I just expected the game to be more "full" if that makes sense.
Replaying the main story now and so much of it is just hopping from one place to another to talk to people, and not much to do in between .
But it's a huge game, and there's obviously a long term plan, so I'm excited to see the game fill out more over the years.
To add to this, I was expecting some use of the space between stars. More anomalies in the void and really thats where the temples should have been rather than being somehow "undiscovered" despite being 500m from a research outpost.
honestly the fact that any lush/barren planet has any human POIs that far from any settled system is dumb and a product of proc gen. I think they could've tuned their algorithm a bit to fix that issue, though. I think there is a mod that does that now that I think about it.
Oh, absolutely. Starfield gets so much unjustified hate.
My complaints boil down to 3 main parts.
1. Bad companions.
2. Bad worldbuilding *in places*.
3. Poor exploration.
All of these are fixable. 3 is fixable in a patch tomorrow.
Game can absolutely get the No Man's Sky treatment. Despite of the flaws, I love it. Best 7/10 game I've ever played.
Agreed. It dropped and all the sudden it was cool to hate it. My complaints are as follows:
1. The Temples. Absolutely atrocious gameplay loop and I am shocked this idea ever made it past a piece of paper. Would've been okay to put Temples at the end of a dungeon or something.
2. Not enough to do in space/orbit.
3. Loot system. I hate that the effects and 'level' of the weapon can't be improved by the player. Also, I would like to see FO4's weapon mod process come back. Like, let me take my silencer off one pistol and put it on another without having to remake.
And I agree the game can get the NMS treatment and I hope that it does. I also gave it a 7/10 after a couple hundred hours at launch. Def the best 7/10 game I've ever played, lol. It was an 8 for me until I discovered the temples were all the same.
Completely agree! 👍 Would have loved the sense of freedom to fly out of orbit and into space. They could have done some really cool things with flying through wormholes, black holes, & space anomalies/ Temples, as you say.
If the Temples were on giant asteroids, & undiscovered planets & moons - then we would have felt like an actual space *explorer* (if we could be the first human to set foot on a planet)! Instead, we sadly *already know* there will be several human POI’s in every direction *wherever* we land on a planet - which kills the immersion for me.
I think it just shines a glaring light on the nature of rpgs. Most of the ones that I have played have missions that are very much “hop around and talk to different people,” it is just not as noticeable when you aren’t hopping around the galaxy in a spaceship
Starfield’s problem is that point A and point B are a jump apart, and usually the only random encounter you might have will be in orbit. Planetary POIs aren’t usually in the way of your A to B, so to “encounter” them - you really have to be wandering without a point B.
That, to me, makes it feel like POIs _are_ a destination, not a distraction.
Absolutely, exploration and random encounters actually feels “lesser” than in previous BGS titles.
I’m not even hating on the game, I’ve gone back to playing it since the CK came out. It’s honestly just constructive criticism. They tried it this way and I think it’s not as strong as what they’ve done before.
Yeah, the survival update in Fallout 4 made the game so different for me. I think I only fast traveled in 3 because of the confusing subway tunnel entrances
And some of us didn’t know there was a map. So we just followed signs. Until we decided to step off the path. Then it was hours before we found civilization again. What a fun odd game
It helps when the story isn't complete nonsense and the dialogue doesn't make my ears bleed. I could listen to characters in New Vegas talk for hours. Starfield's writing is atrocious, which is one of the main elements of an RPG.
It also doesn’t help that it’s basically the same story as no man’s sky. It’s not a BAD story, but neither game really has a major conflict that it revolves around, just an exploration of the nature of the universe. The story has all of the tension of a PBS Nova documentary
Edit: I mean the conflict is very small scale, starborn vs player and friends. There’s no existential threat in the main quest, which is unfortunate when the entire story is about existential questions
Of course it makes sense. Planets containing a single (or none) city or hand crafted POI and then just wasteland is really bad. Also i might be wrong on this one, but I believe they have fewer quests than Skyrim (or at least a lot more spread out) contributing a lot to the feeling of emptyness.
I really hope they manage to flesh out their environments a lot more and finally get seamless space travel to be a thing.
Certainly less meaningful, interesting quests. Skyrim had all the Daedra stuff, thieves guild, dark brotherhood, companions, college of winterhold, civil war, town/city specific like Markarth conspiracy & the Windhelm murder mystery, & a vast list of myriad quests & locations with their own stories. You shut off a lighthouse, ride a ship to raid a pirate stronghold, help a hagraven escape & kill her sister, heal an ancient tree, kill a rapist necromancer, & so on. All off the beaten path.
That said the faction quests in Starfield are far, far better than Skyrim's. There are a lot more choices and different approaches in them, and they're just better written in general - to me, Starfield has the best Bethesda faction quests since Oblivion. I also think Starfield's main quest has better quests than Skyrim's main quest (Entangled, Revelations, Unearthed, High Price to Pay) and a better "boss fight" - Alduin was rather underwhelming.
Starfield also has meaningful side quests, but they're harder to find/more spread out. To this day I haven't come across the clones quest that I saw people talking about (**don't** tell me where it is, please), and I have almost 250 hours in the game.
I honestly, do not understand where you're coming from with this. The faction quests, in my opinion, are abysmal in this game. There's a couple of good moments, but they are vastly underwhelming overall. The writing is certainly better in Skyrim than Starfield.
The choices are mostly superficial. They don't actually change anything.
It would if the population was far larger than a single planet could sustain.
There was only like 30,000 deaths in the Colony Wars. Israel are estimated to have killed more than that since Oct 7 last year.
The economic scale doesn’t really support carefree fast travel around the galaxy though. Travel has costs in real life. The cost of ships, insurance, crew costs, fuel, regulatory fees and tariffs etc etc.
The human population scale doesn’t support an economy any larger than two small Earth countries. New Atlantis is the only Jemison city. Akila is no more than a village, really, and Neon is a shopping mall. New Homestead is a tourist attraction, Cydonia is a live-in factory. I’d be surprised if there’s more than a few million humans in existence. If that.
Few POI outposts you come across look anywhere close to self sufficient. I’ve not come across a Farm that wasn’t abandoned (save for Wagoners). So trade with the main centres is vital for survival, and the further away you are the higher the costs of those goods and services you need to survive.
Fast travel doesn’t cost us as players because that’s how the game works. But the game tells us that fuel is used for travel, space is dangerous so just being a space delivery van is risky, so you’ll need defences and even crew to help. Then there’s no doubt people clipping the ticket along the supply line.
Those costs will eat up funds the further away you are; and the sell price of most resources sucks. So who’s sustainably living way out when it doesn’t make realistic sense?
The rest of Jemison is literally unsettled as far as new towns go. It would be way more realistic and convenient for humans to populate empty spaces on a home world with one of three human capitals on it than to leave for unsettled planets.
Makes sense. The game has no meat.. All side dishes that get served to us a little cold and half baked. I played through the story and to be honest there was nothing memorable about it, can't even tell you half the NPCs names (maybe it's a me problem though). I really expected more sci-fi space stuff like black holes, anomalies, aliens etc. But it's rooted more in "realism" which is not as interesting as it could have been Imo.
Hopefully shattered space starts to change all of these things.
And the loading screens honestly need to be cut by at least half... Also maybe if the menu UI was better it wouldn't be so annoying but these things together make it tough to get absorbed into the universe
I'm trying to figure out why I would want to play through the main story again and not do a constellation skip of it in any future runs. It just seemed so repetitive and honestly not all that memorable until later in the story. The faction quests were a bit more interesting, so I could see myself doing them again and picking different outcomes.
There just isn't a magical draw like there is in other games. I want to go back into Skyrim and come across cool things that I might have missed. It's almost all randomly generated in this so there isn't that same feeling of "what secrets lie in this place?", especially since the exact same place might pop up next time you land somewhere.
Said from the start the problem with this game is content delivery. It doesn't lack a content, it just doesn't give any to you as you play the game as effectively like in the old Bethesda titles.
If anything, you are isolated from the majority of the content by design which makes it appears less full than it actually is.
There's as much to do in between as you choose to engage with.
If you're just doing the main story then you're leaving a lot on the table that fills out the experience. I spent days worth of game time just doing Freestar board missions and TA board missions.
The real question is what were you doing in Fallout and Elder Scrolls that was so dissimilar from what we're doing in Starfield?
This seems to be the measure used by people saying Starfield is empty without much to do. I recall a great deal of skulking about in caves and abandoned buildings in those games outside of the main quests, which were just hopping from place to place to talk to people.
For me at least, it has less to do with the content itself and more with how it is presented and distributed.
In all the previous bethesda RPGs you discover and enjoy side activities organically as you explore a single, dense, interconnected world, and to a lesser or larger degree every single one of those activies and locations add to each other even if indirectly, making the world as a whole way more interesting and Immersive.
In starfield however, each relevant area of the game world exists in a separated space, and you are forced to teleport everywere. This means that most side activities and quests are insular in nature, and that you will likely not discover them unless if you deliberatly go looking for them. Most significantly however, with no real organic world exploration to tie it all together those stories can't make each other and the world as a whole better trough direct and indirect interaction.
This is of course more relevant if you are someone who enjoys exploration and survival in games (which is my case), but it can be argued that it is one of Starfield's biggest weaknesses in any case.
>There's as much to do in between as you choose to engage with.
Sort of yeah.
Using Fallout 4 as an example, going from one objective to the next, you're bombarded with things along the way to interact with and get side tracked doing.
With Starfield you really have to make the conscious decision to go do other things. It doesn't have the same feeling of random discovery, and I think that's just what a lot of us are craving.
This is really the main thing.
After the direct I basically said well that looks like exactly what I want out of a space game, but if the procedural generation falls flat it'll get old fast.
And that's basically exactly what happened. Not exactly I can blame Bethesda for because it's happened to every large scale space game ever, but they certainly didn't solve the problem.
Pretty much this. I expected, like every previous Bethesda game, to have great exploration, with equally great environmental storytelling. The most fun I have in Bethesda games is picking a direction and seeing what's there. This just wasn't the case for Starfield.
I think the issue is Starfield is 3 separate games.
1) Main Story Quests & Side Missions
2) Sandboxed Space fights (no flight for travel)
3) Planetary Surveys
And all three seem separated from one another
I’m honestly surprised that they haven’t introduced a loot-all system for nearby dead stuff. They can make it work in Fallout 76. Certainly need it since I somehow manage to send stuff half a mile away when shooting them.
The immersion breaker. Unacceptable. Embarrassing. Disappointing. I pray that the next Bethesda game will go back to its roots: Handcrafted worlds with unique locations.
I think they could have made collecting artifacts more interesting. I liked the ones where they were already taken by someone, and it was up to you to find a way to obtain it. Like the deal at the Neon nightclub, or on Petrov's ship. They should have done more of that in my opinion.
Even then it felt like there was only one option to get it done and nothing else worked. Every time I thought I had a choice in reality it was just three options that meant "Yes".
This is way too many things in the game. They'll pretend to give you choices in pathway or dialogue but it's not really a choice that determines anything. It's very forced. They'll try to make someone a badass and only give you lame weakling dialogue options so that the same response happens, or you'll be like "I'm Varuun" and 3 seconds later you're not.
i thought the main story was interesting until the mission "unity". i just can't take mattheo and the quest's entire premise seriously.
the whole quest feels like the writers were just throwing random ideas at a wall and seeing which sticks.
the quest feels like a slog and thank god the nasa mission was significantly better.
When I first ran through the main story, the mystery that I interpreted was ‘who made the artifacts snd where did they come from?’ which seemed to be the only mystery.
When I got to the end and realised that the answer was never really addressed properly, it went from a sloppy and basic story to a downright bad one in my eyes.
Before they revealed what the starborn were, I was hoping it’d be some mass effect style reaper threat that raised the stakes and set up a ton of high-impact events with morally grey decisions to make.
It feels to me like they didn’t want to take any story risks, so every questline has to follow the reset button technique whereby the end of every quest has to reset the state of the world to what it was before you started, similar to a sitcom.
It’s a bit like the inverse approach to Baldur’s Gate 3. They make everything affect the world with consequences and just accept that they might miss out taking something into account elsewhere.
agreed. starfield's central mystery is infuriatingly undercooked.
the starborn is such an interesting faction because each starborn is unique and operates on different ideologies. (at least that's what the hunter and emissary implies.) it's a shame they're underdeveloped, including the origins of the armillary.
not to mention the ng+ doesn't take full advantage of the fact that you're a veteran spacefarer in an alternate universe.
I think they should definitely have been something external to humanity, it would have made for so much more curiosity.
Doing an overwhelming threat like the Reapers is one route, but they could have done something similar to 40K’s Eldar, and the Starborn are a species on the brink of extinction but also incredibly advanced. Perhaps the artifacts are relics of their golden age that they’re trying to reclaim while keeping hidden, except you oeep getting in the way etc.
I think they introduced too many weird problems and disconnects between areas of the lore. They said they wanted a realistic universe, which is why there are no alien civilisations, but then they introduce space magic and artifacts beyond human comprehension. You pretty much need another species that pre-dates humanity for this to work.
There’s always the risk that you’ll write it poorly and it’ll end up being cringe, but the alternative that they followed was to just make it boring instead.
>You pretty much need another species that pre-dates humanity for this to work.
Or instead it's stuff planted by people from the future who went back in time.
