Starfield on Steam
store.steampowered.com
Starfield is the first new universe in 25 years from Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4.

I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.

While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you’d expect.

Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.

In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today’s game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don’t scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.

  • JakeroxsEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    There are certainly flaws in Starfield, I never claimed otherwise, but I will push back on bad arguments and provide my own perspective and experience.

    I have played thousands of hours of Bethesda games vanilla and heavily modded, they make good games that are made excellent via mods, and they specifically approve and uplift mods and modders, that’s something very few other companies (especially at this level, indie games/developers can be very good about this as well) do, and their games are all the better for it.

    But people just act like they’re leaving it to modders to fix the broke stuff, while my 96 hours in this game so far has proven (to me) they definitely did focus a lot more on qa and making sure there are no game-breaking bugs. I already a fiend for making saves because of experiences of running into game breaking bugs on past vanilla Bethesda games, but I literally haven’t run into a single one yet with Starfield.

    Are there random floating things sometimes? Yes Are there funny physics glitches that happen? Most certainly Are all the animations perfectly smooth and life like? Nope

    Do any of the above bugs or weirdness effect my enjoyment of the game? Nope, it’s a fun game with a lot to do and see.