I think you are 100% correct and I think a lot of people honest with themselves will agree with you.
To be frank, I feel the same way about Starfield like I did Skyrim. Everything taken on its own is like a 3/10 when contrasted to the best-in-class game in that one specific field. When playing Skyrim I didn’t understand how people could like it. The performance was poor on console, the characters looked pretty rough, the animations were basic, the visuals weren’t particularly impressive. But then I realized I played around 80 hours of it. At that point I realized the allure of these Bethesda games. It was a sandbox that I continued to want to play in.
But because it’s a game that contains so many different things, to the point where few games are comparable, it becomes more than the sum of its parts.
So I would rank so many things about this game a 3/10 and I personally think a score of 7/10 is fair from a technical perspective. But the game does so many things and has so many systems and provides, for me, a sci-fi fantasy to the point where it’s a 10/10 overall.
And I say this despite the fact that I think entire aspects of the game, like some of the crafting, were made meaningless when things like the harmful effects of space and planet atmosphere were neutered. I agree with so many of the complaints. But I’m still super engrossed.
Yeah and it’s not like games are always substituable. Sure, BGS games have a lot of shared mechanics and player freedom, but Starfields the first one I have liked because of the massive upgrade in writing and different tone. I am sure other people love Skyrims tone and that you can walk everywhere.
Feel like a lot of discourse tries to pit games against each other when so often, they are just entirely different events.
A lot of my distaste for Cyberpunk is I don’t want to spend time in that world and I found side content / lore notes / item placement extremely lacking. All of those were intentional developer choices: they want you to hate the world and love the main characters, they wanted to focus on MSQ and factions, they wanted to randomize item placement, and I assume they wanted to write a bunch of spam emails since they did. Some of those I even think are intellectually interesting ideas. But I also don’t enjoy them.
I also wouldn’t say its fair to say Cyberpunk is bad and Starfield is good because of those differences. Makes more sense to judge them on what they were going for and if they achieved that. And I don’t think fancy facial animations or Hollywood cutscenes is what BGS was going for at all.
As someone who has Starfield as his 2023 game of the year and game of the generation thus far, I agree with everything you said because it’s accurate. There’s a lot of things in Starfield that I don’t like (can’t reload your guns when running, like really?) or the animations/facials/realistic reactions and stuff like that. Most are quality of life things.
But I love the story and characters, the writing/dialogue is great even though the characters don’t express themselves through their facial expressions or body movement. A lot of it is “stiff”. But I love the side quests and faction quests. Best quests in any game I have played since The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. Love the on foot combat as im playing Starfield as a pure first person shooter. Haven’t done melee combat at all and don’t think it’s fluid enough due to the lack of animations that should be there. It’s very basic. I hate forced stealth like what’s in the Ryujin quest line as it’s so boring to me but the story/characters make up for it.
Then the space ship combat in third person is fucking great. I love it. So much fun blowing away other ships. I look at Star Wars Outlaws space ship combat and unless they’re not showing you the depth and substance to it, it looks very basic and one note.
Most of all though, I want to keep playing it. I have to put it on the side at times because if I don’t, I wouldn’t play the newer games that are releasing.
That’s when we’re talking about subjective topics but so many of these specific areas are rooted in objectivity.
The facial animations in Hellblade II are superior to Starfield. It’s not a matter of opinion it’s objectively better.
The gunplay in Halo Infinite is superior to Starfield. Again this is not an issue with taste, but rather the fact that it’s objectively better in pretty much all aspects.
And my point is that we don’t have to be really defensive about that because it doesn’t really matter. The game offers an experience that, subjectively for me, is a 10/10.
And that’s where I can see debate happening because I know not everyone will agree with me on that score. I think a lot of people who disagree with me on that are not fans of sci-fi to begin with. A lot of people who say this game is worse than Skyrim may route that in their preference for fantasy over sci-fi.
