this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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I mean, I wouldn't put Starfield in the same family as Diablo IV, with most of the game behind a microtransaction wall. Bethesda promised Skyrim in Space. We got Skyrim in Space. Skyrim is a polarizing game (much like Witcher 3 is, often for opposite people/reasons).
I don't think Starfield is "not so bad", I'm having the best gaming experience I've had in a year or two. I think all the critiques are valid, but I don't really care about most of them.
So why should I play a game I don't enjoy to punish the makers of the game I do enjoy? I have a very limited amount of gaming time. It gets the game I'm having the most fun with.
I feel like I'm in some sort of fugue state with everyone comparing this to Skyrim. In what way is this like Skyrim? Skyrim, for all its flaws, at least had hand crafted worlds with interesting things to see and do in them. From what I've seen of Starfield, that has been completely replaced by procedurally generated barren worlds. Like yeah, you can 'explore' them, but for what? What is there even to find?
Virtually 100% of main and faction story arcs are hand-generated content. I would go further and say Starfield used more distinct model-sets than Skyrim did.
For context, Skyrim's map was ALSO procedurally generated, but most (or all) of the content was built on top of it by hand. We have comparable amount of manually generated content in Starfield, and then tons of procedural content allowing for a larger overall world.
Starfield is approximately 100,000x larger than Skyrim. So yeah, a lot of it is going to be procedurally generated. But you follow a general path, and everything along that path is NOT.
So... no fugue there. Both have similar amounts of handmade content, but Skyrim has a lot of filler content, and that filler content is largely barrel worlds, something that works because planets tend to be barren.
Granny Valentine's singing in orbit Mrs. Kurtz school field trip Space pilgrims
Just a few random orbital encounters that I've found. Planet side there are plenty of structures to explore but no real reason to do it; the random loot system ensures you're as likely to find something exploring on your own as you are fulfilling a bounty contract. There is no special reward or motivation to exploring vs finding these structures via a mission.
What part of Diablo 4 is behind a microtransaction wall? Some skins?
The problem with both games is they disrespect the player's time by turning everything into a slog.
That's way more of an issue with modern game design trying to maximize hours played while minimizing actual content than paid skins. Those may suck, but to be fair it was Bethesda who introduced the damn thing in the first place. I'd rather pretend the premium skins don't exist but have a fun game than have no microtransactions and a boring 150+ hours of empty world with a total of 35 hours of interesting beats.
I think it's "Most of the skins".
I can't speak for Diablo 4 on this, but that's not Starfield. Just like other Bethesda games, Starfield clearly gives feedback when you're leaving major storylines and running procedural content. Radiant Quests have mixed reception, but the number of radiant quests you actually need to complete any Bethesda game is in the single-digits.
If you stick to main-story and faction-mainline quests, you touch virtually nothing that wasn't hand-crafted for your pleasure. No slog. No grind. No nothing. And I find it pretty easy to differentiate between the handcrafted side-quests and the procedural side-quests. If you don't, just ignore the more obscure-seeming side quests anyway.
Is this a personal self-discipline problem of yours? A game with 35 hours of great content is worth the price of a game like Starfield, and you can just NOT go out and play the "150+ hours of empty world" if you don't like it. While I haven't beaten Starfield yet (I like procedural content and spend a lot of time in it), that mainline content isn't gated behind doing procedural stuff. That stuff was added on top of the content you directly pay for.
For me, I love going system to system finding ships to pirate. I haven't really gotten into planetary exploration yet. Maybe I won't enjoy that as much, or maybe I will. If I don't enjoy it, I just won't do it and it won't detract from the game.
I dunno why you're getting downvoted, cause you're completely right. The microtransaction hell in Diablo is all for shit like horse armor. The game plays exactly the same whether or not you've spent an extra dime. With that being said, it is 100% bullshit to have any extra transactions, micro or not, in a $90 game.
He's getting downvoted because despite everything you said, the valid complaints about Diablo 4 are not similar to complaints about Starfield.
It's not the "Diablo 4 microtransactions for skins is OK" (which I disagree with) that got him downvoted, it's "both games disrespect the player's time".
