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Ah yes, another Starfield hate video, at last!

The idea of using the unity to undo the pains you’ve faced throughout the story reminds me a lot of the the end of fable 2 and the tower. You could wish for wealth, for the needs of the many, or for the needs of the few.

I remember going through the Unity, thinking well this sucks, then reinstalling an older save never to bother with it again. Helldivers 2 has 262 planets to explore and i have never felt bored or had nothing to do on any i’ve landed on so far.

Exploration can be fixed relatively easily.

The interior cells can be setup similar to ships. Just.. randomized.. They can make 100 if not 1000’s of different cells, all based on a category.. Cave, Mines, science outpost, living quarters (cave), Living Quarters (science outpost) , etc.. Then.. randomized it..

Literally that’s all they had to do.. Think of it like taking any of the 100 of skyrim caves.. Then.. bashing them together randomly infinitely.. Yes you’d still get some areas or situatoins that are similar, but at least the whole layout, enemy layout, loot, etc. wouldn’t be similar.

Like-wise, they can put “activators” for interior set pieces.. Example. The “Science lab” set piece. the Activator in the middle of the room can be set to randomize a plethora of different things.. from vats, to tables, etc. If a table, it also randomizes the clutter to a degree.

This is how I invisioned their “randomization” would be when they were describing it.

From here you can still have hand tailored locations, and hand tailored quests as normal, and it wouldn’t even take away from the development time too much, as they can use any of those 1000+ set pieces to build their initial layout, and unique location, then add in some more unique set pieces for that particular quest to make it not feel or look “samey”.

Win/Win.

9:55 I genuinely don’t understand how or why they ruined base building so much. They had it almost perfect in fallout 4 but in Starfield you can make large structures at best, I miss decorating houses and getting granular with design. But can’t even spin furniture to be where you want it, it’s tied to your mouse instead of your player and just makes it impossible. It’s so frustrating because Starfield would be the perfect game world to sink time into building settlements like fallout 4, there’s so much more motivation and possibility but it’s almost totally ruined by how they implemented it.

PREY OST FUCK YEAH

to tell the truth, i would just diminish the amount of solar systems, this way it would still be enormous but contained enough that you can land anywhere and still be surprised. this way it would be a nice compromise.

also the alternate universes should have more impact, having me(player character) as a companion across the armilary to meet constelation me would be funny, heck a me party would be awesome. the parents reacting to two you would be great.

Competing with BG3? Not sure how that works.

I’d say ti combat the game world design, I think bethesda should have just thrown in Alien races but whatever. Instead for a universe like this, I’d classify planets into 3 classes, gas giant (which you can’t land on) uninhabited, inhabited, colonized, and abandoned. Inhabited planets would be those planets like new Atlantis where there is full on cities and civilization and so on. Colonized would be planets where small colonies of people exist with industrial sites and what not. Uninhabited would be the barron worlds with no people but there could be life or wilderness. And then abandoned which would be planets like earth where people used to be there but are not there anymore for whatever reason but ruins exist. On top of all of that I would make space itself the open world with a set number of systems and boundaries. Like think of fallout 4’s open world, with the open world being space instead where you see different events or fights happening. Then imagine each solar system as a building, and then each planet or moon in that solar system as a room. Thats probably the thought process I’d use to design a game like this

Not letting players seamlessly take off from and go into space on their own, like literally every other space game I’ve seen (Even astroneer does a good job of this) was the single biggest reason I refused to buy it, because I knew it was just going to be Fallout 4 in space.

With the scale that Starfield is, I think it really doesn’t matter how well crafted the story or quests are. Bethesda simply succeeded in creating a literal galaxy worth of worlds to explore…. but in doing so they dug themselves into a giant hole because they simply are physically incapable of creating a galaxy’s worth of story and quest lines. They made a universe so big that it became impossible to fill.

If I was to summarize Starfield with a single line, it would:
“So now what?”

For some reason no one seems to notice this, the big issue of why planets are mostly rock with nothing else on them is because they are based on real planets.
Bethesda took our galaxy and based the planets ingame on the real ones. Obviously not the best idea for interesting things

I never bought starfield. Todd howard is a well known satanic baby seal clubber. I do not want to give todd howard money so that he can bathe in the blood of the innocent.

They leaned too far into procedural generation. If all the planets that had capital cities that were the size of multiple Skyrim holds (maybe slightly bigger) with hand crafted dungeons, locations, quests (that aren’t radiant garbage) and outlying towns, it may have been worth something. And you have the Proc-gen stuff outside of the “settled systems” that players can enjoy and discover things.

The lack of hand-crafted content absolutely KILLED any chance this game had and the amount of proc-gen assets in their pool is so small, you’ll see everything within a few hours.

!! STARBOUND MENTIONED !!

I have a solution to ONE problem.

15-25 Handcrafted planets full of actually interesting and unique stuff. Maybe another 10 just for side content and decoration, maybe resources and unique shops too. The rest are procedural generation, existing outside of colonized space, and coexist with the radiant questing system, aka the mission boards.

Constellation is an explorers group but you find settlements of some kind all over nearly every single planet. Why have “explorers” explore an already explored galaxy? If half the planets were a colonized frontier and the other half was the unknown, THAT makes more sense.

One more issue I have is deeper than Starfield. It’s uniquely a Bethesda problem. Scripted events, that just wait for the player to happen regardless of how long you take to do it. One glaring example: the execution in Solitude. If you go there in like a day after the dragon attack, sure makes sense. let’s say you wait a few weeks, the execution still happens as if the attack was yesterday. Wait a year in-game, same thing. These are not video games, these are not RPGs, these are theme park attractions solely for the sake of John Player. On the way into Whiterun “You didn’t even try to help with that giant” bla bla bla. My fix: If you’re not there for an event, it should happen anyway, and then rumors about it start happening in passive conversations. “Hey did you hear about the execution?” “Did you hear? The companions defeated a giant just outside the city!”

Bethesda used to be… eh… not bad at “Environmental Storytelling” but now they think you’re too stupid to get it unless they grab your face and shove it into everything FOR YOU.

Starfield should have had about 5 fully detailed planets, each could have been a little smaller than a Skyrim or Fallout map, and then they could have added the 1000 empty planets that they wanted for space realism. That would have made Starfield absolutely amazing! Instead we got very few and very small cities and a 1000 empty planets.

Bethesda have always had a massive problem with shallow writing, repetitious and unrewarding gameplay and most of all a lack of consequence within the game world. The only reason Skyrim was such a success was because, at the admission of the (then) developers themselves, they went way beyond the scope of their individual remits. Pure passion project.

For me, the main story isn’t bad, also how the whole world is built doesn’t seem terrible, but for me, the problems are small details, unfinished and poor made, for example, the ai of npcs.

Great video!

Starfield was a masterclass on the importance of UI design. As a cautionary tale. Ive never seen a game were the highest ranked mod is new menu layouts.

I can “hear” you reading the script if you catch my meaning.

Rodina in the intro 🔥🔥 underrated game

I know that AI generated slop isn’t popular, and it does need to be used in moderation, but hopefully procedural generation improves with the usage of LLMs. There is the potential to use it to generate dynamic missions either on the fly during gameplay, or ahead of time during the game development cycle.

Settlement building isn’t new

The main goal for Starfield is to get to new game+ which makes exploring, buiding bases, building ships and collecting materials a huge waste of time because those will be all gone in your new game. This was the main reason why I stopped plaing the game after I finally decided to start a new game+ after playing for 200+ hours on my first play through.

Starfield is probably the best game ever made if you think about it. If we compare it to a popular game such as The Witcher III, and if we are being honest in our assessments, it’s completely obvious Starfield is the better game. People just jumped on the trend of disliking it but the truth is Starfield is at worst a top 5 game of all time.

I wouldn’t approach the issue of the scale at all. The scale was a major design failure that could never have worked. Those thousand barren planets should be scaled back to a dozen or so, the ~200 various points of interest hand-placed along their surfaces by level designers with intent, and a pass should be made to make them more… well, interesting. It’s mind-boggling that in Fallout 76 we got the best, most interesting world space that Bethesda has ever designed, and in their very next game they didn’t even bother to design a world space, and instead just let a level generator do it without their input.

30:50
How does that even make sense? Is that meant to be a space helmet where it’s open at the top and you hair comes out? Or is that a classic Bethesda fail where a character with hair has it clip through the helmet mesh?

Great video man. Think i have a similar perspective on Starfield. I really enjoyed playing it, but I don’t blame people who can’t see past the many poor design choices.

starfield shouldve been a single solar system and carefully crafted planets, they missed the shot by freaking miles

Adding andromeda as a good game is funny, but back to Starfield, with improved graphics, a huge space and Bethesda’s claims about it people expected a modern rpg or sci-fi fantasy or a choice based story rich game in general, Bethesda’s plan was nothing more than another fallout in space, at best it’s comparable to other Bethesda games not rpgs, it’s boring and pointless, there is no end goal in it, just fetch quests, gatherer builder mechanics and occasional shooting encounters, it doesn’t work, not as a Bethesda game not as any other genres

They should *either* have had a big universe, *or* have done the multiverse thing. You could’ve had a game built around a huge world with loads to explore, and the gameplay and narratvie built around that, or you could’ve had a much smaller setting, but every instance of the multiverse is different in interesting ways. There’s no real way they could practically do both, and so both of them feel very flat and unexciting.

one thing that would make the loss of settlements hurt less is if you could build a persistent settlement on each temple. the temples keep what you built through NG+ via starborn juju. making them more like the fallout 4 settlements with non-temple outposts being more of a small scale pop-up for specific needs.

this also gives a purpose to the temple rather than to slurp them up and forget about them.

“it did steal 100 hours of my time” emphasis on “steal” i guess.
its like if a girl you like starts talking about astrology, youre not listening and engaging because you like astrology, you pay attention becasue you like her.
if a close friend asks you to hear out his new “investment opportunity” and then tries to rope you into a pyramid scheme and you sit there listening to his whole pitch because “theres no way he is actually being serious, there must be something more to it”.
i liked bethesda, so i let them finish talking before saying no. that doesnt mean the game itself can claim it kept my attention. it used good will as coal in the furnace to get the momentum it had.

Just stopping to compliment how you give song credits on screen for the background music. Far too few content creators do this, yet it’s such an easy thing to do that’s greatly appreciated by watchers who want to track down the music used in videos. Kudos

Things you didn’t mention is that 90% of Constellation members are awful people and they could have switched characters around in different universes.

I firmly believe that Starfield has the potential to be an amazing game. But it’s going to take years of updates. And something tells me, considering we haven’t seen any yet, that it’s never going to happen.

Why are they so obsessed with being able to do and be everything in one playthrough ?
And especially why do it IN A GAME WITH NG+ BUILT-IN ???

And why not integrate NG+ into the storyline, with NG+ being the endgame, midgame, hell, even the end of the tutorial in scope…

Starfield: we dont have aliens as thats not “realistic”. Also Starfield: here’s space magic!

11:52 – To my mind, the solution is “realise it’s unsolvable and try finding a new concept”. Like, your game can’t be No Man’s Sky *and* Mass Effect *and* X4 whilst also being constructed in such a way that the Player can just pick and choose what to and what not to engage with, also built on your ancient-ass janky engine.

Like, if you want to have a game that involves facially unrelated mechanics (say, I don’t know, base-building) you have to tie them into each other. Explore to find resources you need to upgrade the base, upgrade the base to give you additional tools and capabilities for exploration.

