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I still don't understand how Todd thought 1000 empty planets were better than 10-50 planets of solid content. Such a shame.

The problem with Starfield, apart from outdated engine and all the problems resulting from it, is the fact that Bethesda plays it safe. Just look at Cyberpunk - despite its issues the guys who made Cyberpunk are not afraid to be creative. The cutscenes are dynamic. The same goes for dialogues. While having a conversation with NPC we see them walking, sitting, doing other stuff. It looks natural and creates a believable illusion of a real world. As of writing, Cyberpunk touches many adult themes, the characters use foul language, scream, shout, chatter, tell jokes, etc while Starfield is like a family friendly sitcom from the 90s. It's so safe on every level. I am not an English native speaker but I hope you got my point.

Only in 2024 are we giving a AAA developer kudos for adding in a map a year after the release of one of the most hyped games of 2023. God I hate being a fan of gaming sometimes.

Todd Howard is big brained, Starfield can't be broken if it breaks your computer first.

Confirmed: talk too much shit and Todd Howard will straight up brick your whole rig

Only 5 more years until the game is good, yay!

Elder Scrolls- Multiple races. Fallout- Multiple races. Vast universe where anything is possible Starfield- Humans only.

Adding new modules to the shipbuilder?! What the fuck, thats the LAST thing they should be doing. How bout giving a purpose to the ones that are already there.

I 100% agree on you map theory. I think they probably took them out because it showed how empty planets were and how small cities actually were

i got burnt out when every single action required a loading screen. That breaks immersion.

oh, they added maps? Yay, they finally added a very basic feature of basically every open world game!

There's not a single support feature such as maps, cameras, framerate settings that can ever fix Starfield. It's an inherently broken, terrible foundation that cannot be fixed.

The PC tried to kill itself rather than run Starfield

A vehicle is a neat feature but that isn't gonna fix the issues with exploration. The travelling wasn't the problem, the destination was, it doesn't matter if you get there in 5 minutes or 30 seconds, it's still just gonna be another empty cave, or the same cryo lab you've already cleared on 3 other planets. They need to add more (and better) POIs and dungeons. What's the point in a rover if you don't wanna bother exploring in the first place?

I have an idea, why not just add fog of war to the uncivilized planets, that way we can stil have that sense of adventure, and have a detailed map as we go explore that planet.

Too little, too late...

Honestly at this point I feel like Bethesda is just an actual vault experiment on how long they can make modern day games using decade+ outdated business practices to build them

We'll never have a DLC as well written as Far Harbour because the person behind it was their only competent writer, and he's left the company.

That was a good explanation of the "performance" mode. Way too many people on Reddit are saying it's a "60fps mode"

Starfield has run into the same problem that earlier broad-scale space sims like Elite Dangerous have faced; the only practical method to populate the +1000 planets you have created is to rely on pre-made and procedurally generated content. Unfortunately, the desire to explore is effectively killed when you encounter the same abandoned listening post that is inhabited by the same number to Crimson Fleet pirates three times in a row.

Starfield feels like Bethesdas game design philosophy taken to its final conclusion. Every game post-morrowind (I’m sure daggerfall enthusiasts would say before this even) gets a little more shaved down, and unlike past bethesda games it doesn’t have an already established world to use as a crutch to hide the flaws.

The detailed mini-maps reveals just how *barren* and *bleak* the game actually is. I had a small sense of exploration before, just like how fog in the distance adds the sense of scale

Revisiting Skyrim made me realize why it has such a lively modding scene, making the game essentially immortal - there is this handcrafted world, rich with lore and locations, which modders can piggyback on. For example, Gods and Worship builds on existing temples, quests and NPC to give you an all-encompassing religion experience. Or Song of the Green involves you taking Auri to see all those beautiful locations Skyrim has. I just don't see any of that being possible in Starfield, where modders only have barren planets and 1,5 caves to work with.

It's not just the fishbowl maps and loading screens that break the illusion of what this game is presenting itself as. It's also once you reach the point of the story where you learn that there's an infinite number of multiverses and an infinite number of you, it makes everything feel pointless.

"At the end of the day its still Starfield"

Can't wait for Bethesda to finish fixing Fallout 5 in 2042

Regarding the map: It only shows markers on POI you discovered, thats why there are many close to you and none anywhere else, because you still have to discover those places. (Source: Just tried it out)

when Bethesda said they will put more interesting quests into Starfield they weren't lying, New Quest started, your PC is dead, will not work till next update in 6 months

No update can make it less boring.

The guy who made skyrim together was making a mod for this game, until he literally got bored. That sleaks volumes.

