And some people were annoyed it didn't win game of the year...
Most average game of the year.
Bethesda hasn't innovated in years, they depend nearly entirely on the name alone
and modders.
Let us all remember that one time that they thought that monetizing the mods was a good idea and a massive amount of Steam users demolished them online. Like oh you want to make awful games, make that money, then have modders make cool content that makes it worth playing, and then have the balls to ask for a cut of what they’re selling it for?
And guess what? They still do that. And the fallout 76 store and subscription is something I will never forget.
One of the games of the year!
The universe of Elder Scrolls: Spacerim just feels… strangely sparse and uninteresting, even in a lot of the places that should be interesting.
If this came out 5-6 years ago, it’d be a different story, but there’s frankly too many competitors that have done space RPG as good or better than Todd has with his latest entry.
I'm looking for games like this and The Outer Worlds, any suggestions?
Elite: Dangerous
No Man’s Sky
Star Citizen
I wouldn't call these RPGs though :( I love the first two, but they are Sandboxes without a campaign and right now I'd kill to have something like Mass Effect. Let's wait for Squadron 42...
Some people will worship anything Bethesda puts out, even when it's mid at best
Hey, at least it's better that worshipping Instinct Games.
Some people worship the turd products released by Apple, some the perfect games from Bethesda 😉
Some other people really let Apple live rent free in their heads lol
I mean, I actually like the game, but I will say that anyone that thought it deserved GOTY awards is delusional and presumably in a tiny minority to think it. It wasn't even plausible that it would even win best RPG when it came out the same year as Baldur's Gate 3. Starfield may not be a terrible game, but it's definitely not great either. It's thoroughly mediocre.
Starfield is one of the most bland games ever made. Modders can't fix it or want too. This is not Fallout or Elder Scrolls. We are talking about a new Intellectual Property (IP) and it was sub-bar at release. To make people care and want to mod it. You need give them something good. Bethesda failed at this for Starfield.
Also I tried of "Bethesda release another mid game, but the modders will save it.". Can we stop this. People need to hold them to a higher standard.
Anecdotally but this is why I felt there were less interesting fallout 4 mods to me than NV despite there being more of them.
As I understand it: the main issue with fallout 4 from a modding pov is that they reworked the entire engine twice between FONV and FO4. Once for Skyrim, which made it much easier to make mods, and then again for FO4 which made modding some things much harder, if not impossible without workarounds.
At the end of the day, people don't want to work really hard to polish a turd when they could be working on improving a flawed gem instead. New Vegas has much better meat on it's bones even if it's the same bones as 3 and 4. Starfield is like someone put a bunch of unflavored tofu on all those bones and tried to sell it as premium ribs.
Please fix your text.
Modders will fix it.
Also like… do we know it will even be easily moddable? When I think of games the most transformed by mods over the years I think of games that are 10+ years old, or extremely modular indie games seemingly designed with mods in mind (like Rimworld).
From what I've seen others say who have been in contact with the "big names" in modding apparently Suckthesda decided to make changes to the engine that made modding way more difficult than it was in the past and changed how some file structure works so combine that difficulty with an already super lackluster game and they basically gave up on it.
Bethesda shot themselves in the foot big time by paying lip service to modding, but actively making it worse.
My money is on money. The same reason Paradox make Collosal Order dumb down cities skylines 2 modding capabilities. They want to sell you content, not let modders create it for free. Once they get their dlcs out then they'll open modding up to whatever degree it's possible with the changes they've made.
How transformative it is is debatable, but the total war warhammer series got a really strong modding scene that's only gotten better with time.
Bethesda keeps their engine for a reason, there is a lot of people that will be intimately familiar with the modding tools once they arrive.
Also like… do we know it will even be easily moddable
They will be releasing a toolset same as their other games. They just haven't said when other than sometime in 2024.
I still don't get why my parents couldn't come to my wedding
Or why my parents are UC citizens despite me having a Freestar background
Or why my parents aren't religious despite me having the Enlightened background
Or why my parents seem to exist just to give me grandma's UC marine armor (but we're Freestar?????) and an ass terrible ship my dad won in a poker game
It's a typical sign that the game lacks polish.
