Yet Another Urbanist Complains About Starfield
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ม.ค. 2024
- It's just not a fun game.
Sources:
West Virginia University | A Ride to the Future
• A Ride of the Future, ...
Starfield: Official Gameplay Reveal - Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase 2022
• Starfield: Official Ga...
GamesRadar | Fallout 4 is so expansive, even its creators haven't seen everything
www.gamesradar.com/fallout-4-...
GameSpot | Fallout 4 Interview: "We're Probably Doing Too Much"
www.gamespot.com/articles/fal...
IGN | Starfield: Developer Interview With Todd Howard | Summer of Gaming 2022
• Starfield: Developer I...
Lex Fridman | Todd Howard: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout, and Starfield
• Todd Howard: Skyrim, E...
IGN | Starfield Interview: Todd Howard on Fulfilling His Vision, Xbox Performance, and More!
• Starfield Interview: T...
Game Maker's Notebook | Making Starfield with Bethesda's Todd Howard
• Making Starfield with ...
Noclip | Designing The World of The Witcher 3
• Designing The World of...
The New York Times | Starfield’s 1,000 Planets May Be One Giant Leap for Game Design
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XKCD | Etymology
xkcd.com/890/
![[Mr Caption] No Todds, No Masters critique Fallout 4 (reupload)](/img/n.gif)
Just gonna pin some corrections people have already made:
- Turns out, I totally misread what the guy on the rooftop terrace was talking about. I guess 'performance evaluations' wasn't meant to be taken literally either.
- There actually is a suit toggle that I missed. I could have articulated the whole clothing section a lot better too.
Regarding the suit toggle, NPCs still react like you're wearing it even when it's hidden, which is annoying.
You mention at 1:19:01 that the Terrormorphs are a bioweapon, but I remember the game emphasizing that they are *not* bioweapons, even though that really seems like it would be more interesting.
Additionally, there is another clone related quest. But it is entirely isolated from the rest of the game and it's factions.
honestly man you get a pass for the suit toggle, it is so easily missed. game UI is not good
Todd Howard deserves credit for helping me learn much more about the rare medical condition where it's possible to be born without an imagination.
Bethesda did learn from Fallout 4: they learned that no matter how much they dumbed-down the gameplay, how bad the writing was and how meaningless the player choices were, their game would still make a gazillion bucks.
Nailed it
Its such a shame.
They want the most amount of money for the least amount of effort.
Far Harbor was actually pretty well written and had a good number of choices
People seem to forget exactly what you stated why every game gets worse.
The fact that CEOs are literally immune to dying in this game says alot lol. But like others have said before here, i dont even think they realize how pro corpo they are. Playing the Ryujin questline made me cringe more times than i could count
Starfield is one of the best recent examples of a game being released to please executives and shareholders, with no thought about player experience. Its the perfect antithesis to Baldurs Gate 3 this last year
Yeah those are all legit criticisms. But we know Bethesda is lazy, and the options suggested for Paradiso would’ve required the devs to create post-quest content that expands the story in interesting ways. Nope, they just wanted it to be *QUEST COMPLETE. FOLLOW NEXT MARKER* … It’s pathetic, this can’t even be called a RPG.
@@istrumguitars but it is worse because they did it before. In the dark brotherhood questline, in skyrim, when Astrid kidnap you, the game show you choices. But there is a hidden choice, kill Astrid and destroy the dark brotherhood! That shows that bethesda is more lazy now than ever
Did you notice the NASA aspects of the game? Well NASA is the US government and if you work with them you have to do what they want.
Why is everything so sanitized and unoffensive?
Why is everyhwere so diverse and inclusive?
Why are 80% of the important characters women?
Why do they include modern day politics?
Its all because of NASA.
Its an New World Order game.. METTS ALL the WEF guidelines, even bugs for food.
You can see it in our culture today, people today will DIE for thier celbrities, companies and political party..
Hell, in USA are literally trying to lock up the opposition caus hes NOT part of the plan.
Neither Is Putin, they are pushing a cumminust system world wide, and this game is part of that agenda, this is why they have ESG scored for games and movies today.
@@thebenc1537 Incase you dnt already know..
Its ESG scores, enforced by BLACKROCK and VANGAURD, on behlf of the WEF .. working for the UN AGENDA.
look up any of those capitols and you will see the NEW WORLD ORDER is not a damn conspiracy theory, Lary Fink From blackrock openly said "We are FORCING behaviors nto the public".
ALSO the UN AGENDA I first seen in UN AGENDA 92, then 95, then 2000, its up to 2030 now, its well documented, also at the WEF meetings every year we can see what the plans for us are "You will own nothing and be happy" (and EATING BUGS) hance the gams today going ALL DIGITAL... you dont OWN THEM and can be taken away with press of a button.
Claus Schwab who is leader of WEF has a book clearly telling us the WEF world view and tactics.
George Orwell wrote books about this in 50s (when people were still educated on how dangerous communism really is).
Gaming industry and holllywood, hell, MOST giant companies are a part of this agenda, and most of thier workers hired based n WORLD VIEW, hence all the games and movies SUCK today.
It seems that in Bethesda's fear of ever punishing the player in any meaningful way, they've eliminated any meaningful choices the player could possibly make.
Essential NPCs. Limitless fuel. Railroading dialogs....
You're never allowed to make a mistake, and mistakes are generally how most of us naturally learn.
But then endging of the game is to restart the game. Their whole plot is an excuse to let players make mistakes and miss stuff. The central plot of the games give the potential for more permanent choices than any other bethesda game, and they completely wasted it with the most unkillable named npcs out of any of their games yet. They could have done something incredible, a second main quest invloving every faction in the game where if you do faction quests in certain orders you get new interactions, with a "true" ending if you do several things in the right order
Pro freedom, anti choice. You can go in any direction you like, but none of it really matters.
The core of a fun RPG experience is failure. Not in a sense of annoying puzzles / fights, but making a "wrong" choice and dealing with the consequences. That's why games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Disco Elysium are so great. They let the player experiment and fail, but there's almost always a path to success even after some failed rolls.
@@chrissennfelder7249I don't think that's entirely true. JRPGs are pretty linear, all things said and done, and they are pretty popular. They usually focus more on a grand, long, epic story (and a bit more grinding) rather than a shorter but wider experience. And they have annoying puzzles/fights, so usually a bit more grindy than a WRPG.
But if judged by JRPG standards, Starfield would rank very poorly, even worse than it would on a WRPG scale. The characters are kind of bland. The world is bland. The story doesn't really build up a climactic world saving finale, but instead, you're playing out a villain's backstory (guy who slaughters thousands, then abandons his friends and world in pursuit of personal power)... and not in a good, compelling way, all before asking you to do it all again. Oh, and with pretty blech leveling up mechanics.
What's ridiculous is how Bethesda used to have devs who had a design philosophy that fixed this issue: make every choice a different reward, rather than there be punishments. That was the entire design philosophy around Fallout 3 and NV. Want to blow up a ship full of people to please a morally bankrupt corpo? The corpo gives you a corpo-themed reward. Want to kill that morally bankrupt corpo to save the ship full of people? The people you saved give you their differently themed reward. It can be 2 different weapons each with an effect thematic to the choice, rewarding either outcome.
Hell, the ENTIRE premise of Starfield's endgame loop is a literal NG+ loop which would allow for the exploration of different choices to get different rewards...but the quests all suck and don't provide any relevant rewards so there's no point in doing NG+ loops. So what's the point of that?
This game is literally if a cooperation in Cyberpunk made a video game
not even. there are no microtransactions, or for ultra dystopia, ads
@@Matty002 it’s Bethesda. Won’t take long for the creation club to show up
It would take any cooperation between people to make a game at the scale of Starfield.
@@Edax_Royeauxhuh
@@Matty002 Their are not microtransactions, yet.
Completing the generation ship quest by building a colony for them would have been such a cool way to settle the issue AND it would actually make the base building feature practical. What a crying shame
So true . Thought that was how it would end up .
I thought that was going to happen too.
That doesnt solve the issue, though.
But then everyone would realize that settlements are dogshit in Starfield, even compared to the flawed version that is vanilla Fallout 4.
@sahara8771 Can they just stop with this settlement nonsense? It was bad and out of place in Fallout 4 and it's just as bad here.
