finally a sane person on youtube talking about starfield
link to video, I haven't watched it but it might be fine.
I feel like Starfield has gotten a lot of bad critique from people like PatricianTV and that dude's channel is a great example of "long critique does not equal good, insightful critique". there's a lot of... impotent fan rage in those sorts of videos, personal attacks directed at the writers (esp. Pagliarulo) and at Bethesda for being incompetent and disorganized, and I think that completely misses the fucking point that Starfield isn't the way it is because of incompetence, though that plays a part in any project going through shit due to management not doing a great job, it's a very well made game in parts, it's just that when those parts are put together you get a fucking clusterfuck mess that defies all traditional analysis and pointing fingers at Howard or Pagliarulo is pointless.
We've posted under the "fix your fucking game Todd" tag as a sign of frustration, obviously Todd Howard isn't solely responsible for Starfield being a mess nor responsible for the parts of it that are good, those that aren't broken that is. It's a complicated game to talk about because a lot of times we have talked about Starfield, people thought "oh they're shitting on it, let me join in the shitting on Starfield" but that does not come from a place of hatred, we would not have dumped over 500 hours into a game we hated, hate playing games can be interesting but they're not worth months of one's life. I genuinely enjoy a lot of starfield because it's fun, it plays nice, when it's not broken, the universe has interesting parts to it, but this is really a gameplay takes priority game much like Fallout 4 was, and that's fine, when it works. When we talk about Starfield it's not to shit on it and say "bethesda are incompetent hacks", there's clearly a ton of talented artists, designers, programmers, voice actors, a lot of talent was put into this game, it just doesn't gel well and puts people off because a lot of the time it's incongruent, uneven, but that's what makes it absolutely fascinating to me as a game.
It feels like a perfect storm of AAA game development being such a nightmare mess of complexity that it's natural that everything sort of blends together into a gray slop, but I'd be hesitant to call Starfield bland or boring or slop because it's just not that at all. It's broken, it desperately needs to be fixed so the main quest doesn't softlock you and screw you over (on all platforms), it needs to be fixed so basic gameplay mechanics like being able to enter your ship doesn't break, ship boarding breaks, outpost building/house decorating breaks, it could do with a balance pass, a ton of quality of life upgrades to the ship builder and letting you keep plans for ships after NG+ing, stuff like that. Starfield isn't just uneven due to not having a design document, it's not unever because the universe and story are bland, it's uneven because it released way too early and it still needs a lot of time to be fleshed out and fixed. Starfield to me as someone who put way too much time into it is essentially a glitchy beta. it's a shipped, feature complete game sure, but after a lot has been cut, scaled back, and it barely holds together. It's been many months and they haven't yet fixed the worst of it so I don't know when Starfield will work fine, maybe it never will! it's hard to say. it's so AAA industry that they're selling an expansion to a game that does not function 40% of the time. I did not buy the expansion, I wanted a working base game first.
I got a lot out of it but after several characters, one that I had to stop playing because she got softlocked out of completing the main quest, and this latest one again being impeded from doing the NG+ cycle due to a glitched last quest.. all I'm left with is frustration. I desperately want this game to work so the good in it can shine through in its fun gameplay, pleasant procedural world generation and exploring, the fun ship building, but so much of it is broken that it's a guarantee that Starfield will fall apart and ruin your playthrough due to bugs.
I wanna recommend it to people and yell about how "it's fine actually" like that video at the top of this post, but I can't. Maybe someday, after a lot of work, reworks, patches, that expansion if it ever comes out, it'll be fine, maybe good even, but until then Starfield is mostly frustrating, there's a lot of unrealized potential in this one and I hope that if it works properly someday then more people will stop mindlessly shitting on it and give it a fair try, it'll be worth it I think.