I don't think making the parents Polish will help anything.
Every game needs more Polish
Cyberpunk 2077 had a ton of Polish and look how it was at launch.
A little too much Polish
They got the balance right eventually.
RIP to the removed Polish
Got it for free with my GPU. still feel ripped off. its just so incredible boring.
Makes you wonder what they spent all that development time doing? It's not like they had to reinvent the wheel and make an all new engine.
I've sunk more time into it than it deserves and I think maybe 50% of the content that feels unfinished or half baked might have been gutted. It feels like there was more there at one point and it got hacked off and spackled over.
Sticking with an old engine can also lose you a lot of time. Particularly, I suspect, when it's this one. Same piece of shit with the same limitations and issues as every Bethesda game, saddled with massive technical debt from the first instant. This thing was made with sword-and-horse CRPGs in mind - not at a huge scale, either - and works sorta OK-ish for Fallout... and now they wanted to tack on space flight, too.
The metro in one of the Fallout 3 expansions was famously basically... a hat, on an NPC. That's the sort of stuff you can end up doing if trying to do new/unsupported shit in old engines - and this is not getting any younger. Working out bugs, missing features, odd edge cases, old hacks that "just fixed something real quick" 15 years ago, trying to dig up old documentation...
Time adds up fast, those sunk costs are gonna fuck you up. And then you end up releasing Starfield.
Still don't know exactly how that translates into "we could only make one interior and copy-pasted it a hundred times" though.
They spent half the time fighting with their truly terrible engine. So many hacky work around for limited engine capabilities it's ridiculous.
They would be off if they just used Unreal, I honestly don't know what they're doing.
Same. I got two copies, actually. One with my CPU and the other with my GPU. My daughter and I both lost interest after the first day when I asked her last week if she had played it at all.
I played the game for at most 2 hours, and I feel ripped off. If it was an outright bad game at least those 2 hours would be fun. But, starfield isn’t even bad, just boring.
MOOD
I got Destiny 2 for free (never played first because no computer) and I want my money back for that shit FOMO exploitative trubbish
I’m sorry Trubbish, I didn’t mean to do you dirty like that
Im just sitting here wondering how anyone thought this was going to be good in the first place. Every bit of trailer or gameplay footage has made me meh from day one. "Looks like skyrim but in space" ive played skyrim.... to death.... changing the theme to space isnt exiting. Its cheap.
When I first heard about it I was excited and then I looked it up and realized it's a Bethesda game. So then I thought, Yeah I don't trust them I think I'll leave it.
They will keep doing this as long as people put up with the fact that they make crap half the time. Don't pre-order stuff just wait until it comes out and if it's good buy it otherwise no.
It's their problem that they are on a 20 year old game engine and refuse to use something more modern, and it's also their problem they don't have a quality control department. Why do we have to suffer for their mistakes?
I haven't pre-ordered a game since 2011. They aren't usually playable for a few weeks at least after launch anyway. The trend is becoming a year or two wait for games to get to the state promised pre-launch. By then they are heavily discounted or in some cases free to play. Just a way better deal.
Starfield did have an acceptable level of quality control as I have heard. It just isn't that great of a game, but not a defective product.
It looked like a mix of Fallout 4, and No Man's Sky.
Yeh, exactly, both famously disappointing games
I never got the Starfield hype either, Bethesda lost their touch years ago and proc gen rarely makes things good. I suspected it would be very average like other Bethesda games and it was.
Those auto generated planets sure tricked a lot of people. The idea of thousands of planets to explore to find out they are all generic empty spaces I bet has been fun for people to have to acknowledge
Why did people ever think that was going to work I don't know. It never even worked in No Man's Sky, the reason people consider that game good now has nothing to do with the procedural generation.
Yeah, I fell out of love with Bethesda with Skyrim, and I've never been big on scifi, so I knew it wasn't going to be for me, but even with my lowered expectations, it just looked so incredibly generic.
