It amazes me that people are talking about this garbage game in 2026. I got it for free a few years ago and couldn’t be arsed to actually play it once I realized how boring it was
Nononno, you don’t understand, with the new update it finally got even more boring and we have new expensive ships.
I played 300 hours of this game when it came out and stopped playing right before the final mission.
You can definitely tell it all went wrong when they decided to do thousands of procedural generated worlds instead of a tight dozen or so.
Another aspect where they went wrong was having the Constilation home base be on the capital planet instead of being your space ship. You know, like how it is on every sci-fi show from Firefly, to Star Trek, to The Expanse.
I’ve played so many Bethesda games that the tricks they used to make the engine and environments seem larger and more sophisticated stick out like a sore thumb.
All that is to say, there was absolutely a great game in Starfield somewhere.
You bought a Bethesda game before a community patch was available.
They knew what they were doing.
That doesnt work this time because the modding community abandoned it quickly after launch due to them just not enjoying the game enough to work on it – I was expecting to do this one with VR but it remains unfinished
Still does because they should just continue to wait until it’s there before buying.
They saw the mess it was on PC and somehow thought it was going to be a good idea to buy it?..
I feel like Bethesda had their moment in the sun with Skyrim and Fallout 3, but since those days they really haven’t made a big RPG that’s felt good.
And as I enter hour 120+ in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, still happily playing DLC and side quests, I can’t imagine wanting to go back to play a Bethesda RPG. They’ve been lapped, in my opinion, at this point.
They’re still in an Xbox 360 mindset, in a world where Baldur’s Gate 3 and KCD2 exist.
Action gamers are spoiled for choice. RPG gamers are spoiled for choice. I just don’t see where Bethesda’s “here’s a wonky game engine and a big map” approach fits in that.
But Bethesda aren’t really being punished for it because tons of people are still buying it and might have no idea games like KCDII or even a fixed-up CP2077 exist.
Are they buying it though? Or are they just playing on Game Pass and cancelling again?
I think MS bought them for what they publish (id, Arkane, MachineGames, etc) rather than what they make. With MS taking over publishing duty, Bethesda Studios could be a lot closer to the chopping block than they think. It’s been a long time since Skyrim (close to 15 years at this point), and even big studios only get so many tries to get lighting in a bottle again.
I mean, TES VI could be a rickroll mp4 and still sell millions of copies. There’s a megaton of nostalgia, and gamers are demonstrably… not the smartest shoppers, in aggregate.
Starfield and FO76 are not commercial failures, even if they aren’t hits either.
Point being, BGS is not short on time. I posit they have at least one “freebie” no matter what, or maybe a few more mediocre releases that will still sell big.
The thing is you can do massive maps without having to use something custom. So they really have no excuse for continuing to stick with their massively out of date wonkfest of an engine
Even the “big map” thing is done better by other companies at this point.
There’s basically one loading screen in KCD2 (besides pure fast travel) and it’s between the two giant maps in the game. Otherwise, you can walk Henry’s silly ass from one end of the map to the other and go into any number of buildings and never see a loading screen.
And most games do this type of asset streaming now, so when Bethesda rolls up with a “open world” RPG with loading screens all over the place it’s like “what is this?”
But can I loot endless amounts of garbage and then force shopkeepers to buy all of it? Because that’s kinda why I play them
Yep.
Have you tried KCDII? Stuff to hoard/sell is everywhere, albeit a bit more realistically.
I mean, sure, you can put 1,000 sandwiches in one room and put a bucket over the shop keeper to fool them.
But after you do that once is it really that fun?
Yes
Yes
The game was trash on the PC, and they thought that downgrading it to a console was going to make it playable?
I recently tried playing it again, and I wouldn’t say it’s “trash”. Yes, they completely dropped the ball on the exploration part of their exploration game, but the meat and bones of a Bethesda RPG are still in there. It’s a good time for anyone bored of replaying Skyrim and/or Fallout if you get it on sale.
Also it runs perfectly on Linux
The thing that ruined it for me was the story just kinda falls apart and the society they made seems laughably small, like total universe has like 30,000 total people in it. Then you add in the loading into loading to watch a cutscene to cover a loading of the next area and the kinda bad ship combat. Eh the end result is not the worst game, but not a game that anyone should pay more then like $15 for.
