Jane is the Only One of Us Playing Starfield | Show of the Weekend
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ย. 2024
- Jane is the only one on the team playing Bethesda's massive space sim RPG. Let Oxboxtra's foremost space enthusiast tell you all about it.
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#starfield
I feel like Luke and Jane are so underrated as co-hosts, especially from a critical standpoint. They're really good at putting pressure on one another (in a friendly way of course) to really articulate their feelings on a thing while being funny and without being rude and confrontational. Their discussion of the various Life is Strange games is still something i regularly go back to.
Thank you! They don't flow together as "well" as some other host pairing where they're getting completely derailed by themselves, but that's because they seem to share a particular flavor of focusing in on the things they like. I feel like listening to Luke talk about racing sims sounds less like Mike talking about racing sims and more like Jane talking about RPGs. They're all good at clear, knowledgeable analysis (games related or otherwise), but the two of them seem to get more satisfaction digging down the "but why?" hole more.
If memory serves, they worked together at CNET over a decade ago (Jane via GameSpot, Luke directly for CNET) as well as for OX in modern times. That kind of long-lasting dynamic really elevates a partnership, even if they weren't always presenting together.
I think it's because they're so similar in their tastes and journalistic foci. So they're just not hosting together all that often because they might be playing the same sorts of games.
Well put. Was thinking the she thing (but less eloquently).
I completely agree! Excited any time these two pair up and I love especially when they talk subjectively about things like Life is Strange characters or twists of a game. :p
I quite enjoyed how Jane summarized her experience with Starfield. It’s great to see someone express criticism without growing negative in sentiment. It’s not easy to do.
Especially with how many people wanted Bethesda to fail for so long.
It's a british form of criticism. ;-)
I completely understand what she's saying, and I agree with most of her points....but honestly Starfield is just BORING. On top of that the fact that they overselled the hell out of it in a way that everyone can UNDENIABLY see was extremely misleading 😮💨. I wanted SOO much for this game to be the next best thing and something I could enjoy for years to come, like old Bethesda titles. I even lost $100 to get early access, that's how much I believed in this game. Unfortunately, if I'm being completely honest and objective with myself, that was a bad decision in retrospect and wish I had bought Cyberpunk or something else entirely 🤷
being a game journalist, she should be able to articulate an opinion a bit better ona game she has played for 50 hours
@@theod9548 oh man, if that's not a perfect representation of the state of "video game journalism" in this modern day...then idk what is 😂
“Maybe we need to give Starfield ..a little space? I’ve been Luke Westaway..”
You, dear sir, have been Ellen Rose! J’accuse!
I cracked up at that intro! That curt "okay" from Jane was so perfect 🤣🤣🤣!
I think it's funny how Starfield fans start their comments with how many hours they have in it. Like a prisoner who can tell you how many hours they have left of their 20 year prison sentence. I've never checked how long I've played. I just play and then stop. If you enjoy time with your significant other you don't know how many days you've been together. If you do then maybe it's a sign...
@@TheCookieCrisp To be fair I do that for the RPGs I've played that have big numbers on them. Like CK3 and Civ 6 both have over 2000 hours from me. It also helps inform you of how informed I am about whatever topic I'm opining on in those games.
@@MunchKING yes but I’m not sure that should be not only the first but DECIDEDLY HIGHLIGHTED POINT about a game especially that has been in dev for like what, 20 years?
I miss seeing Luke and Jane doing deep dives in games together. This reminds me of the Life is Strange discussions that they used to do with Johnny on occasion. Still hoping to see that treatment for Life is Strange True Colors one day.
I think the more game focused show of the week and the more fun focused shownof the weekend were a great combo, and I think it needs to return, just with Luke and Ellen also sometimes helping out on oxbox if they ve played a relevant game.
I like when show of the weekend is just someone talking about a thing they have put some time in, be it a game, a language learning app, an outdoor activity... I like hearing people talk about thei interests
"Best Side Quests that Spiral" could be a list video 👀
Ooh I'd watch the heck out of that
theyve done it before. Skyrim's Drinking Contest quest was one of the entries.
Jane is going to revive Show of The Week on Outside Xbox and force Mike and Andy to play Starfield so they can talk about it.
I would very much like to see how the two of them approach the game.
It's a little funny to think that Jane was the only one NOT to play Garfield, but she's now the only one to play Starfield.
Swings and round-abouts
Nice
"they're all nerds" 😂😂 Jane telling it like it is
Starfield belongs to the nerds!
Constellation were such dorks that I immediately stopped hanging out with them. All the cool kids are in the Crimson Fleet. Jezzamine steals stuff for me and has a punk haircut, she’s the best.
If I had to listen to Sam wistfully talk about the hum of a grav drive in that Timothy Olyphant voice without being able to immediately shoot him in the face, I would not have made it very far in Starfield.
@@denunzioThe crimson fleet reminded me of a bunch of cry baby 8yrs olds. The fake tough guy act they put up was annoying.
I felt it was a very "throwing stones in glass houses" moment, like the Oxbox/Oxtra crew aren't themselves a bunch of nerds
Jane explaining the 'click the thing to click the thing to click the thing' process reminds me a bit of X4: Foundations. Where you start out wanting to explore a bunch, but after a while you're basically playing the game directly through the map interface.
The hell is X4
@@helderoliveira2994 Sort of like EVE if EVE had twitch combat and wasn't just click and click and click. Anybody who is into space sims owes it to themselves to check it out.
I think Luke makes a very good point here, in order to fix Starfeild all Bethesda has to do is add more dragons... Space dragons!
And one very specific ice troll.
There's a game for that and it's better because it has dice in it... Starfinder.
And then let people mod them into Randy Savage, right?
One of the moments that made me realize starfield was a let down was something very simple. In the nightclub there is an elevator to get to the second floor but, you can also reach the second floor via the jet pack. If you chose the elevator you get a loading screen. It really just highlighted the loading screen flaws of the game. Traveling between planets is a 3 separate loading screen ordeal. The real joy I had gotten from Skyrim was the vast world and immersion, in starfield I struggled to remember planet names, where they were in the map of the planets. There were some good moments but very few moments seemed magical
I agree, I'm not sure why some of the loading screens are there and why sometimes you can cycle through an airlock in game but others you can't?
