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[balls of snow]

Hey, you weren’t kidding when you said every faction has a woman as leader. Just encountered the the outlaw “Shaw Gang”, and guess what, their leader is a woman.

Killed her the moment she opened her mouth. Couldnt give a shit with Phantom Liberty so close.

 

[DeVeAn]

Hmm…I guess this is why I found myself speeding through dialogue. I enjoy the game, but characters are forgettable. It didn’t even come close to FO3 for me. Like a Dragon games are coming soon anyway lol.

 

[Arsic]

I think the further I get from my 70 hours with starfield the more warts I see.

I don’t think the writing is bad but it sure isn’t memorable. I know in a few years I’ll likely not remember any of the characters names except perhaps Sarah.

I’ve said it a few times last few days but playing CP2077 2.0 really highlights the issues with starfield 10 fold.

I’m glad ES6 will be open world because quick travel simulator with nothing in between is not it Todd.

 

[UnravelKatharsis]

The game strikes me as surprisingly uncreative in many ways. It's the year 2330, there are near infinite worlds to explore (in the games lore) and the famous tea store has "earl grey, chamomile" and some other normal ass tea on offer that I forget.

Also, the generation ship, I think it's called ESC constant, that's from old earth before grav tech......it has all the exact same equipment on it that all the modern ships have...and it hasn't interacted with anyone in over 200 years....it has eggmund speakers. Computers running "starware." The exact same lockers you find on modern ships. The list goes on. Its just creatively lazy.

I wanted to explore worlds but the game doesn't just let me do that, every colonized world has to have citizens talking about every planet worth visiting as I walk by so the game can give me a quest telling me to go there. I can't just be left to find it on my own.

I'm about to quit playing too I'm finding it rather boring.


Fucking "starware" was kojima given co-writing credits?

 

[Croatoan]

lol okay then

First. There is literally no way what so ever to create or meet a woman in this game with bigger bust than like C cups without it being a fat person. The body morph sliders are completely broken. Hour glass figure don’t exist in this world. Go for a thin waist and the ass gets flatter than on some marathon runner. Literally the biologically preferred body type with wide hips don’t exist. Only if it’s a fat person. No pear shapes. No wide hips and thin waist. Can’t even have a round bigger butt or thicker thighs, and this is in a game made in 2023 when everybody including their grandmas are working out doing a million squats per day specifically to build that type of body. Don’t know if it’s some western politically correct sexualization or objectification protest or whatever it is but it’s quite possibly the most boring character design tool ever and since they use the same tool for all characters it means the whole universe is boring. Can’t believe nobody on the team of 500 or whatever devs hasn’t noticed it.

Secondly. There is no clothes anywhere in this game that in any way trigger anyone to be turned on. Not even in the night club. It’s like some office space unisex casual friday every day in the whole universe at the same time. They even messed up Andreja’s fairly nice black default clothes where you can get hints of some nice legs hiding underneath and placed some wrinkle on the skirt thing on the front so it looks like she’s sporting a hard-on if you look at her from the side.

There is more but I need breakfast

This is why I will wait a year for the CBBE female body mods and clothing/armor to come out before I play the game.

Ohh and for some modder to replace the female companions with a chat gpt bot that is better at being human than Bethesda’s writers.

Balder’s Gate 3 has set the standard for companions in rpg games moving forward. Match or do better than that or don’t even try.

 

[manlisten]

Hey, you weren’t kidding when you said every faction has a woman as leader. Just encountered the the outlaw “Shaw Gang”, and guess what, their leader is a woman.

Yeah, this too. I don’t really care about this for the most part, but the agenda is so in your face that I can’t help but roll my eyes eventually.

 

[German Hops]

The boss man went H.A.M. !

 

[MasterCornholio]

Children story time?

Mark Cernys club?

 

[Thabass]

Easily the worst aspect of the game for sure, even worse than that you can't free travel to planets from space (meaning you can enter the atmosphere yourself instead of fast travel).

