Still can't believe they had the genius idea to showcase the galactic war that formed human society within the lore IN A MUSEUM and were essentially like "See that history-defining event? You just missed it, have fun collecting rocks on barren planets though :)"

Starfields immersion broke for me when I started searching for the ancient Temples, structures untouched for millennia and whose location and existence is a mystery undiscovered yet by humanity. I land to look for one, it’s within 100 feet of the landing zone, and within view of a farm, a pirate den, and another ship landing.

The Cyberpunk fighting montage was so good, its actually a crime that this isnt a seperate video, more people need to see this

The part about Very Hard ship combat speaks to me so much. I was adamant to stay on Very Hard but when I got to that Crimson Fleet mission I died *literally* instantly after the dialogue ended and the combat started, dozens of times, with the best upgrades in the game at the time. I didn't even have time to accelerate before exploding. It was the most obviously untested piece of content I've seen in a "complete" game in ages.

Starfield captures the mundanity of real life in a setting that should set the imagination ablaze. Its actually quite the achievement they managed to do that.

It gets fun after NG+ 23. 14000 hours in I'm finally beginning to see the brilliance of Starfield. Just be patient.

Starfield's melee system should be officially known as The Bethesda Melee System, since it seems like they've been using it in every RPG game, since TES Arena.

I just wanted to talk about the scene from 2077 with the Flathead and Dumb-Dumb. I actually felt tense in that moment. The tone of the voice actors, the music, the little non-verbal ticks of both the gang members and your partner clearly being on edge, and the aggressive motions of the characters built an amazing stand off for everyone involved. Throw in the fact that if your too trusting and don't show enough "cojones" to make them take you seriously you can and will die from a bullet to the head mid-cutscene with no further chance to stop it. It was unfortunate that 2077s gameplay needed a major overhaul because the role playing and experience in this game is top notch and I'm glad that it won the labor of love award. I skipped Starfield completely and I'm glad I did. Everything I've seen about it looks mediocre at best Which led me to come up with a description that made my zoomer nefew laugh. "The game isn't bad, it's just on the low-end of mid."

This game has totally killed my hype for ES 6. If this was allegedly Todd's 25 year passion project, I can only imagine the lack of care that will go into a sequel they feel like they have to make.

200 hours? Nah, you need at least 500 hours to fully understand the greatness of this game. - Starfield fans, probably

honestly I feel like if they took the whole "parallel universes NG+" mechanic to its logical extreme and made all of the factions mutually exclusive, and allowed you to choose ONE faction to pursue the main story and their faction storylines as an interconnected plot, even if each version was slightly shorter than the current main story by itself, that would make for at least four meaningfully different playthroughs based off just one decision, and actually encourage replayability.

I couldn’t even remember where some of the cities were after i first visited them. You’re spot on with the whole categorization of places. It’s such a mess.

I have more fun listening these audio essays on Starfield and comparing them from different creators - than I actually do playing Starfield 😂 What a fucking shame.

In Starfield entering the club involves enduring a loading screen, in Cyberpunk entering the club Totenanz involves having to share an elevator with a tweaked out Maelstromer whose too high to hit the buttons.

The irony of Todd going back to Daggerfall in a sense with procedural generation...when it was his insistence back in the Morrowind days for handcrafted fantasy gameplay.

To be fair, BG3's cutscenes also consist of mostly static camera shots. But there is just so much choice, such a great story and characters, and such good writing and acting that nobody minds. There's more than one way to skin a cat and a game like BG3 couldn't have been made with the expensive cutscenes of Cyberpunk.

the 3 missions you spend with Jackie are more memorable than every companion in starfield put together.

Starfield had a great idea with the option to choose your characters backstory. Then they decided to make you a miner for the opening scene making the player have to bend over backwards in their minds to justify the career change.

I had just finished talking to Songbird at the nightclub/party and Lizzy Wizzy came out to do her performance. I stood there on the balcony mesmerized. I was there. The emotions were powerful and I was thinking about everything I had learned about the situation in Dogtown, worrying about Songbird, not wanting to disappoint Solomon, and caught in the spell of that amazing song and the performance. It was one of my top ten gaming moments of all time. CDPR, knowing they hit one out of the park, even provided us with a braindance recording of the performance because they knew many players would want to revisit it. This was a scene built with pure inspiration and artistry.

