If proton devs put so much effort into starfield, imagine what they would do for a real game!
I applaud the article writer for being one of only 3 people playing starfield currently.
What is it that makes Starfield feel so pointless? like I don’t think the gameplay is that much worse than fallout 4 yet I knew I could mod Fallout 4 to be enjoyable but when I played Starfield I just didn’t care.
In Fallout or Skyrim you get asked to go somewhere, and on the way you stumble upon 5 new locations, a dungeon containing a unique weapon, and a questline. In Starfield you get asked to go somewhere, so you fast travel into orbit of the destination planet, fast travel onto a 10x10 minute patch of soil, and spend 3 minutes walking to your destination with nothing to do.
It’s an open world game that doesn’t have a reason to be open world. The open world is just empty procedurally generated terrain, with occasional creatures or enemies.
I once went exploring outside of one of the main towns. There were a few points of interest, but they were very few and far between. And they weren’t even really fleshed out. They were just sort of… There. Like you’d occasionally find a mercenary base, but there wasn’t anything beyond that. No environmental storytelling, no quest hooks, no purpose. It was obviously just filler content, like they slapped a few structures around the landscape so they could check tasks off of a to-do list.
In older Bethesda games, you could just pick a direction and start walking. You’d stumble upon interesting things fairly quickly, regardless of which direction you picked. But that’s not the case in Starfield. The worlds are almost entirely empty, save for the one or two quest points that pointed you at the planet. It felt less like “Skyrim in space” and more like “the worst parts of Mass Effect’s Mako missions, condensed into an entire game.”
It’s hard to sum up an experience in so few words but I’ll give it a try:
Fallout 4 has very high point of interest density and is also very colorful and filled with countless little fragments of an exciting culture that is the sci-fi 1950s lost to an atomic war apocalypse.
Starfield is just “you’re in space, enjoy it” and leaves you in this uncurated machine crafted literal desert. It’s the first of any Bethesda title to officially use procedural generation extensively.
It’s the first of any Bethesda title, to officially use procedural generation extensively.
There’s Daggerfall.
to be fair pre fo3 bethesda and post fo3 bethesda are two different companies. Fallout started with 3 and elder scrolls started with 5.
To be fair Todd Howard wasnt project leader until Redguard Adventures 1998 and then saved the company from bankruptcy with Morrowind starting in 2000.
But yes you got me there, Daggerfall is an absolutely huge game impossible without procedural generation.
That’s a pretty good summation lol. I played it for maybe 10-12 hours when it came out. And I actually did enjoy a lot of aspects of it. Truly. But it just didn’t hold my attention after that little honeymoon period. Once the allure of “cool, I’m doing space stuff” was gone, that was it. Just felt repetitive and grindy after a while.
numerous bug fixes, Creation Kit upgrades and there’s even a new Very Low graphics setting option.
So the gameplay still sucks, then eh?
STAREFIELD
They’re all just incredibly shocked you’re even playing the game.
I swear I’ve seen some of these faces on my companies teams calls 😆
😂
Despite getting ragged on for it, I really enjoyed the game. It wasn’t spectacular, but I found it fun.
It wasn’t bad… it just wasn’t… good.
I played maybe 50 hrs. Enjoyed some of the scenery and environments. But when neither the mechanics or story elements (for both main and side quests) really hooked me, I moved on.
It had all the same gameplay stuff as Fallout 4 and yet none of the interesting stuff you’d run across in the world like all their other games. It felt like it was made with zero passion. But I really, really like the guns; especially the MAG variety that fire a whole-ass wall of bullets.
