There was no over aching enemy. It needed some form of outside threat.

My problem with Starfield was the NG+. You don’t make a game around base building (it’s funny how the logistical mechanics in Fallout 4 worked better than Starfield’s) and ships so people would throw it all away for some different interactions between the main NPCs and some smartass dialog options that have no impact on the story.

Did f#$ing Todd think that he could ‘pad’ replayability with such a poorly-written gimmick?

Compared to Ubisoft, cyberpunk at launch, and Fallout 76 it isn’t a bad game. But it’s not the masterpiece it NEEDED to be.

My biggest problem with Starfield was how disconnected it all felt. The main story, the sub-stories, the outpost system, none of it had *anything* to do with each other. Not to mention the conflict-less setting ensuring nothing important happens before you get to NG+ and wipe away all your progress.

Starfield is the perfect rpg for casuals. Its super vanilla and barebones that i think somebody without prior knowledge of bethesda games might enjoy.

Even the ship building (the biggest plus of the game for me) has problems. And they’ve done nothing to fix them

Just checked Steam page and Starfield reviews are “mixed” and not “mostly negative” as thumbnail of this video implies. Why are you using false information in your thumbnails?

Picked up starfield recently. And now I understand people that actually enjoy it. It’s a bad game, but it’s kinda interesting to grind some weapons and ships, and!!! If you’re lucky you can actually find interesting quests! Very little, and game doesn’t show you consequences. Literally can’t stop playing even though the first time I tried it, dropped it early cause I was annoyed about every single part of the game. Now I’m just sad, that they wasted time on creating one milion gagilion planets, instead of polishing the core.
I guess the second time I knew it was a c+ not a+.

I like the game , I really don’t like the fact that the mod community has decided it’s not worth their time . Because that’s all it’s lacking , it’s huge and they could mod the ever-loving s*** out of it . But they got it into their heads that it’s not worth their time . If the modding community would give it a chance , I’m pretty sure they would grow to like it as well . Other than that , the DLC should have contained new Starborn powers . Not including that was incredibly lazy on their behalf .

I’m a fan too… but they’ve did the shoulder shrug approach too long, they lost me…

Starfield’s core message has always been the same. Give Bethesda money for the least amount of work.

I dont know why you keep making starfield videos if you have nothing new to say. Theres been like 8 videos where you just said the same thing with the same arguments. Im just fatigued at this point man

If your thinking of playing starfield please play outer worlds instead 😂 The outer worlds is 1000x better than starfield, it’s everything starfield wishes it was 🤣 unless you just want to play a ship building game but then there’s like 0 actual content to enjoy with the ship you build 😭😂

Starfield is such a boring game that I also think you are wasting your Youtube channel on it. No pun intended.

There wasn’t a core message

The fact that you cant go 2 weeks without talking about this game that you supposedly dont like, for 16 months straight, is honestly a little pathetic man. Is there nothing else for you to farm negativity views with? No original thoughts or content rolling around in that head?

I really like the game, but I think the way they took the main storyline is a double-edged sword. Some prominent fans of the series said they wanted the main quest that wasn’t so urgent that it seemed out of character for any human being not to prioritize finishing the game before getting distracted by other stuff. They clearly listen to that, but now the main quest kind of fails to sweep you up in the story. It’s a great game if you just want to live in such a world, but the lack of a core gameplay loop addition to a narrative draw are legitimate criticisms.

In Skyrim you could be anybody who just happened to be the prophesized one. And starfield I only really have fun when I specifically tailor the character I’m RPing as to a type of person that would want to partaking the main quests and NG+. For example, my first playthrough was just someone who wanted to explore the universe. The problem with that is why would such a person take a desk job at Ryujin, or join the paramilitary vanguard, or become a sheriff in the freestar collective, or become a pirate, or become a narc infiltrating the pirates?

The 1000 planets are the problem. They lack substance and the main content is in 1-2 solar systems and just on 2-3 planets there.

