I’m doing all the main and side missions while ignoring radiant or filler stuff and it fuckin’ sucks. I played Fallout 4, which I consider mediocre at best, the same way and remember having a MUCH better time. Starfield is so utterly boring that I’m actually kind of fascinated by it. It’s immediately obvious the first time you set foot on an “unexplored” planet that the entire allure of Bethesda games since at least Oblivion has been abandoned. There is no intricately designed open world here, just copy-pasted garbage.
Never mind how the world feels even more disjointed than ever. There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
Even that could have been done ok if the factions weren’t both garbage self-defeatingly stupid fascist shitholes. Like if the UC was a socialist state that had tacitly tolerated/been unable to stop capitalist colonists from establishing corporate powers and so found itself effectively in a permanent low-intensity conflict with itself as the central party tried to keep control over these large parallel power structures, while the FC was a coalition of breakaway fascist corpo-states that were actively trying to encircle and undermine the UC.
But as it is the two factions are “the fascists from Starship Troopers” and “the Confederacy but it’s constituent parts are feudal corpo-states” and they’re both stagnating and rotting away and being chipped away at by petty warlords in a universe where the literal only hope is that maybe the reform Serpent cult might have a not-dogshit ideology and they successfully wipe out all the fascists and ancaps, but we don’t know anything about them because they’re almost completely absent from the story as it is. And the Bethesda execs and a terrifying chunk of their fans think it’s a good, aspirational setting full of hope.
I think the real problem is that they wanted to have both a well-established space-faring society but also an american frontier settler-brainworm aesthetic, when the two are clearly mismatched. The FC makes sense if the grav drive has only been around for a single generation or something, not the 200+ years as depicted in-game.
maybe the reform Serpent cult might have a not-dogshit ideology […], but we don’t know anything about them because they’re almost completely absent from the story as it is
:todd: had to remove any content involving House Varuun so that it could be made into a $30 DLC later.
The FC makes sense if the grave drive has only been around for a single generation or something, not the 200+ years as depicted in-game.
Having watched a bunch of Bethesda game analysis essays, this is a problem that is consistent with their writers. Bethesda doesn’t really seem to understand time spans.
Aside from the obvious issue of Fallout 3 where 200 years later everything is still a wasteland and unlooted, the same problem is present in Skyrim. For instance, Esbern, one of the last remnants of the Blades, somehow manages to live in hiding for 25 years in a sewer, without any way to earn money and buy food, and while avoiding detection.
The Thieves Guild questline is also made substantially worse by a 25 year gap in the backstory.
Like DAMN Karliah, you were working on this revenge plan for 25 years and this is all you have? A stupid mead business scheme and one single dose of the poison everything hinges on?
Of course, the fact that the writers keep patting themselves on the back by having every other character comment on how genius her plan is doesn’t help
If you’re interested in something fun, there’s an old blog post about how terrible the Thieves Guild questline is:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=14422
It’s a bit long, but I think it’s very entertaining. Deep dive into every single plot hole, and nonsensical story beat.
Lmao I haven’t read Shamus Young in forever
if the grave drive
I’m imagining a setting where Starfield’s early designers made that same typo and just rolled with it instead of admitting their mistake to tod, and how much more interesting of a setting it would be if their FTL tech was some weird necromantic bullshit.
Lol, woops. But hey, space magic is already in the game, so why not?
they wanted to have both a well-established space-faring society but also an american frontier settler-brainworm aesthetic
I’m glad I’m not the only one that picked up on that. In that “making of” video, Bethesda made a huge deal about wanting to capture “the wonder of space flight and exploration”, but at the same time having space travel be routine. It’d be like getting excited by driving down the highway.
Even that could have been done ok if the factions weren’t both garbage self-defeatingly stupid fascist shitholes. Like if the UC was a socialist state that had tacitly tolerated/been unable to stop capitalist colonists from establishing corporate powers and so found itself effectively in a permanent low-intensity conflict with itself as the central party tried to keep control over these large parallel power structures, while the FC was a coalition of breakaway fascist corpo-states that were actively trying to encircle and undermine the UC.
Capitalist realism ideology requires there to be no future possible without capitalism dominating everything.
