“When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored."
Yeah I think that might be because they were on the moon and not pressing WASD to walk around a fake moon
If you landed in an in-game fake moon it would be a wonderfully interesting plot thread.
I think I saw a documentary about that recently
Yeah they should 100% have a flat planet somewhere. Held up by a turtle.
It also bugs me that Bethesda keeps saying that the game is about exploration and finding new planets, but so far every planet I’ve visited has some kind of building upon it. Its clear that people have been on this planet before, so why the hell should I explore this planet? At least give me some incentive or a better reward for finding a true empty planet.
You’re not wrong, but OTOH, it’s pretty funny to see a planet having a building on it equated to the planet being explored, considering Earth was still being explored thousands of years after the first buildings.
Yeah thats true. In Bethesda’s dictionary exploration means: find minerals, 7 life forms and 3 unique geological formations. And by unique we mean like on the other planets.
Or because they didn’t show up at the moon after a loading screen
Customer: I didn’t like the taste of this cake.
Management response: Dear customer, thank you for taking the time to try our cake. This is a cake, which is sweet and tasty by definition. We made the cake so customers can enjoy the cake and taste the typical cake ingredients which taste sweet and tasty. The cake experience as we created should appeal to everyone because cake is tasty.
Customer: Wtf, it tastes like wet socks!
Management: Cake
Customer: Hey there, customer outreach person; how does it feel to repeat yourself over and over again?
Management response: As a large-language model, I am unable to experience feelings the way humans do. Moreover…
You’re enjoying the cake wrong, it’s supposed to taste like shit
Our survey of shit-enjoying-customers proves that more than 99% of them like our cake.
Just wait until some suckers make you a better cake for free.
I blame other cake makers for making good cakes and setting unrealistic expectations for cake making.
The cake is a lie
This was a triumph.
It’s the most* realist immersive cake you’ll ever find.
16x the detail.
Now with optional toppings. Plate included in the deluxe cake edition available for limited time only!
collectors edition plate has been replaced with cardboard
I didn’t find any of the responses to be insightful, more a marketing reply to convince people who are off put by the negativity. This is coming from someone who’s played the game nearly 80 hours. Still disappointed by it, but I have a hoarding sim problem
Bethesda games make hoarding painful though.
Are you kidding? Slowly unloading your ship 200 pounds at a time and waiting for it to hopefully actually transfer to the pods is so fun. Not to mention they have absolutely no storage so you need a wall of them that you must then manually search to find anything. The best is when your cargo ship doesn’t fit on the landing pad so you have to carry it all yourself. Or you could build a convoluted network of shipping docks and either manually fuel them or create another convoluted network of shipping docks just to ship helium 3 to all the other shipping docks. Fuck I love loading screens.
Rage aside, the game itself was pretty fun for a run or two, but after that the shallowness really showed. Outposts suck ass though. I made shitty ones and figured I’d hit ng+ before actually caring about them, but I couldn’t make myself care. Benches go outside, I don’t give a shit.
God I’m just remembering how bad it is now. If the terrain isn’t perfectly level go fuck yourself, you can’t expand your hab. I build a fucking boardwalk with multiple levels and shopfronts in FO4, I had nearly full map coverage for artillery, I could attract settlers to live there and defend it. Now I just drop an extractor and power and fuck off.
Real talk inventory and weight limits are 99% time completely useless mechanics that detract from gameplay.
yeah not having the ability to have shops and all that stuff like fallout 4 sucks, hopefully they will keep adding things like they did to fo4 to get the game to a better state
I mean, to be fair in every Bethesda game you had to do some…let’s call it “inventory management”.
At least in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim
I mean, to be fair in every Bethesda game you had to do some…let’s call it “inventory management”.
At least in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim
I had a barrel outside caius’ house that I dumped all my extra stuff into. One barrel held everything. My current storage outpost has… At least 10 resource storage crates? And that’s still not enough. Plus actually hauling all that shit from mining outposts.