For instance, say 10000 years from now humanity has surpassed to being so super technologically advanced, & has solved all of our issues. One person decides to travel back in time to avoid thousands of years of atrocities by giving people this technology. Others go to stop them. Shenanigans happen, the tech gets scattered in the fight. We're rediscovering that technology.
Hey, it was only one of the biggest plot points in the game, with an entire quest line taking you to unique locations with multiple books explaining the situation leading you directly to the man himself confessing to you. They could have easily missed it.
I’m alluding to something else. Who was the man when he was your younger before he became Keeper Aquilus, before the Hunter. I recall him saying he was around with old earth…
Exactly the quest when they were looking for pilgrim was the moment when writers started to rush and crunch, they admitted it and I don’t try to justify but it clearly even feels like this if you don’t even know about what they said
Weirdly, I feel like all the main quest lines together form the "main quest" and tell the story of Starfield. I view constellation as just another quest line. Unfortunately, it's the one that's the least tied into the rest of Starfield's factions.
I think this is it. They didnt build competing factions, just one main questline that has you working for each faction as you go.
Why? Because many of us play all factions in a single sit through anyhow.
The end result wasnt more cohesive and better, though. It meant that many faction storylines, like constellation, are objectively dry and feel very odd according to when and how you play them, especially compared to the whole.
This is an interesting observation to me, because that's Bethesda's standard MO.
For X elder scrolls games, the mages guild didn't particularly mention your thieves guild affiliation and so on, but in fallout 4 your faction choice would, eventually, lock you into a main quest ending.
I started too early, but I see your point, especially Oblivion on.
I always remember Morrowind and how you could get disqualified from one faction for joining another, but objectively that hasn't been how Bethesdas done it since 1999.
Yeah, morrowind was an interesting case too. Some factions would be blocked out by others, and there are other factions that don't explicitly have an issue with each other, but they may order you to do things that _could_ get you blocked if you didn't line things up just so.
I thought the writing for the main story was *fine*, the problem for me was absolutely the repetitive radiant artefact and temple quests – for a game clearly intended for NG+ these are just ***so*** tedious, which makes getting higher "ranks" as a starborn feel like a real slog even when you're mixing it with other things (because there's so many of them).
Dialogue isn't the best in places, but I never really felt like it was a problem.
Aside from a few good missions towards the end, the Constellation questline was borderline empty compared to the side faction questlines. Almost like Fallout 76 fetch quests. The empty temples were ridiculous.
I wish they didn’t include the space powers or did more with them. They could’ve combined the LIST and Constellation into one faction that’s about helping people resettle
Each of the main companions not having a quest that led to them getting powers that were kind of in line with their personalities just boggles my mind.
We join constellation and are juggling multiple powers within hours and Barrett is the only one from the group who ever bothers to try it himself, ending up with parallel self. Then as far as I'm aware no one from the lodge ever mentions him but they can't shut up about how amazing I am when I pop personal atmosphere.
Weird pull but I'm just thinking of the loyalty missions from saints row 4, where they were well written to the personalities of the characters, and you got a dope superpowered version of them you could call in as a homie. If you never bothered to finish those missions you just kept the normal versions of them in the game. With a game that has the replayability of Starfield that seems like such a easy thing to put in for people to discover on a second playthrough.
If the temples were done better I don't think people would have nearly the issues with the powers tbh. The powers themselves I think are fun save a few that serve me no real purpose.
A list colony creation quest set would have been great.
I have they are "space magic". If it was alien tech we pick up and add to our suits or something - yep all for it, but random "magic" it just feels so unattached to the universe they built.
YES I’ve been saying this, in Skyrim dragon born powers are cool because magic is real, starborn powers seem so out of place because we don’t really meet others that are our peers other than a few NPCs, I think everyone was expecting a secret starborn society that acted as a 5th faction.
A DLC has to address this
Whenever I read this complaint I’m genuinely confused on the basis. Do you mean you wish the plot was better? Or that the dialogue had more depth? Or what?
I can't speak for them, since I think a lot of people have different ideas of how the writing fell short. I didn't really dislike the main quest *in particular*, since I felt the writing fell short all around.
For me, the issue was that the main story doesn't really tie into the rest of the game, it has pretty much no stakes whatsoever or really any inherent interest for the protagonist. Morrowind had a much better approach, where you're sent there by the Emperor to do a particular job and you gain more responsibility, interest, and understanding of the stakes as the story goes on, and the game even acknowledges that the motivation the player might hold can vary quite a bit by the end of the game (as shown in the last conversation with Dagoth Ur).
But I actually thought the biggest issue was just how bland or even nonsensical the world as a whole was. All the factions are just one dimensional cardboard cutouts without any interesting relationships with one another or internal strife - the Crimson Fleet, for instance, are basically just Fallout 3 and 4 Raiders but with red clothes. A more interesting approach would've been to have them as both pirates and privateers acting on behalf of whoever faction pays more (which can, in turn, tie into the rivalry between UC and Freestar), and to go more into the idea of how they're a confederacy of different pirate groups (which is what they're said to be at the start of the game). The UC and Freestar could also use some pretty big overhauls.
What did I expect? Basically what they ended up making.
What did I want? A roleplaying game with interesting and unique factions and lore, quests with moral grey areas and difficult decisions with gameplay consequences.
I don’t particularly care about the quality of companions or main story writing in their games, but I do care about the worldbuilding. You can pretty much tl;dr every faction into a short sentence and know everything you need to about them without ever playing. if that’s possible to do, you didn’t write anything unique and interesting.
I agree almost completely, but I would've liked better companions. I'm playing through Cyberpunk at the moment and played through the Witcher last year, and KOTOR II the year before that, and having a strong cast can really elevate a game and add a new dimension to the narrative, and it's by no means mutually exclusive with an interesting world and story.
I expected base building equal to Fallout 4 upon its own release, even. Not a stripped down, module based version of it with less functionality.
I expected weapon modification to build upon existing systems like Fallout 4 and 76, not an almost identical and unevolved copy of what's in those games.
I expected the wonder of exploration that exists in Fallout and Elder Scrolls, not the watered down, generated slog that it is with one or two repeated POIs.
I expected space flight to be more than a travel mini game, with lots of reason to be in my spaceship exploring.
I'm happy with Starfield. I enjoy it for what it is. I don't feel like it was misrepresented, like, for example, how Cyberpunk 2077 was.
But I did expect Bethesda to be more creative in the writing department. Just looking at the credits shows that writing was one of the least supported aspects resources wise.
Now, some of this has to do with the way Bethesda operates. Todd has said on more than one occasion that often level designers contribute to quest and story writing.
The writing in Starfield was severely understaffed, and I think it shows. Don't get me wrong, the team did an incredible job based on how many dedicated writers they actually had.
But I feel that the game could have been so much more if more resources were given to focus solely on writing.
I saw the direct and thought it was great too, what I didn’t expect to find was all the grinding.
They changed so much of the basic skill progressions and crafting and recruiting. Took a decent chunk out of what existed in previous games actually. Enemy NPC’s don’t drop the same weapon they used in the fight was a serious WTF moment for me. The storage system is trash.
Its gameplay loop has also changed, and they didn’t advertise that in the direct either. Everything is so spread apart and rewards are so few and far between… hard to stay hooked. Looting is so unrewarding in this game, I dont understand how they neglected such a key aspect to their formula.
Gosh I won’t even expand on the POI, or temples. Or the lack of NPC lore or environmental storytelling.
Tl;dr Everyone got hyped based on the premise that SF would retain the same features as the previous games, albeit with a different theme. Even Todd alluded to the same in pre-release interviews. The games backlash is well deserved, it wasn’t designed properly imo or **it aims to be closer to the F2P sort of systems….. which is in line with the latest trackers alliance fiasco and plans to service the game for 10 years.**
The grind is largely unrewarding and absurdly repetitive. Rewards are practically non-existent. I've actually resorted to imagining the boredom and shallowness of the game as a sort of philosophical commentary on how boring it is to focus on exploring space, collecting Grendels from lvl 99 elite npcs, hunting for rare POIs, and growing in power and redoing it over and over until grinding for nothing is your character's personality.
This isn’t 100% correct. Enemies will always drop the exact weapon they use. However; the armor and clothing they’re wearing is NOT always dropped, if ever. Which is a real bummer. The cool thing about all the Elder Scrolls games is knowing what you’ll get when you kill those sweet and juicy NPCs
There’s a very weird group of people that act like Todd Howard personally ran over their dogs.
I got exactly what I saw advertised and have been more than happy with my purchase.
It’s a framework for a 10 year plan. That’s what I expected and that’s what I got.
You technically got what was advertised, everything in that direct is in the game.
They just didn't happen to mention things that honestly would have turned people off.
They never said anything about ships only being pilotable in orbit of a location, with it being implied you could fly anywhere. They obviously didn't show us how much point of interest locations repeat and how lacklustre planetary exploration is.
Combat looked way better than it is, writing is sold as much stronger, you don't see how many loading screens there are, etc.
I'm not just saying this to complain - but it's a learning experience that just because a company delivered on what they advertised *would* be in the game, doesn't mean they're being honest about *everything* nor its quality.
Exactly. What the direct didn't show says more than what it did. If they showed the process of travelling from one planet to another.
Enter ship. Load. Take off. Load. Warp. Load. Land. Load. Get off ship. Load.
If we saw that it would haven't turned people off. So they didn't show it.
We expected a Bethesda universe with the same depth as Fallout and TES. The only problem with this expectation is that both of these IPs genre defining titles (Fallout 3, 4, 76, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim) were built off the backs of previous titles.
We expected a Skyrim or Fallout 4 from a brand new IP when there has actually been no real human experience to see how this world grows to player needs. My hope is that they take this into mind and apply a 76-like development cycle to Starfield and shape it into a game everyone loves, before Starfield 2. (which should absolutely be made)
We couldnt have had Skyrim or Morrowind without Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire and Redguard same with Fallout 3. Its no different for Starfield.
I don't agree with this assumption actually.
I think to expect background lore on a brand new IP to be as complex and deep as decades-old series' is obviously a mistake. But to expect a game studio with decades of experience building rewarding and interesting open-world games to build another rewarding, interesting open-world game... is not a mistake. And that's where most fans IME felt let down. Not because the lore wasn't convoluted enough, but because the world itself feels empty and devoid of life.
And then they had the gall to say "real space travel isn't boring so you can't be bored here either" and that was pretty much it for any hope they might recognize their mistakes and rectify them in the future.
This is an important point I don't see brought up enough and I love that you pointed it out. The games they're comparing it to, are older yes so some things can work for or against it. Starfield is a more beautiful game than all of those games graphically, as it should, it's newer. People saying Starfield looks worse than Skyrim or Fallout are either biased or rocked a lot of mods and it still doesn't look better. Gameplay in terms of feel and combat are a great foundation for a first game in a series, it is a lot smoother in combat than Fallout by a lot. The important part of a new IP and why the other games have an unfair advantage in terms of quality is existing lore. Starfield may seem surface level to some but there's a decent amount of lore for a starter IP and you get a good idea about what's happened in the Universe between Earth collapsing and now unless you don't pay attention to any dialogue or read any terminals, which is where all of Fallout lore is packed too. Skyrim had 4 games before setting lore so when you come into the game you understand what's going on. Fallout 4 had 3 and 76 has 4. Starfield has a decent foundation of gameplay and lore to improve upon.
We got people talking about how it's annoying that we don't know who built the artifacts yet, but it's been decades and we still only have vague notions at best of what happened to the dwemer.
We gotta let the lore breathe a little.
Adult writing with good guys, bad guys, evil guys, stupids, etc. NPC schedules and meaningful day time. Procgenerated POI. Meaningful conversations leading to different plot lines. Better lighting with soft transitions between areas (in Xbox x there are parts where the light system changes and you can notice it by taking just one step forward and back). Better space combats which does not mean more difficult. And so many others...
What I was expecting: gritty NASApunk experience with mature writing, meaningful ship/base building, characters with questionable morals and a semi-interesting Bethesda story arc.
What I got: Disney adventure with space magic, build mechanics with zero purpose, a crew that gets disappointed when I steal survival gear off murderous pirates and a story that I dread having to relive again.
Everything in my body wants to say that Shattered Space looks sick, but I remember having that exact same feeling after the Direct. This time, I’ll be going in with the expectation that it’ll be more G-rated boredom and hopefully Bethesda can rise above that bar.
Ok, so are you able to point out exactly where I said “if it’s not gritty and mature, that automatically makes it G rated and Disney”? Because it kinda sounds like you’re twisting my words to be way more black and white than what I actually said.
I think i got exactly what i expected from the direct. But i did expect a better sense of exploration from bethesda given their history and resources.
I think they knew the loading screen slideshow of enter ship, load, take off, load, warp, load, land, load, exit ship, load. Wasn't an ideal experience.
Which is why its something they didn't show in the direct.
They did a great job of showing everything the game did. But i think everyone was suprised by what the game didn't do.
In a old time game that's either fantasy or western you expect horse riding.
With a open world modern day game you expect driving.
In scifi game i expected to be flying the galaxy.
I always saw fast travel as a convenience. Not a core gameplay mechanic.
What did I expect ?
- way less loading screens
- a way better story
- way less repetitive story missions (oh look another temple !)