Your brilliant, spot on critique of this empty game is infinitely better than the game itself. You also provided, at least for me, the best game review of 2023. Well done.

Exploration gets even worse when you decide to join the pirates and suddenly 80 % of human enemies are your friends.

I love the companions in starfield. They are exactly what to expect from a dead marriage, sassy, alway criticizing you and getting mad at you for no reason.

Dude that roulette sequence in Phantom Liberty is unbelievable. Such an underappreciated scene. You really feel like you're a spy in that moment

It's insane that some of these gameplay problems (particularly movement) are really simple things that literally are part of a beginner's Unity/Unreal tutorial.

I cannot understand why so many people are upset this was not nominated for GOTY.

You made the absolute best piece of marketing that CyberPunk ever had... Amazing. I am buying that game tomorrow.

When I first got Starfield, the thing that horrified me most was melee. I tried sprinting towards an enemy but couldn’t hit them unless my character first came to a complete stop and let go of the firing button. This didn’t seem to be a problem in third person but in first person it was. And don’t even get me started about how you can’t mod your melee weapons.

Very good breakdown. I hope BGS devs/management see this. I played 300 hours, finished it (didn't bother with NG+) and haven't gone back since. I'm now back in FO4, having actual fun again.

Starfield feels like a game that was based upon a checklist that Todd wanted. The devs sought to complete checklist (limited by the ancient engine) and not question if the checklist makes a fun engaging game.

The thing that worries me most about Starfield is that people like it. Meaning it will enforce and encourage the same type of design and gameplay elements for BGS's next games. And that just kills me a little inside.

A point about your demo of the negotiation scene comparison. It's worth noting that in many of those scenes, you can move your camera around and use your optics too, as you demonstrated. The way you played those scenes looked so cinematic, and it was cool to see that zoom in to Royce in the background. It's something I didn't notice when I watched my first let's play of it, since the player didn't notice it either.

Starfield is like having a thousand pots of soup that all taste like water, while Skyrim was one pot of soup with flavor to the extent you would expect ones clothes to explode off like a cooking anime from Japan.

starfield literally feels like the kidz pop version of mass effect including the kid friendly writing and themes.

When I play an RPG, I never skip dialogue. Even generic repeat lines, I love it. Starfield is the first RPG I found myself just skipping forward in hopes of finding *something* interesting. That something never came tbh.

You say when you have a 1000 planets randomly generated, you forego planet side flying, landing, flying into space, and flying to another planet and going from space to the planet, yet you can do all this in No Man’s Sky.

the number of people that defended this game and still defend this game as a good game is mind boggling. they're the reason why studios can get away with producing "AAA" garbage like this because studios know these people will still dumpster dive for their products

Your argument about Starfield having lots of planets with very little content reminded me of a 2003 game. KOTOR is also a planet exploration RPG. It may not have thousands of planets, but man were each planet really deep in terms of content and world building. Edit: I cant believe Bethesda did not learn from a 2003 game in 2023.

Imagine being on the dev team at BGS and trying to give feedback to Todd Howard that they need to rethink their approach but being constantly ignored; "it'll work, people love us, don't worry" ...all whilst playing CP2077 2.0 in secret and rubbing your temples in disbelief. What a life. I think BGS have just used up their last get out of jail free card. If they mess up ES6, they're a finished studio.

Starfield's Neon feels like if one of the Disney Park executives saw Cyberpunk 2077's Night City and said: "Yeah, we'll create a section of Adventure Land and make it Cyberpunk."