Replying to myself because I just can’t get over how shitty storage is. I can carry my armor, pack, like 8 guns, and way too many consumables, then stack another 130 or so on top of that. The giant ass storage crates as tall as me? 100, take it or leave it.
I prefer the use oxygen to run mechanic over the now you can only walk mechanic. But yeah, it could be better. Let me hold all the guns Bethesda, encumbrance isn’t fun. I should just use the console and add that mod that reenables achievements
I wish these idiots would quit trying to tell the people playing the game that they are wrong for not liking it. Like, no man, listen to them, this is feedback. You can’t take all of it without a pinch of salt but if you see a common theme, then you should address it.
Bethesda, simply put, doesn’t know how to react to criticism. Instead of taking this feedback and improving their product they double-down and insist that you should like it because they said so. If it’s boring it’s boring man. They are simply as disconnected as possible. Remember the whole canvas bag fiasco? Then they said “ah, canvas costs too much, we aren’t planning on doing anything with the nylon one”… deal with it in other words. Then they were puzzled why people disliked them to all hell.
I can’t believe how ignorant you are of the worldwide canvas shortage of 2018. Canvas became a global strategic resource. Lack of canvas destabilized numerous nation states.
The idea of frivolously wasting that precious canvas on a video game trinket is frankly offensive.
-Bethesda, probably.
They wasted all the canvas on influencer merchandise some months prior.
How that’s not false advertising is beyond me.
Well, there is a class action lawsuit against them in regards to that and other things FO76 related.
Dont forget about the moldy helmet, how fun.
(it was only for some exclusive edition, not the normal collector helmet, but still)
Yup. And shitty plastic shell for the rum. Then people who requested refund got their info and CC numbers leaked by their system which they took offline immediately.
they took the criticism of fallout 76 and continued working on it, still getting updates to this day when most other places would have left it to rot
I’m not 100% sure but I think FO76 is maintained by BGS Austin. They seem to be far more interested in taking feedback and making the game better than the main Bethesda studio. FO76 may be fundamentally flawed but post-launch it’s definitely getting more care than Skyrim, FO4 and Starfield combined.
They also took class action lawsuits for that game as well, so that might be affecting that push to fix the game. But even if they fix it, doesn’t negate the fact they said they don’t plan on fixing canvas issue, or any problem they caused. Only when there was an outrage they reacted. Remember the horse armor for Skyrim or when they tried to sell mods that were included in previous game. I do.
horse armor was oblivion
Thanks for the correction. Same company though.
yeah. and i guess the 2 expansion packs made up for that fuckup because i hear nothing but great things about the sheogorath expansion
Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design — but that’s not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored." The intention of Starfield’s exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed.
May as well boot up SpaceEngine then.
Starfield, the epitome of scientifically correcty simulations. Why would I expcet my Starship Travel Simulator 2000 to be a fun-focused game after all, durr.
scientifically correct
Why doesn’t nasa just open up the starmap and simply fast travel to the moon or mars?
they do basically except they give spacex a chunk of money to have their rocket tp them
It really evoked a feeling of smallness in me. Namely how small and devoid of content the universe feels.
This is made worse because every inhabited planet I go to has some elaborate situation just waiting for me to solve it. For example: I land on the landing pad, walk 30 meters through a gate and am greeted by a hostage situation in a bank where the hostage negotiator is going to let me, some random, go do his job instead of him, trusting me with the lives of everyone involved without even blinking.
I have played most of the fully 3D Bethesda RPG games and I am accustomed to their game design, bugs, and janks.
But the only thing I hate about Starfield is just the way the game always talks about how amazing exploration of the unknown is (heck, your main character is even a part of the explorer group name Constellation) while trying everything it can to stop player to do just that (overly rely on teleportation, cannot travel seamlessly between planets, etc…)
It feels like you are playing an institute scientist in an fallout game, always stay in your high tech base and only travel using teleportation to the outside world
This is a major turn off for me and there is no way to fix it
100%. The best part of Bethesda open world games is exploring the open space between towns, quests, objectives, etc. Fast travel is an option, but rarely necessary. If you rely on it you will miss lots of cool stuff.