It doesn't get old throughout this video seeing Todd meticulously explain how they made the game progressively worse by removing all the fun features.
Todd had a very specific yet also incomplete vision for Starfield. He wanted a realistic space exploring game. That's kind of it. This is why the tone, the story, the themes are all over the place with no single unifying vision. It's just explore space. What kind of space? Is it Star Trek explore space, Firefly explore space, Aliens explore space? Yes and no. Who cares. Todd didn't.
honestly it fails at every aspect of realism, space, *and* exploration
@@DolusVulpes The only realistic thing they got right was that it's boring.
@@OsirisLord bUt ThE aStRoNaUtS oN tHe MoOn WeReN't BoReD.
@@OsirisLordIt's like making a movie without knowing what the story is. This will automatically be a bad movie. The only difference with games is that gameplay can save or make it less worse.
Feels extremely corporate, made by committee and made to ensure nobody was offended. Deciding not to buy it was made incredibly easy because I don't have an xbox.
It's the corporatocracy dream!
It’s amusing how Todd keeps bragging about this innovative feature of “thousands of planets” you can land and explore - the thing that Elite 2 managed to do in 1993; and that game could fit on a single floppy 😅
I'm pretty sure that the original elite generates like 7 or 8 thousand planets/stations
@@MrJstorm4 I believe the original Elite had like 8 galaxies 256 planets each (gotta allocate the memory efficiently, lol). Elite 2 had the entire procedural Milky Way, multiple planets per star system, Newtonian physics, and you could land on planets too - all those things Todd is so proud of today. Actually, this kinda worked for the game because it's basically a roguelike/trade sim in space, not really trying to 'immerse the player in the Universe' or something.
@@AntonNidhoggr And there was this funny issue, where you could get yourself put into long pursuit after planet/moon you wanted to land on.
The First Contact quest gets mentioned all the time. It is obviously the only half memorable one in the game. Yet the obvious solution - share the planet as it's plenty big enough for a few dozen more people off a spaceship - isn't an option.
Like you exerting your authority as the Dragonborn (i.e. her liege lord) over Delphine wasn't even an option in Skyrim, when she demands you kill Paarthurnax. (Or, preferably, Fus Roh Dah-ing her ass off the mountain side and rebuilding the Blades yourself, in your own image.)
Bethesda talks a big talk about making "RPGs," but they long ago forgot they need also to walk the walk. There is no role-playing in their games anymore. Action-adventure sandboxes =/= role-playing games.
Branching questlines and consequential, varing choices are what we want, combined with deep lore and engaging story!
@@HickoryDickory86non-contradictory lore, while we’re at it
@@Gloomdrake Sadly, they left that in the dust with Morrowind. Special thanks to Ken Rolston for that, since he's the one who forbade making a decisive determination for any canonical outcome for Daggerfall and also for the lack of any internal, coherent "what really happened" for the writers to work from going forward.
According to an interview done with Douglas Goodall, one of the writers of Morrowind:
"Ken and I also disagreed on 'relativism' and 'betrayal,' among other things. I appreciate disinformation, but I believe it works best when you know what the truth is. I like to write a true account and then conceal it among carefully designed false accounts. Ken wrote a dozen different accounts, apparently without any personal preference to which, if any, was accurate, and ignored the contradictions. I wanted to have NPCs betray the player in a few quests, but Ken had a 'no-betrayal' rule (and some other rules, like 'only one coincidence allowed'), which didn't make sense to me."
That's kind of like the "indentured servant" option. The thing with that is that... it's not slavery. It's paying off a debt. IE the colonists are settling on land someone else owns, and thus now have a debt to pay for it.
@@marhawkman303I think the difference is that they can choose how to pay the debt, but with the indentured servant path they are forced to become low wage employees for the debt holder
Starfield is the peak of urbanist criticism of the Suburbs. You are trapped in a location and must use a vehicle to get to another one. The journey in that vehicle is tedious, sometimes frustrating and has no relation to either location or the journey. Travel by car does have time considerations, where Starfield has the same loading time regardless of distance. I genuinely considered making a video myself (never made one) along the lines of “if you don’t like Starfield, you probably don’t like driving either.
I'd watch that
Interesting perspective. I, too, would watch that video.
Sounds like a fun watch! Good luck!
I forth the watching of that video.
I hated starfield, and I hate driving
It pisses me off how pro corpo this game is. They want you to be subservient to the rich
This is my only gripe with the game the Capitalist realism undertones which in a SciFi setting doesn’t make sense to me imo
Remember, Bethesda Softworks is owned by Microsoft.
Given the size of the video game industry and the amount of time collectively spent playing video games, video games certainly don’t help the population become less subservient to corporations. At some point, the amount of time spent playing video games crosses over from entertainment to a distraction from working on problems in the real world.
I played the first 5 minutes and heard the "Nice" foreman lady gloat about how few regulations they have with no sense of irony, I knew the game was going to be Toothless from that moment forward
@@barryrobbins7694 Yeah but Star Field was already deep into development before they joined MS so I doubt their influence had anything to do with Starfield
You're right. I think we need to pay attention to media more closely because I got the same vibes from Disney's Wish. I wouldn't be shocked if other entertainment companies do the same thing.
Todd Howard's comment on how people who focus on the main quest line will see what they expect from Bethesda is wild to me, because people who love Skyrim and Fallout generally love wandering around doing their own thing a lot of the time. It seems almost like he doesn't get why people play his games.
Also, I'd be interested to see your thoughts on No Man's Sky, because it feels like a lot of the issues Starfield has with exploration and space travel are handled really well there now.
It almost seems that he and his team play games to a minimum, and this is the result of that somewhat.
whats wild is that exploration and space travel in no mans sky were actually better than starfield even at launch, and that was 8 years ago
hillarious because even when good imho the MSQ is typically the weakest part of a bethesda game
Honestly the writing in the Atlas storyline of NMS is better than anything I’ve encountered in Starfield and I don’t even like NMS that much (for other reasons).
@@alansilvero pretty sure Todd has outright stated he dislikes RPGs and complex games before. the dude is a jobbernowl, he doesn't get the first thing about enjoying a video game.
The Paradiso quest reminded me of a section of skyrim that took me years to find. If you do the Greybeards Quest without joining a side in the civil war you eventually reach a point where you have to sit down with the Beards, Tulius and Ulfrec in a side room of High Hrothgar to negotiate a cease fire that allows you to have them trade cities without fighting. It's a contingency for a quest to cover an unlikely scenario, and over a decade later BGS couldn't be fucked to do it again in a quest made from the ground up to be negotiation based.
"Took me years to find", "contingency to cover an unlikely scenario"
Bruh
This happens in the first half of the main quest and you are never forced to oppose either faction except for the very beginning when you have to escape from the dragon attack. This isn't an unlikely scenario, it's the most likely scenario for any player because nobody ever in the history of Skyrim bothered to do the civil war plot.
@helgenlane Every time you walk past a guard or soldier they advertise their faction, joining one takes like 5 min tops and counts towards house buying.
Skyrim 2011: "You can join a side but it's not mandatory."
Starfield 2023: "LOL PICK A, B, OR C. THERE IS NO D, DUMBASS."
@@helgenlane that implies anyone plays the main quest and doesnt get sidetracked for hours, every friend I've seen play skyrim for the first time ends up doing the civil war before they get to odaving, also wdym its the first half this is literally 2 quests away froms sovnguard
@@qhu3878 that implies that civil war isn't the most boring part of the game. The majority of people have never done it. Not like that many people finish the main quest, but probably more people want to find out what happens in the story rather than deal with some random soldiers.
Hearing all the stuff Bethesda removed because it was difficult or annoying for the player makes me wish they added it in anyways and had a Hardcore mode like New Vegas, maybe it'd have the original fuel system and more environmental damage and stuff like that. At least give the option (although they were probably assuming people would mod those features in)
They probably did not know how to make it optional.
It's like they are flying blind. Games like Valheim, where you have to take the environment into account, where you actually have to craft to progress, where maintaining your rations is important for your survival are hugely popular in the last few years. Building a base and harvesting resources actually makes sense in those games and is not just side activity. But then again it would be complex and I guess they are doing that anymore.
