I feel like that hasn’t been true since Oblivion. Skyrim has you getting dragon powers a few hours in. Fallout gives you a gun and you’re blasting stuff right off the bat.

It’s those earlier games that force you to slow down. Morrowind for example gives you cave outside the first town that will almost certainly kill you if you go in.

For me, it was a lot of small moments that added up quickly. (By a few hours, I gave it at least 10 or so). One big one was I’d chosen the talent where you get a house on a planet but with a mortgage. I thought this would be a cool way to give me an economic incentive to explore more etc.

I get to New Atlantis and follow the quest for this and I find out the ‘mortgage’ has no penalties, isn’t paid in installments, and can only be purchased in a lump-sum. So, it was a talent that gave me the ability to purchase a house and be able to essentially rent it on a per day basis until the full amount was paid. When I finally do get there the house is empty, and not all that fun to be in. No special quests etc tied to it.

Another moment that soured it for me, and this is a minor quibble but again they added up, was visiting The Eye for the first time. There was this big pile of trash in a corridor used as the block to the door to prevent further exploration. It just entirely took me out of my immersion in what should have been an epic moment. So much so I actually took a screenshot of it at the time.

A lot of folks are likely happy to look past those things but they all added up + reviews from folks further along in the story and gameplay giving a bad impression made me move onto something new. Super happy other folks were able to find enjoyment, just wasn’t for me.

I also didn’t resonate with any of the companions to a degree where I found them actively annoying to be around. I know some would say ‘just don’t loot’ but their constant calling out people who like to loot was annoying too.

Whereas with Outer Worlds I immediately loved Pravati (and most of the other companions too). Starfield I felt like I was talking to puppets only there because I was playing the game. Outer Worlds I felt a connection to their stories as much as my own.

That said, many systems in Outer Worlds were underdeveloped and parts of the game felt empty. It was a game of high highs but also low lows. It did make me excited for the sequel to build on that foundation though.

Genuinely curious, but what systems did you feel added more substance to Starfield? Dialogue choices and completing quests in various ways really made Outer Worlds shine for me, particularly in the DLCs.

Ive not played a single bethesda game beside starfield that didnt hook me a few hours in. They arent that slow to start.

I enjoyed Outer Worlds. It doesn’t hold a candle to Starfield.

I just have a hard time committing so much time for the chance for something to get good. Same for anything else. People keep telling me to watch one piece, sorry not going to invest time in something I am actively not enjoying until it gets good X hours in. That’s not getting good, it’s Stockholm syndrome.

Same here. I actually expected to be disappointed from hearing the early complaints. I got an xbox subscription because there were a bunch of games I wanted to play, so I wouldn’t feel bad if Starfield sucked.

Then I’ve ONLY been playing Starfield since.

That’s the thing though- I’ve already played fallout. I’ve already played Skyrim. There are mods and expansion packs that give me more of the same already.

What I expected wasn’t fallout in space, I expected innovation and iteration on a genre, not the exact same things in a new setting.

I think we can agree on some things, but I have no choice but to object to “genre = lazy”. There is a massive demand for a very specific set of gaming characteristics. Not only is it a silly move not to “scratch that itch”, but it’s a disservice to the fans of that genre to insist that there’s something inherently wrong to provide the exact itch in question.

I like obscure music from a dying genre that never really had a lot of legs. I just got introduced to a band called October Noir, and they’re blowing my mind. You could call them a cheap knock-off, a lazy attempt to get one last career out of the dead Gothic Metal genre. But as someone who has never had access to as many Gothic Metal albums as the mainstream gets access to Boy Bands, fuck that.

Bethesda addicts would consume 4 “Skyrim-Style games” a year, and have as much patience with them as hardcore gamers can be toward cheap soulsborne knockoffs. And I don’t think it’s an insult to the fan OR the companies making such a game.

In that way games are very similar to musical instruments like Fender and Gibson. Both have been selling the same thing for decades, their new stuff is pretty much just a shiny new version and the older the better.

yeah i completely agree. it’s in the details. there are so many oversights and inconsistencies that the game feels soulless, like they didn’t have a central vision they were trying to create. it’s a lot of jumbled parts that oddly feel both repetitive and disjoint. lots of the quests feel the same, and the game just gets so predictable.