And if you can’t, if there’s a mechanic or system in your game that doesn’t really add anything… Why is it there?

You can’t be all things to all people; it’s folly to try.

Bethesda, where ambition goes to die
It is still a massive stain on their history that the best 3D Fallout is not made by them, if we include ALL Fallouts, theirs don’t even make the top 3.
The only thing they are good at is visual design, but as we see over and over they are not able to write good stories, design good, challenging combat or implement meaningful choices or RPG mechanics
Wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle

Ahh, classic Bethesda “fan”, half of the video is just Starfield fanfiction

Skyrim but without the world between cities and towns. That’s the best I’ve heard it said so far, and that’s exactly what this game is missing for me.

The best thing Bethesda can do to solve the unsolvable problem is just add a *shitload* of variety. Spend time pumping out a metric ton of possible dungeons, add procedural generation to the loot tables, and allow it to be marked as “not quest” to avoid not finding the right loot in a dungeon. Skyrim has a shitton of generic “cave” dungeons but there’s enough of them that doesn’t matter. I’m sure they could do the same with Starfield.
Add a bunch more monster parts to the wildlife, increase the number of times the radiant-quest main story points you towards planets that *aren’t* fucking desolate empty moons again, give some purpose to exploring the surface where there’s currently zero- maybe plant parts and wildlife parts from breaking/killing them, respectively, could earn you bits that you could use to reinforce your gear like smithing in skyrim. Maybe there could be a size flag and a small enough monster could be made a ‘pet’ with a dedicated “pet room” ship part that they chill in.

I don’t honestly think Starfield is fixable though. There’s no creative talent left and that’s why the plot line focuses on knock-off-dragonborn that they couldn’t even come up with an original title for- “Starborn”? Seriously? It could at least have been Novakiin if they’re going to parody their own previous works so that it still sounds space-y. The main quest sucks, the side quests suck, more than half the game’s features are visibly in a state where they couldn’t figure out how to implement it so they threw in the half-a-feature they had going or axed it entirely but left the gap they created to fit it in anyway.
And honestly I don’t think the engine works. I know they’re really proud of the gamebryo- sorry, the *Creation* engine, totally different- but it was showing its age already with Skyrim a decade-and-a-half ago, and the kinds of things Starfield set out to do are concepts that the engine was just never fit to handle, which is why going from space to planetside is a loading screen despite No Man’s Sky accomplishing exactly that, having been released earlier that Starfield- and that was the godawful buggy original release otherwise not worth mention, not the current massively-shaped-up iteration that recently added Starfield’s only remaining selling point.

Shattered Space sucked. Megaton but blown up. I wanted a real new city.

Thankyou for expressing my problem. I just didn’t care about being starborn. I wanted to manipulate the factions that already existed.

Starfield was so bland I redownloaded Destiny 2 before I could finish it.

Bro, if Starfield competes with BG3 in your mind, youre lost

All they need to do is take all the combat systems, and quest content and just move that to no mans sky done. The largest issue with this game is the constant having to fast travel. you dont really feel like your playing a ship game because all that is skipable and becomes pointless outside like 3 missions. they need it so you can fucking fly from space to ground landing like you can in No mans sky. even if its just a from orbit kind of thing.

The Exploration Problem section in the video reminds me that people say they want space exploration games, but they usually don’t. Right now everyone is really positive about NMS, but the space exploration part is essentially the same with the same “problems” it has always had, which are the same problems Star Field has.

Having quests guide you to hand crafted POI after hand crafted POI is not the same as just wandering off on your own and seeing if you find anything cool. Having to travel to nowhere in particular and enjoy what scenery there happens to be is not flawed because you aren’t travelling through NCP and Quest ladened purposes.

Nothing wrong with a game putting you on rails and showing you little trinkets to keep your mind from wandering off, but it’s not exploration. I think with this being a Bethesda game, people can’t let go of it not being Fallout or Elden Rings. I think Bethesda couldn’t either, hence the mistakes of letting you fast travel at every opportunity and having quests span the whole map (instead of staying on one planet). But, the open worlds with nothing to do other than to see them – that’s just a space exploration game, that’s what you do in all of them.

You just aren’t playing a genre of game you like. You want it to be a different type of game.

15:30 SPOILER

that “random dude” is Keeper Aquilus of the Sanctum Universum

going to new game plus is a lazy and idiotic main story gimmick who thought restarting the story over and over again was a great idea

the game has problems, but it’s still better than all modern games.
You need to install a mod for hacking locks and not explore planets.
These are already two design mistakes. Hacking should not become more difficult, because you honestly already bought a new level of difficulty for locks. And exploring a planet that has absolutely no boundaries is a scam. You can scan it for a week and not be able to find the last animal.
By the way, NMS has exactly this problem. But NMS fans do not remember this. They are simply dishonest when they hate Starfield.
NMS is worse in everything. And it gets boring after an hour. There is absolutely nothing to do there, no one to talk to, no one to fight with, no quests, there is nothing there except procedural monotonous planets. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
Be honest, haters. At least to yourselves.

Starfield is great. Yall are entitled degenerate children

Yapperty yap, starfield is peak

Try the paid WatchTower mod. It’s as big as a DLC and adds a lot of new mechanics that could be mistaken for a DLC. I highly recommend it. Give more credit to the community’s creations. These people are professionals.

Me happily playing No Man Sky: why would i play starfailed?

Dude, don’t you dare say that No Man’s Sky is a good game because it’s not. It doesn’t have loading screens, but it also has nothing to load. The planets are a great void that only serve to mine and discover words from the dominant races of the system. If Starfield’s planets are empty then No Mans Sky are killed. Because no predation happens among animals.

I know when i got told to go see CONSTELLATION, i just said ‘Nope. WTF are you? No, i’m NOT going in a strange starship with you.”
and it ignored me.

It’s real simple.
the game is ART.
I am playing it to find all the things the devs put in.

IF it’s procedurally generated, there’s nothing to discover, just areas where the RNG favours me.
And i don’t care about that.

only a 40 minute starfield video , cmon people ! get back to 4 hours bethesda destruction. pretty please

starfield failed at being an open world space exploration game, and it failed at being a quest RPG game. but it does look cool and has some interesting features, that are interesting enough to be put in another game from the same open world space exploration genre. and that game did the open world space exploration part right. that game also doesn’t focus on the story/quest part very heavily, but still manages to be more captivating than starfields attempt

Friendly reminder that light no fire (from hello games) has been back porting features and other doodads onto no man’s sky

Light no fire is to be the proc gen RPG that you may be looking for and inversely the some RPG elements specifically NPCs will likely be back ported onto no man’s sky

No Man’s Sky did it better in the end.

Starfield fanbois making up all kinds of cope for Starfield been trash

A world in the future without phones and communication, so you can build radiant quest “goto A, talk to B, fetch C and come back”.
Sounds silly and boring.
Already FO4 had so boring main story that I never finished it. I was simply not invested in a son I’ve seen for less than 1 minute.
Edit: There is answer to all your questions about StarField: Emil is a lazy writer.

it’s weird how Starfield is such a bad game and I know it, and I also complain about it a lot yet it’s my 7th most played game on steam with 349 hours (thanks to mods)

This game was made by people so nakedly malicious that they flattened the butts of their female models… That’s all that you need to know.
Consider the job resumes of the models on this game:
Male models, represented appropriately in-game – “Yeah, I was Sam Coe in Bethesda/MS’s latest space exploration AAA!”
Female models, represented with faces that randomly age like a frothy mixture of sperm-milk and butts flatter than the males – “Yeah… I was on a beach, working on these sick abs!”

I never finished the main story in Oblivion or Skyrim, but still loved those games. I’d always get so distracted by everything else you can do. I finished the main story in Starfield, but enjoyed it much less. After watching this video it made me realize I enjoyed it less because of the lack of distractions, they made it too easy to avoid the possibility of being inadvertently distracted.

Guardians of the Galaxy game is severely underrated

I’ve hundreds of hours in Starfield and I don’t even play it as a game anymore. I’d just fly somewhere, walk around, take photos, and fly back home. Maybe survey a planet or two and then log off

It’s relaxing and I love it, but not what I would call my favourite game

They blew it. 7 or 8 years of development down the drain. All that money to make make proc gen slop. Damn shame really. I really wanted it to be good.
I think a lot of us played it for 30 hours or so waiting for it to get good, then all of a sudden realized…. this is it. Then checked out.

I think the game needs cutting down. If it was much shorter and tighter and allowed you to fail more (get rid of essential NPCs mostly) plus with more mutually exclusive choices in general. That way there’d be a reason to want to do NG+, to see the things you couldn’t last time.

Base building is vestigial and can be scrapped entirely, and the ship related skills are boring grinding without adding much so open up ship parts more.

The “massive game with a million places you can go on a thousand planets” direction is the odd one out compared to everything else, and it’s the weakest link, so it makes sense it should go.

My opinion is going to be different to yours because I’m only a Bethesda fan insomuch as I like some of their older games (Daggerfall and Morrowind specifically) and think Skyrim is kind of boring, in a way that anticipated the way Starfield is REALLY boring. And my diagnosis of their issue is the inability to properly commit to a cohesive design philosophy.

I’ve always said that the problem with Starfield isn’t the gameplay as such, but how poorly the mission system is done, the story script, and the bad characters, if all this were corrected in some way, the rest would be quite good.

Take for example the use of the ships that is very limited, if it were more free, similar to, for example, Elite Dangerous, that part of the game would be perfect, but again I return to how poorly the missions are done and how poorly the characters are written, even if they fix the few flaws in the gameplay, if they don’t fix the missions and the poorly written characters we go back to the same thing, to a game with a boring main story and a lot of parts of the gameplay that are entertaining, but that do not connect properly.

I feel like the solution to the exploration problem is just to say “screw it, one solar system”. Starfield maybe should have been one, seamless solar system with planets that have been fully fleshed out.

People are STILL doing postmortems on this game?

DON’T RECOMMEND THIS CHANNEL

JJ Abrams has had such a fucking miserable and deleterious effect on sci-fi storytelling and you can see it on full display here.

I was so looking forward to Starfield…it was so hyped up. I managed to get 100+ hours into it and just stopped playing it. Never finished it. The whole thing was repetitive, the storylines were boring and decisions made no difference to the game play. Nobody ever asked for 1000 planets! I love Mass Effect, I enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda too.

of course it’s gonna be empty and bland when they’re gonna sell the rest of the game as dlc like every other AAA game. companies been pushing past the $60 price for base game, but they have been selling games for more than that for a long time, they put out a stripped down version and save a bunch of content for dlc. Bethesda specifically has done this, the most concrete example I remember is the scrap bot in FO76 being in the advertising of the game before release and only being “added” later as a paid dlc. idk if they even do that anymore though, they probably just put out their polished betas and only develop it further when people complain. if they can get away with selling us less, they will, so I’m done buying their games, and most new games in general. if this was a $40 game I’d have nothing to say, but it’s 70 fuckin dollars and they’re releasing a second DLC for it to add stuff everyone complained about missing. I’m done lol. They have so much damn money and only ask for more while giving us less, so I’m just gonna play their older games, because there’s no reason to wait for a “new” game that pretty much already exists.

doesnt matter though because kids will play anything and parents dont have to play the garbage they buy for them; it’s a lot easier to make games for people who have no expectations or frame of reference

All Howard had to do was look at Elite Dangerous and add ship interiors, story and characters, that’s it. Don’t know what went so horribly wrong.

even without fundamentally making starfield a better game (getting an engine that works, making a systems based game, replacing Todd with a trained guineafowl) they could have brought starfield up to bethesda’s (bad) standard quite easily without compromising the supposed vision. simply make a core group of systems by hand (same way they did oblivion) then have the distant rim (or outer systems, or whatever the heck you want to call it) be randomized _(not_ generated on entry, though, treat it like daggerfall), sprinkle unique content here and there if you want (hell, give every developer their own solar system to play with) but make sure you have a core experience. have survival systems be mandatory and boom you have a setting that can work for exploration. oh and replace Emil with a _feral_ guineafowl.