They could have also have gone for squabbling Space Anarchists vs Space MLs and had both parties come off somewhat synpathetic against the corpo city states. Genuinely angry that the planet named Gagarin is a fucking company town.
Not holding out much hope for Space Iran.
All of that “transhumanist” “futurology” euphoria about humanity leaving the cradle and spreading to the stars and overcoming death and so on and they’re absolutely fucking terrified of even the possibility of capitalism ending… or trans people existing. Or black people being in their neighborhoods.
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My favorite bit is what Sseth’s review pointed out: you can literally kill the last practicing Jew in the universe as a side effect of choosing the “evil” choice in the resort planet quest. One of the unfrozen colonists has kept up all the rabbinical traditions and is implied to be the last living example of his religion in a setting that has largely allowed religion to die out because it doesn’t serve corporate interests. What the Austrian painter started, Todd will make you finish
Holy fuck… How the? What the what?
You WILL carry out Todd’s final solution
The thought that had to go into this detail… That’s fucking intentional, it has to be, right?
Considering they bullied a transwoman into quitting the company maybe
That was ZOS, a different company/studio under Zenimax, which has its own unique sort of awful to it. It’s the studio/company behind ESO, which is the cash cow subsidizing Bethesda in general.
Zenimax is a shell corporation built out around Bethesda Softworks (publishing arm) not the other way around
Oh, I’m even more happy that I pirated now. Fuck Bethesda, all my homies hate Todd Howard.
Check it out here in her own words https://youtu.be/6kglNioOuK8?si=E2Q9sZnVnL1BM9VH
a setting that has largely allowed religion to die out because it doesn’t serve corporate interests
zero historical materialism mfs
Never mind how the world feels even more disjointed than ever. There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
How is this a background tidbit and not the actual plot of the game?
Well this is Bethesda so the game had to be about you becoming the
dragonbornstarborn and learning thedragon shoutsstar powers.You left out the (CW: lazy ending)
spoiler
wholesome chungus multiverse cliche!
There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
Isn’t that what happened in Firefly
You’re probably right that’s where they got it from, though I think it’s kept deliberately vague there because they didn’t care about the war itself and it was just a way to justify it being a western in space.
Perhaps part of it is that the writers at Bethesda thought they had to provide sufficient backstory because players would be interested. The colony war in Starfield is supposedly a peer-to-peer war of two stellar nations started over the dumbest shit imaginable: there was a law saying no nation could officially control more than 3 star systems. Also the cowboys won.
there was a law saying no nation could officially control more than 3 star systems
That’s honestly a very funny way to justify why there are only 6 cities in the game when humanity has supposedly explored like 200+ systems (many of which are habitable). Like its not that we are lazy or went way overboard with the procedurally generated planets, it’s becuase of space law.
There is exactly 1 other non-procedural inhabited planet that I have found so far, and it’s fucking Paradiso, a beach resort that occupies, if I had to guess, less than 20km2, and with no security.
Also every fucking planet has some human habitation, so despite a pitiful zone of control you’re never actually out beyond the frontier, you’re never exploring.
Yeah but a) space confederates got curbstomped because they attempted regular warfare. b) There is clearly at least a couple of well established major metropolitan planets in the outer planets, they’re just not all fascist star trek.
I honestly can’t understand how Starfield was so boring. I played it a bit waiting for the fun to start and it just never did. Such a weird game
First new IP in 25 years and this time they don’t have decades’ worth of other people’s writing to build lore off of. Their failures of imagination are front and center now.
It’s because it’s unironically just Skyrim with spaceships, but it’s not even good because like @FourteenEyes@hexbear.net said, they don’t have much material to go off of.
They also expect modders to fix everything and I imagine most of them are content with making stuff for fallout and elder scrolls instead.
unironically just Skyrim with spaceships,
hell it’s worse because of all the mandatory loads. somebody made open cities skyrim but i doubt there’s going to be a mod letting you manually fly between planets and even if that did exist it would be boring af instead of interesting.
This “they expect modders to fix everything” thing isn’t even true because the vast majority of their sales are on consoles, where mods can’t even do much.
That’s what the Creators Club is for.
This game really makes you feel like you’re paying for another re-release of Skyrim
waiting for the fun to start and it just never did.
fallout 4 was that for a lot of people.