The game is just bad IMO. It lacks everything which made Bethesda games magical. There is no exploration, no variety and too much bloat with quantity of planets and the lack of handcrafted content.

Bethesdas core message is “You guys are stupid, now give me your money, we’ll give you some 4/10 slop.”

Starfield was laughable. Procedural generation killed any interest in exploration – who cares about finding what’s over the horizon when it’s just some machine places random BS with no rhyme or reason? Same cryolab/outpost/abandoned facility with pick of one of 5 groups of enemies. But the story was absolute garbadge. There are literally no stakes. If the starborn get the artifact – they will just fuck off to some other universe, just like you. No effect. And they only show up halfway, before that there’s literally no insentive to pursue other than simple curiosity. All the other quests are pretty basic story-wise. It’s funny to be a pirate and have 25% of all human enemies be friendly, but you can do a massive blow to the military power of one of two major powers right after the war, take their flagship and it doesn’t affect the world at all.
And the worldbuilding of this sci-fi is just garbadge. They literally think the vacuum of space is cold and good for cooling supercomputers, that’s in a log in a story quest just to make a snarky comment about marketing a “supercomputer on the Moon”. It perfectly summarizes the level of sci fi writing you’re dealing with. For a comparisson, launch Mass Effect, you don’t even have to play it, launch ME, open journal and read the encyclopedia for a bit – especially do that if you want to make some pseudo-smart reply about “oh, this game with space magic lacks real science?”; maybe after looking at that simple example you’ll understand how space magic should work with science, and how writing fiction works overall.
As for the score – it’s the worst kind of a C+ game, if it’s even that. It’s C+ not because it’s brought down by some massive flaws, but because it doesn’t have anything to bring it higher than that.

It’s just boring it misses the fun of their other rpg’s I spent most of my time building a ship to look at in all the loading screens

Personally, I found that Starfield doing a single planet expansion was extremely dumb.
This felt like the opposite of what Starfield needed to me.

Restricting the story to one planet while your Game is about a thousand planets destroys every opportunity of reworking planets and procedural systems that are literally at the core of the game.
Sure, handmade content is nice, but why restrict it to a single planet and a space station.

But the tech isnt cool either… NMS did space combat, exploration, and procedural generation better. The only thing Starfield did well is the ship building. I was surprised how polished and involved it was, and I think it’s the only thing that will be remembered in 2-3 years.

I’m also sick of giving Bethesda a bunch of leeway because of games they made between 2003-2011. Starfield was a buggy mess, still is, and we should be more critical that Bethesda can’t even take engine fixes the modding community made in almost a decade ago.

Starfield IS a D-level game.

I expected it to come to PS5 and eventually tried it on game pass and let’s just leave it at – I’m glad I did.

Engagement milking awooga

Go woke go broke

And the game is still over 40$ a couple years later and during a Steam Winter Sale in 2024.

I enjoy Starfield, but it’s for sure a mess. I enjoy a good chunk of content on it, but it feels like it bogs itself down on the main quest. The side quests are good, and I’d rather just play that than what it was built around. The loading screens are also a pain, but for some reason I can look past it, still not a good look good.

Funny when people keep mentioning Bethesda’s environmental storytelling. Even that, they did better in older games. Always remember the corpse in Morrowind, he had a sword named Fury. Fortifies Attack Damage while also putting a mild blind effect on yourself on hit. Tells me all I need to know about that guy right there.

It’s quite ironic that if you avoid exploration entirely (you land, go to the marked POI, then leave), don’t do any radiant “go here kill this guy” quests and generally avoid ALL of the sandbox elements of the game, your enjoyment will increase quite a lot as for the most part you’ll only see each location once and there is a genuinely huge amount of large unique, handcrafted locations (more than FO4 + Skyrim combined).

