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Bethesda responding to negative Starfield reviews on Steam
(www.eurogamer.net)
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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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The title made me think they were responding to users that needed customer support, but no. This:
is just pathetic. This is nothing more than low-effort damage control. Which, funnily enough, is rather fitting for Starfield in general. It's not a terrible game but it absolutely fell flat on its face on its biggest selling points. Procedural exploration will always have drawbacks but No Man's Sky absolutely smashes Starfield in this department and it came out nearly 8 years ago and made by a team a fraction of the size. And I don't expect Bethesda to put in the same effort as Hello did and make Starfield live up to its promises
An issue is that Bethesda might be getting deluded into thinking that Fallout 4 on its own was fantastic.
It is, on its own, very boring. The story is bland, characters left unexplored. But the mods make it amazing.
Sim settlements alone revitalizes the game, changing settlement building into an optional and story driven thing, particularly in its version 2.
The vertibirds mods which not only fix the abysmal default abilities, but even let you call one in as air support.
Various mods that add travellers on the roads and paths, so you encounter other people.
The mods that let you turn the feral ghouls into zombie hordes.
The list goes on.
Yeah, at the beginning Fallout 4 was just Fallout Shelter with a quest tacked onto it. And especially since the game really pushes you into the Minutemen faction, for a new player, the annoyance of constant settlement building and rescuing settlers and setting up new settlements completely overwhelms you and makes the game extremely frustrating. After my first playthrough I put it down and didn't come back to it for over a year because it pissed me off so much. Realizing you could just ignore the Minutemen made the game so much better. And then when mods came to the consoles, it completely changed the game. Made it so much more enjoyable.
Like, yeah, there's loads of YT channels now devoted to FO4 content, but only because mods allowed people to transcend how lackluster the game was at the beginning. The love of it now is despite Bethesda. And they definitely spend way too much time smelling their own farts thinking they hit the ball out of the park because of all that.
I had high hopes for No Man's Sky based on how people talked about it but was left underwhelmed. I found it boring and repetitive.
Starfield took a lot longer before it started feeling that repetitive (to me.) I put many more hours into Starfield (than NMS) without even thinking about it.
I just rolled credits on Starfield last night and went back to keep playing because I have a ton of unfinished quests and some goals for building my spaceship. With No Man's Sky I felt like there was nothing else to find.
(All that said, I do find a lot of the writing pretty lackluster, the planets now feel boring to look at and now predictable as to what will be there, and I do not particularly enjoy running around trying to find the last things to scan for very little payoff.)
The best summary for NMS I have read is "huge but shallow". There is so much stuff to do, but everything is so shallow that it becomes boring very fast
I agree about NMS, I can't bring myself to try it again. The original feeling that everything is the same is still with me, even after reading reviews of updates.
Spoilers Here
Yeah, I ended up feeling the same about Starfield as I did about NMS. A huge universe that's wildly unrewarding in every way possible. And getting to the end of Starfield, the NG+ feels exactly like getting to the center of the galaxy in NMS. Completely pointless.
The main quest of Starfield had literally no impact on the world at large. And don't get me wrong, that's totally fine. As long as it has an impact on something. But it doesn't. It all boils down to "no one can know about this" and where you stand on the issue, which in itself its meaningless because no matter where you stand, the outcome is exactly the same. You just run in circles and your choices have no effect on anything.
The side quests and faction quests are pretty good. But that's about it. The ship building system is painful, the outpost building system is so fucking bad I don't even know where to start, and it takes hours upon hours to go through levelling up, doing skill challenges, as well as research, to even get to a point where any of it is rewarding, and even then it isn't actually rewarding. At least the settlement crafting in NMS felt like building a cool house and a rad looking planet. Whereas Starfield, settlements are just massive pain in the ass mines and manufacturers.
I got my monies worth out of it, but yeah, it's missing the mark compared to their previous games.