The Failure of Starfield

One thing Starfield is really good at, is making us appreciate other games.

Starfield can be summarized by this sequence: fly (load) into a planet, walk for ten minutes, get to an NPC, have them say "hmm yes, interesting, you should go talk to X on another planet", turning around, and going back to where you come from to repeat the sequence. Starfield is the game that could have been an email.

The audacity of Todd to call this next gen with the amount of loading screens will never stop being funny to me

The loading screens are the most surprising part of Starfield. They improved so much between Skyrim and Fallout 4, with the latter having quite a few buildings you could go in without a loading screen. How did they take such a step back?

Another example of why everyone should ignore the hype and never pre-order games. Make these lazy companies earn your money.

Watching reviews of Starfield has been more entertaining than playing it. We want better.

8:10 I noticed something. Whenever a publisher or developer says "We focused on X to make the gameplay more interesting" it means they never even considered Y and could not make Z work so they gave up.

seeing phil spencer laugh when the journalist asked why tod didnt optimize the game will never not make me laugh.

I don't think we need a new PC upgrade, I think we need a new lead developer for bethesda games.

The writing is also lacking in the small details. For example, they wanted a monster whose name sounds scary and also sounds a bit like xenomorph. So they called it "terrormorph". It sounds like a first-draft placeholder that they never got around to changing.

At 160 hours in, I’m done with it. One of the most infuriating aspects I noticed was the corner cutting they did with the extensive use if copy paste cells. If you’ve been to one abandoned mine, military base, research base, and so on, you’ve seen them all, right down to the same loot in the same place, even the NPCs are in exactly the same place. First time I ran into it I thought I’d already been to that particular site.

The funny thing is, Starfield proved to me that Outer Worlds really was the Starfield Killer, years after its release.

Next gen game = We put MORE loading screens :)

I like starfield for like 80 hours, then i tried baldurs gate. I havent opened starfield since and one of the first things i noticed when i spoke to a dog in BG3 was that even the animals had better facial expressions than the NPC characters in starfield.

The biggest problem I have is none of the dialog choices reflect anything someone with even a room temperature IQ would say. The responses tend to be outright stupid or shows a lack of what the player has already learned. "Terramophs, what are those?" - Actual dialog option after completing the UC storyline and becoming head of the TDM (or whatever the hell it's called). I've slaughtered more than a hundred of these things already, what are you doing having an option for "WhAt'S a TeRrAmOrPh?". As Critical Drinker would say, "fuck off, game."

imagine how cool it be if they had dismemberment and seeing limbs float around after a battle in space or coming across an abandoned ship slowly discovering floating body parts

I had so much fun scanning the same plant 🌱 five times before the scan was complete that I uninstalled the entire game and started playing Red Dead Redemption 1 instead as it’s also on game pass. What a glorious gaming experience that is compared to Starfield even if it’s 13 years older.

