Honestly, I would rather they had limited the game to one solar system with maybe 5 planets to explore, all which were as detailed and hand crafted as Skyrim or Fallout, rather than what we got, 1000 boring procedurally generated planets and moons with the same cut and paste outposts.
sounds like they originally planned to only be like 20 planets but once they realized they could make a few systems easily they could add more with little trouble.
Hand crafted like skyrim and fallout you say lol. Those games aren't handcrafted either. They are nothing but small rule of cool theme parks with shit world building.
they probably could have kept the procedurally generated planets we have as empty worlds in a sort of 'land beyond' - like maybe there are a handful of solar systems humanity has really put roots into and the rest of space is mysterious and empty. I think the difference between that and what we have now is that the worlds should be handcrafted as much as possible, and most of the missions should be set on these worlds rather than just random lifeless rocks with like two creatures. It's almost like they didn't give us land transport because they knew there was nothing to explore.
Why? They made one mid game and that’s it? They tried something new and failed does that really warrant loss of respect? They’re still the creators of Skyrim, morrowind, Oblivion, fallout 3 and 4. I just don’t get it.
I had a blast on my first play through. I enjoyed the faction quests for what they were and I loved playing around in the ship builder. However. When I branched out to start exploring, I maybe put away 10-20 hours in exploring planets BUT I quickly learned that once you’ve seen one abandon research post, you’ve seen them all, no matter how far to the edge of the galaxy you go. It killed any motivation or desire to fling my massive warship to the edge of the known universe to see what’s out there. Instead I never ventured out past the UC or Freestar systems unless a quest took me to a system. Bethesda definitely went for the quantity over quality with starfield.
I remember when procedural generation tech is new and people celebrated how this will cut down development time, I warned them that they always could end up keeping rolling 1s.
I feel like Bethesda wanted to make a big open space that the modders could then add into. I see the benefit in that, but it makes the game at launch feel terrible. It also feels exploitative towards the modern community to do the world building instead of the actual game company
I'm not a Bethesda fan boy. But I am a 67 year old Skyrim fan boy. I played Skyrim since Special Addition came out and 95% of that play time is a modded Skyrim. But Starfield? Well, I was hopeful that an 8 year development would ultimately give us a polished game. I played 74.5 hours over 3 weeks and uninstalled it. I give the game a 4.5/10 and that's for the art department because the game looks pretty good. Excepting water. The game was over hyped, falsely advertised (simply listen to Todd explaining all the cool exploration we can't do), horrible optimization, no immersion, uses a crap engine, totally crap UI, bug filled, glitch filled, crashes, repetitive, boring, broken stealth, horrible perk system, janky base building (with little instruction), janky ship building (with little instruction), copy/pasted POI's, absolutely dreadful and contradictory companions who don't care who or what you are other than you're important and get in your way if they're part of your ships crew, no-name citizens that walk back and forth on an invisible tether and many times get in your way, weak main and side missions, overloaded cut scenes and load screens, mediocre gun play with bullet sponge targets that remind me of 2007's S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl. Really bad circa 2011 AI. There are no real role playing choices with consequences. Any choice you make still takes you on the direction Bethesda wants you to take. Thus, the traits and abilities you pick in character generation have little to no benefit. There is no depth or relevance to this game and its components. This game has no role playing despite it being labeled an RPG. This game has no soul. There's no hook like the opening of Skyrim or Fallout 4. The cringe writing is testament to this. The mind-shattering and pivotal reveal of the game is not mind-shattering or pivotal. It has no effect on your characters needs or wants; in short it's fraking broken. Nothing can fix this now other than a complete rewrite of at least the first act but then, either way, it's just too late. How can the player get excitedly involved in the artifacts? Why? There's no reason to do so other than to just simply do it. Why are the Starborn doing the same thing? Because...reasons we're never privy to. Why is every member of Constellation expecting you to jump through Unity and leave everything in your current universe behind, even perhaps your wife or girlfriend or husband? What manner of non-empathy to anyone must Constellation members have? How is going through Unity a boon or change to humanity? Or even to your character? The junk items you can pick up are pointless, extremely underwhelming carry weight, arbitrary level farming to mend/boost your XP/perks/ money, vendors with little money, NO MAPS, companions scolding you one after the other because you chose the dialog Bethesda didn't want you too, more loading screens in five minutes of play than the entirety of Elden Ring, 300 years of human fiction with nothing to really show for it, no challenging locations or bosses worthy of the name or worthy to fight. And no reason to actually make an outpost to farm stuff because you can simply purchase it at a vendor unless you want to pad your levels. A "2023 next gen game" with 2006 water graphics? Starfield is fundamentally flawed on so many levels. It is NOT open world. It's plagued with bad game design decisions, half baked systems, bland & uninspired writing and outdated quest design. It isn't "Skyrim in Space", nor is it "Fallout in Space". Starfield is a downgraded, mediocre and soulless mixture of Skyrim & Fallout 4, without the free world exploration and the charm of neither. It's a regression from Bethesdas previous titles in all aspects and the saddest part is that it took them 8 years to create this piece of mediocrity with unparalleled boredom. Mario Cart is more fun than the spaceship battles in Starfield. What's even worse is that devs had ALL the creative freedom to write whatever the hell they wanted; there is no established lore that restricts them from going crazy. And yet they went for the most banal unimaginative take on sci-fi. Funny thing with Londinium - I decided to try landing randomly on the planet, ignored the UC ship telling me to stay away and menu clicked my way down there. As soon as I got out, another random ship came a few hundred metres away, as they do. I wandered over, found it was a Freestar Ship that had landed at a "small settlement" or something like that. On Londinium. The planet that was quarantined because it was over-run with monsters. Sigh. Later, I’m desperate to complete the main quest so I can finally uninstall. I made it to the buried temple - which