Random video game news... renewed!

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9 hours ago, melkathi said:

Starfield just seems so bland. I don't even feel any energy to try it.

All I remember is that I thought it looked like **** and being surprised that it dropped off the cultural zeitgeist almost completely within a month after release. It's like a massive void, there's no memes about arrows to the knee or talk of massive mods that make it into a somewhat playable game, there's just nothing there.

[Lexx]

That tells you how bad it was. For me it's funny, because we saw Bethsoft's decline ever since Oblivion. Every game they released got worse, but since you were able to make mods so easily, and the bare minimum gameplay loop was still fun, the majority of people never really cared so much. Starfield is just the next step down the ladder, and truth told, I have no trust in the next TES game either. They just can't do it.

[Zoraptor]

Reckon Starfield was a bit of a perfect storm.

It was never going to have a good story or dialogue and was always going to use their shonky 20 year old engine, and even another TES would have had those two issues. Worse was, while it may have seemed like a good fit in theory it was intrinsically not a good fit for the 'Bethesda style' and made some of its limitations very obvious. Probably the worst though was that just about everyone would have preferred a TES* or Fallout title which meant that a decent subset of the target audience was predisposed against it and unwilling to cut it the slack they might have otherwise; that also meant no built in/ existing enthusiasm for modding. Perhaps as a result, marketing was also unusually tepid.

*fair enough really, not personally a fan of the series but it's already 13 years since Skyrim, and a new game is not close. Best part of 20 years between titles of your flagship franchise is going to stretch people's patience in the best circumstances, if you're going to take 7 years doing a new franchise it'd better look the part.

[MrBrown]

The downside of making a really popular game with lots of replayability (through modding), you can't just do the same again, you have to do loads better.

I remember when they talked about Avowed in one of those big shows about games where they announce new stuff or new trailers, one of the presenters said "Why not just play Skyrim again?".

[Hurlshort]

Yeah, I actually enjoyed Starfield. The setting and story were more engaging for me than Skyrim or Fallout 4. I played through it 1 and a half times. It's far from perfect. The scale and procedural generated stuff is problematic. But I'd argue that a lot of people went in with unrealistic expectations and were surprised when they weren't met. It's still just a video game.

It also sold extremely well, so all this talk about it being a flop is overstated. Bethesda is nowhere near being in trouble as a developer. Heck, it sounds like the Fallout TV show managed to even turn their biggest recent flop, Fallout 76, into a modest success.

[melkathi]

If they had added pulp aliens that are little more than humans with funky foreheads or antenna and pop art skin colours, I would have been more interested. Flying through space is more fun if you end up in a cantina in a hive of scum and villainy with aliens, than if you end up in a cantina in a hive of scum and villainy with just the same garden variety scumy villains you had where you started.

[Lexx]

Starfield probably would have been better already if they just went with the Outer World-route and made like 2 or 3 planets and scrap all that generated content crap. Sometimes less is more.

[Zoraptor]

3 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

It also sold extremely well, so all this talk about it being a flop is overstated.

It's certainly no flop and sold well in absolute terms, but since Bethesda is (basically) a single team studio there's an inherent opportunity cost to spending 7 years on Starfield. ie making it meant they couldn't do other projects.

So you're not just comparing its sales in absolute numbers, but comparing them relative to what sales of an alternative TES title would have been; and probably they would have been better in the short term, and certainly* would have had better longevity via word of mouth etc. Also, if it's 7 years per title as a new norm you'd be looking at 18 years between TES titles and then... 22 years between Fallouts? Even if it goes back to 5 years that's still 16 years and 18 years. That's a lot of time between drinks. You don't really want to rely on someone who played a game as a 13 year old buying a sequel as a 31 or 35 year old...

*ok, not literally literally certainly certainly but just very, very likely.