I've started this video but you've already hit upon a point of contention for me: the exploration aspect. Even looking back at Bethesda's games pre-Skyrim, the way they want you explore is so different. Go back as far as Morrowind which has no compass, and how it felt rewarding to go exploring and find a daedric temple or stumble upon orcs worshipping Malacath. Travelling around and spying a Dwemer structure from afar, a shape in the fog, felt like actual exploration. Hell, using a different game entirely, I have recently been going through Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen, which came out around the same time as Skyrim. There are map icons, but no overworld compass. What you find is due to quests and exploring, and more often than not you are rewarded even if you do initially end up finding a more challenging foe to defeat before you can get it. The swathes of open field and dense forest are pleasant to walk through after you've run into a bunch of bandits, that downtime needed. Starfield feels like it's all downtime. Planets feel like a checklist - go look at the points of interest, go get some materials, defeat some space raiders. Rinse and repeat. A shame, when a space game could have benefited from dense, multi-planet excursions, with the corpos and politics that should be involved with sci-fi settings.

Cyberpunk's launch was atrocious, but the things that where wrong with it where mechanical problems. Most of them have been completely patched out or overhauled to get to the point they are now. Starfield was a functioning game at its launch, but the problems it has are issues with its core design philosophy. Those can't get patched out.

Hot off the heels of Baldur's Gate 3 I jumped into Starfield, and the difference in writing and conversation quality hit me like a truck. I had that sinking feeling in my gut, and sure enough it never got better, it in fact only got worse as the game progressed. I have never skipped this much dialogue in a game before.

Elder scrolls 6 is gonna be trash and people will still be surprised :)

Honestly, I'm kinda surprised anybody actually LIKED the shipbuilding. It was the aspect I was most hyped for...but at the time that I played (they may have patched this by now, in which case, whoops, egg on my face) I had to spend fifteen minutes sussing out why having two hab sections next to each other removed the crafting station I needed, and over an hour trying to figure out why placing a window in the roof of a hab caused my cockpit door to go AWOL, stranding it on the ground. And the inability to ROTATE ship parts (aside from a handful of decorative parts that could be flipped on a single axis). Like...I understand if your cockpit and / or loading ramp need to face a certain direction, but the lack of ability to rotate rooms took all the wind out of my sails. In the end, I must have wrestled with shipbuilding for the better part of five hours to end up with a subpar clunker that didn't look ANYTHING like the traveling Space Mobile Home Of My Dreams™. For me, this game was a complete disappointment, back to front. It felt like the design document was a note in crayon, LADEN with spelling errors, that read only: "FALOUTT 3 IN SPAEC & ASLO WITH STAR-BOATS".

Shortly after starting starfield I was excited to explore the planets I was on, thinking to myself "it's a bethesda game, if I go explore this planet instead of going to the quest marker they gave me i'll be rewarded with atleast something to do right?" After reaching my first poi that was just a bunch of flowers, I was like "huh this is...pointless but the next one just over the cliff will be interesting right?" only to discover it was literally the exact same set of flowers in the exact same positions...I uninstalled the game seconds later

i thought i was crazy for being the only one who noticed how EVERY creature in the game have the same behaviors and are essentially just reskins of one another, finally someone else said it

I always look for character customization in games, whether it's the character's face, outfit, or vehicles. Immersing in the universe feels more complete with appropriate clothing. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that Starfield's outfitting system went back to FO3/NV era where you can only equip helmets and overalls instead of being able to equip modular clothing pieces like Skyrim, Fallout 4, or even Fallout 76. Sure you can customize your ship to your heart's content, but most of the time you won't see your ship, especially when you're dealing with other NPCs.

I was a little bit confused when people on twitter started clowning on the one guy who said that the player should be able to land on gas giants like jupiter, saying that it wasn't like that in real life, and they want it to be realistic. I don't know about everyone else, but I would absolutely be willing to suspend my disbelief in exchange for the wonder of seeing what Bethesda's interpretation of a gas giant would be. Something to the effect of "heheh im gonna crash my ship into saturn because why not" turning into "holy shit you can actually land". I think the call for "realism" in games ends up making the game boring because the real world is boring. I want more whimsy and wonder in my games.