They're adding the survival mode back into the game in a later patch. I suspect there were a lot of balancing issues that needed to be resolved and it just wasn't ready
@@Mike-sf7exit won’t be ready when they add it in, either
@@Mike-sf7ex issues that modders will fix undoubtedly.
I kinda assumed that the "morph" in "Terrormorph" was a lazy play on "Xenomorph" rather than a reference to their morphing ability.
Bro they 100% did xenomorph first and then went, hey wait a minute, what if it transforms!
I also assumed it was a play on the words "terraform" and "xenomorph" with the Terrormorphs following humanity around to every planet they settled.
I assume it simply is a play on the word "morphology", which, in biology, is the study of the structure of a living thing
So, terrormorph would just be a creature with a morphology that strikes terror into the person observing it, and they had no better term to explain that - probably because nobody really got close enough to studying it without getting ripped apart.
Xenomorph itself is also a play on that... it actually means a thing with an alien morphology... "xeno" means foreign, strange, alien... and yes, that is also why "xenophobia" is called that. Fear of the foreign.
Terrormorph might as well be called Scarymonster
That's almost what the name translates to. Fear form/being. You could have called them the scary stabbies and it would kind of mean the same.
@@l0rf Yea, lol. "Deathclaw" in Fallout is also a cartoony name, but it fits the quirky cartoony theme of the game, like a folksy nickname that the primitive people have given to it. Terrormoph doesn't sound like a nickname, nor does it sound like a scientific name, which I guess the game is trying to be all sciency and serious. I've watched a bunch of reviews, don't even know if Starfield has any sense of humor.
the first terrormorph I fought was at that colony for the UC. I just stood in place and shot it when it wandered under a staircase and got stuck. Completely destroyed the build up of the monster.
SPOILERS
Then later at the Space Port they built it all up like oh there's so many killing and mind controlling, and I walked over and stood in place, and they fell over dead. I refused the other special ops soldiers there and did it alone. It was boring after seeing it in the museum I was really excited to see one in game! (I think the one on Kreet failed to spawn in or something)
There was an automatic shuttle train active in Berlin in 1990, called "M-Bahn". Looked and functioned pretty much as in Starfield. It was disassembled after a few years due to costs.
If they did 5 systems and fleshed the heck out of it, we would not be getting videos like this. Also, the hand-holding quest lines were just sad, and this game is a technical genius about loading thousands of maps insignificantly and only has a handful of major locations.
The transit system in New Atlantis was my first indication the game wasn’t good. The city looks big at first with its line of sight blocking buildings but I have a habit of never using fast travel or vehicles (unless the game world is huge and a vehicle is necessary to traverse it) until uncovering things the first time. I get annoyed having to get off a horse to pick flowers or get out of a car to grab something. So i walked around New Atlantis in its entirety and was confused by the need of a transit system at all. It’s tiny. I was under the impression initially the transit system took you to separate hubs of the city that were equally big and when I figured out what was going on I just hated it. I was even more put off when I exited the city and saw its boundaries against the landscape. What a horribly designed city.
The transit system is definitely there to sell you on the sense of scale of the city but it's by no means tiny. There are multiple levels in many of the buildings and all the areas are pretty dense with tons of sidequests to pick up along the way. Would I have preferred New Atlantis to be more like Night City? Absolutely. But let's be realistic here and keep in mind the amount of work it would take to correct everyone's complaints of the game.
@@Mike-sf7ex no it really is a small city. It’s sparsely populated by poorly programmed NPCs. It’s even poorly laid out and feels as though the entire city were the downtown square of a suburb of a much larger city. I kid you not, the suburb of the city I live in has a downtown main square that is bigger than all of New Atlantis and even if we removed every road that made up that downtown area, New Atlantis would still be dwarfed. Tall buildings and all. The artificiality of New Atlantis takes it a step further by having hard cut offs that real cities don’t except in the case where they butt up against mountains, ridges, or water bodies. There’s no tapering off of city into less dense suburb outside its core, the city just abruptly ends. If you leave New Atlantis and turn around it’s jarring to look at. It’s not as though the city needs high walls to protect it from wildlife and it’s not even implied that’s the case. It just looks poorly designed. Like an urban planner’s child got ahold of City’s Skylines and tried making a futuristic looking city from memory. I’m not saying don’t enjoy the game or the city, go ahead. But far as I’m concerned it’s not a good game and New Atlantis is one of the worst cities Bethesda has ever made. Second only the Aquila in the same game. It’s also objectively not a large city. Assassins Creed 2 had cities that were both bigger and felt more alive than what Starfield gave us. So don’t give me the “we should really consider the time and effort that goes into the game…. Blah blah blah” no, dude. You were sold a bad bill of goods and we’ve done better with games a decade ago. Stop defending bad developers for ripping you off.
@@dabluflcn You must not play many games and/or have selective memory with a response like that, no offense. Try looking down at New Atlantis from MAST, jump off and land at pioneer tower, go to the balcony and look down at the space port that still looks like it's far in the distance. The city is pretty big with lots of verticality. Objectively, you are dead wrong lol.
@@Mike-sf7ex That’s your example for New Atlantis being huge? You’re citing the height of the Mast as an example of the city being large. The one building is indeed tall, so what. The building with very selective floors you can access. An upgraded jet pack lets you glide outside of the city from it. Is it because the mast is so tall? Or because the city is so small? The city is small. It’s large by Bethesda standards but not video game standards. When was the last time you played an assassins creed? Every city in any of those games is larger and more densely populated than New Atlantis. The buildings may just be facades but every building in new Atlantis isn’t enterable. Tall buildings don’t let you enter every floor or every room, it’s mostly just facade. Any grand theft auto? Cyberpunk? The Witcher 3? They all have both larger and more alive feeling cities despite being significantly older.
Skyrim had small cities but they utilized what’s called Forced Perspective to make the cities feel larger without taxing player hardware. Starfield does a poor job of conveying a real living city. Failing to use forced perspective to sell the illusion where it was used very well in whiterun in Skyrim. The mast is tall, is hardly a good argument that new Atlantis is large. You can stop kissing bethesdas ass. This is why developers get away with making trash in the last decade.
@@dabluflcn No, I'm telling you to do that in order to get a sense of scale of New Atlantis because you clearly haven't played this game and been on top of MAST let alone jumped off of it. Seriously, try doing exactly what I suggested before being dismissive. Because at this point you're comparing New Atlantis to cities in other games that have ENTIRE development budgets spent on those one cities. Wtf are we even doing 🤣
this is bethesda 101
they rarely have dynamic writing or any quest that expands past the initial resolution ideas.
Skyrim and fallout also had these issues in wide array, you just missed them.
It was made for true Bethesda fans only.
Yep, but Skyrim was placed in some fantasy medieval backwater Nordic province and Fallout4 in a desolate and depopulated post-apocalyptic world...
although cities in Skyrim (Solitude f.e.), and Diamond City in FO4 should definitely be bigger (as initially planned), at least there is some justification (apart from Bethesda laziness). Starfield however is in high-tech sci-fi future, where billions people live. NA is the biggest city in known universe, and it feels smaller than Imperial City from Oblivion... Akila is not much better, I mean cowboy city f f s. How uncreative Bethesda can be? Cowboys make sense in FNVegas but in space??? Only as a meme.
So it's not just Bethesda, it's the worst Bethesda.
Skyrim got away with it because it was an otherwise groundbreaking game with an insane level of choice and exploration options compared to anything most people had ever experienced. Then they decided that worked perfectly and just...kept recycling the same lazy game building techniques, right down to the bugs.
@@amyr4242 What choice, though. To kill the witch or not? To join one bland faction or the other?
Bethesda: "Well if they still like and buy our outdated fantasy game, surely they will love our outdated sci fi game!?"
Bethesda formula isn't outdated. The problem is they dumbed down the formula for their own convenience and making their games bigger despite lacking the technical expertise to do so.
16 times the details, 4 times the size, 1000 systems.
Curry rice is timeless, rice without curry is plain. Entire big pot of rice is a lot of plain. Simple as.
Man. Curry sounds so good right now.
I mean yeah play the elder scrolls games backwards and youll go "hey they removed that from skyrim" about 5 times and go "skyrim added this." Once, because shouts
Morrowinds combat is legit better lol
this games plot, is literally no-mans-sky - enter the center of the universe and restart.
without the space travel, baffles me how they removed a feature that EVERYONE wanted
@@Rocnation51 They couldn't make it work with Creation Engine 2 and make it run on consoles.