is of course just another copy paste junkyard. Sarah said she wanted to speak to me and told me that Barrett was worried about her back at the lodge. Well, Barrett fraking died on the Eye when the Hunter attacked about 30 hours ago! What little immersion I had left was instantly taken away! TLDR; Abysmal writing. The worst part is they made a world (worlds) that were already explored. It all feels like we were late to the party. Every planet is littered with copy/pasted factory’s and outposts, you are never more than a 1000 meters from a structure. The whole colonial war already happened and you just get to hear about all the cool interesting events that already occurred. No matter how far you go, there are almost always humans waiting for you there. Even the plants & wildlife that you need to scan already have names. Therefore, locations have already been discovered in the past. What really burns my backside is that New Game + merely allows you to replay the game over again with the same or different companions; ie., Sarah becomes a potted plant, all the Constellation members are children and I think the very worst is all the Constellation members are you with different personalities (and that's to name just three of the 10 or so variations you get). Not only that, when it comes to the writing and consequences of going through the Unity, Sam Coe's questline revolves around restoring a relationship with Cora's mother, Lillian Hart, yet when it comes to the Unity, Sam shows not the slightest consideration of Lillian in allowing young Cora to go through the Unity. I would think she would be devastated. Also, if you do NG+ to bring all 24 powers to level 10, that means you'd have to jump through 1200 glowy-glitter things in 240 temples. No, thanks. This game was labeled as "Next generation" gameplay? Don't stop to think Bethesda will fix anything other than the most egregious problems and that modders can "fix" the game when Bethesda won't. I've come to the realization that the game is fundamentally flawed in a way that no mod or update can actually fix. It's the base level structures of the game that are so unappealing. Modders can come very close to it, but I don't see that as a modders unpaid job. An example would be that modders made Skyrim better. But they didn't "fix" it. As I sit now with 74.5 hours into Starfield, I honestly don't think I'll ever play this game again. At least not without a Cyberpunk 2.0 and DLC type upgrade or a complete rewrite. And this Bethesda mediocrity has me very worried for Elder Scroll 6. Don't settle for mediocrity.
Good vid! Starfield is essentially (and sadly) a glorified game of "Fetch"; and then there's the game within the game...trying to traverse the literal "obstacle" course of bugs and poor mission design. I don't recall a game with so many work-arounds! Personally, I think an edited version couldn't hurt.
When I play Starfield my Xbox starts going into sleep mode by itself. I know how it feels. I think Starfield is the video game worlds way of telling us that the loss of freedoms we are experiencing in the real world are going to be mirrored in the game worlds. In that sense, there will never be another Skyrim or Fallout 4 where you can just disappear into the game world for hours at a time. They are not in the business of doing that any more.
i agree that the terrain procedural generation is top notch. However, I still do think there are different ways to improvise the generation of POI's. Yes, 200 or so more POI's would certainly work. I would have really liked to see different planets or even system have their own set of POI's that can only be used there. For example, certain planets would be mining planets with outposts specifically mining. Maybe a planet is a base of operations for the crimson fleet, so each planet tile generation has a chance to generate a crimson fleet base. I feel like you could even decrease the amount of POI's on the planet, because with this implementation each planet has a little more identity. However, that's still a huge undertaking... 1000 planets = 1000 themes lol.
I say this as someone who does like Starfield a lot and gave it a 7.5/10 after 200+ hours: the exploration in the game is not good. I've been playing BGS games since Oblivion up to today and BGS is my favorite dev. Fallout 4 is (in my opinion) the gold standard for exploration in open world games. Starfield misses what made Fallout 4 and Skyrim so good exploration-wise. Everything is too spread out and disjointed. I'm not bothered by loading screens, but everything in the game requires a fast-travel load screen, so the exploration doesn't feel like you're doing anything at all. Repeat POIs kill the entire point of exploring--in Fallout 4, I knew if I went somewhere, I'd see something I've never seen before. In Starfield, I see a planet with 4 POIs that I've already seen 2 dozen times, meaning I don't care to explore. The cities in Starfield are cool, but even those don't have enough to offset the lackluster exploration of the rest of the game. The older games have a ton of environmental storytelling, which is mostly missing in Starfield, except in a few locations. Truthfully, BGS should've made the game have 10 planets or so and focus heavily on making them handcrafted like the Commonwealth or Skyrim. Sure, they can have barren planets with some random POIs on them, but the meat of the game needs to be the tightly-packed handcrafted content on a set of focused planets. A narrower scope would've helped this game out a lot.
The exploration in starfield is very, very bland. Which is a shame because I actually like the gunplay and movement compared to other Bethesda games. I really wanted to like this game but It’s just a chore to play at times. I feel like my personal wishlist to better the game is just too much to ask for, so I just gave up on it. Oh well, at least I’m playing Morrowind again
And to think that hundreds of (supposedly experienced) people worked on this game for nearly a decade. A huge part of this game is procedurally generated and a lot of assets are brought over from Fallout so what on Earth were they doing??
Are you seriously demanding 5000 workers work 24/7 to the bone for 7 years, so that Starfield has 1 "properly" hand crafted planet every 7 years? You sure are making us want to be disappointed by GTA 6, as well as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. This starfield game was 10/10 if youre IGN Japan, 9/10 if you didn't like bugs, 34/40 (85%) if you're Famitsu. 7/10 if you're the xbox hater IGN USA. But you ponies and pony appeasers ready to bow down for that trojan pony as it's wooden wheels squeak because Dr Disrespect and the like said they like their Starfield city of troy, but you want a fantasy of a daggerfall ("DEMOCRACY") up yours 💪pour its hollow wooden carcas into your shell of a home because you hate your family & neighbours.
No what the hell I didn't expect a whole 1:1 scale planet full of content but I thought we'll have at least 10 planets that's about one fifth of the size of Fallout 4's world. That's nothing crazy to ask for when something like Jedi Survivor took less than 4 years to complete and that game has roughly 50 hours worth of hand crafted content.