I gave it about 40 hours of my time. As someone who enjoys Bethesda games and sci-fi, I expected this to be a banger that would keep me hooked for possibly months. It just all felt flat to me and once I accepted that I just wasn’t that into and that it wasn’t likely gonna get better, I just put it down and moved onto other games.

“I like Starfield!”

Opinion invalidated. Even the modders don’t touch this POS.

36:44 this is relevant coz the issues that Starfield has will probably end up in ESVI.

I was so disappointed by the end of starfields story. So the whole purpose of the artifacts is to jump to different universes. And the reason the two factions of starborn are after them is… to stop the other faction? And to go to the next universe to do the same thing over again? Hundreds of times? TO WHAT POINT OR PURPOSE?! I was so irritated by this that I decided to kill both of them because I had no interest in this cycle, and I never went through the unity. If the game had given me the option, I would have destroyed the artifacts just to end it. But of course there’s no option for that.

4:10 aaaah the old accidental whack a guard trying to help and become most wanted

the design decision that broke it, agenda
the melting pot of the world diversity and character creator amorphous design so everything is anything
leads to everything feeling safe and character design largely mid even when trying your best to design something

Tbh, I would have preferred it if the starborn were all just different versions of you, maybe they could have used the character customization system to slightly tweak your character’s appearance and back story for the other starborn.

Wow, thanks for the Claire Obscure spoilers.
Blocked.

Oh mate the ‘Dungeon of the Endless’ music put such a smile on my face.

Here I am 4 AM on a Sunday, laying in bed and unable to sleep.

Here comes just the thing which never fails to put me to sleep, Starfield™. Thanks, mate!

In Elite: Dangerous, all settlements are named after sci-fi authors, astronauts, or scientists. For example Ohm City in LHS 20. You can generate unique settlements and create sub-factions

They built a whole game around running new game + dozens of times, and filled it with so little content you’re bored of the repetition before the first completion.

I can tell you what broke it for me, that I didnt even finish it or rather couldnt because of a mainstory bug. Too many immortal npcs and most are way too ugly. And the 100+ other things already mentioned 100+ times.

You should consider trying the demo for The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. It is a 3d remake of a 2D JRPG. What’s interesting about it is that the current series has a continuous story made of 4 arcs (currently) that tell a cohesive story within the continent the games take place in.

I did really enjoy Starfield but I’m very much someone that will play these things like an SF life sim give half a chance. I Really don’t like the main plot, though.

good video, lightly regurgitated due to how many other ytbers were on the topic of starfield, overall, very pleasant! cyberpunk 2077 was a terrible game, yes 😊

The problem with space exploration games is that space is really really big and if you make it an interstellar exploration game then there‘s an awful lot of nothing between destinations.

So you end up fast travelling between waypoints and at the end have a Fallout or Skyrim map with big holes in it.

I did enjoy Starfield, and I’ll likely be playing it again at some point, but there came a moment on my first playthrough when I was talking to Sam Coe. He was describing the joy of exploration – that feeling you get when you know you’re the first human being to set foot on a new world. And the realisation hit me that this hadn’t happened. Everywhere you go, everything you do, humans have been there/are there/done it already.

By the time I stepped into the Unity, this was still the case. You’re never the first. Ships are always coming in to land on these “unexplored” worlds – worlds with numerous human outposts and structures that have clearly been there for a long time. And on top of that, the pool of pre-made locations the game draws from to populate each world really needs to be at least ten times bigger. The first time or two you encounter a melted glacier are interesting. By the fiftieth there’s just little point in bothering anymore.

That joy of exploration and discovery – something that I’ve always loved about Bethesda RPGs – was largely absent, and that was a real pity.

Love the ship building, though!

the developers themselves described the game as “multiple games in one”, and it’s exactly what it feels like to play. They say it’s more than two, but fundamentally, this game is either: A. an open ended crafting, farming and building sim sandbox game or B. a narrative-focused, quest driven role playing game.
I don’t know if it’s the biggest issue, but it’s definitely noticeable.
It’s true that you could say that same thing about the last three main BGS games, but unlike those three, in Starfield, the two aspects of the game are starkly compartmentalized. You can entirely avoid engaging with either one of them, by design. For some, that’s not even an issue but it’s clear that Bethesda had two very different games in mind when creating Starfield and they managed, for better or for worse, to avoid making them interact, or need each other, at all.

Finished my 3rd BG3 playthrough. Bought Starfield having spent a while researching and discussing mods. Downloaded some point of interest and other interesting mods. Played the game. Smiled playing at some points as it reminded me of Fallout 4, one of my favourite RPGs of all time. Thought it was pretty decent and chill. Played 16hours and then for some reason, it just fell flat. I closed the game and then restarted a fourth and fifth BG3 playthrough.

Starfield just did not grab me. This might sound weird but it felt like i was just playing a “game”, didnt really feel like i was in it. Good gameplay though but just feels plastic, even with all the mods…

200 years of human colonialism with a FTL technology… best we can do is a handful of “cities” and egregiously repetitious points of “interest”… And we’ll do ya one better… our main power dynamic is literally the same exact floaty temple test over and over and over again.

Making it all worth while is the completely soulless and uninspired RNG loot.

I haven’t watched through, but man it makes me so mad they’re so anti cinematic in this game.

The way No Man’s Sky allows you to find interesting stuff on your own and still have your quest nearby despite a near infinite map is by making every quest modular! Everything is everywhere at the same time and is interchangeable. And even though distances are still vast, you have vehicles that can quickly travel between points of interest. Jumping between star systems is instantaneous and so is the portal network, a fast travel system that lets you quickly revisit any discovered location with a portal. So, let’s say you had a quest to deliver a package to a trade station on a planet in the next star system you NEVER BEEN TO, but you decided to do something else, went through a black hole since and now you’re thousands of light years away on the other side of the galaxy, you can actually press a button to reset the quest destination to a location closer to you without having to restart or abandon the quest! This is because there is at least a planet that spawns trade stations in every civilized star system and there are civilized systems all over the galaxy. Finding a transmission tower could be any transmission tower on any planet. Going through a portal could be any portal. Visiting a space station vendor could be on any space station. Another example is when you have to build your destination yourself: Clicking on your base computer could be any one of your base computers. It is true the quest marks a specific location and the task isn’t completed until you click on the precise entity marked, but if you’re far enough away, that target can be reassigned to another instance of that same entity closer by.

30:50 Excuse me but what the fuck?

Honestly this video is so good! Such a good, balanced, critique

9:13 oh, look. You met Ellen DeGenerate

Did not enjoy Starfield, and agree that these shortcomings really are what did it in.

While I think Bethesda’s storylines have always been quite weak (Well, I like Daggerfall and Morrowind’s stories) and I don’t even think Starfield is their worst, but it is shocking how little motive it gives the player to actually participate.

You mentioned that one part would have to compromise, but I think that IS the solution to this game. It tried to be too many things, and a lot of those things were contradictory game design. When I played through the game it very much felt like they avoided a ‘kill your darlings’ approach, and really should’ve just cut one of the features.

I think with enough mods that Starfield could still be “Daggerfall in space.” I really wish Bethesda put more effort into their simulation and world building.

To this day I feel myself wanting to play Starfield every now and then, but it just SUCKS. It is such a huge shame and I won’t forgive Bethesda for that.
This game was supposed to be exactly the kind of game that I could get lost in for hundreds and hundreds of hours, but it turned out the way it did. So much lost potential. What a huge shame.

There are just humans humans humans.. No sentient Alien enemies. Just the same booooring human enemies who almost all fight you the same way.

That is exactly the problem with Starfield. Instead of being about the journey which Skyrim and Fallout are, Starfield is about the destination. It’s just not as much fun in my opinion.

I loved Oblivion, Fallout 3, I liked NV, Skyrim and even 76, Starfield was just such a boring experience. I wanted a Mass Effect by Bethesda and the only thing that stuck from this game the ugly Mentis helmet and Sarah Dying… I made the main faction quests other than the red guys because it was ridiculous. I am already a hero of the UC do to the better main quest of Starfield. The Terror morphs, did the freestar collective and Ryujin. Than I learned new game plus is the endgame… It’s so stupid and just a punishment.

“Sometimes the Emissary has gotten to me first and I never arrive” is such a weird line to put in as a throwaway, which would have some pretty deep implications that never seem to be even considered. So the player character is killed in every universe and just gets reset in the next one like nothing happened, but the Starborn can get killed in the current universe but still show up in the next one, memories of the current one entirely intact, despite never having reached nor passed through the Unity in it? Why even seek out the Unity at all if they can apparently just kill themselves to make it to the next universe? But that’s not something the player character can experience themselves: you as a player can only reset your character to a new game after passing through the Unity.

For being the core of the entire plot, surprisingly little thought seems to have gone into it. Even beyond the “who”, “why”, and “how” questions that they pretty openly leave unanswered, they can’t even seem to present a basic “what” is happening.

Have your ship base, then have a mothership type of one you can move from special constructed pad to pad that works like CAMPs. finally a self portable base we can set up for mining, crafting, adventuring.
Travel as a choice – you fast travel for speed but randoms give better cash (Main quests give better exp) and have random interesting things and random quests to find. Vehicle you get +speed -cant scant for resources while driving you do see POI markers on the mini map. Ship flight you can with mods scan while traveling and move very quickly – wi chance of atmospheric events and attacks..

You’re completely stumped how to make them fit together? They literally just needed to add more content to the procedural generation.. More building layouts, procedural quests and mini zones.. The whole game is just lazy bullshit, and so many precedurally generated games manage to make their games actually interesting

@1:27 sure pal 😂

I would approach the exploration problem issue by having AI Made quests and encounters with modular buildings that the AI can use to make more.
The fix has to be equally as infinite as the possible exploration otherwise it won’t work.

15:33 idk why but the unity gives me The 100 Season 7 vibes 💀

Starfield can be fixed by going back in time to 2017 and telling bethesda, NO!

I get that they were going for an introspective, 2001-style tone, but I think not having aliens was a mistake. It was a missed opportunity of worldbuilding when the game could have given us new cultures to explore that could help us re-examine humanity as a whole by comparison and contrast. Having space cowboys and starship troopers and cartoon pirates is the all-time creative nadir of this studio in fleshing out a setting imo, defaulting to the most basic archetypes in a cynical attempt to draw in as large an audience as possible. Starfield is Oblivion taken to an extreme in this regard and I really don’t respect it at all. What’s worse as that the cowboys were clearly a pivot from a much more unique and interesting take on the faction when you go back to the earlier worldbuilding promo videos they put out.