If they had just found a better way of spreading the content instead of copy pasting all 50+ large unique locations (and the hundreds of smaller ones) onto *every frickn planet* players would have had a lot better experience. Doing a full clear of each individual unique location is easily a 50-100 hour playthrough.

Just came to laugh at this clown, still talking shit about his favourite game of all time 😂🤡

I would DEFINITELY trade the whole 1000 planets that are empty and boring for 2, maybe 3 WELL TAYLORED and cohesive planets (and the 3 main planets kinda would be good for that if they were more developed) + some minor satellites and space stations. Starfield is a masterclass on how to waste good potential.

Um, Wow, Um, Shattered Space was already made when Starfield was released!!! Shattered Space was Cut Content from the base game of Starfield repackaged as DLC, just so they could make more money on the game!!! That is common sense, if you did not know that then your stupid!!!! Noobs and there commentary, hahahaha

It was NEVER GOING TO BE GENERATION DEFINING of a game because first and foremost of the TERRIBLE GAME ENGINE BETHESDA USES CREATION ENGINE 2, Its pretty sad gamers/consumers have to tell these Developers how egotistical they are about their expectations are of the development of the game is….

I feel like if I was to watch a podcast with you and Todd, then Todd would find a way to charge me five dollars. Got to work the microtransaction in.

We got a F. Fun for no one

Are you kidding??? The 1000 Plants are Dull, Boring, Repetitive, Generic, there is nothing “Cool” about the 800 planets that are lifeless!!!!! Only 200 planets have content!!!!

I’m kind of in your camp… did i have fun, yes, mostly; was it a waste of time, no; am i glad i played it on gamepass rather than buy it, yep; was it still a disappointment, absolutely. If you as a developer are going to hype up a product, you better bring it.

You guys are really missing out on the mission boards.

It’s a space game where you can’t enjoy flying. If you can’t do that then you have to make it spacey with variety on the ground, but it’s just samey as hell. I’m really disappointed, i hoped for better.

It’s the lore and story building that’s lacking. Fallout and Elderscrolls have deep, rich lore that carries you through the world and keeps you playing for hours and days. And it’s the think that makes fans forgive bugs, errors, omissions, etc. With Starfield, Bethesda seems to have forgotten what made their flagship series’s so great in the first place. I still have Skyrim and Fallout installed on my computer because the worlds feel like real places, and I’m immersed when I play. Starfield, for the few hours I played it, felt like a cheap cardboard set of a 3rd-rate T.V. show acted by poorly written characters.

Looks like the fun and popular phrase these days is “gameplay loop”. Nevermind that, we dont need a gimmicky gameplay loop. Just more content, organized in a much better fashion.

It’s sad that we are now describing ourselves as former fans.

5:02 if you ever do get a interview with Todd, please promise us you won’t ask the softest questions like Matty.

The biggest problem with Starfield is that it really is Skyrim in Space. That means that 99% of outposts you find are filled with spacers or mercenaries. The vast majority of the human population in Starfield are bandits, because the Bethesda game design demands that every point of interest be a combat-oriented one. You don’t get a realistic universe, you get one filled with enemies.

250 hours played still playing, love it.

The answer is yes, it’s completely fair

Just remember: Starfield has no procedural generation. Using a noise map and sprinkling assets around is not procedural generation. You cannot compare the terrain of Starfield with the one in No Man’s Sky.

There is also the issue of the copy and pasted locations. After a few hours of gameplay, you are bound to have seen them all.

I think every new game has to clear the high water mark of other games in its genre, and this is where Starfield failed the most imo. In Bethesda land, Mass Effect or No Mans Sky never existed.

You know, negative review will reinforce you more than positive. That’s not just my theory.

I completely agree here, I want to play more Starfield now, after the negative review, than I wanted before. Starfield feel superior to Massive Effect Andromeda, and that was also a C…. but great fun to play in the end, and a modern title, this is the important part. It has some new cool element, great graphic, and is probably more main storyline than some past titles but ok to play.