That said...this is my favorite Bethesda RPG...mainly because the shooting mechanics aren't ass.

 

[ZoukGalaxy]

I mean… wtf is this supposed to be?

 

[Bojji]

Killed her the moment she opened her mouth. Couldnt give a shit with Phantom Liberty so close.

Same position here...

I like Starfield, but game has many problems. I completed all meaningful quests right now (~70h) and it's time to finish main quest and don't look back. I'm glad I got Steam key for free from a friend (he got it with AMD GPU), I rated it at first as 8/10 but it's 7/10 after all.

Good game but with time and money it got it should be much better.

 

[RoboFu]

I was playing some last night and in more than one occasion I saw a female npc walking around in just her underwear . Is this a new bug? Lol

 

[Atrus]

In the end, Starfield is a mediocre game that somehow seems rushed and reliant on nostalgia around the previous Bethesda games to drive sales. It's probably the worst open world style game they've released with gameplay that is a step back from Fallout 4 from almost a decade ago. Planetary exploration is a poor interpretation of it, space sim and trucking is beat by Wing Commander Privateer (which released in the 90's), and the building portions suffer from design limitations like they just gave up after the minimum required to tick a box.

It can be a good game if you focus on the main quest and factions, but there's a feeling of some sort of development rush or laziness that brings the whole thing down the more time you spend with the game. The Companions are essentially the same person with different origin stories to more easily fit into the overall game with little effort. The story itself takes place is a sterile, barely reactive galaxy that is effectively the same at the end as the beginning, which allows for easy partitioning of quests into their small quest loops but it fails to drive a meaningful or memorable overarching plot. There are several factions but no inter-faction reputation and intrigue since they are self-contained and modular for ease of design.

I really doubt Bethesda will waste any effort trying to fix elements of their game to the scale that CDProjeckt did with Cyberpunk.

 

[ZoukGalaxy]

Main characters are barely better(??) than ps4 launch characters dude...

On the matter, I really think that The Order 1886 deserve to be named regarding the accomplishment that the game reached with the incredible character models and generally speaking, graphics.

 

[the_master]

Reconsider your life choices.

You banned him for that comment?

 

[Gp1]

I really doubt Bethesda will waste any effort trying to fix elements of their game to the scale that CDProjeckt did with Cyberpunk.

I still believe that they will try to fix this on the go.

Bethesda still need that juice dlc revenue to their results.

 

[Raonak]

I think you nailed why I've never liked a Bethesda RPG.

Their writing and characters in all their games are so boring and uninteresting. Like I can't even remember an interesting character in all of them.

 

[ResurrectedContrarian]

Amazing, I haven't played Starfield but the OP captures exactly what is currently making the entire gaming industry into a braindead committee project.

It seems clear to me that games at large scale (I mean: company scale) simply can't be made with quality. It's impossible. Once your team size is large enough, you end up with a thousand corporate middle-managers and employees just drawing a check in 50 layers of chairs, and every bit of authorial spark that might have ignited a unique experience is systematically squashed. You'll farm out many individual components like the dialogue and mission design to a set of people who have no genuine technical skill or vision of the project, so you end up with their bland and safe corporate-approved contributions all over the game, and every character you meet is simply insufferable.

The greatest games of all time were made by smaller teams of dudes working around the clock on passion projects, and it's fundamentally impossible to beat that. The corporate gaming world of today exists to avoid having a few exceptional dudes pursue their uninhibited taste and vision--it's a giant apparatus designed only to Karen-ize every fact of their lives, wrap identity nonsense and progressive values around every loose edge or idiosyncratic idea that might have been great, and push those brilliant developer minds into the background.

These games are now primarily made by people who don't understand the systems or genres at all, who are mediocre employees rather than the exceptional talent that should be given full reign, and who fundamentally resent the fact that a few men created all these systems and genres on their own as a hobby.

 

[Darkmakaimura]

 

[Varteras]

You banned him for that comment?