@@SimuLord Jesus, you're both completely right, and while I haven't played any Skyrim in 2 years, and haven't play it seriously in 4, I'm pretty sure I could literally draw the province map from memory, and opposed to Starfield which got 100 hours six months ago, and I genuinely can't remember the name of the planet where Constellation is based.
This entire video was a set up for Luke's pun and I (and Ellen probably) am so proud 😂
Plot twist, Ellen wrote that line
It was like the BBC news segment wrap up pun and I’m SO PROUD
Maybe all Starfield needs is a mod which totally organically inserts Dragons into the story. And a further mod which turns those dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine for some reason.
I kind of prefer the Rowdy Roddy Piper mod.
Oh yeah! It's the cream of the crop!
@@hrodga That would be Macho Man Randy Savage, not Roddy Piper.
Modded Skyrim sucks, just stop.
@@shadowcat1606 You're right, and I have no idea why I mixed that up, except that I've just rewatched "They Live".
@@missoula2213maybe for you ma'am. Not the rest of us😅
I wanted No Man's Sky with Bethesda type stories sprinkled through it.
When Todd said no one wanted to be able to take off and fly around and go to another planet seamlessly, i realised he wasn't making the game I wanted.
Yeah, that's exactly what I want. That's why I like Zelda BotW, GTA, and Forza Horizon. I can't get out of the car in Forza, but if I can see it, I can go to it.
Yes. Thank you I couldn't articulate my problem with Starfield until then. Honestly if NMS dropped in the bethesda like quests might be easier.
You ALMOST had it. Todd didn't say "no one wanted" that, he said thats not something THEY wanted.
A blend of Bethesda worldbuilding, Empyrion and NMS would be the ultimate space RPG.
Throw some X in there for galactic economy and you have the ultimate space sim.
PLEASE NO! No Man's Sky is FAR more NEEDLESSLY convoluted and complex than it needs to be. You can spend HOURS just trying to figure out the interface and still need HOURS just to make ONE of FIVE THOUSAND things you need to build a board... That you need for a shelter NOW. 🙄 HATE that game's RIDICULOUS and worthless overhead.
STARFIELD FOR THE WIN. Hands Down.
I think the reason Starfield is such a disappointment to many people is that the thing that makes Bethesda games interesting is just not in this. In any Elder Scrolls you pick a destination you have to go, for a quest of whatever, and then you walk there. And then on your way you discover all kinds of interesting and weird things, you may see another small location, you may be attacked by something, some weird glitch happens or other random events that could occur outside in the world. And that is what made Bethesda games fun, but when all your travel is either just picking a point to fast travel on a map or walking around a procedurally generated map with nothing in it there is nothing that can really happen in there.
I mean, that’s basically TES II: Daggerfall in a nutshell. Daggerfall has you fast travelling everywhere unless you’re an absolute masochist willing to put up with the gargantuan procedurally generated world.
It's not dissapointing, it's a hell of a lot of fun.
@@joshuahadams And that masochist option is also in Starfield, you can travel between planets, but it will take you hours upon hours.
Yeah, in a game like Skyrim the fortresses may all look the same but they'll generally have some variance of who's occupying them, and you know that each one is a specific, unique location. In Starfield, once you've visited the same structure five times on different planets you just know that there are an infinite number of them spread across every planet and moon in existence regardless of circumstances, and you'll find the same things in the same places inside them regardless. And the opposition is always just going to be one out of the same 3-4 factions of utterly interchangeable humans with guns.
This is exactly what I explained to my friends.
She's perfectly summing up why it's not Game of the Year material. Those nominations are supposed to transcend genre preference and be so outstanding that the largest possible number playing them willl recognise their quality.
"Give Starfield a little space" nearly made me spit my drink. Thanks Luke.
"Why DO we love Skyrim?" is the question a lot of game developers would like to have an answer to.
I've thought about this quite a bit. Like, objectively Skyrim is a good game, but not a great one. Pretty much everything it does has been done better by similar games (even within the same franchise). The only conclusion I can come to is that it has that weirdly indescribable, "je ne sais quoi"-type charm that not a lot of games have. The sense of place (cause I do think the map/world itself is pretty great), the unbridled freedom, the feeling (especially on the first playthrough) that anything can happen and yes, even the slight wonkiness add up to something that is more than the sum of its parts. I think that is why I have around 400 hours in Skyrim, more than any other game, and will keep defending it against the naysayers, even though it is deeply, deeply flawed and I have played plenty of similar and often better games.
Weren't you watching? It's dragons. Awesome, awesome, dragons. Now, if they would just make a Sucker Punch game so you can fight a dragon with a B-25 Mitchell, they'd make a killing.
Everything. For the time it was an amazing open world. There's discoveries around every area of the map. The music was superb. The story was ignorable yet still had so much lore. Many factions. Some decisions to make
Being perfectly honest, I've never made it past the opening quest. I know nothing of the game after you escape that dragon.
The modding community
Mildly disappointed to find Jane hasn’t found a way to rebuild the crashed ship from the start of Baldurs gate 3 and pilot it into space
Wouldn’t be the first time that the genres collided. You could go to space in the first couple Ultima games back in the early 80s.
Well, that ship died, it didn't just break. So necromancy has to come on too
@@DrBrangar That's fine, necromancy is right up Jane's street too
Is it a Spelljammer?
@@Artificer1911 No, nautaloid. Spelljammers are machines, the Nautaloids are semi-organic mindflayer nonsense
"Boring _humans!_ No aliens. It does pare down your ability to do far out s- ... stuff." - Jane
So in conclusion: we need dragons in Starfield
Or space travel in Skyrim
*Todd Howard furiously scribbles notes in the distance*
Best i can do is Terrormo....OHGODWHY!
You know what? Humans encountering some alien lizard empire COULD EASILY be enough main plot motivation to raise Starfield up...
@@Zinlainor aliens on general.
