My opinion doesn’t carry much weight because I haven’t played nor do I really want to play Starfield. I can, anytime, because I have GamePass, but what this article outlines is exactly why I have no interest. The “Bethesda game” format has never been immersive or interesting or engaging, to me. This is, of course, to…

Seconding that.... I’d be tempted to debate the “writing” aspect in modern Bethesda games. Not that there isn’t bits of questlines here and there that aren’t really good but how the *structure* of the world kind of negate a lot of it in my opinion after playing these games for a while(I’d actually purchased Skyrim on…

This is a bonkers take. After character creation, almost every single upgrade in Starfield is “+10% pistol damage” “+10kg carry weight” “-5% O2 consumption” “+10% persuasion chance”. Comparatively, the skill tree in AC: Valhalla was a fucking design masterclass.

Again, you’re taking a very surface level understanding of things and stretching it to the point of being woefully wrong.

That’s roundtrip latency. The thing that is most important in game perception is not light-action-light, its action-light. Your ability to perceive that gap is roughly an order of magnitude higher.…

Who to believe, Todd Howard who is a part of a Dev studio with a history of horribly optimized games, or myself and my friends who are getting much lower performance in Starfield as compared to games like RDR2 and CP2077, both of which run at higher settings, look far better and get far higher FPS for us. As well as…

You make it painfully obvious that you have no idea how framerate works.

So - just bear with me now - what if I told you you could actually tell when your framerate drops without actually having to monitor the exact number? What if I also told you that it can be highly distracting when that happens?

I feel like needing 120 fps is ridiculous, personally (ditto for needing ultra high…

(Admittedly, somewhat cynical) translation: I got my bag, and the longer this remains available for purchase, the more liable I am for the obvious and blatant copyright infringement the game made its fortune on.

Which, to be clear, I don’t really begrudge. I doubt this dude thought this game would ever have the…

And as far as jetpacks go, even on low gravity planets they are still only as fast as running anyway.

“Todd Howard says it’s all about making planet exploration an “experience.”

Got about 55 hours in now. The main ‘experience’ I have walking towards unexplored waypoints on planets is boredom and annoyance as I sometimes need to wait for my stamina/oxygen to replenish before I can sprint again. And as far as jetpacks…

Let’s see...Tribes managed to have jet packs over 20 years ago. No Man’s Sky has jet packs and vehicles.

Harder to play and also just significantly less joyful. Menuing is not exploration. There is no “ooh whats that over there” impulse except when you’re literally within cities. Something is either placed directly on your lap, or you have to just pick a location from a menu and hope there might be something interesting…

“So we end up where we are with Starfield, a game that visually looks like something from this era, but still plays and operates like a game from 2005"

I’m fine with the same engine and gameplay loop, but they made Starfield harder to play, navigate, and understand compared to their previous games. I was fine playing another Bethesda game, in space, that’s what I wanted and expected, but trying to remember where every shop is, where the trader posts are, and where…

I’m sure there’s some tricky territory that Bethesda devs need to navigate, so they don’t get accused of just copying/stealing a modder’s work. But regardless, they really need to start looking at the popular improvements that people are making to their games and learning from them for the future. This is just getting…

Cool so it took 1 person a few days(?) to completely overhaul and fix the game’s terrible inventory system? It’s a good job that Bethesda aren’t a billion dollar development/publishing goliath with a track record of their games needing the same fixes from community mods of every game they release or this would be…

That’s not how Bethesda operates. You got to hope for fan made patches.

But it’s not amazing.

To be fair for a game of this size with this much anticipation there’s definitely going to be some review bloat. It's the new Bethesda games, people are going to be afraid to give it a low score. Fallout 4 is polarizing, its metacritic scores range from 84-88. Skyward sword is divisive, it's at a 93 on metacritic.…