@@OsirisLord If that’s the case then don’t make the game. It’s not like we would’ve hated Bethesda for it they could’ve pooled their resources elsewhere
@@Rocnation51 I agree they shouldn't have made Starfield. But Todd wanted a space exploration game and since Bethesda Games is basically Institutional Inertia LLC they were going to try to make it exactly like how they make all of their games.
@@Rocnation51 somehow Todd said space travel is not important
From what I've gathered, Starfield tries to do some stuff with NG+ where being a Starborn is something you can choose to reveal, which changes some dialogue, but from what I could tell it doesn't amount to much. There's a small chance of being put into a universe where another version of you has already killed everyone, I guess as a commentary on murderhobo players, but again that seems disconnected. It's like they saw what the NieR games did with multiple NG+ cyctes and tried to imitate that, without actually putting in the work to create the emotional weight needed for the player to care, and the design work to make the player choose to kill NPCs themselves and then feel like a monster for it later
and it's not even consistent, I remember one reviewer talking about the worst quests still required you to go through and it was some of the better quests that you could skip.
It doesn’t even make sense that there can be a reality where your character killed everyone, when you can’t kill anyone who matters
@Gloomdrake but isn't it so much more fun just knowing that an AI character got to make the choices you weren't allowed to make??
Yeah, the Starborn dialog does nothing in most instances, with NPCs simply going "Uh huh" and then continuing as before. In the few cases it does allow you to alter something, it's often skipping things that were supposed to be "memorable moments" originally. I'd call it half baked but even in its ideal form it's still just a skip button seemingly.
NG + should have allowed you to change your background. I wanted to do a run as a citizen of each main "faction" as well as experiment with the dream home or parents. Instesd i had to concole command to reset them.
The last quest i played was the AI computer vs ryujin agents thing. I had to choose which one to help, but i hate both corporations like ryujin and AI. I could not destroy both of them. I feel like even fallout 3 wouldve given me that option. I havent played the game since.
Lol I remember that random mission.
never forget how far player choice has come since New Vegas
As much as I agree with everything else in your criticism, "Terrormorph" isn't actually a nomenclature issue, as "morph" is not referring to them transforming, but their overall shape. For example, the "Xenomorphs" in the Alien series aren't referred to as Xenomorphs because they transform, but because their morphology - the visual and behavioral traits of the creature - are very alien.
In this respect, "Terrormorph" is a very fitting name even before you learn the twist.
The generation ship is truly the best set up for the worst quest in the game. I was actually enjoying the game until I got to this quest. Beyond disappointing.
I started with the Free Star Collective Rangers questline first, I like the concept so wanted to see where the questline would lead and oh boy was I screaming "You can't be this stupid!" and id never have taken ANY Of the choices presented to me at multiple stages of the questline and yeanh, it was all downhill from there with every single faction and side quest.
@@Geraduss Yeah the rangers was pretty meh by the end of it but I was extremely happy with the new ship. It was full of upgrades I didn't have the skills for, which admittedly saved the quest from being totally lame.
Starfield has character and NPC models on par with the first Mass Effect. I don’t know how they managed that
And hilariously, ME1’s stationary NPC’s tend to have more interesting things going on.
36:49 There is a component you can get specifically to make smuggling easier, you can build your ship to smuggle things more effectively. What sucks is that it's a dice roll when it really shouldn't be, lead lining a nuclear reactor doesn't mean that there's a 50% a leak will happen, so is the same if I put my contraband in a scan lined container.
It's a dice roll because this game is an RPG 🤣 you're supposed to make decisions knowing these probabilities the risks vs rewards
Right, but most other systems aren't a dice roll though. I just completed a playthrough of Morrowind, so I'm fine with dice roll's in terms of mechanics, but Starfield's are a bit unbalanced. Like I spent thousands on scanlining my entire vessel, having a scan blocker, and cargo holds they can't see, but still it's a 50/50? It doesn't make sense as my attributes are essentially a nat 20 being treated like rolling a 10.@@Mike-sf7ex
@@Mike-sf7exrpgs use realistic chance like how morrowind works lol
@@Mike-sf7ex see to make it GOOD they need it to have detection levels. Sure SOME places it's iffy and you need a roll to see if it'll work, but only if your shielding isn't good enough.
I failed a 90% chance to pass like 5 times in a row. I know its a dice roll but it doesnt seem fair.
Bethesda has always had pretty shallow world building at least since oblivion but there’s something so neoliberal-y about starfield as if the only future Bethesda could imagine is one that operates exactly as our current world operates, and maybe you could tell an interesting story about how giant corporations become intergalactic omni corporations, what this means for the people who live under this system and what alternatives could be built but instead starfield is just unimaginative and boring and doesn’t even seem to ask why this system exists. Not every game needs to be a glaring critique of the status quo but our own neoliberal society isn’t working and to copy paste that into space but not include the problems our society faces is just so stupid
People 300 years in the future even dress and talk just like us. Imagination bypass. Starfield is a generic RPG with a very thin layer of "space" over the time. Most of the quests are fetch quests that could be in any fantasy RPG. Go find this.. go talk to that person.
@@OrangeNashthey even had the audacity to call their generic aesthetic “NASA punk” more like dollar store sci fi
@@RomanticDrip69 It really irks me the way that "-punk" as a suffix seems to just mean "-themed" now. Cyberpunk was called punk because it was directly inspired by the culture of punk music. I know complaining about semantic shifts like this is pointless, but it really feels like we've lost a useful term.
agreed. it feels like a side effect of, or something that overlaps with, them trying to aim for the same overall tone that mass effect had, too: a mix of star trek optimism and corporate dystopia. but mass effect did a good job of surviving in the middle of that tonal disconnect by being at least a little self-aware about the flaws and struggles of its world, yet still optimistic for its future. starfield seems to lack much awareness of itself in any respect
starfield just feels... naive at best. corporate corruption exists and is portrayed, but they still want this optimistic "exploring new frontiers" tone without doing much to reconcile it with the other stuff. it's "thoughts and prayers" world design
@@sleepinbelle9627when I see the word “punk” I think of working class people with a DIY attitude and a bad attitude towards the status quo. People who have to appropriate old technology, clothes, instruments to make whatever anti establishment and often anti capitalist lifestyle work. NASA punk could be a style poor working class space junkers wear, people who have to appropriate old NASA technology for a future society because they don’t have access to resources people with new technology can afford. Instead nasa punk just feels like a cool name to give to your industrial esque sci fi theme
Starfield personifies the Bethesda mantra of minimum viable product for maximum profit.
even at this late date, people are hopeful for Elder Scrolls 6.
i do not understand
@@WeeWeeJumbo Combination of nostalgia, denial and lowered expectations.
@@vocalcalibration8033And Todd worship
@@WeeWeeJumbo Yes but also many tempered their expectations a lot. I think Bethesda forgot to calculate with people's expectations growing over the years. I have this theory about people who think there is not much wrong with Starfield. Namely that they don't play much else or better games than Bethesda RPGs.
If you played games like Cyberpunk after 2.0 or 2.1, Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, Dragon's Dogma 2 or anything else of this caliber then the issues with Stafield should be very glaring.
But I've also read some weird comments about Elder Scrolls 6. Like how some people only want it to be Skyrim 2 basically... By the time ES6 comes Skyrim will be 2 decades old for F's sake. Possibly 3 console generations behind ES6.
Here something to think about.... I felt more alone and small on the planets (maps) you can visit in Mass Effect 1.. then i ever did in Starfield ever ...there was only emptiness and a feeling of when is this going to be finished....and where are the hot blue aliens ?
True, it somehow managed to feel more expansive
Partly because the game only offered certain planets in a system instead of everything with a surface to land on; partly because each of those particular planets had a map that showed you all the map waypoints in advance and gave you the Mako to traverse it instead of trudging three miles in a sprint-jog-sprint slog; partly because every single planet beyond those had lore entries in the form of the game's Codex...