So, my tuppence-worth on why Skyrim "just works" but Starfield doesn't, is the tranquil beauty of Skyrim's landscape coupled with its incredible score. Conversely, while Starfield's metallic space-core aesthetic might be graphically decent, it feels sterile, barren, and a bit soulless? And while there's a lot of other good stuff to Skyrim, the thing that I, and a lot of other fans, keep coming back to that game for, is the vibe of wandering the landscape with the soaring soundtrack narrating my mood
I agree and with the mass of retexture mods out there it can be truly gorgeous, but I'd also add that Skyrim isn't so much a game at this point as a framework, mods have made it an unparalleled customizable experince and one which you can get the expeirnce you want from, for example Frostfall, Realistic Needs and Diseases and Seasons of Skyrim gives me the challenge of just getting through the wild from point A to B without all the baggage Bethesdas survival mode adds like the damage nerfs and the halved carry weight. I can stand taking in the gorgeous ice fields near Winterhold (made even prettier by realistic waters 2) but I'm always conscious of the fact I'm standing on a glacier and if I loiter to long I'm dead (especially if it's mid-winter) finding yourself in a blizzard in the ice fields is genuinely worrying.
But this is the experince I like and while I cant imagine playing without Frostfall the idea of that sort of gameplay horrifies my partner who doesn't want to consider weather as she murder hobos across Skyrim with an army of cats in tow and both experinces are easily accounted for by over 10 years of mods out there, by contrast just due to its premise as a more grounded universe and it's core mechanics Starfield will ever have that level of customisation.
@@maddlarkin I've only ever played Skyrim on PlayStation consoles, and while I do play with some (limited, thanks Sony) mods, it's not the modded experience I come back for. I try to think of, what is it about Skyrim itself that feels like home and hope? And if as you say Skyrim is now a framework for people to tweak the world to their satisfaction, what is it in that fundamental framework that means that Skyrim, and not some other game, is the one which has developed into this framework?
@alexharrison2743 honestly it's hard to say, certian games capture the modding scene and I think that x-factor can vary, in the case of Skyrim I think the world is compelling a place you want to not only spend time but expand into a fuller experince in that way Skyrim was an excellent base to build on. When you look at some of the larger upcoming mods like the Beyond Skyrim series adding entire provinces (the county of Bruma in Cyrodiil having already been added) its about expanding and building on that base experince, each of the Elder Scrolls games had this, Morrowind was exotic and strange, Oblivion was a beautiful (for the time at least) classic fantsy land and going back Daggerfall was so vast you could build a full life.
Fallout: New Vegas is similar in the terms of its mods, its compelling and deeply layered story inspired a mass of modders to make droves of quest mods building and expanding on that (also I highly recommend a vehicle mod, really makes you feel like mad max in game) by contrast though, when you look at Fallout 4, the mods aren't about building on the experince but fixing the problems with the game, Sim Settlements overhauls settlement building, the most common mods are weapon mods replacing the awful gun design (probably accounts for 80% of my load order). Although there are some new lands and quest mods, in Fallout 4 the overriding focus has always been fixing the core gameplay, mechanics, story and weapons rather than building on what was there as at its base Fallout 4 (outside of Far Harbour) is a bland experince and a flawed leaving little of the base experince to build on, just overhaul.
One of us, one of us! I completely understand those that abandoned the game for a lack of depth, and rightly decried certain aspects of it buuuuut I still enjoyed it and like popping in to continue to build stuff.
Now if I could actually get my decorated items to stay in places without falling through the floor, that'd be great.
To your second point, the item placement is sooooooooo frustrating. I took the Dream Home perk and decorating is so painstakingly precise, it’s a terrible drag when you come home and find all your carefully placed snow globes clipping through the table.
I've come to accept that, in order to relay why I didn't Fallout 4 to people, I have to list off more than a couple of 'cons' that might sit in another person's 'pros' column. I think my fears back then were that the genre was going to become clones of the 'story telling through set pieces, not characters and actions' style of Bethesda's games but we're seeing way too much creativity in the space to worry about what the triple A is doing.
Jane's little "OK" at the start had me rolling because that's me whenever I try to make conversations about my interests
Jane: "They're all such squares!"
Also Jane: *chooses Kaiden as her Mass Effect romance option*
I've been playing Starfield and I'm at considerably more than 40 hours in, and you can iron out the kinks in fast travel by just going to the Starmap wherever you are, expanding out to either the system or galaxy level, zeroing in on the place you want to go, then just Set Course. Job's a good'un, you're either in orbit of that planet being scanned for contraband or you're exactly at the place you want to go without getting in the ship, taking off and all that jazz.
One problem I've noted Starfield has is the same problem Mass Effect 1 had - reusing structures during random exploration. I set out to survey every planet and moon in the Sol System. Took me a while but I did it, mostly because I got caught up in random encounter stuff along the way. But I did note that the Structures started repeating themselves, which is the same thing that happened with Mass Effect 1 when you'd explore different planets. Also like ME1, different enemy factions would be holding each structure which varied things up slightly - Starfield has its Spacers scavengers, Crimson Fleet pirates, Eclipse mercenaries, and Va'ruun cultists, while more hospitable planets also have the local wildlife which can either be neutral to some odd alien wandering around unless you get too close to them, then either flee for its life or attack the interloper, or just one of those two by default. Another oddity during random exploration is that incongruous things can happen, like rain showing up on a planet or moon with no atmosphere, mostly because it has to do with a random encounter that's just been generated nearby, or random encounters in space with unique NPCs being repeated.
But the side stories are where Starfield shines, as opposed to just the random encounters, as in the side stories will show up as objectives rather than just stuff you encounter. It helps if you do listen to the characters and get yourself invested in the lore, as well as invested in your character's own lore. I mean, it _is_ a role playing game.
I love Jane! She's always a delight.
How can you not at least like she’s your big sister if you’re not than much younger than Ellen and her?! 😃
Easy on the eyes.
It's all fun and games until she gets close enough to steal a DNA sample for her experiments.
@@missoula2213understatement of the year.... Lol. The British accent just puts an incredibly seductive cherry on top 😍
@@philiphunn194 Then it's just fun!
Playing for about 20 hours now and I feel a lot of elements in Starfield just feel half-baked. I encountered a few quests that looked like they would go down a long and fascinating storyline only to find they end abruptly with dissatisfied endings. I've messed around with outpost building lately, and it feels cobbled together with duct tape, with lots of bugs and no guides or tutorials on what to do. I originally wanted to play a brawling fists Melee character, and the game looked like it could provide that in it's skill trees - only to find, bizarrely, that I couldn't draw out my unarmed fists. I had to fumble about my inventory to deselect my weapon instead iirc. Just feels like the game provides a lot of things to do, but most activities feel shallow.
