General Gaming Todd Howard thinks Starfield was divisive because it was “too different” than prior Bethesda games….

[Paperclyp]

Todd Howard reckons he knows why Starfield was so divisive: It was too 'different than you've seen from us in past' | PC Gamer

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Some players just "prefer the way it's done in Fallout or Elder Scrolls."

 

I actually quite like Todd Howard but this made me lol and also didn’t inspire confidence for the future haha. 

[best3444]

 

 

@Kal-El814

[Kal-El814]

If by "too different" he means "worse than" then well spotted, Todd.

 

44 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

 

@Kal-El814

 

I feel understood.

 

[Mr.Vic20]

I agree! Most of your games have been 8's that got 9's because of their scale. Starfield is a 6! 

[best3444]

They should have focused on maybe 2 planets that were Fallout/Skyrim in scale and based it's story off that. The entire 1000 planet idea was way too ambitious for the current tech. 

[Kal-El814]

Just now, best3444 said:

They should have focused on maybe 2 planets that were Fallout/Skyrim in scale and based it's story off that. The entire 1000 planet idea was way too ambitious for the current tech. 

 

Aside from the gameplay being just sorta fine and the writing being pretty bad, I think the main issue with Starfeild's approach to a universe is that it's just so segmented that it pulls you out of itself too often.

 

It makes absolutely no sense that there are a bunch of towns in Skyrim that have more cops than civilians, that you can walk across the continent in something like 3 calendar days, that Nazeem busts your balls for never getting to the Cloud District of a "city" that is 300 paces wide, etc. because the game gives you enough shit to do at almost all times that you either don't notice or you're too distracted to care. Starfield segments off so much shit while also making the planets themselves generally pretty boring. Yes that "makes sense" but nobody is coming to BGS games for that shit, nobody cares that setting off a mini nuke doesn't affect corrugated aluminum fencing, they just want to see shit go boom or BOOSH a dragon priest off a fucking cliff and then reload once you realize you can't find his corpse to loot.

 

Make a real space sim or make Skyrim in spaaaaaaaace but hedging like they did is the actual issue because we just ended up with the worst of both worlds.

[Keyser_Soze]

I think a lot of Dragon's Dogma II when I think about Starfield. I do not think the answer is fewer planets. I think the perceived lack of things to do on those planets is the issue. The other issue people had with the game is all the loading, which means you know where to go, and what to do but that direct knowledge leads you into tons of load times.

 

I think if Starfield was more like DD2 in regards to something like this: You get a quest from someone, they say, "you need to find [x] on a planet in this sector" and then you get to the sector and actually have to explore to find what you need, then you need to explore the planet to find what you need.

 

I enjoyed my time with the game fine but I never had the gripes other people had because I did something different and spent hours doing it, I built a base.

 

And to build a base you have to research planets, find what resources they have so you can craft the materials to build your base with. I spent hours doing this and had fun and then stopped playing but doing something like that gives you a reason to stick to a planet, to explore a planet and research all the flora and fauna along the way. If the game had 2 planets this would not be possible and the game would be a lesser game because of it.

[Mr.Vic20]

For me the short comings of Starfield can be boiled down to the following:

 

* Insufficient variety of activities and random mission types on planets

* Points of interest on planets are way too repetitive 

* Buildings on planets reuse the same base structure/layout way too often

* Environmental impacts lack punch. Where are volcanic flows? Meteor strikes, cyclones? Sand storms? If most worlds lack civilization then capitalize on that with the fury and beauty of nature!

* Lack of vehicles

* Poor local maps

* Too few settlements/cities

* Limited amount of melee weapons (we're in the god damn future, surprise me!)

* House Va'runn, where you at? (likely cut from the original game to create the story arc of Shattered Space)

* Lack of massive space stations/capital style ships to board and fight your way through

 

Everything else that isn't great about Starfield are existing design styles that have always been staples of their games, like them or hate them. 

[Keyser_Soze]

12 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

For me the short comings of Starfield can be boiled down to the following:

 

* Buildings on planets reuse the same base structure/layout way too often

 

Yeah I came back to mention that. It suffers from the Mass Effect problem (which also had many planets) of the copy pasta bases and caves. So even though you could explore a lot of planets and even like a bunch of sections on the same planets. You could come across the same landmarks, you'd go through the same bases, same caves / dungeons. For a game that says only 10% of planets have life, they sure did make planets that were 95% the same structurally.

[stepee]

I actually liked Starfield but he definitely isn’t getting that yes it’s not like their other games in a few important ways but also it was trying to be and marketed as being an extension of their other games so that is the problem but it’s a failure not a difference of opinion

[Kal-El814]

1 hour ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Everything else that isn't great about Starfield are existing design styles that have always been staples of their games, like them or hate them. 

