Starfield's been left out to dry at The Game Awards—and even dedicated fans are 'not terribly surprised'

to be fair, ffxvi is not really an rpg either.

But it's not Fallout in Space. I can travel from one edge of the map to the other in Fallout or Skyrim and stumble upon a pitched battle or a cultist ritual or a lost dog or a juicy plot hook. In Starfield I can travel from one interstitial area to the next interstitial area to listen to a bland NPC tell me to go to the next interstitial area.

It's okay. I look forward to mods. Right now it's like somebody reskinned Super Mario Bros from the NES with a generative image AI trained on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day and Mass Effect 1 stills.

For me it's not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.

I didn't think the lack of space exploration would bother me so much.

But after playing the Pirate quest and just fast traveling over and over, my immersion broke and realized how little I'm really traveling.

Empyrion is a way better game about space exploration and i'd never consider it for a GOTY award.

The funny thing is, I think the fact that the RPG mechanics are finally better than the last game developed by Bethesda, instead of worse, highlights just how mediocre Bethesda games are.

I still think once mods and DLCs come out in full force it will be remembered more positively.

For me it came pretty close between the two but eventually BG3 came out on top. Totk was great but after 200+ hours I was done with Totk. I currently have almost 200 hours in BG3 and I feel like there's still so much more to play. I also feel like most of my issues with BG3 (like the poor performance in act 3 and some questlines breaking) are things Larian will fix while the issues with Totk (no rebinds, not being able to infuse weapons from inventory, menus in general, almost everything related to the sage powers) are unlikely to get fixed.

Depends entirely on how much you care about story and characters.

BG3 was a buggy mess and the story has much to be desired. They should have kept the Chris Avellone writing.

I watched part one of a play through. The moment I heard United colonies and Freestar Collective. I knew it was going to be the most generic space setting possible.

I'm a huge Bethesda fan and I absolutely love everything bethesda.

I can unfortunately say that many people will not be impressed with this showing. Outside of a few key characters, most NPCs are forgettable. Most quest designs are basic, and some are outright stupid - like some stranger just giving you the keys to unlock everything.

Skyrim has so much storytelling and "oh wow" moments.

You might find 5-6 of them in the 100+ hours you play. Not to say that won't change in the future.

Ultimately, unless they deviate from the formulaic structure (follow arrow on compass to have awkward uncanny conversation with a mannequin who tells you to go to copy and paste dungeon where you have asynchronous combat against copy and pasted enemies) eventually, people will have the same gripes with ES6 that they didn't know they had with Skyrim. At this point, Creation Engine games are nostalgic, but Bethesda thinks they're still the future.

I can't imagine Beth cares about game awards as long as their sales are good.

I don't see settlement building as a core part of Starfield, I am 160h in (NG+3) and have not touched settlement building at all. It is a feature of the game, but it is completely optional.

Bethesda did not over promise anything, didn't over hype. They said they wanted to create Skyrim in space, and that is exactly what Starfield is. For better or for worse.

Starfield being a disappointment to some is only because those players over hyped themselves.

So, The Outer Worlds of 2023?

Why would you want extensive public participation in an award ceremony? If you want a popularity contest just look at sales numbers. What purpose do awards even serve if they aren't curated beyond validating your own preferences?

It's an excuse for me and some buddies to get drunk and yell at Geoff keighly for a couple hours.

I put very little stock in them as a true reflection of quality in the industry, though it's occasionally nice to see Indies and smaller devs get some recognition.

after you’ve the modders have fixed the bugs

Let's not give developers the habit of relying on modders to finish their games. I'm tired of studios releasing half ass games

I really regret thinking the extra time to polish would result in a game where we don't need modders to make things decent. The mod tools aren't even out and people have rebalanced multiple systems to be way better than Bethesda came up with.

And year after that, and the year after that, and so on for the next 15 years as they re-release it.

It is more stable than their other releases, but that's a very low bar.

I'd never call it stable without that very important context.

Plus, it doesn't pass that bar by more than a few inches.

It definitely doesn't deserve best RPG.

It might win the most "it's alright I guess", game of the year award.

Both spider man 2, re4, and tears of the kingdom are just as formulaic if not more, yet there they are. And SM Wonders is somehow super innovative, just because it is not the exact same formula of all marios but the exact same formula "a little bit harder"

And the early access people hated the plot too.

I wish Hardspace would work again. It had lots of potential before they crippled it.

Yeah, I played it back to back with cyberpunk TPL and it felt pretty sterile and soulless by comparison.

Okay, who downvoted this? Come clean, buster. My opinion about a video game is objective fact and you must agree with it.