Sounds like Jane is hoping to set up an outpost in Animal Crossing.
The problem that I have with Starfield and Cyberpunk is that there isn't much to do in the actual world. Your companions will say stuff like "my favorite restaurant is X" but can't go and have a meal there, it feels like a long hallway between questgivers and the dungeons in space without much diversion
Never forget going to NPC's favorite places to hang out in skyrim.
I’m not hugely surprised by the title, though I’d’ve expected Mike to have played a fair bit of it too. Since it seems tailored exactly for hard sci-fi fans like Mike and space enthusiasts like Jane.
TBQH as a physics major, I don’t think it’s anywhere near hard scifi? It’s like… *attempting* to be hard scifi.
@@bluewilliams4911 It's hard sci-fi for people who don't know what hard sci-fi is, but they've watched a couple of Star Wars movies.
@@bluewilliams4911Most scifis will have one, or several, conceits. The harder the scifi the less conceits they'll have, like with The Expanse the conceit was the probably unrealistic high efficiency fusion drive (not counting the protomolecule which is its own thing). And in Starfield the conceit is the grav drive via the Artifacts, everything radiates out from that conceit. The Grav Drive was based on the Artifacts. So, FTL? Grav Drive. Anti Grav? Grav Drive. Ship inertia/drag in space? Grav Drive.
Everything else seems to obey Newtonian physics, if not Einsteinian physics.
how do you people know and care so much about these people
@@akpokemon Emotional investment
5:03 "I don't care enough about these people" - that's a fatal point to reach in RPGs, or any immersive/narrative-heavy game. I managed to reach that stage without even playing Starfield, just from watching a couple of streams of it I didn't see any meaningful hook to draw me in beyond 'in space', and knew if I played it all I'd end up doing would be goofing around, shooting NPCs in the groin and chucking objects in their stupid faces.
This was my thought throughout as well. In most RPGs my driving force is, how much can I find out about these characters, can I keep them safe, can I help them reach their goals and be happy, etc. I've fallen in love with some BG3 characters just from watching other people play. Does starfield have any beloved characters? Is there some moral or emotional drive for me to help certain people? There doesn't really seem to. If anything, I think I have mostly seen people complain about how annoying certain characters are... But I haven't played it myself so...
You have to meet narratives half-way though, in a way. I was predisposed to like Starfield and let myself get immersed in it, didn't try to multi-task it with other big RPGs, and there was at least one moment in the story that made me genuinely cry, and others where I was screaming at different revelations.
Meanwhile, the game that literally everyone else I know loves, BG3, I was so bored with the characters by hour 10 and dropped it by hour 20. I'm not saying either of these experiences speaks to the quality of each game, it's just that I was pre-disposed to like the setting and narrative of Starfield, and fantasy is low on the list of genres I enjoy. (It didn't help that all the BG3 characters were throwing themselves at me within an hour like it was some sort of weird fanfic, which apparently was a bug!)
Huh. "I don't care enough about these people" was my initial reaction to _Skyrim,_ but I managed to get sucked in by the gameplay despite that. In fact, I think maybe the _only_ Bethesda game where I _did_ care about the characters was Fallout 3.
Luke just needed that CSI:Miami intro theme with some glasses for that last pun... and has been spending too much time with Ellen.
You know you love these guys when you return from the hospital, lie down to sleep and literally say out loud "it's Saturday" as you clap your hands and proceed to open TH-cam to find and watch the Show of the Weekend
I feel like I'm officially An Old because one of the things that turned me away from Starfield was how massive it is and how nebulous the main plot was. I need that main plot to tether me to an open world game or I just don't have time for that anymore!
well you are in luck! its not massive, theres only like 10 actual relevent planets and the gameplay loop is repeating the main quest over and over
Try the UC Vanguard quest line, it’s more what you’re looking for
I think the problem is simple. For a while people have said BGS games are big but shallow. In Starfield they decided to go bigger instead of deeper.
I would love to see Jane playing No Mans Sky now and hear the direct comparison. I played it again around a year ago and it has got SO much better than release. They've constantly been updating and it's great now.
I really liked flying around, upgrading my ships, unlocking freighters decorating them and stuff. I thought it was a bit too much grinding for my liking but I just used some duplication glitches for certain items and had a whale of a time. Ppl should give it a shot.
I have around 150 hours in NMS and yeah, it's pretty great these days (I haven't played Echoes yet though). I felt there was quite a lot of stuff in Starfield that was similar to NMS but the one thing that led me to preferring Starfield was the presence of a full-on single player RPG. Whenever I get bored of exploring stuff or messing around with ships, I can just go do some missions.
I played NMS for the first time last week and it sucks. I was so out off by the janky-arse gameplay that I didn't even get off-planet.
No Man’s Sky and Starfield aren’t really comparable. It’s totally different genres and styles of games.
No Man’s Sky is a survival space sim while Starfield is an action Adventure RPG.
I think what I enjoy the most in an elder scrolls game is the fleshed out lore. Like you'd talk to a tavern owner and they'd tell you small whispers about things happening in different regions, rumors and such. You'd read a book on histories of tamriel, and sometimes, you'd get to witness these histories as they are now. You'd find a dungeon with ancient treasures, find a mask from a draugr which fits into an arrangement in another part of skyrim etc.
This was really helpful, thanks guys! I think you make some fair points re: older and now beloved games - both Skyrim and the Witcher are by no means perfect (if I think about some of the ridiculous glitches I've seen in either) but they've matured enough in terms of development and bug fix input that it doesn't matter, the good stuff has been allowed to shine through. I feel like Starfield is going to be the same. I was very late to the party with Cyberpunk, which I know struggled so much after release, but I promised myself I would not be put off and (thanks to the hard work of the dev teams updating) it was awesome. Perhaps one of my favourite games ever. It was very much a game though where you needed to pick and choose to do what excited YOU, and I feel like (as Jane said) Starfield needs to be played in the same way: do what you find fun. I will tots be joining the pirates and visiting that cyberpunk planet for example. Because that's my bag 8)
I agree with you on the "do what you find fun" thing. Every time a commentator of the game says they hated clearing out the same base again, I wanted to ask "why did you choose to clear it out again then?" The game's not perfect but whenever I have gotten board with something, I've not struggled to find something else I wanted to do.
