Christ, Gwent happened. And my selective memory pushed out Fallout 76 already. The drop in quality, be it hobbled yet buggy mechanics or most shallow quests, is daunting.
Fortunately, many other devs delivered this year. As if hype does not improve products.
A lot of side quests was not great in Starfield. But faction quests and main quests are great. I am enjoying them as much as I did with best quests in Witcher 3.
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Deleted member 11852
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It also feels like there are a fraction of the number of side quests that in previous games. Either this, or I'm completely missing them but I'm a thorough explorer. That said, if they're squirrelling away great quests in places that are not sign-posted on those 1,000 worlds, then I'm likely never going to find them.
Fallout 3 is a great example where Bethesda have done this because whilst there are lots of side quests dotted around the locations that the main quests takes you, there are just as many randomly scattered around the wasteland. The difference is, you explore the wasteland organically whereas space and worlds in Starfield are all individual game spaces behind load screens. You can't 'see' something interesting far off because navigation is a star map.
I think this breaks what is a quintessential feature of Bethesda RPGs; travelling from A to B, then seeing something on the way and getting sidetracked.
Agree. I am 100% sure that dlc will fix most of the complaints. This game is very close from good to great. I am positive they can fix it. Basically this and what @DSoup mention and we have excellent game.
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Deleted member 11852
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Starfield 2 may be further away than that. In an interview with IGN's Ryan Mccaffrey over the summer, Todd Howard said he (rather than somebody else) wanted to direct Fallout 5, so I'd say it's almost certain that after Elder Scrolls VI, Fallout 5 will be the next title.
I really don't want Xbox management to meddle too much with Bethesda Game Studio but I can't get past that this team put out Oblivion in 2006, Fallout 3 in 2009, Skyrim in 2011 and Fallout 4 in 2015 - four game releases over a nine year spread - and it's taken eight years to deliver Starfield. The release cadence is too slow when you have three popular IPs.
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I don't see why those franchises would need to be helmed by BGS necessarily. They've been following the same formula since Morrowind pretty much, and they've managed to keep churning them out even though a lot of their talent has probably cycled in and out several times during that period. Seed a new team with some people from BGS and/or grab Obsidian. I guess the tricky part would be resisting the urge to use UE4/UE5 rather than Creation. As much as I may enjoy shit-posting about Gamebryo/Creation, if you're just wanting to get another BGS game out the door in a reasonable 4-5 years then stick with what works.
Two months after launch, Starfield has fewer players on Steam than Skyrim, which is 12 years old
The Starfield Steam player count has dropped below that of Elder Scrolls Skyrim, just two months after the new Bethesda RPG first launched.
www.pcgamesn.com
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Deleted member 11852
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Todd Howard. He said wants to direct Elder Scrolls VI (and will) and wants to direct Fallout 5. To what degree this is Todd Howard's decision any more is the question. If Bethesda cannot improve their rate of releases I can't see how it's good for Microsoft if Elder Scrolls VI doesn't release until maybe 2029, and Fallout 5 in 2035 and both assume a tighter six development cycle, down from the eight years between Fallout 4 and Starfield.
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
Two months after launch, Starfield has fewer players on Steam than Skyrim, which is 12 years old
The Starfield Steam player count has dropped below that of Elder Scrolls Skyrim, just two months after the new Bethesda RPG first launched.
Unsurprising for a single player game. Unless there is extensive mod support and availability (which Skyrim has in droves and Starfield has only started getting) there's little to no reason to continue playing a single player game after you've finished it. Basically there's tons of mod packs for Skyrim that adds 10's or even 100's of hours of additional fan made content where Starfield hasn't had time for those types of mods to be built.
That said it's still impressive that it currently sits at #56 versus #50 for Skyrim. Everything else around or above that are either multiplayer games or games with TONS of content mods or recently released games.
Regards,
SB
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arandomguy
Veteran
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
MS isn't against expanding studios and teams. They'll likely concentrate on DLC for Starfield and trying to get ESVI out by 2028 while trying to get Fallout 5 started by 2026 for 2031 release. Just a guess.
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Exactly. I was pretty confident before it even came out that this aspect of their games was gonna be hurt in Starfield cuz of the structure of the game. And that sucks cuz it's genuinely one of my favorite parts of their other games.