As a writer myself, I'll give my opinion (TED talk) regarding Starfield's story (bad) and Cyberpunk 2077 (great). First: Starfield has trash motivation Consider Bethesda's other recent games, Fallout 4 and Skyrim. What was the inciting action for both of these games? In Fallout 4, after escaping to the vault, your child is kidnapped and your spouse murdered by random people. When you thaw from cryo sleep, your goal is clear: find my kid. In Skyrim, as your head is placed on a chopping block, a dragon that might as well be Satan himself, swoops down and destroys the village you're in. After you escape, you learn that dragons are not normally around Skyrim, so you have one goal: figuring out wtf just happened and why are dragons appearing. Meanwhile, in Starfield, you grab a mcguffin. Then a guy just randomly gives you, the mcguffin toucher, the keys to his space ship, and tells you to go to his club. You make it there to learn about the mcguffin, and all they have to say is: we don't know what the mcguffin is, we just want to find more... engaging, I know. Where a game like Cyberpunk stands out as a fantastic story is this: first, you pick a background that has you complete a short mission where you meet your bestie. Then, time passes and your bestie has a big job in mind that will make you rich and famous. You come up with a perfect plan, carry it out, then unexpected sh*t hits the fan, turning everything after into a complete clusterf*** where you narrowly escape, only to be shot in the head and wake up later to learn that the long dead remnant of an edgy punk rock terrorist is in your brain, while you're told you are slowly dying and must find a way to survive. Not only do they give you a believeable motivation, but they serve it up to you with a helping of memorable backstory that helps you learn who your character is, what their relationship is like with the world around them, and a cinematic action sequence to really emphasize the high stakes game you're playing. Second: Starfield's world is fake and it shows. Starfield's world is pathetic. It is unbelieveable in many ways. First off, every random person feels the need to tell you random bs you don't care about. Like honestly, have you ever been walking down the street and some random guy goes: don't you hate it when you make a sandwich upside down? It might be funny the first time you hear it, but when it's repeated by twelve different voices one hundred times, it sucks! Like, just shut the f*** up! No, you wouldn't have killed me random pirate if I didn't join the fleet! I'd have caved your skull in and used it to drink canuck maple syrup soda out of! Meanwhile, Cyberpunk npcs only randomly address you if they have a reason to, like threaten you to get away, otherwise they'll attack you. You know, a bit more realistic. The former breaks immersion regularly, while the latter aids it. However, that might be a nitpick compared to the other things. One thing that is clear is the way people talk in Starfield. They talk exactly the way you and I would. They don't use any slang we don't use, and any references that come close to showing its world are weird space references, i.e. sea shanties being sung with new atlantas in them. It's almost like everyone forgot about Earth and what happened there (and even that scenario is completely unrealistic considering Mars took billions of years to lose its atmosphere to what it is today. But apparently Earth could lose it in a few decades). Basically, the world has no history short of the recent colony war. Even on that end, the factions are pretty much the same. The only real difference is that one is just cowboy and the other police. Otherwise, they all speak the same language, they all do the same things, they seem to have the same values, etc. Meanwhile, in Cyberpunk 2077, each gang has a unique appearance, culture, and lore. The world itself uses slang and references we don't, that make sense, as in, there us a clear reasoning behind them that you can see language evolving into: Eddies from Euro Dollars, or the shorthand ED; Preem from premium; klept, from kleptomania, the condition where a person steals on impulse; or choom, which could be chum but spoken phonetically in spanish. Even words like gonk or nova just make sense in their context. Plus, these are memorable. Meanwhile, the only thing I remember from Starfield is dust, as in, I'll dust your ship. The world itself, the way it appears, makes sense. For example, why does a spacefaring superpower have a capital city with roads made of mud and feces? In Cyberpunk, the parts of the cities with said roads are where you'll also be able to throw a bag of crack attached to a rope over a bridge and be able to pull up a junky like you're fishing. But, the areas with the powers that be, are clean and have a real sense of order. The billboards showcase weird, dystopian, things like "real water" or "%70 real meat, meat." The news casts talk about things like the discovery of animals thought to be extinct like the western cotton tail. Meanwhile the ads in starfield are boring, and the newscasts about stuff you did. In short, the world of Cyberpunk feels unique and like it goes far beyond the bounds of the game, while in Starfield, it revolves around you and feels just normal, but in space. Third, and last since this comment is already a small novel, the characters. Oh my freaking Lord, are the characters in Starfield BORING. The first thing I felt when I met Barret was: this guys gonna be Bethesda's Jar Jar Binx, isn't he. Then, my first mission with Vasco was just me pistol whipping him nonstop for saying pointless, stupid things every ten seconds. The characters lack depth, substance, and just feel... well... like NPCs. You can literally understand most of their life by interrogating them for ten seconds and nothing more builds onto them after that, unless they're romanceable. Even after that, it's pretty shallow. Meanwhile, in Cyberpunk 2077, the characters don't talk unless they are talking TO you in a conversation. No stupid quips, no stupid random I'm-so-unique dialogue. Then, slowly, and naturally, characters will open up to you as you interact with them in a way that shows them you can be trusted. Judy doesn't tell you about her childhood town until you do quests for her and show her you have her back. There's no "noname liked that" or "noname disliked that" bs because you shared your opinion on space lsd. It's just you and a character talking and getting to know one another, or butting heads. I guess I could also say the dialogue options in Cyberpunk 2077 don't read like they're from a preschool text book. It's clear the writers went to great lenghts to consider the possible options your character could use to respond, and made them sound as realistically as possible. In Starfield, why can't I choose to use both the microbe and the Aceles for handling terrormorphs? They both have their pros and cons that complement each other, not oppose each other. Why can't I fish an answer like that out? Meanwhile, Starfield npc responses sound like someone who's pretentious, someone who believes they're smarther than they really are. Meanwhile, in Cyberpunk, they sound... well... like real people. To summarize everything, Cyberpunk is a game that feel like the writers wanted to tell a story for every mission. They had a vision, a goal, and ultimately, the game could have been set in any number of time periods and settings and still had the impact it did. Meanwhile, Starfield just seemed focused on... how cool is space, while everything else was an afterthought. It seems like there was no planning; no end goal for a story. Tod Howard himself said that during an entire game's development, it's only about in the last year that Bethesda begins to really figure out what kind of game they're making. They have no clue what they're doing because they don't know where they want to go. It's why everything from gameplay to the story seem like a confused mess because Bethesda had no idea what they were making until it was almost done. Thank you for listening to my TED talk.

The game actually punishes you for exploration on foot by giving you hypothermia every time you venture outside your ship

Vehicles would only highlight just how small (and yet somehow barren/devoid of interest) these procedurally-generated planets truly are. What a galactic disappointment...