected storytelling.
Starfield is a role play on a higher, more player centric, level which allows for way more personal freedom of the player at the costs of having a story with pieces flying loose through the air, so to speak.
The venn diagram of people who like both of those types will most likely don't have a huge overlap.
Neither of those games are bad, they are just fundamentally different.
I'm curious what the design, and reaction to, of Starfield might say about what we'll expect from ES6. For three games now (Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield), have been marked by Settlement building and Radiant quests.
While radiant quests were there in Skyrim, in these later games it felt a lot like Bethesda were making it a core part of the mission design structure. There are a lot of blurred lines in Starfield that make it difficult to tell them apart. (That's more a comment on main missions being so generic than the radiant quests being so good, unfortunately).
Settlement building seems to be a core part of Bethesda's DNA now, and I wouldn't be surprised if the narrative follows a Kingmaker style where you build up a settlement of rebels over time or similar. I imagine the other ES staples will be tied to this too, Thieves Guild = establishing a branch within your new settlement to attack Big Bad Evil Vs joining an established one etc.
I really wonder how much of this poor reaction to Starfield makes its way through to actual change, but my feeling is ES6 will have a lot of hype, but similar feelings of disappointment. I hope I'm proved wrong.
I don't see settlement building as a core part of Starfield, I am 160h in (NG+3) and have not touched settlement building at all. It is a feature of the game, but it is completely optional.
Bought Starfield, still can't play it. Linux, nvidia no MUX switch. Starfield won't use the discrete GPU. Doesn't even know its there. Thrown every launch option I could find at it. Uninstalled and hidden now. Worst purchases I ever made on a game.
Oldrim and Starfield are the only bethesda games I didn't buy on super sale. I'll never make that mistake again. I even purposefully bought it without waiting for sales to throw some support to the devs for building the majority of my favorite games I've ever played.
The up side is that after about two weeks of tinkering I bought Baldurs Gate 3 on a whim. Been playing it non stop ever since. I might not have bought BG3 if bethesdas didn't have such a shity unpayable game at launch, so in a way I thank them. BG3 has far exceeded my every expectation. What I thought would be a mediocre time waster turned out to be the best game I've ever played.
That sounds more like a issue with your proton configuration then a fault of the game.
Have you tried to change the proton configuration, to force it to use the discrete GPU?
Nvidia GPUs are known to be problematic in Linux, not only with Wine/Proton
I played it for 30 min and did not enjoy it past the first 10.
Same with me. As soon as I realized that there is no sane way to travel from planet to planet even within the same system without fast travel, I stopped playing the game. Starfield literally made space boring.
Fast travel is the only sane way, without changing the lore and setting of the world, to travel from planet to planet inside of a system. Space is gigantic and even the distance between planets in a system are huge. Travel between planets, without having to wait real time hours or days to arrive, would need some kind of faster than light propulsion, but the only way to travel faster then light in the lore and world setting is with gravjumps.
The only thing I would change with the current space travel is using micro gravjumps animation between planets instead of the normal fly sequence shown when travelling inside of a system.
So? The writers weren't forced to make there only be grav drives
And Tolkien was not forced to hinder the Hobbits from inventing full automatic guns, but the Lord of the Rings would be completely different if he hadn't.
And the same is true for Starfield and other options of FTL. It would be a completely different game, with a completely different story.
Starfield is hard sci-fi at it's core, with the exception of the grav drive and the powers/unity, a near future setting that is in most parts plausible and possible, a realistic game set in a realistic universe.
They could implement a timewarp mechanic like Kerbal Space program does and just speed up time.
But that's more or less what they have done with the flyby animation shown when travelling inside of a system. You could interpret that as watching a rapidly speed up version of the, boring because space is a huge and empty void, travel.
The designers chose this setting and lore, and could have chosen otherwise for the sake of game experience.
Additionally, there's no reason for the fast travel to have to be distinct, separate from gameplay, as loading screens.
Elite Dangerous keeps you in your cockpit, replaces the outside view with an animation while it loads the system you're jumping to. When landing on a planet, there are various "entering the atmosphere" effects on suitable planets to mask swapping from space to the landable planet.
For ED, in-system FTL is time consuming and you can shave off around 25% of the travel time by doing it manually (risking overshooting and having to loop back around), or you can have the ship's computer do it. ED is multiplayer and you can be yanked from this "supercruise" by players and NPC pirates, so it works mechanically to make the player waste time with it. In Starfield they could show you the ETA and give you the option to skip it or to wander around your ship during it while the ship does its thing.
If you're in a menu on your ship when FTL would end with autopilot, stop the clock before leaving FTL, pop up a message in the corner saying the ship is ready to drop from FTL, and let the player exit it manually from the cockpit so you can't get ambushed while you're on the other side of your ship.
No changes to setting or lore needed, except that there's a basic autopilot now.
As far as programming that goes, the engine already uses loading during gameplay when you're on the overworld, and they have done that since Oblivion. Overworld is set up in chunks, they keep a certain number in each direction around you loaded, and load/unload while you move around.
I won't say it would be easy to expand that background loading functionality, but I will say that they've had many many years to attempt it.
Thats sounds amazing, too bad i dont enjoy Sci-Fi