In my life, there've been more than a few instances where the positive reviews of a game turned me off of it. It happened with Immortals: Fenyx Rising, wherein most of the positive reviews favourably compared it AC: Odyssey - a game I hold in venomous contempt.
But until Starfield, there'd never been a game where the negative reviews made me interested.
See, I like the Bethesda Slop Formula. I really do. Despite my various, thesis-long gripes with Skyrim and Fallout 4 I have about 500~ hours on each title across numerous platforms. So when the reviews dropped, and everyone collectively groaned "Urgh, it's just the Bethesda Slop Formula IN SPACE!", I was excited. Doubly so once a good friend footed the bill just to have someone to talk about Starfield with.
Unfortunately, the negative reviews were wrong. This is not the Bethesda Slop Formula (henceforth BSF), but a hollow imitator of No Man's Sky wearing its skin like a coat.
IMO, the core component of the BSF and its appeal to me is the ability to WANDER. In every other Bethesda game, it is possible to pick a compass direction and simply walk. Along that walk, the player will more-likely-than-not encounter tangible content. Not just procedurally generated content, but quests and unique loot and settlements and all sorts of stuff to cut their teeth on. Fallout 4 perfected this, really, by turning all loot into a part of the BSF through the settlement/crafting system.
Starfield does not possess the ability to wander. For starters, it is near impossible to go anywhere without several loading screens worth of Fast Travel. Even random curiosity requires you point somewhere and go "yes, I want to land here specifically."
And when you do land, 9/10 times there's just... Nothing. A cave with a spattering of resources. An overworld 'dungeon' filled with the same raiders you slaughter by the dozens every 30 real life minutes. Some loot - most of which is worthless. Sometimes a random encounter, which have barely innovated since Fallout 3. But that's about it. Rare are named characters, rarer are the quests, and rarest are the things worth your precious time.
Space itself isn't much better. There are spaceship fights yes, but they're clunky and dull. The developers seem aware of this, with the ship targeting system being a single point unlock that trivializes each fight. There isn't much loot to find in ship wreckages, and what little there is can always be found elsewhere. Sometimes you can find abandoned/hostile space stations to poke around in, but these are egregiously copy pasted even by BSF standards.
Perhaps the worst part is, on top of loot now being mostly meaningless, the loot that is 'meaningful' has very little use. Game balance is deeply skewed, resulting in the vast majority of weapons and suits you find being garbage unless you dip down to Very Easy or are much later in the game. The Outpost system, a lackluster replacement for Fallout 4's excellent Settlements, is nothing more than a DIY resource production/extraction system where you can pretend to build a base. Not a home, though, or a place for people to live. No, you can only 'staff' Outposts. If your dream for Starfield was to make a place to live out in the stars, turn back now.
There is a bespoke crafting system, but it suffers from having far too many components and FAR too many skill-gates. Yes, you can make Outpost construction materials, weapon mods, suit mods and other junk out of resources, but it's a far better use of your skill points to not spec into crafting and instead turn into a scavenger. Sure, you could fuck with research and invest heavily in crafting, but why bother when a quick jump to a higher level planet/space station will more than likely net you better stuff for free?
If this game had Fallout 4's excellent dismantling system, crafting and Outposts might be worth it. But it doesn't, so it's not.
What really ties off this package of misery is that the gameplay just isn't great. FO4's gameplay was solid. Not perfect, but it met a bare minimum of enjoyable and was on par with some of the better Far Cry games. This, though? Everything feels floaty and limp. Even the .50 AE cannon you can use feels like a BB gun. It's almost kind of astounding how bad it feels to play, and melee is the worst it's ever been in the BSF. This can be mitigated by crunching the difficulty down to Very Easy, but at that point it's essentially playing with God Mode on.
All of this, every single complaint I've listed so far, is only compounded by the setting. Say what you will about them, but Bethesda's past outfit has at least made a token effort to make you care about the respective settings and the people in it.
Starfield makes no such attempts. It has some of the most flaccid worldbuilding I've ever seen. The main factions are just banal retreads of popular sci-fi faction tropes. You have the United States in Space, a 'free space' wracked with corruption that uses cowboy/wild west aesthetics, religious zealots in space, megacorps in space and bandits. Oh, and a neutral party obsessed with their own goals.
None of them are given any depth, and characters associated with said faction tend to play their trope straight.