Not likely that comment alone. Some people just have a history here. Still, not a good idea to act like a douche to the owner.

 

[Meifu]

You compare this game with even the first few conversations in Morrowind off the boat and it's honestly embarrassing, there's no soul at all

 

[LegendOfKage]

This was a lot of words to say "Starfield is woke, and it caused the writing to be bad."

This is also a great example of why I try to avoid the word woke. It's a shortcut to describing this sort of thing, and an accusation often made without presenting evidence. This post did the opposite, and it would be nice to see more people write criticism with that in mind. Avoid the pejorative buzzword that causes people to just get hung up on semantics, and instead actually make an argument and list reasons and examples.

This was fun to read, and it made me feel I'm not missing out on Starfield, because storytelling and interesting characters are one of my favorite part of RPGs. I like my shades of grey, and it's lame when you're directed towards a series of good guy / bad guy choices with no nuance and ultimately no real feeling of genuine humanity. It's ultimately a childish way of looking at the world.

 

[Simpkin92]

Only took me 8 hours to decide I wasn't feeling it.

Took me 13. Haven’t felt like playing more

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

In a mission where Andreja is your forced companion, you dock with a ship with the intention of stealing an item from the owner. This a morally gray mission where you’re expected to con the owner, burglarize him, or kill him in order to retrieve the item.

Pretty sure whoever is your "forced" companion on that mission is random or based on some other things (affinity?), because mine was Sam and he was down for all the shenanigans I pulled there.
I actually had no companions for like 70 hours, but when I eventually did I spent most of the time with Sam and he was generally cool\like minded about many things; sarah is the only one that gave me shit randomly, benched her immediately of course.

 

[GooseMan69]

Starfield is one of the best things to ever happen to Cyberpunk.

 

[Sensates]

There's more effort from TS in writing than Bethesda.

 

[Aurelius]

I agree so much with the OP. The companions are just plain annoying (Sarah) or just leave me cold. I don’t care about anything they have to say. I found that the most enjoyable way for me to play is going solo (with the robot), and just play as a rogue time who is in it to enrich herself.

 

[MidGenRefresh]

Main characters are barely better(??) than ps4 launch characters dude...

Dishonest comparison. One is a linear game, one is BIG, open action RPG!

Spoiler

Oops.

 

[MrTroubleMaker]

Pretty sure whoever is your "forced" companion on that mission is random or based on some other things (affinity?), because mine was Sam and he was down for all the shenanigans I pulled there.
I actually had no companions for like 70 hours, but when I eventually did I spent most of the time with Sam and he was generally cool\like minded about many things; sarah is the only one that gave me shit randomly, benched her immediately of course.

correct, the companion with lowest affinity goes with you. If I do some stealthy stuff and get stuck with a companion, I usually tell the companion to wait (at the start area) and pick them up later.

 

[Ammogeddon]

I’m still enjoying Starfield but jumping back into Cyberpunk really shows the difference in writing quality.

Also, I think BGS made some bad decisions with Constellation and the player’s place within it. For all the freedom you get in the game you quite often get chastised for wrong think. I don’t even take the companions with me anymore.

Yesterday Matteo had a meltdown about Starborn. I’m not sure what BGS’ angle is but he was objectively being OTT. I made some comment about his behaviour which resulted in Sarah and Barrett disliking it!! What?

It may not have consequence but BGS doing that is pretty much saying there’s a right and wrong way to reply, if you want to conform to what they deem socially acceptable. I reloaded the conversation and picked the bland choice, as expected Sarah and Barrett liked it. Fuck them.

 

[StueyDuck]

On the matter, I really think that The Order 1886 deserve to be named regarding the accomplishment that the game reached with the incredible character models and generally speaking, graphics.

I could be entirely wrong, but i seem to remember the character artist from the order going to ND and working on U4 and TLOUp2 . which would explain why those characters are great looking too

 

[ShaiKhulud1989]

Good writing in an RPG means different things to different people. You might appreciate meaningful choices. You might appreciate deep conversations with realistic characters. You might appreciate an epic adventure full of memorable twists and turns. You might appreciate years spent on developing the worldbuilding for an interesting universe full of diverse characters, races, species, backgrounds, and ideas.