Here are my biggest problems with Starfield 1. The world design does NOT have any history to it. Remember Word Walls in Skyrim? Each one would be in a totally unique place, and have its own story. One would be in the deeps of a tomb, guarded by a Dragon Priest, and on the way you would pick up journals of people who tried to rob the tomb and meet sticky ends. Another would be atop a mountain, where you would have to brave Ice Wraiths through the forest, only to fight a newly-awakened dragon. But the Starfield "Temples". Go to a Temple in a barren wasteland, complete the same boring minigame and unlock a new power. How is this interesting? How is this a worthwhile experience? Where is the story? 2. There's NO such thing as exploration. When you explore a map in Skyrim, you find things "off the beaten path". So you might try to get from Whiterun to Riften but, on the way, find an ancient, abandoned Shrine taken over by Spriggans. As you go deeper into the Shrine, you can find it's actually haunted. The tale becomes so exciting that you forget about Riften entirely. No such thing happens in Starfield. It's literally just "go through boring planets to make a beeline for a map-marker 400m away" rinse and repeat ad infinitium. It's like Bethesda have taken the best parts of their games, stripped them out and thrown them in the bin. As a die-hard Bethesda fan who literally defended and highly enjoyed EVERY major release (including FO4 and FO76), the extent Bethesda fumbled this release just astounds me.

After watching this video, I realized that Bethesda have completely lost their touch as game designers. Even ignoring the technological innovations they could've added to the game, they appear to be completely creatively bankrupt in terms of even working around engine limitations to create a fun game, and the results speak for themselves.

I made a huge mistake buying Starfield over Baldur's Gate 3, I 've only been to Mars after leaving New Atlantis and checked out mentally when real life stuff came up for me and there's nothing there that will compel me to come back to it. BG3 I bet would be a story that makes me want to come back to see to completion.

I like that you used Cyberpunk for comparison clips. The game came out in a messy state on consoles, but playing it on PC I had an absolute blast with it, and I really feel like it set new standards for what you can expect from games in terms of cutscenes and just general environmental design, which was absolutely top notch throughout the entire game. Bethesda is doing the exact same thing they've been doing 20 years ago, while the rest of the industry are moving leaps and bounds with each new release. For a 60/70 $ game, you really have to bring the best stuff possible, not just the exact same thing again and again.

THE definitive Starfield review/analysis imo. You nailed it perfectly.

The only two interesting things in the Starfield lore had already happened(the war) or were completely missing(Va run and space serpent).

It astonishes me how Bethesda still uses lazy stiff facial mocap that looks like it was made 12 years ago while games like Baldur's Gate have mocap so detailed that it feels like you're speaking to a real person.

The real tragedy of Starfield was Bethesda's response to its customers who weren't thrilled about it. It's an ominous indicator of what to expect for ES6.

The only fun I had in starfield was giving myself unlimited money and building cool ships but that quickly dries up once you realize you can’t do anything with said ships

What a great take on this game. I just finished Cyberpunk, my first play through. I'd avoided after the launch fiasco, but I was blown away by the game, especially how alive Night City was. Then I fired up Starfield, and in less than a week, I was playing a new background/build in Cyberpunk again. I have zero intention of returning to Starfield, everything just feels so outdated and the interaction with NPC's are so stilted.

Why does all of the "insane club music" from Starfield sound like the Human Music™ from Rick & Morty?

What we learned from starfield is that Todd wasn't the one making those games of the past great it was other people who must have retired

As soon as you played the Cyberpunk 2077 combat I got so engrossed into the footage I forgot I was watching a Starfield video. Theres just so much style and flare.

I was enjoying Starfield before Phantom Liberty. I felt some it’s flaws from the beginning but decided to ignored them. I was hyped for the game, but as soon as Phantom Liberty came out and played it, I tried returning to Starfield to finish it and couldn’t. It just feels like a chore.

I really don't understand how someone can be made to wait through hundreds of loading screen just to run through empty, Ai generated sandboxes, and still call this a "decent" game. Like, where have all the standards gone? We need a new industry crash.

After the launch of fallout 76 and Starfield I have realised Bethesda games are now best left for a year or so before buying them, after all the kinks are all worked out and the worlds are more populated.

