I honestly did not expect Starfield to have actual flyable spaceships and vehicles. That was a pleasant surprise, so Bethesda evidently has not stagnated completely. The problem is Starfield has issues with many other game elements (like loading screens, mediocre worldbuilding, etc). Also the fact that it was simply a game in a different genre than previous Bethesda games didn’t help. People expected a handcrafted open world a la Fallout 4 but got a kind-of-procedurally generated sandbox.
Absolutely. I think most of us are excited for incremental evolution.
And conversely a lack of that is the chief source of my frustration with games. Bethesda is another dev that comes to mind with the loading screen debacle that was Starfield.
deadcream@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Starfield was just weird. Like, I expected the load screens and all the other GameBryo/Creation jank. But that’s not what made it disappointing. It was just… Boring. I couldn’t get immersed in the world because nothing about it was interesting once you scratched deeper than the surface. Even the twist ending/NG+ system which is actually kind of a neat idea wasn’t done well (like you might have to go through the game up to 7 times before you even see a difference).
CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t know anything about the NG+ system because I steered way clear of Starfield, but it sounds like somebody at Bethesda saw people playing Skyrim over and over and thought “How can we monetize that”, hence the grind you’re alluding to. The expected you to encounter it organically because of course the game was such hot shit everyone was gonna play it forever. Oops.
Call me a cynic if you want but these are the guys who invented paid cosmetics.
Contemporarium@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
You’re a cynic
CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ecstatic! I’m sure it will go bad somehow, though.
FarceOfWill@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
The draw from Skyrim and other ES games is wandering around and stumbling on cool stuff.
They both removed wandering by having you fly your ship to a planet, and removed the cool stuff by making the planets procgen.
It’s good fun exploring the cities and space stations but then that’s it. They designed out the entire game in favour of more procgen content.