Well, Starfield fails at RPG writing on every level. This doesn’t mean it’s a worthless failure of a game overall. The core mechanics of exploring, shooting, and looting can hold your attention, just as they may have in Bethesda’s previous open world RPGs. But at every turn the writing slaps you in the face.

Let’s start with the companions. Dear god. All of them are Lawful Good wet blankets who criticize you every roughly 15 seconds. Inventory over the minuscule weight limit? “Have you considered NOT picking up everything you can find?” every time you pick up an item. Stealing something, including from villains? “Wow, I didn’t realize I was hanging out with a CRIMINAL” every time you pick up an item. Get into a fight that you could have conceivably avoided via dialogue options? They will sometimes leave your party and brand you irredeemable, even if the only way to avoid the enemies attacking you was through a persuasion check that you failed, leaving you with no choice but to defend yourself. You’ll still be met with the companion leaving your party and refusing to talk to you. Unless every step you take is within their exacting moral expectations you will be reprimanded or dumped.

There are also story beats with bizarre turns. During one of the main faction quests, you are given one of your few pseudo-consequential player choices. Basically, you can choose a risky scientific option that unleashes genetically engineered microbes onto humanity to solve the problem, or a less risky naturalistic option where you breed an animal that will take care of the problem. If you choose the sensible naturalistic option with what is essentially a guaranteed good outcome based on the evidence presented to you, your companions will condemn you as a mouth-breathing moron. If you choose the risky scientific option that explicitly has a chance of wiping out humanity by mutating in unknown ways, your companions will laud you for “Trusting the Science" (actual quote), in what is a bizarre, warped take on recent events political messaging, considering how risky the in-game choice is.

Not only that, but if you have a companion in your party, good luck picking any of the rare Han Solo style dialogue options. In a mission where Andreja is your forced companion, you dock with a ship with the intention of stealing an item from the owner. This a morally gray mission where you’re expected to con the owner, burglarize him, or kill him in order to retrieve the item. When you enter the ship, you’re met with one of the owner’s employees, and he asks you why you’re there. You only have two dialogue options: one, be an imbecile and tell him exactly why you’re there, or two, you can reply facetiously that you heard there was a big party on the ship and you’re here to party. If you say the latter, Andreja, who is literally there to help you steal the item by any means necessary, will respond by Disliking your comment and interjecting flatly that she “has no interest in partying.”

It's a problem endemic to all the characters in Starfield. It was marketed as a Han Solo simulator, but you are constantly badgered and browbeaten by catty, humorless women for anything you do. I won’t dwell too much on the ideological choices made to satisfy the current year climate but suffice to say that roughly 90% of the leaders in Starfield are women. And they are one-dimensional, deeply unlikeable charisma black holes who will talk to you with utter contempt most of the time. Of the remaining 10%, most of the men are presented as incompetent or evil. It’s a galaxy ruled by Karens. And the Karens are also your party members and love interests. I have never experienced a more unlikeable cast of characters in an RPG.

Let’s also consider the dreaded romance options. The first romanceable companion you encounter is Sarah. Sarah is a middle-aged ex-military leader who runs the organization you join. She’s quick to criticize you and expects you to do the conventional and lawful thing at all times. If you romance her, by choosing options like Trusting the Science and by praising her awkwardly at every opportunity in a way that would be creepy and weird to any actual human being, she will eventually begin to trust you and open up. Now, by opening up I mean she will reveal herself to be a giant ball of insecure, wallowing baggage that you are expected to comfort with dialogue options that reduce her to the emotional maturity of a small child. “Wow, you’re so strong, Sarah! Good job staving off that nervous breakdown over nothing, Sarah!” Then, inexplicably, you will end these conversations about her baggage with a “Flirt” option if you want to pursue her romantically. She will rebuff your advances awkwardly and end the conversation every time. Do this on around a dozen separate occasions, with no actual romance or flirtation between you two, only rejections at the end of your impromptu therapy sessions, and she will trust you enough to take you on her loyalty mission, which is literally to confront her emotional baggage. Complete that and she will decide that she can get involved with you romantically. Without any intimate moments, explicitly or implicitly, she will then decide that she has fallen in love with you and want to get married. Handle her baggage for her --> let’s get married. That’s how it works for humans, right? Right?

