Todd Howard’s dream game was to steal the worst part about No Man’s Sky that everyone hated, call it “the Unity”, and write a MacGuffin hunting story that leads you to it while giving you dragonborn powers?

It’s kind of pitiful in a way.

21:54 Absolutely agree about being able to go your own way. In Skyrim, I resolved the Civil War by brokering a truce between the Imperials and Stormcloaks by using my influence as Dragonborn. Both sides were sufficiently ‘morally gray’ for me to not particularly favor one over the other, especially given the cost in lives.

Ah snorefield the most fun to be had with this game is watching videos explaining how lame the game is. Thanks for the video Duder.

Starfield has a horrible entertainment to playtime ratio for a video game. I don’t think it’s too bad of a game, but it is overall a waste of time. I would only recommend it if you have nothing else to do, and I mean NOTHING.

Nobody sets out to make a bad game? Ya they do humans love to screw things up for one reason or another. A scoobydoo movie was intentionally made bad to destroy scrappy as a character because the director didnt like scappy and he wanted everyone else to hate him. There is a hell of a lot of art that is made for the sole intention of it being bad because lol. Why would games be immune to this? Now maybe starfield wasnt made to be intentionally bad, thats probably true, but that doesnt make his post any less wrong. I’m honestly surprised how many people still play it for being such a poorly received game, its more then most must play games. I also dont think gamers arent demanding any more then what was being made before. Old games such as Halo, diablo 2, left for dead 1&2, ect are all still heavily played so clearly we are not demanding more then what has been able to made previously, and for cheaper. We simply want something actually good and not half-assed. The problem is the companies are trying to push this fake notion that we are asking for more so that they can make the game graphically look better and then charge absurd prices because “gamers are always demanding more”

F in the chat for the orange juice 😓 3:26

like starborn ability gathering could been better if it doesnt follows same shit
>talk to black dude
>go to planet
>go to samey location
>do same superman64 puzzle
>ends with same starborn fight

okay hear me out. the death of sam was a lot more impactful on my playthough and this may be an issue with how bethesda set up the story the way i played it

i went into the game. after months of excitement. wanting to be an op lone ranger who mains pistols and doesnt care about anyone. but meeting them and taking them on my journey when they were a part of it. i didnt take them immediatly where they needed to go so they stuck around in my ship for a while. during this time they opened me up and completely grew me as a person in my playthrough i then opened up to be a nicer person due to knowing that sam was raising his daughter alone and i cared about her so much when id come back to the ship and she would give me gifts or say something nice or charming or funny. and i became attached to her. like i was her father too in a way. completely changed who i was playing and made me rethink what i wanted out of my playthrough. and i loved going back to see them

so when sam did die. this was life destroying. i couldnt cope i had to take a break from the game for a bit out of anger. and it was so emotionally hitting that i didnt go back and undo the action cause.. it had been a while since bethesda made me feel that way so i wanted to make sure that feeling stayed. because it was special.

idk man that was mine

9:31 Bruh, this Pilgrim dude is a complete asshole. “How dare my closest confidant ask ME, the inventor of our religion, how the fuck our religion works? Goddamn it, how does she NOT understand?!”

9:35 Edit: “Thank Me that vanity isn’t one of my vices. But being left alone with Myself is being left alone with quite a messy, deranged man. I don’t like This Person that is Me, My Non-Vain Self. Am I funny? Tell Me I’m funny.”

4:50 Wait, so if Sam dies, Cora’s mom comes and takes her away?
Don’t threaten *me* with a good time. Lawl. Sorry, I just can’t stand precocious children.

Edit: Except Matilda. Matilda gets a pass.

Sadly, Game industry is no longer about the art. It’s a business. All about money..
Big companies dont need to do more, they have a sort of pattern, or algorithm. As long as the hype is sufficient there will always be sales. Look at call of duty, or the sports games. Same shit different release.
It’s because there will always be customers. Always.
Until the profit ends, none of this will change.
People gotta stop buying games immediately on release and outright boycott. Just how it is. Wait before buying games.

I played Enshrouded and went back to starfield and was bored to death.

Sideshow Bob ranting about starfield before gta vi

I played Starfield on launch and I really liked it.
But every time you think about it it gets worse. EVERYTIME. There’s not a single questline that is entirely good and make sense.
It is just a dumb game from a dumb company.

Sadly, Emil just has too much damn hubris, and this is a criticism my younger brother has made often since he’s a big fan of Elder Scrolls, and Emil has just about always been the reason recent Bethesda games have such piss poor stories.

And really, after this game here, I’m not very confident on how good Elder Scrolls VI will be (if we ever hear anything about it, that is).

The review about DLC? we are waiting

I found your previous video after reading about the rumors of them remake/remastering Oblivion. I never bothered to play any Bethesda game after skyrim and FO4. I abandoned FO4, simply due to the sheer lack of reason & logic behind any of the factions and the destroyed lore established from all the previous FO titles so I really never touched it after a 2nd play through. They all did the same thing, the all went to the same places and they all generally send a complete noob (OR THEIR RESPECTED GENERAL) of the organization to do the dangerous/important dirty work…..Seriously? With only thing interesting me in FO4 was PA not the story I felt like there was something off. Now that I know there is so so much wrong with FO4 I just dont touch it anymore. Skyrim had this issue but it was less noticeable due to the world setting/lore and immediate importance place on the player.
My expectation of the FO tv show was on the gound and they still managed to hit below it. Bethesda will either live or die on their next title given their track record of the past decade. I just don’t see how they can see FO76/ESO as being successful at this point. While I like the “concept and lore” added by ESO, an MMO is not what I think of when I think about playing a Bethesda game. I think of Oblivion/Daggerfall or Skyrim. A singleplayer game with good storylines.
I am glad someone is pointing out their crap and going through how their games in detail highlighting those issues. Honestly If Bethesda required their writers and developers to sit down and watch youtube videos reviewing their games in this much detail… They might be able to rub together enough brain cells to understand how far they have fallen.

And Bethesda in the 1 in a billion chance your reading this. DONT TOUCH OBLIVION IN ANY REGARDS! Just let SkyBlivion do its thing. You end skyblivion then you have lost that little faith I and (I bet) alot of players had in you. I will never buy your silly horse armor again. Ill just play the original than pay for a game I already own.

Also how are you not on their team? Instead of hiring the brainless morons to write their stories with the quality level of an basic ai, they need to get people like you or The Omega Initiative to do it. People who can show the required level of critical thinking and show the creativity to use to it to make a good game. The only hard part of game design is coming up the idea/story and bug testing it once you got it in place. Difficulty of building the game after the story is written out is just manhours. With technology and game development as it is now, its okay to make a game complicated or hard or low graphics in favor of story and game mechanics. Look at daggerfall! Look at Oblivion!

Not for nothing but you made an hour long video about the devs being lazy…………while you continue to call the artifacts “rocks” when they are clearly not rocks. You could at least be better than the people you belittle.

When Jackie Welles died I actually felt that and knew that I lost a partner being a merc. The funeral made me even miss the guy and hammered how his liss affected my character

Bro you don’t have to kill your characters if you made the right choice no one would die😂 next time put the armory on your ship even that girl ask you are you sure you want to keep it at the lodge

it’s good to see you become a youtuber! We will always be party rocking hard🤟

Great vid 👍🏽 hopefully one day you might make an analysis on cyberpunk 2077 as well? 🤞

Oh come on it only takes around 85 mods to make it fu… enj… playable.

This boring game sucks ass. Why are people making videos about it at all lol

I played Starfield for 6 or so hours on Gamepass and despised every single second. Only reason I played so much is I had multiple friends tell me is was pretty good. They were just straight up wrong. Starfield is legitimately one of the worst games I have ever played. Sure, other games are smaller or more broken but Starfield is just baffling. Coming from BG3 to Starfield is not like stepping back in time – it’s like stepping into a worse reality because Starfield would have been awful 15 years ago. It’s just bad.

Why’s the game so fun

Pretty good video series of a game I won’t ever play! Thanks for going through this big pile of… so I won’t have to be disappointed again!

When people say “Starfield is Fallout or Skyrim in space” I die a little, because I WISH they were right, the reality is Starfield is so much worse, to compare them to Fallout and Skyrim is an insult to those two games

So I’m just going to put it out there that I enjoy wandering the empty planets..
I mean that seriously it’s very relaxing..
In a world with everything fast pace and instant gratification, I enjoy the solitude and the slow pace of the game.

Some people may not like that but I do so if y’all are wondering if there are people out there who like this game you can count me one of them 😊

I stopped going into caves after the 3rd one, because there is nothing in there. And espiecially after I found a cave on Venus that contained dinosaur bones, treeroots and what seemed to be water dripping from the ceiling… on venus… the literal hellhole planet. I dint even bother to set up a base during my 160hrs playthrough, because it dint matter to have it. Nothing did. all that stuck with me is the loading screens and the memories of 4 npcs that were stuck on my ship. They were stuck in the cockpit halfway into the ceiling, so that their upper body was in space. Never was able to get rid of them. Even killing did nothing.

This has to be the worst review ever, first time I can’t use a Starfield review to fall asleep

Last night I bought and installed CyberPunk 2077. I had more fun, and felt more immersed in Night City after one hour of play, than I ever did after 55 hours of Snorefield.

I honestly don’t think that Bethesda have yet received even 50% of the pain and ridicule they deserve over Starfailed. All that time, all that money, all those promises and hype … and they came up with that? Shocking!!

The truth is Bethesda either…
1) is clueless on how to make an RPG anymore.
2) is inefficient with their game development methods and office practices that they could spend years or even decades on a game and still not have a proper RPG.
3) they’re just plain lazy.
4) Making money off casual gamers is more important than actually making RPGs.

Hands down the best essay on Starfield I watched (and I watched a ton of them). I really agree with your perspective and had some laughs too. Watched the three videos several times! Congrats, and thank you for your work!

My biggest criticism of starfield is that I’m not playing it anymore. I gave it 100+ hours and was done with it. I’m not going to become a fucking game journalist to explain why I’m not playing it anymore. I’d rather be playing something else.

Ps: I make mods in fallout 4. I still play it to this day. Fo4 is a fun enough game for me. The main story and map are good enough to build repeated playthroughs on. Starfield doesnt give me those vibes at all.

Vlad died in my play through

Re followers, Mass Effect 1 had your squadmates give unique dialogue and comments that were consistent with how we knew them as characters, to the point where they’d interact with whoever the other squadmate was, uniquely depending on who it was. Characters in the story could acknowledge what they said, adding to the immersion of it all being one cohesive story.

Mass Effect came out in 2007.

What an incredible 3 hours I’ve had today! This synopsis was brilliant, you’re so well articulated and get your point across! It was engaging, passionate and powerful… It was everything that Starfield wasn’t 😂

You earned the sub ❤🎉

I went into Starfield kind of expecting Cyberpunk 2077 levels of interactions, but man, despite how much shit people give Projekt Red, at least they created a compelling universe despite everything taking place in night city. Guess I’ll wait for like 5 more years to see if they improve the game or not. Though I doubt it lol

Bethesdas writers need to be forced to do 2 playthroughs of Star Wars KOTOR. They have no clue how to deliver on the caliber of story they want you to believe they’re capable of.

Amazing video, fuck starfield

Feels mean to dunk on small indie studios like Bethesda

the thing that really demonstrates how inexcusable starfield is is the improvement between red dead redemption 1 and 2

the empath trait i had during my first playthrough i actually enjoyed to a certain extent. it had quite a few dialogue options that would skip persuasion checks basically. and also whenever a companion liked something i got a buff and a debuff if they didn’t like it. (so that’s the issue anything that’s not goody two shoes none of the companions liked it made Sarah x10 more annoying than she alr was)

🌟 FIELD fan here 🖕

It’s hard to look at this gut and take him serious. Every time he pops on screen with his lavender sweater and Sideshow Bob hair I felt like I was watching a parody video.

i feel like writing 4 minor plotlines and character arcs depending on who lives or dies is not that big of an ask. “only 25% of players might see it!!” thats not a super low number and this game is made for replayablility. why not make it a fun experience?? its not like the game has much else going on.