Not so in Starfield, the space between objectives is literally empty space.
I mean, that’s why it’s called “space”, right? That’s literally what it is.
And space travel isnt actually a fun adventure, but the point of a video game is to romanticize the concepts. Not make them as boring and realistic as possible
There’s lots of actual stuff in interplanetary space that you can pull on for inspiration on how to make an interesting game.
You can have counters with shady trader types that are only in the vast gulf between the systems, there could be rogue planets with billion year old abandoned cities to explore filled with automated defences for you to fight and interesting loot at the end. Distant ancient asteroids that contain the seeds of the first life in the universe that when you interact with temporarily give you status change that you can only get from asteroids and temporarily gives you super strength or something, allowing you to complete missions in a way you otherwise would not necessarily have done.
The way these kind of side quests are supposed to work is the player is plodding along trying to get from point A to point B and on the way they get sidetracked by this side quest (the clue is in the name Bethesda). Maybe it changes their priorities or how they’re going to tackle and upcoming mission. Side quests are not supposed to be independent standalone things, they’re supposed to integrate with the main story. They’re not supposed to be something you find easily there’s supposed to be something you come across on your own as you’re exploring the environment, but you can only do that if the developers bothered to provided environment for you to explore. If they just teleport you to your destination then there’s no opportunity for this kind of emergent gameplay.
Loads of stuff you can put between the star systems.
I agree. Unless that’s the whole point of the game you are making, and then it’s just the nature of the game. Flight Sim is one of my friend’s favorite games, but not so for me. At least they aren’t telling people that they are wrong about it being boring because it’s realistic and realism is better or some crap.
There is, in fact, a very heated debate on whether or not simulators that stay true to form are actually games. With the argument being, they are either toys or simulators.
“I had fun playing with it” isnt exclusive to games, as a ball is not a game but I would gladly throw it against a wall for hours by myself with some music.
But lots of people would likely shit on an attempt to rebrand those things as “video toys” when the distinction is largely only relevant to people studying design, so the heated debate is mostly between academics and pedants.
yes. the point is it doesn’t work well in a video game.
So why are you playing it then?
That’s a fair opinion to have, but my preference is actually exploring the towns. I love that Starfield removed many of the middle of nowhere winding dungeons that I got so bored of. (Dwemer/Nord ruins in Skyrim and office buildings/other skyscrapers in fallout 4.)
Yeah it’s quite an accomplishment to make the vastness of space feel claustrophobic and small.
Some of the response to the reviews is bizarre - one seems to try to claim that the planets are not boring because they’re realistic and the real world is boring, and that the player is probably just overwhelmed by the awesomeness of it all.
It almost feels like the game Devs have convinced themselves that they’ve been working on the greatest game ever made and when told “no you haven’t” they’re responding by saying “you just don’t get our vision”.
It’s an ok game. I’m actually less bothered by the loading screens and more by the old fashioned story telling. This game would have been amazing if released closer after Skyrim. But it’s been 12 years and we’ve had Witcher 3, Cyberpunk and Baldurs Gate 3 that have changed expectations. All of them are better at evoking a sense of emotional engagement with the game, and actions having meaningful consequences in the plot. Subplots like the bloody baron in Witcher 3, or Judy in cyberpunk have stuck with me in a way characters and events in Skyrim and now Starfield just never have.
Problem is I suspect Bethesda will focus on all the loading screen / sense of scale complaints and not register the more important (imo) issues with the stories, characters and gameplay. Less but better is the real lesson I think.
Funny thing is, they don’t care. As long as they have fans who will complain but still buy their product at full price… they simply don’t care. This is evident with every product of theirs. Fallout76 had bugs originating from FO4 that were patched by community but were reintroduced in FO76.
I’m actually fine with personally, but what I dislike is that Starfield is too grindy and slow.
If a significant amount of people “misunderstood” you, it’s not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
Same here: if people play the game “wrong”, you didn’t design it properly and/or marketed it completely wrong.
Sure, there will always be “dumb” (or too clever) individuals who you simply can’t properly address and satisfy, but if the group is large enough to be loud, you failed your job.
