Bethesda reached for the stars, but found only space.

You took awhile to get there but make an excellent point: a good game with space travel doesn’t need to be any bigger than a solar system or two, just make sure what’s there is interesting.

Yeah kinda weird they waste people’s time with this nonsense you have KOTOR I & II Mass Effect 1 – 3 all super high rated all being remade and beloved with developers making sequels and similar games like Exodus and then you have Obsidian Bethesda and Bioware that do stuff nobody wants or asked for weird indeed their games lack quality aliens rich open level planet designs with impactful environments such as massive cyborg stations in icebergs or wizards that teach you new spells in huge swamps a la Yoda on Dagobah the big impressive Sci Fi fantasy media is all out there and they couldve built upon that with black matter ghosts quantum aliens ethereal energy serpents cast by Varruun alien wizards instead Bethesda dropped “Constellation” the TV show on Apple+ that did so poorly it won’t even get a 2nd season, we can only hope Starfield won’t get a sequel and they start focusing on the stuff people really want Fallout 3, New Vegas, Morrowind Remakes, Fallout 5, TES6 and a new Sci Fi RPG with alien factions alien backgrounds alien handcrafted open level planets alien ships alien vehicles alien big baddie and everything alien and new humans only as enemies in videogames are so stale and sad i dont think they even recognize how boring they are as directors and developers its really really sad we can only hope for improvement in the future and hope they stop wasting years on such lazy nonsense games.

P.S whats even funnier the Constellation Multiverse story would’ve even worked if they had different classes of aliens in the team with a big baddie telepath alien with psionic powers a la Mindflayer (from D&D) in fact nobody would play or even consider a Pen & Paper game or TTRPG in a NASA setting because it’s so boring and even the Pen & Paper NASA game ( yeah there is one) has space orks lol

This is the biggest load of opinionated bs ever. Mod Starfield yourself and make it do what you want, not what the designers released and even more importantly not what some fatuous internet critic insists you should have. ED is one of the worst examples you can pull from.

i hope starfield drops on Ps5 soon

I like the analysis in this video, but I do not agree with the conclusions. The problem with exploration in Starfield is not that the world extends beyond a single star system, but that the points of interest are procedurally generated and placed around your landing sites. That doesn’t feel real. It’s instead reminiscent of Preston Garvey in Fallout 4 telling you yet “another settlement needs your help,” a loop that we quite quickly understand can go on forever. Instead of immersion in Starfield, it gives us gamers a glimpse behind the curtain, exposing the smoke and mirrors of its design. If the game instead offered unique interesting and cool locations that could be discovered through scanning, then I think exploration would feel amazing and very meaningful in Starfield. And the fact that some star-systems could be completely empty would only add to the coolness of it.

It’s always sad when great companies go downhill. I’ve replayed Skyrim I don’t know how many times at this point, must be dozens, and I’ll probably end up replaying it again. How can a company that created a game with that much replayability go on to make something as dull and empty as Starfield?

I mean… Oblivion and Skyrim were 5 years apart…. 5 YEARS! So why is it that Starfield, a game with a development cycle of about 6-8 years, is so empty and dull? Obviously it’s a whole new IP so I understand if they’re starting from scratch it’s not going to be perfect, but you would think they would have taken the example of their more successful games like Morrorwind, Oblivion, Skyrim and even to a degree Fallout 4 and applied that to Starfield.

“Space is Boring” which is why people are paid to make it interesting. The procedural generation was certainly one problem with Starfield but it was hardly the worst problem. The lame writing, plot and quests were a far more serious problem. The game was bad because, exploration was pointless and boring, the main plot was a dull rehash, many of the game systems were unfinished. The characters were unattractive.

Combat was the only bright spot. It was the best combat Beth had ever made but, it wasn’t enough to save this turd.

What Bethesda needs to learn…
Hahaha! He used “Bethesda” and “learn” in the same sentence. That’s comedy gold right there.

Bethesda always made sandboxes, with a weak main story just for the fuck of it. But I always thought their games didn’t have enough emergent or dynamic systems to be fun as a sandbox and their campaigns are also bad.

Instead of making a sequel, they should just release a “game’s worth” of content as dlc every 3-4 years. Start filling out empty planets, have more factions, more cities, more stories, more interactions. With more enemy types, enemy factions, new weapon manufacturers just more culture and lore. A whole new game, but intergrated into the base game.

But like I said, they don’t do that well, so it’d be more bad added on. They honestly need to learn to make games, cause everything they’ve made is shoddy, half baked and they rely on modders for everything.

It baffles me that they’ve never integrated the object permanence with gameplay. And their “be a god and do everything” approach kills replayability and makes everything boring and linear.

This guy is riveting and totally correct! Who is he?

I feel like I saw this same video for years.

0:45 nvm that was mentioned in the video
sorry to play devils advocate here, but honestly i feel kinda bad for starfield, it WAS a bad game for sure, but knowing how the devs went on record later to say that corporate higherups pushing deadlines and the fact a game based on procedural generation with bethesdas style was just doomed from the start, i feel bad in the way it was Guaranteed to be mid at best, i still do believe bethesda has potential to make good games that arent utter slop but theres still corporate types ruining everything and forcing the devs efforts to go to waste, a small part of me almost wishes theyd make a smaller scale sequel to starfield to try again but i heavily doubt it, and who would even want to try it

Bro starfield is not “Pretty good” if you stick to stories, quests and main systems.