@@valentinvas6454 Todd mentioned he wanted a game like SunDog: Frozen Legacy, StarFlight (1991) etc. StarFlight had 270 star systems. Starfield only has 120 star systems.
Playing this game the first time was fucking magical and I loved it besides the constant loading screens after you beat it there's not much to do and like you said exploration just sucks.
It's a shame nobody could ask questions from Todd when he was boasting about being able to go to planets. I would have asked things like: Okay and how can I go to that planet and what can I find on that random planet?
In all the videos of Starfield I've seen, despite all the claims from Bethesda about planet exploration, I've not seen one planet that mirrors actual planets in our solar system aside from the bare basics. All the planets seem to be featureless moons or weird but livable biomes. No Gas Giants like Saturn, no acrid wastelands like Venus, no ice planets like Neptune. They have all these potentially interesting environments to draw from, to give the player interesting methods of exploration and interesting things to potentially find. And they can't, because their dated tech, bland writing and refusal to provide consequence to actions stops them dead.
I genuinely think the hollow 1000 flat worlds are the only innovative technical thing that starfield has done and thats only because nobody else was foolhardy enough to do it and its not even a good innovation
"genuinely think the hollow 1000 flat worlds are the only innovative technical thing" - good how many planets "X4" and "No Man's Sky" have. Millions of different (and pretty bland!) planets! So Starfield doesn't even do anything new here. 10 interesting planets > millions of bland ones
Seeing the same factory, the same 3 mines, the same cryogenics lab and the same science lab on every planet ruins immersion and kills your will to explore, so I agree with you.
I have seen the same corpse on the same couch on multiple worlds, it breaks immersion and going though the same cryogenics lab over and over again annoys me.
The reason Starfield is inferior to all their other RPGs is because all their other RPGs I could wander randomly in a direction and find interesting interactions. Starfield is void of that and that means it fails miserably as an open world rpg.
I agree in Starfield it is pointless to customize a ship when you barely use it, its just a customizable loading screen and cut scene, I wanted to fly my ship from planet surface to moon surface like a flight simulator but we don’t get that in StarField.
In a sci fi about ships your ship should be the main focus and not be treated like Skyrims horses and there are many things you could do in space besides space walks, scanning anomalies for one.
This game has been made by a comitee and has no soul. So it is a disjointed mess, and each of its parts toned down in order to "work" together. Look at the universe; some people wanted a "NASAPunk" style. And indeed the ships, and the city on Mars, or the small settlements and bases here and there respond to that style. But someone probably watched Firefly or played RDR2, and wanted to have space cowboys.. hence Akila, you know, this city where there is wood (tables, stairs etc...) everywhere because wood=western, on a planet without forests... And someone else was blown away by nightcity, so they added Neon. Neon is the most obvious offender when it comes to toned down style. They wanted a drug ravaged city, but we never see any addict. They wanted a nightclub but instead of exotic dancers had guys with ridiculous spantex alien costumes. The game systems also have this issue, it feels like teams where working ignoring what others where doing, and at the end their work had to be toned down: The fuel system still exists, but is vestigial. Same for the environmental hazards. Or many, many other systems. But yes, the most hearthbreaking, but not surprising, is that the exploration has been gutted. They had only 2 options really to do Starfield: 1/ They go the Mass Effect / Outer Worlds route: They make a small number of handcrafted open world maps 2/ They innovate and implement a space simulator in the game and have it seamless. If you think about the design issue, you will realize that you cannot make a Bethesda game including 1000 planets without implementing a space simulator, because you need to keep a constant "relative landmark concentration". The equation is simple actually. People need to stumble regularly on quality handcrafted content during their journey. So you have this simple calculation, which is speed of the player multiplied by the maximum time between each discovery, and this will inform you of the average distance between each landmark. The issue is that if you explore on foot, this means a landmark every 500 meters. Now you multiply this by the total size of the playable area (here 1000 planets wide ^^), and you realize you need a gazillion landmarks, so as a result they have use reusable templates. But had they implemented a space simulator, with which you would explore (instead of doing it on foot) the player speed could be completely different. Hence you could have only 2 or 3 landmarks per planet for example, but that would be ok, because exploration would take place with the spaceship at astronomical speed. Now I guess their enginr couldn't incorporate a space simulation. And they were too stuborn to take the logical conclusion here.
The unfortunate part about starfield and its planets when it comes to exploration is that they wanted to be faithful to real life planets. The reason there’s a lack of content in these planets is because there’s a lack of life and anything fucking interesting in the actual planets around us which is pretty depressing ngl. I get what Bethesda was going for in starfield it’s real life space exploration with SOME sci-fi elements. Unfortunately 90% of people including myself find that fucking boring so they ended up sacrificing what makes the people want to play their games which is the exploration.
That being said I’m not a fucking doomer like the rest of the Bethesda “fans”. I understand that both starfield and 76 were two ambitious and new ventures that Bethesda decided to do. They’ve never made an mmo and they never worked with procedural generation at this level before and unfortunately they failed at both. It’s my hope that TES6 will be that return to form that and will be that great Bethesda game that I’ve been waiting for since Skyrim. If they fuck up TES6 then I’ll join the rest of the doomers and say yeah Bethesda fucking sucks now.
I appreciate all the aliens they put in the game...but imagine if half of those aliens were instead put into adding more places to see and models to make more unique areas.
@raminMTL he's doin good. Ya know? This is Bobby tho. Jus got done changing Junior's diaper. Gettin ready to try that Ziti Janice brought ovah. Don't got my hopes up. Whattya gonna do? After that goin ovah to Paramus to check on that train set
Good thing I played the game myself because if I would have listened to most reviewers, I would have missed a great game on my view. People form your own opinions not that of others.