I think Oblivion’s success really poisoned Todd’s perception of the audience and proved that selling the most basic, wonderbread, unchallenging Fantasy™️, Post-Apocalypse™️, and Science Fiction™️ games that lean on genre convention and iconic shorthand in favor of more thoughtful, subversive, or at least unique aesthetics is a winning strategy. Best to not alientate players who might be intimidated by something they’ve never seen before. Never mind that Morrowind saved the company and is constantly lauded as our best game!

Anyway, having aliens and a multicultural galactic community necessarily means that exploration is more fruitful and varied as you can come across so many more kinds of characters, weapons, ships, architecture, art, and POIs. The Grand Space RPG could have been anything, yet they settled for Starfield. I’m not even against the low-scifi, humans-only world. They just failed miserably to make it interesting.

My personal main issue with Starfield was absolutely the lore. I was enjoying the core gameplay loop enough. Obviously it has major flaws but I liked it enough. But after I realized that all the factions were hollow, the history of the setting made no sense, and the main quest is just a race to reset your progress, I was done.

THANK YOU for crediting the song composers, not enough youtubers do this

Base building pisses me off. I wanted ONE base on ONE planetoid Charon. I get to Charon go to make my base and a message pops up “sorry bud, you gotta go build 40 useless bases for NO reason, other than the grind, first.” Fuck starfield I was over level 100 when I discovered this so each level and perk is a days grind at least. I turned the game off. Also shattered space is a joke of a dlc

Starfield is proof of concept at best. It needed at least 5 more years.

Starfield doesn’t exist. What you’ve all been playing is Starfield MOD for Fallout 4…. Hear me out on this…
Starfield, as defined, cannot be fully implemented on Bethesda’s current version of the Gamebryo Engine; it is fundamentally limited by it’s concept of Cells. The very nature of their Engine makes a proper implementation of what Starfield should look like, impossible.
Bethesda will not modernise, they are too far into the sunk cost fallacy of their engine. They will probably die along with the rest of the dinosaurs in the industry. Too late, don’t care anymore. This isn’t about “letting them cook”; they aren’t qualified to boil an egg.

if you go to the steam forums, the same 10 people are there everyday telling the rest that we’re stupid and starfield is a masterpiece, it is very interesting.

For ke personally the biggest downside is gun aesthetics. It’s too cursed to even care about, and you can’t play it without shooting.

Playing as a jaded time traveler trying a bunch of different outcomes to quests sounds great, it’s just a shame I have to play Starfield to try it.

I don’t think this is a game that could ever be fixed. It would need to be recreated from the ground up. The writing for Skyrim was pretty bad too, but the exploration, lore (written by people who mostly don’t work there anymore), and level design have always brought me back. I have been trying to wrap my head around what the hell Bethesda was trying to accomplish with this game. It’s just a mash-up of random systems that don’t work well together: terrible quests, lore, writing, exploration; seriously, what the hell were they thinking?

The shops have security cameras and warning signs posted. If the player commits a theft under concealment nothing happens. In Skyrim the shop keep would send hitmen after the player, even though they have no cameras.

I can’t get over how bad those facial animations look, expecially how they keep raising their eyebrows like they’re trying to tell you something in morse code. YES BETHESDA, I can see that NPC’s forehead gets wrinkled every time they raise their eyebrows, you don’t need to keep showing me this new feature.

I hate the unoriginal name: Starborn. Like…so…Soace Dragonborn…NO ONE looked at this similar naming convention and said: “uh…?”

Background music is a little loud but great video!

I have watched a dozen or so hours of Starfield criticism videos in the background while I work, but this is the first one which made me realize the ideas behind Starfield are really good. These are concepts I would absolutely love to play through. It’s just the uninspired, disconnected and lackluster implementation of all these ideas and systems that killed it for me.

There should have been a rival faction to constellation. They all suck I didn’t want to hang with them

Your tastes are sheeeettt. Why would I listen to you?

Again, clearly missing the point… UC playthrough, no crime, no taking ships… All survey missions, 3rd ng+ @ 80 days No 1st Anomaly… Until Every System Explored. This is a no Creation playthrough… I have a modded playthrough as well… Note: The story is not the glue, not here, not Skyrim, Fallout… But in Starfield not playing the story truly works! Newbies play the story, and move on. I do ONLY when I must to open more content, or to ng+ out… Next ng+ Run: Imagine not getting the quest markers after 1st temple… Just finding them… never visiting the Eye after 1st temple. Scans reveal them… now that is exploration! Cannot Survey before starting search… Make Starfield YOURS! Or just critique and miss out.

Starfield should never have made it past the concept stage. ‘Fallout in space’ was such a tantalising idea but was never going to work for all the reasons outlined in this excellent video.

Already the beginning of the main plot was so boring, i couldn‘t force myself to continue. Landed on two planets or so, went through one really large procedural generated dungeon/lab an that‘s it. i think i quit after 3 hours or so. Most boring Bethesda game ever.
I enjoyed Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim a lot.

I played 30 mins of this game the standard you are the chosen one the horrible childish writing of dialogue and the uninteresting look of the game had me walk away so fast glad that it was a gamepass game and I didn’t shell out money for it

Not played Starfield, and never will, but watching out of curiosity – that whole “the creators are the creators, you may meet them one day” is the most insufferably smug meta narrative I’ve ever seen. It’s so transparently self-referential I can’t stand it, just the laziest non-answer. You’re Starborn because you’re the player character in a universe created by Bethesda. Awful stuff.

I am not sure that Betheshda can ever be truly great again as long as Todd oversees the game development. It seems to me that Todd thinks that his development decisions are somehow great and that some players just dont understand how brilliant they actually are. They should have ditched their old engine years ago but for the sake of saving on costs in training the devs to use the new engine they have continued kinda fixing the old engine which clearly isnt up to the task anymore. This is especially visible in starfield with the mostly nonmoving talking npcs and the unnecessary multiple loading screens between some places in the game. Cant remember the name of one city but i think i saw at least 3 loading screens when moving between the different sections of that particular city.

Starfield perfectly describes the saying: “Ocean wide, a puddle deep”. The game that was touted as the Magnum Opus of Todd Howard didn’t push the industry in any way. It became the symbol of corporate stagnation and creative bankruptcy in gaming industry. Technically it was the same old janky a** game as the previous entries just with a weird new coat of paint with sh**ty optimization, narratively it was nothing special and gameplay wise it was just boring to play and to look at being played. It was “NASApunk” in aesthetics only, nothing came even close to realistic astronautics. Lamest game in Bethesda’s lineup, imo

The beginning of the game is a great introduction to an extremely boring and limited game lmao I hate that mining intro it never made any sense to me why or how we got there some backgrounds just make it not make any sense at all

I have about 200 hrs in game and NG+ a couple times. Played every single story line and faction quest. I stopped playing due to all the things you laid out in the video.

Baldurs gate 3 is MASSIVELY overrated. After playing it i dont know how it got so much praise. You are locked into the 1 story, theres very little exploring, the maps are tiny, the “roleplaying” is lackluster and sometimes nonexistent. And what little there is, is only surface deep. The player interactions boil down to “do you want to have seggs with this character or no?”
Its shallow, and pretends to be more grandiose than it really is. Having played baldurs gate 1 and 2 when i was younger, i had expected more. Knowing now it was done by the company who made the atrocious divinity 2 game, i should have stayed away. Solasta is a crappy turned based rpg, but even that was a better game with better mechanics and world to travel.

I find it very hard to believe this was the game Todd Howard dreamed off all those years ago.

The biggest thing I hated about starfield and the unity / new game plus.. was how nothing seemed to change the story / outcomes of quests.. Like the biggest let down for me personally was the UC vanguard quests, how you learn about the heat leaches. but you can’t do / say anything that changes anything… or the amount of times I had a new game plus dialogue option but it never changed the out come at all.. and all the times people said new game plus can change the story /outcomes of quests.. Another thing I think would of been really cool with new game plus.. I personally knew the starborn were going to be human. even people we knew.. it just seemed / felt way to predictable and easy.. But what if by say new game 3 or 4 .. it wasn’t starborn but a brand new type of life.. what if the more times you went through the unity, the more powerful you became and you started gaining the attention of far more powerful / intelligent species.. maybe even eventually gaining the attention of the creators.. Some other things that never made sense to me.. in new game plus .. the worlds never change / systems never change.. yet your character acts like they no idea.. like let us fast travel anywhere we have been in the previous universe.. or maybe switch up the worlds / systems .. so things aren’t where they were before. i could go on for ages about things they could of done.. I just wish new game plus actually mattered.. and actually let you change the story / quests / world

32:55 This is actually a very very good suggestion. It’s engaging, it’s cost-effective.

Something about players enjoying Skyrim or Fallout significantly more than Starfield is that Starfield doesn’t offer a single highly detailed open world, but instead hundreds of large scale dungeons. This is woefully irredeemable especially for players who previously enjoyed Fallout 4’s settlement system.
In Fallout 4, you naturally feel encouraged to create content because everything you create is within a single map, so what you create directly impact the game’s world. You stumble across a new build area that is currently occupied by raiders? Kill them all and build your outpost so that you can have backup and the poor wastelanders can have some protections in the future. But in Starfield, the map is divided into hundreds of pieces completed separated from one another. What you build stays strictly there and will not have any impact on anywhere else.

Don’t know why but i have seen hours of starfield failing and have like 1 hour of plaiying it 😂😂😂

I did like building & decorating the ships & bases, that was the best part of the game, the other parts not so much. I ended up quitting the story part way through and playing it more a like space mining/transport simulator.

To try and answer the question of content within a 1000-planet space: I’d take the concept, as you said, of focusing all the hand-crafted elements to a tighter solar-system/set of solar-systems – and emphasise that expansion outwards is very much still developing and thus very empty. Add in the survival elements that make travelling outwards based in meaningful decisions (ie. fuel/armour needed to reach certain distances) and this in turn helps progression into later stages of the game – while still having meaningful content within that journey. Starting NG+ means that now you can go farther quicker, easier, and engage with more of the space-colonising efforts. You kind of get to have your cake and eat it too.
Although, overall, I think 1000 planets was just never going to work. At that point it has to be for the emptiness of it yet there is random content EVERYWHERE so the big empty universe feels very much travelled in lol

Fair assessment. I could have forgiven most of this daft game’s shortcomings tbh. What I couldn’t get past was the relentless chains of load screens. All destination and no journey.

I’ve been playing a lot of Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader and despite having the same UI-based space exploration system as Starfield, it feels like actually exploring because it does one thing: It makes you scan planets to reveal unique POIs, and these POIs are handcrafted and range from a lure made from distress beacons, abandoned bunkers, a dark pit and a frozen hive city, and much more.

Almost every system in Starfield is built like a minimum viable product. They all work well enough but stop frustratingly short of their potential. Outposts, ship building and exploration start out fun but at a certain point it becomes evident there’s no end goal. If some mechanic doesn’t appeal on a personal level you’re left with nothing because there’s no deeper complexity to uncover and they don’t enhance any other aspect of the game.

The other huge problem is that the multiverse plot is incompatible every other aspect of the game. The UC, Freestar, Va’ruun, and Crimson Fleet are all irrelevant in the face of infinite universes. Worse still, stepping through Unity erases everything you’ve built. All because of some lame meta rationale for New Game+.

If the multiverse was Bethesda’s big idea then the entire game should have revolved around that. Every faction should be gunning for artifacts and the universe hopping should be integral to the game. Each one should have been distinct and ended with the one where the creators live.