If a significant amount of people “misunderstood” you, it’s not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
I find this ironic, because even the tutorials in the game only communicate half of the information you need. A lot of them just outright expect you to have played one of their games before. I could imagine if this was someone’s first Bethesda RPG, they’d be confused as hell. Plus there are a few things unique to Starfield that are confusing even if you’ve played every one of their games before.
No Man’s Sky has had no loading screens during gameplay, and space to planet transitions on full planets, since what… 2016?
The Creation Engine is just too damn old.
Edit @Dark Arc: You’re right. Creation Engine is just too damn shitty, I guess. I called it “old” because the gameplay feels so antiquated.
“Engines” are not static things. What we call “Unreal Engine” goes back to the 90s.
These comments always bug me as a programmer because it’s like someone calling a 2023 Camero old because it doesn’t have the acceleration of a 2023 Mustang… The “age” almost certainly isn’t the problem, it’s where the effort has or hasn’t been put in to the engine and more importantly the game itself (e.g., carrying on the metaphor, the Camero might be slower getting up to speed because all the R&D for the last 3 years was on a smooth ride).
Yeah to be honest what strikes me the most about companies like Bethesda is just how little they’ve improved over the decades. There’s nothing stopping them from making major improvements like removing loading screens, adding vehicles finally (I wonder if the ships are really a hat like the train in fallout 3), fixing the buggy ass collisions and physics, or any number of dumb shits they just keep leaving in game after game. It really speaks to the institutional inertia and spaghetti mess their code must be.
I would assume those things are just not prioritized by management because they’ve never been things that have caused sufficient outrage and/or aren’t seen as things that can increase sales… You can’t exactly use “look we fixed physics” in a marketing video to sell a new game. Maybe you can use “look we have vehicles”… but what’s the number of people that will really care? What % will that increase sales?
e.g. maybe someone would care if EA made your need for speed character able to get out of the car and walk around… Do I care? Nah.
(I bothered to look at the Wikipedia page and) they added multiplayer support to Creation Engine for Fallout 76, that was a huge undertaking.
I mean fixing these things can definitely increase sales, but you’re right not in the sense that they are directly marketable. The thing that makes games really blow up is word of mouth, people recommending them to their friends, and you get that best by making a game with overall quality. It’s basically a given at this point that Bethesda games are buggy messes that get fixed by modders. Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less. All of this hurts sales, if not today in the future. So yeah, they probably aren’t prioritized by management, but management is wrong. They often are.
Fair assessment, though I’d critique:
Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less.
These aren’t the improvements you said you wanted ;) Fixing physics, adding vehicles, etc are features/major changes that can increase instability/take a lot more time to QA.
Creation Engine is static. Others, you are right, change.
Bethesda revealed in June 2021 that they were working on a new iteration of the engine called Creation Engine 2, and that it would power their upcoming games Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI. Creation Engine 2 features real-time global illumination and advanced volumetric lighting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Engine
Case and point
Case in point
Huh, thanks for the tip!
Casing point
Just slapping number 2 at the end doesn’t mean it’s better. That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better. And how big of a joke is volumetric lighting and “real-time global illumination”… hahaha. Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
Here’s an in-game example of that global illumination.
Creation Engine is static. Others, you are right, change.
Points out it does change.
jUst sLappInG a nUmbeR 2 aT tHe End dOesN’t mEan iT’s bEtTer
That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better.
It is… By a lot, ask any web developer. Even before they switched to using Blink under the hood it was a significantly better browser. Now it’s literally a reskinned Chrome. Meanwhile IE11 is a complete mess that requires a ton of hacks to get it to do what you want.
In both cases IE -> Edge and Edge -> Chrome Microsoft changed the literal browser engine. … This just kinda makes my point even more so, the general public has no idea what constitutes an “engine change” and can’t judge whether that will yield the results they want.
Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right…? Destiny 2 only allows certain areas to have the flashlight on because if they don’t plan for it the flash lights can tank their frame rates (seriously) – but hey “Left 4 Dead 2 had a flashlight in source engine!” /s.