Starfield was a game that should've been like outerworld planets but bigger. And skyrm and fallout mixed in space, why i cant be a cat or a lizard this is space there are people called starborne and wierd gods, why is their no alien cat or lizard race or alien elf race. Crafting is just outright dumb, same as unique weapons, same as stats and perks. How can somone have a stat system worse than most games in 2000 its crazy. Perk wall is also crazy, why the heck i need a perk for to use the jetpack it literally on me since the start of the game, it has a thruster why is it perked walled. Man like what happened from skyrm to starfield in the perk and skill level, even Skyrim a decade old game was 5x or more better than starfield perk and skill level, also fallout was better.. Ha the hacking why hacking in lockpiking is the same, the worse part the have diffrent perks crazy Weapon stats are select the highest one. Also gear stats and talents, They dont give any real depghs The shop is so garbage like, why do i need to constantly wait for shop refresh. Also why on earth are ships so cheap in sell, why on earth do i even have the ability to steal ships when its pointless, and why on earth do vendors have pitiful gold numbers, when i need credits in the 10ks for a weapon alone on ships, economy is just straight up not functional in a basic level. Even New World had better economy at realease. This is a literal space game and these vendors have less to offer and less gold than Skyrim npcs at the food market. Just be the sex you want the game has a gender selection. No need for pronouns. Actually that the most offensive thing, pronouns are more developed than the actual game. I just eanted skyrm x fallout in space; well tbh everybody eanted and expexted that. Instead we got a bad copy paste of robot chicken in space made into a video game.
The funny thing is that all those things you stated about their previous games are things that I never really cared about, the worlds sucked, there was way too much just walking around, and not at all my jam. This game makes me happy, I love the game, I love the setting, and oh my goodness do I love the aesthetic of the starfield. This is the only BGS game I don’t need to mod it, in fact I love the vanilla game and I totes love the goody two shoes setting because I am not a twenty year old edge lord who wants to just be a piece of murdering, thieving, piece of shit person. I like a happy, non-dsytopian world. Yeah, I totes dig it and I think it really is an age thing. That and wanting to be a space adventurer more than anything ever, so yeah this game is the only BGS game where I am happy. I’ll take that over some crapsack, grimdark world.
Another funny thing, well several. One, y’all view their previous games through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia, they too had shit tons of loading screens, flat NPCs, meh stories, and needed mods to make them worth playing. Two, for all its supposed flaws STARFIELD beats STAR CITIZEN in the most important way; it shipped, it was actually published and is a functional real game. Call me when you’re not having 30k disconnects that lose all your stuff…oh and it actually ships, you know as a real published game. To quote garbage human but correct manager; real artists ship. And Mister Roberts ain’t shipped yet.
Ya made one good point, and then sadly ruined it because again you have that Johnny Space Ace need that frankly I find to be the dullest and worst part of space games; flying the damned ship. I want to command a starship, not fly it. I want to hire a damn pilot, have them doing the boring parts so I can enjoy walking around the ship I built and talk and interact with the crew I hired to work it. Flying is work not pleasure, I find it tedious and boring, and that’s without adding the combat aspect which I hate even more…because I don’t want to be a pilot. Yeah, ya almost had me but then you ruined it. *sigh* A lonely life command…
Skyrim was released more than 10 years ago, so Skyrim having loading screen is very acceptable at that time because the technology is not yet develop. Starfield was released in 2023, see the problem??!
@@rjproduction486 no, I honestly don’t which is my point. If it works, don’t fix it. But truth is given the expansiveness of the game world that just isn’t possible with the engine they’ve got and know. Again, this I think boils down to an age thing, me when I was young we had PONG or nothing so yeah shit like oh noes loading screens that last under five seconds are the end of world this is game sucks is well, crying over a minor inconvenience, basically a nothing burger of poor impulse control and a non-stop desire for instant gratification. I mean it is under five seconds and playing modded out FALLOUT 4 I had to wait an actual, full-on minute so in load screens so this like literally no time for me. Admittedly I haven’t modded it yet, but I probably won’t for some time because other than hating on those stupid and awful color filters they slap on their games all the time and every time to the games’ detriment, I love the game. It gave me what I wanted, a Bethesda sandbox, but…IN SPAAAACCCCEEE.
He's just appeasing the ponies. There's no wrong in the poi, or loading screens not even the 6 mile boundary (compared to the few meters of boundary in Helldivers 2).
the only way the game could possibly redeem itself a little is if the dlc is just a singular handcrafted world
Lol there is no way they are investing that much effort into a dlc...
its impossible the damn core of the game is shattered. no one wants to play just for a dlc and the rest lf the game to be pure ass
@@Vert_GreenHeart he wants a hand crafted world that would be 20,000 terabytes of data.
It took Bethesda a full month and 250 devs to implement a simple FOV slider, what makes you think they can deliver something with a DLC? Lmao
@@detectivemadoka69420 fancy seeing you here.
Honestly, I would rather they had limited the game to one solar system with maybe 5 planets to explore, all which were as detailed and hand crafted as Skyrim or Fallout, rather than what we got, 1000 boring procedurally generated planets and moons with the same cut and paste outposts.
sounds like they originally planned to only be like 20 planets but once they realized they could make a few systems easily they could add more with little trouble.
Hand crafted like skyrim and fallout you say lol. Those games aren't handcrafted either. They are nothing but small rule of cool theme parks with shit world building.
they probably could have kept the procedurally generated planets we have as empty worlds in a sort of 'land beyond' - like maybe there are a handful of solar systems humanity has really put roots into and the rest of space is mysterious and empty. I think the difference between that and what we have now is that the worlds should be handcrafted as much as possible, and most of the missions should be set on these worlds rather than just random lifeless rocks with like two creatures. It's almost like they didn't give us land transport because they knew there was nothing to explore.
I lost all respect for Todd Howard and Bethesda.
Why? They made one mid game and that’s it? They tried something new and failed does that really warrant loss of respect? They’re still the creators of Skyrim, morrowind, Oblivion, fallout 3 and 4. I just don’t get it.
@@Guava11534 It's more than one mid game.