Personally, I would have ditched the multiverse, which I think is lame, and focused on the tension between factions and humanity’s exploration deeper into uncharted space. That backdrop would have been more interesting and a much better fit for the space sim aspect that keeps many of us coming back.

Oh, and don’t get me started on gear. Upgrades are limited to adding attachments. Some spacesuits are inexplicably capped at lower tiers. The pure RNG that pervades drops, the worst of all being Astra trading. There’s nothing like getting a Hard Target with Bashing, One Inch Punch or Space Adept.

Bethesda’s problem is that they have no visionary talent left. All the people who made their prior games special have been leaving since Morrowind with the last having departed after Skyrim. There’s nobody left at the studio who can give their games that special magic. They’ve just been running off the fumes and goodwill of their prior successes. But with FO76 and Starfield being so awful, players are now waking up.

I don’t see how Shattered Space learned any lessons or improved on the base game. The side quests will have different conclusions but these have little or no branching effect on the story or character interactions. Everyone just accepts that you’re the snake prophet or whatever, even if you mock the idea or express no interest in it. It’s like the base game; you arrive, you’re the chosen one. Bethesda needs to come up with something new. Emil just isn’t a good writer. You’d think a race of zealots who worship a space snake might spice up the dialogue or characters but they’re as bland and orderly as everyone else in Starfield. It’s almost an accomplishment to have so many characters and so much dialogue yet not one memorable character or interaction.

ES6 will be the same. You’ll be the chosen one, you’ll be able to join/lead every faction, combat will still be stuck in the 2000s. Melee and stealth in Starfield has gone backwards, there was little weapon innovation, AI is still brainless, NPCs have the memory of a fish – there’s nothing in Starfield that makes me optimistic about ES6. It seems like they won’t let go of Emil or anyone else because they’re long time friends and the game will sell regardless. Success made them apathetic and insular. They should feel embarrassed by BG3 and Cyberpunk but they won’t be. Starfield wasn’t enough of a dud for them to rethink their process.

The writing on Fallout4 was so subpar, but halfway through playing Starfield I realized Bethesdas decline right in front of me

Starfield is a decent game it just isn’t set up for us to pour our time into like fallout or Skyrim. I start yawning playing Starfield it looks so good but is sooo bland

Thank GOD for No Man’s Sky’s newest Voyager update because now I never have to go back to Starfield ever again

It’s crazy to me how 9th gen console game developers can’t figure out a way to create an ommersive space travel game with interplanetary travel.. Literally jumping in your ship, starting ignition, flying upwards and out of the planets atmosphere into the dark void of space, tap into warp-speed, arrive at destination, fly through planets atmosphere and land ship with No loading screen.

Haven: Call of the King, on PS2 did it.

I wanna clap alien cheeks in a space travel rpg ffs.
Even an Isekai JRPG.

Just an idea for revamping Starfield to be better (as you asked for suggestions at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m15yXTZqfog&t=1154s). Since BGS seems so keen on the whole “reset the universe” mechanic, IMHO they should’ve gone whole hog and just built the game starting from the ground up around this.

I would have dropped the “New Game Plus” moniker and made that an integral part of the game, but instead of jumping to a different universe, there’s only one universe but the Unity changes how it appears each time. Also, I would have separated the finding the artifacts from the Unity- you don’t find the Unity, the Unity pulls you to it with you having no choice.

So you’d start in a basic reality not too different from ours. You can only explore one city and the surrounding countryside like Fallout 4 (but a living one and not a dystopian hellscape ruin, obviously) and do not have access to space travel. The game at first seems to involve mostly doing stuff in the city like meeting characters and doing basic quests while slowly leveling skills like in Skyrim. And then abruptly during a quest the Unity appears translucently “clipping” INTO THE CITY not noticeable by any NPCs and blasts you with Fus Ro Dah knocking you back. You do more basic quests for awhile and then abruptly the color in the environment fades to grayscale and you are transported to the Unity and pulled into it kicking and screaming!

When you reawaken (not a New Game Plus mode), you find yourself where you started the game originally, but the world has random changes (friendly characters are hostile, hostile characters are friendly, some characters disappear or are transmogrified, etc.). Also, mysteriously you have a new super ability in the same vein as Fus Ro Dah and notice that the skills you leveled significantly previously, though reset to level 1, now level several times faster. At first, you do some more basic quests getting to know this new world until suddenly you notice a rocket shooting up into the sky from a distance which was not there before. You have the option to ignore it and continue doing what you did in the previous world in which case you will be again dragged into the Unity after awhile and reappear in a new world also randomized with possibly a different super ability and different skills that level faster. (You don’t get to keep the previous super ability.)

If you decide to investigate the rocket launch, you can start a quest to build a settlement (ACTUALLY POPULATED BY SETTLERS) on a nearby destination planet. After building the settlement, the Unity pulls you to it again and you start again in a new world…. But in this world the settlement you established has been in existence for a long time (and can be easily traveled to) and is no longer affiliated with you! You have the option to build more settlements (not using your own spaceship) or do more quests (and should be starting to tease out how the Unity decides which abilities to give you and which skills to focus on leveling as each reset increases skill leveling speed by several times but also decreases skill leveling speed for skills not leveled in the prior world).

As soon as you build a predetermined number of settlements, the next reset will introduce hyperspace travel between different solar systems. At first, you can only “fast travel” between these systems while doing new quests, meeting new (and different versions of the same) NPCs (with alien races being introduced), and building more settlements (that remain in successor worlds but are no longer affiliated to you), until a further reset introduces a quest to start a career as an explorer. You then have access to a spaceship which you can customize (and which customizations are preserved in some manner during resets).

Only after you have access to the spaceship would I introduce an explanation for why you have been resetting. You have a mysterious quest to an unknown location where you meet your first Starborn who describes what being a Starborn is and explains the Unity. They also describe having seen a ghastly horrific future where your (and their) corner of the galaxy is invaded by an unstoppable bloodthirsty evil, and then you black out. When you wake up, you think it is a normal reset, but are violently shaken to find that evil ON YOUR DOORSTEP and watch every NPC you met (including companions) die screaming

After being killed by the evil, you now realize that the Unity has made you a Starborn to help prevent that fate (or maybe you decide to help the evil triumph?). The rest of the game will be “building” a universe to either destroy or assist the evil. The game ultimately ends after this, but if you play the evil ending only an ending cutscene plays where you and everyone else are subjugated to serve as minions as the evil runs riot across the universe. If you play a good character and help destroy the evil though, the Unity rewards you with a supreme gift! You can now go back to ANY of the prior worlds AT WILL and continue playing in them to see how things play out differently!

Imagine the possibilities:
*A “backrooms” universe where it seems like everyone just vanished prior to you awakening
*A universe where your selected starting species did not evolve beyond living in huts and all NPCs talk as Fallout 3 or NV characters with a SPECIAL intelligence stat of 1
*Literally entering the Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Fallout 4, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, etc. universes and interacting with familiar NPCs as a member of a spacefaring race with futuristic (but reasonable) technology that did not fall to self-inflicted destruction
*A universe where one or more familiar alien species no longer exist and when you travel to their homeworlds you find that they never evolved beyond living in huts

A great review of game that could be made much much better if some time and creativity were put into it.

Bethesda needs😊 to take note of reviews like this, but it seems they never do.

A way to incorporate outpost building into normal gameplay would be to add a fuel system to the ships. Outposts would act as … outposts … where you fill your fuel tank so you can go into deeper (more hostile) space that’s further from settled systems. If you run out of fuel, you have to send an emergency signal out to the Fuel Rats who charge you a premium on fuel prices to refuel you in space.
Money is so plentiful that it would be a slap on the wrist and wouldn’t stop gameplay like Todd Howard was worried about.

this dude sure likes playing girls in games

I enjoyed Starfield but acknowledge its many flaws. One of my personal big issues is planet navigation on the galaxy map is near incomprehensible. Like you pointed out, its near impossible to figure out or remember which plant is important (and not procedurally generated) without a quest attached to the planet.

Thats where Bethesda’s ambitions hurt them. Because they were so focused on making thousands of random planets, it made navigating important ones a chore. Thats something they desperately need to address in a patch or something. Especially if they plan to open the game to a new audience on PS5.

I wish they had just made a couple hand crafted planets and left the procedural generation to caves or dungeons on those planets. Or add an filter to remove the random planets so i can easily see which ones are main hubs.

Did you just say settlement building? In Star Field? And like fallout and Skyrim? Whaaaaaat? 🤣

You also make a fantastic point when you question the motivation for going to the unity and the fact that you cannot refuse or just hand over the artefacts and tell constellation to get lost. I found that incredibly frustrating, especially because similar things happen in other quests in this annoying game.

I have 2 main issue with Starfield: the economy, the murder hobo aspect, and level based ships.

Stealing or conquering a ship, and only getting paid 3000 credits for it is ridiculous. I get more for some guns. The prices of everything are just silly. The reason for this is obvious, every player is a murder hobo, and the game sets that up.

Got a quest to “get rid” of a spacer? No EM weapons, just kill him and his crew of 30 people and you got paid about 100 credits per person. Now you have also have 30 weapons to sell, so they better not sell for a lot. Navy Seals don’t go into a place and kill 30 people multiple times a day, day after day. Bill the Kid only killed 21 men total. I get that body count before I finish my coffee. How about using EM weapons and bringing him back to justice for 9000 instead of 3000 dead?

Lastly, level based ship items is just stupid. By level 30, I can have nearly every tech skill, by 20, all the ones I want, but I can’t buy the engines I want. This is nothing but stretching the taffy out to make the game last a little longer. Instead what happens is that players just leave. I’m not going to grind out 30 levels, I’m going to go play Space Engineers or DOTA.

I like the game. I have had fun, and love many aspects of it, but as you said, it feels small, like their vision shrunk from what it started out as.

Bethesda writing sucks balls.

Good video! As a fallout player, I enjoyed the first 20 hours of SF with the ambience, music and shipbuilder, I wasn’t too bothered by the loading screens at first, it felt exciting… But when the quests ‘get going’ it’s just so drab, boring and sometimes plain frustrating. Stories make no sense, boring and inconsequential, boring characters, no satisfying conclusion, repetitive, and repeated sites to explore. I’ve since bought Skyrim and I’m actually having way more fun!

34:25 – 2 points!

You talking about the missed opportunity of the Unity really made me think. There are so many lore diversion points that could so easily be turned into Unity differences. Maybe there is one where war mechs weren’t banned. Or one where the UC lost the war against Akila, now members of thay faction are part of the pirate questline and Akila is the faction counter to them in that storyline. Simple things like that, that alreasy present themselves as questions the player would have of what an alternate universe (or timeline) within the games existing content and lore might look like.

If I hadn’t played No Mans Sky for hundreds of hours before this game, i probably would have loved it…. well.. liked it (the writing wasn’t great by bethesda standards). But any time i played it, I just wished i was flying around in my ship in NMS, jumping through black holes, landing wherever I wanted and running or driving or flying wherever i wanted on that planet, instead of just loading screens and fast travel. The little landing and take off animations just made me sad every time because it was just animation. After doing the main quest I only booted up this game to build ships sometimes. But now NMS has that and did it better. I just base jumped from orbit from my ship that I built myself down to a planet with not a single loading screen and no stuttering. And i randomly landed on trade outpost. Had no idea what was below me.

Imagine playing Starfield in 2025.

Crimson Fleet, not Crimson Dawn. You’ve clearly not played this game much.