I can almost guarantee Half-Life two also didn’t have “Global illumination”, maybe real time lighting for the flashlight, but Global Illumination is a much bigger thing.
This is Half-Life 2 with global illumination: https://youtu.be/WWYpKRETv8k?si=9eTDmx10m3l9nwdR
Here’s an old forum from 2005 talking about how “real global illumination isn’t yet possible” https://gamedev.net/forums/topic/348797-half-life-2-global-illumination/3282572/
Points out it does change.
In case you haven’t figured it out, it’s a joke that their engine doesn’t change. Whether they want it or not, they have to at least adapt some things and am well aware of that. Joke is that they do so seldomly and we don’t see much progress in quality.
By a lot, ask any web developer.
I am a web developer and have been for 20 years almost. So I know what am talking about. I know IE, whether I like it or not, so intimately I can still quote all the bugs they had from IE6 onwards. All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump. Hence why I quoted it. But by all means please enlighten me with your Google skills in order to justify the fact Bethesda scammed you out of your money once again.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right
Yes, and number of polygons means nothing. Which is why there’s an ongoing joke about people needing to upgrade their computers to run Starfield, when there are better looking games out there which run much much better.
And you are equating global illumination with ray tracing, which is not the same thing. You can do partial global illumination without doing ray tracing. Only thing that means, coming from Todd Howard’s mouth is that they are not using baked in lights, which I don’t believe him either. Remember how FO76 had 16x the details? But in reality they copy and pasted foliage that many times and called it a day with same shitty textures. Yeah, that kind of Todd treatment is expected whatever he says. Even if they did do ray tracing it doesn’t matter one bit if game is boring, which it is.
Also, I gave HL2 and Source engine as an example as a joke as well, since game looked awesome and ran on pretty much any hardware. With the release of Lost Coast, which is what you should be comparing Starfield to, it was demonstrated what Source can do. Lost Coast was released in 2005 and looks significantly better and demonstrates many things Bethesda these days boasts about.
In the end, if all that matters to you is what Todd tells people and then pretends he didn’t and number of polygons so be it. I on the other hand like my games to be entertaining, regardless of how they look.
All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump.
Really? So Chakra was just a fever dream I had? (https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-edge-gets-better-against-chrome-and-other-browsers-javascript-benchmarks)
The initial release of EdgeHTML on Windows 10 included more than 4000 interoperability fixes. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML#cite_note-13)
Initial public release of Microsoft Edge. Contains improvements to performance, support for HTML5 and CSS3.
“Minor bump” that fixed 4,000 bugs, and added HTML5 and CSS3.
I suppose ES6, C++11, Java 8, Python 3, etc are also just “minor bumps.”
I didn’t even buy the game, it didn’t seem interesting to me. I just am frustrated by the fundamental lack of understanding about what an “engine” is and the fact that they’re almost always being iterated on in different ways.
Diversity of engines is a good thing, everything shouldn’t be Unreal Engine, Blink, V8, Clang, etc
That’s true, but the comments are valid when talking about Bethesda games
No man sky also barely has a story and has zero voice acting. It’s apples and oranges, just because they’re both fruit doesn’t mean they can be compared
Except you just compared them in saying they are both fruit. In fact, saying they are both fruit is finding a commonality between them when comparing. There are many metrics on which Apples and Oranges can be compared. They are different colors, have a different internal structures, and different juice content. These are negatively correlated comparisons. More positive correlations would be that they are both roughly spherical, provide vitamin C, and grow on trees.
I have always hated that expression. You can compare anything since comparison is just the act of identifying similarities and differences (positive and negative correlations). One can make meaningful comparisons between and apple and a suspension bridge if the situation calls for it.
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If you don’t like Bethesda games just come out and say it. Those are two games that provide completely different experiences to anything Bethesda has ever made.
Do I wish Starfield had less loading screens? Sure, but the only thing I’m really upset about is that it doesn’t show the ship animations every time I take off and land. But that’s an immersion issue and Starfield is more immersive than either nms or cyberpunk either way.