I guess, I forgot to factor in that it's also a AAA title. Those are, of course, prohibited by law from containing any resemblance of fun. But yeah, I don't know, it just looked like generic space game + generic shooter + generic Bethesda game. And then, as you've said, we've seen plenty games in each of those categories. Merely combining the categories, doesn't yet make for a good game.
Looks like skyrim but in space and also its just a shittier space explorer than no man's sky
what's hilarious is when I took a break from Starfield and went back to play skyrim for a bit, it was amazing how quickly I stopped and went "Oh! I'm having fun."
even skyrim which I've played to death still is fun to play.
It's an ok game.
Had a few plot points in the UC quest line that were cool. I liked that zero g casino fight.
Inventory management was shit, but that's pretty common to the creater.
Base building didn't really interest me in Fallout 4, and didn't do much for me here either. The crafting was weird. I don't like using my combat feats to make better sandwiches.
The ship customization was cool, but since you are just jumping to your destination it didn't matter much for my playthrough.
The proc gen planets were predictably empty feeling. I was worried about that after they said they were putting 1000 in. No way they could hand generate enough content to fill that, which was their strength in The Elder Scrolls.
I suspect they got caught up in the No Man's Sky hype and forgot to use their core strengths. Combine this with not enough innovation on their weaknesses and it was mid.
If they would have done an Expanse scale game, set within our solar system, where you had 2 large terrestrial planets, a number of asteroid bases, and kept their scale in check they may have been able to pull it off. But it felt just too stretched out.
I think that 7/10 review guy was right.
Base building and space ship building has definitely evolved!
Unfortunately, there's ZERO REASON to do any of it.
Even worse, newgame+, which IS required for the full Starfield experience, wipes all of your creations. What a incredibly mind boggling game decision.
Well there is one reason to do it, but Bethesda didnt really ramp up the raids in the way they should have.
I put it down after 25 hours a couple months ago and keep forgetting about it. The thought of moving inventory between my pack, the ship, and that box in the ...what's that building called where the group you joined live? I can't even remember what I was doing, or who that group was. I just can't inventory anymore.
You can prolly do the classic Bethesda "console command max carrying capacity and ignore inventory management at every turn" maneuver
Honest question, as I don't own or play starfield: Is the mod scene not strong?
Without the CK, mods mostly are engine tweaks or model/texture replacement mods. They need to release the creation kit in order for mods such as custom questlines(which IMO, will be the biggest thing for starfield, as there are hundreds of planets modders can utilize for their questlines without needing to use the same loading cell as another modder)
Bethesda hasn't released the official mod kit yet.
So all the mods have been hacks/workarounds that worked for prior creation engine games.
Not surprised. It's OK. Played 40 hours and then got bored. Haven't touched it since. No real incentive to go back to it.
This game reminded me of how awesome no man's sky is and how I'd rather just play that. Curious if they will make a second after that horrible launch?
Man just take starfields art direction, fps combat, and NPCs (no man's sky's NPCs are too dull.) mixed into no man's sky and i'd be thrilled!! I hate the "cartoony" style, extra vibrant colors of NMS and the gunplay is absolutely atrocious, but swap that with starfield and you'd have a real gem.
I liked it. the problem is I feel very little temptation to play it again. it's not a bad game to be frank, but it's not a genre defining game either and obviously a lot of people are dissapointed with that.
I'll get in again once DLC drops and some good mod work is done. but for now I think the 100 hours I spent were fine, but enough at this point
The proc gen planets were predictably empty feeling. I was worried about that after they said they were putting 1000 in. No way they could hand generate enough content to fill that, which was their strength in The Elder Scrolls.
Also to be honest, this was me with every single bethesda game. Play it properly with the GOTY edition (all DLC) and essential mods. Then almost every single one slaps
I only had fun once I started using console commands.
Also I don't think that works unless you also add the lemmy instance like @nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works I just happened to notice your comment randomly. But it's not in my mentions inbox.
And some people were annoyed it didn't win game of the year...