Just need the Lorerim mod

53:00 THIS!!! I would gladly not ”enjoy” every shovelware AAA game that comes on the conveyor belt, if it means I’m able to truly, deeply appreciate a fantastic game (even if it has its flaws) that actually deserves it.

Welcome to diversity design

The thing is, about your last point Mack, is that when Todd came to director seat in Bethesda, he told them to gamble on him, let him go crazy, and we got Morrowind. A game that, admittedly, burned a lot of the creatove staff out since for the time it was an insane game. But thats what happened when they did take a risk, one of their greatest RPGs ever, and a contender for a truly amazing and innovative game for the time.

What happened to THAT Bethesda, like you said it seems they have become complacent or alternatively, scared.

You could build an entire creative writing fandom out of nothing but hypothetical fix-fics for starfields’ world and story.

Why do the characters’ eyes stay perfectly still it’s unnerving

What really gets me is that there is legitimately no point. In Oblivion, why are we getting stronger? We have to stop Dagon/Umaril/Jyggalag. In Skyrim, why are we getting stronger? Oh, we have to stop Alduin/Miraak. In Fallout 4, why are we getting stronger? We have to save our kid and tame the wasteland.

In Starfield why are we getting stronger? Just…because. The point of the game is to get to the end of it and do it again. We get all these powers to do nothing with them. We aren’t gearing up for some big bad evil guy. We aren’t saving the world. The world is already at peace and it stays at peace. At the end of the game, after you’ve collected every power, there is nothing to DO with them. Attack people? I already have more powerful guns. Narratively, why are we even doing this? Because Bethesda told us to?

The sad fact of all this is that Bethesda isn’t going listen to any of these criticisms, it’s BioWare magic all over again

“Those losses could effect the gameplay”
that’s why they weren’t killed. Bethesda has become deathly allergic to any in-game negative outcomes of any kind for the players’ gameplay experience. They are terrified that if you can’t do literally anything literally any time for the entire playthrough, you won’t buy the next one.

I felt more like a space explorer playing Ratchet and Clank for ps2.

This makes me want to play starfield again.

43:30 funny story on the cave paintings – there’s enough evidence found that shows our ancestors doing cave paintings were perfectly capable of making rather accurate interpretations of the animals they were painting, which means that a lot of cave paintings are that way because they were trying to deliberately create something stylised. Even way back then, people were trying and developing new techniques.

so after thinking about it for a bit….I think Bethesda made Starfield so big bc they thought they’d get away with not doing alot. “if we have 1000 planets the players will accept our shortcomings!” but the truth is…….those shortcomings make those 1k planets look like a total waste of time.

They could have done something insanely groundbreaking, but Bethesda was more worried about making the biggest space game that they forgot to fill it with anything compelling. It sucks.

I havent played starfield i was gonna wait until it is free some month

No Man Sky is a better Starfield than Starfield

People die everyday no one cares. Yeah bathesda’s Starfield does nothing to make anyone care about their followers.

I don’t need to know how to make a video game to know when there’s dogshit writing that takes me out of the immersion of the world. Interacting with the characters in Bethesda games has always felt like the weakest parts of the games.

Really makes me appreciate all the emotional points in cyberpunk

These issues have always been there. Skyrim has major writing flaws. You talked about being locked out of paths? Skyrim locks you out of nothing. You can be anyone and do everything in one playthrough. The writing is sub par at best, and they continually just traipse over lore (remember when reading an Elder Scroll would make you blind?)

This was something we should have seen coming a decade ago. It’s just Bethesda turned up to 11. They’re incapable of writing something substantial – the Best Fallout game wasn’t made by Bethesda and modern Fallout has erased its impact because we can’t iterate and have civilization in a Fallout! Gotta have wacky post apocalyptic adventures! God forbid we have anything with depth or see society start to reform!

man, shout out to the composer and orchestra team for sucha amazing music in boring af game 🙏🙏🙏

Well, there’s a reason the voiced protagonist thing was handled the way it was, why it doesn’t feel like it was done in response to the criticism surrounding the decision in Fallout 4 – and that’s that it _wasn’t_ done in response to that criticism. To hear Pagliarulo tell it, they just decided it didn’t work for the story they were trying to tell. They had actors for both genders hired already, apparently, but they just decided ‘fuck it, never mind’ one day.

Bethesda isn’t changing in response to criticism – and they never have. Every decision made was made to make life easier on the developers – content, features, and systems are added or removed based on how hard they are to manage, with no consideration to how something being hard to manage might be counterbalanced by the result being _worth it._ That’s why Starborn choices hardly amount to anything, and it’s why choices, in general, hardly amount to anything. It’s why perks, traits, and status effects all feel like window dressing. It’s why mechs are illegal in Starfield, and levitation is illegal in Oblivion and Skyrim. It’s why magic is simplified to the point of being useless in Skyrim, and it’s why Starborn powers are just dragon shouts again.

Bethesda doesn’t know why we’re disappointed, and they don’t care. We _might_ see Starfield’s problems addressed in ES6, but just like the voiced protagonist thing, it won’t be because we told them how terrible they were. They’ll just wing it. They’ll just wing everything.

I’m so tired.

Emil P is on the record for explaining why Starfield is written so poorly. He feels like you don’t care about a story, you are going to make crates.

That’s it. You are going down a rant rabbit hole pointing out things that could have made the story better and Bethesda literally walked away from the story.

They were banking on people wanting to do base building.

Starfield is Preston Garvey blown up to full game experience. The never ending fetch quest tgst has no impact. Yay.

Exploration did have a reason to go out and do it.

The problem is that it’s not well explained.

You hear a lot about how Bethesda difficulty just adds tedium, it just makes enemies do more and take less damage.

What those sliders are actually meant to do is adjust how many systems you interact with.

On the harder difficulties in skyrim you need to use at least one of the crafting skills. On the highest you need to use at least two, if not all 3 depending on your build. And you need to make sure you’re properly building your character. Conversely on the lowest difficulty you can get by never adding a single perk point or touching any of the crafting systems.

Starfield is the same way. On the highest difficulty you need to manage your chems and make sure you’re weapons are upgraded.

In order to do this efficiently you need to scout out planets with biological and mineral resources you need and then build outposts to exploit them. Because vendors simply don’t have the quantities you need.

On lower difficulties you don’t need any of this and Bethesda didn’t add any other reason to explore. So it all feels pointless. Especially since most people aren’t going to crank the difficulty up when they start, they are going to play on the difficulties where all those systems are optional

Lol the two examples you gave with wanted making things easier are undermine by the fact that both those instances have several traits that can pop an option to get the same effect

“nobody sets out to make a bad game”
A touch of positivity that is expected from a content creator with a job and a name, buuuuut as an anonymous gamer, fuck that shit, bethesda absolutely was set to make a shit sandwich and expected their usual audience to eat it. As that fallout 4 bit, that’s they business model now, to make shit games and rely on the hype, on the hopes and dreams of their consumer.
“Surely, bethesda learned this time”, the fans tells themselves as todd comes back from the pub with beat them with a broken bottle.
Prey and Baldur’s gate 3 absolutely OBLITERATED the bethesda, there’s no reason to expect ANYTHING of value from this company.

Yeah, um…. Nothing good is going to come out of BGS while Plod Coward and Emil are leading the company. The Terrible Two.

Anyone looking forward to TES VI – be prepared for major, unprecedented disappointment….

Plod Coward, since gaining ultimate control after Morrowind, has always done one thing with each new game:

He removes features and mechanics. He has no imagination, and his vision is that of a Simpleton. And he promoted arguably the WORST writer in the gaming industry. That’s his contribution.

Does anyone else remember the conspiracy theories about how post-war chems got into pre-war containers in FO4? Because Bethesda didn’t give a single thought to the continuity of their container loot tables then, either.

I still say TES games hold up because nothing like them have been made since. Big open world games (With things to do!) where you can be your own character of any races. Focus on any of the combat styles, pick out whatever weapons you want and continue getting better versions of them. The roleplaying might be limited but everything else about the game still holds up, and modding makes up for any shortcomings and further add into the game.
There is nothing else like the TES games.

I spent the better part of this week watching all three parts of his review and I have to say BRAVO!

I played this game about upwards of 80 hours and still there were many flaws I didn’t even notic on my playthrough. These videos could be seen as a very biased hate bait but I disagree. All reviewers who love games should be this critical (If the points are valid and proven). This review shows that gamers aren’t just going to sit and consume objectively half-baked games anymore. And I hope the devs with any modicum of integrity see videos like this.

I’d rather know how the hunter became the priest. If it wasn’t for the starborn giving him faith, would he be a killer in our universe?

Which character dies is semi random btw. By doing some specific things before the quest either the least or most favorite character dies out of 4 human companions.
Oh and you can meet Hunter in other cities and talk about different stuff. He’s 100% in Akila.

The idea of jumping into a new universe as the starborn for new game plus was SUCH a great idea, but such a missed opportunity. They could’ve cut 900 some odd planets, and made dialogue choices different, and worked on having vastly different universes and endings in those universes. The most you get is a random chance for a variant constellation group. It’s a game that’s story could offer the most replay value of any game ever, but the mechanics and lack of writing and creativity don’t allow for it. I would rather the game be shorter, with less stuff to do, with WAY less planets. I would rather they took that time to make universes DIFFERENT, and have a higher quality of task and exploration in those universes. The hunter Cora could be hunting you for letting abandoning her dad to die in one, you could have unique powers gained with each new play through, but nah. The biggest difference is they change your starborn armor and upgrade the ship… The ship which you would be better off building your own, and cosmetically looks the same each time. What really frustrates me is there is a glimmer of potential in the game to be incredible. It’s just bogged down with so much junk. So many of the side missions are absolute GARBAGE. WHY AM I A DELIVERY BOY IS SO MANY OF THESE MISSIONS? The entire corporate espionage missions on neon, MOST OF THEM are go here, pick lock, plant evidence, leave. Go here, pick computer, steal files, leave. It took hours to complete all of the missions, and there were only 2 that were MODERATELY interesting. This is the case for most of the side missions quest lines, and even the ones that are interesting take forever to become interesting. They could’ve cut the fat off so much in this game and focused it around things that would actually be interesting, things the game CLEARLY WANTS TO BE, but they don’t. It’s like they’re blue balling you with being a great game. There are so many times I get hooked on a narrative, just for it to fall short and have no real consequences. It’s trying to do so much, that it fails and doing what it wanted to be in the first place.

Basically you want Mass Effect or even Mass Effect Andromeda

The problem with constelation deaths is that they are “procedural” as the character who dies is chosen between the one you use the most and the one you use the least. The problem with that is that in a competent game like BG3 there would have to be specific dialogue written and voice acted for each of these deaths. But that’s not how Bethesda works, so instead you have super generic nonsense that can be used for any of the possible corpses.

Same with the dialogue options based on your background. In BG3 a githyanki can handle a gith base in a calm peaceful way. In Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous an Azata gets a unique companion, base of operations and tons of special army units while a necromancer can resurrect some special companions including slain enemies.