I’m genuinely horrified by the writing in this game, and I pity the people who conjured up these character interactions. They must live some of the dullest and most dysfunctional lives imaginable.

Starfield displays time and time again, without fail, that it fundamentally lacks understanding of the human condition. You land on worlds with the premise of a dystopian cyberpunk society where hard drugs are legal and everything is available for a price. When you arrive, though, all you’ll find is some tepid fully clothed dancing at a bland nightclub and a few people talking about how cu-raaazy everything is. It’s a game unwilling to explore humanity’s faults and genuine human drama on any level. At the futuristic fashionista clothing stores your only options are literally unisex tarps. Everyone is of varied ethnicity but there is no ethnic culture whatsoever. Women are purely masculine, leaving no one left to be feminine. This is not a demand for T&A by any means. In the real world, men and women don’t wear tarps and talk in monotone at a safe distance, defined purely by their profession. Life is messy and dramatic, desires and egos clash, stars rise and fall, people love and lust and hate and trust and betray. But not in Starfield, a corporate-sanitized ideological bog too afraid to include one iota of humanity in its storytelling.

RPGs are doing so much more elsewhere, from Baldur's Gate 3 to Cyberpunk 2077, but even looking back at Bethesda's own games, this one is a step backwards. The Elder Scrolls games incorporate different ethnic backgrounds and intense religious beliefs, ugly racial prejudice and morally gray deities. Starfield reeks of design by committee resulting in a product too afraid to take any storytelling risks. Nothing can ever be well-written when it is this extraordinarily conformist and risk-averse, particularly when the expectations for political correctness are so narrow in 2023.

You can do better.

Thank you so much for this post. Bethesda writing became a meme at this point.

 

[Raonak]

This was a lot of words to say "Starfield is woke, and it caused the writing to be bad."

This is also a great example of why I try to avoid the word woke. It's a shortcut to describing this sort of thing, and an accusation often made without presenting evidence. This post did the opposite, and it would be nice to see more people write criticism with that in mind. Avoid the pejorative buzzword that causes people to just get hung up on semantics, and instead actually make an argument and list reasons and examples.

This was fun to read, and it made me feel I'm not missing out on Starfield, because storytelling and interesting characters are one of my favorite part of RPGs. I like my shades of grey, and it's lame when you're directed towards a series of good guy / bad guy choices with no nuance and ultimately no real feeling of genuine humanity. It's ultimately a childish way of looking at the world.

The problem is that there's so many ways to be woke but also interesting.

Stuff like anti slavery and anti colonial messaging and storylines involving indeginious planet populations. Or stories involving metahumans and intolerance towards them and whatnot. From what I've gathered there aren't even any trans people in starfield. Let alone non binary romance options. So for a woke game, it isn't really that woke.

Like sure some people are complaining that there's no sexy ladies in the game. But if they did fix that would it really make the game any better?

Starfields problem is that it's bland. They created a universe that feels like it's completely devoid of any personality

 

[violence]

I still really like the game, but I can see the Fallout 3 writers were probably having more fun by comparison.

 

[YuLY]

I'm loving the game. Its unique and really is the only game on the market that lets you have a full space adventure: from stealing and selling ships after boarding them in space and killing the crew up-close, to doing bounties for Tracker Alliance, to smuggling harvested organs contraband and selling at The Den to Trade Authority no questions asked, to fully surveying planets and selling the data.

