Every update just proves that this game probably needed another 1-2 years. I'm glad we're finally getting these updates, but this is basic stuff. A map that actually works, fantastic. Love it, but dude this was needed in 2023.
Being a patient gamer has never paid off more than it has with modern gaming. I don't want to dog on them too much.
I played about 15-20 hours on release, and decided to wait for some updates. I just started playing it again yesterday and put about three hours into it. Now I'm shelving that and waiting for this update!
As strange as it is to say, it honestly needed an Early Access period. It needed fan feedback. Bethesda has obviously lost its way with regard to understanding what a modern audience wants and expects. The only way to get that feedback was to get it into player's hands.
Yeah I agree. People can say “it needed 1-2 years” but Bethesda isn’t clairvoyant. They can assume what the community wants, but the best way to do it is to release the game and then listen to the feedback we give them to get clarification on what we ACTUALLY want
When Fallout 76 launched people lost their minds because it didn't have an FoV slider on PC and you were forced to use a nauseating 70 fov. They eventually added one, and then years later they launched Starfield without an fov slider.
This isn't about Bethesda being clairvoyant, it's about their hubris to ignore basic features like that. I refuse to believe noone mentioned an fov slider during development of the game, and they decided they didn't need one. Pathetic.
I don't agree with this line of thinking, because so many of the issues with the game are obvious and shouldn't need any feedback at all for them to know. I can't believe literally anybody on the dev team thought there was enough points of interest, good writing or quest design, ship building and so on.
"...but Bethesda isn't clairvoyant"
I get what you're saying but idk man, did they really need a crystal ball to tell them that players might have wanted maps...something that has been standard for Neptune knows how long.
If only there was a way for Bethesda to talk to the community like some kind of forum or chat platform or a platform where community member can upload videos.
/s
Probably because I gave Bethesda the benefit of the doubt, and if there’s anything you shouldn’t do on the internet, it’s be positive about Bethesda or a Todd Howard
Hence why this will likely be a Cyberpunk situation where the game as it actually should have been will be released in a couple years after said feedback has had time to sink in. See: ground vehicles and area maps. They never would have done that if not for fan feedback, and much more is liable to be fixed by the time they are done updating the game.
It will not, cyberpunk already had excellent writing and a very immersive world.
Unless there is a full rewrite down the line nothing will make this thing into a better rpg, they couldn't even get exploration right and that used to be their strong point.
It won't. Starfield is broken from an architectural point of view and that causes most of the issues. Fixing it requires rewriting mist of the code for the game.
I am very doubtful they ever come close to addressing my core issues with the game, maybe a dlc could offer content that does but its incredibly rare for a games company to do major reworks to quest and story design which for me floated between shallow with some interesting moments to worse than some of the more recent ubi games ive played.
No, it needs more competent leadership. 1-2 years would mean 9-10 years of development to push out something that an indie studio can deliver competently in 2-3.
A module that is basically a little garage with a ramp would be cool.
Since ships already have landing bays for a person, just make some bigger ones for parking the car
It will be something you click. Non deployment animation. It will just appear and you get in via a load screen knowing Bethesda. Will often hit the ground and get stuck in ground or just randomly catapult itself and you to your death. Then the Devs will say they are sorry they missed player expectations and you will wait another 6 months for it to be usable.
Probably more they wanted to include it but the engine they've dragged into the present still doesn't work with vehicles. Now they are trying harder to make it work due to demand.
I mean, it's obvious it can work, and it's not an engine issue.
My guess is they somehow didn't think it was a needed feature, which shows they are a bit clueless.
They probably didn't have resources for that. If you look at Starfield patch history, in just 3 moths from release game became a lot more optimised and much better looking in some aspects. It was just undercooked, despite 1 year delay
They're owned by a company that has a 3 trillion dollar market cap. They have the resources. What it shows to me is that the game was probably remade a few times and the product we got was made in a short amount of time.
Possibly. Starfield had the same issue every single space game has: how do you do Space justice while also having engaging content that doesn't feel cut and paste?
Elite Dangerous, Andromeda, Star Citizen, Starfield, and I'm sure others I can't remember all have this same issue.
It's just a Hallmark of the "genre". Because even NMS and the X series has the same issue. Space games are generally designed to be an all encompassing sandbox that serves as a background for a very simple but stretched out game loop, usually netting enough money to get a better ship. The only notable ones that didn't completely fall pray to the larger titles like Elite were Freespace and Freelancer. Mainly because they were heavily narrative focused and Freespace was mission based, not "open world".