Not that any of this matters, because the game just treats the factions as vessels for banal questlines which are somehow even less interesting than the garbage Oblivion offered up as faction quests. Said questlines offer up the barest of changes to the world, and not even something as insane as "turning a bandit faction into one of the setting's major powers" does anything tangible. Your power to effect change upon the world is null. You are just a tourist, here for the shinies and the funnies. It's an almost startlingly frank admission of what Bethesda writing is at its core, and no attempts are made to doll it up or hide from it.
Oh and the companions are frustratingly bland too. Even Fallout 4's more drab companions had more flavour to them, and there were at least a few I actually liked. Here? I tried out as many as I could, but ultimately stuck with the personality-less robot because he was a good pack mule and wasn't pretending to be a character. This game really could've used companions with strong faction ties, or opinions that they consider sacrosanct enough to butt heads with you over, but... No? None of them even bat eyelids at attempted genocide, and the worst you'll ever get is a finger wagging from Sarah Morgan.
Personally, though? My biggest gripe is that this game squanders the potential of space. There are no outlets to be anything; a surveyor, a miner, a builder, a trader, a pirate, or part of a faction. These are things other space games - Avorion, Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky, etc - nailed. They made the space in Space matter by leaning into the fantasies associated with it. Here, space is just a loading screen. Something that hangs in the background as you wait for the galaxy map to load so you can offload your 500lbs of harvested organs to a janitor in the space-boonies. Looping back to the BSF talk, there's a frustrating lack of landmarks in this game. No distinct space stations or inhuman structures or what-not. Nothing to catch your eye and draw you towards it. No Tenpenny Towers, Winterholds or Diamond Cities.
There's a sentiment on this website and other communities - online and off - that mods might fix this game as it did for the last few outings.
I don't really agree.
Skyrim, Fallout 4, even Oblivion and Fallout 3 had decent enough cores that they could be played without mods - though Fallout 3 is straight up awful. The BSF was completely intact, working as intended most of the time.
Starfield does not have that strong core, that foundation to be built upon. It's hollow, frustratingly and agonizingly hollow.
Starfield is frequently called "Bethesda's No Man's Sky" by its detractors, and they're right for the wrong reasons.
This is not 2023 No Man's Sky, with its excellent gameplay loop, mountains worth of features and functions, weird and varied alien planets or captivating interstellar mysteries.
This is 2016 No Man's Sky, with its hollow repetitive planets, its lack of meaningful goal, its total absence of intuitive guidance, its mostly meaningless loot and its awful ending. In a way, it's a time capsule.
But until Starfield, there'd never been a game where the negative reviews made me interested.
See, I like the Bethesda Slop Formula. I really do. Despite my various, thesis-long gripes with Skyrim and Fallout 4 I have about 500~ hours on each title across numerous platforms. So when the reviews dropped, and everyone collectively groaned "Urgh, it's just the Bethesda Slop Formula IN SPACE!", I was excited. Doubly so once a good friend footed the bill just to have someone to talk about Starfield with.
Unfortunately, the negative reviews were wrong. This is not the Bethesda Slop Formula (henceforth BSF), but a hollow imitator of No Man's Sky wearing its skin like a coat.
IMO, the core component of the BSF and its appeal to me is the ability to WANDER. In every other Bethesda game, it is possible to pick a compass direction and simply walk. Along that walk, the player will more-likely-than-not encounter tangible content. Not just procedurally generated content, but quests and unique loot and settlements and all sorts of stuff to cut their teeth on. Fallout 4 perfected this, really, by turning all loot into a part of the BSF through the settlement/crafting system.
Starfield does not possess the ability to wander. For starters, it is near impossible to go anywhere without several loading screens worth of Fast Travel. Even random curiosity requires you point somewhere and go "yes, I want to land here specifically."
And when you do land, 9/10 times there's just... Nothing. A cave with a spattering of resources. An overworld 'dungeon' filled with the same raiders you slaughter by the dozens every 30 real life minutes. Some loot - most of which is worthless. Sometimes a random encounter, which have barely innovated since Fallout 3. But that's about it. Rare are named characters, rarer are the quests, and rarest are the things worth your precious time.
Space itself isn't much better. There are spaceship fights yes, but they're clunky and dull. The developers seem aware of this, with the ship targeting system being a single point unlock that trivializes each fight. There isn't much loot to find in ship wreckages, and what little there is can always be found elsewhere. Sometimes you can find abandoned/hostile space stations to poke around in, but these are egregiously copy pasted even by BSF standards.