I personally love this game and actually miss living in that world when I’m not playing. A lot of the criticism is just personal preference imo. I could name plenty of problems with Skyrim that bug me much more. Haters should just play other games and stop pretending the ones they happen to enjoy are fundamentally superior.

My solution to the exploration would be to overhaul space exploration and treat that as the open world to explore and planets just as “dungeon hubs” to land almost next to the dungeon, fight, get loot and back on the ship, no running around empty planets. This requires a change on how space exploration works, since we know there are engine limitations we could implement the mass effect style of space movement where you can see your ship on a star system map move around with button click, at any point you could zoom in and move around your ship, treating that time as moving through hyper space and having a scanner range around your ship that would pick up random events happening in your flight path that you could choose to engage or ignore. Once engaging with a target or planet it would load in the fish bowl either above the planet or what ever asteroid, space station, pirate raid or what ever where you would “exit” hyperspace and once again engage in first person.

Again as for planets you would fly close to one scan it from orbit, see what events and locations are generated and then choose to pick one and land next to it to engage with the content. No more running around.

25:55 – My immediate thought on this was “What if using The Unity destroyed the universe that you use it in? Everyone who is at The Unity when it is used is catapulted to a new universe. Everyone else in the entire universe is instantly wiped from existence. At least unless you activate certain safeguards first and the Starborn have no interest in wasting time doing that, since it slows down getting to the Unity. And if you get there too late you are wiped from existence, after all.” That would give it some serious stakes if they got there before you.

BGS are one of the few developers that can take the wonder and fun out of space travel and they really managed it

In all honesty BGS screwed the pooch real bad by going the procgen route. I would’ve kept it all within our solar system, made maybe 3-4 open world planet maps, maybe one of them as a huge space station. All the planets would’ve been filled out a lot more with handmade dungeons and quest lines. Definitely would not have gone with the dragonbo- er, starborn hook. No magic powers, maybe some cool alien tech from ancient spacefaring civs or something. Cool space suits or weapons, maybe even cyberpunk style implants and prosthetics that change gameplay. No chosen one BS. Would’ve made the party members more interesting, not all just different shades of lawful good or lawful neutral. Would’ve given some actual answers instead of just “lol NG+ idk” that we got.

10:40 – It is an inherently difficult problem, but I do have a thought on how to at least mitigate it. Two thoughts, actually. Every planet should have an “anomaly.” Which is something about the planet which affects the entire planet and has some kind of central mystery attached to it. Not one which is written in great detail, so that you can still have a great many, but one that allows a degree of emergent storytelling.

For example, let’s say you land on a planet and suddenly your compass is going haywire. You have no idea why. You could just go on and go to the point of interest you want and ignore this, or you could go explore the planet for the solution. Maybe as you’re exploring you also find resources, scan creatures, come across those points of interest, etc. And then eventually in one of the caves on the planet, that just looks like a random cave, you notice a light coming from inside. And you go in and you say a strange, rotating device there. Next to it lies a rock in which something crudely carved. You can try to figure it out yourself, or send it off to constellation. It turns out to be a distress beacon by an uknown person that you don’t even know was human. Could be a space raider, could’ve been an early colonist, could’ve been a stranded veteran, who knows? Maybe in the future some anomalies would tie back to this. Allowing the mystery to be extended across several patterns.

The point is it gives you a reason to explore even a desolate planet because this anomaly could be anywhere. The biggest risk of exploring an entire section of a planet would be that it’s a needle in a haystack and that finding it might be impossible and demotivating if it took too long. But, that’s why you have the scanning and harvesting of resources. Because then even if you go into a cave and find no anomly there, hey, you still got 5000 marble or whatever, to build your space base. There could also be further subtle hints towards the anomaly such as your compass getting more and more crazy as you get closer (but nobody would tell you, you’d have to just notice that).

And every planet would have something like this. Very simple stuff writing-wise so that you don’t have to write entire questlines for 1.000 planets. But interesting enough that it might encourage exploration.

Then the second thing that I think was absolutely necessary was in-depth survival mechanics. Make travelling non-colonized planets dangerous and make your bases make it less dangerous.

Planets without an atmosphere, you have to manage oxygen. Planets close to their sun? You have to cross the distance you need during the night because when it becomes day you must either be gone or you better have a place to hide. This place to hide, btw, could be a random cave or a base or a point of interest, again encouraging you to explore while you’re stuck there anyway (or wait if there’s nothing there).

I think if “Starfield” implemented those basic changes, anomalies and in-depth, planet-dependent survival mechanics that are mitigated by base building, it would’ve made this problem less severe.

The way to solve the problem is to not try and make an “everything” game but focus on one thing to do well. There’s a reason racing games aren’t also military shooters.
Starfield managed to completely avoid anything Bethesda is good in, namely emergent exploration in an interesting world and laser focus on things they’re terrible at, a compelling main quest, interesting NPCs and meaningful choices. Starfield is the essence of what Bethesda should avoid.
Not to mention the whole game is designed for you to go through the unity an reroll the universe multiple times. But this destroys your outposts. Bethesda had the perfect setup of restarting universes but did nothing with it. They could have many exclusive and terrible choices and perma death NPCs because you can just restart. But they did not. restarting universes is meaningless because basically nothing changes.

Lol, the ending. Yes I play Star Wars genesis over starfield base game.

I have 1000s of hours in Fallout 4 and I’m still playing thanks to mods. Tried to build a base in SF and it broke like 100 times until I just gave up. I had 80 hours in SF and still had not completed the main quest, that’s how slow I was going, but after my 5th exact same temple puzzle and all the other “features” I uninstalled and have never looked back.

The biggest problem with Starfield is the opportunity cost of playing a half-finished mid-tier game, when you could be playing something else that does one of the things shoe-horned into Starfield so very much better (and in some cases released a decade earlier). Why hang about in Neon when I could be in Night City? Why use a half-arsed base building mechanic when I could play Satisfactory? Why engage with a pathetic story, world building, bad writing, half-baked personality-free “companions” and inconsequential choices when I could be Geralt of Rivia, or V, Commander Shepard, even JC Denton? Why play with pathetic procedural generation when I coud play Nethack (where you can meet your previous selves)? “Groundhog-Day-in-Space” is so uninspired and unengaging. It feels like a bunch of siloed dev teams driven by a commitee, not devs making a game they’d like to play (or even ever played a non-BGS game themselves).

I wish I could get back the 300+ hours I wasted on this to reach NG+ with no payoff. At least I never paid for it – it was on a housemates live account.

Starfield is a fundamentally broken experience from top to bottom.

Everything else that can go wrong did go wrong:
– Dialogue is atrocious and usually says with ten sentences what could have been said in one or contradicts a sentence uttered in the same conversation.
– Skill progression is an absolute joke. Fundamental game mechanics (like stealth) are locked away behind arbitrary challenges.
– Enemy AI is laughable and incompetent. This applies to both ground and space battles.
– Weapon design is nonsensical. Different weapons take the same amount, all of the weapons feel like toys, there is no viscerality to any of them.
– Cities feel empty. NPC wander on predefined paths are immediately apparent.
– Environmental storytelling is completely broken. E.g. a supposedly poor outpost built on a desert planet with a ton of wood.
– Enemy scaling. What is the point of leveling up when the entire world levels up with you?
– Loading screens. So. Many. Pointless. Loading screens.
– The main quest is an insult to intelligence in general. No Man’s Sky had a more consistent and meaningful main quest. At launch.
– The persuasion “mechanic” is an insult to gaming in general.
– Procedural generation is fine when it is used with purpose. Having a ton of soulless planets that provide just resources is a waste of development and player time. Even Mass Effect 1 beats Starfield in meaningful exploration on non-main planets through various side quests that expand the lore. That’s just sad.

The doodads and the mission stolen from Titanfall 2 is cool though.

🧡💛🧡

I hated how the monoliths had never been discovered. Gigantic ‘alien’ structures that no one had bothered to explore or try to enter?
And once youd enter one, your companion didn’t mention anything about how amazing it was inside the structure or anything at all.

You make good content and you put solid effort into this analysis but I don’t get it…Not that I don’t get why Starfield is flawed, I understand why it’s flawed. I mean, there’s a YouTube video every day telling me it’s flawed. All I have to do is refresh my feed and I’ll see a new suggestion about how Starfield is broken. Seriously, there must be thousands of videos by now, maybe tens of thousands of videos. Here’s the thing though, Starfield is not a bad game. Flawed? Yes! Is it bad? No, not really. It’s just “ok” and the tragedy is that we expected more from Bethesda. The real mystery behind Starfield, the real story that no other YouTuber has done or dived into is how did this game garner this much negative feedback? A game that is not bad and is just “ok” or “meh”. Look at the gaming cultural phenomena that has happened around this game, how everyone, including their 90 year old grandmother has made a “STARFIELD BAD!” youtube video. Seriously, there are a million Starfield=bad videos, it’s like the golden goose for gaming Youtubers. Again, I’m not arguing that Starfield is good, it’s just plain ok, like eating a slice of bread without toasting and without butter. It’s meh. But the far more interesting story, is why this game became such a dog pile phenomena. The psychology behind that, the cultural trends, gamers expectations etc. Basically, a meta analysis of why there is so much Starfield analysis.

Starfield is very confusing game. I managed to play it over, chose the “bad guy Hunter” approach in the end and played it for almost 150 hours. So there’s clearly something right, but it feels so unfinished, janky and abbreviated. All the generated planets are absolute nonsense, just a number of empty space to shock with its number.
But the worst for me was the lack of any animation, even small in-game movie, anything remotely close to a cinematic experience when something exciting or important happens. Like you bring the second artifact in the lobby and it just falls out of your inventory. Like a thrown potato. Or your engagement with your partner is just another conversation like any other. Nothing exciting, just a plain text and that’s it. Not even holding hands, kiss, hug…something.
Starfield would be a good game in 2015 (probably), but not today. The game standard is somewhere else. And i am very disappointed, coz i liked some of the exploration, the space itself, gunfights and i loved the spaceship interior design very very much. And design choices overall. But the writing, almost anything about main storyline, the incredibly unfulfilled story about our own Earth, no animations, no deeper stuff in general…man, i want to love it, but i can’t.

Thanks for great vid!

EDIT: damn, i already forgot all the LOADINGS over and over and over 😅

starfield suuuuuuuuuucks.

One of the first quests I got was for build an outpost in order to deliver cargo to a civilian outpost, I got that quest right after completing my 1st quest which was helping a LIST group clear out enemies where they were trying to build an outpost of their own. It made it clear to me, but maybe you didnt notice or get that quest, the game is so huge Im sure everyone has a different beginning lol. I love the game by the way, have over 2000 hours in it, I played a few hundred hours vanilla before modding, vanilla is excellent, but modding means we can customize a lot, which I love doing.

I have over 2000hrs in Starfield and I have a negative review of the game on Steam – which says a lot about Starfield and I. The exploration system does work if you invest time in the mining and fabrication aspect of outposts. I built the maximum number of outposts (22) and use them to generate XP and credits. The problem was that it breaks the functionality of game economy due to vendor limitations (without mods). What makes leaving 50 million credits, 22 outposts and 10 overpower ships behind for NG+ was Mods. Arriving in a new Universe to discover the Watchtower has set up camp for example. New universe, new ship parts, new weapons, new quest content.