 

This is actually part of the issue as well.

 

Despite there definitely being improvements in many areas and the aesthetic being distinct from both ES and FO games, this still very much FEELS like one of those games most of the time in a mechanical sense. You move like you do in other BGS games, inventory / weight management is largely the same, dialog is, companion management is, sneaking is, etc. But BGS also seem to want the player to interact with the world in a meaningfully different way than they're used to. Again, it just FEELS like a hedge almost constantly. Maybe if this is someone's first BGS game they wouldn't pick up on this, but as someone that's played all of them other than FO76... it feels like one of those games but it's out of sync with the experience of playing.

 

Not to make a direct game comparison but one of the reasons Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom work to the extent they do is that while they have a lot of the aesthetics and trappings of Zelda games, they're obviously very different mechanically; they are very obviously and meaningfully designed around those differences. And while people still chafe because of their expectations sometimes (the "where are the dungeons" observations, for example) the way those games are built mandate that the broader expectations are different and so the player's expectations are modified as a result.

 

Again, Starfield just doesn't go hard enough in any one of its directions

[Xbob42]

The problems I had with this game are many, and none were because it was "too different," unless, as mentioned, "too different" means "worse."

 

Since we're doing lists, here's a few critical issues I have with Starfield...

 

• Skyrim already had an issue of density, and for me it was twofold: major points of interest were too close together and evenly spaced, making them feel less exciting to find. Starfield just made them really far apart but they're still evenly spaced. So it feels just as artificial except they also suck most of the time because planets are so barren and you're on foot. Minor POIs between major POIs (combat encounters, environmental storytelling, a weird cave, treasure, etc) are important, and Starfield tends to only have this as like detritus within a certain sphere of a major POI, meaning the negative space of the game world is too sparse.
• Planets are barren, but they also each have people living there. Random homesteaders, pirates, fucking electric company crews. You don't feel like an explorer at all.
• While there are more total POIs, because they're spread so thin, it means outside of towns, and especially outside of quests, there's just jack shit to find or do. This is different than just the density, this is like a core problem where even if the density and even spacing were fixed, you'd still have almost nothing to do when not on an active quest.
• Loading Screen Simulator is not what anyone wants to play, ever. Some people say it's the same as No Man's Sky, and while to a certain degree that's true (open an overly complex galaxy map, choose a planet) the fact that GOING to the planet is part of the world and experience and not a literal load screen/cutscene is huge. It builds a sense of cohesion, which for this kind of game is critical. It's why loading screens going to interiors of buildings or ships also sucks. It's way cooler to just walk inside! It keeps you invested and holds your attention!
• They went all out of their way to keep any visible intelligent alien species out of the game for their "NASA punk" theme, but brought in dragon shouts. Okay, fine, I like actual gameplay variety. I'll take magic over not magic 100% of the time in any game. That shit's fun. Oh wait all the space dragon shouts suck ass. How do you make a magic system where all of the magic sucks and is not fun to use?!
• There's several "types" of guns but most feel identical. Shooting a laser gun feels no different than shooting a ballistic gun. Give me wild stuff! Stop being like the Division! Even the Division got away from being the Division and started giving crazy ass sci-fi guns!
• Ship building was super cool and surprisingly robust. It was also almost entirely pointless since there's almost nothing to do in your ship since you don't actually fly anywhere with it (enjoy your loading screens) and it's only actually used for the occasional space dogfight, which, if you don't keep up with your ship's power level will surprise you by being a tedious numbers game near the end, forcing you to go do ship upgrades for unfun space combat.

Here's my expensive-but-you're-Bethesda-you-can-afford-it solution: take all the POIs, get rid of the ones that are like 'scan a rock' because fuck you that's not gameplay, and then put them on a single planet, maybe two. Have them concentrated around civilization, with more procgen stuff further out. Launch the game with fucking vehicles.

 

Take the ship building, base building, etc. and beat Star Citizen to the punch by making everything outside of the story some weird quasi-MMO where you can fly around the other planets, and find other players and their structures. Like No Man's Sky but actually connected with everyone's shit visible. This is gonna require you to throw Gamebryo or whatever in the trash, so make sure to do that before development starts and use a modern engine that can handle this. Get rid of Todd Howard, designate the entirety of Capcom as the new game director, have them make the combat better.

 

Bam. Easy fix.

[best3444]

34 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

This is gonna require you to throw Gamebryo or whatever in the trash, so make sure to do that before development starts and use a modern engine that can handle this. Get rid of Todd Howard, designate the entirety of Capcom as the new game director, have them make the combat better.