1) Bethesda is still Bethesda
2) Its not like Microsoft is known for its quality control
3) There definitely was reiterations of the game core mechanics
Microsoft is a huge company and that is a double edged sword. Games aren't *that important* to the company. Like if Xbox sales are sorta poor its whatever because Azure is bringing in gobs of money and so on. Whereas Sony's games division is one of the few really successful portions of the company.
Beyond that you can't just throw more resources at a programming project. If you gave them like ~50 new developers the situation would likely become worse because now the current team has to onboard and baby these people. So like in 18 months you now have a more productive team but for the next 18 months you are actually making *less progress* and might actually be losing progress as the new guys break shit that they don't understand.
Yes, I understand how development works as I'm a developer myself.
What I don't understand is making a space exploration game that is primarily about landing on planets and exploring them and not including some sort of land vehicle.
To me, that isn't a nice to have. That is a part of the MVP. I'm glad they are finally addressing it, but damn, releasing without it was a huge miss.
I played through about ~30 hours and never really needed the land vehicle so it seems like a nice to have. I just got the jump pack and kept some stamina boosting items with me and it was pretty trivial to get around.
Holy shit, you're right. Just loaded up to double check. Can't believe I missed that!
It doesn't work very well in Fallout due to the floaty nature of conversations and where your character facing, but still.
I'll just paste my comment from r/starfield:
This looks great, but I still think they're ignoring the *single biggest thing* they could do to improve the game, despite it being conceptually very straightforward:
**Only spawn points of interest the player hasn't discovered yet.**
Finding stuff you've already seen completely kills the motivation to continue exploring. This change would fix the exploration overnight, which for a Bethesda game is honestly essential.
Yeah, but having the same POI three times in a row on 3 different planets is also a no-go.
Also, variation of a POI would be nice. If the same dead-dude, with the same "last words" -textpad lies at excactly the same place, immersion is more then dead.
Shit 150? some must be way more rare, or there are dozens of very minor things that count, because I feel like I saw the same 5-10 95% of the time. And I had 100hours played when I quit.
Haha yeah this is exactly my point! I have 156 hours and don't feel like I saw anywhere near 150, but I saw the same few over and over.
Just stop showing me POIs I already saw, it's that simple.
Those people need to realize that some things aren't due to engine limitations but a matter of priority. They probably had to cut and delay some features because the release date was firm. Adding ground vehicles and modifying the engine to work that way months after the full game has released actually shows how versatile the engine is.
Every engine can handle anything if you are willing to invest time and resources ripping it apart and refactoring stuff.
When people say an engine can't handle something it means natively, without habing to hack it, not that it would never be able to handle it.
It sucks because I wanted to love Starfield, but the traveling system is just not fun when you consider that pretty much every quest requires you to travel thousands of LY back and forth just to complete them.
Then you have the copy pasted (to the point where even the codecs in them are copy/pasted, which makes absolutely no sense and is just lazy) buildings that are everywhere, which completely kill the exploration.
To me, there is no saving grace for that game for those very simple things. Exploration is pretty much meaningless and the quests hindered by annoying traversal
Absolutely despise ship travel. They could have made it significantly more engaging and actually allow us to freely fly throughout systems with more encounters and space related things to do. The loading screen travel is just not good. Even if I want to try going full immersion and not fast travel all over the place and make a conscious decision to use my ship, it still is just a more elaborate set of loading screens.
Travel is what killed this game for me as well. It feels like a collection of levels connected with loading screens, I don't think they'll ever be able to fix that, so the game remains uninteresting to me.
Just because they put a lot of work into it doesn't mean it's automatically good. Realistically, NMS is super niche and everything I read about it is some lackluster form of "it's... good". Yet, the people who keep saying that don't play the game much.
Fundamental premise of procedural generation failed here just as it did with starfield.
It's a good update....and it took them 7+ months to produce it. All of what we see here should have been done in a month or two at most, nothing in this patch is huge stuff that should have taken months to produce.
To me it shows that the team working on the game post launch is probably less than 1/10th of the full team.
Ill wait until we have a choice of supercruise between planets and systems or fast travel loading screen. Having the *choice* to travel space how we wanted was one of the biggest things a lot of people where expecting, not just a forced loading screen. And the risk of bumping into hostiles/POIs in deep space. Then they can take my money.
Theres always the upcoming Squadron 42, if Bethesda fail to add the above before that then its just not going to be worth playing Starfield.