This. Bethesda cheaped out on environmental storytelling and fleshed out characters (which is unfortunate since that’s their thing). But the systems they’ve built up in Creation Engine have gotten really good
This sad excuse of wasted dev keystrokes is not even comparable to skyrim and fallout, not adjusted for the time of release or even otherwise
First Bethesda game?
Why would someone buy Starfield?
I pirated it and wish I could get my seed time back.
The wear on my mouse from clicking on the torrent already wasn’t worth it.
I fucking bought it, imagine my despair
Why?
I played it a tad too long to be refunded
I know this doesn’t help you, but someone might find it useful: Steam’s two-hour refund limit only applies to automatic, unconditional refunds. If a refund is justified (e.g. the game is a broken disaster, or the publisher lied about its nature), it may be granted beyond the two-hour window, like it was after Activision lied about AI usage in Black Ops 7.
Thanks, always good to know.
In the case of Starfield, the game ran fine for me, it was just shitty, so not sure this applies…
My condolences.
Thank you, that’s very kind
I also pirated it and spent most if not all my time building ships. naturally had to use console codes to bypass the restrictions but that’s all I did.
the game itself? boring. the characters? bunch of god damn nerds. Like seriously your party are some of the most whiny unlikable characters in gaming. I didn’t care for any of them. AND THEN if you decide “oh I want to be a pirate and do bad things” they just whine even more about it.
I have a feeling Bethesda’s executives ordered the development team to make it as un-controversial as possible. “I don’t give a damn if the game is terrible. You will lose your jobs if you compromise this merger.”
I’ve had a lot of fun with it on Xbox since launch
Because influencers tell them to? It’s not like Xbox players haven’t been taking about the bugs and other issues for the last few years.
But really though. The gun play is fun ads hell, just like any Bethesda game. And, it’s true, you can build a ship, take off, walk around in it… there’s a certain appeal to that. The guts are there to make a decent game. They just don’t love it quite as much as the least of the four fans who still play it.
Bethesda games notoriously have shitty gun play.
How so? They’re fun, and the guns, while silly, are fun to shoot.
Do you mean they’re historically inaccurate?
Or do we just have incompatible views of fun (i.e. it’s subjective)?
The only Bethesda game I can think of with shitty gun play is Skyrim, because then we’re talking about archery. And then, it’s shitty because the way arrows work is, they are spawned at the player’s feet, elevated to the bow, and then fired relatively accurately in an arc. The problem is, the ground is not completely flat, which is why if you’re firing uphill, or there’s a ridge at your feet, you fire into the ground despite very obviously clearing it.
And the only problem I have with guns in Bethesda games applies to just about any game with machine guns: bullets become far less deadly when you can shoot a lot of them in a short amount of time than when you can only fire one at a time. This is categorically false: every bullet from a machine gun is just as deadly as that same bullet would have been, had it been fired from a single-shot weapon. They just make machine guns do less damage per hit to balance the gun, so it’s not overly powerful, and that is stupid. Sometimes they at least make these guns cheaper to shoot, so they’re balanced to cost as well as damage, but in a world where the minimum cost of one bullet (or arrow) is one {CURRENCY} (bottle cap, Septim, whatever), they aren’t nearly cheap enough to justify the damage reduction.
But, maybe next time instead of saying “no you’re wrong,” give us some context. It’s fine to have a differing opinion if you can back it up with some examples.
This is one of the most common criticisms of the Bethesda Fallout games, so I didn’t think I had to qualify my opinion. I am far from the first person to make this claim. Even Bethesda realized the gunplay was lacking in their Fallout games, which is why they hired people from Doom to work on Starfield.
The guns have little feeling of impact or weight, they lack good animations, and there is little variety in the types of recoil or spread. Most of the time you just end up spraying at the enemy, and it takes too many rounds. The guns feel more like squirt guns than real guns.
So you’re saying each bullet should be fatal? That’s how I played Deus Ex (1), but DX1 was a very different game to a modern action RPG (though, it was one as well). Easy and Hard meant your weapons did more or less damage than the enemy. Medium meant it was equal, and Realistic meant it was equal, but each hit mattered more. You could get hit once, maybe twice, but not three times without healing. Also, headshots were lethal. They tell you headshots are lethal, but if you’re playing on anything but realistic… they’re not. (“And remember JC, a headshot is a lethal takedown.” Lies!) So, I knew where the enemies were, and I didn’t get hit. You can’t really play that way in Fallout, especially during the bigger battles. You’re going to get hit, a lot, and you’re supposed to make it to the end somehow. So the player gets a little bullet spongey, and depending on the setting, the enemies may be, too.