Starfield just slaps down a thousand planets, most with no history of note to them, and a large chunk of them with virtually nothing unique or interesting to justify visiting them. The pool is miles and miles and miles wide... but it doesn't make a difference when it's not only less than ankle deep in many places, but all of it is segmented into a million square-kilometer cells.
me1 has great skyboxes showing the mountains going for miles and miles, every one of those worlds feels vast and barren yet with the mako its never to long to the next thing and your clearly at an area of interest, it manages to have content in it while conveying a vast emptyness just beyond where you are, and with the mystery of the protheins the emptyness doesnt feel unsettled it feels unnatural, wiped clean, it conveys in context with the reapers the cosmic horror, but in starfield the context is nonexistent its random meaningless and far more repetitive as at least in mass effect the copy pasted bases on each of these plannets all had something going on and usually were part of a larger story constituting of a few of these locations, and of course the slow uncovering of what exactly cerberus is
About the power diverting feature on ships: its a feature of a lot of space games, with Elite and SC as examples, the problem of Starfield is that the way they implented is too clunky and distracts you from the flying, the other games do it in a more intuitive way, with a single button for every system and balancing the levels of the others in response of your change, so its really second nature.
The first time I ever encountered it was in the 1990's with the X-Wing vs Tie Fighter games...
@matiasalmeida4112
The first time I experienced this was in a PSn2 game, Battlestar Galactica. You could change the balance of your torpedoes in real time, between four different stats in two opposing pairs. This was a 2003 game... 21 years old, and yet Bethesda couldn't get it to work well last year...
Star trek online has it to, though normally players just either max weapons, engines, and dump shields and aux to minimum, or pump aux to max and who cares about the other power levels(if doing a non beam/torp build).
and still interstellar rift manages to have a far deeper and intricate system than all those games
@@jh5kl not the same kind of game
9:20 Er... It honestly just sounds like he was talking about the CEO's bedroom activities in a roundabout way, considering the inflection/emphasis he was putting on certain words. XD
Yes, I think the point was to use his bedroom rumors against him. Basically call him a loser to his face and force him to negotiate a good deal or you'll tell SNN he's a loser or something to that effect.
Man we had the absolute same turning point on this game. Getting to the ECS mission, trying to go back and talk to the crew about the CEO. Then going back to paradiso and trying to kill the board out right, and coming to the realization that I’m railroaded so hard. All of the color that’s comes from a new game turned grey. I realized the whole experience was going to be shallow.
After that intro, I was hype for an almost two hour dissertation on public transportation in Starfield.
As someone who is very familiar with both from both a gameplay perspective and the background scripting perspective, the outpost building feels like a regression from Fallout 4 because they started with the CAMP building mechanics from Fallout 76 as the base they built from as opposed to Fallout 4's settlement building mechanics. I think this was a mistake personally, but what can you do?
absolutely. F4 outposts made sense with a wide variety of their own backstories, side quests, good ranges of building needs, and an easy connect system to share resources. Also no huge leaps of skill points. And I even had fun dressing characters and assigning them tasks.
@@joe19912 I love the outpost at or near Pickman's ally.
@VampiricBard Hangmans Alley. Yeah that place makes zero sense for a settlement. No land, cramped, no soil, close proximity to Raiders. No one would ever live there.
@@mixkid3362,
It's meant to cater to the player in survival mode...
@@aralornwolf3140 then it makes even less sense, for all the reasons previously stated.
I'm honestly curious as when people will finally look at Todd Howard, the same way people looked at Peter Molyneux in the 2000s-2010s. Because it seems like people have the memories of cats with keychains at this point.
cats with keychains?
@@suckassmork2972 Easily distracted. Probably should've said laser pointers. My bad xD
it might be because i was a kid when molyneux was going on, but good ol' pete seemed like an over eager nerd while Todd seems like a grifter.
It's been like this since Skyrim (or Fallout 3) from what I remember. OTOH, Bethesda also makes a type of game that appeals to a significant portion of the market.
They're the "RPG" version of Ubisoft I guess.
To be fair, Skyrim was as wide an ocean, deep as a puddle. Starfield is wide as a planet, and deep as misty residue on a surface.
That’s just… your opinion, man.
@@franzliszt8957 In relation to previous Bethesda entries it's very much quite a fact. Less dialogue choices, more simplified mechanics that doesn't allow for as much variety, easier quests... Don't get me wrong, it's fun to splash around in a puddle sometimes. Being able to have consistent fun is something I can say far more about Skyrim than Stanfield.
@@franzliszt8957and it’s a based opinion at that
@@foko3036Id say that at least in Skyrim it's a lot easier to get lost in the world and kinda RP in a natural sense.
That was completely impossible in Star Field.
@@ZeSgtSchultz I agree, no doubt that's why it was considered a critical success.
"30 times the size of Skyrim"
Twice as many pointless caves!
This is like if you asked an AI to create a video game for you.
They kind of did!
Surprisingly there is actually a planet with a quest revolving around clones called crucible. Basically its a facility filled with clones of ancient (For starfield) historical figures. From FDR Genghis Kahn an Egyptian queen(Completely forgot her name but it rhymes with feet, i think) and even Emilia Earhart. Its kind of interesting. But yea its another example of cloning. Don't know why it exists but it does.
Clone high?😊😊
Queen Nefertiti?
@@karelpasek6284 Say whaaat!?
Queen Amenirenas of Kush, not really egyptian
The player characters have no agency. Just like every other Bethesda game, your role is set from the get go. There can be no deviation from the script.
Exactly like new Vegas
Exactly like new Vegas
Exactly like new Vegas
Exactly like new Vegas
Exactly like new Vegas
I agree Bethesda has lost their storytelling. I can go play my heavily graphically modded Morrowind that looks as good as Skyrim and I still think it's the best game. And there's very little vocalization in that game. Just TONS of choices in dialogue, tons of ways of solving things, great side quests and main story, Loved Oblivion and Skyrim, Fallout 3 and New Vegas. I quit Fallout 4 when they gave me the power armor at the beginning. Haven't bought Starfield and am just very thankful for truthful reviews like yours.
I love all the talk about incompatible, different technology....currency, and they use the same computers.
Paradiso had some potential. Imagine meeting the pompous jerks that frequent resorts like this and deciding you're going to end them and next time you go back security is tighter.
the funny thing about fallout 3 and 4 is, for all their faults they are still FUN to play and have exploration and stuff that for some reason they left out of starfield.
I have to disagree on one thing: the "cloning is never mentioned again" part around 1:20:00 - there is like a whole settlement built around the idea of cloning people and a small but somewhat fun questline that involves playing multiple characters against each other, which will lead to you receiving a new companion.
After finishing this game, man they messed up a lot with the constellation members around you every time. I played the Ryujin quest last, at that point I said f it and gave them the technology. What if I wanted to be the bad guy, constellation is always there to say no, you’re playing the game wrong
Baldur's Gate fixed this decades ago. Do your friends not want you to be evil this playthrough? Get new, eviler friends! 😈
@@autobotstarscream765 I still need to play it but the backlog is so huge 😅
I wish they had included 2 "good" and 2 "evil" companions or even other companions, not part of constellation, who would be morally evil but not against the ethos of constellation
@@julianlaresch6266 I thought Andreja would be that but even with dialogues pointing out dude you almost killed someone, the game always says to you, NO you're playing the game wrong
was not expecting a clip from xenoblade 3 in a video like this, but it was greatly appreciated
Please tell me that CEO Oliver isn't supposed to be an Australian...😩
He's from *Space* Australia. Well, Space Brisbane, to be more precise. Go, Space Broncos!
It's like Australia...in space. But be careful. Space Dingoes will eat your Space Baby. Like my sister...poor sheila.
@@Snarkknight5TFS reference spotted!
1:18:30 I don't know if it was already mention, but "morph" is used to denote shape. I.e., polymorph = to change shape(s); xenomorph = alien shape/form; morphology = the study of animals' forms and body shapes. So calling the creatures a terrormorph could simply be them being named as a creature with a terrifying shape rather than "morphing" (changing from one body shape to another).
All this just goes to show that Starfield was supposed to be a survival game. They should of just kept all the original restrictions and it would be treat
You talking about Paradiso and people just sitting at the beach, not eating at the restaurant, etc. reminds me exactly of why I've been so against Bethesda making its cities bigger.
For years and years and years I've heard people complain that Bethesda's cities are too small and how they want bigger cities even if that means generic NPCs. But here's the thing... making a city bigger will do absolutely nothing except make it feel more lifeless and less interesting.