 

Bam. Easy fix.

 

[Paperclyp]

3 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

 

• They went all out of their way to keep any visible intelligent alien species out of the game for their "NASA punk" theme, but brought in dragon shouts. Okay, fine, I like actual gameplay variety. I'll take magic over not magic 100% of the time in any game. That shit's fun. Oh wait all the space dragon shouts suck ass. How do you make a magic system where all of the magic sucks and is not fun to use?!

 

I literally forgot I had the powers most of the game even though the main quest of the game is going to get more of them. I would accidentally hit whatever button it was once in a while and be like oh yeah. 

 

Another gripe I had was the number of different ammo types. Fallout kind of bugs me with this too, though a bit less so since it's kinda sorta a limited resource game, but I got a headache trying to keep track of what ammo I needed in Starfield for my handful of favorite guns. 

[JPDunks4]

Biggest issue with Starfield was the Proc Gen was some of the worst I've ever seen.  If you are going to rely on proc gen for a game creating thousands of planets, you have really got to flesh out your systems to be as robust and unique as possible.

 

The fact they reused the same exact structure layouts, with the same exact enemy placements, item placements, ect was just beyond inexcusable.  I remember finding a magazine in one of the POIs on a random planet.  And every time I found that same structure on any planet, that magazine was in the same spot in each and every one of them.  Surrounded by the same stim paks on the same dead body in the same shower ect ect.

 

Going into Starfield, and seeing what an indie studio like Hello Games did with No Mans Sky, i really expected Bethesda's proc gen in Starfield to be next level, and make really interesting and believable worlds.   But after visiting a dozen or so, you see the same like half a dozen fauna designs.  Creatures can sometimes be wild looking, but the vast majority were all similar.  I also noticed immediately after I landed on any remote planet, within seconds I'd see another random ship landing just a little ways off from where I landed.

 

I really think if they did a better job with those systems, the game would have worked a lot more in capturing the fun of exploration.

[Bacon]

As a viewer only, Starfield came across as generic when compared to their previous titles. It ain't got a vibe.

[Dre801]

That engaging exploration factor just wasn't there for me in Starfield;  I just didn't find the world as interesting to explore as their prior games.  Strip that away and you're just saddled with mediocrity.   They somehow made sci-fi really boring.   I gave it around 60 hours of my life, and likely won't go back, even with the upcoming update.

[legend]

I've been trying to talk myself into starting Starfield, but this thread is not helping!  

 

The main thing that has been holding me up is its endless load screens. It's simply inexcusable in this era of open worlds. Makes it seem like Bethesda is incapable of growing with the genre they practically invented.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

Love it when creators are so far off the pulse of what the issue is, basically blaming players for their mismanaged mess. 
 

Starfield wasn’t different enough. And what was done just like past BGS games was done equally as bad or worse. Whether it is the engine or design philosophy and leadership the game feels like it was 10-15 years old. And in a way where the game feels like a purposefully crafted throwback. At best this game felt like a lateral step for the company. It some areas it felt like a massive step backwards.  They tried to make something they’ve never made before by making it exactly how they’ve made everything else. 
 

It looks like they spent the majority of their time and budget on 4k models and textures of things, not even character models. I get the feeling they kept back peddling, cutting, and settling so much to the point the game feels like it had barely any ambition at all.

[Mr.Vic20]

11 hours ago, JPDunks4 said:

Biggest issue with Starfield was the Proc Gen was some of the worst I've ever seen.  If you are going to rely on proc gen for a game creating thousands of planets, you have really got to flesh out your systems to be as robust and unique as possible.

 

The fact they reused the same exact structure layouts, with the same exact enemy placements, item placements, ect was just beyond inexcusable.  I remember finding a magazine in one of the POIs on a random planet.  And every time I found that same structure on any planet, that magazine was in the same spot in each and every one of them.  Surrounded by the same stim paks on the same dead body in the same shower ect ect.

 

Going into Starfield, and seeing what an indie studio like Hello Games did with No Mans Sky, i really expected Bethesda's proc gen in Starfield to be next level, and make really interesting and believable worlds.   But after visiting a dozen or so, you see the same like half a dozen fauna designs.  Creatures can sometimes be wild looking, but the vast majority were all similar.  I also noticed immediately after I landed on any remote planet, within seconds I'd see another random ship landing just a little ways off from where I landed.

 

I really think if they did a better job with those systems, the game would have worked a lot more in capturing the fun of exploration.

