this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Starfield only getting one nomination--and in a category it has no chance of winning--is not at all what I would have expected going into this year.
I don't know if that speaks to how nuts this year has been for new releases or to how much Starfield fell short, in light of the fact that its player counts on Steam are starting to fall below Skyrim.
I don't think starfield does anything worth giving it an award for. You should give awards to things that do something unique or took a risk. Starfield is a very safe game that didn't really do anything unique or risky. They just made Skyrim in space.
Us space sim types would tell you it took a few steps back as far as genre standards go. And I wasn't even expecting much on that side of it.
@Ashtear @MJBrune
Was it supposed to be a space sim, though?
My impression was that it was always going to be a skyrim/fallout in space
The space elements were a big part of the marketing. I knew better than to expect atmospheric flight or anything but simple space combat, but intra-system travel being only done in menus and the space sections being put in small lightboxes with planet renderings was rather shocking. That's 20th-century stuff. It's especially bizarre given how much of the Bethesda magic has leaned on roads in the past, and there aren't any roads outside of cities. Even the cargo runs are 100% in menus, without talking to a single person.
I agree, I don't think it's a space sim and I don't think fallout or Skyrim in space is unique.
Skyrim isn't full of unskippable cut scenes.
To be perfectly fair, Skyrim has a decade of sales and mods in its favor when it comes to Steam numbers, and whether or not Starfield has fallen short by any metric, the things that it does were more novel when Skyrim did a lot of the same stuff 12 years ago.
Starfield player counts will go way up once the modkit is released. Every single one of those people playing Skyrim on Steam have modded it out the wazoo.
They might go up but I'd be surprised it will rival Skyrim. I'm a Skyrim fan, yet I'm not enticed to play Starfield for reasons beyond me. It feels like it's lacking something and I can't put my finger on it. I don't believe mods would make much of a difference, but who knows, maybe I'm wrong.
I modded Skyrim (and Oblivion) because the vanilla game was exciting already, in spite of its flaws. I couldn't be bothered otherwise.
For me, it's the vast expanses of procedurally generated nothingness in Starfield that turns me off the most, especially combined with the menu-based fast travel heavy way you get around.
The magic of Bethesda games comes from their handcrafted open worlds, always full of things to see and explore and get sidetracked by. Its the feeling that kicks in when the horizon first opens up after you exit the sewer/vault/customs office and you realize that you can just pick a direction and start walking and you'll come across something interesting.
Starfield doesn't do that. You can't just pick a direction and go, it's all fast travel. And if you're down on a planet you can, but there is no magic to be found because it's all procedurally generated emptiness between copy-pasted points of interest.
In their ambitions to have a bigger scope than ever they sacrificed the very thing that made their games so compelling to begin with.
I think the perfect example of this are the caves that show up sometimes.
First time I found one, I thought "neat, I wonder what's in there." So I go exploring and find out that... nothing. Nothing is in there. It's just an empty cave. So I find a second one, hoping that was a fluke and again... nothing.
The procedurally generated content is severely lacking in a reason for even existing.Nothing is worth exploring in Starfield because there's just nothing there.
This is exactly my thought. In Skyrim, every tree stump looked like it had the benefit of a beauty pass by an artist. In Starfield, it's very clear that most of the ground was never looked at before I got there, and there's no reason for me to look at it now
Depth is what Starfield is lacking, imo. It fixes a lot of what both skyrim and f4 did wrong (there're backgrounds, they affect your skills, and they come up from time to time, to mention one), but they regressed so hard on other things. They tried new stuff but the delivery was so limp dicked that everything landed awkwardly, or not at all. Think the game suffered because of scope creep, honestly, if they had limited the game to just a handful of planets, they could've tailored the experience and they wouldn't feel so empty.
And as always, their obsession to let you do everything in one playthrough hurt the game hard. There's very little reason to go for a second playthrough.
Like, they did a good job with most of the game's mechanics, but everything else is mid as hell. Very forgettable.
Frankly Starfield didn't even deserve the nomination. It didn't do anything unique or deserving of merit beyond just existing. I tried it, and while it has some interesting parts it's just shallow and bland. The lore had huge potential but got Swiss-cheesed by the game mechanics and wasn't developed at all - in what was supposed to be a Bethesda RPG. They need to yeet Todd and bring back the Obsidian folks.