As for Todd Howard directing FO5, that's a bit disappointing if he insists on it. Microsoft have Obsidian sitting right there who have an extremely strong precedent in making a good Fallout game. Microsoft would be foolish to not insist that some parallel development happen here when these games take so long to make nowadays. Waiting until like 2035 before they can get another Fallout game out of this would be so wasteful from their perspective. They've got a golden opportunity here.
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I never considered for a moment that Starfield's universe would be carved up in way it is for this reason. I assumed (wrongly) that space would be seamless with an intermediate speed of travel between combat and the grav drive. When Todd Howard confirmed that there was no seamlessness between space flight and planets, I took that as almost confirmation of two spatial levels; interconnected space and planets, which would make sense.
It's a shame because the flight system is really good, and strikes a good balance between sim and arcade. They even created a ship stealth system
which is next to pointless because of the way you jump around, some encounters you cannot avoid because you're immediately on top of other ships unlike walking around in Elder Scrolls and Fallout where you an avoid encounters because they are detectable from a distance.
Even if they had seamless travel in and out of planets and handled everything as well as something like Elite Dangerous on the flight side, it was never going to solve the problem that each map/location would be necessarily limited. With 1000 planets, you simply cant populate them all with the same size and density of meaningful content that you can with say, Skyrim or Fallout 4 or something. So you were never gonna quite get that experience of just wandering around and stumbling upon all these cool things. Plus you cant have 1000 planets in the same system, so warping between different systems was also gonna be necessary, breaking things up at some point no matter what.
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Deleted member 11852
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True, I think the game would have been much better with less planets and moons lacking unique features but more hand-crafted content. And by hand-crafting, I don't mean the same 20 base layouts with identical interiors and corpses. It feels like the developer who pioneered diverse algorithmically-generated interactive worlds went backwards on the aspects that people interact with, instead chasing really interesting planet generation. And the planet generation is really, really good but without a reason to explore planets and moons, it's largely wasted.
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arandomguy
Veteran
It's a quantity/quality dilemma and I think scale seems to generally win out.
Personally I feel I've always preferred more hub based games, with more to scale/detailed hub areas (eg. Deus Ex style) as opposed to fully open world due to this.
There's always that bigger equals better thought process but the scale issue has always been problematic especially with respect scifi settings. For instance just look at how environmentally visually diverse and vast Earth itself is versus how planets are depicted in scifi, but we need a ton of planets for the numbers. Interstellar scaling is just simply absurd once you think about it, but scifi tends to treat it essentially as travelling from city to city, if not city district to city district.
I wonder if they considered going with moons and asteroids as the primary celestial bodies instead. You could plausibly setup dozens if not hundreds of moons contained in a single solar system (might be to close to Serenity) or even around a single large Jovian body. But "moons" doesn't market as well as "planets" even though realistically a moon is absurdly huge for a single person to explore.
What I've kind of always wanted is maybe a very tight knit and designed setting on something smaller like say a space station, think more maybe Star Trek DS9 (well that ages me, at least to when I last watched TV) size as opposed to Mass Effects Citadel (not sure if people realize off hand how absurdly large that would be to actually fill and explore).
And that was off topic side bar.
Personally I feel I've always preferred more hub based games, with more to scale/detailed hub areas (eg. Deus Ex style) as opposed to fully open world due to this.
There's always that bigger equals better thought process but the scale issue has always been problematic especially with respect scifi settings. For instance just look at how environmentally visually diverse and vast Earth itself is versus how planets are depicted in scifi, but we need a ton of planets for the numbers. Interstellar scaling is just simply absurd once you think about it, but scifi tends to treat it essentially as travelling from city to city, if not city district to city district.
I wonder if they considered going with moons and asteroids as the primary celestial bodies instead. You could plausibly setup dozens if not hundreds of moons contained in a single solar system (might be to close to Serenity) or even around a single large Jovian body. But "moons" doesn't market as well as "planets" even though realistically a moon is absurdly huge for a single person to explore.
What I've kind of always wanted is maybe a very tight knit and designed setting on something smaller like say a space station, think more maybe Star Trek DS9 (well that ages me, at least to when I last watched TV) size as opposed to Mass Effects Citadel (not sure if people realize off hand how absurdly large that would be to actually fill and explore).
And that was off topic side bar.
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100% agree. I wish they'd maybe done like two or three different systems each with multiple habitable planets/moons that each had a modestly large map with a bunch of stuff to find and do.
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