You may not be the first to criticise the gunplay, but a lot of people also do like the gunplay, so I guess it’s a fair point either way and a matter of what you like. I just hadn’t heard much from the other side.
Dude, no one is asking for realism. Why are you strawmaning?
Play a modern shooter, and compare that to Starfield or FO4. They just don’t feel good. Weapons don’t have weight to them, and there’s no impact to them being fired. Your character barely reacts. You just run around spraying bullets, and it doesn’t feel like anything.
What it needs are good animations, recoil systems, camera punch, VFX, and things like that. Starfield and FO4 have almost none of that. It’s the bare minimum to not be absolute trash. If you’re comparing it to FO3, they’re fairly good. If you’re comparing it to something like Battlefield, Escape from Tarkov, or anything modern, not so much.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to enjoy. I think FO4 was reasonably good, and FO3 and NV were good too. I just didn’t enjoy them for the gunplay. It’s everything around that that makes them good.
Personally though, I think Starfield sucks. The story is bland as hell if you know much sci-fi (if you’re failing to appeal to the audience that follows the genre, you failed). Exoring sucks. Clearing dungeons is pretty boring after you’ve done the five dungeons a few times. The loading screens, even on an NVMe SSD, constantly take you out of the experience. I just don’t understand what there is to like. I’d rather play FO4 with a bunch of cool mods if I’m playing something like it, or Morrowind if I want a good Bethesda RPG.
No I’m saying the guns should feel different, have some heft and weight to them. Use the revolver in half life 2 for an example of a gun with weight behind the shots.
You’re free to enjoy whatever you like, I’m not saying you shouldn’t. I just think it’s odd for the OP of this comment thread to say “it’s got good gunplay, it’s a Bethesda game” because the general opinion was that Bethesda games were lacking in this very area until Starfield. Bethesda themselves realized they needed to improve the gunplay from the Fallout games, they brought people over from Doom for this specific reason.
Bethesda still hasn’t provided the fun of knocking someone on their ass with a point blank shotgun blast. Manhunt did that 20 years ago.
I would have said Resident Evil (maybe not “knocking them on their ass” but satisfying result of using a shotgun), but, fair point.
True, but developers from id Software helped Bethesda specifically for Starfield’s gunplay, which is actually fun this time around compared to Fallout 4.
Id helped with FO4 too. Sure, it’s a lot better than 3, but, compared to any other shooter, it’s pretty horrible.
The gun play in Fallout 4 was actually good. It’s 3 and New Vegas where it sucked
Eh, Starfield feels the same as any other regular modern shooter, so like COD. It doesn’t feel like Doom, of course, but that’s it’s own thing.
The gun play is fun ads hell, just like any Bethesda game
You must not have played Fallout 3 or New Vegas. The gunplay was pretty bad before Fallout 4, to the point where you were better off using V.A.T.S. most of the time.
That being said, the gunplay since Fallout 4 has been pretty good. Especially the auto-lean around corners when you use ADS
Removed by mod
You’re fucking nuts if this is your response. I never said anything about age.
And guess what? I played New Vegas when it was new as well. Loved the game, but the fact of the matter is that its gun mechanics are terrible, evem when you compare it to other FPS games from that same year.
Fallout 3 came out in 2008. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare released in 2007. Guess which one has the better gunplay?
Fuck off with your ageism accusation. You want to know why age is irrelevant to the conversation? Because I never brought it up, jackass
Some people enjoy bad games and that’s okay.
I got it for free with my cpu
Because they only have Playstation consoles and keep their eyes and ears shut to anything not on Playstation, so they haven’t heard how bad of a game it is.
Edit: Lemmy: Home of all 12 Starfield fans. 🤣
Youre right, its a game people are ‘told’ to buy, rather than a recommendation. The first thing they see when they start up their console will be an ad for it.
Consoles have always had that market of just buying a few big games a year, they never broke into the indie scene very well.
But PC isnt immune to it, Steam shows ads for launches on startup and both platforms suffer from social media influence. The biggest seller of games has to be Twitch. Get a bunch of streamers playing your shitty game and youll sell loads of copies.
At least you can turn off Steam’s startup ads. I forgot those even were a thing until you mentioned it since I haven’t seen them in years.
I have them disabled too, but even if you just open Steam, there will be an ad on the store page.
