rhinohelix
Dental Dammer
- 3,037
- 5,004
That's a super high bar to get over, and no established company is every going to be able to reach it, man, but I support your choice; I am hopefully for a Phantom Liberty style improvement, although I don't get that kind of commitment vibe from Todd. Perhaps my concerns have been addressed, or I have a bad take on the gameplay/story etc. This is just what it looks like to me. My Top of mind list of What they need to do:
1) Unfuck the narrative. Every other Bethesda (and most other games period) have a narrative path forward, into the future. Because of the NG+/Multiverses are the new hotness choices they made probably 7 years ago and now and a couple years before release, Starfield is stuck at a narrative dead end; it always ends with the player entering the Unity and resetting the Timeline/moving to a different universe. Nothing can progress story wise past that point: The Starfield Universe can't change or evolve, new events can't happen, nothing can become cannon because the player is always going to enter the Unity. Fix this dead end, either with the expansion or an update but fix it.
2) Radically improve the gameplay: By this I mean the flow of travel within the game, from one location to another is like 7 loading screens. Using the Creation Engine again might have seemed like a good idea, and they talked it up before launch but we all saw the limitations, the loading screens, the loading screens, the loading screens. It didn't matter so much in the short run, but over Skyrim-type playthroughs, it makes doing anything too staccato. No one (well, I am not) asking for seamless lift offs from planet to space but lots of systems need better design.
3) Fix the graphics: You aren't going to get Cyberpunk level graphics out of the Creation engine but you need to improve the night club setting so the comparisons aren't humiliating.
4) Make the planets better: Planet exploration should be a top tier item, not hot rando garbage.
5) Fix the mods: They gave Skyrim so much life, this and so much more contribute to how Bethesda is seen as a company: If just for PR purposes, put this thing right.
All this is off the top of my head when I haven't looked at or thought about Starfield in probably a year. It sunk its claws into me deep, and I was burned super hard when I realized what the story narrative had done. Combine that with the thousand cuts of the poor game system design and its one of the biggest flops for me in a long long time. Cyberpunk 2077 at launch was a better game for me, narratively it offered more choice, and while the game had a lot of bugs, none of them made the game seem poorly designed or lesser. Starfield looks like a Frankenstein's monster with leftover parts from 10 years that just accumulated and eventually the third or fourth project manager/director got complete *enough* to ship. No one would confuse that with good.
They have a chance with an expansion to address many of these issues. I haven't been paying that much attention because fuck this game but I haven't heard the right things yet.
Maybe they've said them, or maybe they haven't lost enough money yet.
It's an albatross right now they need to get rid of before they launch anything else. It will weigh down ES6 for sure.
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