I say we petition for M. Pag. to get fired

50:10-50:16 “it only responds to things Bethesda expected you to do”
And there we hit the nail on the head. Bethesda expects you to play one way and one way only around every single system they implement, thus leading to such a mess of a game where players feel like there’s no roleplay options. Because there are practically none.
I think this is paraphrased from a fallout:NV interview: “The trick to a believable interactable world is by having enough lines and ways to go around their intended system that it feels like they thought of everything more often than not.” but I might have gotten that from somewhere completely different.
I can see only two reasons someone would play starfield, one to make an epic youtube video (or multiple) with it at the center, two because somehow miraculously they’re still a Bethesda fan.

“Sense Star Stuff” ability is a nod to Carl Sagan’s fairly well-known quote when he said that “We are made of star stuff” in the context of most elements being originally created in stars. So it is just an in-joke way of saying “sense people”.

One of my biggest gaming regrets was buying this before the reviews. I only played 13 hours. It just got too hard to force myself to play it. I haven’t been this thoroughly bored by a game since I was a kid, renting a shitty game from blockbuster.

Starfield is far from the first game to have an in-universe explanation of New Game Plus. Bastion (2011) by Supergiant Games comes to mind off the top of my head. Transistor (2014) may or may not have one depending on how you interpret events (its writing is very impressionistic and vague). If you count roguelike/roguelite runs as NG+, most games in that genre have an explanation of why there are multiple runs and why there can be a metaprogression system. I’m sure there are many more.
This is very far from unique, and I don’t think Starfield deserves any credit for including this, because they did LITERALLY NOTHING with it other than “lol Sarah Morgan is a potted plant” memes.

Yeah I’m really glad I have game pass and didnt feel bad about stopping my playthrough when the bartender in the bar next to the spaceport in New Atlantis trusted a person she had just met and had no background on with effectively stealing contraband from the spaceport lockup.

It gave me “I’m giving you this quest not because I actually trust you but because you’re the player character” vibes. That is a quest you give a player after talking to this character AT LEAST three times and get to know her first. If you pick dialogue options she doesnt like maybe she shouldnt give you the quest at all. Its all so fucking lazy.

Why would they listen, you just thanked them for making a bad game…They hear the congratulations. Stop thanking incompetence.

I wont get this even if its free on some platform someday.

i cant wait for TES6, all the missiing and dumbed down features, the retcon of huge pieces of lore, the jank and bugs of a creation engine “”3″”, a huge empty world to fill with a bad building system and generic npcs with a single line of dialogue, nothing to replace the radiant ai so npcs just wander back and forth in a single area, cities that you’ve heard so much about that are supposed to be big and important but in game its just 3 shacks and 1 bigger shack for the king, i cant wait!

they had gold in the hand with the idea of a new game+ diegeticaly explained. We could have a game with very impactfull decisionss to make and very divergent branchs of every story, without having to worry about creating a new character to explore them all. but instead, we’ve got lazy one size fit all quests, questionning the point of finishing the game even once. so a multiple times?

it’s so weird living in the timeline where formerly disgraced No Man’s Sky now better fits Tod Howard’s description of his magus opus than the actual Bethesda game, just wild.

15:18 I think you just hit the nail in the head with this thought. The fact that it is a quantum choice. They are all 4 , and none at the same time. And as the death occurs it collapses the timeline. I like to think this is what Bethesda went for with this reveal. It would have been an even bigger reveal to actually learn the fact that all 4 of them exist as starborn and through you they get to meet eachother. Just imagine how cool it could have been to try and piece it all together by influenceing who “dies”. And as you said, you also get to reflect on what your choices mean, and what death mean in a universe where there is proof for a multiverse.

Anyway, I’m writing fanfic at this point, but I do believe they wanted to explore the idea further they just either mismanaged, or ran out of time, because deadlines exist 😔

I know this means condemning you to hours of hell, but I would love to see your take on the Shattered Space DLC. It’s so bad it’s just a joke at this point.

I could not agree with your complaints more

oop I think you need to take a step back from gaming for a while for you own well-being.

Sadly with Todd being the boss and Emil the head writer there is no hope for any future Bethesda game, they are in a feedback loop of “we can do no wrong” while doing everything wrong.

36:50 Exactly this. No feeling. The game is soulless and bland from start to end.

37:10 I yelled out “WHAT” because that means you never touched Dragons Dogma 1

If Cora blamed you, the player, why didn’t she use her insider knowledge and skills passed down by Sam to track down the Hunter and join him?

Watching this video is like slowly taking a blindfold off. I’ve been lying to myself this whole time to force myself to like Starfield.

But now I can see. 😢

The quintessential Starfield moment for me came when I was “surveying” a barren rock. Surveying in Starfield of course means running in a direction with your scanner on waiting for some resource to appear so you can press the interact button on it. I was jogging in one direction on this utterly featureless planet looking for silver or helium or whatever, walking past the fifth identical cave point of interest (you know, the one where there’s always a few dead miners nearby and one has a note on them that says “we hit the motherlode” or whatever), and all the while this absurd swelling of music was happening. Inon Zur’s rousing theme was going and the brass was rising and I was just walking on a flat plane. The dissonance was insane. The music indicated I was supposed to be experiencing this incredible wonder and beauty and I should be feeling the bracing excitement of adventure and exploration, and I was bored to tears trying to check off the last mineral so I could get a few hundred bucks from a kiosk in the basement of Constellation.

I think you’re selling skyrim short a tad. It’s still very shallow, just like star field, debatable more than star field. But it’s game systems are fun to play with at a snack food level. When you train a skill, you get perks around that skill. People will tell you to put your weapons away, and will attack back when attacked. The stealth works.

I think this further frames the failure of Starfield. It’s not even good at a junk food level, it’s uncooked rice.

I love these vids by the way, I love the depths that you explore ideas and conscepts about this game

lol your not to perceptive Keeper Aquilus is starborn he is also the pilgrim and also the hunter witch he admits to when you figure it out and go back and talk to him again and yet again a different version of him is the hunter that is fighting you.

The DLC just dropped. Good luck Captain 🫡

I really cant stand modern bethesda, and i dont fully comprehend how theyre still in business now. And i think the thing that makes me dislike them so much is how… i dunno scummy and dishonest their games are now. Like, ea activision and ubisoft have proven to be worse at almost every level, and i recognize that, but something about bethesda just boils my balls. I think a big part of it comes down to how the modern bethesda “creatiln process” seems to be so tired and labored, like any enthusiasm that the company had back in TES Morriwind days has been completely sucked dry. Now, their deepest “characters” are an amalgamation of exactly 1 1/2 personality traits, their “rpg mechanics” arent from rpgs at all – its literally just leveling up and getting perks and thats the only thing they can understand from an rpg, and instead of lovingly creating fun and interesting worlds and quests…theyd rather let proc gen taske care of almost all of it, even part of the main story. Theres no passion to it, therez no reason that they keep making these actikn games with character creators. They refuse to let players make a single decision, they refuse to ever plan out an alternate route, but they also refuse to just call it what it is (an action game) so the playerbase isnt forced to sit through 300 dialouge “choices” that all lead to the exact same interaction and results. Instead, we have to sit here while the game plays pretend that youre allowed to make a single legitimate decision. And then, when they get criticized for making a boring, uninteresting game, they claim that the playerbase is to blame, or they try to wring more money outta ya to make the game actually entertaining. They could make a good game. With great writing. And well thought out rpg mechanics. And companions/ npcz that are genuinely memorable. Thats what the genre they claim to be making requires. Instead, ole toddy boi is gonna double the amount of ways you can say “no, but actually yes” in dialog, and half the amount of quests eritten by actual human writers.
I just cant stand it

This dude is trying to mimic Adam Conover’s voice/intonation? Im new to this channel

17:40 I like to IMAGINE Todd saying these lines during the pitch meeting 😛

You touched on what I believe to be the core defect at Bethesda. Imagine. Whatever talent is in the companies pool of resources is wasted because nobody has followed up on imagination. Emil’s excuses for making a game is hard is just pathetic. I don’t care. A game is a product consumers purchase to enjoy. One purchases a role-playing game for a role-playing experience. That means player choice and consequence. It has nothing to do with how difficult making a game is. Starfields lack of player choice and consequence equates to IT’S NOT AN RPG! Starfield is a story driven liniar game, but because the player is allowed to walk around and do meaningless side quests, Bethesda feels at liberty to call it an rpg? Half baked dialog and ‘you can’t do that for video game reasons’ is just bad writing and bad design.

There are aspects of Starfield as a concept and as a foundation I think show potential. Asinine excuses and charging full price for such a foundation as a full and complete game, THEN charging those same consumers some extortionate prices for half-baked content to expand upon that foundation? A complete disrespect to gamers.

Skyrim and FO4 have healthy longevity due to the modding community. Bethesda continually tries to directly capitalize on that as a revenue stream rather than making a quality product. Starfield was intentionally made for community content, but for every coin they attempt to squeeze from gamers, they push more away. At what point will Bethesda come to realize their product is not that good. I don’t want to live in Starfield anymore than I want to live to earn money to play a more complete version of Starfield. Wtf are you people smoking?

Honestly, try to imagine an rpg game that people can role-play. Imagine a quality polished game experience. Imagine a universe where anyone, let’s say a miner, could always be a miner, or they could CHOOSE to do something else. Wow, that could be cool. And what if they found a trippy rock. “Hey boss, look at this.”
“Woah, that’s a trppy rock.”
“I know righ. What should I do with it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe see if someone will buy it off you when you get to town. Now get back to work.”
Imagine if nobody anywhere wanted to buy your rock because they didn’t know what it was. Maybe somebody heard a rumor of some explorer group that liked funky rocks. Imagine finding and doing all this without quest markers.

The whole game could be so much better if the people creating the same game could just be allowed to imagine rather than just grinding out a shallow concept. Imagine if someone other than Yes Man or Excuse Boy actually play-tested the final product for fun and completeness. Just imagine Imogene Salzo as a potential companion. Just imagine…

I haven’t followed your streams, but have you tried Outer Wilds? Feels like something that may scratch that space itch for you. Definetely a different experience from what Starfield was going for, but one I love dearly.

I think you are quite right. Yes, our standards for what makes a good game is constantly evolving and changing. Both as a society and as individual gamers. The games we grew up with are always fondly remembered compared to newer games, unless they are groundbreaking in some way, like Baldur’s Gate 3 or something. But the developers can’t use this as an excuse, hoping we’ll somehow lower the standards again. It’s an evolving art. A single dev could code Pac-man and make a revolutionary game in a few weeks or months. Today, we expect more.

For me, Bethesda kinda peaked with Oblivion and Skyrim. My first Bethesda game was Morrowind, but the one I still remember the fondest is actually Oblivion. The music, landscape and general “feel” in Oblivion was better than even Skyrim. Skyrim was definitely also a very good game, so if I were to rate Oblivion at a 10 when it came out, I would say Skyrim was a 9.5.

Skyrim also had a lot more longevity, thanks to better graphics, more modders and just the fact that it was the last elder scrolls game before they went into MMO stuff (which doesn’t interest me all that much)

Starfield might have been well received in 2005. The graphics are probably the best in any Bethesda game, although it doesn’t hold up to its competitors anymore. Music is also quite good, but the gameplay, story, and characters is as bland as watered down milk. It is also painfully obvious that the game engine Bethesda uses, which is basically iterations of the same engine that Morrowind ran on, is not suited for this kind of game. It doesn’t support large cities, large crowds, nor proper ranged weaponry aside from bows.

Also, while I think Bethesda’s voice actors are doing an okay job, it might be time to hire some new talents as well. Hearing the same voices for so long gets quite weird.

I had some hope for Starfield, but it just isn’t good enough. The biggest problem is that it is so boring. I play games to be entertained, not to be bored, slogging through bland auto-generated planets, scanning plants and animals that all look the same, all biomes are uniform… it’s so boring.

