I feel like BG3 had more bugs for me than Starfield, but BG3 is the better game by far even considering that.
Understandable to have a few more bugs when you have 20x the content lol
BG3 is a much smaller game than Starfield overall though. There aren't systems like ship-building, base-building, and the scale is much smaller as well.
Only in the sense that a hollowed out costco with a 1/2 isle of stuff to sell is a bigger store than a target.
Larian and owlcat for me. I have enjoyed pathfinder WoR and Divinity original sin 2/Baldurs gate 3 far far more than fallout 4 and Starfield.
Owlcat has released Rogue Trader now too!
I know. I'm getting it for myself as a Xmas treat and I know nothing about Warhammer but I've loved both Pathfinder games.
it's like AAA games are only early access these days
In two years they can get the award for “best ongoing game” then, just like Cyberpunk :D
God, what a dick sucking award. Cyberpunk may be playable now, but it did fuck all to deserve that.
Better games launched excellent and got better with age. Launching to get removed from online stores and taking years to reach playable is not the best ongoing anything.
It truly was a Great Gamer Gaslighting after that anime was released. Suddenly, cyberpunk was a work of art and everyone wanted to revisit it to see places from the anime. They hadn't even done much to fix it yet at that point, and may even have still been dealing with legal stuff from all the stuff they promised that wasn't in the game.
The PR turn around with that game was wild to watch, it happened almost overnight. And Gamerz TM did it to themselves.
To be fair, it was a bomb-ass anime
/s
Haha I have heard that. It's on my to-watch list for sure
Thank corporate morons forcing devs to the door to meet ridiculous timelines, they don’t give a fuck if it’s ready or not.
I’m a SWE and my manager would tell me shit like “even Apple pushed out the iPhone with some bugs”, “at some point you have to wrap it and ship it”, etc. Mgmt uses this bullshit to feel better about their (or their bosses) poorly balanced priorities and decisions.
It’s all about announce early, bag as much interest and money as possible and then ship it regardless if it’s reached the definition of done or not (you better believe mgmt will throw those goalposts around as they see fit)
Pre-ordering morons hold some blame here as well as they play right into the bullshit I’m talking about
why the surprise? as long as people keep buying they will try to squize more money for less effort.
The worst part is that I've played early access games that have more shit going for them than Starfield
Glad to see they're still improving it. When I get the Ultra Game of the Year Turbo Deluxe edition for $20 in years to come, I no doubt will enjoy it.
I'm gonna wait for the Ultra Game of the Year Turbo Deluxe edition Complete
Can't forget the Ultra Game of the Year Turbo Deluxe Complete Anniversary edition, now with built-in mods.
For TheComputerV2
i didnt play new vegas until the ultimate edition was 5 bucks at wal mart. thankfully avoiding the horrid bugs it had on launch
At the same time, I'll be spending my $20 to buy Skyrim again so I can run it on my toaster.
When a city map is a luxury.
Insane that wasnt in the list of "must ship" features
oh boy, now i get to enjoy... basic features that should have been there at launch?
seems this is a recurring thing nowadays. i pray to god fable 4 doesn't suck the big one.
Putting your faith in a fable game to live up to expectations is a terrible move.
Peter Molyneux is not involved with the project or studio so there’s actually a chance we might have both reasonable expectations and promises delivered. I had to google around to make sure; initially I was going to link some stuff about how trusting Molyneux is really dumb.
Instead it's a title made by a studio that's about 3 levels removed from the original creators.
Nakey Jakey recently did a super indepth video on what is wrong with Starfield. And suffice it to say, I've removed the game from my wishlist. There's betterr games to spend my money on.
If you too have an unhealthy relationship with absurdly long video essays, I'd point you in the direction of PatricianTV's Starfield analysis.
I for one absolutely do, thanks for the rec
You're very welcome. If you get the chance, let me know what you thought of it.
I desperately want to watch his 8 hour analysis of Starfield but am scared of the commitment.
Advice for consumption Patrician himself posted on his 24-hr Skyrim analysis:
Use the YouTube chapters.
Play it in the background or on a second monitor.
Don't rely on YouTube accurately tracking your progress through the vid. Comment a timestamp to use as a bookmark instead.