As far as technical issues go, I couldn’t play it when I had popOS installed but since I switched to Windows I’ve had zero issues on a 3080ti
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It’s relevant because it’s there. If you don’t play those parts it doesn’t mean it’s there. They put the time in other things more important to the game than transitions. Also, the engine is completely different.
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They are completely different games though. Watchdogs 2 had less loading screens than Hitman 3, but that doesn’t really mean much to say.
They are compared because they both are advertised as filling the same niche, of space exploration with emphasis on exploration.
Except they don’t really? And I didn’t see that much. Starfield to me seemed like it was being advertised as for RPG fans, and that they would have a lot of dialogue. And that space was just a setting, not the main character.
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I’m not saying it to justify it, I’m saying that not having loading screens doesn’t make No Man’s Sky a better game. I think Star Citizen is a better comparison to Star Field in terms of style- and is much more empty.
I’m not saying it to justify it, I’m saying that not having loading screens doesn’t make No Man’s Sky a better game.
It makes it better in terms of loading screens.
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Good job, guys, I’m sure that’ll fix it.
Fuck. I mean I even liked Starfield but this level of mishandling the public perception is absolutely unreal.
Honestly, this behavior of responding to player feedback and arguing about how “it’s just because you didn’t play the game right!” is kinda unhinged.
It also, to me, really takes Bethesda’s mask off and reveals what their culture must be as a company. Based on these responses, they seem so convinced that they shit gold that they’ve stopped entertaining feedback or trying to innovate much in their games much at all. Kinda confirms some of the criticism I’ve seen of them since Fallout 4 and 76 came out.
It seems to me like someone in the PR department decided they needed to “try something new,” and then didn’t actually run the idea by anyone who could say this is a stupid plan. Someone on the community management team got a promotion and thought it was time to make a bold move, and they were absolutely wrong.
Part of me believes this was triggered by them only getting one nomination in The Game Awards.
They botched it on a lot of fronts. Them not getting a nom makes sense to me.
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Landing on the boring planets wasn’t my problem with the boring game.
The ground combat was terrible. The space flight was terrible. The space combat was terrible. And it was wedged into every activity for no reason other than lazy design to pad things.
And then there was the UI…
You can’t “feel small” when the game makes you a fiddly murder hobo in the tutorial.
I love that steam reviews can make companies take notice and is harder to shove away compared to other types of reviews with how it’s always there on the store page.
Hot take: Alan Wake 2 would have a lot of explaining to do if EPIC had a review system. My disappointment with that game was immeasurable and my weekend was ruined.
Hmm, I haven’t played it. I avoid everything epic store stuff (even though I would have gotten it for free, since I’m childhood friends with one of the devs). So I’m curious, what’s the problem? I’ve heard like three people say that it’s their game of the year already, so I’m curious what’s the issue for you?
I’d love to hear why, personally. Wasn’t a huge fan of Alan Wake 1, so the huge outcry for the sequel has been a bit odd for me, and would like to hear the other side of the coin.
It was a heart warming situation when I saw Blizzard’s game get mixed reviews. They didn’t release games anywhere else until now and getting a reality check was a much needed thing for them.
There may in fact be a few games where empty spaces and a sense of vastness actually contribute to the atmosphere and make for an enjoyable game. But NOT in a game that’s divided by fucking loading screens with not a single “vista” to look out at.
Everyone seems to be missing the point so I’ll let Todd Howard remind you all, “We’re going to be doing a lot of add-on content for Starfield.”
$5 horse armor folks. That’s Bethesda. Stop paying them to make garbage, or at least stop complaining about it.
Cool, so I’ll wait to pick this game up until it’s $10 on a steam sale in 5 years, and play the community’s modded version.
I’m not sure the game is popular enough to get quite the modding support of the community like previous Bethesda games.
I disagree purely on the point that what Starfield is, more than anything else, an amazing platform to make a mod on. Not a great game per se, but the setting and overall theme leave a lot of room for Bethesda to cash in on the work of others as is tradition.