You got either the highest or second highest in affinity Companion killed, and yet you didn’t care about them. Interesting.

I hate how to the looks good visually and graphic wise but the story and everything else suck

One thing I have to commend regarding your content is that you leave in the natural pauses and periods. You don’t use the schizo editing of sixteen cuts a second to cut out natural stopping points in a series of sentences. It’s somehow MORE engaging than an endless word hose. It’s easier to listen to.

Jesus Christ the character faces are SO FREAKING UGLY

Someone commented on another video that the undeniable proof Bethesda had lost touch was that Todd Howard was genuinely shocked that BG3 won GOTY instead of Starfield.

In fairness to the Cora thing, it makes complete and total sense why Sam’s ex wife (you know her mother) would want Cora to live with her and not a strange group of people who are unrelated to her

Looking forward to the shattered space vid

To be fair… In my story, i married sarah, and it was her that died, only to discover she was one of the travellers. It was pretty impactful, though im pretty sure it wasn’t on purpose 😂

Talking to Sona at Sarah’s memorial is kinda heartbreaking, probably the most human interaction the scene provides.

we NEED NEED NEEED to sign a petition for Todd to fire Emil Pagliarulo. I cannot fathom what stupid shit he is writing for Elder Scrolls VI

Love from a Shark3ozero and Vaush fan!

Thank you for Sharing your explicit view on Starfield, you really are a interesting character to enjoy. I fare from share your perspective and conclutions, but you have tons of valid views and you for sure improved my day significantly. So you Got a New subscriber, who has now watched several of your YouTube creations and I like your animated presentation. Thank you for that!

Sarah died in my game…

Thank you for making these videos. I feel so validated now lol. All of these issues are things that I felt while playing. I’ve been frustrated because it’s hard to verbalize how shallow and empty this game is, and how obvious all these issues felt to me. When I saw people defend it, it made me feel like maybe I was being snobby, but I’m not. That’s literally not how my brain works. I couldn’t even for a second suspend my disbelief in this game and feel engulfed in the universe. It genuinely bugged me the whole time … I still don’t understand people’s argument of “just turn your brain off” and play, but it doesn’t just work like that.

i am addicted to watching starfield rant videos instead of playing the game lol

I don’t care about any kid dealing with the death of the parents. Plus I will never care about game or movies characters. I barely care about actual people I know dying

Dude, its Bethesda. Its Emil’s writing. There is a reason why he propagates a policy of “KSS” (Keep it simple,stupid)
In translation: Keep it simple, because people who playing this game are stupid. Honestly, what did you expect? Some, bad ass CDPR level of story writing. Hah, BGS did not had that since…umm…hold on…umm…yeah, i guess never.

They made THREE Mass Effect games in less time than Starfield

Bethesda don’t know how to, iterate, evolve or grow, they have been on the derivative, devolution, and dilution track, daggerfall was a great RPG with intricate mechanics and although procedurally generated, the world was vast and had tons to offer, Morrowind shrank in the size of the world and the scale of mechanics but in return offered the best world building and storytelling Bethesda has ever done, Oblivion is where the cracks really began to show, it lost a bit in the writing department but scaled back on the more obscure and intricate RPG mechanics slightly streamlining the systems making it less complex but more accessible to less dedicated audiences. Since Oblivion, every subsequent release has been worse than the previous one when it comes to story writing, simplification of RPG mechanics and the streamlining of systems which may have increased the accessibility and appeal to broader audiences it made the games more and more shallow and vapid.

My Cora was pissed haha

(Face palm levels of ridiculousness) what the heck were you trying to say i barely understood you with blocking stupid points

If you hate something don’t make videos about it it’s simple and this garbage won’t be spread

Some like starfield some hate it so what

I like to imagine in one of those alternate universes that starfield was better

Channels like this deserve no attention

This hair… ew

havnt you heard? its not cool anymore to hate on starfield. it doesnt drive views like it did at launch

Bro compare Arabella’s reaction in BG3 and losing Melina in ER to the companion death in Starfield. It is laughable.

I could easily overlook substandard writing if the goddamn game wasn’t also riddled with bugs and glitches, which impede progression.

Besides 2 questlines, every other has eventually produced strange issues at some point during NG+, making my attempts to 100% a playthrough thus far impossible.
I foolishly thought my bad luck was due to an unconventional playstyle, but my follow-up attempts became increasingly worse.
When creations were introduced, my attempts to 100% were thankfully expedited by the NG+ generator mod, but the amount of progression breaking glitches I came across just occurred more frequently.

There are a lot of empty planets, would it have been feasible for Bethesda to sell random chunks of land to Modding teams to build their own dungeons, outposts etc to put in the game as free DLC? And maybe pay extra to have their location promoted in official hubs etc?
It could provide some smaller creators a chance to get attention and build a portfolio as ensure there is almost always new content in the game.

Please try a middle part bro

The ending deserves special mention: If you choose to go through the Unity, you trap yourself in the same cycle of eternal slaughter and boredom as the other Starborn, as well as enact a mass brainwashing on the universe you leave because of how your personality influences every individual person (yeah that’s messed up). If you choose *not* to go through the Unity, it becomes a Paarthurnax situation where it just sits in your questbook forever until you give up and go do the thing (or install a mod to remove the quest). Imagine if they gave you an option to, after learning about what the Unity does to people, walk away and resolve to destroy it, so no one can ever use it and doom themselves + their reality again. Like, a second main quest to discover what was used to create the Unity (since it’s clearly artificial), what its weak point is, and how to blow it up no only in this reality, but EVERY reality. Of course, doing this would lock you out of NG+ on that file, but not being able to play more Starfield is a worthy reward, no?

Bethesda should just paid Obsidian to make their games…..

Somehow Starfield the game purely about space exploration has about as good procedural generation for planet surfaces as Spore. A game with a 17 year gap has just as good planet generation and Spore us barely even a space game.

Is this real?

Great video, would love to see more content like this for both anime and games.

The powers are useless. Literally. Especially on max difficulty. I was baffled by how they literally did nothing to enemies.

I think Bethesda is suffering from some of the same issues other western companies are experiencing. Everything has to be easy, simple, assessable, safe and harmless. No visceral violence, nothing to sexy, nothing emotionally, mentally, and mechanically challenging. It’s impossible to wright an engaging story with this mindset, let alone make a good rpg.

Space Invaders still holds up as a fun game, Galaga even more so.
And yet starfield doesn’t hold up even on release.

I like your videos 😎

I can’t understand how you could want to make something for decades and then have so little ambition to put into it.

Bethesda is a company where each game they make. Gets worse and worse than the last one. They keep removing more and more from the game.

You must be really desperate for content

“You mined a weird rock and had a vision? Take my ship, you’re a special hero now!”

I absolutely knew as soon as they were saying “go to the centre of the universe, see other universes” that they were just ripping off No Man Sky’s already incredibly lame ending, where the great mystery turns out to be….New Game Plus.

I think Starfield is a great idea with poor to mediocre execution. If they were to remake it in 20 years with better technology and more effort, it could be a great game.

In the end, Nothing in this game is really matter. Just like your time that spent wasting on it. Bethesda is really good at wasting people time but not in a good way.

You got a sub for these video game reviews. Looking forward for your Cyberpunk and Valheim review!!!

It’s so fascinating to see a game do Mass Effect: Andromeda WORSE than Mass effect: Andromeda. But maybe ME:A was just so bland that everyone forgot it even happened lol

Boring story that’s too close to the old story (in ME:A it’s just the reapers again by a new name, and in Starfield it’s you’re the special boy with the special powers again).

Companions that are boring and wooden.

In both you’re literally exploring planets to find ruins with relics inside. The difference is, the ruins are at least slightly different puzzles in Andromeda and when you complete them the world around you actually changes! They make the environment more habitable and you can see the changes both in the map and in how the local settlement changes. Also they gave you a vehicle to begin with in Andromeda and your companions will talk a lot while you’re driving around. And actually say things that build their character, even if their character is being bland and dumb.

Plus, the combat is actually kind of fun in Andromeda and you can pick cool powers to use that actually work!

And, because it’s in the mass effect universe, it already has interesting lore, science and species.

ME:A is certainly bad, but i never really connected how similar both these failures are, mostly resulting from publishers banking on their brand to sell half baked products. And have tanked a lot of people’s respect for those brands in the process. Bioware magic has been a joke for like 15 years now. Now Bethesda has become a joke too, even more so since 76.

Dude looks disgusting

Games should start learning from edf and let me sing songs mid combat with my squads.

The combat powers are so weak that you’d be better off using a wrench most of the time.

What’s the song that plays during the Exploration segment of the video in the montage?

I am still upset about the removal of levitation potions. Why? Because they only put levitation potions in to compensate for the bugginess of Morrowind. I just heard how the Creeper was added to Minecraft. Is Bethesda the fun police?

You gained a new subscriber, while i may not agree with some of your takes, you are a breath of fresh air

I assume you’ve figured this out, if not just from life then from some previous comment, but the fact Sam died in your playthrough speaks more to personal interactions with that character (I believe it’s time spent in your company), and isn’t universal. Sarah died in mine, and it was between Sarah and Andrea in my playthrough. So while I agree that it needs to be an impactful character choice, I think Bethesda’s methodology here is fine — they have to guess at which characters are meaningful to any specific player, and the imperfect metric of companion time is about as good as one can get. Better than the selection being fixed, at least.

On the whole I agree that Starfield is rotten to the core, which is a shame as I’m 46 and have been playing Bethesda games since Daggerfall. I’m even considering a pass on Shattered Space, which is something I never thought I’d say.

At some point, after making so many arguably terrible decisions across multiple games, companies need to stop blaming gamers and maybe start listening to valid criticism and take some responsibility. I won’t hold my breath, but it’s not like we are the ones deciding what makes it into the final cut here. A bad game is a bad game, regardless of how much developers try to defend it.

This guy is milking it with all these alternate thumbnails.

…

Oh no. They’re three separate videos!

How Bethesda, one of my favorite developers growing up, my friend and I got into a fight over who got to kill the dragon lord first. We were JUST about to start high school in 2012. And now, as a kid who ponied up for a shitty gaming PC, and eventually got into Star Citizen. I still play Star Shittizen, I will continue to do so for years. Bethesda wants nothing to do with good game design, just huge buzz words

Still better than your haircut 😅

So i ended up with barrett as the emissary because I was too lazy to use anyone else other than sarah😂

Bethesda doesn’t take a page out of Fallout New Vegas’s companions at all. It’s like they saw what Obsidian did and completely ignored how well those characters flow with the main character.

They should not of made constellation full of a bunch of characters that follow you.

Main Companions shouldn’t be in the position where they are pushing the story forward.

Companions should be gained from adventure not handed to you.

Hey Cap. I haven’t and won’t play starfield, but I wanted to let you know that I understand how much effort went into this series of videos and I really appreciate your work even when you talk about topics I don’t care much

you played it wrong… and so did i. b4 going in the unity i did EVERY mission i came across. From freestar to UC. I even thought about not going in the unity. BUT this is all the game wants from you. after playing a second time i fully understood the mysterie of the unity. it makes no difference who dies. because in another univers you die… or barret… or sarah… it does not matter. and the more often you go in the unity and leave everything behing. Ships credits houses a wifes… the more you dont care about saying the wrong thing, or doing something evil like, killing a spaceship full of kids over paradiso xD At the beginning you are the Emissary, but the more often you go in the unity you will slowly turn yourselve into the hunter. b4 starting a new game + i always think about who i will become in the next universe. it can be a pirate, a cowboy or what ever. this game gives you so many choices to form your game! You can just go to the constellation and tell them your a starborn and you come from another universe. OOOOR you just lie to them and act like you dont know anything. Another cool thing is, as a starborn you know what will happen. somebody will die so you can trick the hunter and take the artifakts to your ship. this way he will hunt YOU and none of your companions. it comes whit consequences tho… your companions know from this time on that you are a starborn and remember, you lied to them xD i am on my 3th game rn… this time im a Ryujin assassin who makes alot of money with a very complex outpost to create everything and anything. i craft shit and fly from planet to planet to sell them my goods. Starfield is different. it took my a while to fully understand it. but now i do. and i cant wait for shattered space 🙂

so… you are not sad about somebody dying, unless they do something for you. interesting

Playstation fanboy…. Right? I could almost not guess 😆

18:53 Bethesda chose the worst of three options. They didn’t make the story change depending on who died OR make it so the same person would die every playthrough and have a meaningful death.

