I mean, look at how they do Fallout, which takes place 200 years after the nukes. The OG Fallouts took place only 50 years after the bombs and the cities there feel much more developed and advanced than Rivet City or Diamond City. For Todd's sake, there's still skeletons lying around in these cities after 200 years!
That's a common thing in scifi. And it makes sense. You can't run a phone line between two planets, or even between two asteroids. For instance, it takes about 2.5 seconds for a radio transmission to make it from earth to the moon. And that *can't* go any faster, because Radio's already moving at the speed of light. And if you can't create an FTL ansible, then you can't do real-time ftl communications. So sci-fi authors came up with solutions. Couriers, and courier torpedos. Basically either have a guy going from system to system, and then blasting the new system with a message pulse as soon as they exit FTL. Or an ftl drive in a torpedo that does the same thing.
That and the lack of some sort of ubiquitous PDA/Pip-Boy/Smart Phone style device (the watch doesn't count). Not long after the first few times I was asked to fly to another fucking galaxy to deliver a message for someone, I wondered, hmm, why don't they have comms relays that are essentially grav drives that collect incoming transmissions, then bounce to receivers in other galaxies. Unless I missed it, I was expecting a lore tidbit to answer why not. Bethesda really can't realize a play environment that isn't pre-modern, post-apocalypse, or actively engulfed in war and it's stunning that early in development they didn't realize they ought to place the setting in the middle of the colony wars for an immediate and easy answer to obvious world building issues that arise.
@@TheNotSoLoneWandererYou just put more thought into the worldbuilding than the whole writing team did. It's probably the most uninspired scifi setting that exists, like if your HR department googled genre tropes for a few hours and strung them together in the most inoffensive and simplistic way possible. I'm having trouble thinking of a single element of this game that is original or at all interesting. So disappointing..
@TheNotSoLoneWanderer yeah. Or at least courier probes and then far communication in system. Grav drive probe jumps loaded with digital mail to other galaxies and systems and then it gets transmitted in system. Having to land to hand deliver news is weird. Make it a plot point when pirates or others are disrupting the communication systems or really important plot stuff has to be hand delivered for security
I almost shut the game off permanently when I discovered the _only_ way to steal the trophy on the cruise-ship was to straight up ask the person (who is established to treat the trophy like a child) to hand you the key to the safe it's in, then you show your face to the guard who's sole responsibility is to guard that safe, and they watch you steal it in front of their eyes. I was staggered by the laziness of that one quest, to the point of quitting right then and there.
What about the police investigation quest where you can't even talk to the suspect, they literally don't exist. You go talk to the man who reported the crime only to find the outfit the suspect was reported wearing in his bin at work and emails on his computer incriminating him. You don't even need to bait him away from the computer to read the emails. He just leaves it alone on his own. I was excited to have some police work in the game, thought I could solve a few crimes or other stuff. Yet there's only like 4? and they are all incredibly shallow and petty. The last one or two is locked off by an entire faction questline aswell. Then the guy is all like "The stuff you did made other people want to join up. So you're out of the job, get lost." Or how you are offered to join the guy who wants to betray the pirate leader but you have literally no option to actually join him and then you can't even tell the leader about the guys plans. You can only tell them the guy was useless or helpful which entirely determins whether that guy gets to join up or not. Even if he's rejected he hangs around the station for a bit and even threatens you. If you retaliate to his threats the entire station turns hostile towards YOU, the actual member, in defence of the rejected outsider you couldn't even tell them was planning to betray them.
The terrormorph reveal is the dumbest thing to me. In a universe where we've mastered genetics to the point anyone can pay cheap money to change their entire physical appearance no one ever thought to check the DNA samples of the single most prolific species humanity has ever encountered with the single most dangerous one? Jesus they even fucking look alike in the face. They have the DNA on file, hell they had an entire science branch dedicated to them. No one, not one intern, not one grad student, not one fucking scientist anywhere got curious enough to compare the DNA and see how they matched up?
@@Mrnoonions1234are you sure they had dna on them? Every scientist who has come in contact with a terrormorph died to said terrormorph and on that planet the guy killed everyone who knew the leeches turned in them.
Starfield came out feeling like a game that was 12 years past its release date. "Go to the big capitol of the system!" Arrive and it's got 2 landing pads, a coffee shop, and then a loading screen between districts. After 40 hours or so walking between loading screens I quit and went back to Cyberpunk, at least Night City feels like an actual city and half my playtime isn't navigating to loading screens.
The only thing that I found fun about Starfield was the shipbuilding. _Unfortunately_ the space combat is poorly balanced. You're always outnumbered and outgunned, so your only option to survive until you can get the *good* ships and parts is to simply... not engage with that part of the game... while _also_ building your character to be good at space stuff... to the detriment of the non-space stuff you are _actually doing just to level._
@@asherplease1957 For sure. Fighting three-to-one (or more) on the ground isn't bad because you always have cover. But the space combat obviously doesn't have that.
It's super frustrating because you have to reach perk points locked all the way at the end to get what you need for a really good ship of your own. Pointless. @@jodinsan
The idea that there are two massive warring factions in space who have an uneasy ceasefire and there's some new super power discovered in the universe that make you have godlike powers and neither faction even bats an eye at it and there's no part of the main or side story where war breaks out is like Chekhov's gun on steroids.
@@concept5631 Chekhov's gun that never shoots, making a big plot point kinda usless. Called after russian producer by the name of Bondarchuk for making it way too common in his work.
@@concept5631 yeah the dude's kinda big around here, known for being a 5hitty director, biggest thing he ever achieved was a bootleg fullmetal jacket copy about the afghan war.
Bethesda has been creatively bankrupt for years now. Between Todd's vision and Emil writing, i weep for TES6. Its going to be a slap in the face to fans.
i been thinking that since fallout 4 and was mocked relentlessly for it by friends, and now it's a commonly shared sentiment, i love Starfield only because it vindicated me lol
@@katsu1715 Fanboyism in video games is a big problem. All these manbabies don't want to admit the studio who made their favorite games could have fallen so far. But with Starfield, even they can't cling to their denial any longer.
@@Hero_Of_Oldsad isn’t it? I fell out of love with Fallout. I don’t want to do the same with Elder Scrolls. They can end it now as a legendary series. I cannot imagine how they can beat expectations even if they hadn’t been going downhill for over a decade.
Going back to cyberpunk playing with PT and just walking down one street in Japan town blasts every single location size wise and aesthetics wise in starfield
Constellation: a thin shadow of a guild for a thin shadow of a game. It's almost impressive how Bethesda never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Should have called it Starfaçade.
@@capin8067I haven’t seen any criticism of the dark brotherhood storyline if that’s what you’re referring to. He’s probably a good writer but he’s not a good lead is all its not that deep
The only thing Todd can imagine humanity is done after 100-300 years is ether a scrap town with a rudimentary water system and a bomb, or two skyscrapers and a bar
As much as I dislike Todd's toxic positivity and lies he's not the one responsible for the crappy writing. The blame lies solely at Emil Pagliarulo's feet-a guy who should've never been promoted beyond quest designer. He's their lead writer now.
@@DBWave94 Todd was a Game Director for a Starfield, Fallout 3, 4, Skyrim and Morrowind. Sure writers can be bad, but I imaggine that Todd as a game director had a last say on things. But I could be wrong, so hit me with a stick if I am
@@kamikazehound3243 Cowboys in space makes total sense when you think about when Red Dead Redemption 2 was release. Likewise Neon City make sense when you think when Cyberpunk was released.
I'm an ameteur writer and I can write something better and more exciting as well, but is it a surprise when the guy in charge of writing and creativity for the game, Emil, apparently hates actual writers and creativity thinking it should be K.I.S.S.? I'm sorry but KISS mentality does not belong in writing. It belong in engineering or the tech field where you want to make sure whatever you build or maintain remains safe and doesn't cause death. In writing you need to know how to be complex and abstarct while also knowing your audience and that they will be able to imagine or visual what you write. However, obviously Emil has no imagniation.
Yes Abraham a game is always just an abstraction so it should always be leaving you thinking wondering more that it actually has. Should let your brain fill in the empty parts but it should draw an outline.
33:20 the real reason earth had to be destroyed is because Bethesda was lazy and didn't want to completely recreate the earth, or even partially recreate it.
they took this strange approach where rather than implying distant cities and structures, they mostly only rendered things you could reach and interact with. But the scope of a space game means that you can't really do that for 100% of every single planet. So instead they just left the rest of it unbuilt and uninhabited. Which makes it all feel so empty. Cyberpunk 77's Night City, for all its flaws, is mostly buildings you can't enter, but you get the impression of a huge city that's alive
Because it’s super easy recreating the entirety of Earth while retaining the formula that you can land anywhere on a planet. I’m sure it was just being lazy. Firefly had a similar plot where humans left Earth cause it was drained, nobody complained about that.
@@tarheelpro87but you cant labd anywhere. You land on a randomly generated square mile. It wouldnt have been that hard to create a randomly generated earth in a 1 mile area.
One of the most criminal things about this game that wasn’t brought up in the video is the fact that the powers you get from the temples are rehashed shouts from the elder scrolls games. They couldn’t even make up a more creative name than starborn which is literally the same as Dragonborn like make it less on the nose how lazy this games development was
@@dodojesus4529 That would be really funny. But I wonder how long it will take until we see something substantial. Bethesda seems to still be tinkering with the release of the Creation Kit, probably because they somehow want to get more control over the mods created with it to monetize the mod "market" from the very beginning.
@@dodojesus4529to be fair, starborn would be fine as a name in isolation had Skyrim not exist. I can only hope they were trying to tap into Skyrim nostalgia but omg.. it feels so cheap
Man, I couldn’t even be bothered to complete the opening mission. The narrative whiplash I got with a stranger trusting ME with THEIR SPACESHIP after only knowing me for 30 SECONDS was just… too much. It felt so contrived and I already wasn’t having any fun so I quit out of the game and haven’t touched it since.
@@jimbroaudio Literally my experience as well. I spent more time waiting for it to download than actually playing it. What immediately killed the game for me was the joke that is “space travel” and lack of gore on enemies. I was *not* putting in the effort to learn the games mechanics when the game didn’t put any effort into hooking me
@@StridersBored I remember watching day one gameplay of a streamer playing and what's extra funny is you could just stand still and the enemies would still miss you and stop moving once you moved your crosshair over them.
@@facetubetwit1444 The man is a millionaire, turst me, he's laughing that people are still stupid enough to still buy his games, and if they weren't, he'd still be a millionaire
I knew Starfield was toast when someone said that you were better served taking that $70 and buying the Mass Effect trilogy and some Ratchet & Clank games
A crack in time is oddly a better space game lol, considering it does exploration better with its planetoids (did smooth landings on those) and does the same in orbit in space thing that starfield does. PS3 game with better game design than Todd's dream game 8 year in the making and 20 years in his brain lol
The whole game was zero consequences... my saddest moment was doing the neon cyberpunk ripoff sidestory, that felt so tiny... so weak, not like a megacorp but more like a tiny town in fallout. Many quests "consequences" were like oh many years from now this will make a difference.... the worst one was that I fully expected hostile factions, NCR vs Legion style, but its a universe in peace, we were promised Zealots, you litterally encounter them twice... the other two factions are at peace as well... Like how are they supporting spaceships with a cowboy style town that supports 10k people at most. Whats with mars colony with 10 npcs... Sigh... the just failed at scope big time, if Mass Effect could get scope across then how did this game failed so badly.
At first I was really excited for that questline, I was hoping it would give me a chance to play a real corpo which Cyberpunk never did. Well, I got my wish. But it was just fast traveling back and forth between planets to tell some dude some thing and then go back and tell them what they said and so on and so forth... do they not have phones or any form of interstelllar communication besides going there yourself? And I'm just left still wanting that game that gives me a chance to play out some real corporate espionage in an RPG.
Yeah one thing that immediately bothered me about starfield was how they marketed it so heavily on exploration except every single planet you travel to has already been explored by humans with a bunch of space junk and outposts laying around. What exactly are we exploring here????
It's like being one of those 'urban explorers' who trespass in dangerously dilapidated old buildings. Boldly going where loads of people have been, but nobody else needs or wants to go anymore.
@@sambeckett2428to be fair you'd probably find a more interesting story and lore to the trash in the trashcan of an abandoned building than Bethesda can provide
@@MrNote-lz7lh to some extent that’s fine that’s just the problem with procedurally generated planets. They could have given us locations worth exploring for example like ancient ruins, alien temples, and even old earth ruins. Just something that doesn’t feel populated. They could have even used the destiny approach and have one or two points of interest on each planet it’d make sense considering there’s no seamless transition between planets and space anyways.
Personally I don't care if the game was made with an ancient engine. I don't care about cutting edge graphics. I only care about choices in a role playing game. Starfield has none. The player walks down in a straight line from the moment the game starts to the second that the game ends. The player never makes a single choice that changes the story. It's 100% linear.
Yeah Bethesda is to scared to let make the player choiced that have actuall consequences. They want you to be able to see everythibg with obe character. I think the only time where choices had acuall meaning was in Morrowind. You could even kill anyone, even important story characters. They told you in a RPG style that your mainquest is now broken if you choose to continoue.
@@p.r.1308 I'll never forget that message. Essentially saying "Yeah, you broke the plot, the world is now doomed. We're not gonna stop you, but we want you to know you can't finish the main quest now so you can load a save if you want." in appropriate thematic language. I've wanted to see a story essentially start with that message (or equivalent) for more than a decade now.
@@Sorain1 the sad thing is that, of all the modern Bethesda games, this one is uniquely suited to that. NG+ allows for the player to be locked out of endings/factions/etc. It incentivizes second playthroughs, at the cost of losing what you've built. No one should've been essential. If you break the main quest, you could get set on the path of the pilgrim by one of the starborn and find your way to unity anyways. Of all the things Starfield needed, it needed story weight most.
44:20 The vibrant and unique lore of Elder Scrolls was made by people who no longer work at Bethesda, and most Fallout lore is just recycling Black Isle's ideas or worse, pop-culture references.
i played like 30 minutes of starfield. i tried lying to everybody about the visions when i touched the obelysk. went okay until barret came. No matter what dialogue option i chose, he ended the conversation with knowledge about my trip that i never shared with anyone. broke my immersion
he knew because he'd touched an artifact before too can't remember if his dialogue makes that clear, though, and if he doesn't say it outright, then the writers are counting on you to trust them before they've earned that
@@DavidJCobb thats not what hes saying if you never said anything about the trip he talks about the players experience which makes no sense when i also tried to avoid explaining i cant believe how shallow and dumb this game is
Spoilers but I mean dat ending, come on... "Who built all the gravity temples?" "The people who built them did." "Why?" "So you could find them. :)" ?????
dev's meta self-insert. we couldn't come up with a decent lore for the game, so we made that the lore is it's a game. Enjoy your plant wife and ship full of potatoes
The thing that ruined it for me is the essential NPCs. You’re telling me we can walk through a portal to reset the entire game but they still give NPCs “essential” status and make them invulnerable…why?! It especially doesn’t make sense because it’s established that alternate versions of you, has in fact wiped out constellation in other multiverses
My gripe is that the commands the player character can give Followers are significantly more restricted in scope when compared to those in "TES V: Skyrim". For crying out loud, they cannot/will not sneak into combat scenarios, nor can the player exchange weapons and loot will them. If a Follower doesn't serve as a talking pack mule, why even include them in the game?
@@zoltanz288 yeah that's not why they're uncreative or not doing work it's because work would require them to pay their employees rather than take their profit cut.
We went from "their defeat was mearly delay" to thinkibg their delay is defeat, Bethesda is dead they've so much of their personality and identity in the space between 2011 to now, that Elder Scrolls doesn't even feel like Bethesda is creating it at all
@@Passageofsky the Bethesda that made Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim is gone and will never return. It feels like it wouldn't make a difference if Ubisoft or EA made ES6 at this point.