Right now in Skyrim every NPC has a schedule. They wake up in the morning, go to their job, go to the bar for a drink and a snack, they go back to bed, they talk to people, etc. They live real, actual lives with full schedules. And that is one of the things that makes Skyrim FEEL like a real world. Because the NPCs act like real people.
But if you have much bigger cities you just can't do that. You have to plop in a bunch generic NPCs who say nothing and do nothing and don't like actual, full lives. They can't have actual schedules or go about their day. The most you can do is stuff like have them walking around or repeating the same eating animation over and over again until they despawn.
On top of that, right now in Skyrim most NPCs you can talk to. Many you can't have full conversations with, but at least talk to them a little bit. And a lot you CAN have full conversations with or give you quests. And even those that don't, usually have at least a line that makes them stand out. Like people hate Nazeem for a reason. Because he has lines that you remember. That make him feel like a person, not just a bot.
And you can go into every house or shop you see in Skyrim.
Again, these things are not possible in these huge cities full of generic NPCs and huge skyscrapers (that are basically just outside geometry rather than real buildings).
People have been wanting huge cities for years now from Bethesda and Starfield gave them their wish. And what they got was a lifeless husk full of buildings you can't get into and generic NPCs that do nothing. Which is exactly what I expected from something like that.
You don't want huge cities. Or rather, you don't want Bethesda to make huge cities in a Bethesda game because they will be a lot less full of life than what you've come to expect. No studio has the time and manpower to have these huge cities but also all named NPCs with interesting things to say and all buildings being enterable. That's just not a plausible expectation.
Bethesda's formula isn't broken. Starfield just doesn't adhere to it very well. Not only in this, but in a lot of respects. Like the procedural generation took away the hand-crafted content that made the exploration interesting.
absolute COPE 😂bugthesda needs to make bigger cities and go back to their morrowind roots instead, skyrim is trash and boring
But you're wrong that you can't have both. Daggerfall had massive cities with hundreds of NPCs. They were basic but with modern technology you could easily do the same now but much better. There's also many games which do have those large sprawling cities scapes and they do a great job of making their games feel alive. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a much larger game in scope and it's far more detailed.
They honestly just need to ditch the "you see it you can go there" aspect for some games or game parts. Even if New Atlantis is "big" by Bethesda status, it's still to small to be believable as the main city of a multi planet wise faction. This is especially with akila city... I'd rather had them designed some worlds like Kotor 1 Taris, which didn't had much play able area, yeah but the city felt huge and believable.
I don't think so, look at GTA5 , put your money where your mouth is.
@@supernova4760 No that's exactly the problem of GTA5, once the story is over you can do nothing in this "oh so big" city in the main game. The npcs are lifeless and you can't go into or at least purchase any of the buildings or appartments. Whitout the multiplayer with its typical casino mechanics no one would play it anymore.
personally the paradiso quest line felt so crappily and lazily done that it was what made me quit the game entirely.
".....or I could just kill the CEO" Your pettiness has earned you a like this day! lol
This game makes me so sad. There's not really a game is there, just implied greatness.
When looking around Paradiso did you find the “slum” area where the workers live? This further separates the rich from the working class poor.
The video length, title, and opening sentence got me right in the spectrum
The NPCs just disappear instead of walking in, lol.
Terrormorph is Bethesda avoiding plagiarism since Dead Space have Necromorphs and of course Disney owns Dan o'Bannon's legendary XX121 aka the Xenomorph which has real world influences. They borked it fully but that's my thinking on why Bethesda called them this
Yet it's fairly easy to spot where they copied everything from! It's harder to find anything genuinely original in Starfield than to spot all the original sources.If they thought anything made another game popular, they crammed it into Starfield whether it made sense or not. Though they took out the exploration and the interesting stories.
@@OrangeNash precisely that. I loved TES but Redfall and Starfield have lost any faith I had and so already I feel for Indy and god help us with TES6
@@claudijatzandrapova3347 Me playing Oblivion 20 years ago be like.
Morrowind is still the peak of Bethesda. They should just fire 80% of their staff I guess.
Everybody thinks that Starfield is pro this or pro that. No. It's just bad writing and story telling. It's incoherent or doesn't make much sense half the time.
Most people that own businesses would never have an option in their mind of killing people to a solution to a problem.
That's why I'm saying it's just stupid story telling.
I liked some of your suggestions as alternatives. Lake building a base for those who were lost in space. That would have at least made the base building a little more meaningful and useful.
It's supposed to be an RPG shooter.
The problem with Starfield is that like you said, there isn't enough options to roleplay in a very meaningful way. And when they do give you options they're pretty freaking stupid half the time.
Or it's a quest that doesn't make any sense in the real world.
Anyway, I'm not going to ramble on about everything.
Starfield overall is a failure in my opinion even though if you try you, can pick out some entertaining things about it.
But as I say every time I comment about Starfield: the negatives far outweigh the positives. Imo.
Not a video/topic I expected to see from you, but frankly superbly done, stepping through the various issues in detail. Not really a game for me, so I've only heard secondhand accounts, but this is the most damning of all of them. Truly Starfield is the most Distilled Bethesda game possible
NG+, do the options for that quest change? (paradiso/space ship)
...
really felt like, that quest could have a different outcome, if you can "brain wash" them with an "manipulation" skill.., but unsure if that works as wished..
From what ive heard NG+ only affects constellation, tho you can say "im starborn" to people it does nothing
Super granular ship skills would be fine if the ship actually felt important.
Like, if I'm roleplaying as an ace pilot kind of character then hell yeah I want to dump all my skill points into piloting. But that's not a thing you can do in Starfield, ships just don't matter enough.
It sucks that hijacking ships and to sell the ship and cargo nets so few credits compared to going down to a bandit camp and selling the looted weapons and armor.
Bethesda forgot one thing, less is more, we don’t want a thousand empty worlds. 10, 20 or 30 solar systems with one habitable world each would have been better, also I would have liked coming across Stone Age level aliens, Medieval aliens or industrial level aliens on certain worlds in Starfield I would have loved that.
Also I would have liked having a rover in my landing bay and the ability to use drones and a cellphone it is the future after all, using a futuristic cellphone that could send messages or do calls across light years would have been nice.
A Galactic Cellphone, a Rover and a Drone is what the character in the game needs.
I would get rid of the multiverse shenanigans and 70% of the empty worlds.
The artifacts are just a multiverse trap that Constellation and the Starborn stupidly fell for, you collect artifacts to travel to another universe just to collect artifacts again just to travel yet again to another universe. The artifacts are NOT a path to knowledge, there a multiverse trap meant to put you in an endless loop with no end in sight, it is just a multiverse prison for those who stupidly fall in to its trap like Constellation and the Starborn for example.
I would get rid of this multiverse trap and put something better for in for a main story, like meeting an alien civilization for the first time in human history like a first contact situation.
I would have liked flying planet to planet with my ship personally, would have also liked wing men and wing women thus giving the fleet of ships you own a purpose. You can only use one ship in Starfield thus making owning an entire fleet of ships pointless because you can only use one ship at a time. I do get that one of your ships would solely be a cargo frigate and the other being a dedicated fighter but having them just gather digital dust most of the time is just sad. I would have loved having wing men and women on my side helping me in space battles, rather then it just being one against 4 or 5 ships that are high leveled.
And I hate the illusion of choice, why is my only choice in one mission involving the artifacts involve stealing, I would have liked other options besides stealing something. You can’t have a good character in this game and there are a lot of missions in this game that are the illusion of choice, you have like 3 or 4 yes questions and answers with NPCs and sometimes the opposite where you have 2 or 3 no questions or answers. You don’t have multiple paths in this game, if you join one faction that hates another you shouldn’t be able to join the other faction but you can for some reason which is just unrealistic. Like if you where to join the UC you shouldn’t be able to join the FreeStar Rangers vice versa, ya know because they hate each other.
@@emperorofscelnar8443 And when you switch from one ship to another or edit your current ship, it moves all the items in your chests and display cases into the new ship's cargo hold, and deletes all your decorations.
Anyone got the source for the game during the 7:55 rant?
Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
Really thought provoking review. I watched it all in one sitting and was caught by surprise when I realized nearly two hours had passed.
I appreciated the research you did to help contextualize Starfield in relation to the the philosophy of similar open world games, the sci-fi genre, and the decisions made in its early development.