Uhm. Yeah. Definitely check it out. Get some HD texture mods, ENB and a couple QoL mods and go for it. Some dungeons may get a little familiar but the locations are all unique and gorgeous. There’s even an entire underground world it definitely has the exploration appeal.

There’s too many basic things locked behind perk points before you can even begin doing whatever it is. Like, I spent most of a day to grind to get to be able to buy and fly a bigger ship only to then not be able to put any extra crew on the ship because that is also a perk.

Looking back at the 50 hours I spent on it, I have to contextualize how much of it wasn’t spent having fun. How many of those hours did I spend building an S-class ship and outposts with 4+ materials before I discovered that all of that was utterly worthless due to the main questline destroying everything? Building the ship certainly wasn’t fun. Having a planet on my screen for three hours at a time while I scout for an outpost one pixel at a time was miserable. The point of those was that the reward would be worth it, but then during the main questline it all gets erased and you have to push the stone back up the hill again.

Contrast that with the game I spent the most time on this year: Hi-Fi Rush. It took me 80 hours to FC that game, and I was having a blast almost the entire way through! The tower was a bitch and a half before I learned the meta, beating Mimosa without taking damage took a good two dozen tries, but you know what Hi-Fi Rush has that Starfield doesn’t? Exciting gameplay. A soundtrack. A story worth paying any attention to. Likeable characters. The Prodigy. Even though replaying every level on every difficulty setting is tedious as all hell, the process of doing it was still fun, and I can still open the game up and admire the Wall. I can’t open up my Starfield file and admire my fully customized ship, the Death of Shame. It was erased along with every outpost and every relationship with every NPC.

I mean, at the 1-hour mark I was starting with space piracy and having a blast.

The first 10-15 are misery if you follow the breadcrumb trail and don’t leave it. But the same is (more) true of Skyrim.

I was even kind of interested, but then I got further in the main quest and figured out what the ending is…

Then I felt like there was no point to anything I did.

In fact, it gets worse. As part of the main storyline, everything you’ve done is erased. It is literally not worth your time to engage with the systems in the game, because everything gets reset. The only thing the main story encourages you to spend time on is the worst game mechanic in anything outside of F.A.T.A.L.

Fair enough but it does sound very repetitive and grindy. Would you disagree?

How experienced are you with Bethesda games post-1995 or so? They all have the same grind-factor. The game is tuned so you can play and win with zero grind, but it has these “treadmill” mechanics that you can either embrace or skip.

If you want to max out your perks at level 328, it’s absurdly grindy. But you can beat the game around level 30 or so. If for some reason you want to max out a skill/perk you don’t really use, it’s a bit grindy. But if you use the skills as you get them and get the skills you’ll use, you unlock their levelups asically for free.

Maybe it is not bad but it definitely didn’t deliver what was promised

I hear this again, and again, and again, and again. But nobody has yet to cite one promise Bethesda objective broke with Starfield. You say “how could I expect that from Todd”? That means you know what kind of games Bethesda releases. And they promised a Bethesda game in space. And they delivered a Bethesda game in space.

I underestand people who hate Bethesda games. You can toss a pebble and hit one of them. But I really don’t understand the level of toxicity this time around. I actually almost didn’t buy Starfield, and boy am I pissed because it was a lot better than I expected.

I would say life is too short to play games you don’t enjoy. The 1-10 scale is trying to measure overall quality, not enjoyability to an individual.

I hate Witcher 3. Its 92 on metacritic doesn’t mean I have to force myself to play it more than I already have. But there’s a line after which I usually will not touch a game because its objective failings make it highly unlikely I will enjoy it. Starfield’s 83 in metacritic (not sure why the toxicity hasn’t dragged it down more yet, perhaps because it’s an echo chamber) puts it cleanly in a “give it a chance” level for me.

