I played the game 40+h without any mods and had a lot of fun.
It is very much enjoyable without mods.
Can mods make the game better? Yes, sure
Are the mods needed to have fun with the game?
Absolutely not.
For my curiosity, what on Earth could you possibly do for those 40 hours? Cause for me that's about 5 times more than it's worth spending with the game in its current state.
Someone yesterday said they don't buy Bethesda games because they're good at launch, instead they buy them because the modding community is so prolific.
Paying $60-70 for a game that requires teams of unpaid volunteers to make it playable after launch.
How did you get around how empty the game is? I played a few hours but it is just so empty. Being in a city just means either quick travelling or walking through 100s of meters without any interesting npc or anything at all. I felt skyrim did it much better.
I am waiting for official mod support to make it into a real game. There are so many awesome mods and I've tried a few but I'm too lazy to manually install them. Also I'm so not going to go through the storyline amount 9 times...
Are you new to Bethesda games or it has just been a while? 🙂
I remember starting Skyrim for the first time and making it as far as the character selection screen (well, after spending a few hours fixing the no-voices bug) at which point I went wtf is this crap and went looking for mods.
Somewhere in the vast chasm between "these are the best gameplay element ever conceived" and "this crap cannot be enjoyable with these left in" lies the actual description of their impact for a normal person.
They are perhaps marginally tedious. It bothered one modder enough that he modded them out with a mod that has about 7600 unique downloads. It bothered millions of others so little that they...just played the game anyway.
All game content and story issues aside, what pisses me of the most is that a month after release, we still only had a microscopic amount of bugfixes that don't even address some of the larger issues with the game.
I don't want to bring up BG3 again, but at this timespan after the game release, Larian already fixed THOUSANDS of bugs, big and small and overall, the game was much less obviously buggy than Starfield is. It's issues were more inconsistencies in logic and a handful of quest breakers, but otherwise not even noticeable until you read the patch notes.
It's crazy to me there's so little action from Bethesdas side in fixing this heap. I guess it rolls into their bullshit PR of pushing for Awards (they are literally looking to get a Grammy ...) and saying the game is nigh on perfect.
Bethesda has a bad reputation and still sells so they don’t need to fix it. Their reputation is to make games with the things you outlined specifically
I'd wager technical debt is the reason. It's no secret that Bethesda's engine is bad. Bad code makes it harder to do bug-fixes, because it's harder to find the root cause of things and the risks of having accidental side-effects is far higher. There's only so many hacks and emergency fixes you can slap into a codebase before it becomes a house of cards that collapses if you breathe on it the wrong way.
The engine is what makes the games so great though, no other engine I know is so flexible and open for mods, while at the same time can keep states for huge numbers of game objects that can be manipulated and moved freely in the whole Game world.
Yes it has limitations but I am happy to live with those in exchange for what it enables.
It is more then a fair trade in my eyes.
When has Bethesda ever released patches to fix anything short of game breaking bugs? And even then more often than not they don't fix those.
I mean, some of the most popular mods for fallout 4 and skyrim were community patches. I'm not saying I agree with that practice, just that this is par for the (shitty) course for Bethesda. Starfield probably won't be an actually good game until there are thousands of mods for it.
Please explain the larger issues with the game. I have like 50 hours into it and the only things I've noticed were 1 glitched quest (Madam Devine won't progress, which was fixed with 1 command) and some companion bonuses not applying. Also my chameleon-wearing companion's head would remain invisible sometimes! But largely the game has played well. It's great to bitch and moan but what actual bugs are you talking about, because personally I haven't seen them!
I had to use a cheat and kill a achievements because into the unknown was bugged. Where the temple should have spawned there was a mining rig and the scanner never distorted. It's a pretty common issue reported over and over again on their discord (which is a freaking horrible way to deal with support BTW). And then on the final quest one of the mini bosses clipped through an elevator and I had to wait like 10 mins while he decided to teleport behind me.
Rarely, outposts can become unbuildable. You have to save and reload
The bounty system is slightly more jank than I'm used to. Sometimes I'll get a 15000 bounty for a stealth kill while unseen - those 15000 bounties never go away from witness death. Other times a 650 bounty that immediately goes away from "last witness died". I had to save-scum a pirate ship because it happened with some specific folks, and I solved it by chucking a grenade into the bridge. I commented elsewhere, grenades are super-stealth and you usually get away with throwing a grenade in full view in a crowded room if you can hide before it blows up.
I'd like to see #2 fixed/improved, but honestly don't mind either very much.
I'm almost certain most of the team went on vacation after launch. However, that should probably be over by now and there still hasn't been much of anything as far as I'm aware.
"This is the way it's always been done" is also the same rhetoric bigots use to justify racism. Just because Bethesda has always sucked ass doesn't mean anyone likes it or wants them to continue to suck ass.
To 100% it, yes. It has to be done ever several new game cycles so you'll also have to go through the other shit multiple times too. I don't think anyone is expected to do that though. The new game plus stuff undermines the outpost system though. It'll be gone your next cycle, so just don't bother I guess? The ideal meta progression would be to rush through the main story and complete all the temples on your cycle then move on.
I saw a bit of those on stream and thought maybe the time affected the quality of the result.. but no. It's just filler shit to get your space dragon speech spell or whatever. Then the enemies are all bullet sponges. It all seemed very transparent and very familiar.
My experience with starfield is "ughh this is annoying, ughh this part sucks, oooh thats kinda cool" and then I check my save file and have over 130 hours. So basically my typical Bethesda experience. 10/10 would do again.
This also shocked me when playing Starfield, I basically just completed one of the faction quests and basically just spent time building and stealing ships and my playtime is more than 100 hours. WTF.
I just did my first one after about 50 hours and I really hope there's not many of them...... I didn't know what I was doing or if I was doing it right untill I passed it.