All this is dwarfed by the fact that people didnt get a skyrim in space?? Dunno man. Personally as someone who has Mass Effect 1 as his favorite game, this is the only game that came close to that style, except no real overarching threat, which I would have preffered. Just finished Cydonia after previously doing New Atlantis fully, the quests are many and some are really cool and feel like a space adventure, like the Travis one on Cydonia with all that happens just cause he needed some new tools for this workers.

Evilore mentioned that most of bosses are females. I'm not sure where that came from. From what I've played:
-Cydonia, ruled by male governor. The main boss of the miners is also Travis, a dude.
-Akila was founded by a dude, Coe's ancestor and the sheriff is a dude.
-Crimson Fleet is ruled by a dude, yes 2nd in command is a chick but still ruled by a dude.
-Ecliptic mercs are ruled by Commander Creek, a dude
-UC SysDef Commander of Vigilance that gives u the Pirates questline is a dude
-Even Constellation, it was founded by a dude and current sponsor/guy with money is the old man who owns the staryard company, even if Sarah is the "Chair".
I dunno man, maybe I didnt explore enough, but it seems like a non issue to me.

 

[Toots]

Good writing in an RPG means different things to different people. You might appreciate meaningful choices. You might appreciate deep conversations with realistic characters. You might appreciate an epic adventure full of memorable twists and turns. You might appreciate years spent on developing the worldbuilding for an interesting universe full of diverse characters, races, species, backgrounds, and ideas.

Well, Starfield fails at RPG writing on every level. This doesn’t mean it’s a worthless failure of a game overall. The core mechanics of exploring, shooting, and looting can hold your attention, just as they may have in Bethesda’s previous open world RPGs. But at every turn the writing slaps you in the face.

Let’s start with the companions. Dear god. All of them are Lawful Good wet blankets who criticize you every roughly 15 seconds. Inventory over the minuscule weight limit? “Have you considered NOT picking up everything you can find?” every time you pick up an item. Stealing something, including from villains? “Wow, I didn’t realize I was hanging out with a CRIMINAL” every time you pick up an item. Get into a fight that you could have conceivably avoided via dialogue options? They will sometimes leave your party and brand you irredeemable, even if the only way to avoid the enemies attacking you was through a persuasion check that you failed, leaving you with no choice but to defend yourself. You’ll still be met with the companion leaving your party and refusing to talk to you. Unless every step you take is within their exacting moral expectations you will be reprimanded or dumped.

There are also story beats with bizarre turns. During one of the main faction quests, you are given one of your few pseudo-consequential player choices. Basically, you can choose a risky scientific option that unleashes genetically engineered microbes onto humanity to solve the problem, or a less risky naturalistic option where you breed an animal that will take care of the problem. If you choose the sensible naturalistic option with what is essentially a guaranteed good outcome based on the evidence presented to you, your companions will condemn you as a mouth-breathing moron. If you choose the risky scientific option that explicitly has a chance of wiping out humanity by mutating in unknown ways, your companions will laud you for “Trusting the Science" (actual quote), in what is a bizarre, warped take on recent events political messaging, considering how risky the in-game choice is.

Not only that, but if you have a companion in your party, good luck picking any of the rare Han Solo style dialogue options. In a mission where Andreja is your forced companion, you dock with a ship with the intention of stealing an item from the owner. This a morally gray mission where you’re expected to con the owner, burglarize him, or kill him in order to retrieve the item. When you enter the ship, you’re met with one of the owner’s employees, and he asks you why you’re there. You only have two dialogue options: one, be an imbecile and tell him exactly why you’re there, or two, you can reply facetiously that you heard there was a big party on the ship and you’re here to party. If you say the latter, Andreja, who is literally there to help you steal the item by any means necessary, will respond by Disliking your comment and interjecting flatly that she “has no interest in partying.”