They chose to make all possible deaths equally meaningless.

37:00 what you describe here is how Remnant 2 plays out, there’s like 4 planets and each one has 3 storylines or so

However, the beginning and end is pretty identical but hey there’s lots of potential to replay and get new scenarios

Whos sam?

They could make it good the core story is a copout for not finishing a strong story
The side stories are FAR better but they did nothing but CUT them down to nothing
Also the universe is like 5 towns one is a pirate station so much was cut not even funny

I’ve been actively playing Starfield while listening to this video. The only thing I can say about the game is: it doesn’t demand much from me. So if I’ve had a shitty day or a shitty experience in another game, I can boot it up and role play with myself that I’m some roaming doctor ship captain.

That said though… Starfield is still a massive disappointment.
When I originally got the game, I wanted exploration, survival gameplay, and outpost building.

Even to this day, survival is completely lackluster, with only ever needing to eat or drink once every hour or so in real life time, and never, ever needing to sleep. I really enjoyed survival in Fallout 4 (albeit with mods to remove the inability to save) and I was hoping to mimic some of that here, but alas.

Exploration… I don’t need to say anything. Everyone has already said everything I could say about it. I just wish that after playing games like Skyrim, Fallout 4, and even Fallout 76, they could have at the _very least_ fleshed out the areas surrounding major cities. But they couldn’t even do that.

And outposts? Loved building settlements in Fallout 4. I have over 2,000 hours in Fallout 4 because I keep booting it back up to be creative with settlements. Combined with the survival gameplay I have, I love having settlements that are designed with doctors and merchants in mind, to help patch me up and give me supplies before I venture back out into the wasteland. But in Starfield, there is _zero_ reason to hire a crew and send them to an outpost, and there’s absolutely zero reason to visit the outpost beyond having a place to store all your junk for crafting… since for some god awful reason, the ship’s inventory doesn’t count when you’re using your ship’s work benches.

I didn’t buy Starfield for its story because I knew it would be ass after playing Skyrim and Fallout 4. (Yes, I thought Skyrim’s main story was boring). But even with my low expectations, I didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was. As far as I’m concerned, the Space Dragonborn don’t exist and never should have. There’s no multiverse ending apocalypse that justified gathering as much power as possible, so what even is the point of it all? The answer is: there isn’t.

Since when did redfoo from LMFAO do video game reviews? 🤔

It really is unbelievable that this game took so many years to develop when everything feels so empty and unfinished. BGS is truly dead and it’s time to move on.

I actually escaped to the next universe before the funeral could start because i didnt care and it felt forced.

you cant patch or mod out a shit story or shit gameplay

i played through the story once. went into NG+ and just quit 5 minutes in. nothing changes, nothing of note that is. its bland, boring and a chore to play.

Something im kinda surprised you didn’t mention is just how many npc’s in the game can’t be killed and in some instances can’t even be hurt

Like think about the guy who owns Neon and how many times he tries to screw with you or make things harder and he’s just there telling you himself, first off why hasn’t someone just shot him given that he usually gets the person killed anyway or ruins their life and second why can’t i kill him, i am not scared of that man but in some instances you can’t even hurt him. And its not just him given how “important” he is, its every npc that is tied to a quest can’t be killed, i dont think you can even fail quest in this game in any way

And its not like they can use the old excuse that players might miss out on something and be sad because of the starborn plot and the ability to TRAVEL TO ANOTHER UNIVERS that is exactly the same meaning that you can always do that same quest again as the person comes back to life so this game having the most essential npc’s and introducing the new “ghost” npc’s that can’t even be hurt is so baffling to me

it has been 13 years since skyrim they are clearly not the same team, the only similarity is in name only

“Sense Star Stuff”

ffs “Star Seeker” there I fixed it. it only took me 20 seconds. lmao

16:00 I don’t have a problem with this particular idea it’s just executed badly and like your saying it’s lacking depth. Also after being reborn you can save both companions with the knowledge of the events now. Also not a bad idea, just all the dialogue and characters are shallow and suck.

What sucks to me is that this game is a next gen graphics No Man’s Sky on 3 generations old gameplay. They’ve taken away the exploration and the joy of discovery, the colour is like a depressed earth. It’s somehow the exact same as NMS for a lot of it and yet simultaneously not enjoyable. Maybe NMS isn’t as fun as I think it is but they’ve managed to capture what would actually immerse you in being in space and place you in it; the variety in world colour, creatures, vegetation, it’s mind blowing how seamless (for the most part) a literal full universe is. Going from a game made in 2016 that has no visible loading screens (other than the obvious like warp jumping and entering/ exiting stations) to a game made so recently that just barely manages to load the most drab colour palette my eyes have ever seen is truly incredible, and not in a good way.

Last time the player choice mattered in a bethesda games main story, was in Skyruim, and whom you follow during the intro

Elder Scrolls 6 is being made with the same engine and design philosofies as Starfield is. ES6 will probably release sometime in 2030. And in 2030~ you will load into Elder Scrolls 6, walk towards a building to open the door, and will be slapped in the face with a loading screen…

All they needed was more options, that doesn’t seem rotten to the core to me. If it had ways to make relationships with all NPC’s, and to make your own stories basically by creating settlements and being able to take over planets or eradicate alien species, or ally with factions, then it would be amazing. Big scale changes like that. The problem is the game feels static and you can’t do much to change the course of it, just following the starborns destiny basically…

But the story can be garbage while adding new gameplay like I mentioned.

To make it worse, the person who dies changes based on what companions you have a highest infinity with, so it will never be Vlad, he’s not a companion.

This series has been the definitive starfield critique for me. I think all of the core points you make are really hard to refute. I still see people say things like “this is a masterpiece I don’t care what people say” and I really envy their (lack of) perspective. But anyone who’s played games over the past decade or so can honestly give starfield more than a “meh” which is only so egregious and disappointing considering how much better it could have been.

Instead of 1000 underdeveloped solar systems, they needed one immersive one.

“Starfield spoilers” lmao as if you could spoil something thats already rotten. 🤣

Thanks!

currently they are on the same course of failure like ubisoft failing to innovate failing to listen to critics

49:15 Even Skyrim got this right. Stores close at night. And the shopkeepers go to bed. Perfect time to break in and rob the place is 2 am.

Man, you shouldn’t start with spoilers two seconds in the video. Also, make an audio warning, many of us listen to videos instead of watching them.

You clearly haven’t played for 186 hours, so therefore you’re unqualified to pass judgment on this game.

The bad writing gets even worse on the second play through when you save everyone from the Hunter and your companions are still talking about the Hunter that they never had a run in with.

Your starfield content is what brought me here. Dunking on starfield is easy money, but especially when you do it well, as you did. You better do the dlc…

One thing that puts me off Bethesda’s games is their complete refusal to use cutscenes. The whole interaction with NPCs seem so lifeless always. You see them in this fixed camera, they looking at you directly, or in StarField they added the shocking new looking at you over their shoulder… and that’s it. So for instance, what’s the poing of a romance with a companion if all the interactions are looking at his face, then he/she says “I love you” maybe and that’s it. Not a cutscene with a kiss or anything… it’s funny that they let you customize your character so much given that you don’t get to see it interacting with anyone. Compare this to Mass Effect, Dragon Age or Baldur’s Gate. That way the relationships with companions feel so much real, getting to see the interactions.

I love starfield

Hey man, this video series has been great. The state of bethesda currently makes me extremely worried about Elder Scrolls 6. If they handle their future games like they did Starfield, i’m going crazy

It’s sad that some had a genius core idea: a plot where it makes sense for you to do the plot again and do things differently. Or have knowledge that they shouldn’t have. Where you could see the changes your character made. But then Bethesda just did less than the usual, even fewer choices, even more generic writing, and auto generated environments with barely any environmental story telling. Bethasda is done, ES 6 will be garbage unless they are able to shake up their process far more than I believe they are willing or able too.

WTF have I just watched? A review of some guy in a clown costume that thinks even Skyrim was bad? Well, if he thinks Starfield is bad, because it is like Skyrim, it must be pretty good.

I very, very much enjoyed this deep dive review of Starfield. Now I know for certain that it is only worth $20 of my money.

Well the main problem with the story is that there is no story.

I was listening to this, not watching it. I couldn’t remember who Sam was.

Starfield took radiant quests as side missions, turning it into the main quest 🤣

Amazing review and dissection of the issues

I commend your efforts. I’m sure this is a great video; not going to watch it. I’m over Bethesda.

What happened to 10-20 min videos? Why are there only reels and hour+ long videos now WTH is happening

Also FO1 had 3 ways to end the final fight… You could Try and convince the Master to give up his plan, but he won’t listen to you as he is committed so you have to kill them… BUT you can bring him Evidence his plan is flawed, leading to option 2, you convince him his plan won’t work WITH evidence and he will nuke himself and the project… Or if you get the Weird Key, kill 2 Super Mutants guarding the Nuke itself, which is in the game and not just a nebulas construct and Nuke the Master without even talking to him at all.

That game came out in 1997 and had those sorts of details.

FO1 and 2 have some of the most solid writing, in FO4 you got the paranoid town who want you to execute a Synth they caught… You have TWO Options, kill the town (everyone in the town must die) or kill a Synth who didn’t even know they were a synth… You have Persuasion and the Townsfolk are TERRIFIED of venturing out of the area, meaning if you lied and said the Synth was dead there is LITERALLY noway they would know you lied… but no, you get two choices… That’s it…

also remember in FO3 when the bad guy tells you he wants to do EXACTLY the same thing you want to do, purify the water and provide free water to the wasteland, it will just have an Enclave sticker on it… Also you can literally pass ONE Persuasion check to get the President AI to destroy the Enclave base in Fallout 3… Yeah FO3 writing and FO4 writing so bad… so so bad.

I’m so afraid for ES6

The entire “Star Child” story line as a main plot is not a very good narrative. This is not Elder Scrolls in space. Starfield should have been a more realistic space sci-fi. It should have dealt more with issues of space exploration, conquest and how humanity might deal with the possibility and discovery of alien life. Instead, we get “space magic”. Boring. If I wanted more of that I would just play more Skyrim. I guess I was hoping for something more original and interesting. The writing is sub par and the graphics and game play seem dated. It is a good game but it could have been a great game. It just doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be or what its’ real purpose is. It just seems to broad for that kind of direction. I understand that they want to give you continuous game play with the whole Unity/Starborn concept. I would rather have replayability via broader character backgrounds, dialogue options and plot choice consequences. I have no interest in continuing the game as a “Starborn” with more space magic. I wanted more Nasa punk science fiction with new worlds and lore. Instead, we just got Skyrim in space.

Bugthesda LITERALLY ripped off No Man’s Sky… you travel to the centre of the universe then start over… Yeah… Also procedurally generated planets… Oh and they ripped off Fallout with “This is what happened next”… Which was from Fallout 1 and 2, they used it in 3, Obsidian used it in Fallut New Vegas, since they made FO1 and 2 they were allowed… Then in FO4 they removed it and it sucked…

Starfield it made sense to remove it but they added it coz FO4 dropped it and got backlash.