The characters are AWFUL – like to the point where I did not enjoy a single character story arc in the entire game. That includes the main character and the main story. The newgame + shoehorned into the story was a TERRIBLE decision.

And the faction quests are derivative and boring. There are like 2-3 decently fun missions in the ENTIRE GAME. Mandalorian, first mission where you find a terrormorph (OH EXCEPT THEY ARE JUST RANDOMLY ON PLANETS SO I”D ALREADY KILLED SEVERAL), and maybe a couple of the pirate ones?

The entire corporate arc is basically like having an entry level job. Get me coffee? Take meeting notes?

Bland and boring. If you rated it ONLY on its main content and just forgot how horrifically bad the exploration and combat is… it’s like a 4/10. That other content ranges from a 0/10 (planet exploring) to MAYBE a 6 or 7 for crafting and space combat if we are being generous.

Then wraping it together with a disgustingly fast travel and loading screen-based core gameplay loop and you end up with a 3/10 game.

Take off the rose tinted glasses…

I think Starfield would have been far superior if they had of made 1000 planets instead 10 planets in a single solar system, and spread AT LEAST as much across them as Skyrim. Hell 5 planets! I don’t want to explore 1000 boring worlds, but 5 really awesome hand-crafted worlds? YES

I’ll prefer The Outer Worlds over BGS’s Loading Screen Simulator all-day everyday.

That said, I do think there’s an ideal middle ground between the two. BGS has made great handcrafted worlds, sandboxes with fun NPCs and stories – but that was completely lacking in Starfield. Too much procedural generation, too little handcrafted content coupled with terrible writing.
Modern Obsidian has a tendency to be too linear, lacking true freedom, but at least it’s not completely lifeless.

Idk I’m glad both games exist because they might result in the subsequent games each studio will make might improve from their previous games.
I just want to get a new RPG-Simulator to get lost in; it’s been too long since the last good one

Isn’t excrement, by its very nature and name discarded?

Simply put the game just wasn’t for you and there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everything can be for everyone so why judge it like it is? I don’t like rts games or fighting games but I would never say they aren’t good because they’re not for me. Outer Worlds was more your speed and that’s good.

The thing about No Man’s Sky is that space travel is very, very fast. The distances between planets is short, and the Pulse Drive makes your ship arbitrarily fast when traveling between planets. This is in sharp contrast to Elite Dangerous, where the distances are realistic, and interplanetary travel frequently takes a long, long time.

Many simply did not understand Starfield. And all this talk about removing thousands of planets and leaving only one star system is nonsense. It’s a completely different concept…

Realistic space is so vast that it makes a mockery of human abilities and ambitions.

This means that space games either have to be fantasy games that ignore this – like Star Wars outlaws or mass effect where space is really just scenery.

Or they need to be immersive survival simulations where navigating space is the point, not a power fantasy. NMS and elite dangerous both do aspects of this, but I still don’t think anyone’s really done it well.

Starfields problem is that it refuses to choose. It wants to be a Bethesda role playing power fantasy, in a vast semi realistic NASA punk world.

It’s fundamentally impossible to reconcile. You just end up with mind numbing procedural mining bases full of mundane loot, planetary capital cities with 4 streets so you can have a bunch of voiced NPCs, and stripping out all the survival and free exploration which is the entire point of an immersive survival game.

I still liked Starfield.

When I was a teenager, I loved sci-fi, and probably would’ve loved a game like Starfield. Now, I find myself more into high fantasy.

The guy speaks well.
But ultimately his points were
– Starfield could have had only one solar system like Outer Worlds instead of thousand planets
This is debatable. You still have to fill in those planets with fishbowls and cant handcraft entire planets.
– Games like Outer Worlds dont have actual space flight and focus on stories while Starfield wants you to fly for a while and do other things
I agree here to an extent. But flying and doing the other things, like surveying or creating manufacturing factories, is part of the fun.
Apart from this, he did not give specifics on what Outer Worlds did better.

I can mention 3 areas where Bethesda can learn from Obsidian
– Focus on Character Skill RPG mechanics. Get rid of the mini games.
– Make better Character & Inventory UI designs
– Work on consistent Quest Design.

Ultimately Starfield is a lot of fun, if one engages with the systems and use their creative faculties to roleplay characters.
But most people don’t do it and hate the game.

Love the mako

Let’s not forget about Star Citizen. An actual realistic Newtonian space simulator with multiple whole solar systems…yet there is nothing to do and the game only works half the time.

Bethesda learn? Nah.

Tom was robbed

They wont tho.

Haven’t seen Eurogamer in a while. I like this guy.