Commenting a timestamp is a nice way to get "engagement" for the algorithm.
Absolutely but it is also far more reliable than however YouTube tracks your progress. A win-win.
I agree.
It's almost always better to wait on Bethesda titles and buy the goty/complete edition a few years later.
Maybe it's time to just stop giving Bethesda money all together. Or until they start releasing games when they're finished.
Guess that could be said about any AAA company though
Man, if they release a "pokemon emerald" version of starfield and slap a goty title on it, that just confirms the company only breathes in order to try and blow smoke up our asses
Yeah yeah, wake me up when AI modders recreate Daggerfall in the ES6 engine.
I think people would hate it again, seeing how they hated Starfield that is also procedural.
You'd have to change Daggerfall so that you can't run, only fast travel, between dungeons and cities to truly mirror the Starfield experience.
Are they doing a new engine for ES6?
Yes, Creation Engine 3
/s
Still not buying that garbage.
Honestly I let my Gamepass lapse and was considering re-upping it to play Starfield. And now I am for sure not going to re-up it for Starfield. Maybe I’ll visit it in a few years, but it sounds like not a great time from Nakey Jakey’s review on it.
He provided so many examples of how it's worse than Skyrim 😅
Just the fact that the ship combat is awful AND you don’t get to fly your ship TO other planets makes this a pass for me.
I'd say "i will pick it up on a sale in a year or two" but they're just going to release the enhanced / special / anniversary / superspace edition down the line too, so why bother
Until I can navigate in space like I can in FREELANCER...which BTW is from 2003....
I want nothing to do with it
Friiiiick I miss freelancer so much. Best space sim to date.
It's free to download mate! Plus there's a huge mod that turns it into an MMO that is still being worked on
It's abandon ware now
The main feature I want is better optimization. It’s really not good still and I’ve played with the settings more than I wanted to
Last months patch did a lot for optimization, especially on the cpu and non amd gpu builds, seeing double digit gains.
Pro tip: finish game first, THEN release it!
Enhanced loading screens?
Loading screens inside your loading screens! Now with extended ultra HD loading times
I haven't bought Starfield, was waiting for sub-$25. If there are no mods, I'm lowering that to sub-$10.
Seriously what a clusterfuck of a game this has been. I'm so happy I didn't bite and buy it yet.
When will game companies learn that they could be doing so much better if they just released their games AFTER they're finished?
Reminder that Todd wanted to release this last year, imagine the state it was in lol
Didn't he also say in an interview post-launch that they still hadn't nailed down a fun core gameplay loop until a few months before it shipped?
C'mon Todd, what are you doing?
I should probably pick this up when it’s on sale. I bought it on release after playing CyberPunk with ray tracing and asked for a refund after playing for 20 minutes because it just looked like garbage in comparison.
Part of the reason why Bethesda games visually looks bad is because their tied to the hip with creation engine for modders to use. Part of the reason why bethesda games have soo many mods is because of how much of the games engine is open to modders to modify.
I agree. I was fine with it for Skyrim and Fallout 4 but after getting used to how gorgeous CP2077 was, the difference was jarring for a AAA title in 2023.
The thing is, cyberpunk also has mod support, and it's pretty good, I use a climbing mod, a drone mancer class mod, and before the 2.1 update it already had a metro system via mod.
It pales in conparison to what modders do with bethesda games.
Modders can legitamately put other games into a bethesdasoft title (tale of two wastelands, skyblivion, morrowblivion, skywind)
Take for example, the games let you outright add your own physics engine.
Starfield is a fucking joke.
I mean, the only thing that's really needed is the standard access to the creation kit. After that, I think modders can polish it up to competency, although flying to planets might be outside the abilities of the engine. I think anyone still hoping Starfield is going to be a good space game need to stop dreaming and go back to Elite/No Mans Sky/Waiting for Star Citizen, but there were some really elaborate mods for New Vegas and Skyrim back in the day. Maybe someone dedicated and talented enough could even fix that.
The trick is that they want paid mods so they can do nothing and get a decade of profit. Consider that many of the mods on Nexus have millions of unique downloads.
Even if they charge 3 bucks a mod and get a third of it, that's tens of millions of dollars with zero effort on their part.