My feed has been bombarded with "Starfield Sux" videos lately, so it is incredibly refreshing to see someone who enjoyed the game while still acknowledging it's flaws without being vitriolic about it.
I mean I do understand the need of fresh air but there is a reason of why its happening
There's a comment in the EG review of it that is a *perfect* description of it: "Starfield is a mile wide, but an inch deep". Couldn't agree more. There's so much, well space, and it all feels so very small because all you need to do to go anywhere is press X. Oh, and the in-game menus need redesigning from scratch to just be a LOT less terrible. It doesn't feel like a game with 8 years of development behind it - 2 at the most.
I feel Jane's pain...I'm the only one of my friend circle that even had mildly positive opinion about Starfield. I'm doing live-streams of it now for them "so they don't have to play it themselves" and they see me get sucked in for 4-5 hours just noodling around the rando bases blowing people up. Yes, they can be repetitive but the gunplay is good enough that I actually don't mind.
I've heard one reason people might not be feeling as into it is that apparently it tends to have quite a large average time between points of interest when you're exploring the open world. So people who enjoy that side of Bethesda games are feeling its a lot more empty.
A show of the weekend where they actually talk about games! Still waiting for it break down into choose your own adventure or craft something
Don't worry I'm sure we'll get a pokemon magazine episode soon.
I feel like the Pokémon magazine episodes have slowed down ever since Andy was forced to participate in one. 😂
Nice of them to bring back the little post outro chuckle as well, i've missed that
This is how they get you, lul you into a false sense of security then BAM! You're making Kirby from felt and pipe cleaners.
@@DuckimanHasn't he been in more than one of those?
I totally agree, there’s some stuff in Starfield that just doesn’t hit the way they maybe intended, because expectations were so massive. People want to relive the feeling of playing Skyrim for the first time and, sadly, nothing will ever give you quite the same feeling.
That said, Bethesda really listened to previous criticisms of their games, payed attention to mechanical issues in Fallout and Skyrim, and fixed a lot of stuff so that combat and other parts just make more sense. Combat is great!
And honestly, I’ve played so dang much of it and I do really just love bopping around and doing space stuff. I think Jane and Luke hit on a number of things that probably disappointed people and or didn’t watch expectations but, I mean, can you hit expectations that are that far out there? If it came out without all the hype and no one had played any Bethesda games before it to compare to, people would have been blown out of the water by it.
In any case, if you enjoy space and like rpgs, it’s very good. The main story, not so much, but neither is Skyrim’s, so….. play it anyway, if you love Bethesda and space
“It’s hard to do the astronaut fantasy when everyone is an astronaut.” Such a good point!
It would have been better to set Starfield soon after we leave Earth, imo, before the systems are settled. You can’t really be an explorer if most planets are already explored.
I feel like hype is killing games these days. Imposible expectations and deadline crunch combine to give us games that are over ambitious with not enough time to fulfil that ambition because publishers want the game out asap before the hype dies.
Edit: also I think it helps with any space rpg to have a character that, for whatever reason, have never been to space before and can be a suragate for the players sense of wonder.
I feel like what Starfield doesn't have (and it's realistic that it doesn't!) is the "full" feeling. In Skyrim, you can walk from one city to another and stumble across some half-naked Nord who got drunk and lost his pants, and maybe you just help him find his pants and that's it, fun little interaction, and maybe the interaction is actually with Sanguine and you end up in a quest like A Night to Remember - but in Starfield, there's a lot of empty. Jump from one location to the next, and while you can run around on a given planet, you are far less likely to stumble across those fun things that keep you coming back to explore. And I'm not criticizing Starfield for having realistically empty planets and all that - it makes sense. It just means your main questlines and your (fewer) populated areas do have to carry a lot more weight.
Ohhhh, that Ellen-level pun to end the video was perfect, Luke. Well done.
I see Starfield's sci-fi as being very Sagan-esque. It surprised me because it brought some of the wonder of standing on a remote planet that reminded me of Sagan's Cosmos series, where he would theorize about what life might be like on an inhospitable planet or something like that. I find the planets fascinating from a geological perspective and I also think the oft-criticized procedural generation is much better than it's given credit for, it just needs either a modularly assembled POI system or more POIs that can be injected into the locales.
I've played a lot of Starfield and I honestly have the most fun building different spaceships.
Side quests and factions are fine if not really good in my opinion. Somehow simply exploring generic planets was and is still fun.
But honestly the main story feels out of place. There are so many weapons and ways to mod them and skills that I simply don't need any extra magic powers.
I probably wouldn't have gone to a newgame+ at all if my game wasn't bugged out and a newgame+ somehow could fix it.
If you're curious, the bug was that if an enemy ship landed on a planet they never opened the landing bay so I couldnt steal it and if I boarded a ship in space, it was deserted.
Completely agree. Investing in tech and science perks and getting really good at designing starships and customising weapons is a blast but it does kinda neuter the main story drive of becoming an all-powerful space wizard.
They give you all these cool powers that let you deal damage and mess with enemies, but because I got to a point where my guns were so much better than any powers they had given me, the only power I was using 99 percent of the time was the one that restores your oxygen so I could sprint farther. And some of the stealth missions are made a lot easier by basically giving you an Elder Scrolls-style Detect Life spell and granting you temporary invisibility.
And yes I had the same issue with ships landing and nothing happening. Worst technical experience I've had with a Bethesda game on PC, and I played Skyrim and Fallout 4 at launch.
My favorite thing about Starfield is the ship builder. You can spend 40 hours building a ship you don't really need. You don't need to go back to your ship to leave the planet. You can open the quest log, hit the button to show you were the next quest stage is located, and fast travel to that system, almost entirely regardless of where you are. Then as soon as you get in system you open the menu to land. Without a pirate attack or such keeping you in the ship you can travel from one planet to a different planet in another star system while only being in your ship for maybe 5 seconds.