A store telling you what it sells?
Oh! The outrage! The audacity!
You missed the context.
Did I? the whole conversation is moot. Why wouldn’t a store show you what it is selling? Yes, launch titles get the spotlight for a while. Should movie theaters remove all the posters because it is disgusting marketing(?). There’s a difference between that and egregious, invasive and unethical advertisement. But it is impossible to expect a point of sale to not advertise what it sells. Even still, Steam allows you to disable startup ads and you can also boot directly to library so you don’t have to see the store page ever unless you want to. It’s so much different from what Play Station and Xbox do.
Steam shows ads for launches on startup and both platforms suffer from social media influence.
I haven’t seen the startup ads in what seems like a decade. I don’t see a big deal with content creators providing reviews (and commentary), the key is finding content creators who are independent and focus on the needs of their viewers/readers.
There’s no issue with it, they are obviously going to take money to play a game, that’s on their own morals to decide.
But a lot of people just blindly buy whatever is shown to them, its why standards for games in the mainstream market has fallen off a cliff over the last 15 years. We have people buying $30 skins on the regular…
What year is it? Didn’t we already do this?
No surprise there, Bethesda didn’t fix shit for any of the re-re-re-re-releases of Skyrim, why would anyone think they’d do that for Starfield?
didn’t fix shit for any of the re-re-re-re-releases of Skyrim
Skyrim Special Edition was built for x64 architecture (the original was on x32), is significantly more stable, and supports 4096+254 plugin files (vs 255 in the original). The modding scene has only gotten better frome the update. And let’s not forget the VR support.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. They didn’t change any of the gameplay because 1: the base game is still fun to play and 2: people already mod the hell out of it to fit what they want
USSEP is still around the last time I checked.
Porting a buggy game on a technically satisfactory level does not excuse porting the games with the bugs included.
UESP has existed since like 6 months after the original release of Skyrim and addresses hundreds if not thousands of bugs from minor to quest breaking.
Why go through the effort of a remaster if you can’t address basic gameplay bugs?
Except it wasn’t intended to be a remaster. They used Skyrim as a testbed to overhaul the Creation Engine to x64 to prepare it for Fallout 4, and by the end of it they effectively had a new, more stable version of Skyrim so they released it for free to everyone that already had the base game and DLC’s.
And this was mainly a project for the engine developers. All of the artists, level designers, etc. were focussed on Fallout 4 at the time.
EDIT: You also seem to be unaware that the USSEP is also notorious for taking artistic license with some of their “fixes”. Such as making the Warrior Stone apply to archery instead of the Thief Stone and changing the ores in Redbelly Mine from ebony to iron despite there being good lore reasons for them to be ebony
Its literally called a remastered in its own release materials. What strain of skooma are you huffing?
You dont need artists for bug fixes. You dont need level designers for bug fixes. You just need someone to care enough to get the work done. Todd doesnt care. Todd never cared.
I liked Starfield (I even 100%ed the achievements on Steam). I also loved No Man’s Sky long before the shift in pubic sentiment towards it, so maybe I’m just weird. But if you’re reading this and thinking “this guy wouldn’t know a good game if it shat a voxel-based turd onto his chest”, you’re WRONG. I also loved MindsEye. So there.
Actually this makes perfect sense.
Starfield is… trying to be part Mass Effect with big-budget cutscenes, but it has less charisma than Wrex has in his toe.
I’d argue it’s a bad “Bethesda wandering RPG,” without the quirky, charming side areas Oblivion or even Fallout 76 have.
But it’s an alright No Man’s Sky-like.
You want some crafting? Looting? A vast amount of chill exploration area? Reasonable “I’m in space” fidelity and tasks to tickle your brain? Starfield’s got it in droves. BGS games scratched this NMS kind of “looting exploration sandbox” itch for some, when there was no big-budget alternative back then, and I think Starfield leans into it more.
Hence my hypothesis is that gamers who love No Man’s Sky like Starfield, those who are looking more for “Mass Effect 2” loathe Starfield. And you and @absquatulate@lemmy.world seem to be further datapoints supporting my observations.
The problem is Starfield’s expectation for most us internet dwellers was “Skyrim but Mass Effect.” And it’s kind of Bethesda’s fault for setting that expectation instead of leaning into Starfield’s real niche (and wasting cash on what BGS isn’t very good at).