Also now you learned of Bugthesdas terrible writing maybe apply it to FO3 and FO4, the games where Bugthesda had TERRIBLE writing…

BTW Fallout 1 you need to find a Water Chip, then face the Super Mutants, FO2 you need to find a G.E.C.K. and then face the Enclave, FO3 is Water, Supermutants, G.E.C.K., Enclave… They literally just made a worse version of two great games, but wait THERE’S MORE… Bugthesda remade Fallout Tactics for FO4.

In Fallout Tactics you have everyone scared of an UNSEEN threat, causing strife and pushing groups around from place to place. It turns out it’s robots from NORAD. You play as Brotherhood of Steel who rocked up on an Airship (which crashed from a convoy heading EAST towards the coast).

In FO4 everything is being pushed around by a scary unseen force… It’s Robots, though they called the Synths… They even use Energy weapons like in FOT… Also yeah, the Blimps, when I saw the Predwyn I was like, WAIT…WAIT… WAIT!!! This is Fallout Tactics… THEY ARE REMAKING FALLOUT TACTICS!!!

Bugthesda has been creatively bankrupt from the start, they can’t come up with an original idea, FO3 is a just a remix of FO1 and 2 and Fallout 4 is a remix of Fallout Tactics… It’s insane they nevr get called out for this BS, they can’t come up with original ideas.

Hearing that feels like you should just play The Witcher. Like not even the big third game, just the first. It’s a bit clunky from a modern standpoint, but the story has most of the things you are looking for.

We get it, you hate Starfield

Look at Gabe. Hell look at the entire Morrowind through Skyrim dev teams. Now look at the Starfield team. This is what happens to your game when you let the pink hair thinks they’re the other sex work from home generation make your games.

Bagroller said bugshitsda don’t do design documents.

You should do a whole video on the fact that the interior for the lodge doesn’t fit it’s exterior 😂

It’s a core tenant of Bethesda that they don’t build upon their prior games. They strip away. Those are their words. “What can we strip away, what can we streamline?”

That philosophy, which they’ve had since moving from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim…is their downfall.

your mistake in the conclusion is saying thank you for creating. people shouldn’t clap just because you created something, that’s why entertainment is as bad as it is nowadays

Here is a thought I had.
The Unity is actually an Eldritch horror outside of space-time and use’s the artifacts to bring people to it and if they accept its offer it eats a part of their soul in exchange for power.
Thing is they don’t know this at all and just think they are going on a journey.

So each time a Starborn goes through the Unity the more of their soul and humanity is lost.

They could have gone the route of having hints of the true Eldritch nature of the Unity. In the first “run” there would be very few and hard to find records of its true nature, but each time you pass through the Unity the more info you find but at the same time it grows stronger, making it even harder to beat in the end.

I have my own term for this kind of entity, Soul-Amalgam.
In one way or another two or more souls get combined/merged/eaten, etc.
Needless to say these things are not mentally stable but they all have one thing in common… they want more souls so they can grow.

I hope you enjoy the nightmare fuel I have left you with.

In cyberpunk. Time jackie mom talks to you and when you leave him messages later on.

Seeing victor and padre disturbed by his loss

Freaking misty handling herself like a queen.

It was supposed to be someone you were supposed to like and they wrote in way 90% of players did despite him disagreeing with you multiple times.

They earned his death then milked your emotions.

I need the green screen footage of you saying “This sucks. This is shit. And I’m done~ talkin about it,”

The biggest issue this game faces that cannot be ironed out without remaking the entire game from the ground up is the planets. It all comes back to the planets. Most planets are sparsely connected with barely anything to do on any of them. Not to mention you have to fast travel to all of them, completely defeating the purpose of space exploration. The few planets that do have things to do on them are just as vapid.

There are other issues, too, like too many NPCs being essential (meaning you can’t kill them), the same exact bugs we’ve been seeing for literal DECADES because Bethesda refuses to take the old dying Creation Engine out back and shoot it, and the lore being a mess because the lead writer refuses to use a fucking design document when creating a brand new world!

Some of these issues won’t be present in TES VI (hopefully), but some is not enough. The fact that they’re still using Creation Engine for TES VI doesn’t fill me with confidence.

The reason Constellation’s reactions to Sam’s death are so canned and generic is because either Sam or Sarah can die, and they didn’t want to record two sets of dialogue.

the worst part is the idea of slight changes every cycle would’ve been sooo awesome. But they simply didnt commit to it and Starfield is simply way too shwallow and huge to commit to it

E for engagement

Ive been trying to pin down whats wrong with the game. I still entirely cant, but the summary is, its lazy. Its worse than the games before. Its empty, its meaningless and it just makes me feel sad. Like I wasted my time. When I first played starfield, I thought, ok… perhaps they will update the planets (I was really into the idea of exploring), but no update happened. Same generic stuff everywhere. I didnt know then what game+ was. When I got to the “end” I felt I was slapped in the face with a wet floor rag. The grand finale was a “you get to do the meaningless crap all over again and no one remembers you and nothing changes”. 🙁 It’s just sad. Id rather go back to just walking around Skyrim, because it looks nice.

I noticed that you mentioned that bethesda “took the easy and lazy way of story writing and gameplay”, the main issue is that bethesda has been getting lazier and lazier since morrowind

Now do the same for skyrim and dash our childhoods

Imagine if Bethesda and Emil actually had the skill to write where Starborn are quantum entities where potentially all 4 personalities are observable in The Emissary when you talk to them before the death. How they could crack a joke like the unfunny one in one sentence and then, mid conversation, talk about their child like Adam Jenson. And they sometimes are aware that their identity isn’t stable in this universe until they remove one of their doubles and this could give a reason why the Starborn are so pointlessly violent when no one but them gives a shit about the Unity or the Magic Rocks if they didn’t drag so many bystanders into a mystery and just acted before Protagonist touches them. Maybe if there was a deeper consequence to dimensional jumping then just more power in a slightly different existence, like have to do this ASAP or they dematerialize or they can’t exist in another universe for too long unless they kill their duplicates; maybe they can be more than just the final unreasonable raider type that shows up in game.

Because without some greater justification, they’re just a more boring Space Fiend from New Vegas. Junkies that gotta touch more rocks because that’s all they got left in their meaningless eternity of waking up in another universe whether they tap Unity or wipe out.

I loved the ship builder until I got to level 50 and ran out of anything to aspire to upgrade to. I agree the dialogs are trash, as are the environments. My takeaway from my playthrough is that they sold us a $70 beta of a game as an actual completed title that will be available until they pull the authentication servers offline. Basically, a rug pull set to a timeline that is so slow that no one would be outraged by the loss. I truly miss the days when you could buy a reasonably fleshed out game for $20 and play client side without an online providers interaction for hours. In those days it was closer to playing through a living graphical novel and was rewarding in many of the ways reading a book would be. All of that is lost by trying to make a sparkly game that couldn’t offend anyone ultimately resulting in no meaningful content and a micro transaction store devoid of interesting content expansion. Developers will have to figure that out or the industry will destroy itself.

The single minor fix they could and should have brought to the game was actual commerce. Instead of only being able to connect your colonies together with resources, you should be able to link them to a city somewhere so you can be automatically paid by the trade authority for resources. Instead, if you want money for resources you have to pack them onto your ship and fly to a trade authority kiosk somewhere.
As for the specific topic of this vid, none of the characters are likeable or important. None deserve any emotion if the “die”. Of course, if you want the “dead character not to be dead, open your console and resurrect that character.

The guy who wrote Bethesda story, his tweet is still stupid and out of touch. If Bethesda’s games were free, sure, then his statements could hold true. But this isn’t a George Lucas and cast getting personally attacked for the Prequels. This is a multi-billion dollar corporation getting flamed for putting out a bad game and charging 70 over dollars for.

The best ever sentiment I’ve ever heard about Bethesda is “If they weren’t in the business of making broken and buggy games, they would have long since been out of business” and it is true. Tell me what other industry allows products on the quality of Bethesda games to exist? None. But people were willing to put up with it because their games at least offered something fun. Even if the moment you put even an iota of thought into it, their games completely fall apart.

But Starfield can’t even be bothered to put that iota of care and passion into it. When the interesting and memorable thing about your game is a YouTuber is having a meltdown over your game, well, frankly, you done messed up.

What is the game at 30:17?

Starfield was SO boring

Third video in a row about how you don’t like starfield. we get it.

I was so hyped for this game that I quit playin cyberpunk half way through the moment I got it and it took me 15hrs before I put it down and went back to Cyberpunk and I really tried to stick with it but it got so boring and repetitive especially compared to Cyberpunk 2077

No. This is just another of those reviews that argues it should be 4 shots to the face to kill the end boss.
All I want is a good game, and it can be done lots of different ways, Bethesda only owns some historical property, but…
Bethesda has no understanding of human nature, none of writing, none of story arches.
Examples of better games that do: Kingdom come, Outer worlds.
Examples of better games: CDproject reds games. The one with the albino and Cyberpunk.

It’s kinda funny how even the ending isn’t really all that original either. This is the 3rd iteration of “Go to centre of the universe and unlock new game plus”.

My rage at the heavens moment came during NG+

At the time, I thought the game was a 5 out of 10…there were things I’d had fun with, but I considered a lot of the game mediocre. And it definitely didn’t even deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as things like Witcher 3 or 2077.

NG+ just infuriated me. A game bug forced me to go NG+ to fix my game, and I decided to check out some of the alternate universes while rebuilding things…the first one I found that Constellation wasn’t there in (the ones with kids playing make believe) I witnessed my parents (from the kid stuff perk) have a full one sided conversation with SOMEONE WHO DIDN”T EVEN EXIST IN THAT UNIVERSE!!!!

Just the thought that these people, who get paid more money in a year than I will ever make in lifetime…these people…not a single one of them had the thought that maybe this wouldn’t be a good idea to let happen? It never once occurred to them?!?!? Every single one of them should be fired for blowing something that basic…for not even once remotely considering how the NG+ feature they implemented would affect their own game.

I have next to no interest in playing the DLC…even though I am getting it for ‘free’ And I have no hope for any improvement with ES6. There are far better people and companies to invest your time and money with,

the absolute worst part of this game is the multiverse. not in the fact the concept itself UNDERMINES EVERYTHING YOU DO since you are Effing off to another instance where you didn’t exist until now, but the fact they take something that has INFINITE POSSIBLITIES. imagine you went to an instance where the crimson fleet was the crimson empire and the United colonies was a rebel group, or another one where everyone is an alien with weird cat ears, Or even meeting an instance of the adoring fan who is a vengeful starborn who you left behind because you chose a background that didn’t include him in it. However the instances you go to have very TINY DIFFRENCES! It’s that kind of stuff that makes PLAYING THE GAME POINTLESS.

The “why” to all these questions you pose is that they were lazy and they didn’t have a game director engaged enough to force the lazy troops to do better work. Bodes very poorly for ES6.