What I don't understand is why it even has loading screens. Surely it would be possible for them to level stream that stuff, after all the actual handcrafted environments are not that big, The rest of the planet is procedurally generated.

Bloody hell. I don't even think i have that many hours in most of the games i consider my favourites

I enjoyed it for 3-5 minutes and then it crashed before hitting a save point.

Same with me. As soon as I realized that there is no sane way to travel from planet to planet even within the same system without fast travel, I stopped playing the game. Starfield literally made space boring.

Can't really form an opinion about an RPG in 30 minutes playtime. Hell, I doubt you even know Starfield has magic powers.

It was influenced by the internet calling it bad, you are allowed to admit it.

Just don't call it your opinion.

That sounds more like a issue with your proton configuration then a fault of the game.

Have you tried to change the proton configuration, to force it to use the discrete GPU?

Nvidia GPUs are known to be problematic in Linux, not only with Wine/Proton

....why didn't you just refund it?
Even if you passed the 2h window because of troubleshooting, Steam Support would probably still allow it if you explained you couldn't get it to work at all

It's real nova, choom.

I'm sorry but Bethesda doesn't deserve three years to make a game work. They should make it work on launch and delay it until it's worth launching. They have billions of dollars and ownership from a major tech conglomerate. It's entirely unacceptable for them to release an unfinished product.

Games are never finished now with the internet. The whole industry has agreed to say "fuck it, we'll fix it in post" for basically every single project.

They'd have to rip out and replace the entire plot, which I don't think they would do

I honestly don't think so. NMS sky started from a rock solid space exploration engine, but that was basically it, and has then layered on most of the other parts of a space sim on top since then, but most of Starfield's biggest issues seem to be because their game engine can't handle the scales needed for seamless space exploration.

So at this point Starfield devs have spent a ton of time and effort building a space sim game on an engine not suited for it, and that means that every cut scene and animation and scripted event is built around this engine, making it really time consuming just to bug test, let alone fix any problems that arise from changing or upgrading that engine, let alone designing the old missions and stuff to work with more continuous travel.

I have more faith that 5 years from now NMS will be fleshed out into a really rich and full story driven game, then that Starfield will have fixed it's fundamental exploration / loading screen problems.

The sad part is that Microsoft pulled the original 2022 release to fix a lot of the bugs.

So really the updates have to be pretty impactful.

I'm still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!

You clearly haven't played baldur's gate and shouldn't make comparisons based on your limited experience with it.

Your love for the game is valid but criticisms of the game are also valid. The biggest flaw starfield has is the massive amount of gameworld it provides. In skyrim, CP2077, BG3, Morrowind, Zelda, and whatever else you want to think of, you can pick a direction and go.

In nearly every case, the game is designed to take you somewhere, give you something, reward you for straying off the main path. In Starfield, both space and planet side, youre likely to run into a whole lot of nothing. Which is realistically fine, the universe is already a vast amount of nothing, but in game design that makes for a boring and lackluster RPG and that is the biggest problem SF has. That doesnt take away from the players like you who want this experience though, but thats kind of why Space Sim games are a niche experience.

As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that’s where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.

You should seriously, seriously go play BG3.

You don’t have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can’t really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.

Seriously, BG3. (Between Dark Urge, custom character choices, etc, go.)

The problem is how disjointed everything is. Skyrim and Fallout, I can literally walk across the entire map. I can run into a random plot, some fun environmental storytelling, anything really - there's no sense of discovery for a game so vast as Starfield. Everything is a known quantity which is why you can fast travel to and from basically every area.

All these other functions built into the game are superficial and/or incomplete at best. Ship building is basically pointless, as you can carry a massive crew in a tiny freighter, regardless of crew capacity or passenger capacity of your vessel. Modding weapons is more or less the same as it was in Fallout 4. The environments that are available to explore are all dead with fuck all, and all the tunnels and mines are filled with the same bullet-sponge spacer enemies. You would think with smaller, chunked zones we'd have some very detailed environments that make use of the fact that they are relatively small spaces, but instead everything is truncated with a loading screen and entirely lacking in depth.

I am at 160ish hours and have seen only a small amount of the quests

So you've just been having fun with the most basic of systems that are not much different from all previous games, while barely having touched the things most people are complaining about? The mechanics and stability are pretty good. It's the bland stories within the uninspired quests that are a major source of disappointment.

And to say only a Bethesda RPG does while BG3 doesn't have the kinds of roleplaying you're describing tells me you haven't actually played BG3. Or any actually good RPG for that matter.

What you are trying to say is that Starfield is a sandbox RPG, while BG3 is a Linear Story RPG.

Both are fun in their own ways. You just vibe more with the sandbox aspect.

I bet you also enjoy Minecraft for the same reasons.