I like to think I could've come up with something better when I was in school. Just off the top of my head: Imagine if instead of being a miner in an established colony, you were an actual explorer, and humanity had only just arrived from Earth, and your job was to scout planets for one that was viable for humans to settle on. You could be limited by resources or technology to only be able to reach a few nearby planets at first, with more becoming available as the story progress. The plot could be focused on infighting among the various human factions waiting to establish their new home, and disagreements about where that home should be, how to build it, or even how to deal with indigenous lifeforms encountered where they choose to settle - and actual exploration of the galaxy as you slowly establish a human presence on the planets you visit. The outpost mechanic could even have been used as part of the narrative, having you establish a foothold and base of operations on each planet you visit. Just off the top of my head, that seems like a pretty neat story.
I'm convinced THAT'S why he stands by his "make the story as simple as possible" BS. Not cuz he actually thinks it's good storytelling, but because he has no writing talent and hides behind that excuse.
Nah , day one NMS was horrible. It was barely a functional game. No story , no quests, bugs everywhere. all you did was fly to planet mine shit, fly to other planet with other colors, mine the same shit. Took a long time to become a game worth playing. So i respectfully I disagree on that , starfield is bad but nowhere near as bad as NMS was when released.
Elite Dangerous was made from less than 7 million dollars and it does everything Soyfield fails to do - you can land on any planet seamlessly, disembark in a small vehicle or on foot and scan alien flora etc
@@TheHK_47I doubt it, NMS got better because the devs listened to feedback and the community that decided to stick around. And because of that they added many things they promised and the game is entirely new and fresh now. Starfield is by Bethesda, Modern Bethesda. They still believe that the size of the games map is the most important. Big maps in games were impressive back in the early 2000s to early 2010s but people don’t care anymore, companies can make big maps people know that. But we want a good story in a game, and for a RPG, role-playing game like Starfield Choices that matter.
I'm supposed to believe that humanity discovered light speed travel and just lost interest in exploration? That is the single most illogical part of the entire story for me.
@@adrenjones9301 It's also just practicality, and why open world like this doesn't work for big space games. The reason the citadel always felt so massive in Mass Effect was because you could only ever explore a little chunk of it at any time. and the game let you fill in what else might be going on there with your imagination.
@@KeeganKopas Thats certainly one part. But Mass Effect was more of a Shooter RPG. Starfield prides itself as Exploration. So why not have a Mega City to explore?
@@adrenjones9301 Because a mega-city needs to be built by map-designers. and there's simply not enough man-hours to build both a megacity AND a galaxy. Cyberpunk has a megacity, and it had very little beyond its limits and still had crunch time.
That’s more of a technical problem than anything else. Yes, it was stupid of Bethesda to make a huge universe with like 3 cities the size of a singular block each but I don’t know if anyone else could do both a big universe and well developed cities
And they could have at least given you some impetus to look for the other artifacts, like "your brain will explode if you don't find these remaining artifacts"
Honestly I prefer that they didn't. In the end, this is an open world game and no-one other than speedrunners or NG+ peeps will actually rush through the main-quest instead of getting stuck with like... 100+ hours of sidequests, that's just how it is. At least to me, it'd break my immersion pretty hard that on one hand, the story TELLS me that my brain will go explode or that I absolutely have to find those artifacts because [INSERT OTHER DEFINITELY BAD CONSEQUENCE] but I know for a fact that, no, it won't, it will come close to exploding at precisely the point where I CHOOSE to advance the story. It would have been the same problem as with Skyrim's main quest where, from the moment of the 2nd dragon attacking (i.e. the first you encounter during actual play vs what amounts to an extended opening cutscene) the dialogue and story itself TELLS you that you have to hurry, hurry, hurry becuz omg the dragons are reawakening, hurry, it's all hands on deck. All wihle the supposed saviour builds a house, marries someone, decides to pick up fishing or whatever other sidequests you do. And yes, at certain points like the attack, Starfield does precisely that, but at least for the most part, it left you alone with it.
Meanwhile the biggest complaint about fallout 4 is that it gives you an urgent mission and you spend 100s of hours playing sidequests. Make up your damn mind... or do you just want to shit on games because it makes you feel better?
I dropped off the third artifact at the Lodge, told Sarah 'you nerds have fun with that' and left to join the Vanguard. I'm not touching the main quest, BECAUSE THERE'S LITERALLY NO POINT.
I loved when I got to the end of the game where you're walking around the big endless void and Todd Howard comes through a portal and it seemed he was looking straight at me when he greeted me by my full name. I was shedding tears by the time he said "Nothing you did mattered, do you want to do it again?" So beautiful. Game of the century.
When? Where is your source that Bethesda devs who worked throughout the project say they didn't care about the game? Please provide proof. Otherwise, this is just another ridiculous lie, made up to fit in with the hate bandwagon and get a few likes. I will wait.
@@lotsathedetox With your aggressive style of communication you might not get an answer in the future. (just a hint) I was talking about the story of the game, not the whole game. Just read comment again. The main writer of the game did hold a talk about the topic game story and said, that the story of a game is not important, because the gamers would not care.. You can search it yourself. There are a lot of references at YT and throughout the internet. I believe also the whole talk is at YT.
It's also not just Starfield. The previous Bethesda games he worked with were the same. He doesn't even want to do research and just writes what he only knows.
@@mirusasaki the head writer himself also said that they dont document shit so thats why theres clear contradictions in the writing and so many weird plot points
I also heard that every desicion in Bethesda is made by Todd Howard. And he admitted that he could made complexe space battles, large "non-skyrim-village" scale cities, good etc. But he didn't do it because "he knew what his fans are wanted". Basically admitted that his fans are ready to eat shit and make mods so the game stop suck ass and most of all pay for it and be happy. Starfield is a game indeed
I say get rid of the whole space magic thing, really it ruins it. They made an aesthetic as grounded to reality as possible only to turn it into Destiny 3. Remove the main story entirely, give player a nice opening sequence, then let them be free. Instead of focusing on one single main story, let player explore and find interesting side questlines that are as long as a main story, for example the police vs pirate questline was pretty neat, that alone would've made a better main quest than what we have. This way players will encounter different things as they explore to different directions, they share their findings throughout this expansive space, why make countless planets when you gonna make the player focus on a few handful of them?
Bethesda: * writes a rather interesting story about space exploration tied to a galactic war, war crimes and badass wars, as well for a faction that feel more at home in Elder Scrolls * Also Bethesda: "Lol, lmao, fuck that, no player will experience it, it just works"
At least for me the most enjoyment I got from snorefield is watching people's videos about it. It's so bland and every quest is on rails. I did find it amusing to get arrested for picking up items during major story events. When I decorated the razorleaf with some of my best weapons and such then everything reverted back deleting my items I was about done. When any item dropped on the razorleaf instantly disappeared I was fully done. Thanks for the video Duder.
The amount of exposition Skyrim manages to communicate in its opening minutes blows starfield out of the water. We learn that there is a civil war between the empire and stormcloaks and that Ulfric Stormcloak (the Jarl of Windhelm) is the leader of the rebellion. We learn that the empire is allied with elves called the Thalmor and that the stormcloaks dont like them. And then a dragon attacks. That's a lot of context up front, and Skyrim is already part of a popular franchise. Starfield needed as much or more up front worldbuilding to intoduce the player to the setting
What you’re asking for to do in a new IP introduction is called exposition dump and is universally considered as bad writing. The reason you like this Skyrim intro is because you know the TES lore and played other games. For a newcomer those would be a lot of words meaning exactly nothing. What is Skyrim, what empire, what rebellion, who the heck are Thalmor, why are those discount Romans executing everyone with zero regard?
It feels like the developers didn't even want to make this game. Like they had no ideas, no passion, they didn't really care, whatever, like it was just a job they had to do, and did the bare minimum and pushed it out.
From interviews, you can piece together that it was something worse than uninterested devs. The direction of the project was done so incompetently that the developers, who are admittedly not all the best in their fields, were held back even further. Todd did a lot to make sure this 'dream game' of his completely failed.
If you're ever playing this game and stumble upon a particularly picturesque view that entices you to explore beyond the horizon. Remember the words of the King in Monty Pythons Holy Grail. "On second thoughts lets not go to Camelot it is a silly place.😁
18:56 I love the two characters in the exact same generic wounded animation a room away from eachother. It's almost parody, like the scene in Kung Pow where the chosen one is running through thr field finding all his friends wounded.
I laughed when I first saw Akila and heard that this was the Capital.. it looks like some outpost, not like a capital, but I guess having like 3-4 "big" cities is all they can manage with tech that is outdated for almost a decade.
Akila City looks and feels like a run down frontier outpost, a collection of businesses accreted like barnacles around a Ranger base and its landing pad.
@@G-Mastah-Fash Sometimes It feels like every Bethesda game has gotten progressively smaller since Morrowind lmao. Elder Scrolls 6 is going to launch with national capital half the size of whiterun at this rate.
Moral of the story: Multiverse narratives are almost ALWAYS poison to meaningful storytelling, and are a strong sign of writer hackery/creative bankruptcy.
Id argue that multiverse without rules is the issue. If you do multiverse there needs to be rules and limits so that people can understand the scope, so you have a background to place the story on. The problem is when writters dont commit to the mechanics of multiverse, so litterally anything can happen with no explanation beyond "multiverse" necessary
the best thing in the dialogue options is that they didn`t even bother to make a check if you visited or finished specific locations/quests. I finished the pirate sidequest and still could ask "Who are the Crimson Fleet?" or I did all the Quests on Neon and in the mainquest I could ask a NPC "Is Neon dangerous?" ARE YOU FRIGGIN KIDDING ME???!
This. I did this. I got to the part in the United colonies story until you had to get the access keys, I stopped at the freestar collective key, then BECAME A WHOLE ASS FREESTAR RANGER, went BACK to the embassy IN RANGER UNIFORM, only for everyone there to act like Im a visitor and only there on behalf of United colonies
Or like elite dangerous Earth is the capital planet of one of the factions and only people with permission are allowed to enter. If you get too close you get shot
Or make the setting a cut off colony. Or come up with a reasonable cause for earths destruction that actually makes sense. So many ways to do it and they picked none.
The thing that was most shocking to me is how freaking little does the story make sense from a business point of view. It almost completely makes the development of a new franchise impossible. Why the hell would I want to play a sequel of this game or even a DLC? For Bethesda which is know for long game series like TES this is just dumb. It's like nobody thought about a possible future for the series when this should have been the main concern when launching a new franchise.
I'm afraid the lore in Bethesda's games for fifteen years has been built upon the stuff other people created. TES' lore and cosmology owes a lot to people like Michael Kirkbride who hasn't worked in BGS for more than a decade and a half at this point, and Fallout lore was created by Tim Cain's posse from Interplay. Bethesda was very quick to jump onto the originally mainly aestetic retrofuturism and started shoving it into people's faces: "Look, it's so wacky, but look, there are skeletons on the road! So scary!". Yeah, it's scary that nobody buried the dead even after two hundred years of them laying in plain sight.
I did speedruns till i got to the black starborn suit and then tried to do a normal playthrough, but i was so bored by that point, i just spent my time making money and ship building.
That is why I played through to new game plus and have a second character after 160 hours. That must be why PlayStation shills like Dreamcast Guy say they beat the game and it sucked, but he wants to buy it again on PS5 for the trophies. That is why it has been a top 20 played game on Xbox since launch. That is why it has a user score of 3.75/5 on Xbox and a metacritic rating of 83 and 86 versus what they originally gave Fallout 76 for instance. There is something other than a terrible product at play here with all of this hate towards a god damn video game. It is really bizarre. I challenge anybody to list a couple games, heck even just one that had the amount of hate directed at the studio and game like Starfield, in which there were a ton of PC players that played the game for 60-150 hours and hated their experience. And find me a game or two that was beloved and still a top game on console at least 6 months after launch versus a tiny PC player count and totally different overall opinions from the communities. I will wait.
I just console cheated my way through the game on Xbox Gamepass. There is zero incentive to treat the game with respect. I just wanted to get through it to see what it had to offer, which wasn't much at all.
yeah I fitgirl repacked it to avoid buyers remorse, I never regretted buying cyberpunk or skyrim even though I run pirated copies of them cause of mods and updates. Most of my games sit in my steam library while I play a cracked copy.
It's worth pointing out that the quantum dimensions lab dilemma can actually be resolved with everyone surviving, so it's not really a trolley problem after all. You can send the cart down an empty track.
the trolley problem also doesn't work because in the original problem the dilemma is "directly cause the death of 1 person through your proactive choice of diverting the trolley or choose to take no action and let more people die as a result." in starfield the inaction choice is already the better one so it doesn't hold the same weight, disregarding saving both dimensions
I feel like the identities of the Hunter and Emmissary should have been reversed. The companion you had the best relationship with turns out to be the Hunter. A member of constellation whose hunger for answers and exploration ran away with them, leading them to even kill their own doppelganger. It would make the Hunter's decision to "spare" you have a hint of sentimentality rather than sheer curiosity. Heck, it even is the only thing that could make talking them down at the end make sense-- your own doppelganger used to be their best friend in their original universe, the only one who could possibly connect with The Hunter. Keeper Aquilas as the Emmissary is more in keeping with what we know of his character. He wants to shepherd people, teach, mediate. Aquilas is such a footnote of an npc as-is, there is NO gravity to finding out he was the Hunter. There was no setup, no payoff, it just felt like a "oh. Okay, I guess." Making him the Emissary instead is far more in keeping with his role to us: a Guide whose doppelganger regrets letting others to the Unity and tries to stop them instead, to be reminded by you the player why they wanted to help people in the first place. This game needs a lot more, but I feel like that single switch would have worked far better than what we got.
what you said makes more sense, but as far as I can tell from the "lore" (what ever I can make out from the very fecken little we have, seriously, this shit is more scattered than the thoughts of a schizophrenic person), keeper bumbfuck is supposed to be both the hunter and the pilgram, or atleast that's the most believed theory, the keeper who is at the church thing having stopped going through the unity, the hunter being his opposite, kept going and then just lost himself I guess, idk this shit is stupid either way.
Better yet: have them both be you. Have all the Starborn be alternate yous. That one change smooths over so much that it's really unfortunate that Emil is so bad that he couldn't come up with that cliche.
Starfield's story feels like something I would write up in half an hour during my lunch break just to have some crap to fill space and buy time before writing an actual story.
so we kill a wealthy collector with a huge badass ship and there's no option to kill his entire crew and take his BIG and POWERFUL ship full of RICHES and super cool shit making it a PERFECT new home-base for an organization dedicated to EXPLORING????? this game was written by a sack of wet potatoes.
@@darthdragonborn1552 at least the reasoning for night city requires a bit more of brain power: "why night city? All the things happen at night, therefore its more about clubs, drunk guys, and the occasional crime" Why neon? Cause city has neon. The talent has dried up and left, go buy something else.
Bethesda has referred to this game as NASA-punk. Ignoring the oxymoron at the bottom of that term, they seem to have lost sight of the punk side. It presumes that everyone wants to live out a superficial Star Trek fantasy, when there are so many other character types that people want to play. Be Han Solo, be Henry Dorsett Case, be Paul Atreides, be Anyawu, be Ellen Ripley, be Starbuck, etc. The point of adding a narrative core to 'big space games' should be to facilitate this freedom of imaginary choice. But the game spends so much time, suturing together little boxes and little game systems that it loses sight of the roleplaying that makes RPGs great. If they wanted to make a set story with a few major splits, they should have designed a more linear game world. But unfortunately we got this.