I had a blast on my first play through. I enjoyed the faction quests for what they were and I loved playing around in the ship builder.
However.
When I branched out to start exploring, I maybe put away 10-20 hours in exploring planets BUT I quickly learned that once you’ve seen one abandon research post, you’ve seen them all, no matter how far to the edge of the galaxy you go. It killed any motivation or desire to fling my massive warship to the edge of the known universe to see what’s out there. Instead I never ventured out past the UC or Freestar systems unless a quest took me to a system.
Bethesda definitely went for the quantity over quality with starfield.
16:05 “This feeling is…”
TH-cam suddenly interrupts with an advert for L’Oréal hair.
🤣
Simple narratives are fine if u have characters with depth. Unfortunately starfield lacks this and it shows
I remember when procedural generation tech is new and people celebrated how this will cut down development time, I warned them that they always could end up keeping rolling 1s.
I feel like Bethesda wanted to make a big open space that the modders could then add into. I see the benefit in that, but it makes the game at launch feel terrible. It also feels exploitative towards the modern community to do the world building instead of the actual game company
I honestly believe they would have been better served by going with 100 or so and spending far more time on building each into something interesting.
I thought I was watching a creator with a few hundred k subs. 5k? I hope you make it big man. Quality video 😎
I'm not a Bethesda fan boy. But I am a 67 year old Skyrim fan boy. I played Skyrim since Special Addition came out and 95% of that play time is a modded Skyrim. But Starfield? Well, I was hopeful that an 8 year development would ultimately give us a polished game. I played 74.5 hours over 3 weeks and uninstalled it. I give the game a 4.5/10 and that's for the art department because the game looks pretty good. Excepting water.
The game was over hyped, falsely advertised (simply listen to Todd explaining all the cool exploration we can't do), horrible optimization, no immersion, uses a crap engine, totally crap UI, bug filled, glitch filled, crashes, repetitive, boring, broken stealth, horrible perk system, janky base building (with little instruction), janky ship building (with little instruction), copy/pasted POI's, absolutely dreadful and contradictory companions who don't care who or what you are other than you're important and get in your way if they're part of your ships crew, no-name citizens that walk back and forth on an invisible tether and many times get in your way, weak main and side missions, overloaded cut scenes and load screens, mediocre gun play with bullet sponge targets that remind me of 2007's S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl. Really bad circa 2011 AI. There are no real role playing choices with consequences. Any choice you make still takes you on the direction Bethesda wants you to take. Thus, the traits and abilities you pick in character generation have little to no benefit. There is no depth or relevance to this game and its components. This game has no role playing despite it being labeled an RPG.
This game has no soul. There's no hook like the opening of Skyrim or Fallout 4. The cringe writing is testament to this. The mind-shattering and pivotal reveal of the game is not mind-shattering or pivotal. It has no effect on your characters needs or wants; in short it's fraking broken. Nothing can fix this now other than a complete rewrite of at least the first act but then, either way, it's just too late. How can the player get excitedly involved in the artifacts? Why? There's no reason to do so other than to just simply do it. Why are the Starborn doing the same thing? Because...reasons we're never privy to. Why is every member of Constellation expecting you to jump through Unity and leave everything in your current universe behind, even perhaps your wife or girlfriend or husband? What manner of non-empathy to anyone must Constellation members have? How is going through Unity a boon or change to humanity? Or even to your character?
The junk items you can pick up are pointless, extremely underwhelming carry weight, arbitrary level farming to mend/boost your XP/perks/ money, vendors with little money, NO MAPS, companions scolding you one after the other because you chose the dialog Bethesda didn't want you too, more loading screens in five minutes of play than the entirety of Elden Ring, 300 years of human fiction with nothing to really show for it, no challenging locations or bosses worthy of the name or worthy to fight. And no reason to actually make an outpost to farm stuff because you can simply purchase it at a vendor unless you want to pad your levels. A "2023 next gen game" with 2006 water graphics?
Starfield is fundamentally flawed on so many levels. It is NOT open world. It's plagued with bad game design decisions, half baked systems, bland & uninspired writing and outdated quest design. It isn't "Skyrim in Space", nor is it "Fallout in Space". Starfield is a downgraded, mediocre and soulless mixture of Skyrim & Fallout 4, without the free world exploration and the charm of neither. It's a regression from Bethesdas previous titles in all aspects and the saddest part is that it took them 8 years to create this piece of mediocrity with unparalleled boredom. Mario Cart is more fun than the spaceship battles in Starfield.
What's even worse is that devs had ALL the creative freedom to write whatever the hell they wanted; there is no established lore that restricts them from going crazy. And yet they went for the most banal unimaginative take on sci-fi. Funny thing with Londinium - I decided to try landing randomly on the planet, ignored the UC ship telling me to stay away and menu clicked my way down there. As soon as I got out, another random ship came a few hundred metres away, as they do. I wandered over, found it was a Freestar Ship that had landed at a "small settlement" or something like that. On Londinium. The planet that was quarantined because it was over-run with monsters. Sigh. Later, I’m desperate to complete the main quest so I can finally uninstall. I made it to the buried temple - which is of course just another copy paste junkyard. Sarah said she wanted to speak to me and told me that Barrett was worried about her back at the lodge. Well, Barrett fraking died on the Eye when the Hunter attacked about 30 hours ago! What little immersion I had left was instantly taken away! TLDR; Abysmal writing.
The worst part is they made a world (worlds) that were already explored. It all feels like we were late to the party. Every planet is littered with copy/pasted factory’s and outposts, you are never more than a 1000 meters from a structure. The whole colonial war already happened and you just get to hear about all the cool interesting events that already occurred. No matter how far you go, there are almost always humans waiting for you there. Even the plants & wildlife that you need to scan already have names. Therefore, locations have already been discovered in the past.