But the primary issue is that the current modding framework they're pushing onto Skyrim doesn't support framework mods, so none of the big mods Skyrim is known for, and have kept it alive so long, could happen.
And that people will hopefully riot about paid mods again. The Skyrim framework flew under the radar because of clever timing. There's no way it goes un-noticed on their newest flagship game.
If the modding community likes Starfield it should really help with the emptiness of space at least. I can imagine the idea of just building an entire quest line in your selected planet would be nice for avoiding mod conflicts
I’ve heard secondhand the people working on a coop mod, after making one for Skyrim, gave up on it after deciding the game is just bad and uninteresting.
I know that happened but I'd need to see more of a consensus from modders before I call it a wash. If modders continue to add to the game, it will likely become more appealing and the actual foundation to add mods seems pretty decent.
I already liked the game since I'm not the typical bethesda fan, "their" only game I finished was New Vegas, liked the characters and story and didn't care that planets were empty since I played Daggerfal Unity.
But I don't think they can grab that explorer fanbase again, they are just against procedural generation in general, they probably wanted Outer Worlds but bigger.
But I don't think they can grab that explorer fanbase again, they are just against procedural generation in general, they probably wanted Outer Worlds but bigger.
I don't think that's true. Elite Dangerous is one of my favorite games and it's procedurally generated. I think the issue is that that's not exactly what Starfield is.
When you "land" in Starfield (outside a handcrafted city or similar), you land in a procedurally generated box made just for you. It isn't repeatable by anybody but you. Other people who "land" in the same spot will not see what you saw, they get their own procedurally generated box. The contents of the box are similar (the terrain is the right color, the flora and fauna are the same). If you were to see something particularly cool in your box (although I never did when I was playing the game) - ie: "unusually tall mountain range" or "unusually deep valley" - you can't tell someone "hey go to coordinates x,y and check this out!" You CAN do this in Elite Dangerous. All worlds, all settlements - everything is the same for everyone, and if you explore through it all and you find something interesting, you can share it with people.
In Starfield, your box always contains an uninteresting/unremarkable patch of terrain and magically, literally everywhere you land, there are structures and ships within walking distance - none of which anyone can get to but you.
There is literally no WAY to explore. Everywhere you land, it's just another box and it will always contain the same variation on the same things. That isn't exploration. Exploration implies things that exist whether you are there or not and which can be found by someone if they look long enough.
This is the most precise presentation about what I hated about Starfield. I gave up about 5ish hours in when the 3rd planet I landed on to explore was literally the same as the first two. Maybe it was just me, maybe it was unlucky lottery, but the fast travel to multiple boxes with the same ingredients shaken up slightly was enough to make me walk away.
If people liked it, I’m very happy for them, it just didn’t do it for me and I feel like it’s starting to be diminishing returns with Bethesda after Fallout 3/Skyrim (though I’m sure someone will correct me with an older drop off point).
I think you've excellently captured the difference here. I didn't get heavily into Elite Dangerous, but on one of my longest journeys, I scanned a few things that no-one had ever scanned before. I didn't discover any awesome looking space phenomena that would be worth sharing (at least, none that hadn't been discovered before), but the prospect that I could was exciting.
Even just the idea that my name would be on other people's screens if they came and scanned the same things I did, because we were all sharing the same world.
If I remember it correctly, everything in E:D is procedurally generated, but every player has the same seed so it generates everything identically. That's how they keep the installation a manageable size.
Yes and this is what Starfield doesn't do. Starfield doesn't actually have whole planets generated by a shared seed. Planets in Starfield are just unlimited sources of randomly generated playboxes. Since the planets don't actually exist, they can't properly be said to be explorable.
For anyone interested in this topic, there is a super great video that explains the difference between procedural generation and random generation and how a tiny amount of data can be used to generate extremely complex things.
I got a little excited but when I read the comment… kinda don’t care given I already finished playing sf.
I’ll pick it up again when creation kit drops and someone actually adds something to it
This sounds like a good thing. Maybe I will check the name out in the future.
Soooo… they are working with the unpaid modders to make more content they’ll surely charge for.
SOOOOO glad Sony didn’t buy that garbage.
Why does it matter to you what Sony buys?
Why does what matters to me, matter to you?
