Bethesda are individually rebutting Starfield Steam reviewers, defending the loading breaks and "empty" worlds

Rock and stone, boys!

Damn, that's what I suspected.

Personally I really hate when you fight the same generic enemies but they just get bigger numbers to become bullet sponges. A lot of games that want to be "endless" do this, e.g. Warframe. At least make the tougher baddies bigger? Give them cooler armor or something? Don't make them look identical to the level 1 grunt.

Fuel exists but is inconsequential

My theory is that they used to have actual fuel costs but they cut it late in production when they realized it wasn't fun.

It would explain some of the loading screen tips that reference refueling.

Supposedly No Man's Sky was the vanguard of procgen but I wasn't impressed. I get the impression that Starfield uses it very similarly.

For characters and ships, all NMS seems to do is combine permutations of prebuilt parts, not create any actual unique parts. Spore was way more impressive a decade and a half earlier because it tried to animate whatever wacky creature the player designed.

For terrain, NMS doesn't even create biomes. You won't find a river, glacier, waterfall, or oasis anywhere. They didn't even apply the system to space stations, those are identical everywhere in the universe. Valheim and even Minecraft did better.

Is that an accurate comparison?

I'm completely disgusted by the thought, but I'm like 90% sure they half assed everything "knowing" modders would fix it and they fully intend on charging you for those mods...

It's absolutely fucking disgusting that Bethesda feels entitled to the profits of other peoples work to fix their shit games... They are testing out the new creation store with an update to Skyrim coming very soon and have already built starfield with that in mind (modders have already spoken about the difficulty of modding starfield at the moment because of these changes.)

They pitch it as a boon to modders as they'll get paid, but modders always had links to patron accounts that Bethesda/(now Microsuck) couldn't get their greedy fingers on... I hope no one mods the game to be honest even though I preordered it with the high hopes of modding making the game even better than Skyrim... Greed kills again.

Shipbuilding doesn't need to be rebuilt, just add the fuel mechanic back to give drive upgrades weight and add more space content.

Gun Modification is fine, it doesn't need to be overhauled. It can be better, and cosmetic paints could be added I suppose.

Food and Drink just need the previously hinted at survival mode, so you actually have to plan trips. Not rebuilt from the ground up.

Base building is fine-ish, just needs more benefits.

Research just needs rebalancing, it's fine as a gate for progression.

The map just needs distances cut in half for proc-gen formulas and more locations added to the pool.

The game doesn't really need to be rebuilt, it just needs a survival mode, some new assets and uses for base building (reinforced by survival mode), and distances cut in half for proc-gen.

I got it for free with my cpu, spent three hours trying to get it to work on Linux and then, finally achieving that, spent two hours in game and just got bored. The Bethesda veneer is fully on display here and it's hard to not feel like Neo at the end of The Matrix when he sees the underlying design behind everything. You just realize it's the same game all over again with a different skin, with no evolution in mechanics, UI, or technology.

I specifically recall getting to the major city hub and walking past a mission board and just thinking "well fuck that" and walking right past it. That is shit lazy design. Side quest emergence should be organic, not a shopping list. I spent twenty minutes trying to travel to a moon that was very much visible to me before realizing I'm not actually able to and have to fast travel. That was an unbelievably frustrating experience and is inexcusable given how long Space Engine, Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky, Star Citizen (at least partially) and others have existed.

The writing in the tutorial and Constellation intro fell very flat for me, and the hook was very very weak. The turnaround from "you're a nobody" to "you're a galactically important person" gave me whiplash and the Constellation group felt unrealistically eager to bring a stranger on board (except, of course, for token Mr. Tropey McGrumpypants). It felt less like a story and more like a shoehorn.

"Why would they do that?" "So the game can happen. " "Oh ok."

I mean, Bethesda writing has always been pretty bare bones and pedestrian, so I guess it's not that surprising, but it is still disappointing and jarring.

Oh and the companion robot was easily the most annoying companion I've ever had in a video game. I put it down after those two in game hours over a month ago and have had no compulsion to revisit it whatsoever.

I feel like Bethesda, from top to bottom, has a lot of introspection to do. Sadly, from this news, it doesn't sound likely to happen.

gameplay type ... survival

Bethesda never claimed starfield would be a survival game.

While the game does have a lot of loading screens, I think the disappointment mostly comes from people having wrong expectations.

The people complaining mostly seem to be people that expected a game that feels like an open galaxy Star Wars game. Starfield is not that. Starfield is more like a 2009 Space Odyssey game. It leans farther into "realistic" space games like Elite Dangerous and less into "fantasy" space like Star Wars. For example, planets in real life are mostly just lifeless barren rocks, as Elite and Starfield both depict. Actually, there is more to explore in Starfield than Elite due to the procedural cave systems and outposts on planets being more plentiful in Starfield. Elite feels bigger because there are other players playing with you, and both politics and economy change in realtime in response to collective player actions. Not so in Starfield. Elite is also very good at hiding its loading screens so that, for the most part, they do not interrupt gameplay like they do in Starfield. In actuality, Starfield is a bigger game than Elite. Not in that there are more planets or anything, but that there is more to explore. More NPCs to interact with in a meaningful way. Because Elite was built as a space sim and not an RPG, this is by design.

Starfield itself is quite good. The end user experience suffers due to loading screen fatigue and players expecting planets to not be barren lifeless rocks like they would be in reality. This is where I believe the problem lies.