Most average game of the year.
Bethesda hasn't innovated in years, they depend nearly entirely on the name alone
and modders.
Let us all remember that one time that they thought that monetizing the mods was a good idea and a massive amount of Steam users demolished them online. Like oh you want to make awful games, make that money, then have modders make cool content that makes it worth playing, and then have the balls to ask for a cut of what they’re selling it for?
And guess what? They still do that. And the fallout 76 store and subscription is something I will never forget.
One of the games of the year!
The universe of Elder Scrolls: Spacerim just feels… strangely sparse and uninteresting, even in a lot of the places that should be interesting.
If this came out 5-6 years ago, it’d be a different story, but there’s frankly too many competitors that have done space RPG as good or better than Todd has with his latest entry.
I'm looking for games like this and The Outer Worlds, any suggestions?
Elite: Dangerous
No Man’s Sky
Star Citizen
I wouldn't call these RPGs though :( I love the first two, but they are Sandboxes without a campaign and right now I'd kill to have something like Mass Effect. Let's wait for Squadron 42...
Some people will worship anything Bethesda puts out, even when it's mid at best
Hey, at least it's better that worshipping Instinct Games.
Some people worship the turd products released by Apple, some the perfect games from Bethesda 😉
Some other people really let Apple live rent free in their heads lol
I mean, I actually like the game, but I will say that anyone that thought it deserved GOTY awards is delusional and presumably in a tiny minority to think it. It wasn't even plausible that it would even win best RPG when it came out the same year as Baldur's Gate 3. Starfield may not be a terrible game, but it's definitely not great either. It's thoroughly mediocre.
Starfield is one of the most bland games ever made. Modders can't fix it or want too. This is not Fallout or Elder Scrolls. We are talking about a new Intellectual Property (IP) and it was sub-bar at release. To make people care and want to mod it. You need give them something good. Bethesda failed at this for Starfield.
Also I tried of "Bethesda release another mid game, but the modders will save it.". Can we stop this. People need to hold them to a higher standard.
Anecdotally but this is why I felt there were less interesting fallout 4 mods to me than NV despite there being more of them.
As I understand it: the main issue with fallout 4 from a modding pov is that they reworked the entire engine twice between FONV and FO4. Once for Skyrim, which made it much easier to make mods, and then again for FO4 which made modding some things much harder, if not impossible without workarounds.
At the end of the day, people don't want to work really hard to polish a turd when they could be working on improving a flawed gem instead. New Vegas has much better meat on it's bones even if it's the same bones as 3 and 4. Starfield is like someone put a bunch of unflavored tofu on all those bones and tried to sell it as premium ribs.
Please fix your text.
Modders will fix it.
Also like… do we know it will even be easily moddable? When I think of games the most transformed by mods over the years I think of games that are 10+ years old, or extremely modular indie games seemingly designed with mods in mind (like Rimworld).
From what I've seen others say who have been in contact with the "big names" in modding apparently Suckthesda decided to make changes to the engine that made modding way more difficult than it was in the past and changed how some file structure works so combine that difficulty with an already super lackluster game and they basically gave up on it.
Bethesda shot themselves in the foot big time by paying lip service to modding, but actively making it worse.
My money is on money. The same reason Paradox make Collosal Order dumb down cities skylines 2 modding capabilities. They want to sell you content, not let modders create it for free. Once they get their dlcs out then they'll open modding up to whatever degree it's possible with the changes they've made.
How transformative it is is debatable, but the total war warhammer series got a really strong modding scene that's only gotten better with time.
Bethesda keeps their engine for a reason, there is a lot of people that will be intimately familiar with the modding tools once they arrive.
They will be releasing a toolset same as their other games. They just haven't said when other than sometime in 2024.
I still don't get why my parents couldn't come to my wedding
Or why my parents are UC citizens despite me having a Freestar background
Or why my parents aren't religious despite me having the Enlightened background
Or why my parents seem to exist just to give me grandma's UC marine armor (but we're Freestar?????) and an ass terrible ship my dad won in a poker game
It's a typical sign that the game lacks polish.