What really burns my backside is that New Game + merely allows you to replay the game over again with the same or different companions; ie., Sarah becomes a potted plant, all the Constellation members are children and I think the very worst is all the Constellation members are you with different personalities (and that's to name just three of the 10 or so variations you get). Not only that, when it comes to the writing and consequences of going through the Unity, Sam Coe's questline revolves around restoring a relationship with Cora's mother, Lillian Hart, yet when it comes to the Unity, Sam shows not the slightest consideration of Lillian in allowing young Cora to go through the Unity. I would think she would be devastated. Also, if you do NG+ to bring all 24 powers to level 10, that means you'd have to jump through 1200 glowy-glitter things in 240 temples. No, thanks.
This game was labeled as "Next generation" gameplay? Don't stop to think Bethesda will fix anything other than the most egregious problems and that modders can "fix" the game when Bethesda won't. I've come to the realization that the game is fundamentally flawed in a way that no mod or update can actually fix. It's the base level structures of the game that are so unappealing. Modders can come very close to it, but I don't see that as a modders unpaid job. An example would be that modders made Skyrim better. But they didn't "fix" it. As I sit now with 74.5 hours into Starfield, I honestly don't think I'll ever play this game again. At least not without a Cyberpunk 2.0 and DLC type upgrade or a complete rewrite.
And this Bethesda mediocrity has me very worried for Elder Scroll 6. Don't settle for mediocrity.
Well said. Same kind of feeling here
Good vid! Starfield is essentially (and sadly) a glorified game of "Fetch"; and then there's the game within the game...trying to traverse the literal "obstacle" course of bugs and poor mission design. I don't recall a game with so many work-arounds! Personally, I think an edited version couldn't hurt.
When I play Starfield my Xbox starts going into sleep mode by itself. I know how it feels. I think Starfield is the video game worlds way of telling us that the loss of freedoms we are experiencing in the real world are going to be mirrored in the game worlds. In that sense, there will never be another Skyrim or Fallout 4 where you can just disappear into the game world for hours at a time. They are not in the business of doing that any more.
There can be another open world RPG like Skyrim. Might already be in development. Just not trusting Bethesda to do it.
It took forever to play this game because you had to walk long distances just to get to locations
i agree that the terrain procedural generation is top notch. However, I still do think there are different ways to improvise the generation of POI's. Yes, 200 or so more POI's would certainly work. I would have really liked to see different planets or even system have their own set of POI's that can only be used there. For example, certain planets would be mining planets with outposts specifically mining. Maybe a planet is a base of operations for the crimson fleet, so each planet tile generation has a chance to generate a crimson fleet base. I feel like you could even decrease the amount of POI's on the planet, because with this implementation each planet has a little more identity. However, that's still a huge undertaking... 1000 planets = 1000 themes lol.
I say this as someone who does like Starfield a lot and gave it a 7.5/10 after 200+ hours: the exploration in the game is not good. I've been playing BGS games since Oblivion up to today and BGS is my favorite dev. Fallout 4 is (in my opinion) the gold standard for exploration in open world games. Starfield misses what made Fallout 4 and Skyrim so good exploration-wise.
Everything is too spread out and disjointed. I'm not bothered by loading screens, but everything in the game requires a fast-travel load screen, so the exploration doesn't feel like you're doing anything at all. Repeat POIs kill the entire point of exploring--in Fallout 4, I knew if I went somewhere, I'd see something I've never seen before. In Starfield, I see a planet with 4 POIs that I've already seen 2 dozen times, meaning I don't care to explore. The cities in Starfield are cool, but even those don't have enough to offset the lackluster exploration of the rest of the game. The older games have a ton of environmental storytelling, which is mostly missing in Starfield, except in a few locations.
Truthfully, BGS should've made the game have 10 planets or so and focus heavily on making them handcrafted like the Commonwealth or Skyrim. Sure, they can have barren planets with some random POIs on them, but the meat of the game needs to be the tightly-packed handcrafted content on a set of focused planets. A narrower scope would've helped this game out a lot.
Time for another does of my anti-Bethesda schadenfreude.
The exploration in starfield is very, very bland. Which is a shame because I actually like the gunplay and movement compared to other Bethesda games. I really wanted to like this game but It’s just a chore to play at times. I feel like my personal wishlist to better the game is just too much to ask for, so I just gave up on it. Oh well, at least I’m playing Morrowind again
Emil has been with the company for decades which is mind-boggling to me, however there have been other writers involved in the past
And to think that hundreds of (supposedly experienced) people worked on this game for nearly a decade.
A huge part of this game is procedurally generated and a lot of assets are brought over from Fallout so what on Earth were they doing??
Are you seriously demanding 5000 workers work 24/7 to the bone for 7 years, so that Starfield has 1 "properly" hand crafted planet every 7 years?
You sure are making us want to be disappointed by GTA 6, as well as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
This starfield game was 10/10 if youre IGN Japan, 9/10 if you didn't like bugs, 34/40 (85%) if you're Famitsu. 7/10 if you're the xbox hater IGN USA.
But you ponies and pony appeasers ready to bow down for that trojan pony as it's wooden wheels squeak because Dr Disrespect and the like said they like their Starfield city of troy, but you want a fantasy of a daggerfall ("DEMOCRACY") up yours 💪pour its hollow wooden carcas into your shell of a home because you hate your family & neighbours.
No what the hell I didn't expect a whole 1:1 scale planet full of content but I thought we'll have at least 10 planets that's about one fifth of the size of Fallout 4's world. That's nothing crazy to ask for when something like Jedi Survivor took less than 4 years to complete and that game has roughly 50 hours worth of hand crafted content.
@@valentinvas6454 Todd mentioned he wanted a game like SunDog: Frozen Legacy, StarFlight (1991) etc. StarFlight had 270 star systems. Starfield only has 120 star systems.
Playing this game the first time was fucking magical and I loved it besides the constant loading screens after you beat it there's not much to do and like you said exploration just sucks.