Two different games … i loved Starfield.. and i love outer worlds also

Nothing.
Outer Worlds is dogpoo

The fast travel trivialized the space part of the game! Space travel should be dangerous and tricky, making your actual journey mean something, rather than just a fade to black in between basically the same old rock a thousand times over. Even Star Trek has warp mishaps on occasion. This cowboy NASA-punk could take some thematic cues from Firefly. They basically removed their fuel mechanic because they couldn’t figure out the problem with out making it too hard I guess. Rather than sand off the edges, you gotta lean in a little. You run out of fuel or something breaks and you have to make an emergency landing to search for salvage or resources to refine. There’s a reason to build a base and set up a temp refiner, and a use for engineering skills; a better maintained ship will cost less to run, and break down less

I LOVE STARFIELD. it isn’t for everyone though…

It’s amazing how many doors starfield has

Narrator: They didn’t.

I think if we get a starfield 2 it should definitely be a single solar system. Also I think it needs to be called something other than starfield 2.

Space is not boring in STAR CITIZEN!!!

They just needed to shorten the amount of planets and add more curated content. The last DLC showed promise and improvement.

On the other hand outer worlds 2 felt rushed as you don’t explore much on those six planets.

Morrowind mentioned 👍

I have never played starfield and won’t. Its because it is very obvious how a mostly empty game is not fun and instead boring. How the developers did not understand this concept while designing this game is beyond me.

Outer worlds is low quality unoptimized slop! The hardware it requires in relation to its visual output is complete non-sense. Lazy developers with greedy company who decided to save money and push to release unrealistically looking garbage

Starfield wasn’t too BGS, it wasn’t BGS enough.

Games are pretty much these mini digital theme parks we get to visit. When you get engrossed/immersed in a world or its story, you forget the theme park aspect of it. You fall to that “trickery.”

I felt like the theme park bled through and was noticeable while playing Starfield.

The modding community didn’t only abandon Starfield because it was boring. The primary reason why ppl stopped trying to make mods for it was because of the way the game works – the game is pretty much designed to break mods. I don’t know if Bethesda made it that way on purpose or if they didn’t realize that’s what would happen. Starfield doesn’t have a load order like previous Bethesda games do and that makes it extremely difficult to make mods for it, especially if you want to have more than one mod on your save file.

Always love a Jim video

Starfield was designed for the modding community, we need to keep that in mind. They kept the game a blank slate as much as possible so modders could go in do their thing. The game wasn’t designed for the player, at least not to capture us like what Elder Scrolls and Fallout have, which are more designed for the story and the player to have plenty of things to do throughout their playthroughs.

In my opinion, Starfield has potential, but because Bethesda already seems like they dropped the game, even the modding community has pretty well turned their back on the game.

I love outer worlds more than fallout and starfield

I’m not gonna say i don’t have issues with starfield, but at the end of the day i enjoy the game overall and finished it about 4 times, although the dlc was kinda shite.

They should, but they won’t

Nice to see some positive Outer Worlds content, if only tangentially to show Starfield’s flaws.

They will learn nothing as the Outer Wilds 2 is absolutely shit and a huge step backwards for Obsidian who are fucked now after this latest pile of crap

And in 15-20 years they’ll do this exact thing again and relearn the lessons we’ve been taught countless times.

Procedural content does not equal unlimited content. Just because your play area is massive, doesn’t mean its fun.

We’ve learned this lesson multiple times over the years come on guys

What happened to the Eurogamer team?

The main problem wasn’t space. The cities felt lifeless and the inhabited planets boring. Then there was the absurdly stupid double standard of starship sales and just the overall crappy main storyline. Oh, I almost forgot, the NPCs looked like 6 miles of mud fence

If X4 had planetary landings (and orbits) it would be my space game of all time.

If Starfield would’ve instead of 1000 empty planets had been like 3 planets that were all 1/3 the size of skyrim and fully handcrafted and explorable and then another 20-25 planets that were largely unpopulated and just used for singular missions or bounties and had the procedural generation, and were mostly there to mine resources for building or whatever, it would’ve given it some scale while also just being a lot more enjoyable. So much of bethesda games’ appeal is that all of their elements are just kind of serviceable but then their immersion and exploration are god tier and it glues all the more average parts together into an experience that’s just very easy to get lost in. Stripping away the exploration by having all their planets be procedurally generated with copy pasted points of interest combined with stuff like eating away at the interest of the world they created by making all the creatures just look like Spore animals while running into a loading screen nonstop (which would be diminished if there was more incentive for on foot exploration as opposed to fast traveling nonstop between quest stages because there’s no point to exploring on foot) just killed the game. Overall i thought it was okay, like a 7/10 game that I enjoyed while I played it, but I can’t imagine what would make me decide to pick it back up

I think this whole grounded NASA sci-fi approach was too limiting in the end.
The Bethesda formula would lend itself way better to a more 90s style sci fi universe with lots of alien species, like Babylon 5 or Farscape

Unfortunately, even the “classic Bethesda” parts of Starfield feel hopelessly outdated and janky compared to the best of the current RPG crop.

The fact that Bethesda has to learn how to at least make a mediocre game from Obsidian is a damning statement about both companies.

Awesome video but I need my nose back please. Thank you!