Skyrim biggest hook was it's Music and atmosphere, the taverns were cozy with it's somber bard music, warmth of the fireplace, you walked down roads next to streams with fish in them and as they splash against the rocks, swamps is coated in ankle high fogs and the lands around Falkreath is lush and dense with green, ALL cresendoed by a masterful soundtrack that makes you want to look up in to the night's sky in awe. What do you get in Starfield? well, Todd was being very literal when he called it "The space game"...it certainly is Todd, it's just a game set in Space, no lore to discuss or theorize because everything's explained on the spot, no bigger mystery about it, even the origin of Earth drying up isn't that grand, it's basically just a plot to push people in to space colonization, that's it, not aliens, divine intervention or even cosmic horror, just scientists being wide-eyed to Space colonization.

Your point about seeing the exact same base twice and how it breaks immersion is so spot on. Within my first 10 hours I saw the same base 3 or 4 times across 3 or 4 different plants and systems.

I know it's been said over and over again, but it's still boggles my mind that BGS makes every new game with less and less of the things people like about the older ones. Makes it feel like it must have been an accident that they ever made anything good in the first place, an accident they've been doing their damnedest to "fix"

"When you have a thousand planets made using RNG, you also forego some really cool features like planet side flying, flying between planets or out into space or the ability to take off." Except, No Man's Sky did just that.

59:44 It's funny that you call this Starfield's most ambitious scene when all of the dialogue options have the exact same outcome. I've heard so many people describe this as the best part of the story because it has so many options, but none of them bothered to try out the other options before putting it on a pedestal. Even if you try to fail by selecting the worse options, the game makes you succeed. That one scene is the embodiment of everything wrong with Starfield's storytelling.

I think a really simple but fundamental flaw with exploration in Starfield is that the points of interest map markers are already there when you land on a planet. In Skyrim they would pop in as you got within a certain range so you would visually assess the landscape and walk towards something you think could be of interest, the game would then affirm your curiosity by saying 'yes there is a cave here' and then you would discover the cave and go in an explore it, it felt rewarding. In Starfield you already know as soon as you land how far away the map marker is so it's literally just a case of making a b-line straight to that marker with no sense that you've actually discovered anything. It's strange how they could mess up something that seems so insignificant but actually has a massive impact on exploration.

It's funny how no video games have ever had a full, convincing earth, each area filled to the same extent that the rdr2 map is, and yet Bethesda thought they could make a good game with a thousand planets... The state of the video AAA game industry is just an absolute mess.

I don't say this often about stuff I watch on YT, but your video is just brilliant. Very good flow, not too long or too short, perfect comparison to CP77. The one thing I've missed though would've been a quick comparison to Star Citizen in terms of space flight, spaceships, and exploring planets. I've enjoyed Starfield when it was first released, I liked the introductary pacing and that the game can draw you in and you can spend a lot of time doing side quests. Funny enough, I've never touched the main questline when it was dooming on me that I'd be playing as yet another chosen one-character. I already disliked that approach in Fallout 4, although that game was way more fleshed out (despite the game-breaking bugs and poor PC performance at launch). Imho, the worst thing about Starfield is not the ambition behind it to build a huge space game, but that Bethesda prioritized quantity over quality. You've made a really good point that in the end, Starfield is just plain and boring and just doesn't deliver on their promises. Although this can be said about a lot of modern games, it doesn't make it better. After at least 3 months of not playing this game at all, I have yet to return to it, but I probably won't for the forseeable future. If I want a faster-paced, well thought-out and high quality action-rpg-shooter, I'm gonna play Cyberpunk 2077 again. If I want to explore space, fly around or just do whatever I want in a sandbox game, I'm gonna play Star Citizen. Both of these games are also a lot more enjoyable than Starfield will ever be - even if I'd count in mods.

After playing phantom liberty for a couple hours and getting hooked instantly i realized how bad i was gaslighting myself into thinking i was having a good time in starfield lol. I think the most interesting thing that happened in my entire 48hr play through was the AI mini quest.