I intentionally avoided any hype or media before the game and in a vacuum the game just seemed bland. After watching I feel a sense of closure with my Starfield experience.
I can see how it wasn’t just bland, it was uninspired by other works in its sci-fi genre and early design decisions hampered the traditional Bethesda formula.
Can’t do environmental storytelling when the environment is 32x larger. Can’t engage with layered mechanics when most are reduced to flavor text for tone. Can’t engage in meaningful exploration when content is distributed with random events in space and several-minute single-direction walking sessions on the ground.
Your suggestions were spot-on and made me realize how much I hoped for more futurism in this game. There was so much potential and yet they used the lore to hold it back so advancements in technology experienced by the player were limited to improvements in fast-traveling (with the ships) while the rest like lasers, jet packs, and talking robots were already explored in Fallout.
This game is more than just bland. It’s the sum of its parts and I’m grateful with the painstaking analysis you did on each part as it helped me appreciate the whole of what Starfield really means to me.
Btw, it's okay to actually have a NASApunk game that doesn't have intelligent aliens, but the execution is way off and the temples/starborn betray this design direction.
A few things I want to add:
You can actually shoot Petrov in the head once and he will surrender immediately and stand down all of his guards at once, take the artifact like no one cares and you can even loot the entire ship if you wish to do so, without repercussions, at all. I don't know if this makes things a bit better for Starfield or a lot fucking worse, side note: it doesn't matter when in the game you get a bounty, once you'll get your first bounty it will bring you to the dialogue with ending up getting to be a secret super agent.
Regarding the funeral: it's generic because whichever character just causes the picture to change and not the "speeches" if you could even call them that.
I lost gay Barry and the priest said the exact same thing but in this scenario I recall Sarah being the speaker and saying the exact same things as Barry in your playthrough, word for word.
Starfield is easily the worst game I have ever played and also the biggest madly disappointing experience in my life in gaming, it was also one of the games I looked the most forward to play and the wait from announcement till launch was extremely rough and I'll never forget how shockingly traumatic empty I felt when I very quickly realized the reality of the situation after a mere couple of hours into the game.
My first run, I don't even know how I got a bounty lol I was just suddenly arrested and taken to the ship
It's honestly fascinating to me the number of reviews that cite the generation ship quest as the point where their enjoyment dropped. The vast consensus is that it's a horribly constructed quest. I have yet to encounter anyone who seems to have liked it. My questions about that quest end up really being questions about the entire game: was there cut content that made that quest more sensible? Did somebody get fired in the middle of writing it and their notes just got pushed to production? Was the lead writer just blasted on cocaine the whole time?
The game died to me during that time quest. I had kept ignoring all the issues, even the ones where I had to use commands to fix my game from a game breaking bug. But that quest just made everything implode on me
They didn't finish it. Like a lot in this game. They probably stopped working on it halfway through.
Another point about the ECS Constant I have seen other people make: If you talk to the people aboard you will quickly learn that the society of the ship is authoritarian, even if it is for a good reason. There is strict population control and people go through predetermined education and career paths to ensure they have experts to handle the ship's systems. Plenty of people aboard wish they could get away from there to live a freer life. But even though you are otherwise making a choice in this quest that affects everyone aboard, you are given no option to help these people break away in a situation that should logically allow an opportunity for that.
7:50 Yeah. It sounds like the quest should have an option to, say, invade the planet with the aid of the space colonists.
Hey just a tip, sometimes you can hear the mouse click when you’re about to stop recording! Good video btw
I used to record and overdub trombone duets, quartets, section excerpts from orchestral pieces, etc. in audacity and it took me forever to realize I could eliminate the click.
Yea.. I'm not purchasing any other title or DLC from Bethesda after pre-ordering Starfield. I can't even imagine how much they're going to butcher ES6, not too mention the game is going to look, play and feel like it's from the 2010's.
The sneaking sucks because the game calculates sneak chance based on the weight of things you are wearing. So it's almost impossible to sneak wearing a bulky spacesuit even though that's realistic.
I was surprised how easily I was getting detected even with 4 ranks. But once I took off the spacesuit, it felt a whole lot better. Sucks at places where you can't take off the suit and it's also annoying to equip and unequip every time.
Half the fun in NMS is getting your carcass off the first planet by finding everything you need. This game is looking more and more like a pale imitation eh?
I would encourage any modder to, when the Creation Kit is released, create mortal NPC replacers not marked essential for this company and provide for the migrants to settle in New Atlantis.
The major thing that stuck out to me about Stanfield is that they've seemingly ditched radiant AI. The first Bethesda RPG since like Oblivion where NPCs dont have an actual life. They just sit around in their spot, at most on their patrol route waiting for you to come talk to them. They dont eat, dont sleep dont talk to each other. You go to a shop at any time and the owner will be there waiting for you.
I think I'm addicted to listening to people tear starfield apart. I have no interest in the game but I've watched more than a dozen 1.5-2 hour videos and you all say basically the same thing but it never gets old. Help
What to procedurally generate and what not to procedurally generate that is the question.
In my opinion, Shattered pixel dungeon is a great example. As a roguelike, the map itself and what items appear can be random, together with their enchantments. However artifacts, quests and bosses are set, since they need a basis of coherency and flexibility that is difficult to achieve and balance with random generation.
Starfield was a mistake. But Todd wanted to make his “dream game” regardless of the fact that the Creation Engine is incompatible to make a space game. It was never designed to make a space game ( Starfield) or a multiplayer game ( Fallout 76). Yet the last two games BGS has released have both handicapped themselves trying to be something other than what BGS and the Creation Engine has done well in the past. These new “upgrades” they’ve made to the Creation Engine have hurt their games way more than they’ve helped them. Both of these games ( Starfield and 76) and their added functionality came at the cost of ruining the base game experience. I understand wanting to add something different to your game, or change things up a bit. But when those changes completely negate the entire reason people have loved your games in the past is it worth it? Maybe some of the added functionality they’ve added to the Creation Engine can be implemented in future games in a good way, a way that doesn’t completely compromise the main game, but I’m not sure.
My greatest disappointement with the game is the fact that nothing you do or choose matters. Take the generation ship. You can blow them up, resettle them or condemn them to servitude. None of the choices have any consequences for you. Or the pirate storyline. You can murder every last man and woman on the SysDef capital ship and you're still being made a citizen of the United Colonies, because there's only "rumours" that you might have been involved in that massacre somehow. Seriously, WTF?!? If you choose the Crimson Fleet, you're occasionally ambushed by SysDef ships. If you choose SysDef, you're occosionally attacked by Crimson Fleet ships. Yay.. so much variety. Oh, and you can murder the entire population of New Atlantis, pay a fine, and be friends with everybody again. Seriously, how is this an RPG???
Exploration was another major disappointment. You can travel to the most distant star, touch down on the most hostile planet, and be surrounded by man-made structures. That's not "go where no one has gone before", it's visiting a place where hundreds of people, engineers, traders, settlers and scavengers have already been. It completely ruined my interest in exploration.
Difference between "choice" in good games and in bad games:
*In Good games, the choices have consequences!*
36:30
im pretty sure you can buy a module to make the detection of stolen cargo lower when you join pirate faction.
Oblivion supported wide varietys of food, npcs wandering on complex hourly schedules and even gave them the ability to sit down at tables and EAT THE FOOD OFF THE TABLE
The Todd Howard Standard Excuse for any feature not possible to implement in Creation Engine is that said feature is not wanted by players.
Even if said feature is present in other games, and massively enjoyed/appreciated by players.
Okay but what was the game at the 8:00 mark because that VA was great.
You mean Xenoblade Chronicles 3?
I saw the First Contact mission as a lazy attempt at corporate/dystopian satire, which Bethesda did slightly better in Fallout 4 (leaning hard on someone else's original IP), and which Obsidian did much better in The Outer Worlds. The situation in Edgewater, at the start of The Outer Worlds, is fully developed, with a range of options, and at least a bit of pathos even in the resolution of the "good" option.