But in no way is it bad I dunno, many good points are made throughout this video about some objectively bad design decisions

Fallout 4 was even worse, that’s kind of a point I raise, that Bethesda has been riding the coattails of better lore. There are dumb fetch quests in every Bethesda game.

Daggerfall had some basic guiding principles that have been slowly stripped away by every new release…

1. It was unapologetically grimdark. The lore was dark, sinister, and scary… very Robert E Howard meets Lovecraft.

2. It was obsessed with simulation. They wanted a world that functioned logically… hour to hour, day to day, season to season, character to character, and as seamlessly as possible.

3. It strove for tabletop-level freedom without limits. You could climb, sneak, swim… across rooftops, in streets, in dungeons… there were no barriers whatsoever.

4. It reinforced that decisions have consequences, with multiple paths if you followed the main story.

With Morrowind, they killed the grimdark and gutted the lore. They replaced the existential dread of the lore with “weirdness”. They took the mature, unflinching tone out behind the shed… replacing it with T-rated YA content. Oblivion finally completed the transition from grimdark to sterile high fantasy. This is especially heinous because the Elder Scrolls Bible laid out the franchise from Daggerfall through Oblivion, and Oblivion was supposed to be the final, the darkest, most oppressive game in the series, being literally about the end of the world.

While Morrowind strove to preserve some of the simulation, the grand multi-season scope pared this back somewhat. From there, it never evolved or advanced at all, with each new game using the same minimal, basic simulation.

The tabletop level freedom was completely axed as a guiding principle. Instead, the gameplay became much more gamey. No longer would you sink if you tried to swim while carrying too much weight, climbing has been completely non-existent, dungeoneering mechanics - and dungeoneering as a major gameplay loop - were removed en masse… and all while the seamless open world has had more and more seams - loading zones, invisible walls, etc - added.

And finally, all consequences were removed as basic principles. You could join any and all guilds or factions, your choices had no ramifications or outcomes or branching paths… there was not so much as an attempt to maintain an illusion of impact on the story or simulation.

These are the things people are talking about when they complain about each new TES game being lesser than the one before. And worst of all, they took all this withering away of ambition and applied it to Fallout, gutting the IP’s very soul… and nobody really noticed this trend until Starfield, because it was a new IP that was less prone to being viewed through rose-tinted nostalgia.

Every Bethesda game that comes out (not just TES) is worse than the previous. Objectively. Because Todd Howard has removed every shred of fearless ambition from the company.

‘I’m idolizing my childhood so you must be too’ is not productive, to put it lightly. Daggerfall has a comically large empty world full of nearly-identical comically large empty towns. It sends you to dungeons that are hideously complex, which is a nice change of pace, but not exactly great to play through. Dialog is a lot more freeform, for better and for worse, and I could at least allow that dialog gets streamlined more harshly in every game.

Look: Daggerfall was ambitious. Its reach exceeded its grasp, by a lot - but it fuckin’ tried. That’s admirable, and something to strive for now that knowledge and technology have advanced so far. But it doesn’t make a jank relic with sink-or-swim gameplay the bestest thing evar. It certainly doesn’t make the homogeneous medieval aesthetic have more personality than mushroom castles, meteorite prisons, and a crab-dome city.

I didn’t start with Morrowind but Oblivion so you can’t blame nostalgia for my opinion, and I have spent around 50-100h on Daggerfall. Now that your point is invalid, do you want to try something else?

I’ve played Starfield for 30 hours and I’ve played about 10 hours now of BG3.

The difference is remarkable. As far as RPG goes, BG3 actually gives you a way to do the role-play part of RPG. You just have so much choice and your choices have consequences. For example, it turns out, someone died because I left an encounter that I wasn’t prepared for and that came back on me later when I found a guy that I should have had a quest line with.

You have relationships, you can choose several ways to approach problems and quests, and the character building is huge. There’s real strategy to everything.

Starfield is just so bland in comparison.

(BTW, BG3 combat is real difficult early on, where I’ve had to save scum just to make it past some fights, but at lvl 3 it gets more manageable. Definitely take time to learn your party’s strengths and weaknesses.)