Bethesda Logic: Talk to vlad, go to planet. Walk to temple, claim AWESOME power that no one else thought to claim. No need to fight hordes, no bosses gatekeeping powers. Just walk in. Meanwhile, in FromSoft games, it took me 1 whole week to learn Mohg's moveset. If you dont beat Mohg, you dont get into the DLC.
Its like Emil Pagliarulo wanted to rip off the Quickening from The Highlander, but didn't even bother to write a arbitrary reason for why The Hunter nor the Emisary or Any Starborn keep bothering to always come into conflict over The Unity. Especially if they've done this so many times that no matter what, they'll still jump to a New Universe no matter which choice Player Character makes. Hell, the Trader is the only one who makes sense because by your first loop they just go "Nah, I'm okay with just settling down in this universe for good" and they don't show up again by "New Game Plus" number 2. No Starborn keeps anything material except a slightly better set of armor, powers and space ship. No matter which side wins in this universe, another universe will have their doppelganger win enough to where there is seemingly even more Starborn to fight in random battles that also seemingly don't matter how many exist or cross over. To the point where the PC will fight and find millions of alternate versions of themselves. This game, more than any other Bethesda game, is the ultimate Nihilistic Nightmare once you're Starborn and Emil doesn't have the talent nor balls to even utilize this thing he made by indifference.
Plus they dont make the game until right before release which is just nutty...8 years..day one Todd scribbles idea on napkin....7 years later Todd takes it out of his desk and sets the team to work...gosh bugs in this thing we rushed out last minute?...noooo Oh don't forget Microsoft MADE them work on it a extra YEAR! Imagine the game if they had released it as they saw fit🤔😶
yeah and other games like Cyberpunk and BG3 have got 40+ years of wiki to draw from. Makes sense considering they were both tabletop games before video games...
I'm still convinced Emil Pagliarulo simply couldn't be bothered to write an ending for this stupid story. He probably got to a certain point, realized nothing was making any sense, and then turned it into this stupid multiverse narrative that just loops over and over and over. That way they can say they "built New Game+ mode into the narrative", as you continuously start over again and again in "new" universes, even though literally nothing significant changes.
Which begs the question, what the HELL is ,"Shattered Space", even going to be about?! They really don't have much more to grasp at. *Maybe* they could dig deeper in to the House Va'Ruun stuff and add their galaxy, but that doesn't really add anything to the shitty overarching narrative. They could TRY and pull off something like CP Phantom Liberty, where the DLC is added into the main story, along with the bazillion missing features necessary to make Starfield interesting and replayable, but BGS has never been great at admitting their faults. At least CDPR admitted they rushed Cyberpunk out the door and then spent nearly 2 years patching and fixing it, making it much closer to what was promised, and even then, CDPR still decided to ditch their (very impressive) proprietary RED Engine for a custom version of UE5. BGS *really* needs to ditch the Creation Engine. It's simply time to retire that old, tangled mess of code. I think they stick with it out of laziness and complacency, when they could likely partner with UE5 in a similar way as CDPR; port in the elements of Creation Engine that they "need" to work the way they're used to, while still benefitting from all the massive, new tech in UE5. UE5 just seems so adaptable to any type of workflow, which has to be why so many studios are jumping on it. I mean, again, RED Engine is so much more impressive than Creation, but that didn't stop CDPR from realizing UE5 would be better in the long term.
@@doggodproductions2259 given the fact it's called "shattered space", and we already know the multiverse is a thing, it's going to be either A: second colony war in universe you are currently in, or B: alternate universe where colony war is happening cause timespace bullshit and you get yeeted into past, idk only shit I could think off, lol.
I refunded this game when the dude at the beginning just gives you his ship. Totally broke my immersion. Like they really couldn’t have thought of anything better than that???
I would give the player that pirate ship that lands on Vectera, with barely functional systems, so YOU can actually repair it after, install new weapons, learn how to be a better pilot. Then you and Barret compete who's going to end up with better ship. So, you race through Solar System without using grav jumps. Who wins ends up with both ships. If you defeat Barrett, you EARNED his Frontier ship.
The same people who made your character creation backgrounds mean absolutely zilch. "I'm a bounty hunter, which is why I'm a miner"... *Rollseyes* It would have been great if each "background" had a separate entry point to the game. Then, after a bit, you find the space rocks and touch them... now you're trying to figure out what you have.
@@aralornwolf3140Or at the very least have a more generic start that fits the different backgrounds. I mean people joke about the Skyrim intro but at least that is not immersion breaking.
@@aralornwolf3140 I'm a former Diplomat in the Wars who's now a miner and my parents are proud I've joined Constellation, guess I was a pretty crappy Diplomat...
I remember the exact moment I realized the fundamental reality that even mods couldn't "save" Starfield. Because the writing, the hollowness of the experience, the illogical story elements, that's the MAIN failure of the game. You can polish the hell out of it, add land vehicles, maybe make space fully traversable in 3D, but none of that matters when at its core the game is simply a head scratcher when it comes to fun gameplay and interesting story.
I have some ideas that could make Starfield's story a bit better. Here they are. - Make the two main factions of the game similar to the USA and USSR, to mirror the space race. It would be much more interesting than Space United Nations vs Space Cowboys. - Make the artifacts and temples remnants of an alien civilization and Constellation an organization that is researching them. - Make the Starborn a group of humans that were able to master the power of the artifacts, but without the dimension traveling bit. Instead they just want to keep this power to themselves. - Make the reveal of Earth's demise to be unintentional. Instead of one man just allowing it to happen. The scientists at NASA were experimenting with the artifact, which resulted in the creation of the grav drive, but also doomed Earth.
@@EmilyAllan Thanks. By the way. I have another idea. Instead of every settled planet being a multicultural mish-mash, with English as the main language. Make them culturally and linguistically different. Lets have planets settled by different nations. Such as Americans, Brits, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Russians, and many more.
A conflict between the player discovering they are Starborn and having to decide if they want to hide/shelter it like the Starborn, democratize and study it with the UN/USA/USSR, abuse it with pirates, or whatever options you could come up with would be far more interesting. I have no idea why they decided to spike the idea of player choice so hard.
@@bbbbbbb51 Speaking of the Player and the Starborn. Instead of the Player being some random miner, make him/her a mercenary. A mercenary that was tasked to guard an artifact while it being transported, and instead of being attacked by the Crimson Fleet, it was the Starborn who attacked. After you succesfully escaped them, and delivered the artifact to Constellation, they give you an offer. Since the Starborn is out there, attacking anyone who has an artifact, Constellation needs a capable fighter, and they would pay you every time you deliver an artifact. This would give the player a reason to do the main story. As for the Starborn. Make them a morally gray faction. Their goal is to guard the artifacts, because they believe the power they possess would be dangerous in the wrong hands. Ironically the Starborn themselves are causing a lot of death and destruction just to keep the power of the artifacts a secret. At first they would only attack you during artifact hunts. They wouldn't attack The Lodge because its located in a large city and their attack would bring unwanted attention. They would only attack it after you collected a lot of artifacts. After the attack, Constellation decides to relocate the artifacts to a safer place. Thats when the Starborn sends you a message. This whole situation went out of hand and now they want to make you an offer. Tell the location of the artifacts and they would reward you handsomely. You would have 3 options here. Tell them the location and betray Constellation. Refuse their offer, and fight alongside Constellation in a final battle against the Starborn. Or convince Constellation to hand over the artifacts to avoid more bloodshed.
My favorite part of Starfield is how the tutorial contains clever tutorialization for things that were later cut from the game. Jumping into House Va'ruun space without prior authorization is dangerous? Good to know! Except House Va'ruun doesn't have any space on the map and their embassy can only be visited in one quest. Jump fuel can be acquired either through mining or by purchasing it? Great! Except jump fuel was removed as a mechanic.
Nice video, I'm sure it will get a lot more views soon. You spoke a lot about plot holes in this video, but the part where you show each of the four settlements from outside really struck me the hardest. It feels like Bethesda wanted to tell stories where the character's face familiar (if sometimes fantastical) challenges, but then completely failed to build a setting that makes those challenges seem plausible. Constellation is a group of explorers, but "exploring" in this universe just requires grav-jumping into someone's backyard, then walking across empty terrain for 5 minutes. New Atlantis has a "housing problem", but has plenty of land outside the city that I can easily build an outpost on. Paradiso is a tiny resort, but somehow they can't share the same _planet_ with a small colony ship. Neon is a "dystopian cyberpunk" city, which feels more sanitary than my own kitchen. Unfortunately, this lack of plausible conflict completely breaks the illusion for me. If I wanted to engage in a series of fun but barely justified gunfights I would simply play Ultrakill, Apex, or Helldivers 2. What's so disappointing is that this has historically been Bethesda's strength. Morrowind's factions have complex ethnic, religious, and political reasons for their conflicts. Skyrim's factions might be simple, but their sources of conflict mostly still make sense (although the antagonists' are often stupid). Even Fallout 4's factions have plausible reasons to be in conflict, despite much of them starting with "the institute was power hungry."
We can't have complex religious and ethnic issues in games anymore. Didn't you get the memo? Sweet Baby Inc. literally threatens companies if they don't hire them, apparently.
I mean, Ultrakill absolutely has some solid justification for its gunfights, it just doesn't actually need it and it doesn't shove it in your face. Pretty similar for the other two, but I don't know as much there. If you have good enough gameplay, your story can suck. If you have good enough story, your gameplay can suck. But starfield has mediocre gameplay _and_ a bad story, which means that it sucks.
Imagine making a Star Wars game set after the the Empire was defeated and the New Republic had complete peace. Imagine making a LoTR game set after the One Ring was destroyed, Saurons army were defeated, Mordor had fallen and there was complete peace in Middle-earth. This is exactly what it feels like the play Starfield, the great conflict is over and anything even remotely tense just boils down to squabbles between pirates and a fascist military group with a history of war crimes. Nice. If you go back to the Starfield trailer they depicted Delgado as a barbaric leader who kills his insubordinates without a thought. But when you play the game he's the most chill dude who asks you to use pacifism whenever possible lmao, there isn't even an option to rat on Mathis after he explicitly tells you he's going to murder the leader of the fleet and takeover, yikes.
Both of those could work really well, but they'd need a different genre. Republic after the empire is dead? City skylines but in space Lotr after sauron? Stardew Valley but you play as Sam
I can do that, come up with conflicts for these settings. For Star Wars we have things like the Yuuzan Vong invasion or the Corellian Crisis. For Lord of the Rings, bring up the dark Numenorian influences in Gondor, and the southern Numenorian colonies beyond Umbar. But I see your point.
Honestly the companion death moment gets worse when you consider that, in the event you decide to play without followers, the ONLY candidates that might be killed in this situation are Barret, Sarah, Sam, and whoever they sent you to the scow with. Usually i find it to be a choice between Barret and Sam, so this whole thing falls flat even more than playing normally. (ignoring the fact i also didn't get attached to any of them because, i mean why would i? I'm not travelling with them or actively interacting with them) So they added a trait that discourages me from using companions and yet this major story element needs me to have been using them to actually have impact?
I think the real issue is that Starfields setting is horribly undercooked. There’s no focus or real draw like Fallout and TES. It’s genetic space game. I think they should leaned more into the supernatural / fantastical sci-fi. I think 💯 this game coulda had more material for the writers if they just chose not to set in an uneventful era of peace. Shoulda had some crazy terramorph epidemic raging across the galaxy and have it all tie back to some x-files type explorers guild.
I don't think it's necessarily the setting of Starfield as a whole that's the main problem, you can do a lot with a basic space setting. Skyrim is really a fairly generic fantasy setting and Oblivion even more so. Fallout is honestly just not a fair comparison imo because that has got to be one of the most interesting settings in all of fiction. Most other space sims all have similar settings, if anything Starfield is actually a little bit unique because of the whole "NASA Punk" aesthetic. If anything the main problem with the setting is that the 3 of the main cities completely forego the NASA Punk vibe in favor of ultra generic tropes. If Bethesda actually committed the writing to being NASA inspired, then the game would feel much more holistic. But no what we get are a couple of video game trope theme park cities, and Rick and Morty multiverse rip off disguised as space magic.
29:25 - Actually, you can save both. If you look at Rafael's dead body in the 'good' version, he'll have a datapad that explains how to finish merge the realities, where you basically have to flip some specific ones of the switches off and back on, and then mess with the frequencies of the experiment in both universe, before finally hitting a big button near the artifact. End result is Rafael somehow getting sent back with the player to the 'good' ending, despite his corpse also being in that reality. Not sure why or how that works, other than it being a bit of a 'kobayashi maru victory' scenario.
Unfortunately starfeilds potential is capped by the ancient engine they are still using. It is literally impossible for them to release DLC with more exploration. That’s why moders gave up on it.
@@WillowWisp2112After a quick google search, I believe they didn't use Unreal, they use their in-house "Creation-Engine", which is what made Fallout 76 so hilariously easy to hack and cheat in. Starfield uses the Creation Engine 2, which is supposedly an upgrade over what they could do in Fallout 4. Boston kinda looked bigger than the space cities shown in this video though, mabe that's just me.
Meh. You can always fix an engine. The age is not really the problem. The tech debt is. And Bethesdas especially modern Bethesdas refusal to do anything about it. It's not that they are still using the engine it is that they have basically done nothing to adapt it for this game in 8 years of development.
@@martinjrgensen8234 Well to each their own. Personally I love Fallout 4. I agree the story is complete trash written by a 5 year old, but who plays it for the story? Same goes for Skyrim. Unfortunately I found it impossible to ignore the story in Starfield because it was constantly being shoved down my throat at every turn. Even when I could forget about it for five minutes the cookie cutter procedurally generated trash I was slogging through at 15 FPS while fighting the worst UI known to man just killed it for me. Maybe mod devs will save it but they have a hell of a job in front of them.
For the opening landing at the pirate base, another youtuber brought up something that most likely explains it. The base has helium tanks on the roof, which is also where we fight the boss. Helium is the FTL fuel used by the ships. At one point, fuel usage was most likely a game mechanic, but one dropped to make the game less hardcore, less simulation, in favor of fuel automatically refilling, just being a limit on how far you can go in one jump. So, most likely, part of why we originally were supposed to go there was to fill up our tanks so we could then go on to the Constellation HQ. But without that gameplay mechanic, it ceases to make sense, since we can just go straight to the HQ, no problem. Paridiso is even dumber than the travel costs. It's a high-G planet. What sort of person would want to go there for a relaxing vacation? As far as getting to the Eye in time when it is being hit, it'll take far longer than 10m to get to the station. There would be a lot of pre-flight, fueling, and, most importantly, getting permission to launch. But the bigger question is, why would we go there? We're in the capital system of one of the biggest powers. We have political influence supposedly. Call the freakin' space cops to go to the station. For the main story, there's another big issue: it doesn't matter in another way as well. What happens if we just let the Starborn do there thing and don't interfere? Well, they leave, and our life goes on. Because letting them have the artifacts has no consequences for us. And, for that matter, you don't even need all the artifacts to move on. To start NG+, you don't have to find all the temples, get all the power. So, yeah... And ultimately, another big problem: because Bethesda wanted to make NG+ part of the world, the main story is a villain's backstory. Yeah, we're the bad guy. We're someone that leaves countless destruction in our wake, abandons everyone we know and love, all on a quest for personal power.