Omg me too! Wasn’t there a marketing term for person that tends to buy only failed products and based on them liking a product they could predict whether it would fail or not? Always thought I’m one of those. Mafia 3 - loved it, but hated mafia 2. Love AC 1,3 and syndicate but didn’t vibe with 2 or black flag. Loved Borderlands 1, hated all the sequels etc. Still, I feel the hate against starfield is way overblown and there’s too much polarization. A game can be either great or awful, with no more room for meh games.
A game can be either great or awful, with no more room for meh games.
I think it’s more just that expectations are much higher for a AAA studio like Bethesda. They built so much hype and asked for nearly $100 at launch for a game that didn’t live up. There’s plenty of meh games out there, they’re just priced accordingly. There’s also a ton of really great games out there priced way lower than what AAA studios are asking. I think it’s very fair to hold those studios to a standard that reflects the prices they’re charging.
“Harbinger of failure” is the term you’re looking for. Not sure it applies here, though; I think most of these games were commercially successful.
And because I can’t resist sticking my own opinion everywhere, I personally thought Starfield had a ton of potential and squandered it with some highly questionable design choices and poor execution. Some of that may be fixed now, but some of it is baked in. There’s genuinely a lot to like, but as a whole I thought it was really dragged down by some of those bad decisions.
I also liked AC1, though, and was a little disappointed with 2. The first one was imperfect but bold and new and interesting. The second got rid of most of what made the first one unique in an effort to appeal to broader audiences. I still liked it, but it wasn’t special.
Yeah, no amount of mods will fix some of Starfield’s faults, but it foes have some of that old bethesda coziness, so it’s not all bad.
Starfield’s main issue is that it isn’t fleshed out as much as the other Bethesda games. And there’s a lot of mods to do that for Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The issue is that it didn’t capture enough attention to get as much TLC from the mod community
Kinda tough sell to release a $70 game, then leave it up to the modding community to finish it for you
So a normal Bethesda launch. Has no one told these “gamers” what they were buying?
on Playstation no less, notoriously shit at running bethesda games (see new vegas)
I have about 140 hours in the game on PC, since launch. I haven’t played it since. I was just poking around the mods at Nexus, I see the Genesis thing. That might be worth playing it again.
Mods keep Bethesda games going, I have over 6700 hours in FO4. That’s only because of the mods.
Sadly mods won’t fix the fact you have to play a loading screen.
The fact that Bethesda thought they could get away with their ancient engine once again is laughable.
I’m willing to bet that you’ve never actually played Starfield, you’re just parrotting what others have complained about.
Does Starfield have problems? Yes. But anyone who goes “hurr durr ancient engine” clearly hasn’t played a Bethesda game since Skyrim
Nope. Sorry if you need copium, but I played about 50 hours. It got really boring because planets are generally empty. Combat is OK, but not special.
There really needed to be improvements to flight. As it stands, you can’t even walk around your own ship while it’s underway. And that, as I said, is because of the Creation engine. It’s just not acceptable for a modern game. Bethesda knows this, they’re just milking what’s left.
Is it the worst game ever made? Not by a longshot. But it’s not a good one either.
PS- and if you like the game, great. That’s the cool thing about opinions. Everyone can have their own.
As it stands, you can’t even walk around your own ship while it’s underway.
I dare you to list 3 game engines that actually can handle that, while still having other ships and obstacles rendered outside of the player’s craft while the player is outside of the pilot’s seat
I dare you to stop stumping for Bethesda.
That’s the cool thing about opinions. Everyone can have their own.
So, you made a claim with nothing to back it up, based solely on parroted complaints from other people, and now you’re getting pissy when someone asks for proof?
How predictable
Not even a proper release on PS5. Glitchy as hell and not complete on disk for physical. Embarrassing.
Genuine question, are literally any PS5 gamed actually physically on the disk fully?
Yes, most.
Lol why downvote I haven’t bought a console since x360 I’m literally just asking
Tbh, their reply sounds like they’re making it up. Physical releases have been pretty notorious for not having the full game on disk and/or requiring massive day-1 patches the past decade
If you’re unsure you can use a website such as “does it play” but yes. Majority of games are shipped fully on the disk and installable and playable offline.
See and that’s what I’ve heard a lot of for the past like decade, but I really wasn’t sure how true that is lol
lol I sent this article to my brother and he sent me like 20 texts defending the game.
Be kind to him, he’s in a abusive relationship with them 😁
Maybe they need to upgrade their PS5