Literally just make Cowboy Bebop The Game. Cowboy aesthetics on other planets, real guns, a variety of jazz genres. It’s so god damn simple.
This brought to you by every video game adaptation ever lol and to be clear I agree with the sentiment, its hard NOT to like bebop but being simple is exactly the same trope perpetuated by people at the top in hollywood/sillicon valley.
The bebop setting you describe is just a very rough outline of what the game would look like, it is by far not enough to build around it. Imagine for a moment once you get past the novelty and somehow ignore the blatant “cultural influence”(read: ripoff) you’d be left with the same fundamental problem with Bethesda games.
The problem is they have a very basic formula for the game loop, their engine is a literal monster from 15 years ago or something and ultimately they must go down the corporate checklist of things “marketing” says must be in the game because how else do you justify the budget?
You’re basicaly doing the same thing as telling a blind person to draw a Mona Lisa, even telling them its ok to copy is not the point at all.
its hard NOT to like bebop
“this is anime? I hate anime then, lame”
I got one better, take Cowboy Bebop then combine it with what’s been done in Red Dead Redemption 2, and probably for shits’n’giggles throw in a bunch of other random shit a la Yakuza/Like A Dragon in terms of making games within games - I want to play VA-11 Hall-A but Bebop style when I want to chill out between missions.
Just give me Firefly: The Game but written by someone that’s not Joss Whedon please Todd Howard I promise I’ll consider actually paying money for it.
that might actually make me play a game for once
Played it for like four hours and moved on, and I’m a big space travel sci-fi buff… Boring.
Edit: I’m glad I pirated it. I’ll probs uninstall it.
You won’t be missing anything. The game does not get better. If you are feeling any FOMO you can toss it out of the window.
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Nah, it’s basically all fetch quests and empty radiant quests.
There’s a quest where a generation ship arrives at a resort planet, and the resort CEO wants you to destroy the generation ship so the people aboard can’t gross up the planet. The only other solution other than killing everyone on the ship is to go buy an FTL drive, with your own money, to retrofit the generation ship to go find another planet but faster. The resort CEO is an essential NPC and can’t be killed.
The only other solution other than killing everyone on the ship is to go buy an FTL drive
You’re forgetting one: convince the colonists to accept being enslaved by the resort company, and then provide the materials to build their housing yourself.
The whole quest is the absolute worst, it’s literally just “remember Tenpenny Tower from FO3, and the plots with Megaton and the ghouls? So do we, so here it is again but you can only side with what Tod thinks the right faction is (the rich guys) this time.”
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Yeah it’s completely fucked, and the whole thing just kind of trails off after you meet the resort company board like the writers literally lost interest and phoned in the rest because the ship captain who starts out bombastic and demanding will just eagerly submit to whatever capitulation you choose for them and that’s it that’s the whole story.
One could almost imagine the writers outlined a plot where you help the colonists seize power over the corporation and either Tod or the hack lead writer shot it down and insisted it be resolved in the corporation’s favor, so the actual writer just gave up and gave them the bare minimum after that.
The only other side quest that’s any good is the one where two corpos send you to shut down a space probe that’s become sentient from talking to travellers who stumbled accross it over centuries so they cen bull it apart for cash. You can side with the probe and be it’s friend but it wins either way.
Space engineers is better anyway
Too bad my PC is too weak to bare the epicness of this game tho
Idk when the last time you tried to play it, but it’s pretty well optimized. My cousin was able to play it on a very mediocre laptop.
The problem is that when >1 medium sized ship appears, my fps go down tragically. They weren’t good in the first place. My problem is that I have bottleneck on CPU, so the reason is clear
I’m pretty sure more people are playing Skyrim than Starfield.
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God Enderal is so fucking good
I couldn’t play it in my old ubuntu laptop despite being able to play skyrim perfectly, the game kept crashing. Now I got a dual boot so I’ll try it.
Just based on availability alone that’s for sure true.
god I miss the days of HL and HL2
Same. I used to be knee deep into making maps in Hammer Editor and playing mods back in those days. HL and HL2 were more than just games, they were platforms people would build amazing stuff on.