It doesn't matter to me. I am just curious as to why it matters to you.
It doesn’t matter to me. I’m just glad Sony didn’t buy them out.
Too late.
I feel like BG3 had more bugs for me than Starfield, but BG3 is the better game by far even considering that.
Understandable to have a few more bugs when you have 20x the content lol
BG3 is a much smaller game than Starfield overall though. There aren't systems like ship-building, base-building, and the scale is much smaller as well.
Only in the sense that a hollowed out costco with a 1/2 isle of stuff to sell is a bigger store than a target.
Larian and owlcat for me. I have enjoyed pathfinder WoR and Divinity original sin 2/Baldurs gate 3 far far more than fallout 4 and Starfield.
Owlcat has released Rogue Trader now too!
I know. I'm getting it for myself as a Xmas treat and I know nothing about Warhammer but I've loved both Pathfinder games.
Gross, Larian
it's like AAA games are only early access these days
In two years they can get the award for “best ongoing game” then, just like Cyberpunk :D
God, what a dick sucking award. Cyberpunk may be playable now, but it did fuck all to deserve that.
Better games launched excellent and got better with age. Launching to get removed from online stores and taking years to reach playable is not the best ongoing anything.
It truly was a Great Gamer Gaslighting after that anime was released. Suddenly, cyberpunk was a work of art and everyone wanted to revisit it to see places from the anime. They hadn't even done much to fix it yet at that point, and may even have still been dealing with legal stuff from all the stuff they promised that wasn't in the game.
The PR turn around with that game was wild to watch, it happened almost overnight. And Gamerz TM did it to themselves.
To be fair, it was a bomb-ass anime
/s
Haha I have heard that. It's on my to-watch list for sure
Thank corporate morons forcing devs to the door to meet ridiculous timelines, they don’t give a fuck if it’s ready or not.
I’m a SWE and my manager would tell me shit like “even Apple pushed out the iPhone with some bugs”, “at some point you have to wrap it and ship it”, etc. Mgmt uses this bullshit to feel better about their (or their bosses) poorly balanced priorities and decisions.
It’s all about announce early, bag as much interest and money as possible and then ship it regardless if it’s reached the definition of done or not (you better believe mgmt will throw those goalposts around as they see fit)
Pre-ordering morons hold some blame here as well as they play right into the bullshit I’m talking about
why the surprise? as long as people keep buying they will try to squize more money for less effort.
The worst part is that I've played early access games that have more shit going for them than Starfield
Glad to see they're still improving it. When I get the Ultra Game of the Year Turbo Deluxe edition for $20 in years to come, I no doubt will enjoy it.
I'm gonna wait for the Ultra Game of the Year Turbo Deluxe edition Complete
Can't forget the Ultra Game of the Year Turbo Deluxe Complete Anniversary edition, now with built-in mods.
For TheComputerV2
i didnt play new vegas until the ultimate edition was 5 bucks at wal mart. thankfully avoiding the horrid bugs it had on launch
At the same time, I'll be spending my $20 to buy Skyrim again so I can run it on my toaster.
When a city map is a luxury.
Insane that wasnt in the list of "must ship" features
oh boy, now i get to enjoy... basic features that should have been there at launch?
seems this is a recurring thing nowadays. i pray to god fable 4 doesn't suck the big one.
Putting your faith in a fable game to live up to expectations is a terrible move.
Peter Molyneux is not involved with the project or studio so there’s actually a chance we might have both reasonable expectations and promises delivered. I had to google around to make sure; initially I was going to link some stuff about how trusting Molyneux is really dumb.
Instead it's a title made by a studio that's about 3 levels removed from the original creators.
Nakey Jakey recently did a super indepth video on what is wrong with Starfield. And suffice it to say, I've removed the game from my wishlist. There's betterr games to spend my money on.
If you too have an unhealthy relationship with absurdly long video essays, I'd point you in the direction of PatricianTV's Starfield analysis.
I for one absolutely do, thanks for the rec
You're very welcome. If you get the chance, let me know what you thought of it.
I desperately want to watch his 8 hour analysis of Starfield but am scared of the commitment.
Advice for consumption Patrician himself posted on his 24-hr Skyrim analysis:
Commenting a timestamp is a nice way to get "engagement" for the algorithm.