It’s mind blowing to see you talk about space games, space traversal, and space sims for 14 minutes and not once mention Star Citizen…

How are you gonna shit on no mans sky for half the video then praise betheda and starfield for the rest. You mention the outer worlds like 2 times in this video. Sounds like someone is on the betheda payroll just like IGN

standing again at the 10 minute mark had to stretch my legs but u did it though 🙂

12:28 a starfield sequel? Ha ha, good joke.

I love the idea of Starfield. I even love exploring wild, empty planets. I just got bored of clearing out the same 7-ish pirate-infested outposts all over the place. Once I had unlocked all the ship parts and all the weapons and armor crafting parts, I couldn’t think of a reason to keep playing.

I stood up and cheered @01:20 u articulated my screams for the last decade lol crazy man u called it

Saying no mans sky is not a space game because the planets dont orbit is ridiculous. Then you shit on the way you can fly down onto the planet realistically, then praise the way the do it in starwars outlaws? Wtf dude

Great video and I think you’re right. The number one thing I felt while playing this game for the first time was how unsure of itself it felt. It starts you in the ugliest mine ever because they felt they had to get the alien artifact mystery going because they don’t think the game is that interesting. You are automatically granted entrance into the 1880s stodgy adventure club because they have to say we’re an adventure game because we don’t think we can show it. You are given a fuckin ship for a nonsensical reason because this is a game about you having a ship. Yes, i know, you’ve gotta get these elements into here somehow and if the rest of the game was interesting and adventurous and leaned into its promise, I wouldn’t care. But it isn’t and it makes these desperate attempts to say what the game is all the more glaring.

Excellent take !

That you can make a whole video about space games and not mention Star Citizen which does everything you want ( seriously ) is kind of baffling . No Star Citizen is not a Scam – Yes Star Citizen is an Alpha – but it is a playable Alpha . I have every space game ever made – played them all – none of them scratch the Elite Frontier-2 style Itch right now except Star Citizen . If Frontier would finally put Atmospheric planet landings and ship interiors in then Elite Dangerous would be back on top .

Starfields a pretty decent game. Community mods have added a lot as well. All this negativity outdated. More clickbait garbage from eurogamer.

There’s something to be said for massive open-world RPGs, but it seems sometimes like that’s what every game nowadays is trying to be. Companies don’t want to keep releasing games year after year, so they just come up with one Forever Game that they can keep updating until the sun explodes. And it gets boring after a while! Not to mention how insanely intimidating the vastness of games like RDR2 can be. Sometimes you just want a nice linear adventure like your Uncharteds or your Halos where you can sit down, finish it in a couple weeks, and move on to something else

Space can be analogous to a lonely stretch of highway. Imagine you are in an RV and you happen upon another RV in the dead of night. That RV has a pirate flag and a mini gun. If you somehow survive the encounter, whether you fought or ran, you had an adventure and a story to tell. If gamers are willing to embrace quality over quantity and suspense over action, that would be a good place to start. Think Alien, not Aliens. Also, a compelling game can take place in space without encompassing or traversing all of it. Think Outland, not Star Wars.

Not that it really matters but the nitpicker in me can’t help but take issue with your description of NMS and its “realistically sized planets with realistic distances between them”. Both the sizes and distances are comically miniscule compared to the real thing. They’re tiny little toy planets, at distances so close that if they were real planets they would literally tear each other apart with their tidal forces. NMS is in no way anything like real space (nor is it trying to be).

Starfield actually makes me nervous for the next Elder Scrolls…

I was never able to put into words how I felt about Starfield until you did so in this video.

It truly is the handcrafted/bespoke element that makes good games.

That Star Wars Outlaws transition to and from orbit was orders of magnitude better than a loading screen. It worked rather well I feel. Sadly, devs at Bethesda never had the attention to detail drive to do something similar.

Obsidian’s Fallout: Las Vegas was also a far better realised world and story than Bethesda’s other Fallout titles.

Nothing because OW2 is garbage too.

the AI is not at a level where it cam fill the empty ‘space’ with something interesting, yet

I liked Outer Worlds 2 but felt fatigued with it on the last third. Just felt like I was doing stuff because I paid $75 (tax) for the game.

Just let me pump alien princesses

Obsidian’s Outer Worlds should learn from Obsidian’s Fallout…

You’re a joy to listen to wanted you to know that

You mean from the outer worlds 1, while 2 is not exactly bad, its also not good, its a very disappointing sequel that mycrosoft had envolvement in fucking up, the first is way better

Space is not inherently boring anymore than earth is inherently boring. Large swathes of the planet are empty… and people don’t set their games there! Star wars outlaws handeled space the best i think. 4 curated space sections, with astroud belts, shipwrecks and space stations to flythrough, and to land you just fly towards the main planet of the area and pick a landing spot. Its all curated so none of it is boring.

Bassically, games dont simulate every aspect of life of earth, why should they in space? Skip the boring bits!

I wanted Bethesda to just make a Fallout type game, but in a Star Wars/Trek type universe. They could have made like 5 hand crafted planets and a shuttle loading screen in between. Each planet could have their own factions.