Good video. One thing I've been noticing a lot in my recent playthrough of Cyberpunk was just how much Night City feels like an actual place that people live in. There are NPCs just walking the street, but then you go into the alleys and you see construction workers discussing projects, kids playing around, some dude spazzing out from an overdose, people hanging out and watching some tv, et cetera. You can't go into every building, but the ones you can are constructed like real buildings - everything is where you'd expect it to be, everything is properly placed, they feel like real spaces. I'm sure there are some patterns and cookie-cutter structures, but it's hard for me to tell, even though I've sunk hundreds of hours in the game. It's an insane level of detail, and it makes Night City feel alive in a way that few games even come close to.

Starfield is exactly what I expected it to be. As wide as the ocean but as deep as a puddle.

The first thing that came into my mind, and continuously reinforced by every update that I hear, was that the game was the "Minimal Contractual Obligation" owed to Microsoft for Bethesda's purchase, reinforced by the news that the senior developers cashed out their stock options & retired a week after the game came out. I enjoyed your essay and pretty much agree if not all at least most of your points. There are a few things I would like to add. Our... skybox? area of exploration, wither in planet or in space, is based on what they call a "single point system" that essentially plots everything around us by direction & distance, in this case around our spacecraft. The problem is that the farther away from our central point the harder it is for the game to resolve our location until we eventually enter a space the game cannot map and everything crashes. Why is it done this way? It was a simple way to save data space back in the eighties. Why, after 20+ years is it still being used? For that reason of a limited box to explore in is why we do not have any sort of ground transportation, they were too scared we would try to drive out of the box and they would be right. Which brings me to the procedural generation and how it was implemented improperly. Actually I would also add 'shallow' & 'sloppy' to my description, but that is a reflection of more of it's depth. The procedural generation we see we were not supposed to be stopping at. Those farms & bases we see are supposed to be scenery as we speed along the ground, instead that have become destinations that we trudge to. Not to mention that it doesn't even seem that they tuned the locations, resulting, as you noted, the same people in the same bases with the exact same gear in the same exact locations. Bethesda has procedurally generated dungeons to positive effect, but they couldn't be bothered to do the same for the caves, let alone modify interiors? And of course the story, and I have a question: Why isn't each of the governments trying to disect me? Seriously, we are assembling the components to a trans-dimensional gate and no government is taking an interest in us? A Starborn attack in the middle of the city, harming people and placing even more at risk, and NOBODY drags us away to even ask us what the (censored) is going on? Now I can understand why we cannot 'call' other systems and have to go in person. My next question is how everyone else is? We are given the ridiculous gift of the ship, but why is there no public transportation? We didn't need to be given a ship right away and it just seems more sense that piloting would need to be a learned skill. (I also think we should have had more mechanics tied to our crew's skills, but that is more of a wish list discussion slated for the game editor which brings up my last point of discussion...) The final thing I would like to bring up is that Bethesda games have a slightly different clientele than other games and that is because of the game editor. This makes Bethesda games different from others as it allows us, the users, to actively create in the game and often serves as a good introduction for game development. Only this time they didn't. From the looks of the engine they continued with the Fallout 76 engine, which had been stripped and modified to prevent modular additions to prevent hacking. I can understand why these components were removed for a MMO, but they essentially made things a mess for the modding community. Add to the fact that several flaws, like the single point system mentioned earlier, have been found to require an entire rewriting of the system... There was a meme that said that "the modding community will fix it". well the modding community wants to 'create', not 'fix' and I think it's fair to say that the community is getting sick of this. While the dedication of many is unmistakable, there are also many waiting to see if the time will be worth it. Me, I'm just glad that this time I decided to try it on game pass first. This engine and game have been so many steps backwards that we were better off with the Fallout 4 engine.

I'm playing Oblivion again for the first time in 6 years after being disappointed in Starfield and I forgot how fun Bethesda's older games are I put over 500 hours into Oblivion before starting again and I still ran into quests I never seen before like wow the amount of content, detail and care that was put into it still impressive especially considering Oblivion is 17 years old and Starfield is a new game😆

I hope everyone liked the melee in Starfield because that's what you're going to get in the next Elder Scrolls game!! Take care!