One of the funniest things about the grav drive side effects is that it was apparently fixed with a patch. So it wasn't an issue with the tech but a software/calculation issue that nobody noticed or managed to fix before earth went boom. Nothing about the whole starborn thing makes sense. We can only go to the next universe if we get all the artifacts but that would imply there can only be one starborn per universe or multiple from separate universes but apparently the hunter and emmissary have met multiple times which should be impossible unless they have a different way to travel universes. We always get to the same point in time, no matter when we do it. So shouldn't the starborn that touches the artifact the earliest always be a step ahead and by extension win the most. Also the changes between universes are shallow af. Only constellation changes. We have no universe where earth isn't destroyed, Where the other side won the war. Where the extremists are the main religion, where Mars is terraformed. They do absolutely NOTHING worthwile with this concept. It's also one of the worst New Game+ modes ever. What's the point if you loose all your equipment, ship, house, inventory. It's basically nothing than a new game we start high level. We can't even change the story with our knowledge of what events are going to happen. So what's the point of the New Game+ and of playing through it all again?
If I had a nickel for every time I got married in a game and then my spouse was immediately killed off in the next mission. I’d have two nickels which isnt a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
You say your a widow twice and only have two nickels. But filed for two million dollar life insurance payouts. You're coming to the station to answer some questions...
The tiny settlements are hardly new. The thriving trade city of Whiterun is a few disheveled house and an upside down boat inside a few crumbling walls. And it's not like they don't already had the good bones of a city. Keep all the named NPCs and the style, add 10 times the NPCs and buildings, repair the walls and it at least would look good. The best example for this is always Novigrad in Witcher 3. It doesn't have that much more named NPCs than Skyrim, but it has hundreds of NPCs and buildings for everyone you interact with. It's an awesome background which simply feels as if it's a city. If Bethesda was using this method for forests, they would design 3 very good looking trees and call it a forest, asking you to imagine the rest. And the more advanced the setting is, the less it makes sense. Having Whiterun is boring, but alright, it's a harsh fantasy land, maybe it's supposed to look so destitute. But any city that has skyscrapers either has to have more substance than that.
It's like they don't understand why skyscrapers exist, they just think "it looks cool". Skyscrapers are *expensive* and *very* difficult to build. You only build *up*, when you run out of room to build *out*. But Aqua (or whatever, I forgot the city's name), is surrounded by MILES of empty, easily-developable land. You never just see a puny little village with a gigantic skyscraper in the middle; it's always a huge dense city where they start making skyscrapers as the city starts running out of space. Come to think of it, how they heck did they build that city? Where's all the infrastructure around it? Where did they get the materials? Where did they get the cranes and other construction equipment to make that skyscraper? Where did it all go? Where's all the farmland? (Not just on the planet, but like...period. The game has no large-scale farms to support a civilization, even of the laughably small scale seen in-game. Neon technically goes fishing, but it wouldn't appear everyone is subsisting entirely off of fish exported from another planet. Or maybe they are, and that's why they all have that glazed-over dead expression; they're suffering from countless vitamin deficiencies and mercury poisoning.)
I can’t be the only one who just…hated. All of the companions. They all sucked. They were all boring. Normal. Standard middle aged humans. No asari no robo waifus no garus no Spock. No Marie curie no piper. So lame Boring g judge mental. Even after being told we don’t care about what you do just don’t bring the cops here I endlessly heard shit for doing a top secret covert stralth mission I told no one about. Once a companion chewed me out told me one more fuck up like that and they were leaving!!! It was actually an option to ask why are you mad? I had no idea. So I asked. They got maddder like oh so you don’t know?!?!! To this day I have no idea why I was apologizing. I never finished this game. Its story is objectively trash. Knowing if I finish the main quest there are two outcomes. Outcome a or outcome b. And I do t want either outcome. They’re bad. Stupid. Lame. Pointless and self harming. I chose not to finish the campaign. Because that’s the logical choice. Becoming a star born seems like hell. Failing is death. Fuck this I don’t want o play I’ll go explore space fml. That’s all I ever wanted. Mmgod famn it I hate this game so much
I just watched part of a video titled "Starfield has no problems, YOU do!" I get that art is subjective, but goddamn. So much of Stafield's story and "worldbuilding" is inexcusable.
After the NASA mission, I was kind of waiting for the UC or the Freestar collective to have an artifact and using it to develop a superweapon that could destroy magnetic fields like what happened to earth, as some sort of larger conflict and reason for the 2 factions to exist in the first place... but no... fetch quest best quest apparently
The problem is you're thinking about it like a story and not a series of shortcuts to junk they wanted to put in the game. They wanted a sparsely populated universe that felt huge but also lived in and also one faction should have a firefly asthetic and you should be part of a group of idealistic explorers and there should be an opening where youre a simple miner- they made those decisions and instead of making it fit they just brushed over how badly they work
So The weird detail with the Grav drive scientist is explained in one of the logs. He knew about the flaws but opted to produce the flawed version because humanity wouldn't spread as far as quickly if he didn't force a mass exodus.
Which makes no sense, since a planet of billions will produce far more colony missions and people taking to space to seek their fortune, than a few colonies that have to regrow civilization and who have no reason to expand and explore, since their planets are massively underpopulated. The only downside to Earth is it means there is a defacto hegemon that has a massive advantage over the colonies for millennia to come.
I loved when the Fallout series included bits of history and mysteries on some terminals. It made places feel like they've existed longer than the game itself. So many short stories that don't impact the main story, but make the world more believable and fun to speculate. It made exploring interesting and worth talking about with friends.
Imagine how good it be if they had a whole area of unknown space and that was like unexplored world when you drop into Skyrim or Lands Between. So then you could explore with all these other factions which be filled with loads of stuff like a frontiersman and that would lead to needs of diplomacy like getting licenses and negotiations with NPC to create your own mining and mercantile elements or work in a partnership etc .
To be fair, that "space priest" IS the pilgrim. That's why he was able to easily say the truth. He was testing you, and he says this if you encounter him once you are Starborn.
What's dumb is that they could have added content by forcing players to find pieces of these power rocks. That would have been a good way to get people to go to different parts of a planet, and interact with different locals. But that requires a sense of wonder, and storytelling capabilities.
Starfield makes perfect sense. Hype the crap out of it, people bought it, shareholders get rich quick, Perfect. The same lessons were learned from Fallout 76. Promise fun and new, deliver the exact same lame crap we've been playing for years waiting for something new, Profit. Maybe we should learn to NEVER PRE ORDER, or learn that "missing out" is part of life. You think McDonalds cares if you like the exact same thing you've been eating since you were 3? No, because they know you'll still eat it, or someone sure as hell will.
The Alternate Dimensions mission made absolutely no sense to me. Because you have to make the choice where you can save one person, but doom hundreds (or more? I don't remember the specifics) or choose the reality where the monsters haven't killed everyone and send only person to his death. It was such a no-brainer choice and they made a big deal out of it in the end like you were a monster for killing the one guy. The whole story felt like it was just made up as they were going.
29:41 The reason the Trolly Problem can't exactly work in many games with violence as an expected path is that the Trolly problem was never focusing on wether you would kill one for the many, but if you felt you had the right to make that choice for someone else. By that point in the game, you've already established yourself as someone who's made that choice many times over, ergo of course the answer was an obvious one. No shade on the quest for the most part, but to me it really hurts what's meant to be a climax not just because "well duh", but because it's a common improper use of the trope that adds yet another mark to showing the writing team lacks nuance or deeper thought.
Yeah, one key part of the trolley problem, is that it is set up to kill a group of people by default, and you have to actively choose to divert the trolley to kill another innocent person instead - making you directly responsible for that one person's death to save the larger group. It's not just having to make a choice - it's having to make the choice to take the life of someone who would have otherwise lived without your interference. A minor, but significant distinction. If the quest was set up in a way, so they guy had basically already "saved" himself, he was in the clear and had resolved the situation - and in order to save the other people in the other universe, you had to *undo* his work and sabotage his safety, that would have made it a far more nuanced moral conundrum. I still think most would agree, that sacrificing the one for the many is the "correct" choice, but it hits a lot differently, when the blood of that sacrifice is on your hands.
Honestly, I kind of find trolley problems in general pretty boring, and trying to present them as some deep moral dilemma always bothers me. They have to add so many extra contrivances to force there to only be two mutually exclusive choices, because real world situations don't actually work that way.
@@-tera-3345 Uh, I think maybe you don't understand the point of hypothetical moral dilemmas. They aren't supposed to be reflections of real world situations - they are specifically designed to be situations you are unlikely to encounter in real life, presenting you with choices you wouldn't normally have to make, in order to make you examine your own beliefs.
@@LadyDoomsinger The trolley problem doesn't really give you some deep philosophical introspection into how you think. It's just an observation that a direct action carries heavier weight and responsibility than an intentional nonaction. Trying to turn it into "which do you think is the correct choice" usually just turns into a weirdly utilitarian and often nearly eugenic discussion of what kind of people you think it's ok to let die, as people modify the situation to change the stakes involved in the choice. But it's kind of become the e=mc^2 or Schrodinger's Cat of moral philosophy: something people reference to sound smarter than they actually are, in this case because they can't come up with "difficult" moral decisions of their own.
“This makes the companions look as if they have a hive mind.” I believe this is a profound statement on the people who made this game. They got rid of all of the devs who made games interesting because they had differing views.
I also suspect that some commissar, I mean story consultant, showed up during production to remove anything interesting or edgy from any of the characters. It's fairly obvious that Andreja got a lobotomy at some point, Sam Coe was probably more of a gunslinger and not an emasculated single dad, and Vlad was probably a Russian who got a completely different character model for political reasons.
Bethesda writers simply dont understand how long 100 years really is
I mean, look at how they do Fallout, which takes place 200 years after the nukes. The OG Fallouts took place only 50 years after the bombs and the cities there feel much more developed and advanced than Rivet City or Diamond City. For Todd's sake, there's still skeletons lying around in these cities after 200 years!
Or how humanity's progress speeds up exponentially as tech improves and the population increases over time.
Fallout 4's fridge already proved that.
@@nado1908 their entire handling of the Fallout franchise proves it, honestly
Bethesda writers simply don't understand
It's crazy how long-range communication doesn't seem to exist in a universe where instant ftl travel is possible
That's a common thing in scifi. And it makes sense.
You can't run a phone line between two planets, or even between two asteroids.
For instance, it takes about 2.5 seconds for a radio transmission to make it from earth to the moon. And that *can't* go any faster, because Radio's already moving at the speed of light.
And if you can't create an FTL ansible, then you can't do real-time ftl communications.
So sci-fi authors came up with solutions. Couriers, and courier torpedos. Basically either have a guy going from system to system, and then blasting the new system with a message pulse as soon as they exit FTL. Or an ftl drive in a torpedo that does the same thing.
That and the lack of some sort of ubiquitous PDA/Pip-Boy/Smart Phone style device (the watch doesn't count). Not long after the first few times I was asked to fly to another fucking galaxy to deliver a message for someone, I wondered, hmm, why don't they have comms relays that are essentially grav drives that collect incoming transmissions, then bounce to receivers in other galaxies. Unless I missed it, I was expecting a lore tidbit to answer why not. Bethesda really can't realize a play environment that isn't pre-modern, post-apocalypse, or actively engulfed in war and it's stunning that early in development they didn't realize they ought to place the setting in the middle of the colony wars for an immediate and easy answer to obvious world building issues that arise.
@@TheNotSoLoneWandererYou just put more thought into the worldbuilding than the whole writing team did. It's probably the most uninspired scifi setting that exists, like if your HR department googled genre tropes for a few hours and strung them together in the most inoffensive and simplistic way possible. I'm having trouble thinking of a single element of this game that is original or at all interesting. So disappointing..
@TheNotSoLoneWanderer yeah. Or at least courier probes and then far communication in system. Grav drive probe jumps loaded with digital mail to other galaxies and systems and then it gets transmitted in system. Having to land to hand deliver news is weird. Make it a plot point when pirates or others are disrupting the communication systems or really important plot stuff has to be hand delivered for security
If you can propel physical objects at ftl then sending mass-less waves/particles at the same speed should be even easier.
I almost shut the game off permanently when I discovered the _only_ way to steal the trophy on the cruise-ship was to straight up ask the person (who is established to treat the trophy like a child) to hand you the key to the safe it's in, then you show your face to the guard who's sole responsibility is to guard that safe, and they watch you steal it in front of their eyes.
I was staggered by the laziness of that one quest, to the point of quitting right then and there.
What about the police investigation quest where you can't even talk to the suspect, they literally don't exist. You go talk to the man who reported the crime only to find the outfit the suspect was reported wearing in his bin at work and emails on his computer incriminating him. You don't even need to bait him away from the computer to read the emails. He just leaves it alone on his own. I was excited to have some police work in the game, thought I could solve a few crimes or other stuff. Yet there's only like 4? and they are all incredibly shallow and petty. The last one or two is locked off by an entire faction questline aswell. Then the guy is all like "The stuff you did made other people want to join up. So you're out of the job, get lost." Or how you are offered to join the guy who wants to betray the pirate leader but you have literally no option to actually join him and then you can't even tell the leader about the guys plans. You can only tell them the guy was useless or helpful which entirely determins whether that guy gets to join up or not. Even if he's rejected he hangs around the station for a bit and even threatens you. If you retaliate to his threats the entire station turns hostile towards YOU, the actual member, in defence of the rejected outsider you couldn't even tell them was planning to betray them.
The terrormorph reveal is the dumbest thing to me. In a universe where we've mastered genetics to the point anyone can pay cheap money to change their entire physical appearance no one ever thought to check the DNA samples of the single most prolific species humanity has ever encountered with the single most dangerous one? Jesus they even fucking look alike in the face.
They have the DNA on file, hell they had an entire science branch dedicated to them. No one, not one intern, not one grad student, not one fucking scientist anywhere got curious enough to compare the DNA and see how they matched up?
@@Mrnoonions1234are you sure they had dna on them? Every scientist who has come in contact with a terrormorph died to said terrormorph and on that planet the guy killed everyone who knew the leeches turned in them.
@@AtelierwanwanWow
Oh FFS
XD
Starfield came out feeling like a game that was 12 years past its release date. "Go to the big capitol of the system!" Arrive and it's got 2 landing pads, a coffee shop, and then a loading screen between districts. After 40 hours or so walking between loading screens I quit and went back to Cyberpunk, at least Night City feels like an actual city and half my playtime isn't navigating to loading screens.
The only thing that I found fun about Starfield was the shipbuilding. _Unfortunately_ the space combat is poorly balanced. You're always outnumbered and outgunned, so your only option to survive until you can get the *good* ships and parts is to simply... not engage with that part of the game... while _also_ building your character to be good at space stuff... to the detriment of the non-space stuff you are _actually doing just to level._
@@jodinsanI had this exact experience and was so frustrated. I’m really relieved to hear someone else knew about this issue.
@@asherplease1957 For sure. Fighting three-to-one (or more) on the ground isn't bad because you always have cover. But the space combat obviously doesn't have that.
It's super frustrating because you have to reach perk points locked all the way at the end to get what you need for a really good ship of your own. Pointless. @@jodinsan
Night city is as shit
The idea that there are two massive warring factions in space who have an uneasy ceasefire and there's some new super power discovered in the universe that make you have godlike powers and neither faction even bats an eye at it and there's no part of the main or side story where war breaks out is like Chekhov's gun on steroids.
So a bondarchuk rifle?
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 Bondarchuk rifle?
@@concept5631 Chekhov's gun that never shoots, making a big plot point kinda usless. Called after russian producer by the name of Bondarchuk for making it way too common in his work.
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 Interesting. Thanks for the info.
@@concept5631 yeah the dude's kinda big around here, known for being a 5hitty director, biggest thing he ever achieved was a bootleg fullmetal jacket copy about the afghan war.
Bethesda has been creatively bankrupt for years now. Between Todd's vision and Emil writing, i weep for TES6. Its going to be a slap in the face to fans.
TES is my fav game series and honestly, I'd rather they didn't bother.