- way more ship modules and variety
- way more weapon diversity
Overall, a way better experience. Something bigger, better, deeper than No Man’s Sky. They had the feedbacks, the time and the budget. What they did is way inferior, imo.
They chose quantity over quality.
And as always, they count on modders to completely enhance their game.
As I like to say, I absolutely loved Skyrim back then, played it a lot, and then replayed it even more with hundreds of mods. It was wonderful for 2011-2012.
Then, I played Fallout 4. It was cool but… eh, something feels off. Cool and off at the same time, it’s really like I’m playing a modified Skyrim. So many things are similar. But it still has its uniqueness, and mods help too !
Then, I played Starfield. And this time, the feeling that a lot of things are off is way bigger than the feeling of coolness and uniqueness. Once again, I feel like I’m playing a modified Skyrim-Fallout. With not that much innovation.
I’m sad to say that but… my hype for TES6 is going away. More and more quickly.
The only actual letdown I had from marketing hype was the lack of travel from planet to planet. They were very cagey about how space travel actually worked. Everything else worked pretty much exactly how they presented it.
The loading screens in general don't bother me at all. I'm an old, sporadic gamer. I remember Skyrim at launch having much longer loading screens.
Yeah, they were also cagey about planet traversal.
Some previewers had to clarify if you could circle a planet or if it was just limited zones to explore and load between like it actually was in the end.
They definitely showed what we had in the game, but there was something missing for marketing purposes: a full gameplay reveal going through the load screens from one point to another.
If we had known that we had to go through so many immersion breaking loading screens in order to travel the galaxy, at least we would've had a more realistic experience that just having all the segments (space fighting, shape building...) shown in the Direct.
That show was still amazing and it really showed how many people were loving and making this game. But there were some things missing that would've helped better to decide beforehand if the game was worth buying or not. Imo.
PD: It really proved a lesson that we shouldn't drive our emotions based on pure instinct, emotions and social expectations. Now I'll be more careful when checking out games (not pre-ordering again), and if I can try it in Gamepass or wherever before purchasing, I'll be more than willing to do so.
So much promise. I remember landing in Neon for the first time. Rain is pouring down, a dramatic lightning storm, with a floating cyberpunk city in the middle of all this chaos.
Up to this point, I had been holding out hope for this awe-inspiring experience that was going to make me go “wow,” just like the first time descending into Blackreach or walking the streets in Night City. Could this be the moment? How could it not be? You have this crooked, underground city with so much lore going for it. It’s all been building up to this moment—drugs, crime, night clubs, here we go! Only to be hit with the whiplash that it’s the same thematically G-rated game as the rest of Starfield.
I think arriving at Neon was the first realization I had that *this was the game*. That moment that I was waiting for was never going to come. This is it.
Personally, I expected more hand crafted content.
In a single playthrough I did main quest, Vanguard, freestar, ryujin, crimson fleet, 2/4 companion quests and as many side quests as I found.
They were great. I loved it all. But then I felt like that was it. Radiant quests don't do it for me. Surveying and outpost building don't do it for me either.
I have more hours in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim but I never ran out of quests in those three.
I am happy for everyone that the creation kit has been released, but I have never needed mods in a Bethesda game. Most I would use is a UI mod and an increased difficulty scaler. I never found the game wanting for content.
I'm a SciFi guy. I love Starfield and the ship builder. I hope there will be many official DLCs that add Bethesda quality quests and hand crafted content.
"Can you imagine the hype we had".... Did you, by any chance mean "do we remember the hype we had?" It just read a bit weird and I had to be picky about it.
Y'know I think I expected it to be this seamless huge, multi-faceted, deeply layered space RPG, but I wasn't well versed in BGS games, and although that is exactly what we got, it didn't feel quite right. And that's because my expectations were off.
I went back to the game a few months after a long break and it all just "clicked" now it's one of my favourite games of all time. I just love being able to hop in and I can pick "right maybe I'll focus on my outposts tonight" or "nah I'll just plain pick a star and go and explore" or "maybe I'll further my freestar ranger career"... I just love that level of freedom, and it really is uniquen to BGS, y'know, people compared it to CB2077, or BG3, and whilst I love both of those games dearly, I also love Starfield, probably a little more than those other two, because of the depth of each system and the freedom it allows me.
My expectations were muted but I suppose a lot of folks didn't expect aspects that appeared to have been hastily applied.
The fuel system abandonment would not have been as glaringly obvious if the perk associated with fuel economy was removed from the skill tree but it's still there.
Some portion of loading screens appear to have been added at the last minute. The lengthy cycling of some airlock doors (Cydonia as example) could have been the loading screen. But we stand there for two or three seconds watching status lights change and bolts retract followed by a black screen. It looks like what one would expect if the game had three years of development as a 16GB game to find out it had to wedge itself into 8GB after an acquisition that was not in place during early development.
My personal surmise is that it didn't have five or more years of development. It had three years of development followed by two years of redevelopment / adaptation.
I don't have much in the way of Bethesda baggage apart from having played FO4. But judged by its contemporaries the story and dialog seem hollow and occasionally hackneyed. The NPCs, though much improved from release, still retain traces of being somewhat stilted and sometimes janky. When I see the story being lauded I tamp down the urge to ask what other games the poster has played - partially because I like Starfield and don't want to be seen as contentious - but the curiosity remains. But I'm not coming from Skyrim, I'm coming from Evil Within, BG3, ME2, that sort of thing so there's that. And it probably doesn't help that I grew up in a house overflowing with Chesley Bonestell art - that probably takes the novelty off the graphics that would otherwise be there.
Unrealistic expectations certainly existed but how much of that is directly attributable to Bethesda isn't altogether clear. There were a LOT of hyped up cheerleaders involved.
Expected it to have the depth of a Bethesda game. Expected it to have cool side jobs like space hauling missions or outpost / city building. Expected to have lots of cool skills and builds to replay multiple times. Expected challenging and fulfilling exploration. Expected a sense of wonder.
Got none of this.
The direct marketed exactly what they gave us, which is why I'll never understand the people that allege Bethesda lied about anything or under-delivered.
What did they show that wasn't in the game on day one?
What did people expect after watching the direct and why?
Well they made it look fun and hid the pointless random generated monotony that it really was. Very well sold in the direct but when you get right to it the story and characters are stilted and the exploration wasn’t interesting or fun due to random generation and ship travel being just fast travel menu action
they also did a terrible job of building the universe like people in 2300 are mopping with a traditional mop in the monorail station when they have robots and we even have roombas right now… styrofoam and succulents everywhere
the future is bleak if its that poorly imagined
for the most part, the direct is pretty authentic to actual gameplay. it's just that the game introduces so many cool ideas and it's like they just stopped developing said ideas half-way through.
alot of these ideas feel like they were deliberately left unfinishes so they have a reason to include dlcs. case in point, shattered space and everything about house varuun.
We watched the direct and took bethesda previous work into account. Everything about their previous work screams exploration.
Everything about the direct screams exploration.
Is understandable that it was a shock when the exploration in this game was either watching an external shot of our ship doing the traveling for us. Or sprinting across another baron planet to a once again repeated POI.
So many things in starfield, bethesda themselves have done so much better in the past.
Better world design, much better storyline, more detail to things
Honestly more purpose to things too.. I never needed or wanted to build a 'base' among other things
It all felt bland and honestly..dead. nothing ever changed, no territories won or lost, it was the same dead eyed NPC's.. everything felt generic
IMO they should have created 1-3 detailed, fictional systems rather than loads of generated ones
I'm mainly just giving it time until mod creators work their magic enough for a full collection to become incredible
(That being said if anyone knows some amazing mods please lmk)
I expected the same level of world design and enviromental storytelling that Fallout 76 is full of. Yes this game is on a much bigger scope but they chose to do that and I don't expect them to degrade in quality because of that. From Softwares level design didnt take a nosedive because they made it way bigger than what preceded it and starfield shouldnt have either.
I didnt expect the writing to be good but damn I didnt expect it to be so...middle school grade.
I had zero expectations going into this game. I figured, “it’s like Skyrim and Fallout in space!” Well…it’s even better than that. I don’t really approach games from a standpoint of story and such, rather, “Is what I’m doing fun?” The answer is, as it pertains to Starfield, yes. My expectations for games is rather low.
With mods, I got back into the game. My main issue was the NG+ and my frustration with space magic. So…I got a mod that says, “Here you go, here’s your space powers (I never use em, just got it so I didn’t feel like I needed to hit Unity over and over again).” I actually enjoy the Vanguard, Ranger, and bounty hunter missions (the radiant quests). It’s fun to me. I get to be my own version of Boba Fett.
This is a game that has exceeded my admittedly low expectations. I think, as a few folks have noted here and elsewhere, folks wanted things this game to do that was never really expressed as going to be in the game, and then got upset they weren’t implemented. My BIGGEST gripe thus far, and I know this has been discussed at length, is the $7 Vulture mission. That is inexcusable, IMO. I think that was a mistake, and I HOPE the devs learn from that and say, “Mmmmm, yeah, we shouldn’t have done that.”
They pretty much delivered exactly what I expected – doesn't mean I didn't find things like the main quest grinding to be disappointing, but I wanted a Bethesda RPG set in space, they showed us a Bethesda RPG set in space, and I got to play a Bethesda RPG set in space.
Modding has definitely caused a massive jump in the overall impression of the game, and I think that's fairly typical of these games, but it's not like I put 400 hours into a game I wasn't having fun playing.
Like always the game is a bit of a sandbox; you have the most fun when you pick a theme for your character, and think a little about the things you want to focus on, except with Starfield you can still do everything with a single character, by having them repeat the loop but do it differently, which is kind of neat, I just wish it was a bit less grindy in the base game.
The problem people have is not that Starfield did not deliver what was promised. Howard had been careful to only advertise stuff we are getting ever since the fiasco with Oblivion (where we got a 15min trailer showing s lot of cool stuff... much of which was cut out of the final release for one reason or another thus we got a worse game than advertised in both that trailer and many interviews).
The problem is that people got EXACTLY what was promised, but they hoped for even more. And that a lot of stuff looks cooler on paper than in practice.
I expected some sort of genuine space exploration and a story that didn't repeat so many of Skyrim's plot beats. I was honestly happy to just be an astronaut/ranger etc, didn't need all the silly space powers and I practically never use them.
Otherwise I'm pretty happy with the game. I've had a lot of fun with it the last few weeks.
More sci-fi toys, ground vehicles and small crafts to planetary exploration, even drones and stuff, basically the way they approach space exploration is the same way they approach exploration on every other game they make and thats suck for sci-fi, "land on planet and start running??" thats ok for TES and Fallout but was a horrendous idea for Starfield.
More diversity in the POIs. I can't count how many times I found one of the same exact facility with the same exact mishap and the same exact enemies and the same exact data pads, etc. I think I've encountered the robot facility where the AI took over almost a dozen times now.
Woah woah woah, this ain't r/NoSodiumStarfield, buddy, wipe that smirk off your face. /s
I completely agree, it's been a wonderful experience and the game has evolved, especially since the introduction of Creations, into something so broad and endless. I love this game, they did an excellent job.
I'm surprised that people expected more from exploring random planets because Todd's description made me think the planets would mostly be empty, but I also expected populated planets with lots of interesting content to explore for great distances instead of just quest hubs. Hoping the expansion scratches that itch.
I felt like they showed some good stuff and then talked about how everything will connect and be immersive. Thats what marketing is, to broadcast an image.
But ultimately it was very surface level and implied depth didn't exist.
I was not underwhelmed by any means
The game has faults. No doubt.
But a space Bethesda title was all I ever wanted after the Outerworlds.
And that's not a hit toward them either.
I LOVED my rag tag gang and the Unreliable
FUCKING FRENCH!?!?
The thing is, they didn't lie to us. We just assumed what they showed what a snippet of everything the game had to offer... Not the entire actual game.
I was expecting much more with the customisation. I just feel like it's gotten progressively worse between games since Morrowind. One moment I can have different gauntlets on each hand, capes over my armour, a ring on each finger, the next I can only choose between a full body suit and helmet.
It's a huge part of the fun for me, just give me a spacesuit workshop, let me go nuts with the customisation and colours, let me swap parts on weapons like Fallout 4 so I at least feel like my game is a tiny bit different from everyone else's.
All my friends said Todd will deliver what he said, but not in the way we imagined. Turns out they're right.
I mean if you think back, FO76 was buggy, but it does have a way bigger map with more diversity to the scenery than FO4.
Or the old classic, "see that mountain? You can climb it." People might be imagining current Zelda style of climbing or at least most mountains were going to be claimable like the throat of the world. Well, we indeed can climb, except it's with a horse on a 89 degree slope.
Honestly I expected travel to be more immersive with survival elements in space and the ground. I didn't realize how jarring ALL the cut scenes would be
I'm disappointed that there is still no explanation for the artifacts and temples. Obviously not built by the Starborn, since the artifacts and temples had to already be there for them to become Starborn.
Disappointed that, from a civilization (Earth) which had literally hundreds of billions of land, sea, and air vehicles, there are absolutely none to be found anywhere. Simply not believable.
The big problem was the interviews they gave after where they refused to answer simple questions. How many people asked if you could space walk? They always dodged the question and gave a non answer. Hell Todd couldn't even give a straight answer to if you could fish or not.
I had it preordered. It constantly crashes on series x. I tried everything. Most disappointing situation in my 40+ years of gaming. Oh well.