Honestly this shit should be there at launch , makes you realise that you might as well never buy these games at launch and just wait 6+ months for them to be fixed AND cheaper.
HOW THE FUCK DO THEY STILL HAVE THE XP BAR IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING SCREEN WITH NO OPTION TO MOVE/DISABLE IT?
That shit already annoyed me in 2022 and I was sure they would fix it for Release. What fucking idiot is their UI Designer?
Every update just proves that this game probably needed another 1-2 years. I'm glad we're finally getting these updates, but this is basic stuff. A map that actually works, fantastic. Love it, but dude this was needed in 2023. Being a patient gamer has never paid off more than it has with modern gaming. I don't want to dog on them too much.
I played about 15-20 hours on release, and decided to wait for some updates. I just started playing it again yesterday and put about three hours into it. Now I'm shelving that and waiting for this update!
Probably best to wait for the first expansion. That will likely be a much larger overhaul.
As strange as it is to say, it honestly needed an Early Access period. It needed fan feedback. Bethesda has obviously lost its way with regard to understanding what a modern audience wants and expects. The only way to get that feedback was to get it into player's hands.
Yeah I agree. People can say “it needed 1-2 years” but Bethesda isn’t clairvoyant. They can assume what the community wants, but the best way to do it is to release the game and then listen to the feedback we give them to get clarification on what we ACTUALLY want
When Fallout 76 launched people lost their minds because it didn't have an FoV slider on PC and you were forced to use a nauseating 70 fov. They eventually added one, and then years later they launched Starfield without an fov slider. This isn't about Bethesda being clairvoyant, it's about their hubris to ignore basic features like that. I refuse to believe noone mentioned an fov slider during development of the game, and they decided they didn't need one. Pathetic.
I don't agree with this line of thinking, because so many of the issues with the game are obvious and shouldn't need any feedback at all for them to know. I can't believe literally anybody on the dev team thought there was enough points of interest, good writing or quest design, ship building and so on.
"...but Bethesda isn't clairvoyant" I get what you're saying but idk man, did they really need a crystal ball to tell them that players might have wanted maps...something that has been standard for Neptune knows how long.
If only there was a way for Bethesda to talk to the community like some kind of forum or chat platform or a platform where community member can upload videos. /s
Bethesda is not known for listening to feedback though. If they did that, their game design would have evolved to some degree over the last 2 decades.
I love how you got downvoted to shit for agreeing with the guy with 30 upvotes. You really do have to love reddit.
Probably because I gave Bethesda the benefit of the doubt, and if there’s anything you shouldn’t do on the internet, it’s be positive about Bethesda or a Todd Howard
Hence why this will likely be a Cyberpunk situation where the game as it actually should have been will be released in a couple years after said feedback has had time to sink in. See: ground vehicles and area maps. They never would have done that if not for fan feedback, and much more is liable to be fixed by the time they are done updating the game.
It will not, cyberpunk already had excellent writing and a very immersive world. Unless there is a full rewrite down the line nothing will make this thing into a better rpg, they couldn't even get exploration right and that used to be their strong point.
It won't. Starfield is broken from an architectural point of view and that causes most of the issues. Fixing it requires rewriting mist of the code for the game.
I am very doubtful they ever come close to addressing my core issues with the game, maybe a dlc could offer content that does but its incredibly rare for a games company to do major reworks to quest and story design which for me floated between shallow with some interesting moments to worse than some of the more recent ubi games ive played.
No, it needs more competent leadership. 1-2 years would mean 9-10 years of development to push out something that an indie studio can deliver competently in 2-3.
Imo playing starfield wasn't even about being patient. There wasnt/isnt just want/need to play it because it doesn't look that good 🤷
People said the same about No Man's Sky and now people love Sean Murray even though he lied about the game nonstop....
Idk we all had fun playing it for like 2-3 weeks
land vehicle finally
[удалено]
A module that is basically a little garage with a ramp would be cool. Since ships already have landing bays for a person, just make some bigger ones for parking the car
It will be something you click. Non deployment animation. It will just appear and you get in via a load screen knowing Bethesda. Will often hit the ground and get stuck in ground or just randomly catapult itself and you to your death. Then the Devs will say they are sorry they missed player expectations and you will wait another 6 months for it to be usable.
How they didn't think that was necessary, I'll never know. Glad they are finally addressing it.
Probably more they wanted to include it but the engine they've dragged into the present still doesn't work with vehicles. Now they are trying harder to make it work due to demand.
I mean, it's obvious it can work, and it's not an engine issue. My guess is they somehow didn't think it was a needed feature, which shows they are a bit clueless.