That’s a damn good analysis. A lot of game reviews by people in their 20s with zero background in gaming. Here’s my like and follow

They honestly should have done they own thing instead trying to be like No Man Sky knowing they engine wasn’t designed for it.

I stopped buying their games ages ago. They aren’t what they used to be.

How to make space fun?… Easy, follow what StarLink, Chorus, and EverSpace 2 did. Problem solved

If New Atlantis was bigger I’d feel like I could spend more time there

This is one of the best Eurogamer videos I’ve seen in a long time

‘Stuff sim’. I like that- it describes how I feel about a lot of games now.

Amen, brother.

s/o Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy game

“I want to be able to get out of the space ship” has real Andy Farrant winding up Mike Channel about racing games energy.

Want to know how vast space is? Recall the moment in The Empire Strikes Back when Han flies into an asteroid belt. C-3P0’s pissing and moaning notwithstanding, it is a valid tactic for an extremely skilled pilot to hide in an asteroid belt and let the pursuing fighters crash a lot.

Unfortunately, it is very different in reality. The average distance between asteroids in both of the belts of our solar system is about 160,000 kilometres, or multiple times the circumference of the Earth. Canonical sources put the sizes of Star Destroyers and Darth Vader’s Super Star Destroyer at 1.6 and 8.0 kilometres in length, respectively.

All three of the major ships or groups of major ships in this chase would need to deliberately steer into an asteroid to crash into it. Never mind the fighters.

When you explain it this way, the emptiness of real space becomes that much easier to conceive of. The most densely-packed part of space would take the space shuttle Challenger ten hours to cross (ie from asteroid to asteroid) at its maximum speed.

The way older games set in space dealt with this is by putting jump points at various parts of maps, having battles in set points you can “hyperspace” out of, or giving every ship the player can fly the most ridiculous speeds. Sometimes combinations of these ideas.

Go and play Privateer and Privateer 2: The Darkening. That is how space sims should play.

Why not demanding all the things that starfield does than other rpgs don’t? Like ship design, outpost creation, 0 grav mechanics, survival mechanics, real time weather and planet simulation, HUGE etc. After putting +400h into Starfield, playing Outer Worlds 2 is like going backwards speed of light.

Can’t remember who said it, but a post on twitter talked about how interesting Starfield would’ve been if ANY of the data logs of far off places that had dense, usually tragic backstories were PLACES YOU COULD ACTUALLY GO

I’m only here for the Swindon bashing.

Allow me to play devil’s advocate, “At least Starfield isn’t Star Citizen!” 🤪

The most annoying thing is scanning, for a game of starfield features it should be more practical, 1 or maximum 2 item to be scanned.

Ow2 is a little better than starfield, they better don’t learn from Ow2, but rather they should learn from Skyrim and fallout 4 and new Vegas.

Who could have believed it ? Turns out being able to explore hundreds of procedurally generated planets that all look and feel the same with copy pasted building and objectives is not interesting and having a much smaller hand made map with meaningful content and quests is much more fun and interesting for players. I’m mindblown

Where Starfield misses for me, is where Outer Worlds 2 shines. The exploration, the ability to kill anyone you want and still be about to finish the game, the gore, the weapons melting people, the way you can complete quests. With Starfield, less would have been more. It is over designed. You need perks to do basic things like jetpack, pickpocket, slide, pick locks. Like come on.

Heck, even just a single handmade solar system would be amazing.

Outer Wilds, of course, doesn’t have RPG elements or space cabinets to steal from. But what it does offer is so much better—a handcrafted solar system with planets that are dense with secrets, a robust physics engine where everything operates with proper orbital dynamics and newtonian physics, and a beautifully told story that captures the awe, beauty, and terror of the vastness of space.

A soulless game.

Awesome vid!
There is often the implication in gaming that more is better (No Man’s Sky planet count, Borderlands’ “Bazzilion guns”), but development time spent on quality, not quantity, gets noticed and appreciated more… IMHO.
Your excellent example being Daggerfall vs Morrowind. Perfect example. Nothing more need be said.

Bethesda has nothing to learn I’ll say it I don’t like the outer world games I played like halfway into the first game and deleted it

More Jim please. This was like going back 10 years and watching VideogamerTV again

At first I thought yet another person hopped on the Bethesda- and Starfield-hating wagon (ragebait title), but it turned out the video almost rather defends Starfield in many areas…

I will continue to stand against what may perceivably be the popular opinion that Starfield sucks and that Bethesda should move on from it. I don’t, in fact, think that is the popular opinion. It is what many on social platforms want us to think. I can think for myself, thank you very much. Starfield is a great game. It is extremely close to the ultimate gaming experience I have always wanted. Part of that experience are the pillars of player agency and customizability via mods I can make myself. The perfect game doesn’t exist; it is subjectively made for, and by, each user.

I assume Bethesda decided to included pro-gen POIs simply because otherwise many players were going to think the planets are too empty. Little does anyone realize that empty planets would have been realistic! There are already options to fine-tune these to your taste. I, for one, will remove the pro-gen POIs altogether. I want there to be mostly completely barren and empty planets with a small percentage of populated planets with permanent POIs. I’m sure thousands of you would disagree with this one idea while some may agree. That is the point.