20 mins in and all I can think is he should play Boulder’s gate 3

One of the worst pRts of NG+ is that your reward is a ship significantly weaker and with fewer features but one unique gimmick. That you didn’t then unlock a whole set of starborn ship building options was super disappointing

Yeah, it’s definitely worse than Skyrim. Skyrim has a world, it has characters you remember and quote, all of the nordic crypts are still technically unique from one another (although obviously still fairly repetitive, no two are identical, unlike Starfield where you can find literally identical bases where all enemies and loot are in the exact same spots), and it also just had a cool factor it leaned into (shouting my enemies to death with words I learned from ancient dragon walls with chanting emanating from the ether is cooler than just starpowers from rocks and temples with glowing light balls). You at least have a wider variety of things to kill, if nothing else, and more ways to kill them. And Skyrim has lore. Yes, it’s sort of coasting on it’s long history, it’s a bit unfair of a comparison, but that’s the point; if making a new IP, you need to make that lore. Starfield’s lore, besides the most recent history of some wars, is just “there are magic rocks for some reason that give you powers for some reason so you can universe-hop for some reason.” That’s trash. The daedric quests in Skyrim might not be deep or have branching plot threads, but at least they are fun and memorable; I’m sure every Skyrim veteran can place the following quote, taken from my memory–“Weak. He’s weak. You’re strong. Crush him!” I don’t mind that Bethesda does not try to make Baldur’s Gate or Dragon Age or The Witcher or Red Dead Redemption; that’s fine. But they don’t even keep a consistent level of quality internally–their games keep falling short of their previous games. I would be okay with TES6 just being Skyrim but in a new location, with new quests and NPCs and dungeons, but all made basically the same–that wouldn’t be ideal, but it’d be fine. But I’m afraid it’s going to be much worse, because they can’t even manage that anymore.

Talking your way out of the final boss fight isn’t good if it’s dumb. Fallout 1 let you do this because it made sense–you just had to make it clear to the main enemy that he’d already lost. In Fallout 2, you can’t, because the final boss is like “Hi, I don’t care what you have to say, I’m going to crush you into paste” and then attacks you, which is also completely within his character (though the game does give you a variety of ways to make that fight far easier for non-combat builds, so you don’t feel screwed). Both of these work. Here, there is no real reason for it; if the Hunter wanted to take a break, he could just kill you (or at least, he thinks he can), take your artifacts, jump forward, and THEN find a beach to hang out on for a decade.

I think you missed a detail; the grav drives didn’t inherently destroy the earth’s atmosphere, the scientist deliberately mis-designed them so they would do so. He didn’t just give humanity the ABILITY to leave, but FORCED it to leave. Because he’s an ass. Oh, and this flaw was secretly covered up with like a firmware update. Every grav drive apparently can destroy the magnetosphere of a FREAKING PLANET if you just roll back it’s OS. Which is not only ridiculous on the tech side, but also not how PLANETS work. This is one of the few times they really tried to do the science part of science fiction, and it’s terrible.

I’m reminded of the singular conversation in Fallout 4’s Far Harbor DLC that happens if you have Nick with you when first talking to Dima. It was nice to have dialogue that didn’t feel so static and have a companion effectively and meaningfully chime in. Unfortunately it looks like Bethesda couldn’t iterate on that in any sort of meaningful way.

Your first two were good, but this opening tells me you are just a murderhobo. Can only care about characters death if they personally benefit you.

Soyboy Mack at it again. How very very sad.

Having a random member of the main cast die was so stupid. Even if they did it right, it would require a ton of additional dialogue that has to be tailored around whoever died, and that NOTHING any of the potential marks did after this fact really required them. Which is why they got lazy and just used generic lines as much as possible, and made sure none of the 4 are really all that impactful. Extremely foolish. They should have picked one, made them likeable, and killed them off, causing us issues–boom, a death with some level of imact. Instead you have 4 possible deaths that don’t really matter unless you just like Barrett’s dad jokes or Andreja’s indeterminate accent. It’s not that I’m saying they couldn’t have done much better, but it was basically taking on a massive amount of work they weren’t willing to do–so why even have it? It’s amazing how consistently the creative choices in this game were just the wrong ones.

This is one of the best game rants I’ve watched on YouTube. Wonderfully done; your frustration is felt and empathized with. If only Bethesda could hire people like you to tell them what they can do better, haha.

Starfield – a lot of nothing

What the hell are you?!

The best way to sum up Starfield exploration is that they took No Man’s Sky’s exploration, and then did it worse. No truly unique planets, rare finds, actual rewards, seamless flights, none of the good parts.

I just keep thinking about Baldur’s Gate 3 when at the start of character creation you make a significant choice with either being normal or Dark Urge.

And with Dark Urge, it opens up an entire new storyline involving you having random murder moments leading up to the revelation that you’re the Anti-Christ.

And this isn’t talking about how your class, race and background matter. Like how if you’re a Drow, you’re immune to certain poisons and get the short end of the stick when it comes to Fantasy Racism. Or if you’re a Selune Cleric, your relationship with Shadowheart becomes more antagonistic due to conflicting faiths with different gods.

Would love to see you do a video that is the opposite of this, talk about an RPG you really like, by coincidence I finished Cyberpunk today and was shocked at how good it was. It’s the best RPG I have played in many facets, a true GOAT for me.

Good videos.
I remember first playing The Outer Worlds (NOT Outer Wilds) and thinking that it was too hemmed-in and limited. But looking back on it now, I appreciate it. The smaller scope led to a tighter game with less bugs and writing that was… Well, not GOOD, but good enough for what it was.
I’ll take that over Starfield’s bloated carcass any day.

And for anyone who was disappointed by how Starfield handled the Unity, play Outer Wilds (NOT The Outer Worlds).
No spoilers, just trust me.

>base whole game around the concept of ng+
>make the story extremely railroaded and bland, without branching choices, without differences
Intredasting…

if you want a real space exploration game, try outer wilds. that game literally changed my life. it’s extremely innovative from game design perspective, has spectacular writing, is very thought(and emotion)-provocative, and absolutely nails the exploration aspect. it sets the bar SO high, it’s amazing how an indie game can do everything a megacorp with tons of money and resources is trying to do, and break all the standards while at it

Lol, as if anyone cares about spoilers for this game.

Hi, this is a message from Todd:
Don’t worry. Elder Scrolls 6 will just work!

I feel like this game is like visiting a theme park for an IP you’ve never watched. They want you to be involved but not to affect anything because the next guest needs the same experience because they bought tickets.

Starfield makes me think about the new Starwars trilogy; it was probably designed by a committee, which might explain why it lacks soul: it is a disjointed mess where each element seems to have been developed in isolation from the rest, and later diluted to make them work together and appeal to the widest audience possible.

For example, consider the universe; it feels like it has been constructed by merely throwing together various popular themes:
Some envisioned a NASAPunk style, like “The Expanse,” reflected in the ships, the Martian city, small settlements, and bases.
Parallel to that, they aimed for hard sci-fi high-level concepts, like in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Contact,” and indeed the main quest is consistent with this idea.

However, it seems someone was inspired by “Firefly” or played “Red Dead Redemption 2” and wanted space cowboys. Thus, we have Akila, a city where wood (tables, stairs, etc.) is prevalent to evoke a Western vibe, on a planet without forests.
And apparently, someone else was impressed by Cyberpunk, leading to the addition of Neon. These additions really left the feeling of an inconsistent universe, strikingly different from the carefully crafted Elder Scrolls universe.
Neon is a glaring example of diluted style. They aimed for a drug-ravaged city but omitted visible addicts. They planned for a nightclub with exotic dancers but settled for men in absurd spandex alien costumes.

The game systems reflect similar issues, seeming as if teams worked in isolation. And by the end, their contributions were watered down:
The fuel system exists but is vestigial, environmental hazards are underdeveloped, etc.
Most disheartening, though unsurprising, is the gutted exploration element. Essentially, they had two paths for ‘Starfield’:

Option 1: Follow the “Mass Effect”/”Outer Worlds” model: Create a few handcrafted open-world maps. This would also allow for a good space-themed RPG but won’t offer the “Big Space Game” feel.

Option 2: If you want to give a true feeling of immensity, you will need to integrate a space simulator for seamless exploration.
When considering design, you realize that a Bethesda game with 1000 planets requires a space simulator to maintain a constant ‘relative landmark density’.
The formula is straightforward: the speed of the player multiplied by the maximum time between discoveries dictates the average distance between landmarks.
On foot, this would mean a landmark every 500 meters. Multiply this by the size of the playable area (encompassing 1000 planets), and you’d need countless landmarks, leading to the use of reusable templates, which led to the very defeat of the original purpose; nothing feels less immersive than finding the same landmark several times on different planets.
However, if they had implemented a space simulator, allowing exploration via spaceship at astronomical speeds, having only 2 or 3 landmarks per planet might have been sufficient. Hence they could have had about 200 landmarks, like in previous Bethesda games, spread over a huge empty universe that you can pass by at astronomical speed.

It appears their engine couldn’t incorporate a space simulation, and they were too stubborn to embrace the necessary implications.

The fact that I know you got that beserk and weyland saga Manga from Walmart lol

Been a literal year since I’ve played this game, and after watching this video, I don’t miss it in the slightest. Game is terrible.

Can anyone tell me what the music is in the “exploration” section when he showcases all the different games?

Kinda pissed me off how Barrett handled it when it was his turn to speak honestly

Evolving isn’t really in the cards for Bethesda, which is pretty clear once you look a bit into the path they took with the Elder Scrolls series. It’s more devolving than anything

I don’t care what developers have to say about what it takes to make a game. We’re not the developers, we’re the players and if your game is trash, i dont care that Marcy spent a month designing the best gun in the game. The game remains trash regardless of Marcy’s efforts, in the same way developers don’t care that i go to work to be able to make money to buy their game. They don’t care about my bills so why should i care about theirs? Make a good game, that is their job and they didn’t.

When you try to make something appeal to everyone equally, you often end up with something that is interesting to nobody.

Idk man. I just don’t think it’s that bad. I feel like the same people who shit in it are the same ones who get hard over Blazblue or Fortnite. Yeah the writing is ass at times, and yeah the world is a bit empty at times, but the same can be said about real life.

I think your flaw is that you actually build a friendship or relationship with him you actually complete his story, hus separation, his daughter and you use him as a companion, i can see your gripe, but i liked sam, i do think it could have been handled better, but if its sam Barrett andreja or sarah that dies you practically have the same funeral and there is a wake certainly for Barrett, maybe bethesda just didn’t put much weight behind it and corey does come looking for you in another play through as a grown adult and is out for revenge, but hey its your opinion, you said that sam is a character you never liked so his funeral and emotional break down from other characters would have made you annoyed.

There are so many things that I agree with your 3 part docu. However, one things that SF has going for me is that it’s my first Bethesda game. The procedurally generated planets are bad no way around that and I agree that for a game that is about exploration it’s vapid at best. That being said, I honestly did enjoy my time with every character and in my play through Kora stayed at constellation the mom didn’t take her away. I also really enjoyed every curated quest that you had to do, yes the challenge was “meh” at best but it was fun for me. The crafted environment were fantastic but everything else was just filler. I’m hoping the Shattered Space DLC brings more of the crafted experience and not more generic quests

00:38:40 At least going through the Unity fixes quest lines that are broken and basically resets the game.

Can you share ya hair routine bc i like ya hair

On every last one of my games so far Barret died. And I basically said the same thing as I said when I tossed grenades at Garvy & co in the museum where you find him in FO4:
“Have fun with that. Bye!”

Edit: Also I have jumped the unity more times than I can even count. And I have never seen a single ‘differing lodge’ setup. It’s always the same ‘Skip story’ or ‘Replay story’. And the more times I go through that same old BS, I seem to getting more and more frustrated and hostile toward anyone who defends this PoS.

We as gamers, are NOT asking to much of these companies. They are spreading their scope to much over things that do NOT MATTER. These games have to pass hundreds of eyes or thousands before its made because it MAY offend someone. Instead of standing on its own and being its own thing. Its muted because it HAS to be. Millions and millions of dollars and man hours, made for nothing unique

Only a few minutes in but i agree with the deaths in bethesda games. So few devs are capable of making me care about characters.