Yeah omg you actually have to _"explore"_
It's a shame nobody could ask questions from Todd when he was boasting about being able to go to planets. I would have asked things like:
Okay and how can I go to that planet and what can I find on that random planet?
@@valentinvas6454what sucks is that most interviews like that have a script or a specific set of questions they are supposed to ask
Not being able to fly through space in a space game was the killer for me. As you said in your video, ships are useless and have no purpose.
In all the videos of Starfield I've seen, despite all the claims from Bethesda about planet exploration, I've not seen one planet that mirrors actual planets in our solar system aside from the bare basics. All the planets seem to be featureless moons or weird but livable biomes. No Gas Giants like Saturn, no acrid wastelands like Venus, no ice planets like Neptune. They have all these potentially interesting environments to draw from, to give the player interesting methods of exploration and interesting things to potentially find.
And they can't, because their dated tech, bland writing and refusal to provide consequence to actions stops them dead.
I genuinely think the hollow 1000 flat worlds are the only innovative technical thing that starfield has done and thats only because nobody else was foolhardy enough to do it and its not even a good innovation
"genuinely think the hollow 1000 flat worlds are the only innovative technical thing" - good how many planets "X4" and "No Man's Sky" have. Millions of different (and pretty bland!) planets!
So Starfield doesn't even do anything new here.
10 interesting planets > millions of bland ones
The key here is IMMERSION
Seeing the same factory, the same 3 mines, the same cryogenics lab and the same science lab on every planet ruins immersion and kills your will to explore, so I agree with you.
I have seen the same corpse on the same couch on multiple worlds, it breaks immersion and going though the same cryogenics lab over and over again annoys me.
"We want to say yes to the player as much as possible" Very few games say so much no to the player like starfield does.
The reason Starfield is inferior to all their other RPGs is because all their other RPGs I could wander randomly in a direction and find interesting interactions. Starfield is void of that and that means it fails miserably as an open world rpg.
6:54 oh dear Lord :D :D
And having 100 unique planets with good quests and interesting NPCs would be enough.
I agree in Starfield it is pointless to customize a ship when you barely use it, its just a customizable loading screen and cut scene, I wanted to fly my ship from planet surface to moon surface like a flight simulator but we don’t get that in StarField.
In a sci fi about ships your ship should be the main focus and not be treated like Skyrims horses and there are many things you could do in space besides space walks, scanning anomalies for one.
This game has been made by a comitee and has no soul. So it is a disjointed mess, and each of its parts toned down in order to "work" together.
Look at the universe; some people wanted a "NASAPunk" style. And indeed the ships, and the city on Mars, or the small settlements and bases here and there respond to that style.
But someone probably watched Firefly or played RDR2, and wanted to have space cowboys.. hence Akila, you know, this city where there is wood (tables, stairs etc...) everywhere because wood=western, on a planet without forests...
And someone else was blown away by nightcity, so they added Neon.
Neon is the most obvious offender when it comes to toned down style. They wanted a drug ravaged city, but we never see any addict. They wanted a nightclub but instead of exotic dancers had guys with ridiculous spantex alien costumes.
The game systems also have this issue, it feels like teams where working ignoring what others where doing, and at the end their work had to be toned down:
The fuel system still exists, but is vestigial.
Same for the environmental hazards.
Or many, many other systems.
But yes, the most hearthbreaking, but not surprising, is that the exploration has been gutted.
They had only 2 options really to do Starfield:
1/ They go the Mass Effect / Outer Worlds route: They make a small number of handcrafted open world maps
2/ They innovate and implement a space simulator in the game and have it seamless. If you think about the design issue, you will realize that you cannot make a Bethesda game including 1000 planets without implementing a space simulator, because you need to keep a constant "relative landmark concentration".
The equation is simple actually. People need to stumble regularly on quality handcrafted content during their journey. So you have this simple calculation, which is speed of the player multiplied by the maximum time between each discovery, and this will inform you of the average distance between each landmark.
The issue is that if you explore on foot, this means a landmark every 500 meters.
Now you multiply this by the total size of the playable area (here 1000 planets wide ^^), and you realize you need a gazillion landmarks, so as a result they have use reusable templates.
But had they implemented a space simulator, with which you would explore (instead of doing it on foot) the player speed could be completely different.
Hence you could have only 2 or 3 landmarks per planet for example, but that would be ok, because exploration would take place with the spaceship at astronomical speed.
Now I guess their enginr couldn't incorporate a space simulation. And they were too stuborn to take the logical conclusion here.
Just found your channel today. Some of the best videos I’ve ever watched. Keep up the work bro
Amazing stuff, I really enjoyed watching this video keep it up!
Thanks a lot!
Quality is crazy for 5k subs, keep it up
The unfortunate part about starfield and its planets when it comes to exploration is that they wanted to be faithful to real life planets. The reason there’s a lack of content in these planets is because there’s a lack of life and anything fucking interesting in the actual planets around us which is pretty depressing ngl. I get what Bethesda was going for in starfield it’s real life space exploration with SOME sci-fi elements. Unfortunately 90% of people including myself find that fucking boring so they ended up sacrificing what makes the people want to play their games which is the exploration.
That being said I’m not a fucking doomer like the rest of the Bethesda “fans”. I understand that both starfield and 76 were two ambitious and new ventures that Bethesda decided to do. They’ve never made an mmo and they never worked with procedural generation at this level before and unfortunately they failed at both. It’s my hope that TES6 will be that return to form that and will be that great Bethesda game that I’ve been waiting for since Skyrim. If they fuck up TES6 then I’ll join the rest of the doomers and say yeah Bethesda fucking sucks now.
As Bethesda's Pete Hines put it, "Starfield only gets good after you complete the main story".
I appreciate all the aliens they put in the game...but imagine if half of those aliens were instead put into adding more places to see and models to make more unique areas.
take it easy with that title. we're not making a western here
Junior !
@@xman777b How's Junior, Junior?