I don't think making the parents Polish will help anything.
Every game needs more Polish
Cyberpunk 2077 had a ton of Polish and look how it was at launch.
A little too much Polish
They got the balance right eventually.
RIP to the removed Polish
Got it for free with my GPU. still feel ripped off. its just so incredible boring.
Makes you wonder what they spent all that development time doing? It's not like they had to reinvent the wheel and make an all new engine.
I've sunk more time into it than it deserves and I think maybe 50% of the content that feels unfinished or half baked might have been gutted. It feels like there was more there at one point and it got hacked off and spackled over.
Sticking with an old engine can also lose you a lot of time. Particularly, I suspect, when it's this one. Same piece of shit with the same limitations and issues as every Bethesda game, saddled with massive technical debt from the first instant. This thing was made with sword-and-horse CRPGs in mind - not at a huge scale, either - and works sorta OK-ish for Fallout... and now they wanted to tack on space flight, too.
The metro in one of the Fallout 3 expansions was famously basically... a hat, on an NPC. That's the sort of stuff you can end up doing if trying to do new/unsupported shit in old engines - and this is not getting any younger. Working out bugs, missing features, odd edge cases, old hacks that "just fixed something real quick" 15 years ago, trying to dig up old documentation...
Time adds up fast, those sunk costs are gonna fuck you up. And then you end up releasing Starfield.
Still don't know exactly how that translates into "we could only make one interior and copy-pasted it a hundred times" though.
They spent half the time fighting with their truly terrible engine. So many hacky work around for limited engine capabilities it's ridiculous.
They would be off if they just used Unreal, I honestly don't know what they're doing.
Same. I got two copies, actually. One with my CPU and the other with my GPU. My daughter and I both lost interest after the first day when I asked her last week if she had played it at all.
I played the game for at most 2 hours, and I feel ripped off. If it was an outright bad game at least those 2 hours would be fun. But, starfield isn’t even bad, just boring.
MOOD
I got Destiny 2 for free (never played first because no computer) and I want my money back for that shit FOMO exploitative trubbish
I’m sorry Trubbish, I didn’t mean to do you dirty like that
Im just sitting here wondering how anyone thought this was going to be good in the first place. Every bit of trailer or gameplay footage has made me meh from day one. "Looks like skyrim but in space" ive played skyrim.... to death.... changing the theme to space isnt exiting. Its cheap.
When I first heard about it I was excited and then I looked it up and realized it's a Bethesda game. So then I thought, Yeah I don't trust them I think I'll leave it.
They will keep doing this as long as people put up with the fact that they make crap half the time. Don't pre-order stuff just wait until it comes out and if it's good buy it otherwise no.
It's their problem that they are on a 20 year old game engine and refuse to use something more modern, and it's also their problem they don't have a quality control department. Why do we have to suffer for their mistakes?
I haven't pre-ordered a game since 2011. They aren't usually playable for a few weeks at least after launch anyway. The trend is becoming a year or two wait for games to get to the state promised pre-launch. By then they are heavily discounted or in some cases free to play. Just a way better deal.
Starfield did have an acceptable level of quality control as I have heard. It just isn't that great of a game, but not a defective product.
It looked like a mix of Fallout 4, and No Man's Sky.
Yeh, exactly, both famously disappointing games
I never got the Starfield hype either, Bethesda lost their touch years ago and proc gen rarely makes things good. I suspected it would be very average like other Bethesda games and it was.
Those auto generated planets sure tricked a lot of people. The idea of thousands of planets to explore to find out they are all generic empty spaces I bet has been fun for people to have to acknowledge
Why did people ever think that was going to work I don't know. It never even worked in No Man's Sky, the reason people consider that game good now has nothing to do with the procedural generation.
Yeah, I fell out of love with Bethesda with Skyrim, and I've never been big on scifi, so I knew it wasn't going to be for me, but even with my lowered expectations, it just looked so incredibly generic.