Absolutely but it is also far more reliable than however YouTube tracks your progress. A win-win.
I agree.
It's almost always better to wait on Bethesda titles and buy the goty/complete edition a few years later.
Maybe it's time to just stop giving Bethesda money all together. Or until they start releasing games when they're finished.
Guess that could be said about any AAA company though
Man, if they release a "pokemon emerald" version of starfield and slap a goty title on it, that just confirms the company only breathes in order to try and blow smoke up our asses
Yeah yeah, wake me up when AI modders recreate Daggerfall in the ES6 engine.
I think people would hate it again, seeing how they hated Starfield that is also procedural.
You'd have to change Daggerfall so that you can't run, only fast travel, between dungeons and cities to truly mirror the Starfield experience.
Are they doing a new engine for ES6?
Yes, Creation Engine 3
/s
Still not buying that garbage.
Honestly I let my Gamepass lapse and was considering re-upping it to play Starfield. And now I am for sure not going to re-up it for Starfield. Maybe I’ll visit it in a few years, but it sounds like not a great time from Nakey Jakey’s review on it.
He provided so many examples of how it's worse than Skyrim 😅
Just the fact that the ship combat is awful AND you don’t get to fly your ship TO other planets makes this a pass for me.
I'd say "i will pick it up on a sale in a year or two" but they're just going to release the enhanced / special / anniversary / superspace edition down the line too, so why bother
Until I can navigate in space like I can in FREELANCER...which BTW is from 2003....
I want nothing to do with it
Friiiiick I miss freelancer so much. Best space sim to date.
It's free to download mate! Plus there's a huge mod that turns it into an MMO that is still being worked on
It's abandon ware now
The main feature I want is better optimization. It’s really not good still and I’ve played with the settings more than I wanted to
Last months patch did a lot for optimization, especially on the cpu and non amd gpu builds, seeing double digit gains.
Pro tip: finish game first, THEN release it!
Enhanced loading screens?
Loading screens inside your loading screens! Now with extended ultra HD loading times
I haven't bought Starfield, was waiting for sub-$25. If there are no mods, I'm lowering that to sub-$10.
Seriously what a clusterfuck of a game this has been. I'm so happy I didn't bite and buy it yet.
When will game companies learn that they could be doing so much better if they just released their games AFTER they're finished?
Reminder that Todd wanted to release this last year, imagine the state it was in lol
Didn't he also say in an interview post-launch that they still hadn't nailed down a fun core gameplay loop until a few months before it shipped?
C'mon Todd, what are you doing?
I should probably pick this up when it’s on sale. I bought it on release after playing CyberPunk with ray tracing and asked for a refund after playing for 20 minutes because it just looked like garbage in comparison.
Part of the reason why Bethesda games visually looks bad is because their tied to the hip with creation engine for modders to use. Part of the reason why bethesda games have soo many mods is because of how much of the games engine is open to modders to modify.
I agree. I was fine with it for Skyrim and Fallout 4 but after getting used to how gorgeous CP2077 was, the difference was jarring for a AAA title in 2023.
The thing is, cyberpunk also has mod support, and it's pretty good, I use a climbing mod, a drone mancer class mod, and before the 2.1 update it already had a metro system via mod.
It pales in conparison to what modders do with bethesda games.
Modders can legitamately put other games into a bethesdasoft title (tale of two wastelands, skyblivion, morrowblivion, skywind)
Take for example, the games let you outright add your own physics engine.
Starfield is a fucking joke.
I mean, the only thing that's really needed is the standard access to the creation kit. After that, I think modders can polish it up to competency, although flying to planets might be outside the abilities of the engine. I think anyone still hoping Starfield is going to be a good space game need to stop dreaming and go back to Elite/No Mans Sky/Waiting for Star Citizen, but there were some really elaborate mods for New Vegas and Skyrim back in the day. Maybe someone dedicated and talented enough could even fix that.
The trick is that they want paid mods so they can do nothing and get a decade of profit. Consider that many of the mods on Nexus have millions of unique downloads.
Even if they charge 3 bucks a mod and get a third of it, that's tens of millions of dollars with zero effort on their part.