Jane: For a beach house check both Porrima II and Jamison. Jamison is the same planet New Atlantis is on. Porrima II is the planet the Paradiso resort is on. Both planets have relatively friendly native wildlife. Both have friendly environments. It may be harder to find the beach you're looking for on Porrima II than Jamison, but I think you can find a great location on either. Good luck with the outpost builder, I find it difficult to work with. I suggest you bring a large cargo vessel with a lot of basic resources so you can afford to destroy modules as you go because mistakes will be made.
I'm still playing. You aren't alone Jane. My wife stopped, but she only did it because she likes to explore and she got bored with all the locations basically being the same.
I play it for the same reasons you are. It is the game I have wanted for years. Don't worry about anyone else, you keep having fun. 😊
Rare Luke and Jane combo! We love to see it!
I feel like what people liked about Skyrim is the sense of exploration. Like, you could just play the game going directly from city to quest objective and back, and still run into all kinds of things along the road. And most of those were just generic dungeons, sure, but even the generic dungeons had something worth seeing more often than not. A few had NPCs and their own mini-quests, but even the ones that don't stand out as much almost always had at least one unique interaction, gimmick, or setpiece or a bit of narrative or worldbuilding.
Even if you didn't care at all about SKyrim's quests you could pretty much pick a direction, walk into the first dungeon you found, and have pretty good odds of finding something that made it worth doing.
All of the dungeons in Starfield are procedurally generated outside of the ones hand-built for quests, so your odds of randomly stumbling on something interesting are pretty much nil. There's no sense of exploration or discovery, which is kind of at-odds with how the player is part of Constellation, pretty much an explorer's guild.
784hrs and just discovered a new poi, am waiting for 3 others I've only seen once to pop up again, found a second variant of the collapsed mine. Am on my tenth character, level 62 and haven't even started with Sarah yet. Its nice to have on the side as a daily adventure now.
I started playing day one, I got to level 91, the game crashed and I somehow lost all my saves and had to start again. On the second run, I got to level 58, the game crashed again, and I lost about 20 hours of saves and was back to level 36. Had a few days rest, and got back on the horse. By the time I got back to and surpassed my original level 91, I was suffering from Starfield fatigue. I will go back to it, but it won’t be for quite a while.
The scale of Starfield is too big, too sparse. But it reminded me of something about the Elder Scrolls series: The first ES game was Arena, which had a geographically huge but rather sparse world in which you played in. Subsequent titles in the Elder Scrolls became more focused.
If and when the Starfield franchise moves onto later titles, perhaps the game worlds will be tighter in scope but richer in detail because of that. Maybe in the next one you mill about in just a cluster of star systems with a hundred tailored destinations scattered over a dozen planets, scores of moons, and several Lagrangian station points.
Yeah, I think this is one of those situations where Starfield (at least at release) is disappointing in a way that Elder Scrolls 6 can't be. Starfield is, as any multiplanetary sci-fi game kind of has to be, disjointed in its playable space, in a way that a game set in a singular landmass just isn't going to be. Ultimately, I hope that this means that the good parts of Starfield will be carried forward while the weaker parts will be left behind.
@@stratospherica I don't think it's just that there is a lot of space and things are spread out, but that things are not connected when they should be. The authored spaces feel small and are small. Getting to points of interest is dull and takes a long time. Having things spread out is fine. Having things empty is fine. Forcing the player to spend a lot of time traversing these empty spread out spaces is not. Also, the procedural point of interest system is itself badly done. If the sparse explorable generated content was an addition to more authored and full (and interconnected, not in the physical sense but in the feel and worldbuilding sense), then it would actually add a lot of value.
There are good ways to do all these things, but the game just doesn't. The most frustrating thing is that you can see that it could be better. You FEEL like you SHOULD like it more.
It's so fascinating to me because video games, especially open-ended open world games like Starfield, are so huge and complex that they're inevitably going to be flawed in some way. The question is whether they've got the magic touch that'll make most players see past those flaws.
I think Starfield will mature like space wine as time goes on and modders are able to sculpt the things many of us wanted but didn't get. I'm sure DLC could help, and I have hope that a Starfield 2 could make significant improvements. I'm going to wait until the game goes on sale for 20-30 bucks - by then I should have pages upon pages of mod options, heh.
"I cooked drugs in a drug lab" _ if that quest wasn't called "Spacing Bad" I'm never touching a bethesda title again.
We like Skyrim because it has dragons and it lets you hit them with your sword.
Also the bugs can be a total laugh.
We LOVE skyrim because the base game was ok and then modders made it AMAZING and huge and detailed. But the base game was a good...um...base. I hope this works out for fallout in space, I mean Starfield...
I’m in love with Starfield. Probably because I didn’t look at any trailers or anything, I knew nothing before I started, I had no expectations except “bethesda in space” and honestly my own expectations were met
I think the other thing with Skyrim is that its got a legacy of the rest of the Elder Scrolls series, which (for the most part) has been very good. Skyrim, just added to that lore and world building that people already loved I think (just my opinion obviously 😊) But Starfield is very much brand new from almost every aspect. So, I think its just people need to get through the teething stages and I really hope it finds its feet :D Thanks for the great vid guys!
I really appreciate the Starfield coverage, given how overlooked it's been, because I really would like to get/play it at some point. What I've noticed about a lot of the commentary I've heard is that while it doesn't seem to be as stellar a game as we were hoping (ha), it has a lot of stuff that I personally am very excited about. E.g. Jane says Constellation are all nerds, and my immediate reaction is "SIGN ME THE HECK UP" 😄
It's hard because it is just genuinely popular to hate on the game. And most of those commentators are most definitely trying to cash in on that popularity. Those who evaluated it fairly like Jane are rare. I greatly enjoyed it but it is definitely not perfect. Every concern Jane brought up was valid. But I like it! Considering your reaction to Jane's nerd comment I think you might enjoy the game.
@@TheCommaA Thanks for the honest input :) I'm definitely looking forward to trying it out at some point
My first playthrough of Skyrim was almost a hundred hours before I found that second dragon. I had joined the werewolf guys and then immediately began rampaging across the whole map as a werewolf. I had read dozens of the dragon words and had no way to activate them.
