Is Starfield Bethesda's Biggest Disappointment?

Starfield has been out for quite a while now...let's take a look back and see how things have been going.

[Mcw]

I have never tried harder to enjoy a game more, but after 25 hours, I just wasn't having enough fun with it, so I bailed. I kept expecting it to get better.I'm happy for those who like it.

[Schumski]

My opinion is they tried their standard formula on a setting which isnt really compatible with it, space not being a single map like in their previous games, think thats the major issue for me.

[TravisWiley]

I've always been amazed how Bethesda can get so many things right while half assing so many other things. I wish we could combine the best things from Rockstar and Bethesda into one company.

[mandmwest]

As a Bethesda fanboy, really fan-old-man, I was so hyped. 2500 hours in both Skyrim and FO4, Probably just as many in Oblivion and FO3. I wanted to love it but just couldn't. It was OK, good, but that was it for me. I played almost 500 hours finishing most of the faction quest lines and the main story but that was it. I didn't nessisarily want some big new thing, just a vast improvement, or maybe it's better to say expanding on the systems they already had. What I found disappointing was that I felt that in many ways it was a step backwards for those sytems and they had years to fine tune them. For example, outposts. Whats the purpose in Starfield other than to farm XP and cash. If they would have expanded on FO4's settlement system. Even incorperated aspects of the sim-settlement mod. Settlemnts in space, recruit others to settle there, build shops, small quests involing your settlements, etc. A place to manage, trade, and defend, i.e. given them a real purpose. Also companians. While they were better than Skyrim and FO4, not by much. There was a companion mod in FO4, Heather, that after traveling with her, getting to know her backstory, I, as a 60 something year old man irl, was fighting back tears as she very emotionally told me how the institute had killed her sister. How she watched her die and felt so helpless. I am amazed, no blown away, that a part time modder, at home, doing her own voice acting, come create a NPC companion you can connect with and truly want to get to know, empathis with and a game studio with a three trillion dollar company behind them can't even remotly come close. Finally the procedural generation. I think I cleared out five exact same 'abandoned fuel depot' with the exact same bad guys that were in the exact same locations in the buildings on five different planets one weekend. That gets really old, really fast. Give me smaller but had crafted world any time. After Starfield, if I know in the future a game is procedurally generated I probably wont buy it. It's my biggest hestitation in trying Valhiem. Sorry it's so long, a lot to get off my chest. BTW, love your guys content.

[Boss_Fight_Index_muki]

The problem with Starfield is the things NPCs asks you to do would only make sense in a medieval setting. Those "talk to [person]" quests where you travel to another planet, talk to [person], then travel back to the 1st planet, would only make sense in a future where interstellar comms somehow don't exist, but interstellar travel does.

[RH]

I got bored very quickly. But fair play to those that enjoy it. Life is about finding pleasure where you can. I looked elsewhere

[Djaermi]

I put a couple hundred hours into this game and I have thoughts. When I judge what a game means to me, one of the most important moments for me is the very end, where I accomplish everything I set out to accomplish, go to my favorite spot, put on my favorite outfit (if applicable), and hit save for the very last time (for the time being, at least). It gives me that cathartic sense of a great story reaching its end and me letting it go. At that moment, I look back on the journey that I went through. I reflect on my first impressions during the tutorial and think about how long ago that felt, even though maybe it was only a couple of weeks before. I remember all of the special moments and challenges I overcame and, if the writing was good, the growth that the characters went through. Usually if I put more than a hundred hours into a game, this moment is very special. But with Starfield, it wasn't the same. First of all, without spoiling anything, the ending gives the player an unfair dilemma. It wants you to make a certain choice, but gives you every reason not to make that choice. It basically tells you that those hundreds of hours you put into it were not enough, and in order to nab this mysterious carrot that they are dangling, you need to give even more. In that way, it feels a bit like a never-ending live service game, because there is never a feeling of completion and satisfaction. There is only a feeling that the game wants you to keep going toward this vague future reward, and it expects you to trudge through endless recycled content to get there. I think that's a big reason why so many people have given negative reviews after spending so much time playing it. They endured the excruciating commerce system, the endless loading screens, the major plot beats delivered through boring dialogue instead of on-screen action, and the exhausting traversal systems, and all they asked was for the game to reward them with a fulfilling conclusion. But that reward never came, and at some point they had to just let go of this story and let it drift out into space.

[Necropheliac]

The biggest disappointment is that we didn’t get The Elder Scrolls VI because they made this instead.

[NitronF]

For me, a big problem was repetition. Once I come across something in a game that feels repeated and endless, something happens in my brain where I lose all interest in doing that task. One of the first custom landing points I went to on a planet had a science outpost or something, and a random quest to find someone lost in a cave.

Then, another planet I landed on soon after, had a quest to find someone lost in a cave… and there was a Science outpost with the exact same layout as the first. That was basically the end of my planetary exploration.

[spaceidiot]

the magic of bethesda games has always been setting off to complete a quest;
5 hours later you've run into a half dozen other quests, dungeons, pretty landscapes and you've completely forgotten what you had wanted to do in the first place.

pretty hard to get the same feeling on a bunch of barren rocks with one thing to do on them.

[zc]

I am a huge bethesda fan and a huge sci-fi fan, so despite having played through the game and only kind of enjoyed it I do still find myself really wanting to play the game.

But then I log on and two things in particular bother me. First, the loading screens. I know it's been talked about, but I just can't with the loading screens. It just makes the whole universe feel so small and I end up feeling like 60% of my playtime is sitting there watching the screen do its thing.

Second, there's literally just not enough to do. I've already done all the faction quests and the main quest and a bunch of side quests and now there's just radiant quests from the mission board. I've basically not touched 80% of the planets and I've done everything there is to do in the game.

So now when I log on occasionally, I find myself teleporting from planet to planet looking for something interesting to do only to realize I've spent the last 10 minutes watching loading screens and I shut the game off.

[itisWhatitis]

My takeaway was that I stopped paying attention to online commenters and unsubbed from a lot of places and now just enjoy what i like

[SlothinAintEasy]

Starfield. World as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.

[AmogusAsbestos]

I feel like I kind of hit a plateau in my excitement at 15 or so hours. I never really felt myself getting more drawn in like I did with Skyrim. I feel like the world building needed to bake for a while longer.

[Hardeleiar]

About the modding.

I saw some YouTube video about it, something about the main problem now is the origin of the game world is not the player, the game will crash if the player travel too far away. Hence the loading screen. Each loading screen change the origin of the game world.

But if people want to mod it, the best option is to fix the origin of the world to the player character. However, since the origin of the game world is where the game build on, it is not an easy fix. Some had said it is easier to make a whole new game than to change the origin of the game world.

[fasle]

I think what we're seeing, in real time, is developers finally learning that bigger is not always better. A limited scope map packed full of content will always be a better game and bring people back more than an infinite universe with nothing going on. Their OWN crowning achievement, Skyrim, is a perfect example of this.

[sheltongolden]

One of the main issues with Starfield is the lack of interesting wandering. You can wander around the major settlements, and that is actually pretty good. But, other than that, there's not much more to find out there on the planets and in space.

[Korelon]

"the best thing bethesda's done since oblivion" lmfao gaming journalism is such a joke.

[razorbackz]

The only reason you would be disappointed with Starfield is if you swallowed the hype.

[chrisdakers]

I remember playing The Outer Worlds and being enthralled. Arguably Starfield was bigger, newer (not that newer is better), and a little more content rich, but it was just not as fun. I think like Jake said, it was just ok.