But the primary issue is that the current modding framework they're pushing onto Skyrim doesn't support framework mods, so none of the big mods Skyrim is known for, and have kept it alive so long, could happen.
And that people will hopefully riot about paid mods again. The Skyrim framework flew under the radar because of clever timing. There's no way it goes un-noticed on their newest flagship game.
If the modding community likes Starfield it should really help with the emptiness of space at least. I can imagine the idea of just building an entire quest line in your selected planet would be nice for avoiding mod conflicts
I’ve heard secondhand the people working on a coop mod, after making one for Skyrim, gave up on it after deciding the game is just bad and uninteresting.
I know that happened but I'd need to see more of a consensus from modders before I call it a wash. If modders continue to add to the game, it will likely become more appealing and the actual foundation to add mods seems pretty decent.
I already liked the game since I'm not the typical bethesda fan, "their" only game I finished was New Vegas, liked the characters and story and didn't care that planets were empty since I played Daggerfal Unity. But I don't think they can grab that explorer fanbase again, they are just against procedural generation in general, they probably wanted Outer Worlds but bigger.
I don't think that's true. Elite Dangerous is one of my favorite games and it's procedurally generated. I think the issue is that that's not exactly what Starfield is.
When you "land" in Starfield (outside a handcrafted city or similar), you land in a procedurally generated box made just for you. It isn't repeatable by anybody but you. Other people who "land" in the same spot will not see what you saw, they get their own procedurally generated box. The contents of the box are similar (the terrain is the right color, the flora and fauna are the same). If you were to see something particularly cool in your box (although I never did when I was playing the game) - ie: "unusually tall mountain range" or "unusually deep valley" - you can't tell someone "hey go to coordinates x,y and check this out!" You CAN do this in Elite Dangerous. All worlds, all settlements - everything is the same for everyone, and if you explore through it all and you find something interesting, you can share it with people.
In Starfield, your box always contains an uninteresting/unremarkable patch of terrain and magically, literally everywhere you land, there are structures and ships within walking distance - none of which anyone can get to but you.
There is literally no WAY to explore. Everywhere you land, it's just another box and it will always contain the same variation on the same things. That isn't exploration. Exploration implies things that exist whether you are there or not and which can be found by someone if they look long enough.
This is the most precise presentation about what I hated about Starfield. I gave up about 5ish hours in when the 3rd planet I landed on to explore was literally the same as the first two. Maybe it was just me, maybe it was unlucky lottery, but the fast travel to multiple boxes with the same ingredients shaken up slightly was enough to make me walk away.
If people liked it, I’m very happy for them, it just didn’t do it for me and I feel like it’s starting to be diminishing returns with Bethesda after Fallout 3/Skyrim (though I’m sure someone will correct me with an older drop off point).
I think you've excellently captured the difference here. I didn't get heavily into Elite Dangerous, but on one of my longest journeys, I scanned a few things that no-one had ever scanned before. I didn't discover any awesome looking space phenomena that would be worth sharing (at least, none that hadn't been discovered before), but the prospect that I could was exciting.
Even just the idea that my name would be on other people's screens if they came and scanned the same things I did, because we were all sharing the same world.
If I remember it correctly, everything in E:D is procedurally generated, but every player has the same seed so it generates everything identically. That's how they keep the installation a manageable size.
Yes and this is what Starfield doesn't do. Starfield doesn't actually have whole planets generated by a shared seed. Planets in Starfield are just unlimited sources of randomly generated playboxes. Since the planets don't actually exist, they can't properly be said to be explorable.
For anyone interested in this topic, there is a super great video that explains the difference between procedural generation and random generation and how a tiny amount of data can be used to generate extremely complex things.
I got a little excited but when I read the comment… kinda don’t care given I already finished playing sf.
I’ll pick it up again when creation kit drops and someone actually adds something to it
This sounds like a good thing. Maybe I will check the name out in the future.
Soooo… they are working with the unpaid modders to make more content they’ll surely charge for.
SOOOOO glad Sony didn’t buy that garbage.
Why does it matter to you what Sony buys?
Why does what matters to me, matter to you?
It doesn't matter to me. I am just curious as to why it matters to you.
It doesn’t matter to me. I’m just glad Sony didn’t buy them out.
Why does it matter?
It's just weird, that's all.
what?