100%! After enough visits to floor plans A,B,C, I would know where the safes, containers, cases would be and if they would be locked, just by sight. I get that space is hard and an argument could be made for redundancy based on modularity, but the lack of variation in the Lego build  was/is terrible.

[Mr.Vic20]

24 minutes ago, legend said:

I've been trying to talk myself into starting Starfield, but this thread is not helping!  

 

The main thing that has been holding me up is its endless load screens. It's simply inexcusable in this era of open worlds. Makes it seem like Bethesda is incapable of growing with the genre they practically invented.

In a word, Gamebryo! I run large project teams and I can say from experience that when better tools come along there is a collective puckering from the staff about having to learn new things. Then come the power point presentations that ostensibly indicate how not moving to new tech will save time, money, and pain. What those charts don't show is how staying comfortable also builds cultural intrenchment and allows for the same dumb mistakes over and over. Proof that in life, there are no problems or solutions, only configurations in time/space. 

[Keyser_Soze]

35 minutes ago, legend said:

I've been trying to talk myself into starting Starfield, but this thread is not helping!

 

I'll help.

 

One of your companions is a robot. You'll love the game!

[legend]

1 hour ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

In a word, Gamebryo! I run large project teams and I can say from experience that when better tools come along there is a collective puckering from the staff about having to learn new things. Then come the power point presentations that ostensibly indicate how not moving to new tech will save time, money, and pain. What those charts don't show is how staying comfortable also builds cultural intrenchment and allows for the same dumb mistakes over and over. Proof that in life, there are no problems or solutions, only configurations in time/space. 

 

I totally believe this is the case, though it's so foreign to me -- I tend to have the opposite mentality in my group's large software base. I regularly want to burn everything down and start fresh. In the cases where we can't because we have some annoying legacy dependency, I'm counting the days to get rid of it and pushing for the steps that will allow ourselves to be free of it so that we can do something new and better.

[TwinIon]

Something that I discounted at first, but came to resent later in my playthrough was how limiting the landing tile is in Starfield. If you could fly your ship (or drive a vehicle) around a seamless planet in Starfield like you can in NMS, all the sudden I think the largely barren nature of planets would be far easier to deal with. I spent quite a while wandering around planets, looking for the right sites to build bases. Usually it was just trying to find the right combination of resources that would all be available in the same spot, but even doing that was a real pain. It involved landing in different tiles, scanning everything by hand, being unable to find both rare resources near each other, going back to orbit, and trying again. Being able to fly around planets and survey from the air or in a vehicle would have been a god-send.

 

I also think it would have made generated quests and locations far more interesting, plausible, and fun. The first "undiscovered" temple I found had a random outpost within line of sight. One of the first random missions I took up sent me across the entire barren map and back, which took ages. Even with all the limitations of what we were given, having a seamless planet would dramatically change the nature of the game.

 

Of course, having that continuous planet would only further amplify one of the games' other major failures.

 

13 hours ago, JPDunks4 said:

Biggest issue with Starfield was the Proc Gen was some of the worst I've ever seen.  If you are going to rely on proc gen for a game creating thousands of planets, you have really got to flesh out your systems to be as robust and unique as possible.

 

The fact they reused the same exact structure layouts, with the same exact enemy placements, item placements, ect was just beyond inexcusable.  I remember finding a magazine in one of the POIs on a random planet.  And every time I found that same structure on any planet, that magazine was in the same spot in each and every one of them.  Surrounded by the same stim paks on the same dead body in the same shower ect ect.

 

Going into Starfield, and seeing what an indie studio like Hello Games did with No Mans Sky, i really expected Bethesda's proc gen in Starfield to be next level, and make really interesting and believable worlds.   But after visiting a dozen or so, you see the same like half a dozen fauna designs.  Creatures can sometimes be wild looking, but the vast majority were all similar.  I also noticed immediately after I landed on any remote planet, within seconds I'd see another random ship landing just a little ways off from where I landed.

 

I really think if they did a better job with those systems, the game would have worked a lot more in capturing the fun of exploration.

 

Of the complaints listed in this thread, this is the one that hits home the most to me. I think condensing Starfield into one or two planets would be a terrible idea unless they fixed the procedural generation first, because then you're trapped on one boring planet instead of having any sense that you're actually in space. If you've got better generated content, you may as well have more planets.

 

While I think the flora and fauna generation in NMS is great, I would personally put that pretty far down the list of importance. The "stuff to do" generator is the real key here. Encountering the same structures and scenarios over and over again spread across solar systems is disheartening. Traveling light years only to find the same dead guy in front of the same magazine is boring, and never should have made it into the final game.

 

Building a giant sandbox is great as long as it's fun to play in, and Starfield just didn't put enough toys in that sandbox.