I had fun with starfield in my first playthrough. Not as good as skyrim or fallout but it was okay. The main issue is that it really had no replayability value, unlike every game in the es series and fallout series. i really hope they don’t make a sequel set in the same universe.

Honestly Starfield was Todd’s hope they could make a auto-generated goldmine but then reality hit that they were in fact just crapping the bed.

Starfield 2 should be about a full fledged solar system to explore before the invention of faster than light travel with few colonies that are on the way to war and epic ship to ship battles and…
… I think I’m actually describing The Expanse…

Starfield really grew on me, it’s definitely a SLOW BURN story but it gets incredibly good if you go into the game with ZERO expectations. I started to enjoy the game when I just accepted the game for what it was instead of what it wasn’t. I’ve since beaten the main campaign and have started the DLC.

Starfield got a lot of hate but it’s actually a good game imo.

The Outer Worlds 2 is fun as hell. Obsidian made a game that feels like a Fallout New Vegas successor, you can lie your way through the game, shoot your way through, or even sneak your way through, PLUS decisions you make have REAL consequences & it’s AWESOME lol

Happy gaming ✌️

I have no interest whatsoever in Starfield, The Outer Worlds, Elder Scrolls, Fallout or any western RPG guff, but this was still a great video.

Hey, there You are. You haven’t drop of the face of the earth after all!! I live You mate 😉

Starfield had bad writing and bad world lore. It is not a world that makes any sense. It is a world with few people, many in poverty while surrounded in infinite resources. It was a world that lost mobile phones/all communication and the invention of the wheel. It was supposed to be the spread of humanity and art through the universe. But there was no art or culture anywhere. Art design wise it was just copied art styles from star wars and star trek and nasa. Everything you saw in the game was generic sci-fi you had seen 100 times. It was fallout in space but the world lore didn’t describe a post apocalyptic world. An RPG needs good writing, good world lore, good characters. Starfield failed massively on all these levels. The dialogue was so bad I dreaded any encounter with the starborn. The main questline was just terrible…. finding Unity was a mission you should be ashamed to release.

The Mako was the BEST part of Mass Effect. Mako haters are the gullible sheeple who thought the problem with Mass Effect 3 was the endings…

More of this please 😂❤

Outer worlds 2 is great, Starfield was lame

Recently just started playing Starfield and loving it. I build bases anywhere and connect them across planets, i can build my own ships, i can specialize into different builds and skills, i can find all sorts of stories and quests and complete them at my own pace. But yeah ok i cant walk around a planet and there are a lot of 2 second loading screens

Doesn’t actually talk about the title of the video until about the 11 minute mark.😅

SW Outlaws and NMS have amazing spaceship gameplay

Whoever captured that Frontier: Elite II footage is some kind of hero. Probably sexy, too.

I struggle to finish this game. The faction quests shine but to get to it is a real slog and tedious bore.

Nothing? TOW2 is trash

Space probably shouldn’t be open world

Great video Jim. The truth is that in the modern era, there have been so many attempts at creating “THE” space game, and it seems inevitable that each attempt gets one thing right while missing out on so many others – presumably due to the scale required to get it all right at once. The narratives in Starfield/TOW, the eye candy of NMS, and the space trucking of E:D are all great in isolation, but it might be an impossible task to tie it all together into the “holy grail” game we all seem to want (ie the Freelancer successor). The demand’s clearly there; it’s the reason people keep spending absurd amounts in a game as broken as Star Citizen. Whether it’s feasible to deliver on all fronts is another question I suppose.

I agree.

Yeah it’s cute you think Bethesda will a) ever make a sequel to Starfail and b) exist in 2070.

What about that Star Citizen thingy?

great host, who isn’t an access-media shill.

I’m on my second play through of Starfield right now (the first was at release), the whole game just feels mediocre. The cities feel stale and boring and the dialogue blows, you point out the inclusion of things like restaurants but even there they’re just prop pieces…. Like Andreja mentions a couple times that she loves this specific restaurant in New Atlantis, so I go there thinking I’d treat her to a nice dinner but….. it’s just a walk up counter. Wtf is the point of having her repeatedly mention this restaurant every time we’re in New Atlantis, only to have nothing to actually do at that place especially when bribing the person who loves it so much. Everything feels underutilized in this game.

That being said the spaceship building is fun and well done, and I like the spaceship combat personally.

Elite “… about 4,000 years ago …” – and with that, I turn to dust. I PLAYED the original Elite. When it was NEW.

If they do a sequel, they should make an ‘Expanse’ sized solar system

They should just make a game that has an intriguing start of a story, a gripping second act, with a satisfying ending, all of which takes place over multiple planets. Don’t make space exploration the main draw—that’s just inherently going to be boring. Give me, the player, a good story that will serve as a vehicle to catapult me through space. All this space mumbo jumbo should really just be the skin, the frame work—the main game loop should be an adventure game, meeting characters, solving problems they have, or overcoming conflicts they pose, etc. Nobody likes Star Wars or Star Trek because of the flying through space—that happens, sure, but it’s only just 5% of the whole runtime. The rest is drama, action, adventure, on multiple planets or space stations, all exotic and exciting, designed by humans with intention and story telling in mind.