I missed the VATS system a lot while playing, being able to shoot weak points, and teleport around as melee. And having activated crits being guaranteed hits added just that little bit extra to combat strategies when you open with a 50 yard missile crit to the biggest dude's face. Jet was also pretty sweet for bullet-time on demand. I wish they'd pulled more from Fo4, but seems they took inspiration from 76 instead.

Mass Effect had those interesting descriptions when you visited planets. You couldn't land on them but it added some flavor to an otherwise mostly emtpy universe. The only thing Starfield had to do was to create 50 to 100 or so planets and turn descriptions like those Mass Effect had into actual stories you can play. The planets could be created using procedural generation, most of them could still be empty, but every planet worth exploring should include handcrafted locations and quests that fit organically into the environment. But most of all, they should've first developed the tech necessary for seemless exploration without loading screens. If they needed more time for that they should've made TES6 first.

watching people get sick of the slop is long overdue and extremely gratifying.

23:07 - 25:00 looked immearsuably more fun than all of Starfield's combat combined. Now I want to go back and give Cyberpunk a second try.

Fantastic analisys 10/10. I subscribed. Looking forward to see more content.

The real kick in the nuts is having 1000 planets and only 5 “major” settlements..

As someone that actually loved Fallout 4 despite the criticism, expansions included, I pretty much left Starfield within 10 hours. I knew where it was going mechanically and after seeing this video, I wasn't wrong.

My theory is that Todd Howard is a secret Daedric prince, the Prince of Disappointment, and Bethesda's releases are how he grows his power.

you still making fantastic video, im glad.

God Cyberpunk ended up being so good. It's at the level where I'm jealous of people who get to play it from the beginning for the first time.

The club scene in Phantom Liberty was such a beauty to behold. I recall having just finished one of the mission parts and I was supposed to go meet someone, but the shows starts, and since the game doesn't rush you and lets you just really notice it starting by how striking it is, that I just did. No reason to stay and watch, but so glad I did. The golden wings and the performance have stayed in my mind still.

There are no excuses for this game. I wouldn't be surprised if AI made it, honestly

Perfect example of several great ideas blended together with twice as many bad ones. It's like ordering a bowl of Kung Pao Chicken with vegetables, only to get home to find a few pieces of chicken buried underneath a mountain of veggies. Yes, it's technically Kung Pao Chicken, but you've clearly been bamboozled.

It boggles my mind that with as much as tech has advanced in the last decade, it almost feels like game development as a whole has actually DEVOLVED and it's fucking depressing

That part where it goes to the club in Neon and the dancers are going "Come on people, drink some Aurora and get crazyy!" before it pans to a completely dead dance floor had me dying. Kinda sums up what I didn't like about this game, zero effort put into making it feel like a real place instead of a video game. Meanwhile Skyrim had like a hundred books you could read and tons of little details that brought the world to life

