Comment on New Starfield free update added a ground vehicle
shneancy@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoI’m a huge fan of bethesda games (well, mainly TES and Fallout) and bloody hell did the hype die fast as i was playing that game. Normally bethesda games keep me playing for months, i take my time discover the fun little quests and hidden areas with lore. But Starfield? there’s what, 2 decent quest lines, little to no meaningful lore (repainting death claws doesn’t count, and you somehow managed to make space cowboys boring? impressive). And the only actually interesting faction is just straight up missing from the game, and not in a fun “Dwemer are all gone what happened to them” way, no, they’re cultists who fucked off to do cultist shit and have no involvement in the story spare for that one guy who just goes “yea here’s the thing you need bye”. And then you go on to solve the big mystery of the universe with some half assed floating debri excuse for an important item.
And i know making NPCs is hard but why did you stop at 20? you picked space for your RPG game setting and then forgot to put people that are capable of a conversation in it?? i want to hear the stories a settler on a distant world has to say! but noooo because they have to be randomly generated and meeting the same person on multiple planets would ruin the “immersion” they failed to establish
sorry rant over
This would could’ve been so much more interesting, and so much more lived in if they hired more writers to write the goddamn lore so we can care about anything that happens in that world. Bethesda reheating the good ideas they had without understanding what made them good is just, infuriating. I wanted to love that game, but now it just makes me mad by how bland it is
ICastFist@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
My biggest gripe with the quests within Starfield is that everything feels absolutely pointless, every story, every quest, is completely isolated from everything else. I’ve never played a game that gave me such a strong feeling of “you’re achieving absolutely nothing”
shneancy@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
exactly! in Skyrim helping a little kid get revenge on a person who abused him gets you drafted into the murder guild, in Fallout:NV you follow a trail of a missing scientist and discover sentient plant life!
i remember so many little quests from those games because they turned out to be much bigger than i could ever imagine. But it takes courage to hide a chunk of your game behind a quest somebody could miss or even fail, courage that bethesda fucking misplaced somewhere and i doubt they’re even bothering to look for it
it honestly feels refreshing to be able to miss content in games, playing Baldur’s Gate 3, and then watching a gameplay of someone else playing it is thrilling, because look at all the things i never knew you could do, look at all the quests, npcs, items, i never saw. There’s a whole full fledged companion character that if you’re playing as the good guy, which is most player’s first choice, you yeet off the cliff the first time you see her and that’s it, she’s gone! Recently I asked my friend who’s been playing that game since launch “are there any other mimics in the game? I only discovered one spot with them” and he replied with “there are mimics in this game?”
argh and in Starfield all that mystery and wonder of discovery is stripped down for “convenience” of walking through a location and picking up 10 quests in a row titled “Help Bob, Help Sam, Help Biggus Dickus”. Why would I bother playing that quest if you didn’t bother to spend a whole 5 seconds to give it a unique name? Honestly it wouldn’t even be an issue if there was enough meaningful quests to play through, but there’s one quest that has any work put into it per faction so i guess i’ll go do that
ICastFist@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
Not to mention that like 99% of Starfield depends on any sort of instant communication not existing. I don’t even mean interplanetary, FTL communication, even cell phones and walkie talkies are completely missing from the game. I think the only time a character speaks to you via radio while you’re on foot, is during that “mandatory stealth mission” in Neon with billionaire idiot.
Oh, a significant portion of the stories also rely on portable cameras not being a thing. You know, the thing that every cell phone has had for well over 10 years now? That went completely missing 200 years in the future. Photographs? Video recordings? You speak funny, spaceman.