It's a problem endemic to all the characters in Starfield. It was marketed as a Han Solo simulator, but you are constantly badgered and browbeaten by catty, humorless women for anything you do. I won’t dwell too much on the ideological choices made to satisfy the current year climate but suffice to say that roughly 90% of the leaders in Starfield are women. And they are one-dimensional, deeply unlikeable charisma black holes who will talk to you with utter contempt most of the time. Of the remaining 10%, most of the men are presented as incompetent or evil. It’s a galaxy ruled by Karens. And the Karens are also your party members and love interests. I have never experienced a more unlikeable cast of characters in an RPG.

Let’s also consider the dreaded romance options. The first romanceable companion you encounter is Sarah. Sarah is a middle-aged ex-military leader who runs the organization you join. She’s quick to criticize you and expects you to do the conventional and lawful thing at all times. If you romance her, by choosing options like Trusting the Science and by praising her awkwardly at every opportunity in a way that would be creepy and weird to any actual human being, she will eventually begin to trust you and open up. Now, by opening up I mean she will reveal herself to be a giant ball of insecure, wallowing baggage that you are expected to comfort with dialogue options that reduce her to the emotional maturity of a small child. “Wow, you’re so strong, Sarah! Good job staving off that nervous breakdown over nothing, Sarah!” Then, inexplicably, you will end these conversations about her baggage with a “Flirt” option if you want to pursue her romantically. She will rebuff your advances awkwardly and end the conversation every time. Do this on around a dozen separate occasions, with no actual romance or flirtation between you two, only rejections at the end of your impromptu therapy sessions, and she will trust you enough to take you on her loyalty mission, which is literally to confront her emotional baggage. Complete that and she will decide that she can get involved with you romantically. Without any intimate moments, explicitly or implicitly, she will then decide that she has fallen in love with you and want to get married. Handle her baggage for her --> let’s get married. That’s how it works for humans, right? Right?

I’m genuinely horrified by the writing in this game, and I pity the people who conjured up these character interactions. They must live some of the dullest and most dysfunctional lives imaginable.

Starfield displays time and time again, without fail, that it fundamentally lacks understanding of the human condition. You land on worlds with the premise of a dystopian cyberpunk society where hard drugs are legal and everything is available for a price. When you arrive, though, all you’ll find is some tepid fully clothed dancing at a bland nightclub and a few people talking about how cu-raaazy everything is. It’s a game unwilling to explore humanity’s faults and genuine human drama on any level. At the futuristic fashionista clothing stores your only options are literally unisex tarps. Everyone is of varied ethnicity but there is no ethnic culture whatsoever. Women are purely masculine, leaving no one left to be feminine. This is not a demand for T&A by any means. In the real world, men and women don’t wear tarps and talk in monotone at a safe distance, defined purely by their profession. Life is messy and dramatic, desires and egos clash, stars rise and fall, people love and lust and hate and trust and betray. But not in Starfield, a corporate-sanitized ideological bog too afraid to include one iota of humanity in its storytelling.

RPGs are doing so much more elsewhere, from Baldur's Gate 3 to Cyberpunk 2077, but even looking back at Bethesda's own games, this one is a step backwards. The Elder Scrolls games incorporate different ethnic backgrounds and intense religious beliefs, ugly racial prejudice and morally gray deities. Starfield reeks of design by committee resulting in a product too afraid to take any storytelling risks. Nothing can ever be well-written when it is this extraordinarily conformist and risk-averse, particularly when the expectations for political correctness are so narrow in 2023.

You can do better.

Quite an interesting read Boss !

I don't know if others pointed out these deeply troubling problems, but certainly not the game jounos.
It seems that all the systems Bethesda developped long ago for better games (elder's scroll, fallout 3, etc.) became nothing more than checklist entries that the devs have to strike without even understanding what they bring to the game and the gameplay. Every exemples you give show me that the devs don't understand what made those gameplay elements interesting in a rpg context. The companions actively ruining your game is the perfect exemple. All the cultural performative bullshit is just the cherry on top ("trusting the science" i wish they had Earth president or whatever stands for a supreme leader in this game tells you that he believes in truth not facts, if you argue with him that maybe a microbial plague is not the best plan possible and far more dangerous than trusting mother nature...)