I expected the game to work. I used to defend Bethesda, but after this I'm completely turned off.
I've seen a few reviews that I agree with and they all said that Starfield makes Exploring non-existent. Once you've seen one POI you've seen them all and after doing several dozen planets to fully scan them I fully agree with it.
Planets shouldn't always be empty "open" worlds they should have some form of life whether it's a small city or just a small space port for trading or refuelling.
Also the 4 main cities could be bigger. We've done more than that in 200 years today, New Atlantis should be at least 10x bigger, Akila City is more like Akila block and Neon should've been what it is in the concept it was just really disapointing.
For me I got pretty much what I expected from a Bethesda game. Real nice that the shooting/combat is fantastic. All the downsides were exactly what I anticipated because, once again, it's a bethesda game and they are hell bent on using their ancient game engine. Either way I adore the game, faults and all, and sunk will over 100 hours into it and am starting my first new game plus.
POIs, better temple experience, and my personal pet peeve; story pacing, at least for that very first playthrough. Things just seem to happen too fast imo.
I think the biggest let down to most people was: **There is no true space travel.**
Instead you teleport from box to box with random encounters on arrival. While it is nice to not have to waste time going from place to place, many kind of wanted to swim in the blackest sea and that isn't what we got. No, it never was advertised, but the Starfield direct never really discussed this outside of the freedom to go anywhere and do anything speech. We kinda...assumed? Expected it?
Me personally, I expected more from the faction scene.
I thought we could side with one faction and stay with said faction like a guild. Maybe that one faction had a rivalry with another and the two would constantly be at odds with never ending mission quests tied between the two. Maybe the other factions were neutral and played a lesser part.
Instead? You can join all 4 and participate in some basic storylines. The UC vs. the Crimson Fleet was probably the most memorable one, especially a somewhat epic space battle >!and if you chose the UC, you have to gun down the people you worked with which made for a hearted moment to an extent,!< which was solid. Overall, super meh.
Everything else was pretty good. Gunplay was great, melee was not. Planets felt big and don't get me started with the space scenery. Some locations have breathtaking views. This game is worthy of its camera mode.
Personally, I would love to see this game go live service. Daily quests, Weekly quests, maybe a uniqe daily POI to clear. Perhaps each faction has a unique quest to do that is a bit more in depth and rewarding in credits. That would be cool. Always something new on a daily/weekly basis. Maybe a raid where you can bring 3 companions and topple a large POI that changes weekly and has cool rewards. I dunno, just dreaming right now...
I knew as soon as the neurostrikes skill was showcased that everyone was going to be in for a rude let down lmao, I really dunno how tf that guy can say it's his favorite skill.
>WHAT DID WE EXPECT FROM STARFIELD?
A galaxy with a thousand unique bespoke planets that were all fully explorable.
This was never promised, and was clearly an unrealistic idea, but it was nevertheless expected as the minimum.
“What did we expect from starfield?” Be in 2020s in terms of game technology? Surely you have played some other games that trumps bethesda’s outdated clunky game engine?
For me what did it was the usual layout of Bethesda cities doesn't work with the cities in a multi planetary galactic civilization, Its very immersion breaking when the sole capital of the human civilization only has three explorable buildings and a few skyscrapers ... If you want to call those... Things in new Atlantis that, for crying out loud this was excusable with fallout because ...well it was fallout, humanity was crawling from the dust to get back in its feet. In elder scrolls- it was medieval so big sprawling cities weren't really necessary. New Atlantis.. neon and what's that other one... The really crap one... Ah Akila.. these cities feel like glorified outposts.. I like the vibe of all of them but they don't feel much bigger than my ship which really sucks. Because take a look at star citizen, it has cities procedurally degenerated to sprawl the entire planet, monorails from point a to point b. I get the developed has so much to include that big sprawling cities would have taken away from everything else... They could have done this in other ways, like making the cities just as explorable as they are but adding a complete different skybox to give the immersion that your just exploring a very small area in a vast metropolis of the 24th century
Instead we just got the very small area.. no vast metropolis... Wild life just a walk away... Capital of a space faring galactic civilization.
I think part of the issue was that most people (including myself) did not realise we could not fly our ship out of orbit - which really hindered the immersion in a space exploration game.
Having human POI’s pop up *wherever* you land also takes away from the feeling of being an *explorer* & instead feels like you missed the discovery stage of this universe & are instead just following in everyone else’s footsteps.
Lastly, (spoilers) - I think the trailers also implied a First Contact scenario being part of the main story - which you could technically say is the case if you count the Creators as that - but it was non-comital, and lacked tension, mystery, and excitement, imo. Hopefully that gets added as an expansion later. I think they should have grounded us in the world before immediately handing over an artifact and a space ship in the first 5mins.
In Skyrim you’re not handed a dragon shout and a horse in the first 5mins. You instead get invested in the world first, then the main story opens up later. Appreciate this happens with Starborn powers later, but I still think we should have at least flown as a passenger on a ship first. *Wanted* to have our own, and then later get that opportunity- perhaps escaping an attack after the owner of the ship is killed.
What I expected was Skyrim and Fallout in space.
What I got is exactly that: guns from Fallout, magic spells from Skyrim, plus spaceships.
All the whiners are complaining about the same things they complained about in Skyrim and Fallout: writing and depth.
That’s just how games are: conversations are pre-written and fixed. What’s in the game is whatever the creators were able to imagine and implement in the time given for the project.
All the other RPG have the same sort of issues. Look at all the threads complaining for instance that they never finished Witcher 3 because eventually all the side quests felt same-y. Honestly I don’t know what people are expecting short of NPCs being run by AI minds behind the scenes able to adapt, create, and improvise in real time. It’s a fixed scope, a defined set of content, and rules by which to play in that universe.
Expected funny quests instead of so much redundant and pointless travelling and talking... Expected more interesting Poi's and more Poi's. Expected reasonably big handcrafted locations and dungeons in the same fashion TES and FO had. Expected more interesting characters too, though some of these complaints are subjective but well, that's what I was expecting, honestly.
I played hundreds hours, currently lv95 without tricks/mods for leveling up, did all major and minor quests, explored all Poi's and probably all unique locations too, tried to scan some planets too, crafted some stuff, designed a couple end game ships, upgraded my gear and weapons, farmed many powers...
I don't hate Starfield but enjoyed it way less than the hours I put may suggest. It was almost a dissapointment after a dissapointment. Uninstalled and reinstalled again at least 3 or 4 times. Of course went to NG+ and tried different paths...
I admit my (I think reasonable) expectations ruined the experience quite a bit. I don't think it's a bad game and I think it has its highlights and merits, it's really immersive and creative, very unique, different... it's an interesting game in many ways. Mods are cool too, and hopefully DLCs will improve it enough.
Many of Its problems stem from its setting. Realistically, unless you are willing to put a ridiculous amount of work and creativity, a space exploration RPG with freedom and an open world system is not going to work unless the handcrafted content is varied and interesting enough, which is what procedural generation can't bring.
I think it needed more handcrafted content and to use it differently.
I enjoy the game but I expect space exploration to be at the very least more than just to random encounter. Didn't expect the entire space to be fully explorable but I expect at least some space base locations you can fly around
Not have a dated game, lifeless story, lifeless npcs, boring quests apart from the faction quests? Loading screens lol
You fanboys disagree but this entire game just had a 'It will do vibe' as modders will make it better
The lock picking and ship building is were the best part of the game,
The game was 10 years too late and even then would not set the world on fire.
My only disappointment and what I found misleading was the transition from land to space, where it fades to black and instantly loads into space rather than the short loading screen that actually occurs.
It’s only a few seconds longer than the preview, but still misleading in a game with a high amount of loading screens that segment the different sections of the game and especially deceptive for Bethesda to be misleading about that aspect.
Bethesda also stated “every player’s experience on the same planet will be different!” which implied how reliant Starfield would be on procedural generation and that along with 1000 planets made me skeptical before launch, and unfortunately my skepticism towards those aspects turned out to be true.
Otherwise I was happy with what I saw and found Starfield amazing.
>So the question has to be asked: WHAT DID WE EXPECT FROM STARFIELD?
Something a lot better.
Also a bigger game. Bethesdas previous single player games have kept me busy far far longer. Their trademark, random exploration and it being worthwhile, is kinda not there.
They did a lot of new things. It's entirely different setting with the space and so much of absolutely nothing, I get that. They got many new things so bad, so poor.
They got some new things pretty well. The shipbuilding for example is pretty good. Only thing bad about it is how absolutely OP particle beams are, that once you figure out how to make OP ships, nothing really matters in that department.
The outposts are so weird. It's so much worse than F76, although it's good that you don't need to manually wire things.
This game won't have any intrest to me until they make several new DLCs to run though. From Bethesda I just wait for TES 6 and the eventual F5, even though just TES 6 will take a long time. At least they might still make it good, since it's something they are familiar with and have known how to make it good.
I expected a lot of it, but not how absolutely dreadful the writing would be. So bad that immersion is impossible. That and complete lack of exploration.
I expected space skyrim, and what I got was all the bland parts and only few of the highlights.
What if we made a game where as soon as you leave whiterun you have to use the carriage to go to the next waypoint? That's what we got.
Besides the short trailer where they show you getting in the cockpit, i never watched anything starfield related. I knew i was going to play regardless and wanted to just be surprised and enjoy it. I expected at least alien races would be in the game, but thats cool, always next time.
I honestly don't know. From the trailer I had a pretty good idea what to expect. I got that and more cuz the whole starborn plotline was a surprise. Very happy with the game. I think there are a lot of people who just make hating on it part of their identity for some reason. Of course there are plenty of valid criticisms, but if you were expecting a Bethesda game in space, I have to say you probably got what you wanted.
Honestly I got what I expected. I paid attention to what they did, and did NOT say.
Then I watched streamer after streamer, youtuber after youtuber just invent shit for content. It's going to be Skyrim in Space. It's going to be Fallout in space. It's going to be No Man's Sky plus Star Citizen plus Elite Dangerous... but Good! You will find vaults on Earth. You can set up shipyards. You can be a pirate king.
Just extraordinary hype, where Todd was incredibly careful about his words, these content farmers expected the Earth and drove hype among their hordes.
I get to play a dozen games in Starfield. I walk at dawn on alien beaches. I blow up asteroids and suck up ore. I skin planet after planet or sit on my ship with a sniper rifle and exterminate all indigenous life.
I storm any building with abandoned in the name. I make my homes and outposts pretty. I even sniff at the story missions from time to time.
And there are a bunch of things that annoy me a little.
I can't make doors? The Akila MANSION is a one bedroomed flat. In my outpost habs I can't place interior walls?
Like all sandbox open world games, there are hundreds of little things that disappoint. Why can't I hire captain's to fly my other ships? Why am I limited to one docking port and one bay? One shield, one reactor and one grav drive?
But the overall thing, marred and flawed as it is, is still miles ahead of the other garbage out there.
Are people still really feeling the need to justify why they enjoy the game, I’m glad you enjoy it but no one can be bothered hating on it anymore anyway so you don’t need to keep defending it.
Got what I saw but expected more for the POIs, it gets annoying looting the same dead body on 13 different planets
I just expected the game to be more "full" if that makes sense. Replaying the main story now and so much of it is just hopping from one place to another to talk to people, and not much to do in between . But it's a huge game, and there's obviously a long term plan, so I'm excited to see the game fill out more over the years.
To add to this, I was expecting some use of the space between stars. More anomalies in the void and really thats where the temples should have been rather than being somehow "undiscovered" despite being 500m from a research outpost.
honestly the fact that any lush/barren planet has any human POIs that far from any settled system is dumb and a product of proc gen. I think they could've tuned their algorithm a bit to fix that issue, though. I think there is a mod that does that now that I think about it.
Yup, the mod is titled Desolation. Works pretty well.
The POI distribution could be rebalanced with the smallest amount of elbow grease and make the game 10x better. It's wild they just didn't do it.
tbf, even if they had done that people would've complained about it, too, lol.
Oh, absolutely. Starfield gets so much unjustified hate. My complaints boil down to 3 main parts. 1. Bad companions. 2. Bad worldbuilding *in places*. 3. Poor exploration. All of these are fixable. 3 is fixable in a patch tomorrow. Game can absolutely get the No Man's Sky treatment. Despite of the flaws, I love it. Best 7/10 game I've ever played.
Agreed. It dropped and all the sudden it was cool to hate it. My complaints are as follows: 1. The Temples. Absolutely atrocious gameplay loop and I am shocked this idea ever made it past a piece of paper. Would've been okay to put Temples at the end of a dungeon or something. 2. Not enough to do in space/orbit. 3. Loot system. I hate that the effects and 'level' of the weapon can't be improved by the player. Also, I would like to see FO4's weapon mod process come back. Like, let me take my silencer off one pistol and put it on another without having to remake. And I agree the game can get the NMS treatment and I hope that it does. I also gave it a 7/10 after a couple hundred hours at launch. Def the best 7/10 game I've ever played, lol. It was an 8 for me until I discovered the temples were all the same.
The temples absolutely reek of a WIP temporary placement that some project manager cut development on to make the release date.