If it takes 6-7 years before you think the game is somewhat “fun” even from a developer point of view – you should’ve perhaps cancelled the game 3-5 years earlier.

i got starfield cheep, i played it like i play elite dangerous, travel to a system scan planets land on plants that have anything there kill/loot the place repeat when storage is full go sell it, wish you could scrap weapons and armour

When Fo4 came out, some people said it’s bad. No, Fo4 was above average, fun game. Starfield is the real bad game, it’s boring, below mediocre, below average and I think it’s best to be forgotten, like it never existed.

Bethesdas problem is the inability of the higher management to admit that things are not right development wise. Sometimes you need to be able to take critical feedback and make adjustments. Also Starfield is a prime example of creating repetitive content with the aid of procedural coding. Having hundreds of stars doesnt really help the game if most of the quests on those planets can be boiled down to same quests repeating on each planet.

What is Stephen even talking about. I swear he is just talking to talk

With the ability to reset the universe at the end of the story, the core message was “nothing you did matters”. After that it all feels meaningless and it’s no surprise that players did that and then lost all desire to keep playing.

Even mods won’t save Starfield. They can add all the content/overhaul they like. But the core system of fast traveling everywhere and system limitations that prevent you from doing anything creative are just unpleasant to play.

Everything the main story, characters, and missions, all of it felt bland and juvenile, paling in comparison to Skyrim, a game more than a decade old.

Bro is still farming starfield content Jesus bro move on

Loved Starfield, still love it. Have hundreds of hours in

Characters were so dull, they were basically robots. The story was also incredibly dull. Starfield made me realise Bethesda has never really been that great at story telling. Their strength lies in crafting detailed, immersive environments.

You really don’t get it Luke. It all just works!

Also didn’t help them that Baldur’s Gate 3 had already sucked all the air out of the room by the time it launched.

I’m gonna say something crazy…

I’ve been enjoying it… I’m sorry…

Probably because I’m a Firefly fan and this is the closest thing us Browncoats will ever see to a game about our franchise which is for the most part… ya know… dead in the water.

Why would you have gone into Starfiel expecting an A+ game when they haven’t produced one in over 10-15 yrs?

Gameplay cycle of Bethesda games is basic dungeon crawler – you find a dungeon, go in and take out as many enemies and treasure you can, go to town to sell your finds for gold, upgrade your inventory and character, repeat. But what with Starfield?
Dungeons are getting repetitive really quick, it’s hard to find something interesting in terms of structure of location or unique enemies. Dungeons were good in Morrowind. They weren’t giant most the time, but you never know what can you find in this particular tomb or cave. Maybe something great like an artifact. Or something funny like naked Nord bandit with his girlfriend, but you can imagine what you have disturbed and getting bonked for.
Going to towns that have 1.5 of interesting NPC and places to go, one of wich is the shop to sell your junk? It’s Bethesda so cities even more look like a glorified village that wants to everyone to call it city. It’s not even like Oblivion where you want to go anywhere and talk to people because you probably will stumble on some quest, and Oblivion side quests generally were fine.
And why also do you need to explore space in this game? Even good views not worth it. In Skyrim you can seek another dungeon, another fetch quest, but most of the time should you just slow down and look around and you’ll see beautiful nature around you. Forests, mountains and plains. There’s plenty of places to catch your eye.

If there is something that Bethesda made good in Starfield then it’s the quantity of star systems. Not their quality. And at the end we got the game that worse than anything they got. Achievement by itself, but I wanted for them good achievements and not this shame

1:17 Let’s be real, Bethesda’s “environmental storytelling” usually amounts to a dead body in a room with a note or an audio tape explaining how that person died. Which is… just not very good environmental storytelling.

It’s just a boring game that feels outdated and lifeless. Outside of a couple side-quests, the game had nothing interesting about it.