And, as I also mentioned, it doesn’t matter because we seem to be comparing these particular features to the best-in-class games out there. Which is problematic. We also don’t see this happening to other games, like I don’t remember GTA V having its car physics compared to Gran Turismo.
Alternatively we can objectively state that Starfield is best in class in some areas. The shipbuilding and their customization is unmatched.
But yeah, I think there needs to be a recognition that all videogames are a sum of their parts. It’s why I’m not defensive in stating that certain features don’t compare to the best-in-class implementation of those features.
Halo Infinite gunplay isn’t better though, as there are some extra factors to take in when accounting for the gunplay in Starfield than HI. What they do have in common is 1st person, ADS and making sure the weapons recoil doesn’t cause you to miss. Starfield than has weapon sway, weapon accuracy effected by percentages depending on weapon upgrades, changing rates of fire for every weapon (2 of the same guns can have different parts), rpg mechanics that hinder the weapons ability to do damage, weapons that use energy have different accuracy to ballistics(the only ballistic weapon with a slight difference in Halo Infinite is the Mangler and even that is incredibly accurate the drop off of the bullets only causes it to have a shorter range).
Starfield has a much larger cast and a lot more lines they need to record than Hellblade 2, if Ninja Theory were to expand the game to match it a lot of the facial animation wouldn’t be as accurate to keep with a certain time frame of development. Or the games development time and cost would have to increase considerably to be able to actually do so with the same type of facial animation from a team so small.
Yes, I agree that all games are the sum of their parts. But I disagree with your notion that when compared to other games, Starfield falls short in certain areas. As it feels like you’re ignoring that there’s a lot more going on with Starfield in those comparisons.
Starfield needing to take from games like Cyberpunk is one of those contentious topics around here that has been fought over a few times so most of us won’t touch it lol.
Don’t worry about it, it’s impossible to know and this didn’t blow up like it usually does haha. It’s one of those things you’d only know after having argued the same thing with the same people multiple times.
Inspiration from Cyberpunk or not, it absolutely is something they need to work on, I think a lot of Starfield is great overall and with some tweaks here and there could improve it massively, that being said, the character interaction is absolutely one of it’s weaker aspects
They’ve added the new camera option in the update which is definitely a big improvement as the original zoom in/talk stuff is very outdated but I think that also comes from some characters looking kind of dead in the eyes and just unnatural in general
Like Skyrim came out in 2011, it’s bad that there’s so little advancement in terms of it feeling natural when talking to someone
Yup. Whenever I see these kinds of complaints, especially the ones framed in a definitive “we can all agree” sort of a way, I just wanna quote Will McAvoy from The Newsroom:
But instead I usually don’t say anything and move on. Often to go play Starfield.
I very much am and that’s how these comparisons work, unfortunately. And it does suck when the game being compared to define all the parameters.
Like you said, these cinematic games rarely have branching dialogue.
It’s one problem I had with Forza Motorsport vs GT7 comparisons where things like rain effects were compared, but zero mention that Forza calculates hanging fog along with general fog, leading to visuals and gameplay experiences not seen in other sim racers. That’s as much as part of the rain experience.
But I personally would agree with comparisons on specific features like reflections and car materials that are objectively done better in GT.
So I definitely see where you’re coming from. Many of these comparisons need to be holistic, even if we do consider the feature being compared to be specific.
Forza Motorsport is another title where, when compared on particular features, may fall short in comparison to the best. But the end result of it all added together along with features found in the game not found in any other game results in some visuals that are unmatched.
I’m assuming that the game uses ForzaTech 2.0 which is why I’m confident that Fable looks as impressive as it does (and is running in real time) in all of the demos shown so far.
The link is to a NoSodiumStarfield thread with a SteamDB screenshot, showing lots of recent back-end updates and code changes. Something which usually is indicative of an imminent update.
I doubt it’s Shattered Space, seeing how we don’t have a date yet and I can’t imagine they’d shadow-drop that. But the already announced vehicle? Why not.