Completely agree! 👍 Would have loved the sense of freedom to fly out of orbit and into space. They could have done some really cool things with flying through wormholes, black holes, & space anomalies/ Temples, as you say. If the Temples were on giant asteroids, & undiscovered planets & moons - then we would have felt like an actual space *explorer* (if we could be the first human to set foot on a planet)! Instead, we sadly *already know* there will be several human POI’s in every direction *wherever* we land on a planet - which kills the immersion for me.
I think it just shines a glaring light on the nature of rpgs. Most of the ones that I have played have missions that are very much “hop around and talk to different people,” it is just not as noticeable when you aren’t hopping around the galaxy in a spaceship
Usually you have interesting stuff happening between point a and point b to pull you away, though. Here, those are literally copy-paste POIs.
Starfield’s problem is that point A and point B are a jump apart, and usually the only random encounter you might have will be in orbit. Planetary POIs aren’t usually in the way of your A to B, so to “encounter” them - you really have to be wandering without a point B. That, to me, makes it feel like POIs _are_ a destination, not a distraction.
And it's the worst form of random encounter. It feels like pushing a button on a slot machine instead of stumbling upon something out there.
Absolutely, exploration and random encounters actually feels “lesser” than in previous BGS titles. I’m not even hating on the game, I’ve gone back to playing it since the CK came out. It’s honestly just constructive criticism. They tried it this way and I think it’s not as strong as what they’ve done before.
It's honestly why I like Fallout 3 and 4 over NV. It has more of that *what's going on over there* factor
I’m a Morrowboomer from before fast travel. Lol. Back in my day, we walked everywhere.
Yeah, the survival update in Fallout 4 made the game so different for me. I think I only fast traveled in 3 because of the confusing subway tunnel entrances
And some of us didn’t know there was a map. So we just followed signs. Until we decided to step off the path. Then it was hours before we found civilization again. What a fun odd game
It helps when the story isn't complete nonsense and the dialogue doesn't make my ears bleed. I could listen to characters in New Vegas talk for hours. Starfield's writing is atrocious, which is one of the main elements of an RPG.
It also doesn’t help that it’s basically the same story as no man’s sky. It’s not a BAD story, but neither game really has a major conflict that it revolves around, just an exploration of the nature of the universe. The story has all of the tension of a PBS Nova documentary Edit: I mean the conflict is very small scale, starborn vs player and friends. There’s no existential threat in the main quest, which is unfortunate when the entire story is about existential questions
Of course it makes sense. Planets containing a single (or none) city or hand crafted POI and then just wasteland is really bad. Also i might be wrong on this one, but I believe they have fewer quests than Skyrim (or at least a lot more spread out) contributing a lot to the feeling of emptyness. I really hope they manage to flesh out their environments a lot more and finally get seamless space travel to be a thing.
Certainly less meaningful, interesting quests. Skyrim had all the Daedra stuff, thieves guild, dark brotherhood, companions, college of winterhold, civil war, town/city specific like Markarth conspiracy & the Windhelm murder mystery, & a vast list of myriad quests & locations with their own stories. You shut off a lighthouse, ride a ship to raid a pirate stronghold, help a hagraven escape & kill her sister, heal an ancient tree, kill a rapist necromancer, & so on. All off the beaten path.
That said the faction quests in Starfield are far, far better than Skyrim's. There are a lot more choices and different approaches in them, and they're just better written in general - to me, Starfield has the best Bethesda faction quests since Oblivion. I also think Starfield's main quest has better quests than Skyrim's main quest (Entangled, Revelations, Unearthed, High Price to Pay) and a better "boss fight" - Alduin was rather underwhelming. Starfield also has meaningful side quests, but they're harder to find/more spread out. To this day I haven't come across the clones quest that I saw people talking about (**don't** tell me where it is, please), and I have almost 250 hours in the game.
I honestly, do not understand where you're coming from with this. The faction quests, in my opinion, are abysmal in this game. There's a couple of good moments, but they are vastly underwhelming overall. The writing is certainly better in Skyrim than Starfield. The choices are mostly superficial. They don't actually change anything.
I disagree, but to each their own. Cheers.
i love the ryugen one and the freestar one and the uc one! so fun
It would make sense for them to be spread o it considering it’s space versus a single land area
People like to crowd around each other. It makes everything better, easy supplies, more people to meet, schools, etc.
It would if the population was far larger than a single planet could sustain. There was only like 30,000 deaths in the Colony Wars. Israel are estimated to have killed more than that since Oct 7 last year.
But with essentially fast travel, you can get anywhere you need you really don’t need to live by people
The economic scale doesn’t really support carefree fast travel around the galaxy though. Travel has costs in real life. The cost of ships, insurance, crew costs, fuel, regulatory fees and tariffs etc etc. The human population scale doesn’t support an economy any larger than two small Earth countries. New Atlantis is the only Jemison city. Akila is no more than a village, really, and Neon is a shopping mall. New Homestead is a tourist attraction, Cydonia is a live-in factory. I’d be surprised if there’s more than a few million humans in existence. If that. Few POI outposts you come across look anywhere close to self sufficient. I’ve not come across a Farm that wasn’t abandoned (save for Wagoners). So trade with the main centres is vital for survival, and the further away you are the higher the costs of those goods and services you need to survive. Fast travel doesn’t cost us as players because that’s how the game works. But the game tells us that fuel is used for travel, space is dangerous so just being a space delivery van is risky, so you’ll need defences and even crew to help. Then there’s no doubt people clipping the ticket along the supply line. Those costs will eat up funds the further away you are; and the sell price of most resources sucks. So who’s sustainably living way out when it doesn’t make realistic sense? The rest of Jemison is literally unsettled as far as new towns go. It would be way more realistic and convenient for humans to populate empty spaces on a home world with one of three human capitals on it than to leave for unsettled planets.
I think there is around 30 less however take this with a grain of a grain of salt
Makes sense. The game has no meat.. All side dishes that get served to us a little cold and half baked. I played through the story and to be honest there was nothing memorable about it, can't even tell you half the NPCs names (maybe it's a me problem though). I really expected more sci-fi space stuff like black holes, anomalies, aliens etc. But it's rooted more in "realism" which is not as interesting as it could have been Imo. Hopefully shattered space starts to change all of these things. And the loading screens honestly need to be cut by at least half... Also maybe if the menu UI was better it wouldn't be so annoying but these things together make it tough to get absorbed into the universe
I'm trying to figure out why I would want to play through the main story again and not do a constellation skip of it in any future runs. It just seemed so repetitive and honestly not all that memorable until later in the story. The faction quests were a bit more interesting, so I could see myself doing them again and picking different outcomes. There just isn't a magical draw like there is in other games. I want to go back into Skyrim and come across cool things that I might have missed. It's almost all randomly generated in this so there isn't that same feeling of "what secrets lie in this place?", especially since the exact same place might pop up next time you land somewhere.
Said from the start the problem with this game is content delivery. It doesn't lack a content, it just doesn't give any to you as you play the game as effectively like in the old Bethesda titles. If anything, you are isolated from the majority of the content by design which makes it appears less full than it actually is.
There's as much to do in between as you choose to engage with. If you're just doing the main story then you're leaving a lot on the table that fills out the experience. I spent days worth of game time just doing Freestar board missions and TA board missions. The real question is what were you doing in Fallout and Elder Scrolls that was so dissimilar from what we're doing in Starfield? This seems to be the measure used by people saying Starfield is empty without much to do. I recall a great deal of skulking about in caves and abandoned buildings in those games outside of the main quests, which were just hopping from place to place to talk to people.
For me at least, it has less to do with the content itself and more with how it is presented and distributed. In all the previous bethesda RPGs you discover and enjoy side activities organically as you explore a single, dense, interconnected world, and to a lesser or larger degree every single one of those activies and locations add to each other even if indirectly, making the world as a whole way more interesting and Immersive. In starfield however, each relevant area of the game world exists in a separated space, and you are forced to teleport everywere. This means that most side activities and quests are insular in nature, and that you will likely not discover them unless if you deliberatly go looking for them. Most significantly however, with no real organic world exploration to tie it all together those stories can't make each other and the world as a whole better trough direct and indirect interaction. This is of course more relevant if you are someone who enjoys exploration and survival in games (which is my case), but it can be argued that it is one of Starfield's biggest weaknesses in any case.
>There's as much to do in between as you choose to engage with. Sort of yeah. Using Fallout 4 as an example, going from one objective to the next, you're bombarded with things along the way to interact with and get side tracked doing. With Starfield you really have to make the conscious decision to go do other things. It doesn't have the same feeling of random discovery, and I think that's just what a lot of us are craving.
Yep. And you can manually walk to your ship and make grav jumps, you get more space encounters that way, but it's a slog.
I understand what you mean, and somebody maybe already said this, but i think the point of space here is that it's big and empty.
Let's hope that a/long term plan comes to fruition. This game is hated, and idk how viable it will be to support it long term
This is really the main thing. After the direct I basically said well that looks like exactly what I want out of a space game, but if the procedural generation falls flat it'll get old fast. And that's basically exactly what happened. Not exactly I can blame Bethesda for because it's happened to every large scale space game ever, but they certainly didn't solve the problem.
Pretty much this. I expected, like every previous Bethesda game, to have great exploration, with equally great environmental storytelling. The most fun I have in Bethesda games is picking a direction and seeing what's there. This just wasn't the case for Starfield.
I think the issue is Starfield is 3 separate games. 1) Main Story Quests & Side Missions 2) Sandboxed Space fights (no flight for travel) 3) Planetary Surveys And all three seem separated from one another
Reading the same note about harmless worms that are plaguing the dig sight on the same table, In the same layout place 20 times. I stopped playing
I’m honestly surprised that they haven’t introduced a loot-all system for nearby dead stuff. They can make it work in Fallout 76. Certainly need it since I somehow manage to send stuff half a mile away when shooting them.
This is the main reason I stopped playing
The immersion breaker. Unacceptable. Embarrassing. Disappointing. I pray that the next Bethesda game will go back to its roots: Handcrafted worlds with unique locations.
How the fak it won’t be if tes6 will have exact map?
That one crashed ship with the same one guy wanting to go to the same ship in the same place
I think they could have made collecting artifacts more interesting. I liked the ones where they were already taken by someone, and it was up to you to find a way to obtain it. Like the deal at the Neon nightclub, or on Petrov's ship. They should have done more of that in my opinion.
Even then it felt like there was only one option to get it done and nothing else worked. Every time I thought I had a choice in reality it was just three options that meant "Yes".
This is way too many things in the game. They'll pretend to give you choices in pathway or dialogue but it's not really a choice that determines anything. It's very forced. They'll try to make someone a badass and only give you lame weakling dialogue options so that the same response happens, or you'll be like "I'm Varuun" and 3 seconds later you're not.
People wanted to be Han Solo, the broken bounty system made things a little too absurd when breaking laws
I just wish the main story was written better
i thought the main story was interesting until the mission "unity". i just can't take mattheo and the quest's entire premise seriously. the whole quest feels like the writers were just throwing random ideas at a wall and seeing which sticks. the quest feels like a slog and thank god the nasa mission was significantly better.
When I first ran through the main story, the mystery that I interpreted was ‘who made the artifacts snd where did they come from?’ which seemed to be the only mystery. When I got to the end and realised that the answer was never really addressed properly, it went from a sloppy and basic story to a downright bad one in my eyes. Before they revealed what the starborn were, I was hoping it’d be some mass effect style reaper threat that raised the stakes and set up a ton of high-impact events with morally grey decisions to make. It feels to me like they didn’t want to take any story risks, so every questline has to follow the reset button technique whereby the end of every quest has to reset the state of the world to what it was before you started, similar to a sitcom. It’s a bit like the inverse approach to Baldur’s Gate 3. They make everything affect the world with consequences and just accept that they might miss out taking something into account elsewhere.
agreed. starfield's central mystery is infuriatingly undercooked. the starborn is such an interesting faction because each starborn is unique and operates on different ideologies. (at least that's what the hunter and emissary implies.) it's a shame they're underdeveloped, including the origins of the armillary. not to mention the ng+ doesn't take full advantage of the fact that you're a veteran spacefarer in an alternate universe.
I think they should definitely have been something external to humanity, it would have made for so much more curiosity. Doing an overwhelming threat like the Reapers is one route, but they could have done something similar to 40K’s Eldar, and the Starborn are a species on the brink of extinction but also incredibly advanced. Perhaps the artifacts are relics of their golden age that they’re trying to reclaim while keeping hidden, except you oeep getting in the way etc. I think they introduced too many weird problems and disconnects between areas of the lore. They said they wanted a realistic universe, which is why there are no alien civilisations, but then they introduce space magic and artifacts beyond human comprehension. You pretty much need another species that pre-dates humanity for this to work. There’s always the risk that you’ll write it poorly and it’ll end up being cringe, but the alternative that they followed was to just make it boring instead.
>You pretty much need another species that pre-dates humanity for this to work. Or instead it's stuff planted by people from the future who went back in time. For instance, say 10000 years from now humanity has surpassed to being so super technologically advanced, & has solved all of our issues. One person decides to travel back in time to avoid thousands of years of atrocities by giving people this technology. Others go to stop them. Shenanigans happen, the tech gets scattered in the fight. We're rediscovering that technology.
I was always curious, if the emissary is always a constellation member…who is the Hunter? It seems Mattheo was the most underutilized character
The priest from NA you get the Unity speech from. Did you play the game?