With the pac-man eat-'em-up gameplay of being a werewolf in Skyrim, I didn't even get bored. When my form would finally wear off, I'd go back to places I had unlocked and ransacked and be like, "oh, man, you guys have it rough. Did a werewolf attack or something? Wild!"
Maybe Starfield needs more werewolves? We could call them Space Wolves! Although, that sounds familiar. Perhaps some Star Vampires?
I think Starfield really polished the Bethesda game interface, and I really like playing the game (almost 400 hours played). However I don't have the encounters like I did in Fallout 4 where I don't know if I will survive, or I need to plan how to attack. It is not challenging once you have leveled up a few key skill areas.
Luke asks a great question about why Starfield's flaws are different than Skyrim's or Fallout's.
Personally, I don't find them different. Starfield isn't perfect, but I love it. I also thoroughly enjoyed Cyberpunk even at launch. I think people just get overhyped and wind up with unreasonable expectations, instead of just naively enjoying the experience that they have.
So, what's the difference? We're older. We have less time for gaming and feel like we need some kind of perfect experience to make it "worth it". But for Skyrim, we were young enough to just play it and enjoy it, without feeling like we needed to justify its place in our life.
I feel like Ellen would be proud of that pun at the end there
Luke saying 'why do we like Skyrim' was something I felt in my very soul. Many people have asked me the same thing, I just don't know why 😂
For me, it was the lore... When I was obsessed with the game, I actually spent way more time thinking about it than actually playing it.
I've been playing Starfield since launch. 210 hours as of yesterday on Steam and I'll probably be playing for quite some time more. It has absolutely grabbed me and I love it. But If someone asked me why I'm so into it, I don't think I'll be fully able to explain it. Maybe it's the combination of the various aspects and systems of the game. The game, however, is absolutely flawed in some ways. The exploration is perhaps the weirdest and the most different aspect here. It can be both exciting and frustrating in equal measure. You'll discover some really cool/strange places, quests, aliens, etc. and then 5 barren rocks back to back after that. I think the galaxy should have been smaller with more densely packed content. Also, why is there no questline for the Va'run? And why can't I buy luxury ships and parts from Trident?
P.S.: Jane talked about building an outpost on a nice beach biome. Has she visited Paradiso in Porrima?
I played up until you got your ship after the pirate attack at the beginning and I could leave the planet... but I didn't. I don't know why, but I just walked away from it at that point and haven't been back. Then while I was talking to one of my friends who plays, I found out that you can't romance and marry a robot, so I guess I made the right decision. =)
Though I find Starfield to be a fun and enjoyable game that I'm sure I'll be playing on and off for years to come, truthfully it falls far short of the masterpiece that it was hyped up as being.
I think that's the position that BGS games are often in. They're good games to while away some hours, mess with the systems, find weird quests and mod the hell out of. But in the presence of games with alot of narrative hooks and compelling minute to minute things going on, they struggle to hold people's attention. They're more 'activities' than games, if that makes any sense.
@@gman7497they knows how to hype people and make their games looks good. Activision does that too
I think one of the main problems is that people were expecting another Mass Effect type game and Starfield was never going to live up to that.
12:30 ... I hear the same complaints about City Skylines 2. 'It feels half finished.' It only feels half finished because you are used to playing the original game, which has had nearly a decade of updates, DLC, mods, workshop items, etc. put into it.
You can fast travel directly to any landing zone from anywhere without need to take off via one loading screen. Select starmap, highlight where you want to land, and just select land. You will load in already out of your ship at the landing zone or city you selected.
I'm about 80h in, and I've barely scratched the surface. I haven't touched the faction quests yet and barely progressed into the main quest. I just keep getting sidetracked by exploration and smaller stories. I can see myself playing this game for tons of hours over different playthroughs sprinkled over the next ten years, just like Skyrim, Oblivion or Fallout before.
I played some Starfield myself, and tbh I found the best word to describe it for me was "Dry" It was lacking in some of the charm Skyrim and Fallout have, and to me, nothing felt that worth doing. There was never a moment (like in Skyrim) Where I was totally hyped in seeing how a quest would go or to go somewhere I had never been. I didnt hate it, but yes, defo "dry"
I'm happy to talk about Starfield. Loved it.
Enjoyed this. After spending a good amount of time with Starfield and enjoying it as well. There are a couple things that I think about when I don’t have constant ship designs running through my head. The travel between long distances I love the fast travel/cutscene approach. The short distance from orbit to the surface I really wish I could have the option to actually do that part. Taking my ship that I’ve put so much love into and approaching a body, slipping into the atmosphere whatever it’s makeup, leveling out close to the ground, weaving across the terrain, buzzing the wildlife and NPCs if there is any, identifying landing site, executing a sweet thruster slide drift move, and then seeing the cutscene of landing gear deploying and dusting off the LZ and touching down. And then when I leave the body, I can leave just as awesome. If I decide to go take a look around, walking down the ramp like a G, calling my mech/copilot out of the ships 2nd docking ring and jumping in for surface exploration. I’ve seen mechs of all sizes and conditions in this game. From individual sized to 50ft beast that have been converted from weapons platforms into mining models. Having a mech builder just like for ships so you can maybe swap out wheels/tracks and propulsion types to allow slow spool up and slow fuel consumption to allow steady horizontal travel across the surface, just like a variant of boost pack that could do the same. I know it is all wishful thinking, but it would make the game hit different. Catch a smile out there.
I have been enjoying Starfield too. While I am mostly fine with the cutscene transition to land, your description does sound... Stellar!
Thinking along that line of thought, you know what I would love? The option for in atmosphere dogfights! Weaving that awesome ship you lovingly built through the variously colored clouds and air depending on the planet would be cool!
As someone with 100 hrs in Starfield i agree with Jane on this. Its good for a new release, it doesn't have the terrible quality of game play as Cyberpunk did when it was first released. The fact is the game is just good, I am waiting for the creation kit to release and the mods that will let players use some of the randomized planets to build their own cities and questlines which i think would be an amazing thing, along with all the quality of life improvements modders make.
I was also a bit disappointed in Starfield... but the more I play it, the more I'm absolutely enjoying it. The game definitely makes you work for the lore and the more in-depth storylines.
