this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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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.
Really? 35 hours of great content?
Exactly what parts of Starfield struck you as great?
I'll agree that around the 30 hours mark of my playthrough I was thinking the game felt big and expensive and was excited to spend more time in that universe.
But it wasn't long after that even the faction quests ended up just so repetitive in scope and even level design that I was over it.
The number of loading screens just to go from point A to B for a fetch quest is probably the worst of any open world game...ever.
It's like they finally had SSD tech so they just decided to throw any concern over loading out the window in game design.
The story is mediocre, the voice acting is meh, the gameplay loops are extremely repetitive.
The thing you like is the one thing I also enjoyed of ship combat with boarding enemy ships. That was done well, outside of the fact you can't physically go outside your ship.
And "you can play 35 hours without hating it" as the barometer of whether a game is satisfactory sells yourself and your time short. You as a consumer deserve more, and making excuses for outdated and poor game design doesn't do yourself any favors. Legitimate complaints about games getting their fair amount of attention leads to better games, as happened with games like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk. The only way Bethesda's game devs are going to get the appropriate resources from management to focus on making a game that doesn't waste your time with repetition on the next one is if there're enough complaints about the repetition in this one that management is concerned about repeating bad press which might impact sales.
You do yourself and the devs disservice minimizing or dismissing complaints and only do the execs a favor.
That's great if you don't feel that way. I'm guessing that as you put more hours in the title you'll feel different, but hope that's not the case and your enthusiasm remains. But for many players that were quite excited for the game, it ended up being rather disappointing.
The major city locations. The major factions/plots. But specifically, I was referring to the approximate amount of hand-made content from previous research. If you don't think handmade Bethesda content is great, well obviously don't buy it like I wouldn't buy another Witcher title.
Not my experience. It's worse than any seamless game, but I found the loading screens and loading times to be pretty reasonable compared to other games. Specifically, I noted that loading times were shorter. And as much as people bitched about the "sequence" loading screens, they're a whole lot nicer than the black-screen-with-image I was used to in the past.
Now you're going full-subjective. As my college English professor used to remind us, "I didn't like it" is not a real metric for quality. I don't agree the story is mediocre. I don't agree the voice acting is meh. And I don't agree the "gameplay loops" are repetitive. Unless you choose to stick with the intentionally repetitive content.
Actually, my metric was "35 hours of GREAT non-procedural content". YOUR metric is 35 hours without hating it. It may help to remind you that I also enjoy the procedural content. But a lot of people are whining that the whole game is procedural, despite having comparable hand-made content to any other Bethesda game.
If you don't like Bethesda games, you shouldn't be complaining about Starfield, the same way I don't complain about some fancy wine sucking (I don't enjoy wine). If you DO like Bethesda games, your critiques above probably apply to them more than Starfield. Same issue. This is a good "wine" for people who like "wine".
I'm doing myself and devs a disservice by loving a game because it's the game I was looking for and the game I was promised? Do you even hear yourself? When I have a hankering for Whiskey, if someone puts a glass of Macallan 25 in front of me, I'm not going to bitch. I'm going to enjoy it. No matter who I'm doing a disservice because it's not a Budweiser