On the payroll. Game sucks a*s

This is why the best space game is Outer Wilds (not Worlds!). Much smaller scale, but the solar system is actually fully simulated, every single planet is very distinct, and the space craft actually behaves like you’d expect it to. And it’s also about the only game that actually makes you feel the cold indifference of Space.

When a “professional” think something like this I lost my faith. They are incomparable, stop.

Bethesda took on more than it could chew. It made sense on paper: “We’ve been making games with procedurally generated environment for ages. That’s practically a skeleton for a space game right there!” They probably didn’t realize it until they were already knees deep in development that the ‘Bethesda formula’ would make a terrible space game. People are willing to suspend their belief for a tiny capital city in a TES game, but a tiny capital city for galactic government is asking too much. Starfield should have focused on exploring the frontier where sparse settlements make more sense from a world building PoV.

more critique from this man please. I get a Charlie Brooker/Ben Croshaw level of knowledge with a Scottish matter of factness that is much needed

well put 👍🏽

“Nothing”, is the answer. It needs to learn absolutely nothing. I bought both games, happily spent over 800 hours in Starfield and having fun over and over, while I’m genuinely struggling to enjoy and finish my first Outer Worlds 2 playthrough, if there will even be a second one. Stop telling us what to like, damnit! Shut it!

It would be one thing if Bethesda’s problem were only a content issue, but the real problem is in their foundations. You can’t fix those in post-launch.

You nailed it!!!
BOTH Outer Worlds games are leagues better than Starfield and they don’t have ship combat. Procedural Generated content is fine for a Sim game (No Man’s Sky) but Outer Worlds, Mass Effect are HANDCRAFTED experiences. Bethesda decided to cheap out. I weep for the upcoming Fallout and Elder Scrolls, and I’ve been playing those since DAY ONE.

6:21 I mean, if Bethesda Game Studios by some miracle survives long enough to make a Starfield sequel, Todd Howard will likely be retired by then. They’ve got at least two other games in the pipeline before then and they take about a decade per game by this point.

1 Solar system with 10 planets and a bunch of moons. You could even include a rogue planet. Maybe even a mission where you land on a comet. There would be plenty of room for space stations. They could also do away with the Groundhog Day storyline.

Outer Worlds 2 was, objectively, not a better game than Starfield. I mean come on.

I quit Starfield in the first 30 minutes – as soon as it made me fly the space ship and use it in battle. All I wanted was Skyrim/Fallout in an alien setting. A single planet with various environments/climates/settlements/cities like in Skyrim would’ve been just fine.

the biggest problem they still have is where is the narrative hook? the multiverse is nothing, “NASApunk” is nothing, and explorers guild full of boring laughable centrists is nothing, so I can’t be arsed.

Starfield is like the 11th most modded game on Nexus mods. So how have modders abandoned this game in droves?

I generally really enjoy Starfield and I’ve struggled to put into words why. Starfield works when it’s smaller, with the specially crafted locations and written quests and NPCs. That part of the game I think gets overlooked due to the boring procedurally generated exploration. It’s just not needed. Here’s to playing Starfield 2 in my retirement home! Or nuclear shelter or whatever is bloody coming…..

Just make a more “game-like” Citizen Sleeper. The Citizen Sleeper games are absolute perfection, and they make awesome worlds and characters feel real and poignant. The first game is on one station and I loved it more than any other space game, and 2 is on one part of one belt of asteroids, and a 3D, Bethesda RPG in that world would be more incredible than any of the current crop.

Obsidian continues to 1-up BGS, first FO3 vs New Vegas and now Starfield vs The Outer Worlds 2.

I am fine with Starfield’s procedural generation, it’s the writing that failed for me. There’s an arrested and somewhat infantile theme to the tone.

Absolutely agree that Starfield should have been confined to a solar system. Starfield as it is is fairly barren, which is sad as previously – especially Morrowind onwards – Bethesda excelled with world design in their single player RPGs. Worlds full of character and stories you can randomly stumble upon (sometimes it’s just environmental storytelling!). I genuinely liked the factions stuff in Starfield but the exploration side was a big letdown, considering it’s outer space!

Space Travel is Boring by Modest Mouse sums up the problem with trying to do a Bethesda style RPG in space, especially because they opted to aim for a “realistic” level of encounter density. Boring!

How to fix them??? two words: The Expanse

Yes, great idea. The sequel to Starfield should cut out the thing people who liked Starfield liked about Starfield. The thing none of those other games offer.

They need to vehemently change the way they make games instead of letting a single man run it like a dictatorship a few former developers said anonymously in interviews that nothing that was done in Starfield without it being approved by Todd Howard first meaning they everything they did had to be run thru him and needs his direct approval to be implemented, they need to have a better collaborative work leaders voices are heard and game direction is properly planned.

The problem with Starfield is that they had one idea: a thousand planets to explore. Sure plenty of other games have had similarly brief core gimmicks, but they’re often at least a bit more fleshed out.
Elite has a thousand planets to trade goods with, No Man’s Sky has a thousand planets to fill with procedurally generated aliens and crafting resources, the X series has a thousand planets to not just trade with but also to serve as backdrops for exciting space ship combat.
But Starfield went for none of that. They just had to have a thousand planets, for no reason other than to have a thousand planets.

