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Most of the complaints I saw were how soulless and empty and sloppily made it is, so it's really just Fallout 4 in space
I regret to inform you that it is more soulless and empty and sloppily made than Fallout 4. You can repeatedly run into the same points of interest that have the exact same enemies, the exact same diary entries, and the exact same set dressing.
My favorite example is the racetrack some raiders have set up for robots you find in Fallout 4 where the only option you have is to kill everyone there. You can't enter your own robot into the race, bet on the robots, or anything like that. The only way to interact with this marginally interesting thing is to destroy it utterly.
I am certain Starfield has nothing even remotely that clever
I loath 'Raiders' and 'Bandits'. Who are these people, and why are there so many of them?
We must assume that 95% of Skyrims population turned to banditry because Skyrim is a barren wasteland inhospitable to agriculture. They commit their acts of robbery by sitting around in abandoned forts and mines until someone decides to kill them
It should be so easy to make the enemies in Skyrim make sense. There's a civil war going on, there can be deserter factions, mercenaries, hostile warbands, disparate ethnicities like the Forsworn, orcs and dark elves, and yes, bandits, but they should be opportunitistic thieves made up of people who can't make a living because of the war and ex-soldiers, not the majority of the population.
Bandits and Raiders are just the laziest form of enemy. They're people you only need to kill without having to engage with the story in any way, you don't need to think about the factions or politics or their cultures or histories. Compare how New Vegas has distinct raider groups, like the fiends, powder gangers and khans, who are all a part of the story and immediately hostile factions. They can be both, but Bethesda just can't write them like that.
What strikes me on my new Vegas playthrough that I just started is that everywhere I go it feels like a real place and there are things happening and there are people trying to make use of what's around. In Fallout 4. Everybody just sits there all day long. Basically doing nothing. Nobody has any ambition. Nobody tries to change anything or build anything. It's just so empty and soulless.
Yeah for sure. The story of Fallout 4 should have resolved before you ever thawed, or it shouldn't have been happening. The Minutemen were destroyed but I guess no one filled the power void. (What even were the minutemen? A political entity? Did they have a presence in diamond city or goodneigbor? Who paid them? Did they extract taxes from farms? I guess we'll never know). The Commonwealth is a place ravaged by Raiders who thoughtlessly kill and rob farmers, it's basically a no-mans land warzone, but for some reason, people still live and farm and trade there. The railroad and institute have no interest in anything that doesn't involve synths, but they're both in a complete stalemate before the protagonist arrives for no reason. The world doesn't need to literally progress without the protagonist present like in shadow of war or something, but the narrative should act like it will.
Bethesda is in love with this idea of the wasteland as a lawless wild-west with a million tiny factions and no states, even though it's been two hundred years and political power solidified in the west over a century ago. They even destroyed the NCR in the show so they could have this
the lumpenproletariat/lumpenpeasantry
Forcing Bethesda staff to read hobsbawms Bandits
Very different than, say, New Vegas where all the enemies that fill the "Raider" or "Bandit" niche are named factions with actual reasons for existing and histories that make sense. Legion, Vipers, Jackals, Khans, Fiends, Powder Gangers, and so on, and each of them has their own aesthetic and gameplay touches.
Well sure, I guess 90% of the enemies could just be random jet/psycho addicts wearing scrap metal who rush your power armored ass with a pool cue while yelling "Kickass!". That's fine too I guess...
At least NV gave their Raiders a bit of lore as to why they are meth addicted brigands.
The fuck? Being able to death race would have been a perfect minigame. Same with tears of the kingdom, you can make your own vehicles and there's only one racetrack and it's time trial and sucks?
borderlands 2 (another game about bizarre people in a post apocalyptic wasteland) had a great death race quest - the stuff between the Podunks and the Irish hillbillies or somethin
You get to play both sides in a conflict, that part you blow up their race track and cars and blame it on the other clan lol
that race track, the combat zone, and the entire gunners faction make it feel so empty.
mass effect's plot hook and installations with none of the bioware.
It's genuinely mindboggling how bad it is. The story, quests and universe are somehow extremely bland, boring and senseless even for Bethesda's standards, there's genuinely like twenty barely unique dungeons stretched over like two thousand planets, I'd be surprised if there were more than 10 enemy types, the base-building feels even less relevant than in Fallout 4, the "powers" are irrellevant and how you unlock them is ridiculously repetitive, the crafting is so much worse than Fallout 4 and the whole new game plus system just doesn't work at all.
The one thing I feel actually kinda works is customizing your spaceship (no matter how clunky it is) but they ruin even that in New Game Plus by giving you a shitty non-customizable ship that is just stats-wise much better than any other ship you can probably buy, although new game plus also removes all money and items you earned so you couldn't buy another ship right away even if you wanted to. The ship they give you doesn't even have chairs for your companions so they just stand around awkwardly and it also doesn't have crafting stations, making it even more useless.
It's by far the worst thing they've ever made and that's saying something.