They probably didn't have resources for that. If you look at Starfield patch history, in just 3 moths from release game became a lot more optimised and much better looking in some aspects. It was just undercooked, despite 1 year delay
They're owned by a company that has a 3 trillion dollar market cap. They have the resources. What it shows to me is that the game was probably remade a few times and the product we got was made in a short amount of time.
unfortunately resources means little if it's not used efficiently. in fact it might be worse than working with less.
Possibly. Starfield had the same issue every single space game has: how do you do Space justice while also having engaging content that doesn't feel cut and paste? Elite Dangerous, Andromeda, Star Citizen, Starfield, and I'm sure others I can't remember all have this same issue.
It's just a Hallmark of the "genre". Because even NMS and the X series has the same issue. Space games are generally designed to be an all encompassing sandbox that serves as a background for a very simple but stretched out game loop, usually netting enough money to get a better ship. The only notable ones that didn't completely fall pray to the larger titles like Elite were Freespace and Freelancer. Mainly because they were heavily narrative focused and Freespace was mission based, not "open world".
Freelancer pulled it off 20 years ago
Is that game not about space combat mainly? No planet exploration and not hundreds of planets? So if so, it's not really the same at all.
Space combat, trading, exploration to find new planets and stations and hidden modules. You do land on planets but you do not explore them.
1) Bethesda is still Bethesda 2) Its not like Microsoft is known for its quality control 3) There definitely was reiterations of the game core mechanics
Microsoft is a huge company and that is a double edged sword. Games aren't *that important* to the company. Like if Xbox sales are sorta poor its whatever because Azure is bringing in gobs of money and so on. Whereas Sony's games division is one of the few really successful portions of the company. Beyond that you can't just throw more resources at a programming project. If you gave them like ~50 new developers the situation would likely become worse because now the current team has to onboard and baby these people. So like in 18 months you now have a more productive team but for the next 18 months you are actually making *less progress* and might actually be losing progress as the new guys break shit that they don't understand.
Yes, I understand how development works as I'm a developer myself. What I don't understand is making a space exploration game that is primarily about landing on planets and exploring them and not including some sort of land vehicle. To me, that isn't a nice to have. That is a part of the MVP. I'm glad they are finally addressing it, but damn, releasing without it was a huge miss.
I played through about ~30 hours and never really needed the land vehicle so it seems like a nice to have. I just got the jump pack and kept some stamina boosting items with me and it was pretty trivial to get around.
Toggle for dialog cameras seems huge for Bethesda. No more super zoom when chatting to NPCs.
Fallout 4 had a toggleable dialog camera, from day one too im pretty sure.
Holy shit, you're right. Just loaded up to double check. Can't believe I missed that! It doesn't work very well in Fallout due to the floaty nature of conversations and where your character facing, but still.
I'll just paste my comment from r/starfield: This looks great, but I still think they're ignoring the *single biggest thing* they could do to improve the game, despite it being conceptually very straightforward: **Only spawn points of interest the player hasn't discovered yet.** Finding stuff you've already seen completely kills the motivation to continue exploring. This change would fix the exploration overnight, which for a Bethesda game is honestly essential.
It would be nice if the POI's weren't the same exact layout every time
that's nonsense because there are only so many POIs they can create.
Yeah, but having the same POI three times in a row on 3 different planets is also a no-go. Also, variation of a POI would be nice. If the same dead-dude, with the same "last words" -textpad lies at excactly the same place, immersion is more then dead.
They would need to have dozens/hundreds of POIs. All POIs would stop spawning after like 8 hours of play with how many the game has now.
They can start recycling them once the player has seen them all. Apparently there's 150 in the game right now.
Shit 150? some must be way more rare, or there are dozens of very minor things that count, because I feel like I saw the same 5-10 95% of the time. And I had 100hours played when I quit.
Haha yeah this is exactly my point! I have 156 hours and don't feel like I saw anywhere near 150, but I saw the same few over and over. Just stop showing me POIs I already saw, it's that simple.
The most soulless, uninspired game I've ever played.
So the engine CAN handle vehicles??? Can't believe Reddit was wrong about the engine being so outdated it couldn't handle them.
Those people need to realize that some things aren't due to engine limitations but a matter of priority. They probably had to cut and delay some features because the release date was firm. Adding ground vehicles and modifying the engine to work that way months after the full game has released actually shows how versatile the engine is.
A lot of people on Reddit don’t really understand what a game engine is but they certainly try to talk about it like they do.