You can literally fast travel from anywhere as long as you're not encumbered. That description of tedious step-by-step travel IS possible, and great for immersion, but you don't have to do all that. Open the map, pick a destination, go. :) You can even fast travel by line-of-sight on a planet. 3km from your ship? Just open the scanner, look at your ship icon, and press one button. Bam, you're in the pilot seat.
I have also played many many hours of Starfield. I've now reached the level where I could finish the main quest if I wanted. But I still feel like I want to travel around and level up some more. I think the game is great. My main criticisms are those that were brought up in the video: The main quest is very samey. This could just be Skyrim 2 in space. Nothing about the story is Sci-Fi, it may as well be just fantasy.
Base building is so hard that I just don't get anywhere. I wish there was more freedom in it.
Even as a level 70, my character is not good at very much. Possibly because Bethesda wanted people to play it over and over as different characters with different skills, but honestly, it takes too much time to play! If it was a quicker game, that would be an option.
I believe there are very good mods that balance that last issue you mentioned (from someone who hasn't played the game but who's been reading too much about it)
I too am playing Starfield...
The reason Starfield was such a huge disappointment to many was that it could never live up to the hype. And it wasn’t even the devs who were hyping it up. Players were saying it was going to be the greatest game ever, before we saw even the tiniest fraction of gameplay footage.
That said, I remember the same being true of Mass Effect: Andromeda. But when I revisited the game a few months later, now with tempered expectations, I discovered it was actually a really good game. So maybe it’s time to give Starfield a second chance?
For me I am underwhelmed because it's exactly what i thought it would be. Im not a bethesda fan at all, and when i heard they were making this everyone waa saying it was going to be a new direction for the company so I gave it a chance. One of the most dry boring games I've ever played. Its competently made, it's visually beautiful. But there's nothing there at its heart. Its cynical tech bro dorkery.
It was really enjoyable to hear Jane's take on Starfield, and Luke raising the all important question of why do we love Skyrim. I think that Bethesda is really good at creating compelling universes, and in the ES franchise case, absolutely bonkers mythologies (I have spent more time than I care to admit reading the wiki on the history and mythos of Tamriel, and I still feel a sense of wonder and awe thinking about it, about the mysteries that remain). However, where they tend to fall short is in the writing of the actual main quests, in the day to day lives of the protagonists and their entourages. Now I’m a big fan of Bioware games, I love the Witcher saga, Baldur’s Gate 3 was an instant hit for me, and I’ve played lots and lots of FFXIV because I love its story so damn much. I feel that these games have true depth in their writing, that there is intention in the stories told, and while you get plenty of fun and silly sidequests, at the core of those stories you have true purpose, and a deep emotional connection with the various characters presented. I very rarely feel that in a Bethesda game. They’re games I like to lose myself in exploring, learning about the world, chasing achievements but I rarely care much for the actual story being told, because there is something just missing to light that spark. They’re still enjoyable, genuinely good games, but not games I would recommend to people looking for a compelling story first and foremost.
Currently at 170ish hours played in Starfield. Enjoyed a lot of quests but really got hooked on ship building. Since you spend a lot of time taking off and landing, seeing my hand crafted ship doing spacey things really put me into the world.
Starfield is less like one huge space game, and more like 100 smaller space games put together. It has lots of amazing questlines that can be wildly different in tone and atmosphere. It is a different game from the usual Bethesda titles. I wouldn't say that any Bethesda RPG to date has been very "focused," but somehow this is less focused than any of the others, and more like just a "go to place out of curiosity, find random amazing questline you had no idea was going to be there, finish it, feel empty inside for a bit, leave, go to a different place, repeat." It's almost like the game equivalent of watching a scifi series from the late 90s, where every episode has it's own little contained adventure.
It feels like a Firefly patch/crossover would help. The heart of Skyrim and Fallout was the parts that blended reality with larger-than-life mythos. Firefly achieves that “space-travel is old news” with tantalizing adventure, without the need of aliens.
It doesn't need such a crossover. The Freespace faction is basically a space western in that style; it's already in the game.
Problem isn't that isn't everything we hoped it would be, but it also isn't exactly what they promised us it would be. When looking at every single negative detail individually, nothing really seems to be that big of a deal, but they sum up pretty fast. Just to point out a few, you can't really explore anything in this game, but isn't that what the Constellation is standing for? You sure can visit every planet, moon etc. but on each surface, you can't go that far, without hitting an invisible wall after about 10-15 minutes of walking, which asks you to go back. You can visit floating icons shown nearby, which completely takes away the surprise element. If you want to explore the planet further, you have to enter your ship, take off, land on a different bit of the planet and then keep walking the randomly generated surface further. And the worst part of this, you don't even have to walk back to your ship, you just teleport there. Or even better, you don't even have to teleport to your ship, you can literally just pick the next moon or planet and teleport there, without any animation of you entering your ship, taking off, flying there etc. The whole game, that should be an atmospheric masterpiece, is just a loading screen simulator of very small locations to walk around in. And even these small locations are mostly empty. This is nothing future updates can fix that easily, because the game's foundation already is flawed on so many levels. Usually modders used to fix Bethesda games, but this isn't anything modders can fix either.
Starfield 2,3,4 or 7 will end up great eventually, but judging by the developer comments on negative Steam reviews lately, just shows, that don't even understand what the issue is, which gives me very little hope for the future of Bethesda.
Speaking as someone currently playing Starfield, everyone else is right. Keep Jane the only one.
It’s a known thing among developers that the longer people play your game, the more likely they are to spend money on it. Once you see that, modern game releases make more sense. D4 is the worst but Starfield doesn’t respect the player’s time. You are basically forced to grind and grind to “get to the good part” but that good part is just a different grind.
this exact philosophy has ruined so many games, I am also completely sick of the grind for its own sake, it seems to me if they are not talented enough to make an engaging and interesting gameplay loop developers will simply make it about that grind
Jane is an ICON and has expressed completely how I feel about the game! Basically sorta enjoyable, a bit of a stockholm syndrome, it's complicated!
oof ^^"
13:40 Anyone else like me waiting for Petrov to brag "I collect everything. If I had a sister, I'd collect her in a second!"
In short starfield needs an alien race that looks like awsome dragons