I’m always sad to see so much dislike for this game, I absolutely love it and will continue to come back to it. Most of the things people mention are failures on their part to understand what the game is and how basic things, both in the real world and in game design, work.
Please, it’s not that complicated or hard to understand that exploration in Starfield is unrewarding. It’s great you enjoy it, but qualitatively it doesn’t come close even to Bethesda’s past titles.
I also enjoyed my playthrough of the game, and am looking forward to what Bethesda does. I’ve gotten my money’s worth, but I’m hoping they manage to do much more with the game than what’s currently available (but it’s fine if they don’t as well).
I also think that a lot of the criticisms are completely valid – Personally the missions and story were enjoyable enough for me, and the systems were neat to explore, but 8 years on from FO4, and a generation later and the game still suffers from the same engine limitations, further exacerbated by the scope they decided to reach for.
Bold claim to say that the reason people dont like the game is because the players play the game wrong.
Even if it was secretly the goty, and you just needed to stand on your head and cross your eyes to really play it… Thats still the games fault for not making it obvious how to play it “correctly,” no?
I don’t think I’ll be returning to Starfield until they fix the underlying issue: the infinite pond of shallow exploration that yields no rewards for exploring the next point of interest other than random generic loot.
I assume it’s possible, but will BGS commit the time and resources to overhauling their Point of Interest system?
The issue comes down to environmental storytelling. I can travel to any planet in the galaxy and have a good chance of encountering a Science Tower filled with Space Pirates, and in that tower, there will be the same 5 terminals with 2 or 3 slice of life emails. And I can do this multiple times. The only thing that changes is the loot tables and the enemy levels.
How can we fix that? Can you create multiple engaging storylines that populate in the terminals and in the environment at random? Can you create a storyline that spans multiple locations on a planet and as you uncover more and more it leads you to a handcrafted POI with a unique reward?
Fallout 3 did this in a more basic way with its A/B random encounters. And that mechanic added excitement and unpredictability to the world.
Or can you create procedurally generated locations and dungeons? As it stands, a landscape is just populated with a bunch of POIs that never deviate from their blueprint.
The outpost building system would, from a layman’s perspective, lend itself to procedurally generated locations.
I don’t think we’ll see any of that patched in since there’s no money in it.
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