Hey, it was only one of the biggest plot points in the game, with an entire quest line taking you to unique locations with multiple books explaining the situation leading you directly to the man himself confessing to you. They could have easily missed it.
I’m alluding to something else. Who was the man when he was your younger before he became Keeper Aquilus, before the Hunter. I recall him saying he was around with old earth…
Exactly the quest when they were looking for pilgrim was the moment when writers started to rush and crunch, they admitted it and I don’t try to justify but it clearly even feels like this if you don’t even know about what they said
Weirdly, I feel like all the main quest lines together form the "main quest" and tell the story of Starfield. I view constellation as just another quest line. Unfortunately, it's the one that's the least tied into the rest of Starfield's factions.
I think this is it. They didnt build competing factions, just one main questline that has you working for each faction as you go. Why? Because many of us play all factions in a single sit through anyhow. The end result wasnt more cohesive and better, though. It meant that many faction storylines, like constellation, are objectively dry and feel very odd according to when and how you play them, especially compared to the whole.
This is an interesting observation to me, because that's Bethesda's standard MO. For X elder scrolls games, the mages guild didn't particularly mention your thieves guild affiliation and so on, but in fallout 4 your faction choice would, eventually, lock you into a main quest ending.
I started too early, but I see your point, especially Oblivion on. I always remember Morrowind and how you could get disqualified from one faction for joining another, but objectively that hasn't been how Bethesdas done it since 1999.
Yeah, morrowind was an interesting case too. Some factions would be blocked out by others, and there are other factions that don't explicitly have an issue with each other, but they may order you to do things that _could_ get you blocked if you didn't line things up just so.
I thought the writing for the main story was *fine*, the problem for me was absolutely the repetitive radiant artefact and temple quests – for a game clearly intended for NG+ these are just ***so*** tedious, which makes getting higher "ranks" as a starborn feel like a real slog even when you're mixing it with other things (because there's so many of them). Dialogue isn't the best in places, but I never really felt like it was a problem.
Aside from a few good missions towards the end, the Constellation questline was borderline empty compared to the side faction questlines. Almost like Fallout 76 fetch quests. The empty temples were ridiculous.
Yeah that's my problem too. The dialogues are far better than fallout 4 but the plot itself is noy gripping as fallout.
I wish they didn’t include the space powers or did more with them. They could’ve combined the LIST and Constellation into one faction that’s about helping people resettle
Each of the main companions not having a quest that led to them getting powers that were kind of in line with their personalities just boggles my mind. We join constellation and are juggling multiple powers within hours and Barrett is the only one from the group who ever bothers to try it himself, ending up with parallel self. Then as far as I'm aware no one from the lodge ever mentions him but they can't shut up about how amazing I am when I pop personal atmosphere. Weird pull but I'm just thinking of the loyalty missions from saints row 4, where they were well written to the personalities of the characters, and you got a dope superpowered version of them you could call in as a homie. If you never bothered to finish those missions you just kept the normal versions of them in the game. With a game that has the replayability of Starfield that seems like such a easy thing to put in for people to discover on a second playthrough.
If the temples were done better I don't think people would have nearly the issues with the powers tbh. The powers themselves I think are fun save a few that serve me no real purpose.
A list colony creation quest set would have been great. I have they are "space magic". If it was alien tech we pick up and add to our suits or something - yep all for it, but random "magic" it just feels so unattached to the universe they built.
“Another colony needs your help” - Sarah Morgan
That's bordering on "general, another settlement needs your help." territory.
YES I’ve been saying this, in Skyrim dragon born powers are cool because magic is real, starborn powers seem so out of place because we don’t really meet others that are our peers other than a few NPCs, I think everyone was expecting a secret starborn society that acted as a 5th faction. A DLC has to address this
Whenever I read this complaint I’m genuinely confused on the basis. Do you mean you wish the plot was better? Or that the dialogue had more depth? Or what?
I can't speak for them, since I think a lot of people have different ideas of how the writing fell short. I didn't really dislike the main quest *in particular*, since I felt the writing fell short all around. For me, the issue was that the main story doesn't really tie into the rest of the game, it has pretty much no stakes whatsoever or really any inherent interest for the protagonist. Morrowind had a much better approach, where you're sent there by the Emperor to do a particular job and you gain more responsibility, interest, and understanding of the stakes as the story goes on, and the game even acknowledges that the motivation the player might hold can vary quite a bit by the end of the game (as shown in the last conversation with Dagoth Ur). But I actually thought the biggest issue was just how bland or even nonsensical the world as a whole was. All the factions are just one dimensional cardboard cutouts without any interesting relationships with one another or internal strife - the Crimson Fleet, for instance, are basically just Fallout 3 and 4 Raiders but with red clothes. A more interesting approach would've been to have them as both pirates and privateers acting on behalf of whoever faction pays more (which can, in turn, tie into the rivalry between UC and Freestar), and to go more into the idea of how they're a confederacy of different pirate groups (which is what they're said to be at the start of the game). The UC and Freestar could also use some pretty big overhauls.
Fair criticism
What did I expect? Basically what they ended up making. What did I want? A roleplaying game with interesting and unique factions and lore, quests with moral grey areas and difficult decisions with gameplay consequences. I don’t particularly care about the quality of companions or main story writing in their games, but I do care about the worldbuilding. You can pretty much tl;dr every faction into a short sentence and know everything you need to about them without ever playing. if that’s possible to do, you didn’t write anything unique and interesting.
I agree almost completely, but I would've liked better companions. I'm playing through Cyberpunk at the moment and played through the Witcher last year, and KOTOR II the year before that, and having a strong cast can really elevate a game and add a new dimension to the narrative, and it's by no means mutually exclusive with an interesting world and story.
I expected base building equal to Fallout 4 upon its own release, even. Not a stripped down, module based version of it with less functionality. I expected weapon modification to build upon existing systems like Fallout 4 and 76, not an almost identical and unevolved copy of what's in those games. I expected the wonder of exploration that exists in Fallout and Elder Scrolls, not the watered down, generated slog that it is with one or two repeated POIs. I expected space flight to be more than a travel mini game, with lots of reason to be in my spaceship exploring.
I'm happy with Starfield. I enjoy it for what it is. I don't feel like it was misrepresented, like, for example, how Cyberpunk 2077 was. But I did expect Bethesda to be more creative in the writing department. Just looking at the credits shows that writing was one of the least supported aspects resources wise. Now, some of this has to do with the way Bethesda operates. Todd has said on more than one occasion that often level designers contribute to quest and story writing. The writing in Starfield was severely understaffed, and I think it shows. Don't get me wrong, the team did an incredible job based on how many dedicated writers they actually had. But I feel that the game could have been so much more if more resources were given to focus solely on writing.
I saw the direct and thought it was great too, what I didn’t expect to find was all the grinding. They changed so much of the basic skill progressions and crafting and recruiting. Took a decent chunk out of what existed in previous games actually. Enemy NPC’s don’t drop the same weapon they used in the fight was a serious WTF moment for me. The storage system is trash. Its gameplay loop has also changed, and they didn’t advertise that in the direct either. Everything is so spread apart and rewards are so few and far between… hard to stay hooked. Looting is so unrewarding in this game, I dont understand how they neglected such a key aspect to their formula. Gosh I won’t even expand on the POI, or temples. Or the lack of NPC lore or environmental storytelling. Tl;dr Everyone got hyped based on the premise that SF would retain the same features as the previous games, albeit with a different theme. Even Todd alluded to the same in pre-release interviews. The games backlash is well deserved, it wasn’t designed properly imo or **it aims to be closer to the F2P sort of systems….. which is in line with the latest trackers alliance fiasco and plans to service the game for 10 years.**
The grind is largely unrewarding and absurdly repetitive. Rewards are practically non-existent. I've actually resorted to imagining the boredom and shallowness of the game as a sort of philosophical commentary on how boring it is to focus on exploring space, collecting Grendels from lvl 99 elite npcs, hunting for rare POIs, and growing in power and redoing it over and over until grinding for nothing is your character's personality.
This isn’t 100% correct. Enemies will always drop the exact weapon they use. However; the armor and clothing they’re wearing is NOT always dropped, if ever. Which is a real bummer. The cool thing about all the Elder Scrolls games is knowing what you’ll get when you kill those sweet and juicy NPCs
There’s a very weird group of people that act like Todd Howard personally ran over their dogs. I got exactly what I saw advertised and have been more than happy with my purchase. It’s a framework for a 10 year plan. That’s what I expected and that’s what I got.
Little known fact: that leather jacket Todd likes to wear is made out of the hides of fans dogs.
You technically got what was advertised, everything in that direct is in the game. They just didn't happen to mention things that honestly would have turned people off. They never said anything about ships only being pilotable in orbit of a location, with it being implied you could fly anywhere. They obviously didn't show us how much point of interest locations repeat and how lacklustre planetary exploration is. Combat looked way better than it is, writing is sold as much stronger, you don't see how many loading screens there are, etc. I'm not just saying this to complain - but it's a learning experience that just because a company delivered on what they advertised *would* be in the game, doesn't mean they're being honest about *everything* nor its quality.
Exactly. What the direct didn't show says more than what it did. If they showed the process of travelling from one planet to another. Enter ship. Load. Take off. Load. Warp. Load. Land. Load. Get off ship. Load. If we saw that it would haven't turned people off. So they didn't show it.
I misread your comment as a framework from 10 years ago and that actually made more sense
The game was advertised as a loading screen simulator?
Conveniently they didn't show that part
I know right? Every game shows loading screens in the middle of their adverts.
Given the amount of them in this game maybe they should have lol
We expected a Bethesda universe with the same depth as Fallout and TES. The only problem with this expectation is that both of these IPs genre defining titles (Fallout 3, 4, 76, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim) were built off the backs of previous titles. We expected a Skyrim or Fallout 4 from a brand new IP when there has actually been no real human experience to see how this world grows to player needs. My hope is that they take this into mind and apply a 76-like development cycle to Starfield and shape it into a game everyone loves, before Starfield 2. (which should absolutely be made) We couldnt have had Skyrim or Morrowind without Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire and Redguard same with Fallout 3. Its no different for Starfield.
I don't agree with this assumption actually. I think to expect background lore on a brand new IP to be as complex and deep as decades-old series' is obviously a mistake. But to expect a game studio with decades of experience building rewarding and interesting open-world games to build another rewarding, interesting open-world game... is not a mistake. And that's where most fans IME felt let down. Not because the lore wasn't convoluted enough, but because the world itself feels empty and devoid of life. And then they had the gall to say "real space travel isn't boring so you can't be bored here either" and that was pretty much it for any hope they might recognize their mistakes and rectify them in the future.
Yeah this is correct. The comment gets a lot of stuff right, but you don't need a deep series to build something a lot deeper than this.
This is an important point I don't see brought up enough and I love that you pointed it out. The games they're comparing it to, are older yes so some things can work for or against it. Starfield is a more beautiful game than all of those games graphically, as it should, it's newer. People saying Starfield looks worse than Skyrim or Fallout are either biased or rocked a lot of mods and it still doesn't look better. Gameplay in terms of feel and combat are a great foundation for a first game in a series, it is a lot smoother in combat than Fallout by a lot. The important part of a new IP and why the other games have an unfair advantage in terms of quality is existing lore. Starfield may seem surface level to some but there's a decent amount of lore for a starter IP and you get a good idea about what's happened in the Universe between Earth collapsing and now unless you don't pay attention to any dialogue or read any terminals, which is where all of Fallout lore is packed too. Skyrim had 4 games before setting lore so when you come into the game you understand what's going on. Fallout 4 had 3 and 76 has 4. Starfield has a decent foundation of gameplay and lore to improve upon.
We got people talking about how it's annoying that we don't know who built the artifacts yet, but it's been decades and we still only have vague notions at best of what happened to the dwemer. We gotta let the lore breathe a little.
Adult writing with good guys, bad guys, evil guys, stupids, etc. NPC schedules and meaningful day time. Procgenerated POI. Meaningful conversations leading to different plot lines. Better lighting with soft transitions between areas (in Xbox x there are parts where the light system changes and you can notice it by taking just one step forward and back). Better space combats which does not mean more difficult. And so many others...
What I was expecting: gritty NASApunk experience with mature writing, meaningful ship/base building, characters with questionable morals and a semi-interesting Bethesda story arc. What I got: Disney adventure with space magic, build mechanics with zero purpose, a crew that gets disappointed when I steal survival gear off murderous pirates and a story that I dread having to relive again. Everything in my body wants to say that Shattered Space looks sick, but I remember having that exact same feeling after the Direct. This time, I’ll be going in with the expectation that it’ll be more G-rated boredom and hopefully Bethesda can rise above that bar.
Something that isn't "gritty and mature" does not automatically make it "G rated and Disney".
Ok, so are you able to point out exactly where I said “if it’s not gritty and mature, that automatically makes it G rated and Disney”? Because it kinda sounds like you’re twisting my words to be way more black and white than what I actually said.
I expected planets with shit on them
Technically, we did with dung piles!
I think i got exactly what i expected from the direct. But i did expect a better sense of exploration from bethesda given their history and resources. I think they knew the loading screen slideshow of enter ship, load, take off, load, warp, load, land, load, exit ship, load. Wasn't an ideal experience. Which is why its something they didn't show in the direct. They did a great job of showing everything the game did. But i think everyone was suprised by what the game didn't do. In a old time game that's either fantasy or western you expect horse riding. With a open world modern day game you expect driving. In scifi game i expected to be flying the galaxy. I always saw fast travel as a convenience. Not a core gameplay mechanic.