The irony is that Mass Effect Andromeda attempted to implement a system similar to that in Starfield, and realized it was too abmitious, there was too much feature creep, procedural generation couldn’t compete with handrcrafted worlds–so years into production, they had to scrap the whole thing, and then built several unremarkable worlds with their remaining time and finished assets. The failure of Andromeda was well documented, as was its production nightmares, and yet Bethesda didn’t get the memo.

My biggest frustration is I didn’t like Constellation, I hated all of them but was stuck with their faction. If I could have just told them all to F Off, I feel chosing to join them would have been much more interesting.

Starfield is forgetable and just boring. Sacrifice has no meaning and content is endless boring. Did I mention boring?

The answer to “How do you populate an open world on a realistic interstellar scale with stuff to do?” is actually counterintuitive. You actually came across the objectively correct answer in your “mobile base” pitch. Starfield already has a “mobile base” that you can build up, customize, hold your stuff and act as your resupply point. It’s actually your ship. The cardinal sin of Starfield, which impacted every single gameplay mechanic downstream in development, is that It’s a space game with no engaging space travel in it. How do you populate an open world on a realistic interstellar scale with stuff to do? You don’t. The actual correct answer is you engage the player via your ship, the actual act of traveling from place to place and the things players can do to make themselves at home.

Don’t believe me? Kerbal Space Program objectively has an incredibly barren solar system, with nothing significant to do on planetary surfaces once you reach them. And yet it is beloved because the fun is behind the challenge of building spaceships, stations and even surface bases while restrained by orbital mechanics. Similarly, No Man’s Sky core gameplay loop can be summed up in: bum around. But it ties player progression to the capabilities of their ship at first, and later mechanics expand around it, by complementing the ways in which the player can travel the world (freighters, exocraft and now corvettes) or ways the player can make the world their own (base building, settlements, freighter customization). Or just look at the playerbase this game managed to retain: they are all about building out their ships and desperately want for Bethesda to implement at least seamless interplanetary travel.

Really nice and constructive video, wish Bethesda would see it and take some notes

No it has zero staying power

No man’s sky single handedly shat, spit and dunked on Starfield, I’ve been glued to it since voyagers update and completely forgot starfield even exists, it’s literally the best space game out now and no one can change my mind

What annoys me the most in that game is the uneven quality of it. On one side you have some very well design features and on the other side they are implemented in the most stupid way.
Just a little example that really pissed me , the spacesuits. They are very well designed, very realistic and look like a functional real spacesuit… but… they are just used like a Fallout 4 armor, they use the same code (i’m a modder for those games), they give you combat protection and give you some environmental protection but you go into toxic fumes and you are incomodated, a sand storm and you suffer. This is absolutely stupid and if you add the fact that a single bullet would puncture it and you will die.
You would say that it’s just a detail, but it’s the same for everything in this game. It’s a space game in the look but not in the facts and it shows the lack of education and the goodenough thinking that has made this game.
And it’s better i don’t talk about the main story because i would go mad. That mix of space Jesus with religion in space and that multiverse made in the most stupid way is a total nonsense. I don’t know what happened at Bethesda, are they getting old, worried about death, getting into religion to serve us that awfull mixture of pseudo phylosophical religious Unity bullcrap. And all this to get what, some great knowledge about the universe ? no, just a bunch of superpowers to smash down your ennemies, what a joke!!

68 hours of my life waiting for this turd to get fun. It didn’t.

I always expected to survey planets and after selling the data settlements would start popping up

I really think the journey needs to be more important than the destination to make Starfield work. The ship should be home and you should be required to maintain it, not unlike No Man’s Sky. That should include stuff like doing space walks to conduct repairs. Travel should matter and astrogation should be important. I hate that ships have these neat central desk consoles that are just fast travel access. Make astrogation a mini-game modified by skills, the worse you are at it, the more likely you are to end up off course. Make fuel matter, with fuel scooping hydrogen from gas giants necessary. I want to have to plan my trip to get from a quest a planet A to return to either a communication buoy or a hub planet to turn that quest in. Complete with fuel stops at systems with either fueling stations or gas giants used for scooping fuel. Space travel is rigorous and difficult, making it a fast travel mechanic kind of sucks.

For once a critique that’s actually a critique rather than a laborious recap of everything in the game with critique sprinkled in.

great video i enjoyed it, yeah i hope bethesda can improve starfield further – it sounds like they’re based on bethesdas latest dev video with Tim Lamb.
also what’s the name of game you’re playing in your “Closing Thoughts” part of the video?

I learned some fun facts about Pluto that pissed me off about starfield even more. Bethesda is famous for taking us to fantastical worlds, they gave us a thousand of the same rocks to find the same points of interest on. Then they have the gall to think “maybe we were too generous giving them that car early” IN THEIR EMPTY SANDBOX!

Oh Starfield… the only game bold enough to ask, “What if we made the entire Main Quest a radiant quest?”. It was a stupid question, but they did answer it.

So for Points of Interest bases they should have used the Xcom 2 map design. Each map has a theme but the maps have random generations allowing each instance of a mission map to be different. With so many loads a screens adding more load screens that make each and every POI different via multiple sections of those POIs varying by random selection .

It was not bad but it was so much less than what Bethesda has put out before. If this wasn’t a Bethesda game people would have said it was pretty good. I expect thousands of hours out of a Bethesda game i only got about 200.

33:56 Adding the French will genre switch the game to horror

*Mass Effect Andromeda > Starlink: Battle For Atlas >>>>>> Starfield*

I think the promise of a game like this also clashes with the whole Bethesda huge open-sandbox, many locations. People also really like the RPG, your own character idea, which does conflict a bit with a main-quest.

A bit of a little idea-crafting: I think it would’ve been really interesting to have the game to be a bit more survival, exploration centric than quests centric. Imagine that Constellation sends you into the starts to try the first Grav drive, and you land near a life-sustaining planet. The Grav drive malfunctions, and you are forced to land with your crew and explore the planet.

Eventually, perhaps through some hidden guidance, you happen upon a city. A human city. You then play the game sort of like a normal ES experience, eventually flying to other planets and moons in the systems, with their own settlements, pirates, etc. The main quest is a mission to refuel,repair the grav, and when you return to earth you find it barren, life-less. You uncover the NASA, story of earth that we have in Starfield.

A few more star systems open up, with more cities and Skyrimy stuff to do. Cool story quests, locations.
As far as the main story, you finally meet the leader of that first city/faction you discovered, and it is an older Sarah/Sam/etc. They reveal the truth that only a select few know: That first firing up of the grav drive takes you to a new universe, expending the artifacts. This gives you the option to hunt them and temples down, then access to NG+.

I like what you are saying, but the speed at which you are saying it all is just too much.

@30:45 I would like here to compare Vampire the masquerade bloodlines. This games has 3 total different game modes, normal, nosfaratu, malkavian but its short and and invites to replay. Don’t understand why someone wants to replay 250h most grind to test a different sidequest.

Regarding travel and exploration, it might be interesting to look into Star Citizen. Far fewer planets (currently 10 + a couple of dozens of moons) and star systems (currently 2), but due to the totally seamless travel, number of hand-crafted locations, the emergent scenarios that come from other players and the “trails” they leave, diegetic UIs and the fact that you stay in-character constantly, all that results in a sense of travel and of scale that is pretty unique and give exploration a lot of potential (I say “potential” because the game is in development hell and lacks quite a few features to support exploration proper). What’s interesting is that it challenges the idea that you need a quintillion stars to feel overwhelmed by the vastness of space (something NMS does succeed in using, but Starfield does not).

Game blows, they would have to update the game for 10 years or more to make it actually a decent space game and they won’t do that.

Starfield characters need more depth. They need habits and quirks about them. maybe Sarah is a drunk and when you load onto your ship and Shes not an active companion sometimes she can be found drunk and swearing at herself spewing words about how its all her fault and shes coping with constellation as her crutch and she is like this until you complete her affinity questline and give her closure. Perhaps the first time you meet Andreja she sneaks aboard your ship and has aggressive dialogue towards the player adding more conflict, but then other members of constellation explain to the player who she is. Both Andreja and Sarah’s dialogue can play off one another making the entire ships mood feel uneasy for a while. Things like that every character is missing that extra depth that makes them feel more human with flaws.

Always here ready to support anyone willing to spend 40 minutes SHITTING on Starfield! And well deserved, Starfield is an awful, awful game.

The procedural generation took out what makes Bethesda games interesting. A handcrafted world to explore with encompassing quest, and interesting characters.

I got solutions for the exploration part, keeping the procgen and all:
– Makes random POIs per main planet, doesn’t need much, but to build the world I need to see how a village outside New Atlantis would look like, not an abandoned weapon station with sealed entrances, it doesn’t make sense. They also need some gameplay, like hunting a gang member ina house, a “gig”;
– Make unique necessities and items, the game has a 1000 planets and moons to land, we need at least a 1000 unique resources or items, that would force us to go and would give us a unique or cool reward for it. “Resource” could be a sample from a plant or a rock, some chemicals to make a unique armor material, etc;
– We have around 10 main planets and moons, each need their own architecture, a couple of houses and buildings for each is enough as minimum, not that much investment;
– These places need varied gameplay, can be simple, but varied, I need to shoot something, solve a problem, learn about the world ina immersive way or have a cinematic experience, at least.

This game can offer all of these with relative ease, but it is certainly a time consuming endeavor, so we need a bit of patience, thankfully Bethesda helped modders to keep the game afloat.

For the explorations problem what if instead you had to actually fly to those locations, and only after discovering them could you fast travel, with systems like Sol, Alpha Centauri, Cheyenne, Polvo, and Volii as already discovered as their main systems? But if you wanted to explore faster you could spend credits to buy starmaps to locations? It would give an option of exploration, as if you are discovering these systems for the first time.

Starfield was my first Bethesda game

It will also be my last

I like Starfield, but it could be so much better. I wouldn’t call it a complete failure, but its not a success.

I mean, the biggest decision that broke Starfield was that apparently the teams working on it weren’t allowed to communicate or otherwise do anything together, so the various systems in the game do not work in tandem, each is its own thing, which results in a hodgepodge of design ethos.

Worse, the WRITERS were apparently not allowed to cross reference beyond a 15 page series bible. For those who wonder why that’s bad, Patrick Stewart in ES4:O was given an 83 page booklet on the Emperor’s life, for his role. One character, had that much info on him, and this whole game was given less than a 1/5 as much for the whole thing.

Game is jst boring thats it

Starfield is amazing

Starfield is actually a good game once you’ve finished eating all the insulation in your attic. Anyone who finds a single aspect of this slop enjoyable has a feces fetish.

it doesn’t have a good story, universe, character, systems or anything else, pretty much the worst game i ever bought and i even got the expansion for free and haven’t even touched the game since i got sick and tired of it 35 hours in

Massive comment.

Tldr; can’t fathom how you like this game. I have ideas on how to fix your issues. 1. Change how the map is laid out and leveling and vase building is done. 2. Nearly anyones idea is better than the story we got.

Base building should be used as way points that open up new star clusters. In the center of the “map” are the Settled Systems. Around the Settled Systems is the Outer Systems. And there’s four stars that connect the two on the North, South, East, and West. A mission will take you to the North connection but you need a base to refuel or pay a HIGH toll to be refueled. As you clear the Outer Systems you find the other three connections so you can more easily come and go from the two clusters. This will also gate keep the enemy difficulty level.