@raminMTL he's doin good. Ya know? This is Bobby tho. Jus got done changing Junior's diaper. Gettin ready to try that Ziti Janice brought ovah. Don't got my hopes up. Whattya gonna do? After that goin ovah to Paramus to check on that train set
@@xman777b how many white castles did you have watching this video?
With 7 or 8 handcrafted worlds it could have been memorable
"Starfield has the most handcrafted content we have ever done" Yeah sure.
Starfield just an exploration game with zero exploration experience.
No man's sky's exploration was so much better.
This content is great! I’d love to play this game but my hardware isn’t good enough. Heard Boosteroid could help!
Is that star citizen music in the background lol
What a wonderful video
1000 planets but only 50 different pois
It just works
10:20 SC music spotted
No man sky does this and it's all free dlc bruh
Good thing I played the game myself because if I would have listened to most reviewers, I would have missed a great game on my view. People form your own opinions not that of others.
Sorry, having played this game, I'm thinking this video is copium. Starfield is baaad, really bad.
im just saying some of the visuals are so awsome
FFS BGS
LISTEN
TO
CRITISISM
Bad video, but it's your opinion.
haha you mentioned star citizen
"Promo SM" 🙌
Starfield was a game that should've been like outerworld planets but bigger.
And skyrm and fallout mixed in space, why i cant be a cat or a lizard this is space there are people called starborne and wierd gods, why is their no alien cat or lizard race or alien elf race.
Crafting is just outright dumb, same as unique weapons, same as stats and perks.
How can somone have a stat system worse than most games in 2000 its crazy.
Perk wall is also crazy, why the heck i need a perk for to use the jetpack it literally on me since the start of the game, it has a thruster why is it perked walled.
Man like what happened from skyrm to starfield in the perk and skill level, even Skyrim a decade old game was 5x or more better than starfield perk and skill level, also fallout was better..
Ha the hacking why hacking in lockpiking is the same, the worse part the have diffrent perks crazy
Weapon stats are select the highest one.
Also gear stats and talents, They dont give any real depghs
The shop is so garbage like, why do i need to constantly wait for shop refresh.
Also why on earth are ships so cheap in sell, why on earth do i even have the ability to steal ships when its pointless, and why on earth do vendors have pitiful gold numbers, when i need credits in the 10ks for a weapon alone on ships, economy is just straight up not functional in a basic level.
Even New World had better economy at realease.
This is a literal space game and these vendors have less to offer and less gold than Skyrim npcs at the food market.
Just be the sex you want the game has a gender selection. No need for pronouns.
Actually that the most offensive thing, pronouns are more developed than the actual game.
I just eanted skyrm x fallout in space; well tbh everybody eanted and expexted that.
Instead we got a bad copy paste of robot chicken in space made into a video game.
The funny thing is that all those things you stated about their previous games are things that I never really cared about, the worlds sucked, there was way too much just walking around, and not at all my jam. This game makes me happy, I love the game, I love the setting, and oh my goodness do I love the aesthetic of the starfield. This is the only BGS game I don’t need to mod it, in fact I love the vanilla game and I totes love the goody two shoes setting because I am not a twenty year old edge lord who wants to just be a piece of murdering, thieving, piece of shit person. I like a happy, non-dsytopian world. Yeah, I totes dig it and I think it really is an age thing. That and wanting to be a space adventurer more than anything ever, so yeah this game is the only BGS game where I am happy. I’ll take that over some crapsack, grimdark world.
Another funny thing, well several. One, y’all view their previous games through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia, they too had shit tons of loading screens, flat NPCs, meh stories, and needed mods to make them worth playing.
Two, for all its supposed flaws STARFIELD beats STAR CITIZEN in the most important way; it shipped, it was actually published and is a functional real game. Call me when you’re not having 30k disconnects that lose all your stuff…oh and it actually ships, you know as a real published game. To quote garbage human but correct manager; real artists ship. And Mister Roberts ain’t shipped yet.
Ya made one good point, and then sadly ruined it because again you have that Johnny Space Ace need that frankly I find to be the dullest and worst part of space games; flying the damned ship. I want to command a starship, not fly it. I want to hire a damn pilot, have them doing the boring parts so I can enjoy walking around the ship I built and talk and interact with the crew I hired to work it. Flying is work not pleasure, I find it tedious and boring, and that’s without adding the combat aspect which I hate even more…because I don’t want to be a pilot. Yeah, ya almost had me but then you ruined it. *sigh* A lonely life command…
Skyrim was released more than 10 years ago, so Skyrim having loading screen is very acceptable at that time because the technology is not yet develop.
Starfield was released in 2023, see the problem??!
@@rjproduction486 no, I honestly don’t which is my point. If it works, don’t fix it. But truth is given the expansiveness of the game world that just isn’t possible with the engine they’ve got and know. Again, this I think boils down to an age thing, me when I was young we had PONG or nothing so yeah shit like oh noes loading screens that last under five seconds are the end of world this is game sucks is well, crying over a minor inconvenience, basically a nothing burger of poor impulse control and a non-stop desire for instant gratification. I mean it is under five seconds and playing modded out FALLOUT 4 I had to wait an actual, full-on minute so in load screens so this like literally no time for me. Admittedly I haven’t modded it yet, but I probably won’t for some time because other than hating on those stupid and awful color filters they slap on their games all the time and every time to the games’ detriment, I love the game. It gave me what I wanted, a Bethesda sandbox, but…IN SPAAAACCCCEEE.
Dude u hate everything.
Criticizing != hating ;-)
OK we get it, Skyrim good, Starfield bad!
th-cam.com/video/GM0tpk5II4s/w-d-xo.htmlsi=7CVLgBlDD8A5SysV
You literally said it wouldn't suck, welcome to AAA games, where quality is non-existent
He's just appeasing the ponies. There's no wrong in the poi, or loading screens not even the 6 mile boundary (compared to the few meters of boundary in Helldivers 2).