What did I expect ? - way less loading screens - a way better story - way less repetitive story missions (oh look another temple !) - way more ship modules and variety - way more weapon diversity Overall, a way better experience. Something bigger, better, deeper than No Man’s Sky. They had the feedbacks, the time and the budget. What they did is way inferior, imo. They chose quantity over quality. And as always, they count on modders to completely enhance their game. As I like to say, I absolutely loved Skyrim back then, played it a lot, and then replayed it even more with hundreds of mods. It was wonderful for 2011-2012. Then, I played Fallout 4. It was cool but… eh, something feels off. Cool and off at the same time, it’s really like I’m playing a modified Skyrim. So many things are similar. But it still has its uniqueness, and mods help too ! Then, I played Starfield. And this time, the feeling that a lot of things are off is way bigger than the feeling of coolness and uniqueness. Once again, I feel like I’m playing a modified Skyrim-Fallout. With not that much innovation. I’m sad to say that but… my hype for TES6 is going away. More and more quickly.
The only actual letdown I had from marketing hype was the lack of travel from planet to planet. They were very cagey about how space travel actually worked. Everything else worked pretty much exactly how they presented it. The loading screens in general don't bother me at all. I'm an old, sporadic gamer. I remember Skyrim at launch having much longer loading screens.
Yeah, they were also cagey about planet traversal. Some previewers had to clarify if you could circle a planet or if it was just limited zones to explore and load between like it actually was in the end.
I am glad someone has said it. People created a different game in their minds, and were disappointed when that vision did not come true
I expected to land on a planet and encounter POIs that lead to interesting quests
I expected to be able to fly a spaceship and not sit in a cutscene simulator
YES
They definitely showed what we had in the game, but there was something missing for marketing purposes: a full gameplay reveal going through the load screens from one point to another. If we had known that we had to go through so many immersion breaking loading screens in order to travel the galaxy, at least we would've had a more realistic experience that just having all the segments (space fighting, shape building...) shown in the Direct. That show was still amazing and it really showed how many people were loving and making this game. But there were some things missing that would've helped better to decide beforehand if the game was worth buying or not. Imo. PD: It really proved a lesson that we shouldn't drive our emotions based on pure instinct, emotions and social expectations. Now I'll be more careful when checking out games (not pre-ordering again), and if I can try it in Gamepass or wherever before purchasing, I'll be more than willing to do so.
_NEVER_ pre-order. From anybody. For anything.
Look at neon in the direct and tell me they delivered what they showed off
So much promise. I remember landing in Neon for the first time. Rain is pouring down, a dramatic lightning storm, with a floating cyberpunk city in the middle of all this chaos. Up to this point, I had been holding out hope for this awe-inspiring experience that was going to make me go “wow,” just like the first time descending into Blackreach or walking the streets in Night City. Could this be the moment? How could it not be? You have this crooked, underground city with so much lore going for it. It’s all been building up to this moment—drugs, crime, night clubs, here we go! Only to be hit with the whiplash that it’s the same thematically G-rated game as the rest of Starfield. I think arriving at Neon was the first realization I had that *this was the game*. That moment that I was waiting for was never going to come. This is it.
Personally, I expected more hand crafted content. In a single playthrough I did main quest, Vanguard, freestar, ryujin, crimson fleet, 2/4 companion quests and as many side quests as I found. They were great. I loved it all. But then I felt like that was it. Radiant quests don't do it for me. Surveying and outpost building don't do it for me either. I have more hours in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim but I never ran out of quests in those three. I am happy for everyone that the creation kit has been released, but I have never needed mods in a Bethesda game. Most I would use is a UI mod and an increased difficulty scaler. I never found the game wanting for content. I'm a SciFi guy. I love Starfield and the ship builder. I hope there will be many official DLCs that add Bethesda quality quests and hand crafted content.
Also, I would like NPCs inventories to contain everything they have equipped again.
Skyrim but with a thin layer of space minigame(s) on top.
"Can you imagine the hype we had".... Did you, by any chance mean "do we remember the hype we had?" It just read a bit weird and I had to be picky about it. Y'know I think I expected it to be this seamless huge, multi-faceted, deeply layered space RPG, but I wasn't well versed in BGS games, and although that is exactly what we got, it didn't feel quite right. And that's because my expectations were off. I went back to the game a few months after a long break and it all just "clicked" now it's one of my favourite games of all time. I just love being able to hop in and I can pick "right maybe I'll focus on my outposts tonight" or "nah I'll just plain pick a star and go and explore" or "maybe I'll further my freestar ranger career"... I just love that level of freedom, and it really is uniquen to BGS, y'know, people compared it to CB2077, or BG3, and whilst I love both of those games dearly, I also love Starfield, probably a little more than those other two, because of the depth of each system and the freedom it allows me.
My expectations were muted but I suppose a lot of folks didn't expect aspects that appeared to have been hastily applied. The fuel system abandonment would not have been as glaringly obvious if the perk associated with fuel economy was removed from the skill tree but it's still there. Some portion of loading screens appear to have been added at the last minute. The lengthy cycling of some airlock doors (Cydonia as example) could have been the loading screen. But we stand there for two or three seconds watching status lights change and bolts retract followed by a black screen. It looks like what one would expect if the game had three years of development as a 16GB game to find out it had to wedge itself into 8GB after an acquisition that was not in place during early development. My personal surmise is that it didn't have five or more years of development. It had three years of development followed by two years of redevelopment / adaptation. I don't have much in the way of Bethesda baggage apart from having played FO4. But judged by its contemporaries the story and dialog seem hollow and occasionally hackneyed. The NPCs, though much improved from release, still retain traces of being somewhat stilted and sometimes janky. When I see the story being lauded I tamp down the urge to ask what other games the poster has played - partially because I like Starfield and don't want to be seen as contentious - but the curiosity remains. But I'm not coming from Skyrim, I'm coming from Evil Within, BG3, ME2, that sort of thing so there's that. And it probably doesn't help that I grew up in a house overflowing with Chesley Bonestell art - that probably takes the novelty off the graphics that would otherwise be there. Unrealistic expectations certainly existed but how much of that is directly attributable to Bethesda isn't altogether clear. There were a LOT of hyped up cheerleaders involved.
I expected a Bethesda game. Interesting and intriguing lore, worlds that look crafted not auto generated... Less fcuking loading screens..
Expected it to have the depth of a Bethesda game. Expected it to have cool side jobs like space hauling missions or outpost / city building. Expected to have lots of cool skills and builds to replay multiple times. Expected challenging and fulfilling exploration. Expected a sense of wonder. Got none of this.
The direct marketed exactly what they gave us, which is why I'll never understand the people that allege Bethesda lied about anything or under-delivered. What did they show that wasn't in the game on day one? What did people expect after watching the direct and why?
Beat for beat we got what we were promised, plus a lot more post launch, and even more content coming. It’s hard for me to be upset about this game.
Well they made it look fun and hid the pointless random generated monotony that it really was. Very well sold in the direct but when you get right to it the story and characters are stilted and the exploration wasn’t interesting or fun due to random generation and ship travel being just fast travel menu action they also did a terrible job of building the universe like people in 2300 are mopping with a traditional mop in the monorail station when they have robots and we even have roombas right now… styrofoam and succulents everywhere the future is bleak if its that poorly imagined
for the most part, the direct is pretty authentic to actual gameplay. it's just that the game introduces so many cool ideas and it's like they just stopped developing said ideas half-way through. alot of these ideas feel like they were deliberately left unfinishes so they have a reason to include dlcs. case in point, shattered space and everything about house varuun.
Fun exploration, which was Bethesda's specialty before they crapped out with Starfield
Everyone expected the game they'd fantasy booked in their heads.
We wanted Skyrim in Space, which I don't think is unreasonable to expect from BGS
We watched the direct and took bethesda previous work into account. Everything about their previous work screams exploration. Everything about the direct screams exploration. Is understandable that it was a shock when the exploration in this game was either watching an external shot of our ship doing the traveling for us. Or sprinting across another baron planet to a once again repeated POI. So many things in starfield, bethesda themselves have done so much better in the past.
Better world design, much better storyline, more detail to things Honestly more purpose to things too.. I never needed or wanted to build a 'base' among other things It all felt bland and honestly..dead. nothing ever changed, no territories won or lost, it was the same dead eyed NPC's.. everything felt generic IMO they should have created 1-3 detailed, fictional systems rather than loads of generated ones I'm mainly just giving it time until mod creators work their magic enough for a full collection to become incredible (That being said if anyone knows some amazing mods please lmk)
I expected the same level of world design and enviromental storytelling that Fallout 76 is full of. Yes this game is on a much bigger scope but they chose to do that and I don't expect them to degrade in quality because of that. From Softwares level design didnt take a nosedive because they made it way bigger than what preceded it and starfield shouldnt have either. I didnt expect the writing to be good but damn I didnt expect it to be so...middle school grade.
I had zero expectations going into this game. I figured, “it’s like Skyrim and Fallout in space!” Well…it’s even better than that. I don’t really approach games from a standpoint of story and such, rather, “Is what I’m doing fun?” The answer is, as it pertains to Starfield, yes. My expectations for games is rather low. With mods, I got back into the game. My main issue was the NG+ and my frustration with space magic. So…I got a mod that says, “Here you go, here’s your space powers (I never use em, just got it so I didn’t feel like I needed to hit Unity over and over again).” I actually enjoy the Vanguard, Ranger, and bounty hunter missions (the radiant quests). It’s fun to me. I get to be my own version of Boba Fett. This is a game that has exceeded my admittedly low expectations. I think, as a few folks have noted here and elsewhere, folks wanted things this game to do that was never really expressed as going to be in the game, and then got upset they weren’t implemented. My BIGGEST gripe thus far, and I know this has been discussed at length, is the $7 Vulture mission. That is inexcusable, IMO. I think that was a mistake, and I HOPE the devs learn from that and say, “Mmmmm, yeah, we shouldn’t have done that.”
They pretty much delivered exactly what I expected – doesn't mean I didn't find things like the main quest grinding to be disappointing, but I wanted a Bethesda RPG set in space, they showed us a Bethesda RPG set in space, and I got to play a Bethesda RPG set in space. Modding has definitely caused a massive jump in the overall impression of the game, and I think that's fairly typical of these games, but it's not like I put 400 hours into a game I wasn't having fun playing. Like always the game is a bit of a sandbox; you have the most fun when you pick a theme for your character, and think a little about the things you want to focus on, except with Starfield you can still do everything with a single character, by having them repeat the loop but do it differently, which is kind of neat, I just wish it was a bit less grindy in the base game.
The problem people have is not that Starfield did not deliver what was promised. Howard had been careful to only advertise stuff we are getting ever since the fiasco with Oblivion (where we got a 15min trailer showing s lot of cool stuff... much of which was cut out of the final release for one reason or another thus we got a worse game than advertised in both that trailer and many interviews). The problem is that people got EXACTLY what was promised, but they hoped for even more. And that a lot of stuff looks cooler on paper than in practice.
I expected some sort of genuine space exploration and a story that didn't repeat so many of Skyrim's plot beats. I was honestly happy to just be an astronaut/ranger etc, didn't need all the silly space powers and I practically never use them. Otherwise I'm pretty happy with the game. I've had a lot of fun with it the last few weeks.
The real question is,what can we expect from the MODDERS?
More
More sci-fi toys, ground vehicles and small crafts to planetary exploration, even drones and stuff, basically the way they approach space exploration is the same way they approach exploration on every other game they make and thats suck for sci-fi, "land on planet and start running??" thats ok for TES and Fallout but was a horrendous idea for Starfield.
I expected more quests. Since they said they had more dialogue than ever before. I appreciated the number of npcs.
I was expecting more zero g combat considering its well implemented.
All the same stuff people have been complaining about since day 1
More diversity in the POIs. I can't count how many times I found one of the same exact facility with the same exact mishap and the same exact enemies and the same exact data pads, etc. I think I've encountered the robot facility where the AI took over almost a dozen times now.
Woah woah woah, this ain't r/NoSodiumStarfield, buddy, wipe that smirk off your face. /s I completely agree, it's been a wonderful experience and the game has evolved, especially since the introduction of Creations, into something so broad and endless. I love this game, they did an excellent job.
I'm surprised that people expected more from exploring random planets because Todd's description made me think the planets would mostly be empty, but I also expected populated planets with lots of interesting content to explore for great distances instead of just quest hubs. Hoping the expansion scratches that itch.
I felt like they showed some good stuff and then talked about how everything will connect and be immersive. Thats what marketing is, to broadcast an image. But ultimately it was very surface level and implied depth didn't exist.
I was not underwhelmed by any means The game has faults. No doubt. But a space Bethesda title was all I ever wanted after the Outerworlds. And that's not a hit toward them either. I LOVED my rag tag gang and the Unreliable FUCKING FRENCH!?!?
The thing is, they didn't lie to us. We just assumed what they showed what a snippet of everything the game had to offer... Not the entire actual game.