Freelancer combat please. Sit above a battleship and pick off torpedos, none of that chasing around malarkey. Nice can of Thatchers Zero on the desk. Sponsorship deal? 🤔

This oft-repeated claim that the modding community abandoned the game is objectively, provably untrue, and you have access to the same data the rest of us have that proves it. The game is already in the top 11 most modded games, will be in the top 10 soon, and the only reason it’s 11 now is Skyrim is taking up two slots instead of one.

“Can I pump the blue enby science princess” was answered by that trilogy REALLY wanting you to pump the blue enby science princess to the point they alone got special DLC in the second game just so you can do it while the other ME1 petrol station stands instead acted like you’d shat yourself in the bed.

Naughty Dogs Intergalactic will change everything

Are we really talking about Space Games and not mention the best of them? Outer Wilds? Are we really not even mentioning it, when it comes to scaling an entire Solar System? Having you explore a rich and vast feeling world where each planet feels more unique than the next? With a story that even perfectly integrates its space-themes and makes them the core?

Kinda surprised honestly

Has a Star field 2 been announced?

“Outer Wild” (sic!) does it best: 6 unique planets, flying there is engaging and quick, the planets are small and manageable. Perfect

Why have I never thought about Boots like that…

Really good video an analysis of the endless problem with this type of games. I’m in the small camp of really liking the good bits of Starfield so it’s nice to see someone actually point out the good things.

Another excellent Jim video 👏🏼

The problem with space games is that although aliens and different planets are cool “space” is inherently boring. Space is cool for maybe an hour before you youve seen everything you need to see in an endless void of literally nothing.
Pirate games have a similar problem but at least there’s waves, fish and other boats.

This was an excellent video. Throughly enjoyed it

If Bethesda tries to make a Starfield 2, I’m pretty sure Microsoft will shutter the whole studio.

You speak correctly – Star Wars: Outlaws was actually good!

Yes! I’m not sure why we need more than a system or two!!!

Why did Jim say “community” like that? 😢

You’re so great, Jim! Love your videos man.

… I will be coming for my nose

Will there even be a Starfield 2?

IMHO Starfield’s problem is not and has never been that it over relied on procedural generation – it didn’t rely on it enough!
Instead opting to procedurally place a bunch of hand crafted things rather than assemble new levels from bits of those hand crafted things.

Very well thought out video. Nice one

my god, seriously, why are you fucks still bitching about starfield? every day I see 3 to 4 new forced hate vids and some positive vids on this game, im like, its a 2 yr old game, and the way people call it dead online, doesn’t seem like it, i swear its get more buzz than a so called 10 on 10 game, you wont see people talking about the actual bad games 6 months down the line, which makes me realize now, that its actually far from a bad game, its just the internet has some agenda against it

Starfield would have been better if it had been limited to a handful of star systems. Not the dozens of empty desolate copy-and-paste place interest star systems, planets and moons.

I do like Starfield, pirate hunting, ship building and pretty much staying away from the boring main plot. It is such a disappointment when you look at the density of things to do in previous BethSoft games. Akila City is meant to be the capital of the Freestar Collective, but it feels more like an outpost, New Atlantis isn’t much better. Expanding the cities underground might have been a solution, but everywhere would likely look identical.

It wouldn’t have been all that hard to come up with some plot device explaining why interstellar travel is both possible but also limited to a few hand crafted systems. The existence of the Starborn is so woefully under utilised in the plot, they feel like a group of shoehorned in angry edge lord after thoughts.

How do you make space travel interesting? As you say there is no one correct approach, but there is an incorrect one and they found it.

I might be wrong but if they adopt a Death Stranding type concept in space games it would be much more engaging

I could go on and on about all the problems I found with Starfield but to sum up; boring, broken and belurg. Boring and broken speak for themselves but the bleurg is just the characters and the world. There was a cowboy theme park planet ffs. Also the skill tree was laborious and … trying not to go on and on….. Basically, Mass Effect was so beloved because of the characters. Sci-fi is beloved because of the weird sciencey/spacey stuff as allegories or metaphors for real human problems…. (except star wars which has cool swords and space wizards)

I’ll never understand bethesdas ongoing effort to streamline all the depth out of their games and replace all the handcrafted storytelling and environments with procedurally generated slop.

Starfield’s space really didn’t feel like space anyway though. It felt like the ship was in a rather small cube, like sitting in a simulator. I still don’t know what the problem was; maybe the camera remaining too static or the ambient audio wasn’t quite there or the perspective on objects looked wrong as they approached.. Whatever was going on, it was crap & should absolutely have been replaced with a loading screen (especially considering that it was already book-ended by loading screens).
That said, Bethesda’s been looking to offload more & more of the actual game making stuff to their players for a long time now, which is why those systems are just kind of there & not engaged with. Perhaps this time they flew too close to the local star.. or star-looking PNG.

Great homage to hitchhiker’s guide.