If you had the time to do some kind of editorial thread once a week, talking a bit more in depth about something gaming related or not, i'm sure it would be pretty cool.

I know you post threads that are often really good, but i mean more like you do here : your take on something directly, no link to anything else needed.

 

[saintjules]

The poor writing, boring characters and bad pacing of the main quest are major reasons why I’ve quit playing it after about 50hrs. It’s a very dull and uninteresting place to be from a character and story perspective. I have other problems with it but these ones are some of the major ones.

I have been playing through Mass Effect 2 for the first time and so far the gulf in writing quality and characters is huge between the two games.

Sounds like the other guy on here who played FFXVI at 65 hours and said it was "average to bad game".

Why do you guys put yourselves through long gameplay hours? Surely you can tell within 2-3 hours a game would suck and just stop lol.

 

[Zuzu]

Sounds like the other guy on here who played FFXVI at 65 hours and said it was "average to bad game".

Why do you guys put yourselves through long gameplay hours? Surely you can tell within 2-3 hours a game would suck and just stop lol.

I’ve provided some explanation which is on the third page of this thread. Maybe after the initial 25 - 30 hours I should have quit but perhaps I was breathing in the hopium that it would get better. And even though I wasn’t enjoying the main quest much I still wanted to see how it turned out in the end because people online said that the new game+ was unique. I wanted to see what that was all about so I kept on going through the main quest.

 

[FlyyGOD]

I actually really regret buying Starfield.. I don't think reviews should have been this good

Why do you regret buying it? It's a fantastic game.

 

[Interfectum]

Nothing really more to say other than Evilore nailed it. The game is so goddamn dull and the characters are fucking awful. It's especially jarring coming off of BG3 into this. Fucking night and day difference.

 

[DEAD ORIGINAL]

Yeah think you're right my Xbox has been a paper weight for last year and it finally gets some love and starfield is not really giving me the fizz.

 

[meech]

Oh dear, how did they even manage to make the armor look worse than in the first game. Looks completly plastic and cheap.

 

[Klik]

Why do you regret buying it? It's a fantastic game.

I don't think its worth 70€.

6.6/10 score on Metacritics just proves i'm not delusional..

 

[gaming_again]

I was playing some last night and in more than one occasion I saw a female npc walking around in just her underwear . Is this a new bug? Lol

They heard Gaffers’ pleas and decided to bring the HEAT.

 

[RoboFu]

They heard Gaffers’ pleas and decided to bring the HEAT.

I took some screen shots after on xbox after I made made my original post lol... These on on two totally different planets. and not even all the times its happened! lol

 

[ssringo]

When I was playing and having an OK time I decided to romance Sarah. I kinda liked her after all. But the further I went down the romance rabbit hole the less enthused I became and towards the end I actively wanted to break it off but it was too late. I went through with it hoping it would turn out OK but I only lasted another hour before uninstalling.

 

[Humdinger]

The bottom one doesn't even look like a woman.

 

[Cyberpunkd]

I took some screen shots after on xbox after I made made my original post lol... These on on two totally different planets. and not even all the times its happened! lol

Oh boy, quality dialogue right there.

 

[XXL]

Nothing really more to say other than Evilore nailed it. The game is so goddamn dull and the characters are fucking awful. It's especially jarring coming off of BG3 into this. Fucking night and day difference.

I went from Starfield to BG3 and you're right and this doesn't just apply to the writing.

I had to fight myself (at times) to keep playing Starfield.

Baldurs Gate 3 sunk it's claws into me in 30-60 mins and has just escalated from there.

The word masterpiece gets thrown around alot, but BG3 is an actually one and anyone who doesn't own it is doing themselves a disservice, imo.

 

[Zheph]

I took some screen shots after on xbox after I made made my original post lol... These on on two totally different planets. and not even all the times its happened! lol

Surely its a bug wtf