The writing is so dog water anything you come up with will be better than what we got. In short Starborn don’t exist in my fix and the story takes place 800 years in the future but society had to “restart” after a conflict destroyed Venus, Earth, and Mars. IO becomes humanity’s jump point out of the solar system. A restart but with advanced technology and interstellar travel; but they had no means to manufacture or repair all of that tech for 300 years. The story starts as multiple different companies are recruiting to explore the Outer Systems and beyond. In the end you find ancient alien tech that allows alternate time lines. But it’s damaged and can no longer be calibrated to specific timelines. The gate is huge and you fly your ship into it, therefore keeping your weapons and gear. After NG+ 5 you get a timeline where the gate works and you can freely jump between your previous 4 timelines whenever you wish. OR more alternate timelines that are more wacky.

Overall bland game. Not even mods can save Starfield. Bland characters, exploration and outposts suck. The ship builder is only good for photo mode.

Thanks. I love Starfield. 👍

What they should’ve done was to limit the number of planets to two digits. Made the surrounding areas of the settlements into proper hand crafted open world spaces. Then leave the randomly generated planets as they are but up the number of locations you could find.

It’s actually a pretty simple solution that I’m sure most players would’ve been happy with.

I can’t think of any total solution to the “wicked problem” of designing a vast universe that allows players to land anywhere, and yet allow it all to be meaningful, but here are a few possibilities –

a) Drip-feeding exploration possibilities – instead of showing a massive galaxy map with dozens of solar systems, initially show only the 1-2 solar systems that have been meaningfully populated with handcrafted content. Never tell the player from the start that they can explore further. But as players unlock new technology, allow them to see more and more star systems, so that they actually get the feeling that they’re breaking unknown ground. This would make it clear that the handcrafted content is in the beginning, and everything else is effectively empty, since humanity has not ventured so far out before the player character. This at least sets expectations for handcrafted missions and content, which is where the second point comes in……

b) Systemic gameplay; instead of generating interesting questlines and content for each planet which has no handcrafted content, a bunch of interacting systems could be allowed to create scenarios that encourage player exploration. For example, allow other factions to carry out their own exploration research in the background. This could just be a straightforward ticking clock that maybe keeps slightly ahead of the player’s tech progress. Any planet in that unexplored zone which is mineral-dense has a probability of other factions landing there. I know it isn’t bulletproof but it’s much more grounded that humans colonizing so many planets all over the galaxy and building the exact same building again and again on all of them.

Bethesda made a bunch of cool tools and mechanics, but they can’t make a game to save their life. If you gave all the stuff they made for Starfield to another developer with say a stronger ip?

Imagine a Star Wars game with Starfield mechanics. Or a Metroid game!

Hell even a fresh ip could work with a great studio. Imagine a few planets with cities about 25-30% the size of Night City, like 4 or 5 of those, each distinct. And actually interesting factions that interact with each other. Obsidian embarrassed Bethesda with their own engine and tools. So could almost anyone else.

But I know why. Bethesda made a minimum viable game: it has shoot, it has drive, it has ‘story’. Past that, they wanted to sell content. 7 dollar missions, creation club crap, factions in the form of dlc that was chopped out of the game. Starfield is No Man’s sky 1.0, but they wanted to sell what Hello games did for free.

Jesus christ. How can anyone with an above room temp iq play this slop for more than a few hours??

The gunfights, the most prominent part f the game sucks because the enemies don’t bleed or take wound decals, no dismemberment like cyberpunk. Even the alien creatures don’t even shed blood or any gore from all the different weapons.

You have grenades rockets, mini guns nothing does any sort of visible damage…

Once I saw the Satisfactory doggo I liked. Simple as.

9 years old No Man’s Sky ftw!

I expected nothing more than Bethesda Fallout in space and was still disappointed. The exploration was so barren, combat only slightly improved but still behind the times, level scaling was constantly broken where you would find level 5 enemies on level 70 planets, gear looting a regular waste of time, most legendary effects worthless, weapon and armor modding a terrible experience and really lacking in variety, outposts that serve almost no purpose. The list goes on.

There are even simple mechanisms that Starfield took from Fallout 4 and did it *worse*. For example you can mark resources to show an icon in the ui when you see the item to show you want to pick it up. In Fallout 4 if you have that item with that component in your inventory you can switch views in pipboy and mark that specific component. In Starfield? You HAVE to have a recipe unlocked and known from either the research bench or the crafting benches that happens to have one of the components you want to mark. What’s worse is by marking for that one component you mark ALL of the components in that recipe.

Starfield could not even meet the low bar of their own games before it.

Starfield can’t be fixed. The whole idea is a broken mess. There are ways to improve it but it basically would require to rework the whole game.

Not a Single aspect of starfield just works.

I truly love Starfield 🎉

Perhaps the in game universe should have been limited to like 3 to 5 star systems and at most 30 planets, moons, space stations, etc. But the universe is persistent trough NG+ and every time you pass trough unity you start as a new random NPC in a new job and location. Think your second NG+ you start as girlboss Asian woman miner, 3rd NG+ you start as a space cowboy in Akila, 4th NG+ you start as a gang leader on Neon, meanwhile the universe is persitant and keeps all the changes and bases and ships you made in the last playtroughs.

No Man’s Sky just does everything better than Starfield

For a game that supposedly was in development for 20 years, Starfield sure had a lot of elements lifted directly from No Man’s Sky, only with half-assed implementation. Starfield also straight up duplicates Skyrim’s shout system, also half-assed. The Starborn powers were so underwhelming, I often forget they were there after finishing the half-assed main quest line.

That’s how I define Starfield. Half-assed.

Try X4, it’s super janky but much more interesting than Starfield.

You do meet other versions of yourself, including as the hunter.

It NEEDS multiplayer with that much space. Lile 76ish gameplay where certain areas of space are 100% pvp/pve. This can still happen. Also this game should add space station building.. thats would ve a majir game changer. A space station base.

You can’t have more than one solar system. There’s only one sol. Star system is the term you’re looking for.

My ideal rewrite without completely changing the setting of the game would be to go from a parallel universe NG+ gimmick to a time travel gimmick.

I’d start by cutting down the number of artifacts from 24 or whatever it was to like 12 and each location they’re found is unique and is part of a temple instead of two different procgen grinds for each. This way the experience of getting an artifact is memorable and the location itself can have unique puzzles and challenges.

The visions instead of just being random flashes of light with no meaning stay vague but offer subtle hints to where they came from by guiding the player to hidden puzzles in the temples that wouldn’t be accessible until unlocking certain abilities, each time you go back the visions are closer to completion making it easier to understand the hints. Theoretically the player would then visit the hidden locations in each area and have a true ending.

After learning that the artifacts create a gateway to the past, outside of getting hints to eventually solve the mystery each return the player is also motivated by mistakes that originally happen in the story resulting in nearly all of Constellation dying giving strong motivation to go back and do it better instead of just leaving it undone in the original story because abandoning your universe isn’t very enticing.

Earth isn’t dead it’s just missing. This would be a better mystery with less plot holes than the base game had that even if the player doesn’t care about alien relics the fate of Earth could be its own unique mystery.

seems like lots of these quests would be irrelevant if the game lore introduced secure quantum communication. 🤷🏻

I love the idea of starfield but absolutely hate playing it. The gameplay loop, quest design, and over arching narrative are abysmal and do not hold my attention

your character looks good.

The biggest problem with Starfield is that it’s lore is an absolute nonsensical dogshit. Fallout 4 had similar brain dead writing (the Father twist still haunts me to this day), but at least the world was interesting. In Starfield the world is at the same time painfully boring and unrealistically stupid.

A massive Bethesda L.

One option would be to introduce local factions with different stances. For example a group colonists at site A and suddenly pirates set up a base on the same planet. This can lead to generated encounters on the planet, which the player can ignore or affect the outcome. Assisting the pirates means the colonists are eventually enslaved or leave the planet, or you can help the colonits drive off the pirates, which causes them to go to another planet. Or the player might be to negotiate a truce between the two groups. Leading to the farmers producing illegal substances which the pirates would start to distribute to neighboring planets.

Basically a kind of simulation that reacts to the player but also plays itself creating a non-static universe.

With roles through gameplay style, play as someone who just sets up colonies without worrying about local politics you can do it. Or become a trader, or smuggler. Or be a space marshal who brings law to the distant colonies.

10:33 …this is likely one of the main reasons there’s such a disconnect between players and developers. After downloading almost every P.O.I. Mod from Nexus, and several from Creations Store, to include adjustments to how P.O.I.s generate, a dungeon randomizer, and a mod that makes duplicate structures unique and non-repeating, the exploration in Starfield can actually get pretty “overwhelming”~ and also good. It’s not a nightmare situation, but totally fixable, they just needed to be as clever as their fans, about how to solve a complex problem.

Nearly every YouTuber seems to give terrible advice in this area, like, they know how to describe what’s wrong with the game (which isn’t very hard to do, you can just borrow from somebody else who probably already said it better), but boy are you all terrible at offering any reasonable solutions. I knew exactly what Starfield’s issues were and was able to fix them because of it. Would be nice to see more clever YouTuber fans (who also don’t make anything of tangible use to the community) offer more clever solutions! 😆🤣🤣

I really enjoy all aspects of Starfield. You are welcome to your views.

Did you kmow when astronauts landed on the moon they didn’t find the experience boring? Playing Starfield is just like being a RL astronaut. BGS said so, so I believe it.

Although I’m a big fan of Bethesda games, I couldn’t stand Starfield. All these loading screens just destroy my will to play: most of the time I just went frorm one NPC to another, spending literally house in loading screens from fast travel. And also there is no fucking map of the cities, I just can’t understand how one can not make a map of the city

It’s wild how much Bethesda studios has just been trying to steal everything from Bioware games. Starfield is Todds idea of what the Mass Effect 1 uncharted worlds should have been.

I’ve been a BGS gan ever since getting a copy of Oblivion with a used Xbox 360. That gave me years of fun and sent me down the rabbit hole of fallout games. Then Skyrim launched and absorbed a few more years of my gaming life. If someone had told me that BGS would ultimate disappoint me as a gamer with their games after Skyrim, I’d have laughed in total disbelief.

I preordered Fallout 76 and was one of the players who tried it out, found it to be terrible, but still gave BGS the benefit of the doubt since they had tried something new and untested with their fallout IP.

I also preordered and massively hyped myself up for Starfield. What I got thought was the last straw and I am consumed with doubt and regret over BGS games now.
Starfield was a betrayal of the player base and fandom of BGS games. It’s insulting in its blandness, aggravating in its emptiness, and infuriating in its simplicity of writing. If it weren’t for the shipbuilding, I doubt I’d have spent more than 10 hours in the game. But stealing and rebuilding ships was the only thing keeping me entertained for the 48ish hours I logged in the first couple weeks after launch. Haven’t touched the game since and even hearing the game added a ground vehicle and having DLC story missions added was not enough to bring me back.

I got the DLC for free and it was so uninteresting I forgot to finish it.

The heist on neon was trash

This game is the same as watching paint dry

And the loading and menu screens kill all momentum

Oh …u mean no man’s sky

Solid video. Good assessment

A lot of anger at BGS for wasting a decade on this disappointing game and Fallout 76 instead of Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. They are maximizing revenue for Microsoft and lifting a middle finger to their core fan base.

This was a super interesting and thoughtful analysis of starfield!

Ok I don’t remember alot but neon was such a let down

Story is boring and gameplay is bland. The game isn’t “bad”, but it’s just a boring game.

11:28 You should play Vintage Story then