It's a happy accident, but the fact that stepping into the multiverse brings you face-to-face with the Queen of ALL Cosmos... *chef's kiss*
The First Contact mission might be my least favorite quest I've played in a BGS game even when compared to "Kid In A Fridge" At least in KIAF I could sell the kid and had a secret option to follow the slaver and kill him opening up a secret dialogue about bitch boy being upset that I didn't let him in the "plan" of taking the money and getting an easy kill with his back turned. Also, that fridge is damn easy to avoid in the wasteland so I never have to play it again or have it in my quest log as long as I give a 10 ft wide birth to one spot on the map. Paradiso harasses you just for flying near their system to talk to the Chief Security Officer then you are forced into acting on their will with no option to refuse or act in the interests of the colonists. What's worse is after I finally saved up the money to buy them the stupid grav drive the colonists are still assholes to you. Every guard harasses you for walking near them, and half the populace of the ship hates you for forcing them to stay on the ship with no option but to tell them the other option was literal slavery! Even though destroying that ship is comically evil if I ever had to start a new play-through without the bonus of NG+ money being easy to make I would just kill them all to get it out of my quest log. Don't agree with your overall view on Fallout 4 as I love that game.
You can toggle a setting to hide your spacesuit in settlements
Yeah, sneak is terrible even after the patch that made it "easier" they tried to avoid the "Sneak Archer" meta ignoring the fact that that was only super popular because non-sneak playstyles require enchanting and smithing to even feel on par, and dagger sneak is harder than bow and arrow.
God that funeral was horrible, you could tell Emil only wrote one set of speeches so it could apply to all making them feel like roommates or even strangers at best.
Very nitpicky on my part because it's an ultra-rare encounter only on NG+ but there is one Starborn that does help you, for a price. She has ultra-powerful legendaries that she collected through her travels across unities (doesn't make sense since you can't transfer your gear over but whatever) and only sells to other Starborn.
The ending was terrible, the aether between the next universe is supposed to show you all the decisions you made but only shows off the main story forks in the road, and conclusions to faction questlines. NG+ adds a dice roll to see if your universe changes meaning you can roll 10 times and never see an alt version of events. I did NG+ 5 times and had to look up the events on TH-cam. The worst one is the evil version of you that kills everyone but BGS in their infinite wisdom doesn't give you the option to become that character and kill everyone! Once you're on NG+ why is any character essential? You know you have to collect the artifacts, if you kill Vlad you know and have data on what to look for with the eye on your own!
IMO the story seemed primed for Barrett to be the villain, he also had a Starborn vision and could have felt threatened that you rose the ranks of the constellation so fast so he made a power play to steal the artifacts and killed any companions who weren't traveling with you at the time. You find out that the hunter is Barrett and he went through the unity ONCE, not a billion times ONCE and he won his first battle with you, he also killed this version of Barrett so he wouldn't take Unity from him. Also, the ending dialogue that all of Constellation can follow you to Unity is insane! If Unity opens a portal to the multiverse instead of a one-time transfer why would anyone fight over it? Hunter should just let Constellation open the door for him and walk through.
The Emissary would then be the priest who offers to help you on the condition that you take him with you over your last surviving companion. If unity was made this one-time transfer that can pull you and one other person max you have to give up taking your spouse and starting their questline over for a 2v1 Starborn battle. Then the Emissary and the Hunter have a reason to team up; you and Sarah go to the next universe and beyond or the Hunter and the Emmisary do even if they have different ideologies they set their differences apart for a common enemy. Emil is going to be the downfall of BGS.
This is the first video of yours I've seen and made it to the end. Going to check out your other stuff, keep up the good work.
It's so strange that every you go feels so lifeless, they copied RDR2's Aesthetic for an entire faction but they didn't do anything that actually made that game amazing. There's no detailed animations or bustling streets, if Rockstar made Paradiso it would actually feel like a Paradise world.
These shrimp fresh?
I get what you mean, but I wouldn't go that route, they pulled some weird crud in development when it came to crunch and what animations and similar they prioritize (cough making animators and programmers worry about horse balls cough)
BUT, the thing is Bethesda has made stuff feel alive and bustling with far more limitations and few animations with better set pieces, smart placement, etc, yet they didn't do that here when they should have, they prioritized the wrong things environmentally.
When you describe something as simple as "the whole point of a greenhouse", it reinforces my belief that Bethesda doesn't understand anything. People say they don't understand game design, good story, and stuff like that. But I truly feel most Bethesda employees are on the spectrum. I came to this conclusion when I realized they specialized in rpgs where speech is an important trait, yet nothing from their games convinces me they understand how people, or even children behave.
i don't think you actually know what the spectrum IS. i guarantee you nearly every autistic person who is at all functional has a much better idea of what the world we live in looks and feels like than bethesda does. starfield comes across more as almost AI-generated or alien. a mind with little recognizable identity and emotion attempting to create the image of something it has only ever heard about, and even that information was probably collected algorithmically.
actually, to be a little more detailed... i think there's a misunderstanding sometimes that autistic people can't comprehend or properly internalize social interactions, situations, societies, etc. but that's not really accurate. we understand all of it. generally we can accurately describe all of it, too. the difficulty lies in the execution; i know what normal looks like, hell, i can write a story about normal that no one would ever know came from an autistic person unless i wanted them to, i just can't ever seem to make my own body and behavior line up with it. bethesda's issue doesn't feel like that, it feels like they're creating worlds from the perspective of someone who's never paid attention to their own world, or honestly like someone who doesn't exist within their own world (or any world) at all. i don't know how this happens over there, honestly. i have to think it must be higher-ups in writing/directing/etc who basically just don't remember what it's like to do anything but be in a boardroom talking to investors.
There is a whole faction whose mission it is to settle people on planets. And you can't build settlements for them. It's like the individual departments don't talk to each other.
Who made the Starborn ship?
It came ready from another universe, I think.
Since artifacts and temples were created by creators then ship was made by ship makers. /s
@@PobortzaPl Ohh I see.. they were made by The Makers. Got it.
"more polished game at launch".
No. Its not.
I played CP2077 from launch day. It had visual glitches and crashed a handful of times. And moat of the visial glitches turned out to be because my graphics card default settings for the game were very very wrong , the moment i set up a manual profile for the game most of the graphics issues disappeared. The only quest i wasnt able to complete first try without major bugs was one of the street crime incidents where it didn't register that i had picked up the loot to finish it.
Atar field is WAY worse. I picked it up a month after launch. My first character was unable to finish multiple quests, including a whole major faction questline because of significant bugs. Ive had major issues like my ship deleating itself from every single save i had it in, which permanently bugged out every member of the crew that was aboard. And it crashes most times i play.
Starfield is less buggy than an average Bethesda launch yes, but its still one of the buggiest games of the year and cyberpunks bugs were always grossly exaggerated (outside of last gen consoles).
CP2077 on console was infinity worse then starfield
@@pubertypie6913let's be fair that's because cyberpunk should not have been released when it did and probably shouldn't have even featured on previous gen consoles
58:58 The tiles are actually contiguous, separated by invisible walls. However, planet travel icons are large enough to put you multiple tiles away rather than directly adjacent to the one you intend to land. The tiles are actually quite small and numerous, meaning the planets are truly and surprisingly very large in scale.
"We had nerfed the hell out of environmental damage because we couldn't be bothered with informing player that they might be expecting particular kind of environmental damage.
Yes, we also have scanning planets in this game, why you asked?"
Sweet mother, Bethesda is just lazy.
I found Greedfall and Andromeda better than Starfield. This is not so much a shot at those games, but my level of disappointment in Starfield. This game is the definition of Day 1 gamepass release smh 😅 I wasted money on the the damn premium upgrade steelbook to get early access for a damn game I know I wont ever pick up unless it's $10. Gamepass runs out April so hopefully Shattered Dreams releases before then. 😢
the worst part about Andromeda compared to Starfield is that at least bioware realised that the whole 1000 randomly generated planets idea was horrible so they canned it to focus on ehat they could under the insane conditions that game was devved under. Bethesda went the other way and scrapped actually good content and fucked over what content we got all in the name of 1000 planets and it just makes me so sad imagining what game we couldve gotten if they focused on a few smaller worlds, though in all likelihood they wouldve just released this game earlier because unlike bioware they dont seem to have a single writer with any passion to try and fix the mess they made.
@@qhu3878 1000 planets for absolutel6 no payoff. They really thoughr people just like running across barren planets bc "exploration"...fools
Kinda weird that I found your channel due to the Tears of the Kingdom's video.