We can. But they're different. I have a problem with microtransaction-driven games, even if it's skins. I won't fault you if you like D4, but D4 is the first (second if you count the mobile shit) Diablo game that I haven't put 100 hours into, or even played. The complaint about microtransactions is valid and objective however, and there have been criticisms on cosmetic-microtransactions for almost a decade now. It's not a feature by any stretch of the imagination, and nobody who plays the game seriously prefers "$25 armor set" to "customizable armor set"
Nobody "has to enjoy" Starfield. But the topic of the hour is whether Starfield was overhyped or (imo) whether Starfield is a valid target for the kind of criticism that came up when BG3 came out and other game studies complained it was too well-polished.
There are objective complaints and subjective ones. I don't care about the subjective ones. You don't want base-builders, so be it. You don't want procedural quests, whatever. Sometimes I play games with a playtime of 30 minutes because I don't want a long game. But Starfield was not misleadingly advertised or a bug-riddled mess. We got Skyrim in Space, and that's what we were promised.
That's a breath of fresh air. I'd appreciate that even if I didn't want to play Skyrim in Space. If someone comes out with a game and says "It's just like Witcher 3", I'll thank them and never touch it. I won't fault the game for being like another popular game I happen to hate.
I only brought up D4 here because people are saying Starfield is "just like D4"
That's also all we were promised. No false advertising here. Bethesda knows what Bethesda fans want, and they make the game Bethesda fans want. It's literally the only gaming experience left where I don't feel like I have to over-research and pirate-demo to figure out if I should buy a game.
Yeah. But I love that about CP. I got it dirt cheap when everyone was bitching, and just waited for them to fix it before I started playing. Best $17 I ever spent for a new AAA game! I can be patient.
Huh? Starfield is the best RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind, because it's an actual RPG. It has the best quest design since Oblivion, with almost none of the quests boiling down to "Go there, kill guys", but actually needing to talk to people, pay attention to the environment, interact with the world and make choices (and your Background, Traits, Skills and faction membership all add new ways for you to go about a quest.) The weapon design is an incredible improvement over Fallout 4. Almost everything in Starfield is either a massive step up or a return to form compared to their previous work and you don't actually know what you're talking about.
And that's not even to mention things like the ship building system, which is genuinely extremely impressive.
We must be playing different games. Every storyline quest I've done has been:
It's nothing but, "Go there, kill guys," as you call it. Everything is a fetch quest with faceless mooks between me and whatever fifth turn I need to take to get to the end of the corridors in the space dungeon.
And comparing the game to Morrowind is laughable. Morrowind was an amazing feat of world building based on actual player choice. Starfield is a bunch of boxes to tick to see the next space cliche.
To me this reads like you havent done the Ryujin plotline which has a lot of stealth involved, and the UC/Crimson Fleet one that has some detective work/stealth
Half the damn quests don't even require me to leave the city they started in. Maybe you just had bad luck picking all of the quests that are like that and none of the others and I had the opposite. Or maybe you did 3 quests and are talking out of your ass. I don't know, I wasn't there when you played the game. I mean, did you even do anything other than main story? Join a faction, do sidequests, anything? Because I could point you to half a dozen quests just in early game New Atlantis that are entirely reliant on dialogue, choices etc. without any killing and that do not give you a mandatory companion. Like, do the UC Security quests, investigate the brownouts in the well, talk to the preacher guy, the art guy in Jemison Mercantile, the collector guys in Terrabrew, the bartender at Viewport, the scientist by the tree. The game will literally put half of these quests in the quest log from ambient dialogue, and the other half you get from just engaging with the world and talking to NPCs in the first city you visit. It's not like these are incredibly hidden quests you have to go out of your way to find. Hell, when you go to Akila the game just plops a hostage negotiation right in your face. I mean, come on, you're either being wilfully disingenuous or you played that game blind as a bat.
And if you don't believe me and don't want to bother playing the game yourself again, just look at the playthrough of somebody like Many A True Nerd. He did a lot of the quests I just mentioned.
Yeah, that happens when you just skip dialogue
So tell your mandatory companion to "wait here" when you plan to Stealth Archer. Or give her a chameleon suit. Ironically, the "stealth archer" meme is the most valid critique of Bethesda games, and you're complaining because it isn't working well for you.
what I find more wild is as usual the toxic gaming community can't handle opinions. I like the game, I don't care if others don't, but acting like I don't have "standards" cause you don't like it is rediculous. Likewise, I got bored so fast of baulders gate 3 but apparently it's the second coming of christ and I must be wrong. No, I get why people love it, it just wasn't my jam. Starfield is