I guess, I forgot to factor in that it's also a AAA title. Those are, of course, prohibited by law from containing any resemblance of fun. But yeah, I don't know, it just looked like generic space game + generic shooter + generic Bethesda game. And then, as you've said, we've seen plenty games in each of those categories. Merely combining the categories, doesn't yet make for a good game.
Looks like skyrim but in space and also its just a shittier space explorer than no man's sky
what's hilarious is when I took a break from Starfield and went back to play skyrim for a bit, it was amazing how quickly I stopped and went "Oh! I'm having fun."
even skyrim which I've played to death still is fun to play.
It's an ok game.
Had a few plot points in the UC quest line that were cool. I liked that zero g casino fight.
Inventory management was shit, but that's pretty common to the creater.
Base building didn't really interest me in Fallout 4, and didn't do much for me here either. The crafting was weird. I don't like using my combat feats to make better sandwiches.
The ship customization was cool, but since you are just jumping to your destination it didn't matter much for my playthrough.
The proc gen planets were predictably empty feeling. I was worried about that after they said they were putting 1000 in. No way they could hand generate enough content to fill that, which was their strength in The Elder Scrolls.
I suspect they got caught up in the No Man's Sky hype and forgot to use their core strengths. Combine this with not enough innovation on their weaknesses and it was mid.
If they would have done an Expanse scale game, set within our solar system, where you had 2 large terrestrial planets, a number of asteroid bases, and kept their scale in check they may have been able to pull it off. But it felt just too stretched out.
I think that 7/10 review guy was right.
Base building and space ship building has definitely evolved!
Unfortunately, there's ZERO REASON to do any of it.
Even worse, newgame+, which IS required for the full Starfield experience, wipes all of your creations. What a incredibly mind boggling game decision.
Well there is one reason to do it, but Bethesda didnt really ramp up the raids in the way they should have.
I put it down after 25 hours a couple months ago and keep forgetting about it. The thought of moving inventory between my pack, the ship, and that box in the ...what's that building called where the group you joined live? I can't even remember what I was doing, or who that group was. I just can't inventory anymore.
You can prolly do the classic Bethesda "console command max carrying capacity and ignore inventory management at every turn" maneuver
Honest question, as I don't own or play starfield: Is the mod scene not strong?
Without the CK, mods mostly are engine tweaks or model/texture replacement mods. They need to release the creation kit in order for mods such as custom questlines(which IMO, will be the biggest thing for starfield, as there are hundreds of planets modders can utilize for their questlines without needing to use the same loading cell as another modder)
Bethesda hasn't released the official mod kit yet.
So all the mods have been hacks/workarounds that worked for prior creation engine games.
Not surprised. It's OK. Played 40 hours and then got bored. Haven't touched it since. No real incentive to go back to it.
This game reminded me of how awesome no man's sky is and how I'd rather just play that. Curious if they will make a second after that horrible launch?
Man just take starfields art direction, fps combat, and NPCs (no man's sky's NPCs are too dull.) mixed into no man's sky and i'd be thrilled!! I hate the "cartoony" style, extra vibrant colors of NMS and the gunplay is absolutely atrocious, but swap that with starfield and you'd have a real gem.
Hello Games has said they are working on something with an inconceivable scope.
So they are definitely working on something 'big.'
Though given the past, they may be a bit more close to the chest until ready this time around.
I liked it. the problem is I feel very little temptation to play it again. it's not a bad game to be frank, but it's not a genre defining game either and obviously a lot of people are dissapointed with that.
I'll get in again once DLC drops and some good mod work is done. but for now I think the 100 hours I spent were fine, but enough at this point
Also to be honest, this was me with every single bethesda game. Play it properly with the GOTY edition (all DLC) and essential mods. Then almost every single one slaps
I only had fun once I started using console commands.
Some of the guns you can come up with is amazing.
@nanoUFO
yes?
Shit sorry. I fat fingered the comment. Nvm
Also I don't think that works unless you also add the lemmy instance like @nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works I just happened to notice your comment randomly. But it's not in my mentions inbox.