@@Hero_Of_Oldor just develop roguelikes devoid of any of that pesky writing
i been thinking that since fallout 4 and was mocked relentlessly for it by friends, and now it's a commonly shared sentiment, i love Starfield only because it vindicated me lol
@@katsu1715 Fanboyism in video games is a big problem. All these manbabies don't want to admit the studio who made their favorite games could have fallen so far. But with Starfield, even they can't cling to their denial any longer.
@@Hero_Of_Oldsad isn’t it? I fell out of love with Fallout. I don’t want to do the same with Elder Scrolls. They can end it now as a legendary series. I cannot imagine how they can beat expectations even if they hadn’t been going downhill for over a decade.
Just as Neon feels like how a child would make a dystopian cyberpunk city, the entire game just feels juvenile and poorly thought out
even the name Neon is bleh
That is basically Emil Pagliarulo's level of writing in a nutshell... He is the one who designed and wrote it after all.
Going back to cyberpunk playing with PT and just walking down one street in Japan town blasts every single location size wise and aesthetics wise in starfield
I made a better cyberpunk city in fallout 4 as a settlement
It’s their writer trying to be apolitical and just ended up milquetoast
Constellation: a thin shadow of a guild for a thin shadow of a game. It's almost impressive how Bethesda never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Should have called it Starfaçade.
This comment is cutting asf 😂
@@ethanhernandez9889he even put the fancy hook underneath facade
@@G-Mastah-Fash fuckin’ legend
Potemkinfield seems about right to me.
@@G-Mastah-Fash You know a motherfucker means business when he breaks out the windows character map.
I'll give Emil one thing - it's pretty impressive to be this consistently mediocre for over 15 years.
Well, if someone was born mediocre, he will remain mediocre.
I’ve heard he only has his position because he’s best friends with Todd
@@thomaspaine7098 This is obvious. No one keeps such a talentless person for fun.
@@thomaspaine7098 People have been criticizing his bad writing since Oblivion but he's still the lead writer at BGS
@@capin8067I haven’t seen any criticism of the dark brotherhood storyline if that’s what you’re referring to. He’s probably a good writer but he’s not a good lead is all its not that deep
The only thing Todd can imagine humanity is done after 100-300 years is ether a scrap town with a rudimentary water system and a bomb, or two skyscrapers and a bar
As much as I dislike Todd's toxic positivity and lies he's not the one responsible for the crappy writing. The blame lies solely at Emil Pagliarulo's feet-a guy who should've never been promoted beyond quest designer. He's their lead writer now.
@@DBWave94 Todd was a Game Director for a Starfield, Fallout 3, 4, Skyrim and Morrowind. Sure writers can be bad, but I imaggine that Todd as a game director had a last say on things. But I could be wrong, so hit me with a stick if I am
Like cowboys in space
@@DBWave94grow up loser
@@kamikazehound3243 Cowboys in space makes total sense when you think about when Red Dead Redemption 2 was release. Likewise Neon City make sense when you think when Cyberpunk was released.
Starfield has done wonders for boosting my own confidence in my writing skills. I don’t know how this stuff even made it to paper/text file.
At this point i wouldn't be surprised if the story was created by AI too.
Turns out they didn't. Bethesda doesn't use documentation.
I'm an ameteur writer and I can write something better and more exciting as well, but is it a surprise when the guy in charge of writing and creativity for the game, Emil, apparently hates actual writers and creativity thinking it should be K.I.S.S.? I'm sorry but KISS mentality does not belong in writing. It belong in engineering or the tech field where you want to make sure whatever you build or maintain remains safe and doesn't cause death. In writing you need to know how to be complex and abstarct while also knowing your audience and that they will be able to imagine or visual what you write. However, obviously Emil has no imagniation.
@@lordmontymord8701 Nah, no way dude, even ChatGPT would've come up with something more interesting than starfield.
Yes Abraham a game is always just an abstraction so it should always be leaving you thinking wondering more that it actually has. Should let your brain fill in the empty parts but it should draw an outline.
I find Starfield more entertaining as a youtube topic than actually playing the game.
The videos get more views than sales
I skipped through the entire GLP upload of it. I say skipped in contrastv to watched the whole thing, not in contrast to watching
33:20 the real reason earth had to be destroyed is because Bethesda was lazy and didn't want to completely recreate the earth, or even partially recreate it.
they took this strange approach where rather than implying distant cities and structures, they mostly only rendered things you could reach and interact with. But the scope of a space game means that you can't really do that for 100% of every single planet. So instead they just left the rest of it unbuilt and uninhabited. Which makes it all feel so empty. Cyberpunk 77's Night City, for all its flaws, is mostly buildings you can't enter, but you get the impression of a huge city that's alive
Because it’s super easy recreating the entirety of Earth while retaining the formula that you can land anywhere on a planet. I’m sure it was just being lazy.
Firefly had a similar plot where humans left Earth cause it was drained, nobody complained about that.
@@tarheelpro87 because Firefly didn't suck
@@parentaladvisory113 so it’s wrong when Starfield does it? Alright, makes sense.
@@tarheelpro87but you cant labd anywhere. You land on a randomly generated square mile. It wouldnt have been that hard to create a randomly generated earth in a 1 mile area.
One of the most criminal things about this game that wasn’t brought up in the video is the fact that the powers you get from the temples are rehashed shouts from the elder scrolls games. They couldn’t even make up a more creative name than starborn which is literally the same as Dragonborn like make it less on the nose how lazy this games development was
"Starborn" is such a pisstake of a name.
How many DLCS did their last games get? It's not too late for space dragons. Fallout 3 got an entire act 4 in dlc.
@@Drak976 watche the replace "dragon" with "drakon" an just copy paste the entire skyrim dragons
@@dodojesus4529 That would be really funny. But I wonder how long it will take until we see something substantial. Bethesda seems to still be tinkering with the release of the Creation Kit, probably because they somehow want to get more control over the mods created with it to monetize the mod "market" from the very beginning.
@@dodojesus4529to be fair, starborn would be fine as a name in isolation had Skyrim not exist. I can only hope they were trying to tap into Skyrim nostalgia but omg.. it feels so cheap
Man, I couldn’t even be bothered to complete the opening mission. The narrative whiplash I got with a stranger trusting ME with THEIR SPACESHIP after only knowing me for 30 SECONDS was just… too much. It felt so contrived and I already wasn’t having any fun so I quit out of the game and haven’t touched it since.
Then I hope you got a refund! 😅
@@Draeckon Game Pass. I didn’t pay for it in the first place… and I STILL feel like I wasted money somehow lmao
Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but I have your job and you have mine now
And your boss, standing right there, is like "makes sense to me"
@@jimbroaudio Literally my experience as well. I spent more time waiting for it to download than actually playing it. What immediately killed the game for me was the joke that is “space travel” and lack of gore on enemies. I was *not* putting in the effort to learn the games mechanics when the game didn’t put any effort into hooking me
@@StridersBored I remember watching day one gameplay of a streamer playing and what's extra funny is you could just stand still and the enemies would still miss you and stop moving once you moved your crosshair over them.
‘’Who’s laughing now?” We are, Todd. We are.
And then Todd starts laughing, NO Todd we laughing at you, Not with you.
@@facetubetwit1444 The man is a millionaire, turst me, he's laughing that people are still stupid enough to still buy his games, and if they weren't, he'd still be a millionaire
you can laugh all you want but he's still a millionaire because people keep buying 4672384523th Skyrim editions
Yea that dork needs to go back to the chess club he crawled out of
@@Solaxe that horse was a curse, an omen of things to come
I knew Starfield was toast when someone said that you were better served taking that $70 and buying the Mass Effect trilogy and some Ratchet & Clank games
I wanna get Rift Apart, it looks fun as HELL
@@glowdonk Rift Apart is so fucking good 😩🙏
A crack in time is oddly a better space game lol, considering it does exploration better with its planetoids (did smooth landings on those) and does the same in orbit in space thing that starfield does. PS3 game with better game design than Todd's dream game 8 year in the making and 20 years in his brain lol
l@glowdonk if it's so good then why did it flop? The original R&C trilogy is better.
Mass effect 3 was the last time where AAA publisher's cared
The whole game was zero consequences... my saddest moment was doing the neon cyberpunk ripoff sidestory, that felt so tiny... so weak, not like a megacorp but more like a tiny town in fallout. Many quests "consequences" were like oh many years from now this will make a difference.... the worst one was that I fully expected hostile factions, NCR vs Legion style, but its a universe in peace, we were promised Zealots, you litterally encounter them twice... the other two factions are at peace as well... Like how are they supporting spaceships with a cowboy style town that supports 10k people at most. Whats with mars colony with 10 npcs... Sigh... the just failed at scope big time, if Mass Effect could get scope across then how did this game failed so badly.
At first I was really excited for that questline, I was hoping it would give me a chance to play a real corpo which Cyberpunk never did. Well, I got my wish. But it was just fast traveling back and forth between planets to tell some dude some thing and then go back and tell them what they said and so on and so forth... do they not have phones or any form of interstelllar communication besides going there yourself? And I'm just left still wanting that game that gives me a chance to play out some real corporate espionage in an RPG.
Drew Karpyshen was the original author of the Mass Effect universe. He's way more competent than Emil.
@@bkjamesdaking"FTL communication not possible duh"
@@RED_Theory038Emil is not qualified for his position only reason he's a friend of Todd that's all there is to why he's there
@@chilbiyitoTodd is not qualified for his position either. All he does is blame-shifting, shaming, deflecting and straight up manipulating.
Yeah one thing that immediately bothered me about starfield was how they marketed it so heavily on exploration except every single planet you travel to has already been explored by humans with a bunch of space junk and outposts laying around. What exactly are we exploring here????
It's like being one of those 'urban explorers' who trespass in dangerously dilapidated old buildings. Boldly going where loads of people have been, but nobody else needs or wants to go anymore.
@@sambeckett2428the difference is that urban exploring is actually interesting
@@sambeckett2428to be fair you'd probably find a more interesting story and lore to the trash in the trashcan of an abandoned building than Bethesda can provide
The alternative is countless empty planets with nothing to see except nature. Like no man sky.
@@MrNote-lz7lh to some extent that’s fine that’s just the problem with procedurally generated planets. They could have given us locations worth exploring for example like ancient ruins, alien temples, and even old earth ruins. Just something that doesn’t feel populated. They could have even used the destiny approach and have one or two points of interest on each planet it’d make sense considering there’s no seamless transition between planets and space anyways.
Personally I don't care if the game was made with an ancient engine. I don't care about cutting edge graphics. I only care about choices in a role playing game. Starfield has none. The player walks down in a straight line from the moment the game starts to the second that the game ends. The player never makes a single choice that changes the story. It's 100% linear.
Yeah Bethesda is to scared to let make the player choiced that have actuall consequences. They want you to be able to see everythibg with obe character. I think the only time where choices had acuall meaning was in Morrowind. You could even kill anyone, even important story characters. They told you in a RPG style that your mainquest is now broken if you choose to continoue.
@@p.r.1308 I'll never forget that message. Essentially saying "Yeah, you broke the plot, the world is now doomed. We're not gonna stop you, but we want you to know you can't finish the main quest now so you can load a save if you want." in appropriate thematic language. I've wanted to see a story essentially start with that message (or equivalent) for more than a decade now.
@@Sorain1 Funny thing is that in Morrowind, you can beat it without the main quest lmfao
@@Sorain1 the sad thing is that, of all the modern Bethesda games, this one is uniquely suited to that. NG+ allows for the player to be locked out of endings/factions/etc. It incentivizes second playthroughs, at the cost of losing what you've built. No one should've been essential. If you break the main quest, you could get set on the path of the pilgrim by one of the starborn and find your way to unity anyways.
Of all the things Starfield needed, it needed story weight most.
What? Your choices even change the next world.
44:20 The vibrant and unique lore of Elder Scrolls was made by people who no longer work at Bethesda, and most Fallout lore is just recycling Black Isle's ideas or worse, pop-culture references.
Fun fact: The guy who basically created Elder Scrolls lore worked at Larian studios on Baldur's Gate 3.
@@ksl-988pretty sure he's at his own studio doing wayward realms and has been for a few years
Fallout 2 sucks ngl
@@ksl-988 That's a shame. BG3 sucked ass.
@@rclaws3230you sound like Bethesda copium
i played like 30 minutes of starfield. i tried lying to everybody about the visions when i touched the obelysk. went okay until barret came. No matter what dialogue option i chose, he ended the conversation with knowledge about my trip that i never shared with anyone. broke my immersion
he knew because he'd touched an artifact before too
can't remember if his dialogue makes that clear, though, and if he doesn't say it outright, then the writers are counting on you to trust them before they've earned that
@@DavidJCobb , dude barely played and didn't even pay attention lmao
@@dazedmaestro1223 as if starfield has anything worth paying the attention for.
@@DavidJCobb thats not what hes saying if you never said anything about the trip he talks about the players experience which makes no sense when i also tried to avoid explaining i cant believe how shallow and dumb this game is
Happened to me, didn’t say anything to Barrett and then when I got to the lodge all the members were like “Barrett told us what you said you saw”
Spoilers but I mean dat ending, come on...
"Who built all the gravity temples?"
"The people who built them did."
"Why?"
"So you could find them. :)"
?????
It's "Diety" because Todd is christian I'd guess.. -_-
Unless the game bugs out and doesn't bother spawning them and cuts that short.
Yup. This is just another way of saying, "a good question . . . for another time." They just Mystery Boxed us.
dev's meta self-insert. we couldn't come up with a decent lore for the game, so we made that the lore is it's a game. Enjoy your plant wife and ship full of potatoes
That would make me take out my terabyte ssd and throw it in the bin.
The thing that ruined it for me is the essential NPCs. You’re telling me we can walk through a portal to reset the entire game but they still give NPCs “essential” status and make them invulnerable…why?!
It especially doesn’t make sense because it’s established that alternate versions of you, has in fact wiped out constellation in other multiverses
because it would require work to do that. and methesda dont really HAVE to do a lot of that. you know, having brain dead noobs and fanbois and all.
Killable important NPCs? This isnt Morrowind, my friend. Todd had a vision for this game.
My gripe is that the commands the player character can give Followers are significantly more restricted in scope when compared to those in "TES V: Skyrim".
For crying out loud, they cannot/will not sneak into combat scenarios, nor can the player exchange weapons and loot will them. If a Follower doesn't serve as a talking pack mule, why even include them in the game?
@@zoltanz288 yeah that's not why they're uncreative or not doing work it's because work would require them to pay their employees rather than take their profit cut.
@@zoltanz288 Then why make the game like that? Why make what is essentially a quarter of what it could be?
If you had told me ten years ago that I would have zero hype for a new elder scrolls… I never would have believed it.
Sad times truly
We went from "their defeat was mearly delay" to thinkibg their delay is defeat, Bethesda is dead they've so much of their personality and identity in the space between 2011 to now, that Elder Scrolls doesn't even feel like Bethesda is creating it at all
@@Passageofsky the Bethesda that made Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim is gone and will never return. It feels like it wouldn't make a difference if Ubisoft or EA made ES6 at this point.
It all feels like a school play that the teachers told the kids to make up on the spot
I like to think I could've come up with something better when I was in school. Just off the top of my head:
Imagine if instead of being a miner in an established colony, you were an actual explorer, and humanity had only just arrived from Earth, and your job was to scout planets for one that was viable for humans to settle on. You could be limited by resources or technology to only be able to reach a few nearby planets at first, with more becoming available as the story progress. The plot could be focused on infighting among the various human factions waiting to establish their new home, and disagreements about where that home should be, how to build it, or even how to deal with indigenous lifeforms encountered where they choose to settle - and actual exploration of the galaxy as you slowly establish a human presence on the planets you visit. The outpost mechanic could even have been used as part of the narrative, having you establish a foothold and base of operations on each planet you visit.
Just off the top of my head, that seems like a pretty neat story.