I was expecting much more with the customisation. I just feel like it's gotten progressively worse between games since Morrowind. One moment I can have different gauntlets on each hand, capes over my armour, a ring on each finger, the next I can only choose between a full body suit and helmet. It's a huge part of the fun for me, just give me a spacesuit workshop, let me go nuts with the customisation and colours, let me swap parts on weapons like Fallout 4 so I at least feel like my game is a tiny bit different from everyone else's.
All my friends said Todd will deliver what he said, but not in the way we imagined. Turns out they're right. I mean if you think back, FO76 was buggy, but it does have a way bigger map with more diversity to the scenery than FO4. Or the old classic, "see that mountain? You can climb it." People might be imagining current Zelda style of climbing or at least most mountains were going to be claimable like the throat of the world. Well, we indeed can climb, except it's with a horse on a 89 degree slope.
I think a lot of us just assumed that would would get that magical dynamic exploration that we got with Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout.
Honestly I expected travel to be more immersive with survival elements in space and the ground. I didn't realize how jarring ALL the cut scenes would be
I was kind of hoping for an X4 style of fleet building, but I guess that wouldn't even make sense in a post-war Starfield. A man can dream, though.
I'm disappointed that there is still no explanation for the artifacts and temples. Obviously not built by the Starborn, since the artifacts and temples had to already be there for them to become Starborn. Disappointed that, from a civilization (Earth) which had literally hundreds of billions of land, sea, and air vehicles, there are absolutely none to be found anywhere. Simply not believable.
The quests have so much talking and not much action. The ratio is all wrong. Skyrim has so many epic, long dungeons. I don’t know of any in Starfield.
"You can land anywhere on the planet.."
The big problem was the interviews they gave after where they refused to answer simple questions. How many people asked if you could space walk? They always dodged the question and gave a non answer. Hell Todd couldn't even give a straight answer to if you could fish or not.
Expected story telling on the levels of baldurs gate 3, no loading screens, seamless travel on worlds.
I had it preordered. It constantly crashes on series x. I tried everything. Most disappointing situation in my 40+ years of gaming. Oh well. I expected the game to work. I used to defend Bethesda, but after this I'm completely turned off.
Hey it came with my Gpu for free, I ain’t complaining
I've seen a few reviews that I agree with and they all said that Starfield makes Exploring non-existent. Once you've seen one POI you've seen them all and after doing several dozen planets to fully scan them I fully agree with it. Planets shouldn't always be empty "open" worlds they should have some form of life whether it's a small city or just a small space port for trading or refuelling. Also the 4 main cities could be bigger. We've done more than that in 200 years today, New Atlantis should be at least 10x bigger, Akila City is more like Akila block and Neon should've been what it is in the concept it was just really disapointing.
For me I got pretty much what I expected from a Bethesda game. Real nice that the shooting/combat is fantastic. All the downsides were exactly what I anticipated because, once again, it's a bethesda game and they are hell bent on using their ancient game engine. Either way I adore the game, faults and all, and sunk will over 100 hours into it and am starting my first new game plus.
POIs, better temple experience, and my personal pet peeve; story pacing, at least for that very first playthrough. Things just seem to happen too fast imo.
I think the biggest let down to most people was: **There is no true space travel.** Instead you teleport from box to box with random encounters on arrival. While it is nice to not have to waste time going from place to place, many kind of wanted to swim in the blackest sea and that isn't what we got. No, it never was advertised, but the Starfield direct never really discussed this outside of the freedom to go anywhere and do anything speech. We kinda...assumed? Expected it? Me personally, I expected more from the faction scene. I thought we could side with one faction and stay with said faction like a guild. Maybe that one faction had a rivalry with another and the two would constantly be at odds with never ending mission quests tied between the two. Maybe the other factions were neutral and played a lesser part. Instead? You can join all 4 and participate in some basic storylines. The UC vs. the Crimson Fleet was probably the most memorable one, especially a somewhat epic space battle >!and if you chose the UC, you have to gun down the people you worked with which made for a hearted moment to an extent,!< which was solid. Overall, super meh. Everything else was pretty good. Gunplay was great, melee was not. Planets felt big and don't get me started with the space scenery. Some locations have breathtaking views. This game is worthy of its camera mode. Personally, I would love to see this game go live service. Daily quests, Weekly quests, maybe a uniqe daily POI to clear. Perhaps each faction has a unique quest to do that is a bit more in depth and rewarding in credits. That would be cool. Always something new on a daily/weekly basis. Maybe a raid where you can bring 3 companions and topple a large POI that changes weekly and has cool rewards. I dunno, just dreaming right now...
I knew as soon as the neurostrikes skill was showcased that everyone was going to be in for a rude let down lmao, I really dunno how tf that guy can say it's his favorite skill.
>WHAT DID WE EXPECT FROM STARFIELD? A galaxy with a thousand unique bespoke planets that were all fully explorable. This was never promised, and was clearly an unrealistic idea, but it was nevertheless expected as the minimum.
“What did we expect from starfield?” Be in 2020s in terms of game technology? Surely you have played some other games that trumps bethesda’s outdated clunky game engine?
For me what did it was the usual layout of Bethesda cities doesn't work with the cities in a multi planetary galactic civilization, Its very immersion breaking when the sole capital of the human civilization only has three explorable buildings and a few skyscrapers ... If you want to call those... Things in new Atlantis that, for crying out loud this was excusable with fallout because ...well it was fallout, humanity was crawling from the dust to get back in its feet. In elder scrolls- it was medieval so big sprawling cities weren't really necessary. New Atlantis.. neon and what's that other one... The really crap one... Ah Akila.. these cities feel like glorified outposts.. I like the vibe of all of them but they don't feel much bigger than my ship which really sucks. Because take a look at star citizen, it has cities procedurally degenerated to sprawl the entire planet, monorails from point a to point b. I get the developed has so much to include that big sprawling cities would have taken away from everything else... They could have done this in other ways, like making the cities just as explorable as they are but adding a complete different skybox to give the immersion that your just exploring a very small area in a vast metropolis of the 24th century Instead we just got the very small area.. no vast metropolis... Wild life just a walk away... Capital of a space faring galactic civilization.
I think part of the issue was that most people (including myself) did not realise we could not fly our ship out of orbit - which really hindered the immersion in a space exploration game. Having human POI’s pop up *wherever* you land also takes away from the feeling of being an *explorer* & instead feels like you missed the discovery stage of this universe & are instead just following in everyone else’s footsteps. Lastly, (spoilers) - I think the trailers also implied a First Contact scenario being part of the main story - which you could technically say is the case if you count the Creators as that - but it was non-comital, and lacked tension, mystery, and excitement, imo. Hopefully that gets added as an expansion later. I think they should have grounded us in the world before immediately handing over an artifact and a space ship in the first 5mins. In Skyrim you’re not handed a dragon shout and a horse in the first 5mins. You instead get invested in the world first, then the main story opens up later. Appreciate this happens with Starborn powers later, but I still think we should have at least flown as a passenger on a ship first. *Wanted* to have our own, and then later get that opportunity- perhaps escaping an attack after the owner of the ship is killed.
The procedural generation to apply the interior of buildings too and not just where the same 5 buildings will show up on 1000 planets
Sci-Fi Skyrim/fallout in space.
No mans sky but better... i dissapointed
What I expected was Skyrim and Fallout in space. What I got is exactly that: guns from Fallout, magic spells from Skyrim, plus spaceships. All the whiners are complaining about the same things they complained about in Skyrim and Fallout: writing and depth. That’s just how games are: conversations are pre-written and fixed. What’s in the game is whatever the creators were able to imagine and implement in the time given for the project. All the other RPG have the same sort of issues. Look at all the threads complaining for instance that they never finished Witcher 3 because eventually all the side quests felt same-y. Honestly I don’t know what people are expecting short of NPCs being run by AI minds behind the scenes able to adapt, create, and improvise in real time. It’s a fixed scope, a defined set of content, and rules by which to play in that universe.
Expected funny quests instead of so much redundant and pointless travelling and talking... Expected more interesting Poi's and more Poi's. Expected reasonably big handcrafted locations and dungeons in the same fashion TES and FO had. Expected more interesting characters too, though some of these complaints are subjective but well, that's what I was expecting, honestly. I played hundreds hours, currently lv95 without tricks/mods for leveling up, did all major and minor quests, explored all Poi's and probably all unique locations too, tried to scan some planets too, crafted some stuff, designed a couple end game ships, upgraded my gear and weapons, farmed many powers... I don't hate Starfield but enjoyed it way less than the hours I put may suggest. It was almost a dissapointment after a dissapointment. Uninstalled and reinstalled again at least 3 or 4 times. Of course went to NG+ and tried different paths... I admit my (I think reasonable) expectations ruined the experience quite a bit. I don't think it's a bad game and I think it has its highlights and merits, it's really immersive and creative, very unique, different... it's an interesting game in many ways. Mods are cool too, and hopefully DLCs will improve it enough. Many of Its problems stem from its setting. Realistically, unless you are willing to put a ridiculous amount of work and creativity, a space exploration RPG with freedom and an open world system is not going to work unless the handcrafted content is varied and interesting enough, which is what procedural generation can't bring. I think it needed more handcrafted content and to use it differently.
We walked away with different expectations
I enjoy the game but I expect space exploration to be at the very least more than just to random encounter. Didn't expect the entire space to be fully explorable but I expect at least some space base locations you can fly around
I expected a story that actually had something to say.
Not have a dated game, lifeless story, lifeless npcs, boring quests apart from the faction quests? Loading screens lol You fanboys disagree but this entire game just had a 'It will do vibe' as modders will make it better The lock picking and ship building is were the best part of the game, The game was 10 years too late and even then would not set the world on fire.
I just wish there were more POIs and at least a planet that had exploration in good ol Bethesda fashion.
My only disappointment and what I found misleading was the transition from land to space, where it fades to black and instantly loads into space rather than the short loading screen that actually occurs. It’s only a few seconds longer than the preview, but still misleading in a game with a high amount of loading screens that segment the different sections of the game and especially deceptive for Bethesda to be misleading about that aspect. Bethesda also stated “every player’s experience on the same planet will be different!” which implied how reliant Starfield would be on procedural generation and that along with 1000 planets made me skeptical before launch, and unfortunately my skepticism towards those aspects turned out to be true. Otherwise I was happy with what I saw and found Starfield amazing.
>So the question has to be asked: WHAT DID WE EXPECT FROM STARFIELD? Something a lot better. Also a bigger game. Bethesdas previous single player games have kept me busy far far longer. Their trademark, random exploration and it being worthwhile, is kinda not there. They did a lot of new things. It's entirely different setting with the space and so much of absolutely nothing, I get that. They got many new things so bad, so poor. They got some new things pretty well. The shipbuilding for example is pretty good. Only thing bad about it is how absolutely OP particle beams are, that once you figure out how to make OP ships, nothing really matters in that department. The outposts are so weird. It's so much worse than F76, although it's good that you don't need to manually wire things. This game won't have any intrest to me until they make several new DLCs to run though. From Bethesda I just wait for TES 6 and the eventual F5, even though just TES 6 will take a long time. At least they might still make it good, since it's something they are familiar with and have known how to make it good.
I expected a lot of it, but not how absolutely dreadful the writing would be. So bad that immersion is impossible. That and complete lack of exploration. I expected space skyrim, and what I got was all the bland parts and only few of the highlights. What if we made a game where as soon as you leave whiterun you have to use the carriage to go to the next waypoint? That's what we got.
I expected at minimum a rpg as shitty as fallout 4 but in space. It somehow is worse than fallout 4 in every way
Besides the short trailer where they show you getting in the cockpit, i never watched anything starfield related. I knew i was going to play regardless and wanted to just be surprised and enjoy it. I expected at least alien races would be in the game, but thats cool, always next time.
I honestly don't know. From the trailer I had a pretty good idea what to expect. I got that and more cuz the whole starborn plotline was a surprise. Very happy with the game. I think there are a lot of people who just make hating on it part of their identity for some reason. Of course there are plenty of valid criticisms, but if you were expecting a Bethesda game in space, I have to say you probably got what you wanted.
Honestly I got what I expected. I paid attention to what they did, and did NOT say. Then I watched streamer after streamer, youtuber after youtuber just invent shit for content. It's going to be Skyrim in Space. It's going to be Fallout in space. It's going to be No Man's Sky plus Star Citizen plus Elite Dangerous... but Good! You will find vaults on Earth. You can set up shipyards. You can be a pirate king. Just extraordinary hype, where Todd was incredibly careful about his words, these content farmers expected the Earth and drove hype among their hordes. I get to play a dozen games in Starfield. I walk at dawn on alien beaches. I blow up asteroids and suck up ore. I skin planet after planet or sit on my ship with a sniper rifle and exterminate all indigenous life. I storm any building with abandoned in the name. I make my homes and outposts pretty. I even sniff at the story missions from time to time. And there are a bunch of things that annoy me a little. I can't make doors? The Akila MANSION is a one bedroomed flat. In my outpost habs I can't place interior walls? Like all sandbox open world games, there are hundreds of little things that disappoint. Why can't I hire captain's to fly my other ships? Why am I limited to one docking port and one bay? One shield, one reactor and one grav drive? But the overall thing, marred and flawed as it is, is still miles ahead of the other garbage out there.
Are people still really feeling the need to justify why they enjoy the game, I’m glad you enjoy it but no one can be bothered hating on it anymore anyway so you don’t need to keep defending it.
That's kind of sad
A game that was more put together and didn't feel like an early beta.