I've played starfield for about 100 hours when it came out. It was a truly strange experience. At first I hated the disrupting limitations set in this "do whatever you want-sandbox" by the game's design. no real spaceflight, no consequences for my actions, no immersion despite my best efforts to feel like I could immerse myself into it. I kept on playing after those first days, gradually getting used to "features" and gameplay mechanics, starting to feel "okay" with the game. But despite feeling so little about it, i kept on playing for some reason. What I didn't knew back then was, that I was probably subconciously clinging to this game, because I knew, once I wouldn't start it up again, I wouldn't do so ever again, at least for a very long time. I kept on grinding on "exploring", trying to set up a good base and looked around the vastness to find my own fun in this game, because at this point i was already fed up with the quest design. And then I had to go home for a week, because I wanted to visit my parents. Once I came back, I've never looked at starfields tiny desktop icon and thought: "Well, let's try it again." I was so sick of it. This game - although it's very hard to say this about a team with hundreds of developers - lacks any vision, any creativity, any feel for good gameplay design and any thoughts about past mistakes. The gameplay just sucks, both in general game mechanics and in quest design. Constant fast-traveling, to the point where it's making me try to calculate the "most efficient fast-travel route" ... I get bad emotions just thinking about this. As someone who hasn't anything in general against loading screens, I thought I could be forgiving about bethesda's level design going into starfield. But I also enjoy the road towards my next poi or waypoint, may it be in a beatiful, organically feeling world of RDR2 or in the vastness of procedual generated space of Elite:Dangerous, the way starfield made me travel was slowly and constantly filling me with despair. And the quest design... I just say UC Vanguard/Crimson Fleet. Also, what really bothered me and made me lose any interest in the main story (aswell as in quite many sidequests) is best described by one word: "Starborn" This totally new IP by Bethesda had me hopping into a group of people to explore the world because I was the chosen one. Also the game wants me to become a Starborn, to save the world or whatever... Sounds alot like I'm the space version of a Dragonblood... very creative. Took plenty of time to came up with this. This similarity got even more absurd once I looked into the german localization. In german, both are named "Sternenblut" und "Drachenblut" (literal translation would be starblood and dragonblood) and this gave me the rest. They are not only trying to copy their basic story ingredients from their most beloved title, they also lack the inspiration or are just terribly lazy by copying the name for the "chosen one". This may not be as important to other players, but I kinda felt ... betrayed, somehow. Almost as if Bethesda was mocking my wishes for a fresh, new, original bethesda game. The fact, that they chose to learn nothing from their past, just underlines this last statement. Their engine may not be suited for different level designs, I get it. But how about not trying to make a space game with dozens of star systems and hundreds of planets then? How about not trying to write "humanity's great expansion" into your lore, if the three most important cities in your world are one large plaza with 5 buildings around, one small town looking like a mixture out of an antique city and an american mid-1800s settlement while having space for about 200 people and a bigger than average offshore oil-drilling place. And maybe, just maybe, try to implemet an ESSENTIAL mod like SkyUI or something as capable of managing your inventory by default next time? I don't know why I'm writing all of this. This is clearly nothing new to every person that tried to find the fun in Starfield themselves. Spoilers: There is none.

That they sold a game you KNOW no one at Bethesda would want to play themselves is enough for me to never give them any money for Starfield.

I haven't played neither Cyberpunk nor Starfield but I find this video ironic considering Cyberpunk's release. It's a love letter to Cyberpunk and is basically saying "Starfield, why can't you be more like Cyberpunk?". Well, considering how bad people thought Cyberpunk was on release 4 years ago and how good you think it's now, I'd say give Bethesda 4 years and this game may be good by then. It worked for Cyberpunk apparentely lol

The splicing together of the two “making a deal with shady characters” quests in starfield vs cyberpunk really just sums up so well where one succeeds and one fails. Also kinda crazy how mass effect over a decade ago perfected having alien powers that you can send out to charge and then send another one to explode the charged enemies and in starfield you can’t synergize your powers like that

Best way to describe this game to anyone who hasn’t played it. Bethesda was up to bat and while they hit the ball, it was with very little force so the ball didn’t end up going anywhere.

When you think about it, probably the most detrimental thing to open world games a genre is the little number you see counting down the distance before you reach something. In every single game that has that little counter, your entire field of view shrinks down to watching that number go down and any form of exploration is reduced into waiting for you to reach tour destination. So it has to be the most harmful thing you can put in your game. If you’re gonna guide tour players on where to explore, give them a direction rather than a distance. That’s what the best good open worlds do, because that way you don’t know how far you’re going and you still have the possibility of discovering other stuff as you go. Without that, why even include an open world if your game is gonna be fixed locations separated by empty scenic space.

8:10 I've seen this outpost multiple times in my playthrough, and multiple other times in other peoples videos. It goes to show that they didn't even bother to make more than one or two different outpost types to litter around the game world. If there were dozens of different layouts to find, then it wouldn't be as bad to stumble upon this identical outpost 2 or 3 times in a 100 hour playthrough. But the fact that I've seen it more than 5 times in around 40 hours is wild. And that wasn't even with me actively exploring landmarks.