@@LadyDoomsingerThat just Mass Effect Andromeda
@@syamless I guess it's not the most original concept - but in my defense, I haven't played any of the Mass Effect games.
@@syamless no MEA had atleast a litre of depth, starfeild is barely half a glass
That's exactly what it is 😂 but the children are DEI employees
Unfortunately, you're asking too much effort from Emil.
dude's a fkmg joke. i have no idea how he got the job.
I'm convinced THAT'S why he stands by his "make the story as simple as possible" BS. Not cuz he actually thinks it's good storytelling, but because he has no writing talent and hides behind that excuse.
Emil thinks he can write "the great American novel" - he doesn't have the capacity to write a story plot for Sponge Bob.
@@pigpuke We didn’t even bother making paper airplanes this time, we just threw it on the fire.
Their first new IP and they make an entirely disposable universe. Even the characters don't want to stay in it, why would anyone else?
Incredible how Bethesda made a space exploration game somehow more barebones than day one No Man's Sky.
Yeah NMS was many times more fun than Starfailed
Nah , day one NMS was horrible. It was barely a functional game. No story , no quests, bugs everywhere. all you did was fly to planet mine shit, fly to other planet with other colors, mine the same shit. Took a long time to become a game worth playing.
So i respectfully I disagree on that , starfield is bad but nowhere near as bad as NMS was when released.
@calidara3236 I agree. However nms got much, much better. Hopefully starfield does the same
Elite Dangerous was made from less than 7 million dollars and it does everything Soyfield fails to do - you can land on any planet seamlessly, disembark in a small vehicle or on foot and scan alien flora etc
@@TheHK_47I doubt it, NMS got better because the devs listened to feedback and the community that decided to stick around. And because of that they added many things they promised and the game is entirely new and fresh now. Starfield is by Bethesda, Modern Bethesda. They still believe that the size of the games map is the most important.
Big maps in games were impressive back in the early 2000s to early 2010s but people don’t care anymore, companies can make big maps people know that. But we want a good story in a game, and for a RPG, role-playing game like Starfield Choices that matter.
I'm supposed to believe that humanity discovered light speed travel and just lost interest in exploration? That is the single most illogical part of the entire story for me.
Not just invented FTL travel but also *destroyed the Earth* but.. they just lost interest in exploration. Yeah, makes perfect sense..
You are the first person I've seen to actually mention one of my biggest beefs with this game.
How ridiculously small the cities and factions are.
Thats probably due to the Engine though. That old workhorse is nearing 30 Years.
@@adrenjones9301 It's also just practicality, and why open world like this doesn't work for big space games. The reason the citadel always felt so massive in Mass Effect was because you could only ever explore a little chunk of it at any time. and the game let you fill in what else might be going on there with your imagination.
@@KeeganKopas Thats certainly one part. But Mass Effect was more of a Shooter RPG. Starfield prides itself as Exploration. So why not have a Mega City to explore?
@@adrenjones9301 Because a mega-city needs to be built by map-designers. and there's simply not enough man-hours to build both a megacity AND a galaxy. Cyberpunk has a megacity, and it had very little beyond its limits and still had crunch time.
That’s more of a technical problem than anything else. Yes, it was stupid of Bethesda to make a huge universe with like 3 cities the size of a singular block each but I don’t know if anyone else could do both a big universe and well developed cities
And they could have at least given you some impetus to look for the other artifacts, like "your brain will explode if you don't find these remaining artifacts"
It’s about letting go
@@devintienken THEMES and NUANCE? In MY bethesda studios' trademarked story? Nuh huuh
Honestly I prefer that they didn't. In the end, this is an open world game and no-one other than speedrunners or NG+ peeps will actually rush through the main-quest instead of getting stuck with like... 100+ hours of sidequests, that's just how it is. At least to me, it'd break my immersion pretty hard that on one hand, the story TELLS me that my brain will go explode or that I absolutely have to find those artifacts because [INSERT OTHER DEFINITELY BAD CONSEQUENCE] but I know for a fact that, no, it won't, it will come close to exploding at precisely the point where I CHOOSE to advance the story.
It would have been the same problem as with Skyrim's main quest where, from the moment of the 2nd dragon attacking (i.e. the first you encounter during actual play vs what amounts to an extended opening cutscene) the dialogue and story itself TELLS you that you have to hurry, hurry, hurry becuz omg the dragons are reawakening, hurry, it's all hands on deck. All wihle the supposed saviour builds a house, marries someone, decides to pick up fishing or whatever other sidequests you do.
And yes, at certain points like the attack, Starfield does precisely that, but at least for the most part, it left you alone with it.
Meanwhile the biggest complaint about fallout 4 is that it gives you an urgent mission and you spend 100s of hours playing sidequests. Make up your damn mind... or do you just want to shit on games because it makes you feel better?
I dropped off the third artifact at the Lodge, told Sarah 'you nerds have fun with that' and left to join the Vanguard. I'm not touching the main quest, BECAUSE THERE'S LITERALLY NO POINT.
The fact that Sarah turns into a plant on a NG+ circle and nothing changes is all you need to know
Starfield was the culmination of all of Todd Howards efforts… an entire game of radiant quests
@InterdactedThere's nothing to explore. 💀
@Interdactedreally there is nothing to explore…you can’t go into planets without going through loading screens and planets are so fucking boring
I loved when I got to the end of the game where you're walking around the big endless void and Todd Howard comes through a portal and it seemed he was looking straight at me when he greeted me by my full name. I was shedding tears by the time he said "Nothing you did mattered, do you want to do it again?" So beautiful.
Game of the century.
😂
😂
16x the story.
It just works.
kek
16 times zero is still zero
1/16th the story
He even lied about having been in the chess club
Starfield: Collect stuff because just do it. Then go to the next universe and do it again, ad infinitum, ad absurdum.
You can the outlines of happy Microsoft investors on the other side of the unity. Happy about endless player engagement. So was the plan.
The story of Stariddled is contrived and makes no sense -- because the devs did not care. They said it themselves.
When? Where is your source that Bethesda devs who worked throughout the project say they didn't care about the game? Please provide proof. Otherwise, this is just another ridiculous lie, made up to fit in with the hate bandwagon and get a few likes. I will wait.
@@lotsathedetox With your aggressive style of communication you might not get an answer in the future. (just a hint)
I was talking about the story of the game, not the whole game. Just read comment again.
The main writer of the game did hold a talk about the topic game story and said, that the story of a game is not important, because the gamers would not care.. You can search it yourself. There are a lot of references at YT and throughout the internet. I believe also the whole talk is at YT.
It's also not just Starfield. The previous Bethesda games he worked with were the same. He doesn't even want to do research and just writes what he only knows.
@@mirusasaki the head writer himself also said that they dont document shit so thats why theres clear contradictions in the writing and so many weird plot points
I also heard that every desicion in Bethesda is made by Todd Howard. And he admitted that he could made complexe space battles, large "non-skyrim-village" scale cities, good etc. But he didn't do it because "he knew what his fans are wanted". Basically admitted that his fans are ready to eat shit and make mods so the game stop suck ass and most of all pay for it and be happy.
Starfield is a game indeed
I say get rid of the whole space magic thing, really it ruins it.
They made an aesthetic as grounded to reality as possible only to turn it into Destiny 3.
Remove the main story entirely, give player a nice opening sequence, then let them be free. Instead of focusing on one single main story, let player explore and find interesting side questlines that are as long as a main story, for example the police vs pirate questline was pretty neat, that alone would've made a better main quest than what we have.
This way players will encounter different things as they explore to different directions, they share their findings throughout this expansive space, why make countless planets when you gonna make the player focus on a few handful of them?
Bethesda: * writes a rather interesting story about space exploration tied to a galactic war, war crimes and badass wars, as well for a faction that feel more at home in Elder Scrolls *
Also Bethesda: "Lol, lmao, fuck that, no player will experience it, it just works"
Emil's writing ruined Bethesda games
He suckssss
Emil should go back to make anti-pasta, his family name is Tortellini after all.
@@freddan6flyexcuse me, it's actually Pagliatelle
Both Emil and Todd need to get the boot.
@@WobblesandBeanHave you seen honestcon? (Channel unscripted)
Me in the Starfield bad rabbit hole, and loving it
At least for me the most enjoyment I got from snorefield is watching people's videos about it. It's so bland and every quest is on rails. I did find it amusing to get arrested for picking up items during major story events. When I decorated the razorleaf with some of my best weapons and such then everything reverted back deleting my items I was about done. When any item dropped on the razorleaf instantly disappeared I was fully done. Thanks for the video Duder.
The amount of exposition Skyrim manages to communicate in its opening minutes blows starfield out of the water. We learn that there is a civil war between the empire and stormcloaks and that Ulfric Stormcloak (the Jarl of Windhelm) is the leader of the rebellion. We learn that the empire is allied with elves called the Thalmor and that the stormcloaks dont like them. And then a dragon attacks. That's a lot of context up front, and Skyrim is already part of a popular franchise. Starfield needed as much or more up front worldbuilding to intoduce the player to the setting
What you’re asking for to do in a new IP introduction is called exposition dump and is universally considered as bad writing. The reason you like this Skyrim intro is because you know the TES lore and played other games. For a newcomer those would be a lot of words meaning exactly nothing. What is Skyrim, what empire, what rebellion, who the heck are Thalmor, why are those discount Romans executing everyone with zero regard?
It feels like the developers didn't even want to make this game. Like they had no ideas, no passion, they didn't really care, whatever, like it was just a job they had to do, and did the bare minimum and pushed it out.
From interviews, you can piece together that it was something worse than uninterested devs. The direction of the project was done so incompetently that the developers, who are admittedly not all the best in their fields, were held back even further. Todd did a lot to make sure this 'dream game' of his completely failed.
i still recall that 1 developer who seemed really passionate about fighting with just fists. It was the most passion I felt behind someone's words
Hey! I do the bare minimum in my job every day, nothing wrong with that. At least they got paid.
They wanted to make es6 already
@@mynamejef7963todd will be there to make sure it just works
In almost 200 years, Akila never bothered to build ROADS!!! Just, mud. I swear, Akila is an unused _Fallout_ asset they repurposed.
If you're ever playing this game and stumble upon a particularly picturesque view that entices you to explore beyond the horizon. Remember the words of the King in Monty Pythons Holy Grail.
"On second thoughts lets not go to Camelot it is a silly place.😁
This got me several times. Why include so much space around the missions if all of it is just decorative?
18:56 I love the two characters in the exact same generic wounded animation a room away from eachother. It's almost parody, like the scene in Kung Pow where the chosen one is running through thr field finding all his friends wounded.
"Wait! If you guys are still alive, then surely Sam Coe-- Oh."
Loved that movie. “And then he killed the dog” *sharts* *dog dies*
Omg that’s so lazy
I laughed when I first saw Akila and heard that this was the Capital.. it looks like some outpost, not like a capital, but I guess having like 3-4 "big" cities is all they can manage with tech that is outdated for almost a decade.
Akila City looks and feels like a run down frontier outpost, a collection of businesses accreted like barnacles around a Ranger base and its landing pad.
Oblivion had bigger cities in 2006. I'm pretty sure the Imperial City is still the biggest they ever designed.
@@G-Mastah-Fash Sometimes It feels like every Bethesda game has gotten progressively smaller since Morrowind lmao. Elder Scrolls 6 is going to launch with national capital half the size of whiterun at this rate.
@@uponeric36 The only thing that has actually improved at Bethesda since Morrowind are Todd's marketing skills.
Did you see the Akila concept art? It actually looked neat and original but in the game it's just a Wild West town...
A prelude by Ron Perlman saying “Space… Space never changes” or anything like that wouldve done wonders
Moral of the story: Multiverse narratives are almost ALWAYS poison to meaningful storytelling, and are a strong sign of writer hackery/creative bankruptcy.
the other way around - it's an easy scapegoat
@@512TheWolf512Name a good multiverse story.
@@Blackcloud288spiderverse? Everything Every where All at once?
Id argue that multiverse without rules is the issue. If you do multiverse there needs to be rules and limits so that people can understand the scope, so you have a background to place the story on. The problem is when writters dont commit to the mechanics of multiverse, so litterally anything can happen with no explanation beyond "multiverse" necessary
@@JackdotC lol lmao
the best thing in the dialogue options is that they didn`t even bother to make a check if you visited or finished specific locations/quests. I finished the pirate sidequest and still could ask "Who are the Crimson Fleet?" or I did all the Quests on Neon and in the mainquest I could ask a NPC "Is Neon dangerous?" ARE YOU FRIGGIN KIDDING ME???!
Ludo narrative dissonance?
This. I did this. I got to the part in the United colonies story until you had to get the access keys, I stopped at the freestar collective key, then BECAME A WHOLE ASS FREESTAR RANGER, went BACK to the embassy IN RANGER UNIFORM, only for everyone there to act like Im a visitor and only there on behalf of United colonies
Why didn't they just declare the Earth a nature preserve and say the player couldn't visit it due to having alien microbes? That'd have been so easy!
Or like elite dangerous
Earth is the capital planet of one of the factions and only people with permission are allowed to enter. If you get too close you get shot
Or make the setting a cut off colony. Or come up with a reasonable cause for earths destruction that actually makes sense. So many ways to do it and they picked none.
The thing that was most shocking to me is how freaking little does the story make sense from a business point of view. It almost completely makes the development of a new franchise impossible. Why the hell would I want to play a sequel of this game or even a DLC? For Bethesda which is know for long game series like TES this is just dumb. It's like nobody thought about a possible future for the series when this should have been the main concern when launching a new franchise.
I'm afraid the lore in Bethesda's games for fifteen years has been built upon the stuff other people created. TES' lore and cosmology owes a lot to people like Michael Kirkbride who hasn't worked in BGS for more than a decade and a half at this point, and Fallout lore was created by Tim Cain's posse from Interplay. Bethesda was very quick to jump onto the originally mainly aestetic retrofuturism and started shoving it into people's faces: "Look, it's so wacky, but look, there are skeletons on the road! So scary!". Yeah, it's scary that nobody buried the dead even after two hundred years of them laying in plain sight.
I'm just surprised there's simps buying their slop
I'll never understand the Bethesda forced Prologue and how it gets longer and longer in every game lol.
I couldn't even finsh the game, unless you do a speedrun you'll get burnt out and have buyers remorse
I did speedruns till i got to the black starborn suit and then tried to do a normal playthrough, but i was so bored by that point, i just spent my time making money and ship building.
That is why I played through to new game plus and have a second character after 160 hours. That must be why PlayStation shills like Dreamcast Guy say they beat the game and it sucked, but he wants to buy it again on PS5 for the trophies. That is why it has been a top 20 played game on Xbox since launch. That is why it has a user score of 3.75/5 on Xbox and a metacritic rating of 83 and 86 versus what they originally gave Fallout 76 for instance.
There is something other than a terrible product at play here with all of this hate towards a god damn video game. It is really bizarre. I challenge anybody to list a couple games, heck even just one that had the amount of hate directed at the studio and game like Starfield, in which there were a ton of PC players that played the game for 60-150 hours and hated their experience. And find me a game or two that was beloved and still a top game on console at least 6 months after launch versus a tiny PC player count and totally different overall opinions from the communities. I will wait.
@@lotsathedetox what?
I just console cheated my way through the game on Xbox Gamepass. There is zero incentive to treat the game with respect. I just wanted to get through it to see what it had to offer, which wasn't much at all.
yeah I fitgirl repacked it to avoid buyers remorse, I never regretted buying cyberpunk or skyrim even though I run pirated copies of them cause of mods and updates. Most of my games sit in my steam library while I play a cracked copy.