I like the game myself, but I’m not really attached to many of the characters. They do have more depth than people give them credit for but it’s not unless you do a lot of side quests to open it up which is fine, I guess but a strange decision. I was thinking about getting Dragon Age Veilguard but I heard it some ideology being pushed in it that I don’t agree with. I won’t be buying supporting or playing that either which is sad since I have been a fan since the original. The modern day gaming scene in general seems like the top brass are so disconnected to the gamers who actually buy the games.

i think the whole thing about the death is because it isnt always sam, it can be anyone on the team, so to make it easier they just talk about the concept of death. for me it was the smugler chick….was she a smugler, i dont remember.

Starfield is just proof that no matter what a developer does these days it’ll get trashed because everyone thinks he’s entitled to get the game he deserves. Something not meeting a certain expectation results in years of tears, repeated tantrums and whining – in case of YouTube clickbaiting and repeating of talking points from months ago.

I really enjoy Starfield for what it is, it’s the kind of game i never got to play when i was younger. Yes, it lacks here and there but i’ve got patience – comes with age kids – and oddly enough no one forces me to play it 24/7…

The more people on a project, the more sanitized and pathetic it is. This game had like, 20 times the team size of skyrim. Comparing writings of each game. Skyrim is still a better story even though its rough

The priest didn’t become the hunter, the priest is the pilgrim who was the hunter. The hunter is Bethesdas way of saying that multiple NG+ runs will make you become the hunter. You care less and less, and kill, creating chaos to amuse you. Which is kind of true, after multiple NG+ the game is more like, fuck it, imma reset the cycle anyway so I’ll kill these people this time.

The one version of the hunter gets tired of resetting, life has no meaning, no purpose. It’s an endless search for power, that gives him no life. So he settles into a system a does what we probably would do if we could. He creates a religion about himself.

The priest in our universe was the hunter. Because the hunter was the pilgrim that created the religion, the religion can lead to the unity, and it pushes the hunters ideology about the strong survive, they deserve it.

I had to stop watching your video once you got there, saying it made no sense that a priest becomes a hunter. Once someone enters the unity, they create many variations of themselves. So at one point, many variations of the hunter were created, who has stepped many times, and said “I’m done”.

That’s why the religion he preaches leads to the unity, that’s why the keeper knows where the pilgrim lived, that’s also why the keeper remembers you in NG+ runs. You can speculate that this keeper steps into the unity eventually to continue to spread the religion.

FYI, he is wearing a “Relaxed Fit Jacquard-knit jumper.” Its currently sold out.

It’s like they took the worst part of Dragon’s Dogma and decided “Yeah, that’s a great twist!”

out of the 4 possible deaths, none of them really gave us enough of a reason to care about their deaths. It happens too quickly.

Do more of these. I keep watching them over and over. Like your comedy style

“It doesnt need fixing”

– Bethestards

Fallout New Vegas, a game that came out over a decade ago, is a better rpg than starfield.

I saw something scary on twitter…

don’t worry bros everything will be fixed with the dlc

lmao

skyrims a horrible example to use considering oblivion and morrowind are bigger. and oblivion is more detailed. the NPCs actually had schedules. lives to live.

Also for future reference the past tence of “Seek” is “Sought” not “Seeked” the Pilgrim didn’t seek followers they SOUGHT him.

IDK why anyone was surprised Starfield was a massive bomb. Bethesda has essentially been slapping a new coat of paint on Terminator Future Shock since 2002 and calling it a finished game.

Best game going around, keep crying, it’s pure comedy. 🤣🤣🤣

Literally dread the elder scrolls
I genuinely think it will literally make or break them

I had Sarah for a companion early on, but managed to piss her off to the extent that I could hear her badmouthing me when we were wandering around and if I tried to talk to her, she’d angrily tell me to leave her alone. However, when it came time for the character with whom I had the most affinity to die, it turned out it was Sarah, somehow.

Like, whuuut? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I think the fact that Baldurs Gate came out at the same year Starfield did really shows how Bethesdas lack of evolving their formula. In Baldurs gate you can literally miss entire character arcs and plot threads just because you killed a single character. The world seems to genuinely react to your actions no matter what and there are still so many secrets in the game, it is genuinely wild. I hope Baldurs Gate is not a one of a kind thing and becomes a trend for gaming in general.

Here is the thing about the end part tho.
For an effort to be worth it, it needs to come out with something worth it
Effort for effort sake is pointless, charging 70$ solely because you put effort in a shitty game is bullshit
Yeah, games take a lot of work, but if you are creating a shit game, its just that, shit

Sams death can be impactful.. if you use him as a follower and do his quests and talk with him you can get to know him pretty well. same thing with the other constellation companions. you are completely wrong about that.

I would just like to inform you that persuasion works like stealth, I think I got one point in it but I never even thought about putting any points into it because without doing anything just randomly picking the “hard” choices I won them like 75-95% of the time
and I always had an auto win ready if I really wanted to succeed one

I persuaded the starborn first try

Video games are not art. They are a product. Video games include art in them, but they themselves aren’t art. The reason why Bethesda fails isn’t because it doesn’t do art, it’s because it doesn’t give the customer what the customer wants.

I love how you kept calling them rocks 😂😂😂 Call me Rock the Rockborn, welding my rock powers in my enternsl rocky road towards gathering more… rocks

5:00 why couldnt we have the option to adopt cora either? maybe help her with the grief and have her come to terms and see you as a new parental figure, its not like adoption is foreign to bethesda, on top of that you cant even start a family in this game, you can have a “wife” but no kid of your own.

Patreon? NEVER.

I will always tout this game as a great “exploration” RPG, but Outward is a good example of providing a world where your map doesn’t help you and you must rely on reading landmarks and their directions to navigate. You can always see something in the distance that leads you naturally in that direction, the map has landmarks that give you a sense of where places are generally in a distance sense, and there are also still unmarked caves and places that keep you on your toes to push for further exploration or remember what nearby landmark is there to return as you go to a town to take care of your inventory first.

Starfield is a fundamentally flawed game, is the game big? Yes it is. But this isn’t the early 2000s anymore people aren’t wowed by big maps. People want stories, emotional stories, stories that make them eager for more.

Starfield doesn’t have that, it has gameplay and story. But that story is so dumb and makes little sense that it just brings the game down. People love stories but even games people consider masterpieces don’t always have the best stories. Because the gameplay and characters make up for it, Starfield doesn’t have that.

Question, who does the art for the thumbnails? Is it you? Whoever it is, they do a great job!
Love your videos BTW, absolutely love your editing and commentary

Great video but I do have to disagree at 34:32 where you said that leaving the stories open ended is better than telling you the consequences of your actions. One of the greatest moments I have when I finish a run in Fallout NV, Pillars of Eternity or any other RPG with meaningful choices is finding out how the story moves on without me. However the reason why it fails in this game, is because the choices genuinely feel so hollow in my honest opinion. The choices in the game feel like they exist as a check box in a spreadsheet rather than a natural logical conclusion. It’s one of the reasons why Bethesda games are so fundamentally divorced from their CRPG origins, they are okay Action-Adventure games at best. I do however see where your criticism is coming from and while this might be a contention of personal taste, I think it’s a fair opinion to have even if I disagree. I hope this game can be a lesson to all of the game developers in the audience and I know I’m trying my best to learn from this fumble of a game.

I wish there was a fourth option: destroy the unity. End the chaos and greed of the starborn forever

Okay, this video is obviously fabulous, but I’m also really curious as to what the games you showed at the beginning of the exploration section. I haven’t played many games, so I only recognize skyrim and one of the zelda games but I’m not actually sure.

I spent 80 hrs in Starfield and got no where near any part of what he’s talking about. They built a game that takes 40+ hrs to realize it sucks. To them, it’s a huge success and these videos are just part of the ecosystem of a majorly successful game.

I mean starfield is trash but 3 videos is crazy

Amazing Starfield reviews. I think you called out everything wrong with Bethesda. All they need to do is listen to these points

The character who dies on the space station is decided by the max affinity the player has with that character, Sam death is the most impactfull the game has to offer, just let that sink in for a while.

Cyberpunk 2077. 25 seconds in to this and you hit the nail on the head why I disliked Cyberpunk. The death of a character that should have been story altering was a “So that happened”. Flat and as dystopian as the whole setting but could have been a moment for some zumanity to squeak through, even if just for a few more scenes of dialogue. In a time when everything must be “narrativized” we can’t tell our way out of story.

Having watched all three videos I have a hard time disagreeing with you but I would add that it’s hard not to have high expectations of a product when the developers hype it up to be ambrosia then hand you a can of Fosters instead, Bethesda are one of the worst serial offenders when it comes to this practice.

The hate for starfield on this channel is delicious 🤤. Y’all got issues.. I’m 2000 hours in and enjoying.

Every time I think about this game I get mad that I spent $70 on it, that’s the only thought I have anymore on it

Thank you for going through Starfield and pulling the parts out so you can critique it fairly. Now people can’t say you didn’t play it you just have the same opinions as others. No you have evidence of the shallow writing. Great job.

Great video mate. Was a good watch. I gave starfield 1 hour of my time and never played it since. u didnt even touch on it but even just navigating the UI was a pain in my ass and i got turned off. These videos help highlight not just with Starfield but the issues that plague Bethesda as a studio. i have no respect for them anymore and even less for people who defend their mediocre RPG releases. Having high standards is more than fine as one should not settle for SHIT.

Bethesda is just pioneering AAAA early access 😊

37:17 Dragon’s Dogma also has the new game plus, as part of the main plot.

Sam did not die in playthrough

Fallout 76 destroyed any hope I had for Bethesda making decent games anymore. I liked Fallout 4, at least, for its exploration – but mainly because I could mod out all the problems I had with it. I can’t do that with FO76, and Starfield is even more mod-restrictive. The people who made Skyrim so moddable were BANNED from BGS’ Discord for daring to ask for help in parsing the mess that is the Starfield engine!

BGS games are legendary for being “kinda meh but amazing with mods” – and then they ganked the mod community in order to put worse content behind overpriced paywalls.

Gonna spend my money elsewhere until and unless they do a complete 180.

Banger videos, subbed

Brother how many “starfield is bad” videos do you have in the holster 😭😂

Good Video. Starfield sucks

This vid is top notch stuff and what a eye opener and the reason I could never get invested into the game. 10 out of 10. I hope this is the end of Bethesda’s little game and they start making proper games again.

pretty early on in the game i did the UC vanguard mission where the city is attacked by terramorphs.
The city spaceport gets defences put up and injured soldiers on stretchers getting treatment.
Probably like 12 hours later I do the main mission and get chased by the hunter through the spaceport.
When i return after the mission THE EXACT SAME DAMAGED SPACEPORT is loaded. I was shocked at how lazy that is….. Same fker on a stretcher getting treatment.. same chick sat resting against an advert board near the transit…. same robot parts on fire at the scanning ramp area….
I quit shortly after out of self respect

I wished the starborn would keep their visors opaque! Their faces look sooooooo stupid to me. They just look like projections rather than an actual “real” face.

The more I learn about Starfield, the more I can’t stop myself from thinking “Mass Effect did pretty much everything better 17 years ago. It had space magic, shooting, some degree of customization, fully voiced conversations, hard consequences that cover multiple games in the series, engaging, much beloved characters with quotable lines (Calibrations! Big stupid jellyfish!), buuuut it did not have ship customization and I think it had less planets in the full series than Starfield has, and those planets in ME are also not has openly explorable, I’d say? Maybe in Andromeda, but I only played to ME3 due to hardware limitations.

I gave up after 8 hours. This game just feels dated, it’s like a menu simulator with loading screens and everytime something made fun Bethesda built in a game mechanic to destroy the fun again. huge disappointment. I’ll probably never touch it again.

And yeat, here you are wasting hours of your time trashing a game you hate. Go figure