The difficulty settings are cool but I’m missing a true survival mode plus Shattered Space being not very good killed my interest

The Core Message bro the phj in that are so scary im therapy since then

It really is a bad game, but unpopular opinion I do enjoy it. Until I get tired of the 30 loading screens And go play CP 2077 instead

Yeah it happened to me. Got hyped PS first party games for years. Tried GOW and it was the most mid game ever

Starfield is easily an 8.5/10 — the problem is the narrative created by influencers exactly like Luke…and the largely uninitiated masses who simply take his ‘talking points’ at face value, having never played the game (or at best, put a couple hours in and quit due to confirmation bias) and repeat this false narrative ad infinum.

If you play Starfield like it’s Skyrim, expecting Skyrim, you’re a dumba##, plain and simple. It’s okay not to like the game, but a huge swath of folks choose not to judge this game *by its own merits* but by a set of hyperbolic generalizations and moving goalposts.

I’ve put 200+ hours into Starfield and am STILL seeing new stuff each time I fire it up. The factions, side missions and main story are leagues beyond anything BGS has ever done since Morrowind. Skill checks, and RPing opportunities abound, left and right. Companions are fleshed out with deep individual story lines. Researching, crafting, modding are all deep intricate systems. I could go on and on.

Yes, there are a slew of games that can do “X” or “Y” specifically better than Starfield. however, I maintain there is NO other game that does as much, as well as Starfield.

I think there’s been a a discrepancy between the kind of games Todd Howard wanted to make and the kind of games he ended up in charge of. The game he pitched to Robert Altman back in the day was supposed to be his masterpiece, his Kojima moment. I mean, just look at those middle-aged romantic interests, you’d have to be a 50-something to even see them that way. But Todd’s perfect game was just not what we wanted, it was Bethesda going against everything it does best, while also lacking the tech to properly implement the kind of game he envisioned. Robert is probably rolling in his grave right now.

Wait, it had a Core Message?

The ship building seems cool until you realize it’s the same editor you used in Morrowind to snap building pieces together, only a bit more polished. I guess it’s the same as Fallout 4 when you use those modular Vault pieces to make your own base.

Starfield is the game that Gen X had been waiting for our entire lives. We finally got it. People say it feels like Starfield is 20-25 years too late. And I agree. So, I’m not surprised that Millennials and Gen Z don’t like it. But hey. There is always Cyberpunk and BG3 for you guys. And a new GTA is coming. There ya go.

The message seemed to be – here’s a half ass game, give us your money.

I have spent quite a few bucks to MOD the living sh*t out of Starfield and I’m a God Dam* Space Explorer. That’s all I ever wanted.
Yep, I already know the counterargument, and yes I understand. You should not have to dump money into mods to enjoy an unfinished game.
But I’m at a point in my life where I don’t give a rat’s a**.
I got the FY money. I got the time. I got the gear.
My clock is ticking. And I’m going to explore the COSMOS before it’s over.

Just go ahead and ban me.

Starfield is worse than just bad. It is one of the most boring games ever made. It goes out of its way to be inoffensive and absolutely fails to do anything interesting.

The whole point of the dlc was you get a new gun and the gun could only be shot four times before being rendered useless.

Think about that for a second. Bethesda’s ENTIRE goal with that was to make one. Functioning. Weapon. And one of two things happened. Either they KNEW it was broken and asked for your money anyway because f*** you or not a single person on that whole team gave enough of a f*** to even shoot that gun FOUR TIMES to see “Oh, dang. This is bugged”. Bethesda is modern gaming distilled to its purest form and I’m so excited to never buy another product from them.

Assuming the modders would yet again fix/add life to their games finally bit them hard. Will they learn? Unlikely.

The core message I got from Bethesda is, We’re lazy, we think you’re stupid now just hand over your money. THAT’S the “message” I got.

I never found a “soul” in this game and felt no urge to continue playing it…

Starfield at launch was a “good” not great game. Its biggest issue is suffering hard from being a jack of all trades master of none.