It's worth pointing out that the quantum dimensions lab dilemma can actually be resolved with everyone surviving, so it's not really a trolley problem after all. You can send the cart down an empty track.
the trolley problem also doesn't work because in the original problem the dilemma is "directly cause the death of 1 person through your proactive choice of diverting the trolley or choose to take no action and let more people die as a result." in starfield the inaction choice is already the better one so it doesn't hold the same weight, disregarding saving both dimensions
I feel like the identities of the Hunter and Emmissary should have been reversed.
The companion you had the best relationship with turns out to be the Hunter. A member of constellation whose hunger for answers and exploration ran away with them, leading them to even kill their own doppelganger. It would make the Hunter's decision to "spare" you have a hint of sentimentality rather than sheer curiosity. Heck, it even is the only thing that could make talking them down at the end make sense-- your own doppelganger used to be their best friend in their original universe, the only one who could possibly connect with The Hunter.
Keeper Aquilas as the Emmissary is more in keeping with what we know of his character. He wants to shepherd people, teach, mediate. Aquilas is such a footnote of an npc as-is, there is NO gravity to finding out he was the Hunter. There was no setup, no payoff, it just felt like a "oh. Okay, I guess." Making him the Emissary instead is far more in keeping with his role to us: a Guide whose doppelganger regrets letting others to the Unity and tries to stop them instead, to be reminded by you the player why they wanted to help people in the first place.
This game needs a lot more, but I feel like that single switch would have worked far better than what we got.
what you said makes more sense, but as far as I can tell from the "lore" (what ever I can make out from the very fecken little we have, seriously, this shit is more scattered than the thoughts of a schizophrenic person), keeper bumbfuck is supposed to be both the hunter and the pilgram, or atleast that's the most believed theory, the keeper who is at the church thing having stopped going through the unity, the hunter being his opposite, kept going and then just lost himself I guess, idk this shit is stupid either way.
Better yet: have them both be you.
Have all the Starborn be alternate yous.
That one change smooths over so much that it's really unfortunate that Emil is so bad that he couldn't come up with that cliche.
Starfield's story feels like something I would write up in half an hour during my lunch break just to have some crap to fill space and buy time before writing an actual story.
I don't think I could write a story that poor even if I wanted to.
@@sambeckett2428 I've written low effort porn with more fucken effort than the writers put into this game
Starfield legitimately feels like a first draft…
@@somethingcliched4921 I've never put out a first draft that incomplete before.
You have to give Bethesda credit for creating a TH-cam cottage industry of bashing Starfield
so we kill a wealthy collector with a huge badass ship and there's no option to kill his entire crew and take his BIG and POWERFUL ship full of RICHES and super cool shit making it a PERFECT new home-base for an organization dedicated to EXPLORING?????
this game was written by a sack of wet potatoes.
Wait.... the cyberpunk city is named.... Neon?!?!?!?! That tells me all I need to know about this game's writing🤦♂️
To be fair, night city isn’t the greatest name either lol
@@darthdragonborn1552 at least the reasoning for night city requires a bit more of brain power: "why night city? All the things happen at night, therefore its more about clubs, drunk guys, and the occasional crime"
Why neon?
Cause city has neon.
The talent has dried up and left, go buy something else.
@@darthdragonborn1552 Night City is just plagiarizing Neuromancer which begins in a Japanese getto with that name.
@@Duchess_Van_Hoofwould be very interesting if there was a deposit of neon under neon 😊
@gaminggaming.6071 it's also named after it founder, a mega corpo ceo who's last name was night, he was latter assassinated
Bethesda has referred to this game as NASA-punk. Ignoring the oxymoron at the bottom of that term, they seem to have lost sight of the punk side. It presumes that everyone wants to live out a superficial Star Trek fantasy, when there are so many other character types that people want to play. Be Han Solo, be Henry Dorsett Case, be Paul Atreides, be Anyawu, be Ellen Ripley, be Starbuck, etc. The point of adding a narrative core to 'big space games' should be to facilitate this freedom of imaginary choice. But the game spends so much time, suturing together little boxes and little game systems that it loses sight of the roleplaying that makes RPGs great.
If they wanted to make a set story with a few major splits, they should have designed a more linear game world. But unfortunately we got this.
Bethesda Logic: Talk to vlad, go to planet. Walk to temple, claim AWESOME power that no one else thought to claim.
No need to fight hordes, no bosses gatekeeping powers. Just walk in.
Meanwhile, in FromSoft games, it took me 1 whole week to learn Mohg's moveset. If you dont beat Mohg, you dont get into the DLC.
Its like Emil Pagliarulo wanted to rip off the Quickening from The Highlander, but didn't even bother to write a arbitrary reason for why The Hunter nor the Emisary or Any Starborn keep bothering to always come into conflict over The Unity. Especially if they've done this so many times that no matter what, they'll still jump to a New Universe no matter which choice Player Character makes. Hell, the Trader is the only one who makes sense because by your first loop they just go "Nah, I'm okay with just settling down in this universe for good" and they don't show up again by "New Game Plus" number 2. No Starborn keeps anything material except a slightly better set of armor, powers and space ship. No matter which side wins in this universe, another universe will have their doppelganger win enough to where there is seemingly even more Starborn to fight in random battles that also seemingly don't matter how many exist or cross over. To the point where the PC will fight and find millions of alternate versions of themselves.
This game, more than any other Bethesda game, is the ultimate Nihilistic Nightmare once you're Starborn and Emil doesn't have the talent nor balls to even utilize this thing he made by indifference.
40:15 It's because Bethesda has a stupid practice of not keeping design documents and not coordinating writing and design across departments.
yeah that is super wild and explains quite a lot about Starfield..
Plus they dont make the game until right before release which is just nutty...8 years..day one Todd scribbles idea on napkin....7 years later Todd takes it out of his desk and sets the team to work...gosh bugs in this thing we rushed out last minute?...noooo
Oh don't forget Microsoft MADE them work on it a extra YEAR!
Imagine the game if they had released it as they saw fit🤔😶
@@mikeschaoticgardeningYeah, the lack of respect for players is insane. Feels like being spit on.
They do but Emil is in charge of it so...
yeah and other games like Cyberpunk and BG3 have got 40+ years of wiki to draw from. Makes sense considering they were both tabletop games before video games...
I'm still convinced Emil Pagliarulo simply couldn't be bothered to write an ending for this stupid story. He probably got to a certain point, realized nothing was making any sense, and then turned it into this stupid multiverse narrative that just loops over and over and over.
That way they can say they "built New Game+ mode into the narrative", as you continuously start over again and again in "new" universes, even though literally nothing significant changes.
Which begs the question, what the HELL is ,"Shattered Space", even going to be about?! They really don't have much more to grasp at.
*Maybe* they could dig deeper in to the House Va'Ruun stuff and add their galaxy, but that doesn't really add anything to the shitty overarching narrative.
They could TRY and pull off something like CP Phantom Liberty, where the DLC is added into the main story, along with the bazillion missing features necessary to make Starfield interesting and replayable, but BGS has never been great at admitting their faults. At least CDPR admitted they rushed Cyberpunk out the door and then spent nearly 2 years patching and fixing it, making it much closer to what was promised, and even then, CDPR still decided to ditch their (very impressive) proprietary RED Engine for a custom version of UE5.
BGS *really* needs to ditch the Creation Engine. It's simply time to retire that old, tangled mess of code. I think they stick with it out of laziness and complacency, when they could likely partner with UE5 in a similar way as CDPR; port in the elements of Creation Engine that they "need" to work the way they're used to, while still benefitting from all the massive, new tech in UE5.
UE5 just seems so adaptable to any type of workflow, which has to be why so many studios are jumping on it.
I mean, again, RED Engine is so much more impressive than Creation, but that didn't stop CDPR from realizing UE5 would be better in the long term.
@@doggodproductions2259 given the fact it's called "shattered space", and we already know the multiverse is a thing, it's going to be either A: second colony war in universe you are currently in, or B: alternate universe where colony war is happening cause timespace bullshit and you get yeeted into past, idk only shit I could think off, lol.
I refunded this game when the dude at the beginning just gives you his ship.
Totally broke my immersion.
Like they really couldn’t have thought of anything better than that???
I would give the player that pirate ship that lands on Vectera, with barely functional systems, so YOU can actually repair it after, install new weapons, learn how to be a better pilot. Then you and Barret compete who's going to end up with better ship. So, you race through Solar System without using grav jumps. Who wins ends up with both ships. If you defeat Barrett, you EARNED his Frontier ship.
The same people who made your character creation backgrounds mean absolutely zilch. "I'm a bounty hunter, which is why I'm a miner"... *Rollseyes*
It would have been great if each "background" had a separate entry point to the game. Then, after a bit, you find the space rocks and touch them... now you're trying to figure out what you have.
@@aralornwolf3140I’m a scientist who’s a miner for some reason
@@aralornwolf3140Or at the very least have a more generic start that fits the different backgrounds. I mean people joke about the Skyrim intro but at least that is not immersion breaking.
@@aralornwolf3140 I'm a former Diplomat in the Wars who's now a miner and my parents are proud I've joined Constellation, guess I was a pretty crappy Diplomat...
I remember the exact moment I realized the fundamental reality that even mods couldn't "save" Starfield. Because the writing, the hollowness of the experience, the illogical story elements, that's the MAIN failure of the game. You can polish the hell out of it, add land vehicles, maybe make space fully traversable in 3D, but none of that matters when at its core the game is simply a head scratcher when it comes to fun gameplay and interesting story.
Someone could do a mod that rewrote the entire main guestline.
I have some ideas that could make Starfield's story a bit better. Here they are.
- Make the two main factions of the game similar to the USA and USSR, to mirror the space race.
It would be much more interesting than Space United Nations vs Space Cowboys.
- Make the artifacts and temples remnants of an alien civilization and Constellation an organization that is researching them.
- Make the Starborn a group of humans that were able to master the power of the artifacts, but without the dimension traveling bit.
Instead they just want to keep this power to themselves.
- Make the reveal of Earth's demise to be unintentional. Instead of one man just allowing it to happen. The scientists at NASA were experimenting with the artifact,
which resulted in the creation of the grav drive, but also doomed Earth.
Great ideas.
@@EmilyAllan Thanks. By the way. I have another idea. Instead of every settled planet being a multicultural mish-mash, with English as the main language.
Make them culturally and linguistically different. Lets have planets settled by different nations. Such as Americans, Brits, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Russians, and many more.
A conflict between the player discovering they are Starborn and having to decide if they want to hide/shelter it like the Starborn, democratize and study it with the UN/USA/USSR, abuse it with pirates, or whatever options you could come up with would be far more interesting. I have no idea why they decided to spike the idea of player choice so hard.
@@bbbbbbb51 Speaking of the Player and the Starborn. Instead of the Player being some random miner, make him/her a mercenary. A mercenary that was tasked to guard an artifact while it being transported, and instead of being attacked by the Crimson Fleet, it was the Starborn who attacked. After you succesfully escaped them, and delivered the artifact to Constellation, they give you an offer. Since the Starborn is out there, attacking anyone who has an artifact, Constellation needs a capable fighter, and they would pay you every time you deliver an artifact. This would give the player a reason to do the main story.
As for the Starborn. Make them a morally gray faction. Their goal is to guard the artifacts, because they believe the power they possess would be dangerous in the wrong hands. Ironically the Starborn themselves are causing a lot of death and destruction just to keep the power of the artifacts a secret. At first they would only attack you during artifact hunts. They wouldn't attack The Lodge because its located in a large city and their attack would bring unwanted attention. They would only attack it after you collected a lot of artifacts. After the attack, Constellation decides to relocate the artifacts to a safer place.
Thats when the Starborn sends you a message. This whole situation went out of hand and now they want to make you an offer. Tell the location of the artifacts and they would reward you handsomely. You would have 3 options here. Tell them the location and betray Constellation. Refuse their offer, and fight alongside Constellation in a final battle against the Starborn. Or convince Constellation to hand over the artifacts to avoid more bloodshed.
I thought they should go with tradition so you're on a prison mining colony at the start.
My favorite part of Starfield is how the tutorial contains clever tutorialization for things that were later cut from the game. Jumping into House Va'ruun space without prior authorization is dangerous? Good to know! Except House Va'ruun doesn't have any space on the map and their embassy can only be visited in one quest. Jump fuel can be acquired either through mining or by purchasing it? Great! Except jump fuel was removed as a mechanic.
Nice video, I'm sure it will get a lot more views soon. You spoke a lot about plot holes in this video, but the part where you show each of the four settlements from outside really struck me the hardest. It feels like Bethesda wanted to tell stories where the character's face familiar (if sometimes fantastical) challenges, but then completely failed to build a setting that makes those challenges seem plausible. Constellation is a group of explorers, but "exploring" in this universe just requires grav-jumping into someone's backyard, then walking across empty terrain for 5 minutes. New Atlantis has a "housing problem", but has plenty of land outside the city that I can easily build an outpost on. Paradiso is a tiny resort, but somehow they can't share the same _planet_ with a small colony ship. Neon is a "dystopian cyberpunk" city, which feels more sanitary than my own kitchen. Unfortunately, this lack of plausible conflict completely breaks the illusion for me. If I wanted to engage in a series of fun but barely justified gunfights I would simply play Ultrakill, Apex, or Helldivers 2. What's so disappointing is that this has historically been Bethesda's strength. Morrowind's factions have complex ethnic, religious, and political reasons for their conflicts. Skyrim's factions might be simple, but their sources of conflict mostly still make sense (although the antagonists' are often stupid). Even Fallout 4's factions have plausible reasons to be in conflict, despite much of them starting with "the institute was power hungry."
We can't have complex religious and ethnic issues in games anymore.
Didn't you get the memo? Sweet Baby Inc. literally threatens companies if they don't hire them, apparently.
R.I.P. your kitchen.
@@LoveProWrestling It is truly a tragedy 😔
@@James_Bee Who cares what some influencer on Twitter thinks?
I mean, Ultrakill absolutely has some solid justification for its gunfights, it just doesn't actually need it and it doesn't shove it in your face. Pretty similar for the other two, but I don't know as much there.
If you have good enough gameplay, your story can suck. If you have good enough story, your gameplay can suck. But starfield has mediocre gameplay _and_ a bad story, which means that it sucks.
Imagine making a Star Wars game set after the the Empire was defeated and the New Republic had complete peace.
Imagine making a LoTR game set after the One Ring was destroyed, Saurons army were defeated, Mordor had fallen and there was complete peace in Middle-earth.
This is exactly what it feels like the play Starfield, the great conflict is over and anything even remotely tense just boils down to squabbles between pirates and a fascist military group with a history of war crimes. Nice.
If you go back to the Starfield trailer they depicted Delgado as a barbaric leader who kills his insubordinates without a thought. But when you play the game he's the most chill dude who asks you to use pacifism whenever possible lmao, there isn't even an option to rat on Mathis after he explicitly tells you he's going to murder the leader of the fleet and takeover, yikes.
Both of those could work really well, but they'd need a different genre.
Republic after the empire is dead? City skylines but in space
Lotr after sauron? Stardew Valley but you play as Sam
The cherry on top is even peaceful settings could be interesting... if the writers have the skill to make it so.
They should of had an interstellar trade agreement storyline. like in the phantom menace.
To be fair Star Wars you could always tell an interesting story set in the Outer Rim, where things were still mostly ruled by crime families.
I can do that, come up with conflicts for these settings. For Star Wars we have things like the Yuuzan Vong invasion or the Corellian Crisis.
For Lord of the Rings, bring up the dark Numenorian influences in Gondor, and the southern Numenorian colonies beyond Umbar.
But I see your point.
Honestly the companion death moment gets worse when you consider that, in the event you decide to play without followers, the ONLY candidates that might be killed in this situation are Barret, Sarah, Sam, and whoever they sent you to the scow with.
Usually i find it to be a choice between Barret and Sam, so this whole thing falls flat even more than playing normally.