You had the patience to use hammer, which is respect. Getting doors to work in that piece of shit is hard enough, im surprised valve managed to make this many games using hammer, hell im impressed they managed to make their games that good looking with hammer. In fact I think its hilarious that any time some new user waddles in forums whining about hammer and how shitty it is, everyone just replies “yep its utter shit”.
This was my unprompted rant about a very bad no good doodoo editor, thank you.
Thanks for reminding me to download some of those scarily good horror games people have made with Half Life.
almost all the tropes I have seen from that game only work well in horror and B-rating-ethesda can’t do horror imo
It has a few good sci-fi tropes that could work well, like the generation ship concept. They just can’t write in a way that is outside of the system they are in. The only solutions are extremely capitalist and also extremely stupid. There are very few concepts executed well or interestingly, despite the insane amount of sci-fi out there to copy from.
How tf has Bethesda not fallen on their ass yet? Oblivion is the last decent thing they did.
[it wasn’t decent at the time]
Valve didnt update tf2 so valve still bad.
Valve would rather update rage simulator (Dota 2) which is kept alive by a Saudi prince buying battlepass every year than updating tf2
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Dota 2) which is kept alive by a Saudi prince buying battlepass every year
Which most likely brings Blizzard no end of rage, lol
Maybe an unfair comparison. Half-Life is one of the greatest games of all time.
But my hot take is that I’m glad Starfield was made and released before ES6. If they hadn’t then maybe they would be riding too high from making Skyrim and all the other money they made just releasing it and assumed if they made anything similar that it would be successful so they might have made ES6 as well as they made Starfield. Now I just hope Bethesda listens to the critiques and complaints people have of Starfield so that they take it into account when creating ES6 and make it better.
hope Bethesda listens to the critiques and complaints
Skyrim is better than fallout 3 tho. Es 6 will be better than starfield
it’ll be better in that it will be wearing a franchise people like’s clothes, making whatever horrible decisions they made seem more tolerable
I know. I said at the start that it was a hot take. Haha
Only played starfield from gamepass (lies of p and hifi rush are pretty good) and besides the sterile feeling of the game, fuck bethesda for making melee useless. Why tf a knife and axe has the same swing speed? Why the guns with 0 perks outdamages melee with a full specced melee char.
“Its supposed to be realistic” well fuck realism then. Honestly with the low weight limits and annoying onjuries systsem, i think Starfield was originally a survival space game that bethesda rescapped into RPG today
Is lies of p on game pass? I’ve been wanting to try it
Yea
I think theres a 14 day trial for 1 buck too
I always kinda wonder if it isn’t some deep nerd brain worm that us nerdy types down want melee to be effective. Like, that’s too jock. Despite the fact that in half life the crowbar was absolutely deadly.
It’s hard to get around the obvious upsides of a gun in settings that have guns. I think making the learning curve for guns way steeper would be better. Your aim is shaky af, longer time between shots, shitty accuracy at range and it should tske way longer to level up to being very useful than melee and also don’t give every enemy npc guns and ammo. I’m mostly thinking Fallout rn, wouldn’t play Stanfield even if I could. Guns and ammo should also be really rare and usually locked up or hidden, not just laying on a table or whatever.
Guns are ideal for killing someone at 30 to 100 feet away. More or less than that and things get weird.
I made my own post apocalyptic TTRPG and was aiming for some degree of realism. Guns were borderline none viable as anything much more than a threat. Almost none worked, the bullets they had were probably all you’d ever find so you maybe have like 2 shots and then you may as well toss the gun and you suck at using them, there’s no real time or place or extra bullets to practice. There was a chance it’d just backfire and blow your hand off. This counted for enemies as well. So either side having a firearm was basically just being able to pull out a total wildcard that’s super dangerous.
See, I dig it. Quick trip to the hardware store and you have any number if old fashioned weapons quickly and easily. A few bits if scrap wood amd you got an an atlatl that can quietly take down someone as far as you cna see them in a city.
No one thought to make an atlotl, I would’ve for sure let them, but many spears were made out of random stuff which worked okay. I think the top tier player weapons were rusty hatchet and piece of rebar with a bit of concrete on the end.
That kinda thing does take a bit of practice to get right though
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I wasn’t super crazy about half-life, but the mods were something else. So many awesome mods.
Fond memories of the bizarre and surreal journeys in the Easter egg tunnels of certain Action Half-Life maps
