Starfield

"by popular demand" of the playtesters at Bethesda

There were complaints about it on the Starfield subreddit.

Truly this had to make it to the top of the list, ahead of NPC spaceship spinning in space like tops coz the ai is borked, or the space travel sucking, or the lack of detailed maps on planet. Or the ship builder's insane layout design and lack of ability to review ship interiors.

Eating sandwhiches were the deal breaker here.

Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems

This could be a forum signature. Or someone's last words.

Honestly yeah, that is a great quote the more I think about it. XD

Sounds like Pokemon Scarlet and Violet criticism too.

So Bethesda apparently is using ChatGPT to comment on/respond to negative Starfield reviews on Steam.

Which is... a choice.

Although I'll agree that the responses certainly look off, the article doesn't appear to imply that they are made by Chat GPT.

Yeah, but it's common theory among fans and professional commenters like Juice Head.

Yeah I mentioned Bethesda responding to the reviews a few pages ago. Some of the responses are hilariously missing the point (The aforementioned "The moon landing wasnt boring, and there's nothing on the moon, ergo our planets cannot be boring" in particular is hilarious)

and yeah, not seeing the Chatgtp bit.

I mean, be that as it may citing an article and implying that it proves they used Chat GPT when the article didn't do anything of the sort is not a good look. I don't think you deliberately intended it to be as such but that's frankly deceptive, if someone didn't click on the link (as many don't) they would be mistakenly thinking that it's a proven fact when it simply isn't.

Bethesda's response has been bad enough, we don't need to mislead people.

Even if they did, so what.

It's a dumb responses anyway. Not like they automated the responses (there's only a handful of them), so someone had to read this, go "Yeah it's good enough", and paste that under their company account.

AI or no someone had to approve of that response to post it, so if it's an AI who did the writing or a person, I don't see the difference, a person made this happen either way.

Yeah, this too. The responses are fundamentally bad regardless of the source. Focusing on Chat GPT is topical but practically speaking it's irrelevant, human sourced drivel is just as much drivel :V

Not a huge fan of the Forbes article.

I think Starfield is shit, but saying "The only new feature they added isn't a reason to come back" isn't particularly meaningful when, like, the game has been out for maybe two months?

Big interesting features for AAA Video games don't usually come out that quickly.

If Starfield had been out for a year and not gotten many patches or updates, sure, but two months? Calm down.

I do think the lack of player numbers is relevant though; contrary to some twitter comments. Twitter users defended it saying "It's a single player game so player numbers aren't relevant to game success".

And I mean, sure, that is far more important in a live service or multiplayer game. But it's still relevant to single player games. A game could sell A TON of units, say 12 million, and it probably says a lot if less than a thousand players have clocked more than 20 hours into the game.

It's not a subscription game where you're bleeding money, but still not a great look. I might akin it to a movie that has a huge opening weekend and then dies every weekend after; the marketing really sold the movie but no one wanted to see it after word got out on how good/bad it was.

Thing is, that article is largely defending Starfield. The writer makes the point that of course a single-player game is going to lose a lot of active players after a couple of months. Most of the people who bought the game at launch are simply done with it because they've played through all of the content.

The real test of Starfield's staying power will be if future content brings in more players.

Edited by M84 on Nov 29th 2023 at 2:19:12 AM

Of course a single player game will lose a lot of active players.

But you also wouldn't likely see it dip so severely and so quickly if there was also an intake of new players coming after the ones who started day one.

I mean, look at Skyrim, even if it's gotten new "editions" (I loathe to even call them that) over the years, you'd expect that to die off a lot as there's no new content. Mods, sure, but the modding community is also a lot smaller than the full audience of a game. Skyrim itself hasn't gotten new content in well over a decade, yet still has a pretty dedicated player base.

Ehm, even if you ignore Creation Club items and quests, there are at least two large questlines added in Anniversary Edition year ago or so. But I agree it's probably not a main reason of Skyrim's staying power.

In a way, I do think there are the bones of a really good game buried in Starfield.

Like the basic premise: A future where the Earth has been destroyed but humanity had time and the technology to evacuate and has spread across the stars within a hundred or so light years. There are three major human factions that have a rocky history but are not currently at war, plus a smattering of outlaws and independent worlds/organizations. Players will explore hundreds of worlds that consist of a combination of hand crafted and procedurally generated content as they uncover the nature of a mysterious set of artifacts of unknown origin.

That pitch sounds really good. The problem is that the procedural generation system isn't quite up to snuff for what they are trying to do with it. The main story hinges heavily on the player being invested in the multiverse for it's own sake and falls completely flat if you aren't. The heavily integrated New Game+ system means you don't really ever feel like you have reason to just go explore before you wipe the slate clean yet again.

I'd actually argue that the worlds being mostly barren isn't inherently a problem, but the lack of ground vehicles to quickly traverse empty land is.

Well the lack of anything interesting or new after spending 1 hour exploring any given random planet is kind of a deal killer, even if I could go pop donuts in a Mako a la mass effect. Like, sure, I can scan things, and get ressources. I have no reason to do the former, and I can just buy the later, which is both faster and more convenient that finding a planet that has the one rare element I want.

I do agree that on paper Starfield has the bones of an interesting game. The worldbuilding and factions are nice. There's even stuff I'll argue Starfield does very well - the handcrafted settlement show Bethesda's ability at visual storytelling via world design is still peak. Walk around New Atlantis for 10 minutes, even without talking to anyone, the design of the city tells you everything about UC: A stratified society that values order, its self image, papering over its flaws, with an eye to the future. Same thing with Akila city.

The gunplay is in general very good. Sure the perk system gets in the way and the game loves its Double Unlock, but combat itself can be very fun.

Edited by Ghilz on Nov 29th 2023 at 9:24:17 AM

Lack of creativity in setting is one of my main problem, to be honest.

It's bog-standard Firefly-ish setting with some cyberpunk flavour in Neon City. I can't think of any single unique or original element of Starfield universe.

Even aesthetics are inconsistent. NASA-punk evokes sense of discovery some unknown areas of space. But we actually never discover any new planet, come to think of it. It's like Star Trek: Enterprise with its "to boldly go, where everyone has been already".

What we are able to discover is... dissapointing.

Hadn't seen this one

The Modder behind "Skyrim Togheter" is abandonning Modding Starfield because "the game is too boring"

Everything connected to this game is baffling.

Starfield design director calls out unfair game criticism: 'Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is'

Marc Tardif, Studio Director at Bethesda Game Studios Dallas has left the company

Man, things are looking really bad for Starfield...

I think we're going to get one of those big expose articles about this game in a few months. Like what happened with Anthem. Because there has to be something going on behind the scenes that killed... any interesting story whatsoever.

I mean, again, I've yet to play it (I've got a lot on my plate so I'm waiting until it gets at least below 50%), but everything I'm hearing about the story makes me scream internally. This wasn't some random side project or an obvious cash-in, this was supposed to be a new flagship franchise. They've been hyping it up for years. Could they really not come up with anything even mildly engaging? Like, people complained about Fallout 4's story, but they talked about it, it was definitely engaging. It feels like pulling teeth to just get people to talk about this game's story, and of course it's inevitably just complaining.