(ignoring the fact i also didn't get attached to any of them because, i mean why would i? I'm not travelling with them or actively interacting with them)
So they added a trait that discourages me from using companions and yet this major story element needs me to have been using them to actually have impact?
I think the real issue is that Starfields setting is horribly undercooked. There’s no focus or real draw like Fallout and TES. It’s genetic space game. I think they should leaned more into the supernatural / fantastical sci-fi. I think 💯 this game coulda had more material for the writers if they just chose not to set in an uneventful era of peace. Shoulda had some crazy terramorph epidemic raging across the galaxy and have it all tie back to some x-files type explorers guild.
I don't think it's necessarily the setting of Starfield as a whole that's the main problem, you can do a lot with a basic space setting. Skyrim is really a fairly generic fantasy setting and Oblivion even more so. Fallout is honestly just not a fair comparison imo because that has got to be one of the most interesting settings in all of fiction. Most other space sims all have similar settings, if anything Starfield is actually a little bit unique because of the whole "NASA Punk" aesthetic. If anything the main problem with the setting is that the 3 of the main cities completely forego the NASA Punk vibe in favor of ultra generic tropes. If Bethesda actually committed the writing to being NASA inspired, then the game would feel much more holistic. But no what we get are a couple of video game trope theme park cities, and Rick and Morty multiverse rip off disguised as space magic.
29:25 - Actually, you can save both. If you look at Rafael's dead body in the 'good' version, he'll have a datapad that explains how to finish merge the realities, where you basically have to flip some specific ones of the switches off and back on, and then mess with the frequencies of the experiment in both universe, before finally hitting a big button near the artifact. End result is Rafael somehow getting sent back with the player to the 'good' ending, despite his corpse also being in that reality. Not sure why or how that works, other than it being a bit of a 'kobayashi maru victory' scenario.
Rafael makes a good companion
Unfortunately starfeilds potential is capped by the ancient engine they are still using. It is literally impossible for them to release DLC with more exploration. That’s why moders gave up on it.
Ouch, if modders give up on something, you know it's dead D:
A whole 2 modders gave up. the game is dead.
Yeah, can't believe they're still using the Unreal engine, absolutely ancient that thing is.
@@WillowWisp2112After a quick google search, I believe they didn't use Unreal, they use their in-house "Creation-Engine", which is what made Fallout 76 so hilariously easy to hack and cheat in. Starfield uses the Creation Engine 2, which is supposedly an upgrade over what they could do in Fallout 4. Boston kinda looked bigger than the space cities shown in this video though, mabe that's just me.
Meh. You can always fix an engine. The age is not really the problem. The tech debt is. And Bethesdas especially modern Bethesdas refusal to do anything about it. It's not that they are still using the engine it is that they have basically done nothing to adapt it for this game in 8 years of development.
The best thing about Starfield is how much it made me want to play Skyrim and Fallout 4 again.
Not that Fallout 4 is all that good either
@@martinjrgensen8234 Well to each their own. Personally I love Fallout 4. I agree the story is complete trash written by a 5 year old, but who plays it for the story? Same goes for Skyrim. Unfortunately I found it impossible to ignore the story in Starfield because it was constantly being shoved down my throat at every turn. Even when I could forget about it for five minutes the cookie cutter procedurally generated trash I was slogging through at 15 FPS while fighting the worst UI known to man just killed it for me. Maybe mod devs will save it but they have a hell of a job in front of them.
@@ParGellen guys in the comments here under this video say modders gave up on it because of old engine or something. So it will not be modded.
@@hulking_presenceIt's already being modded.
@@ParGellenFar Harbor is decently written. Easily the best piece of fallout content we've had from Bethesda.
For the opening landing at the pirate base, another youtuber brought up something that most likely explains it. The base has helium tanks on the roof, which is also where we fight the boss. Helium is the FTL fuel used by the ships. At one point, fuel usage was most likely a game mechanic, but one dropped to make the game less hardcore, less simulation, in favor of fuel automatically refilling, just being a limit on how far you can go in one jump. So, most likely, part of why we originally were supposed to go there was to fill up our tanks so we could then go on to the Constellation HQ. But without that gameplay mechanic, it ceases to make sense, since we can just go straight to the HQ, no problem.
Paridiso is even dumber than the travel costs. It's a high-G planet. What sort of person would want to go there for a relaxing vacation?
As far as getting to the Eye in time when it is being hit, it'll take far longer than 10m to get to the station. There would be a lot of pre-flight, fueling, and, most importantly, getting permission to launch. But the bigger question is, why would we go there? We're in the capital system of one of the biggest powers. We have political influence supposedly. Call the freakin' space cops to go to the station.
For the main story, there's another big issue: it doesn't matter in another way as well. What happens if we just let the Starborn do there thing and don't interfere? Well, they leave, and our life goes on. Because letting them have the artifacts has no consequences for us. And, for that matter, you don't even need all the artifacts to move on. To start NG+, you don't have to find all the temples, get all the power. So, yeah...
And ultimately, another big problem: because Bethesda wanted to make NG+ part of the world, the main story is a villain's backstory. Yeah, we're the bad guy. We're someone that leaves countless destruction in our wake, abandons everyone we know and love, all on a quest for personal power.
What's wrong with personal power?
You americans are crazy about that.
You would chop off your PP not to have any power.
One of the funniest things about the grav drive side effects is that it was apparently fixed with a patch. So it wasn't an issue with the tech but a software/calculation issue that nobody noticed or managed to fix before earth went boom.
Nothing about the whole starborn thing makes sense. We can only go to the next universe if we get all the artifacts but that would imply there can only be one starborn per universe or multiple from separate universes but apparently the hunter and emmissary have met multiple times which should be impossible unless they have a different way to travel universes. We always get to the same point in time, no matter when we do it. So shouldn't the starborn that touches the artifact the earliest always be a step ahead and by extension win the most.
Also the changes between universes are shallow af. Only constellation changes. We have no universe where earth isn't destroyed, Where the other side won the war. Where the extremists are the main religion, where Mars is terraformed. They do absolutely NOTHING worthwile with this concept. It's also one of the worst New Game+ modes ever. What's the point if you loose all your equipment, ship, house, inventory. It's basically nothing than a new game we start high level. We can't even change the story with our knowledge of what events are going to happen. So what's the point of the New Game+ and of playing through it all again?
If I had a nickel for every time I got married in a game and then my spouse was immediately killed off in the next mission. I’d have two nickels which isnt a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
what's the other one?
that's technically the entire plot of max payne
You say your a widow twice and only have two nickels. But filed for two million dollar life insurance payouts. You're coming to the station to answer some questions...
@@mykal4779 Fable 2
The tiny settlements are hardly new. The thriving trade city of Whiterun is a few disheveled house and an upside down boat inside a few crumbling walls.
And it's not like they don't already had the good bones of a city. Keep all the named NPCs and the style, add 10 times the NPCs and buildings, repair the walls and it at least would look good.
The best example for this is always Novigrad in Witcher 3. It doesn't have that much more named NPCs than Skyrim, but it has hundreds of NPCs and buildings for everyone you interact with. It's an awesome background which simply feels as if it's a city.
If Bethesda was using this method for forests, they would design 3 very good looking trees and call it a forest, asking you to imagine the rest. And the more advanced the setting is, the less it makes sense. Having Whiterun is boring, but alright, it's a harsh fantasy land, maybe it's supposed to look so destitute.
But any city that has skyscrapers either has to have more substance than that.
It's like they don't understand why skyscrapers exist, they just think "it looks cool". Skyscrapers are *expensive* and *very* difficult to build. You only build *up*, when you run out of room to build *out*. But Aqua (or whatever, I forgot the city's name), is surrounded by MILES of empty, easily-developable land. You never just see a puny little village with a gigantic skyscraper in the middle; it's always a huge dense city where they start making skyscrapers as the city starts running out of space.
Come to think of it, how they heck did they build that city? Where's all the infrastructure around it? Where did they get the materials? Where did they get the cranes and other construction equipment to make that skyscraper? Where did it all go? Where's all the farmland? (Not just on the planet, but like...period. The game has no large-scale farms to support a civilization, even of the laughably small scale seen in-game. Neon technically goes fishing, but it wouldn't appear everyone is subsisting entirely off of fish exported from another planet. Or maybe they are, and that's why they all have that glazed-over dead expression; they're suffering from countless vitamin deficiencies and mercury poisoning.)
I can’t be the only one who just…hated. All of the companions. They all sucked. They were all boring. Normal. Standard middle aged humans. No asari no robo waifus no garus no Spock. No Marie curie no piper. So lame Boring g judge mental. Even after being told we don’t care about what you do just don’t bring the cops here I endlessly heard shit for doing a top secret covert stralth mission I told no one about. Once a companion chewed me out told me one more fuck up like that and they were leaving!!! It was actually an option to ask why are you mad? I had no idea. So I asked. They got maddder like oh so you don’t know?!?!! To this day I have no idea why I was apologizing.
I never finished this game. Its story is objectively trash. Knowing if I finish the main quest there are two outcomes. Outcome a or outcome b. And I do t want either outcome. They’re bad. Stupid. Lame. Pointless and self harming. I chose not to finish the campaign. Because that’s the logical choice. Becoming a star born seems like hell. Failing is death. Fuck this I don’t want o play I’ll go explore space fml. That’s all I ever wanted. Mmgod famn it I hate this game so much
Starfield analysis and review is my new favorite sub-genre on TH-cam
Ironically, all these Starfield critique videos are far more enganing and entertaining than the game itself, which is shallow and boring af.
"The problem is that you think. Don't think. It's good story, trust me bruh." - Writers
I just watched part of a video titled "Starfield has no problems, YOU do!"
I get that art is subjective, but goddamn. So much of Stafield's story and "worldbuilding" is inexcusable.
After the NASA mission, I was kind of waiting for the UC or the Freestar collective to have an artifact and using it to develop a superweapon that could destroy magnetic fields like what happened to earth, as some sort of larger conflict and reason for the 2 factions to exist in the first place... but no... fetch quest best quest apparently
The problem is you're thinking about it like a story and not a series of shortcuts to junk they wanted to put in the game. They wanted a sparsely populated universe that felt huge but also lived in and also one faction should have a firefly asthetic and you should be part of a group of idealistic explorers and there should be an opening where youre a simple miner- they made those decisions and instead of making it fit they just brushed over how badly they work
So The weird detail with the Grav drive scientist is explained in one of the logs. He knew about the flaws but opted to produce the flawed version because humanity wouldn't spread as far as quickly if he didn't force a mass exodus.
Which makes no sense, since a planet of billions will produce far more colony missions and people taking to space to seek their fortune, than a few colonies that have to regrow civilization and who have no reason to expand and explore, since their planets are massively underpopulated. The only downside to Earth is it means there is a defacto hegemon that has a massive advantage over the colonies for millennia to come.
"Bethesda's writers played the mind game with themselves, and lost" is the best summary of Starfield I've heard and I am *totally* stealing it.
I loved when the Fallout series included bits of history and mysteries on some terminals. It made places feel like they've existed longer than the game itself. So many short stories that don't impact the main story, but make the world more believable and fun to speculate. It made exploring interesting and worth talking about with friends.
Imagine how good it be if they had a whole area of unknown space and that was like unexplored world when you drop into Skyrim or Lands Between. So then you could explore with all these other factions which be filled with loads of stuff like a frontiersman and that would lead to needs of diplomacy like getting licenses and negotiations with NPC to create your own mining and mercantile elements or work in a partnership etc .
To be fair, that "space priest" IS the pilgrim. That's why he was able to easily say the truth. He was testing you, and he says this if you encounter him once you are Starborn.
What's dumb is that they could have added content by forcing players to find pieces of these power rocks. That would have been a good way to get people to go to different parts of a planet, and interact with different locals. But that requires a sense of wonder, and storytelling capabilities.
Starfield makes perfect sense. Hype the crap out of it, people bought it, shareholders get rich quick, Perfect.
The same lessons were learned from Fallout 76. Promise fun and new, deliver the exact same lame crap we've been playing for years waiting for something new, Profit.
Maybe we should learn to NEVER PRE ORDER, or learn that "missing out" is part of life.
You think McDonalds cares if you like the exact same thing you've been eating since you were 3? No, because they know you'll still eat it, or someone sure as hell will.
The Alternate Dimensions mission made absolutely no sense to me. Because you have to make the choice where you can save one person, but doom hundreds (or more? I don't remember the specifics) or choose the reality where the monsters haven't killed everyone and send only person to his death. It was such a no-brainer choice and they made a big deal out of it in the end like you were a monster for killing the one guy. The whole story felt like it was just made up as they were going.
You can finish the experiment and save everyone. Its a secret third option that is hinted about in the various journals and computer entries.
29:41
The reason the Trolly Problem can't exactly work in many games with violence as an expected path is that the Trolly problem was never focusing on wether you would kill one for the many, but if you felt you had the right to make that choice for someone else.
By that point in the game, you've already established yourself as someone who's made that choice many times over, ergo of course the answer was an obvious one.
No shade on the quest for the most part, but to me it really hurts what's meant to be a climax not just because "well duh", but because it's a common improper use of the trope that adds yet another mark to showing the writing team lacks nuance or deeper thought.
Yeah, one key part of the trolley problem, is that it is set up to kill a group of people by default, and you have to actively choose to divert the trolley to kill another innocent person instead - making you directly responsible for that one person's death to save the larger group. It's not just having to make a choice - it's having to make the choice to take the life of someone who would have otherwise lived without your interference. A minor, but significant distinction.
If the quest was set up in a way, so they guy had basically already "saved" himself, he was in the clear and had resolved the situation - and in order to save the other people in the other universe, you had to *undo* his work and sabotage his safety, that would have made it a far more nuanced moral conundrum. I still think most would agree, that sacrificing the one for the many is the "correct" choice, but it hits a lot differently, when the blood of that sacrifice is on your hands.
Honestly, I kind of find trolley problems in general pretty boring, and trying to present them as some deep moral dilemma always bothers me. They have to add so many extra contrivances to force there to only be two mutually exclusive choices, because real world situations don't actually work that way.
@@-tera-3345 Uh, I think maybe you don't understand the point of hypothetical moral dilemmas.
They aren't supposed to be reflections of real world situations - they are specifically designed to be situations you are unlikely to encounter in real life, presenting you with choices you wouldn't normally have to make, in order to make you examine your own beliefs.
I mean, there's nothing stopping you from picking some other third option you come up with yourself.
Will certainly make the psychoanalysts work.
@@LadyDoomsinger The trolley problem doesn't really give you some deep philosophical introspection into how you think. It's just an observation that a direct action carries heavier weight and responsibility than an intentional nonaction. Trying to turn it into "which do you think is the correct choice" usually just turns into a weirdly utilitarian and often nearly eugenic discussion of what kind of people you think it's ok to let die, as people modify the situation to change the stakes involved in the choice.
But it's kind of become the e=mc^2 or Schrodinger's Cat of moral philosophy: something people reference to sound smarter than they actually are, in this case because they can't come up with "difficult" moral decisions of their own.
I am 110% convinced that the Vanguard storyline was the main story of this game until relatively late in development.
It's certainly the best questline by a wide margin.
“This makes the companions look as if they have a hive mind.” I believe this is a profound statement on the people who made this game. They got rid of all of the devs who made games interesting because they had differing views.
I also suspect that some commissar, I mean story consultant, showed up during production to remove anything interesting or edgy from any of the characters. It's fairly obvious that Andreja got a lobotomy at some point, Sam Coe was probably more of a gunslinger and not an emasculated single dad, and Vlad was probably a Russian who got a completely different character model for political reasons.
...after 5 in game days you literally forgot that one of the NPC's died? I think that says more about the game than it does about your memory...