Phil Spencer wants Starfield to be a 12-year hit, just like Skyrim

The problem with Starfield is that most of the problems aren't fixable. Sure, they can incrementally fix it, but no amount of patches will fix a loading screen inbetween every door, the lack of exploration, the awfully mediocre dialogue and boring roleplaying...

I say this as a general fan of the game by the way, but I just don't see it being relevant for more than a year.

The thing I hate about this game, one of the biggest fundamental differences between it and any other BGS title is that it isn't compelling to go explore a planet that has copies of the content on all the other planets, and astoundingly little at that, the same way it is to just pick a direction in Skyrim or Fallout and walk, and end up stumbling on some shit going down in a cave or abandoned building just off the beaten path. Even if you remove the loading screens and add vehicles on planets to minimize the amount of time between engaging set pieces, it's still the same abandoned factory populated with the same pirates guarding the same generic fetch quest objective. It is such an aggressive, unrewarding waste of time with so few redeeming qualities that I'm a little shocked anyone at Bethesda thought this should merit any amount of hard-earned money, let alone seventy fucking dollars. Didn't they know? Didn't they know?
- Narrator: Oh they knew. They didn't care.
- It really feels like Bethesda forgot that what made up for their chit story writing with later titles is that at least they had unique little set pieces one could explore in Elder Scrolls or Fallout games. Starfield however turns that into bland repeats of endless bland outposts with very little uniqueness about them with an extremely mid scifi design asthetic.
Agree. Normally I take BGS games slow, opening every door and talking to every person. I couldn't even bring myself to hit the level cap before losing interest. The story is interesting enough but the gameplay and exploration are not at all intriguing enough to bring myself to finish.
- For the first two days of exploring planets to get all the locations, I hit all the points of interest I ran into. After the third or fourth identical underground hangar mission I started speed running locations. And don’t get me started on how fucking gnarly finding sea fauna is.
Skyrim is great because of the exploration. I’ve not played Star field because the system requirements are too high anyway.
- Skyrim is great because of a robust modding scene. I believe it would've long faded into irrelevancy otherwise.
- I have it running "mostly" stable on my i5, I had to use the 512k low res "Starfield Performance Texture Pack" (https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/510?tab=description) but still get the occasional crash but often hours of play before that.
Yep, I played 2 different characters and a total of almost 200 hours and I'm just done. Unless they somehow make the game far less boring than it is I won't be installing it again.

12 years!? Pure fantasy.

I played Cyberpunk for the first time properly recently, having waited for enough patches to make it worthwhile and what hit me the most after playing Starfield is the quality of conversation. NPCs you talk to emulate real people - they walk around, show emotion, interact with the environment etc. In Starfield, every conversation is a fixed camera POV of you staring directly at the character’s face. It’s so awkward, not at all realistic, unbelievably dated, and I can’t understand why Bethesda continue to make that design choice when there have been countless better implementations over the years.

Haven't played cyberpunk, but the dialog animations in Witcher 3 were down right cinematic, there were wide shots, people pacing back and forth, unique animations.

Mostly for the main quests, but it wasn't camera reverse camera for NPCs as well
- Even Baldur's Gate 3 - a CRPG - has more realistic and varies animation of characters across its million lines of dialogue.
- so did we hate fo4s dialogue or not? im confused
Me and my SO recently picked up fallout 76 to play together (thanks steam sales) and it honestly felt like fo76 NPC interactions were better than starfield NPC interactions 😂 insane how hard they dropped the ball there. It completely kills the game for me.
I don't even think that's necessarily the issue as The Outer Worlds took this approach and the game was fantastic, albeit a bit short. I think it just stands out in addition to the rest of the game being bland.
cyberpunk devs disagree with you. theyve given starfield some high praise

I've said it before. The real problem with Starfield - compared to TES or Fallout - is it's bland SF.

TES is not just vanilla fantasy world, it has its own lore and most importantly its own character, its own feel. Fallout is the daddy of post-apocalyptic worlds and has personality in spades.

But Starfield, so far, is just... a bit meh, it has no beating heart, no joie de vivre no unique identity.

I personally think it'll pick up once the dlc is released then we'll know more about the (spoilers ahead, i dunno how to mark)

Temples, who built them, and why the starborn are the way they are. Then, I hope the universe will feel a bit more interesting
- I hope you're right, but explaining mysterious cosmic things seems to have a history of ruining scifi.
  
  Also just like, starfield never gave me a reason to care about any of that besides it simply being the main quest line.
- I guess they could potentially do a huge DLC with alien contact. Alien races could bring significant personality to the game, I'd argue they're the main thing that brings flavour to Mass Effect which is otherwise somewhat bland in terms of its background and world-building.

It's nice to want things.

Looks like its gonna be about 12 years short of that goal

Seems unlikely. Skyrim is good

Mods..
- Skyrim was good without mods. Mods made it better. Starfield needs mods just to be good.
- I've played it and enjoyed it many times without mods. Plenty of people have

I'm just gonna play New Vegas for the 117th time.

Ooh, can we get an Obsidian Starfield? That would be awesome.

Wait, we have that already.

Skyrim was an awesome game at launch, even without mods. The epic storyline, they way you're face to face with a dragon within minutes of starting, and the diverse range of races and classes you could be made it your own. There's a reason why it lasted as long as it did.

1000 planets to explore. So why couldn't they have let you upload your base to a server online, and then have other people's bases randomly appear in your game as you play? Bearing in mind, this would not be an online game, you would have the opportunity to download them.
Ship building is fun, but it's too limiting. It feels like a system that's still in its infant stages and could've been refined. Give me the ability to resize modules, have the ability to merge parts, so my ship looks more like the ones in Mass Effect or Star Citizen, and not like a mass of parts bolted onto each other.
Bethesda NPCs just don't work in 2023. There's so little life in them, and the voice acting sounds like they are speaking in a recording booth. There's no life to their voices or characters. It's so jarring, going to Starfield after playing Baldurs Gate 3, or Cyberpunk 2077.
Loading screens.
Boring. At least give me an all terrain vehicle to explore 1000 planets, or don't make carrying capacity and oxygen so difficult to manage. How about they give us free DLC after release that continues to add curated content to other planets. Give me a damn reason to play the game, Bethesda! What the hell is this BS?

1000 planets to explore. So why couldn't they have let you upload your base to a server online, and then have them randomly appear in your game as you play? Bearing in mind, this would not be an online game, you would have the opportunity to download them.

This could work the way it does in Fallout 76 too, since they make multiplayer bases work well in that game.

It didn't even last 2 months for me. Super bored of it

I haven't bought Starfield yet. $49 on sale just seems pricey to me. Bring it below $25 or no deal.

Why wouldn’t he? Why would anyone not want a game they put out to continue to be successful for a long time?

It's kind of new thinking in the games world. Todd Howard has said that if they'd anticipated Skyrim's enduring popularity, they'd have released a lot more DLC for the game. Instead, they put out two DLC plus a home-builder addon and then moved everyone to Fallout 4. Which probably seemed like the best use of resources at the time.