Perhaps the worst part is, on top of loot now being mostly meaningless, the loot that is 'meaningful' has very little use. Game balance is deeply skewed, resulting in the vast majority of weapons and suits you find being garbage unless you dip down to Very Easy or are much later in the game. The Outpost system, a lackluster replacement for Fallout 4's excellent Settlements, is nothing more than a DIY resource production/extraction system where you can pretend to build a base. Not a home, though, or a place for people to live. No, you can only 'staff' Outposts. If your dream for Starfield was to make a place to live out in the stars, turn back now.
There is a bespoke crafting system, but it suffers from having far too many components and FAR too many skill-gates. Yes, you can make Outpost construction materials, weapon mods, suit mods and other junk out of resources, but it's a far better use of your skill points to not spec into crafting and instead turn into a scavenger. Sure, you could fuck with research and invest heavily in crafting, but why bother when a quick jump to a higher level planet/space station will more than likely net you better stuff for free?
If this game had Fallout 4's excellent dismantling system, crafting and Outposts might be worth it. But it doesn't, so it's not.
What really ties off this package of misery is that the gameplay just isn't great. FO4's gameplay was solid. Not perfect, but it met a bare minimum of enjoyable and was on par with some of the better Far Cry games. This, though? Everything feels floaty and limp. Even the .50 AE cannon you can use feels like a BB gun. It's almost kind of astounding how bad it feels to play, and melee is the worst it's ever been in the BSF. This can be mitigated by crunching the difficulty down to Very Easy, but at that point it's essentially playing with God Mode on.
All of this, every single complaint I've listed so far, is only compounded by the setting. Say what you will about them, but Bethesda's past outfit has at least made a token effort to make you care about the respective settings and the people in it.
Starfield makes no such attempts. It has some of the most flaccid worldbuilding I've ever seen. The main factions are just banal retreads of popular sci-fi faction tropes. You have the United States in Space, a 'free space' wracked with corruption that uses cowboy/wild west aesthetics, religious zealots in space, megacorps in space and bandits. Oh, and a neutral party obsessed with their own goals.
None of them are given any depth, and characters associated with said faction tend to play their trope straight.
Not that any of this matters, because the game just treats the factions as vessels for banal questlines which are somehow even less interesting than the garbage Oblivion offered up as faction quests. Said questlines offer up the barest of changes to the world, and not even something as insane as "turning a bandit faction into one of the setting's major powers" does anything tangible. Your power to effect change upon the world is null. You are just a tourist, here for the shinies and the funnies. It's an almost startlingly frank admission of what Bethesda writing is at its core, and no attempts are made to doll it up or hide from it.
Oh and the companions are frustratingly bland too. Even Fallout 4's more drab companions had more flavour to them, and there were at least a few I actually liked. Here? I tried out as many as I could, but ultimately stuck with the personality-less robot because he was a good pack mule and wasn't pretending to be a character. This game really could've used companions with strong faction ties, or opinions that they consider sacrosanct enough to butt heads with you over, but... No? None of them even bat eyelids at attempted genocide, and the worst you'll ever get is a finger wagging from Sarah Morgan.
Personally, though? My biggest gripe is that this game squanders the potential of space. There are no outlets to be anything; a surveyor, a miner, a builder, a trader, a pirate, or part of a faction. These are things other space games - Avorion, Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky, etc - nailed. They made the space in Space matter by leaning into the fantasies associated with it. Here, space is just a loading screen. Something that hangs in the background as you wait for the galaxy map to load so you can offload your 500lbs of harvested organs to a janitor in the space-boonies. Looping back to the BSF talk, there's a frustrating lack of landmarks in this game. No distinct space stations or inhuman structures or what-not. Nothing to catch your eye and draw you towards it. No Tenpenny Towers, Winterholds or Diamond Cities.
There's a sentiment on this website and other communities - online and off - that mods might fix this game as it did for the last few outings.
I don't really agree.
Skyrim, Fallout 4, even Oblivion and Fallout 3 had decent enough cores that they could be played without mods - though Fallout 3 is straight up awful. The BSF was completely intact, working as intended most of the time.
Starfield does not have that strong core, that foundation to be built upon. It's hollow, frustratingly and agonizingly hollow.
Starfield is frequently called "Bethesda's No Man's Sky" by its detractors, and they're right for the wrong reasons.
This is not 2023 No Man's Sky, with its excellent gameplay loop, mountains worth of features and functions, weird and varied alien planets or captivating interstellar mysteries.
This is 2016 No Man's Sky, with its hollow repetitive planets, its lack of meaningful goal, its total absence of intuitive guidance, its mostly meaningless loot and its awful ending. In a way, it's a time capsule.