I didn’t think it was crap. I found it to be aggressively mediocre for a game Bethesda kept trying to claim was new and revolutionary – for a game that is the result of the better part of a decade’s work by one one the biggest, most important developers in the world that once produced a virtual game of the decade. A game called “Starfield” that didn’t even implement a true 3D map of the Star f**king field in question. They should have called it Starrectangle. A sigh of disappointment followed by one of indifference is exactly the right word for my reaction.

When the studio behind the game ISN’T THRILLED in making the game , the end product isn’t going to be much better . I’d love to ramble on and rip Bethesda a new hole , but Starfield was my first and probably last game I’ll ever buy from them . I enjoy NMS much more and NMS is STILL getting new and fresh content that makes it fun and exciting to play .

procedural content is trash

When I played it, I really didn’t hate it, in the beginning I actually quite liked it but I noticed that since like 2 weeks after launch I really didn’t have any desire to play it again. I think I was hoping it would be like a more open world Mass Effect (we don’t mention Andromeda) with the typical Bethesda elements but maybe those expectations were just too much

Starfield selling the game as an A+ to get more sales early really hurt them

I just want like 1000 new points of interest and some more customized regions. Also maybe make those big cities a lot bigger.

The trouble with a space game, in my opinion, is that you have to commit. Either you make a space exploration game based on reality, where practically all worlds have absolutely nothing on them at all, or you have to write the game in such a way that every system has at least one planet that has billions of individual characters living on it, in multiple cities across multiple continents with different characteristics based on planetary tilt, rotation rate, and orbital mechanics. You cannot have most of the visitable planets be barren, save for a single, copy pasted shitbox outpost, occupied by corpses, bandits and alien creatures.

The issue for me, really, is that all the space games out there, are ahead of their time in the wrong way. Starfield, Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous… They’re ALL bad, because they all make the same common error. The developers tried to make galaxies, before ANY developer has successfully designed a game that occurs on a single, contiguous, fully explorable world, populated with billions of individual characters all with unique backgrounds, traits and circumstances.

When games can be made that model a WHOLE world, with a properly large population, that operates on its surface the way societies ACTUALLY operate, there is NO reason to even TRY and make a game like Starfield, or any of the others. Thousands of fully functioning societies, on thousands of worlds would be cool. Anything less than that is humdrum.

Todd: it took 7 years to make starfield fun to play
Me: bro the game wasn’t fun at all to play. lol

the POI system should have been procedurally generated then it would have endless exploration

Starfield also lacks conflict. You hear about this war that happened between the UC and the Freestar Collective but you never get to experience any of that.

The 1000 planets became one of their biggest weaknesses since its still using the creation engine, CTD upon leaving your ship far enough after traveling 2-3 planets is high especially if you keep on visiting planets with high population of NPCs. Doesn’t matter if you are vanilla or just using mods that fixes bugs, its baked in the foundation of the engine.

They just made it worse from how it was tolerable in Skyrim but not in Starfield cause of the amount of loading screens.

Starfield is an OK but flawed game when we wanted a great game. But I got more than 200 hours out of it, so I don’t feel scammed. Unlike with some other games like Diablo 4 which were junk at launch.

I haven’t even got 10 hours on star field. There are to many loading screens I don’t understand how people didn’t completely burn out making it. Seriously it takes three loading screens to travel anywhere.

I actually really like Starfield, but IDK why it’s taking them so long to fix lackluster aspects of the game, and add more content; it’s hard to believe that it took a year for Shattered Space.

Its too corporate

The core message Xbox sucks XD

For me, it comes down to a game needing to have 2 out of 3 things:

1. Quality Graphics
2. Story
3. Gameplay

If Starfield had at least 2 out of the three, I could recommend it. However, they failed at not just one, or two, but all three. So, to me, it is complete crap, waste of money, do not buy – even if its free.

I need them to get rid of 70% of the loading screens

Feels like menus and quick travel the game, heaven knows the loading times on HDD lol