Starfield's first DLC is one of the worst Bethesda DLCs of all time

Post-2.0 Cyberpunk is one of the best gaming experiences I've had in a long time. You can tell it's a product of effort, and love for the project. They have taken in a considerable amount of feedback from pre-1.5.

Meanwhile, Starfield is a complete miss in just about every way imaginable, and the expansion has followed through the same footsteps. On top of that, the studio actively gaslit people who expressed disapproval, even when it was constructive criticism.

Same with No Man's Sky. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but they buckled down and delivered on almost every promise that they failed on back at release. Not only that but every update since the game came out has been for free. Both No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk are fantastic games, and they were garbage on release. Bethesda has been doing the opposite approach and avoiding feedback from fans since Skyrim came out the first time.

Cyberpunk was buggy, unoptimized, and kind of unfinished, but the fundamental game design was sound.

Starfield on the other hand is broken at its core. The Bethesda RPG experience just does not translate to the open worlds space map they built the game on. So they can't take the cyberpunk approach because they'd have to build an entirely different game from scratch.

The difference is, there is no fixing Starfield, it is rotten to the core. You would have to re-do most of the story elements and writing, and the disjointed, empty world. On top of that you'd have to fix the bugs and technical limitations like the constant loading screens. At this point you would be throwing out most of the game and basically starting from scratch with a few systems done, like the ship building and possibly gunplay.

I think cyberpunk never became what many wanted, but if you let go of your expectations, it is a good game.

I might need to revisit cyberpunk, I didn't know an expansion was ever released. I kind of hit max level doing mostly side quests within 4 months of launch and lost interest.

I mean, it all hinged in the fact that under all those glitches and bugged mechanics CDPR still had a nice game. Starfield can't be salvaged cuz the core game is just mediocre shit.

I wanna say it's a failed IP at this point, but who knows how many copies sold. What is sure is it doesn't deserve any more of my time. I have the DLC but won't reinstall that garbage

I didn't play it at the time because of the bugs, but from what I saw the good parts of Cyberpunk were already present. Stuff like storytelling, interesting characters etc.
Starfield has none of that.

I'm still mad the monowire doesn't work how it was said it would and that the cops can't be bribed and shit like that. It's a great game now and a lot of fun to play but I won't ever trust another game company again like I did with them after they made witcher 3.

I just finished playing it for the first time and I was blown away right from the start! Guess I'm glad I waited for the polish, but the world design, voice acting and overall storyline was absolutely fantastic. I couldn't help feel bad for all the artists that clearly put a lot of love in to the world only to be overshadowed by bugs and poor implementation.

On that note, how is Cyberpunk still 60 euros on Steam? I know it's been getting better with the DLC and everything, but the game's been out for ages.

That said, I might have to buy Phantom Liberty. I bought and finished the base game like 2 or 3 years ago I think and I really enjoyed it even back then.

... And still could bit fix that some keys are hardcoded. But I agree, with expansion the game was quite enjoyable.

Microsoft is a fucking ghoulish, evil company. The only reason they bought Bethesda was to own their IP. They have Elder scrolls, Fallout, and Doom Because of ID games. That alone is going to bring them so much money, if they ever want to sell any of those franchises in the future, they can sell them for a fortune. That's probably the reason why they acquired Bethesda to begin with. Laying off Hi-Fi Rush after they delivered an excellent product was just pure evil.

Bethesda literally invented shitty DLC

At least horse armor was good for the memes. This is so bland no one even cares to meme about it.

Still better than Horse Armor. So no, not Bethesda’s worst DLC.

The difference is that Oblivion wasn't bad at all. It was terrific. Starfield was trash from the beginning, then delivers a trash DLC. That's much worse. No improvement.

There are 2 important words there that you're missing.

This was exactly my first thought. Not surprised that the pioneers of shitty dlc made shitty dlc.

Yeah...

Basically every Oblivion DLC that was not Shivering Isles (and MAYBE Heroes of The Nine or whatever) was god awful. And Fallout 3 (aside from the last two hours of the story DLC) was only really tolerated because it was mostly sold as a season pass. Operation Anchorage was a cool novelty that made stealth trivial and the rest... existed.

Which was exclusive to...Microsoft! Full circle.

they are a reverse midas. Anything they touch doesn't turn into gold but into shit

They do ESO makes anything else the company does largely irrelevant. Same as Blizzard back when Activision bought them.

You're not. I pirated it on release and was very glad I didn't buy it.

Well...except the next installations of Fallout and Elder Scrolls. Let's be honest, that's what Microsoft were really buying, and neither are anywhere near a release.

Bethesda was obviously already toast to anyone paying attention when Fallout '76 came out. They certainly haven't improved since.

...And I can't believe that these are the motherfuckers who own the rights to Doom now.

as a hige indi/small developer fan i see great times ahad. AAA will fail, clmpanys will close and developers will find new homes in smaller teams. by 2030 i predict a golden age for AA and and perhabs also a new golden age for indi.

oof ffxvi? the "rpg" which is just a action game. ff vii remakes are at least good.

Even Capcom I'm not preordering. If wilds is getting good reviews a couple days after launch I'll get it. (Even though I'm pretty sure it will be a good game)

Nintendo's games are still usually very good, even though their business practices suck ass.