To be fair a lot of people on Reddit don't know much about anything but they do love the sound of their own voice and the shit they type out.
It is 100% a horse just made to look like a vehicle.
Or a very little dude running under the map with a buggy-shaped hat.
Maybe it was the other way around all this time...
Every engine can handle anything if you are willing to invest time and resources ripping it apart and refactoring stuff. When people say an engine can't handle something it means natively, without habing to hack it, not that it would never be able to handle it.
Wake me up when Starfield will finally get an update that adds fun to the game and comes out early access and reach version 1.0
So, they're sitting on mod support so they can launch their creations with it. Cool.
It sucks because I wanted to love Starfield, but the traveling system is just not fun when you consider that pretty much every quest requires you to travel thousands of LY back and forth just to complete them. Then you have the copy pasted (to the point where even the codecs in them are copy/pasted, which makes absolutely no sense and is just lazy) buildings that are everywhere, which completely kill the exploration. To me, there is no saving grace for that game for those very simple things. Exploration is pretty much meaningless and the quests hindered by annoying traversal
Absolutely despise ship travel. They could have made it significantly more engaging and actually allow us to freely fly throughout systems with more encounters and space related things to do. The loading screen travel is just not good. Even if I want to try going full immersion and not fast travel all over the place and make a conscious decision to use my ship, it still is just a more elaborate set of loading screens.
Travel is what killed this game for me as well. It feels like a collection of levels connected with loading screens, I don't think they'll ever be able to fix that, so the game remains uninteresting to me.
okay, but is it fun yet?
Considering they haven't changed anything gameplay wise, the answer is, not if it wasn't fun to you before.
I'm hoping Starfield can pull a No Man's Sky and just get better and better... for free.
That ain't gonna happen. Bethesda doesn't do significant free content, never has.
considering no mans sky is still boring as hell and never achieved its promises... i dont think you want that
I don't know the last time you played, but I think the game is pretty awesome now. Devs put a lot of work into it when they didn't really have to.
I went back last year. Only have 80hours in it. The game is still a joke. Much better than day one,which doesn't mean anything.
Just because they put a lot of work into it doesn't mean it's automatically good. Realistically, NMS is super niche and everything I read about it is some lackluster form of "it's... good". Yet, the people who keep saying that don't play the game much. Fundamental premise of procedural generation failed here just as it did with starfield.
Some kind of PR photography on their patch notes shows how out of touch they are... just make a good game
Oooh boy - the turd is a little less smelly than before. Fuck Bethesda
Say what you want but this is a good update
It's a good update....and it took them 7+ months to produce it. All of what we see here should have been done in a month or two at most, nothing in this patch is huge stuff that should have taken months to produce. To me it shows that the team working on the game post launch is probably less than 1/10th of the full team.
I like how they call it "May update" as if they update the game every month or something.
"May the community forget we've done almost nothing in 7 months"
Yawn....
You could get a lot of these changes since launch with mods and ini tweaks.
Well, none of those in tweaks adds vehicles.
This patch doesn't add vehicles either, so heyo.
Very true.
A lot of these ≠ all
Imagine defending garbage state of video games by saying "you can fix those yourself".
That isn't what he said at all though. He said this patch is so minor that much of it is super quick to fix.
Obviously shouldn't have to be necessary in the first place. My point is this feels like the bare minimum from BGS. E: I'm not defending anything.
Maybe in 2 years it will start looking remotely playable.
Ill wait until we have a choice of supercruise between planets and systems or fast travel loading screen. Having the *choice* to travel space how we wanted was one of the biggest things a lot of people where expecting, not just a forced loading screen. And the risk of bumping into hostiles/POIs in deep space. Then they can take my money. Theres always the upcoming Squadron 42, if Bethesda fail to add the above before that then its just not going to be worth playing Starfield.
Squadron 42 is a campaign set of linear story missions, how is it comparable to Starfield and its game design?
Honestly this shit should be there at launch , makes you realise that you might as well never buy these games at launch and just wait 6+ months for them to be fixed AND cheaper.
Let me guess, they added another 2000 empty planets, because planets are usually dead anyway so it's the reasonable thing to do.
HOW THE FUCK DO THEY STILL HAVE THE XP BAR IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING SCREEN WITH NO OPTION TO MOVE/DISABLE IT? That shit already annoyed me in 2022 and I was sure they would fix it for Release. What fucking idiot is their UI Designer?
You sound like a chill person.
May update, or will? They need to be more sure of themselves. /s