Story and worldbuilding wise, ES6 has a very bleak future ahead. Emilio Pagliarulo, the de facto director of Starfield and lead writer, has shown that no hole is deep enough that he won't dig it further down when it comes to lack of quality and consistency. Not that Skyrim's main story was good, but it was certainly better than Starfield's. There's also the disturbing indifference of "the world" to everything happening around it. Literally nothing you do in Starfield affects anything outside its own storyline. Hell, shooting up in the air or using fucking space magic in the middle of a city generates no reaction from npcs if nobody is hit.

The problem is Starfield isn't a one off. It's the latest in a line of progressively worse games. Every game they've released since Skyrim has been worse than the one that came before it.

If ES6 is just a refreshed Skyrim I really see no reason to buy it. There are much more interesting RPGs than the Bethesda style nowadays.

I actually liked beyond earth 🥲

I think ES6 will have the advantage that it won't be a procedurally generated world, or at least I don't hope so.

But it will probably still run on the shitty Bethesda engine that they cling onto for dear life for some reason.

I think it will never actually live up to the hype, expectations are so insanely high, and the longer it takes the higher these expectations rise it seems.

And I bet it will turn out to be another half-assed game that they hope modders will fix. Like the last bunch of games, they all require mods to be even remotely playable, but even mods can't fix core issues.

My expectations for Bethesda dropped to bare minimum with everything that came after Skyrim.

My sister loves Beyond Earth; I still prefer Alpha Centauri.

Yeah they need to get rid of that cokehead.

and they ended up with something that didn't really work and shouldn't have shipped.

That sure didn't stop the marketing department, as this game was being shoved in our faces left and right as if it was the end-all-be-all game we'd be playing with our grand children in 50 years.

My guess is that this game pivoted during development

Nah, the game matches pretty well with what Lyin' Todd said he wanted to make almost 20 years ago

It's also very clearly their usual design decisions but in a new setting

If anything the issue is that they stayed stuck in EXACTLY their usual development methods: no design document because Emil doesn't like them, their writers make their quests too, and use an engine that's absolutely not meant for the kind of game they're making ON TOP of being ancient and garbage

Thats just usual Microsoft speak while plugging their ears and finding new ways to milk you.

I would have enjoyed it a lot more if they had kept making good games!

Your storage drive will thank you.

I liked the pit...

Hard disagree. Enjoyed all of those dlcs.

I was on Windows at the time and had GamePass, so I pleasantly had access included with what I was already paying for. I ended up pirating it so I could mod it (that is prevented on GamePass), because it needed mods.

No, it's not negative because it's MS owned. It's a very bad game. I love older Bethesda games and I love sci-fi. This should have been an easy win for me. Wow, it was disappointing. The actual combat gameplay is fine, but everything between combat sucks. Too many loading screens taking you out of the gameplay.

The writing sucks. They make use of established sci-fi tropes, but then they don't understand how to make them work in a story. They give you very few choices, often not including the most obvious ones.

Despite this being the "exploration" game, exploration is essentially non-existent. Every planet pretty much has the same stuff. There's like five bases that spawn everywhere identically, and a handful of "natural" points-of-interest, which appear all over the planet identically, as well as being the same as every other planet with the same ones. You might see some benefit to explore if you're building bases, but that system is incredibly clunky and frustrating to make operational. Even once you have things running, it'll still require managing storages from overflowing and blocking incoming supplies. It's really bad.

The universe is incredibly unreactive too. If you thought this was true for their previous games, it's worse in Starfield. There's no ships bringing supplies to colonies. No colonies being built that weren't there at the start. No fighting between factions, besides pirates randomly and it's the same random event that happens when you warp into a place, not something that happened because pirates are raiding a supply line or something. It just doesn't change ever.

Basically, no. Starfield actually sucks. I really wanted to like it, but there's nothing to like in my opinion. I've seen some people say they like it, but I honestly don't get it. Every aspect seems like a downgrade from FO4, which had its own issues but had reasons to like it too.

Sometimes I wonder whether Starfield truly deserves all the bad publicity

Having played it on games pass, which I was mostly paying for for other games I was enjoying at the time:

It's quite literally the worst Bethesda game I've ever played. And yes, I've played Battlespire.

Honestly even the harsh reviews tend to go nicer on it than it deserves, imo

The UI and perk system is actively hostile to playing the game. It was one thing when you could always try to pick the lock in Skyrim and the more locks you picked the better you got. Now you must take the perk and it's a requirement to pick locks before the next perk.

You cannot even craft or use core gameplay mechanics without perks. Booster pack? Perks. Targeting sub systems? Perk. (Which is hilarious because it's in the tutorial mission and they just hard coded the event ship not to blow up. So until you visit the Internet you don't actually know how to board other ships)

Out post building is ridiculously complex, resources take up a bajillion spaces in your inventories, there's no guidance on production chains, and basic resources aren't even on the same planet. So you're back to just buying resources to get it off the ground and why are we even building an outpost again?

To be fair, the story, the fly here, shoot this, listen to story parts of the game are fine. But literally everything else around it is made as obtuse as possible because yes I want to go through a loading screen every time I need to access my main stash.

As some one said when it released. It's Fallout 4 in space. But if all the ancillary stuff was made 100 percent more inconvenient.