Honestly, just filling the maps with a bunch of interesting pois would go a long way. I think that would be good for any update, for any game

For those on Xbox Series X who want to check if they have VRR. Go to Settings > General > TV & display options > Video modes > Variable refresh rate towards the bottom.

Bethesda: We've added little maps in cities! Gamers: Can you improve the writing and RPG elements? Bethesda *in sad voice*: Oh my no.

Every single time I see this game in action I'm reminded how much better base Cyberpunk was in comparison lol.

My problem with Starfield is that strictly speaking there are no planets, no space travel, only instance 'dungeons'. Also while almost every planet has something little on it's surface "because that's how it is realistic", however for some reason, even on unexplored planets there are buildings by humans. How is it unexplored, if people already built on them? This is the basic stuff, there would be many more however it's announced as a game of exploration, while you have 0 chance to explore. I've played 319 hours with it in 3 months, there are good points to the game, but it becomes boring. With Newgame+ I've tried how many differences come in the game (story or quests) after 'reborning', but was underwhelming. I deleted it in October or November, waiting if they could make it enjoyable. I hope they can, also hoping the modders could make it better.

Bethesda thinks adding maps and a vehicle to explore nothing in fish bowls faster will save Starfield 😂

Never underestimate Bethesda's ability to disappoint.

Even your PC is like "Yeah...... No" 😂

Very good point about the immersion/illusion being broken. Once it's broken, there's not really much that they can do to bring us back. The problems of this game are way too baked into the core of it that it will always be just meh.

starfield is such a good example of how CEO-brained developers have totally lost track of what makes games fun lol

Heres a boost buggy so you can explore absolutely nothing slightly faster

This game needed just one galaxy with more hand crafted planet content and variety. Could have been so good, daamn.

I'm not going to let them lower the bar, things like city maps, variable refresh rate, and fov sliders are bare minimum features that every open-world game should launch with. I'm not going to give Starfield a chance because they are finally catching up with the standards of 10 years ago.

I wish they let us fly the ships manually into the planets, land manually, etc! That's why I droped the game. I have a feeling that I don't need my ship for anything! That's horrible. It breaks the freedom that Bethesda games always had

Can't wait for one person to make a more vivid, adept version of Starfield in a few years

yesterday i was on a mission near mars and having played 40+ hours i thought erm there's phobos, and it's not far away, lets actually fly to something, , having never needed to really do it, apart from space stations, fly right up to , and tried to land on it, went right through it , Elite 40+ years ago had better space exploration, hell Asteroids did

I don't think it's better 87 hours and nothing here is compelling. Perks bad, travel bad, npcs boring, no cheek clappable Sarah morgan mods yet

maybe in 3 years i'll come back. the core issues are much deeper

I fully agree that the maps show the real lack of content in Starfield. This was the first thing that also popped in my mind when you showed the map of a planet lol

I had to artificially remove 40 points in my IQ in order to roleplay this game and somewhat enjoy it :D

6:05 idk, man. I played a lot of Starfield when it first came out, 369 hours according to Steam, and I did a lot of exploring on planets. Yes they were largely empty however from what I recall, they were not as empty as that map makes them appear. Points of interest seemed to be spread around the maps because I'd only see some of them pop up on the HUD once I had gotten a fair bit away from my ship. It was almost always the case that if I took off running away from the ship, toward nothing, within a few minutes I'd have a point of interest pop up on the HUD somewhere ahead of me. I suspect this surface map you showed only shows points of interest once you've gotten close enough to them.

2:46 I wish the 3rd option was "[ Cyber Run] Go play Cyberpunk instead?".

Regarding the map: NEVER waste the players time. And with sci-fi planetary scanners, it makes sense that we can see where points of interest that aren't even tagged may be. However, this also gives modders a great chance to see the maps and start ADDING new stuff to these 'empty' worlds.

more immersive navigation would make this game actually enjoyable to me. it doesnt even feel like a space game the fast travel is egregious

What's the point of having a vehicle in a world with nothing to do or see?

Bro got the authentic Bethesda experience with that crash

Nice. The update is like chocolate sprinkles for a poop cake :D

14:48 They made the same assumption with Fallout 76. Everyone in the game was a real person. People don't play like NPCs making soup, giving quests, and running a shop, etc. They assumed reality would be enough and it wasn't. They should've learned there that "realism" has limits on "fun". If reality was as fun as video games we'd all be outside haha.

The FPS issue with this game is yet another symptom of running with a decade-old engine that has long been surpassed by competitor studios.

if they could also procedurally generate interesting cities, characters, stories and quests for all those planets it would be genuinely awesome, which is where i think the future of these big open world story games will go

whoever is capable of releasing a fully functional game, running at 4k 60 fps with all content included for 70 bucks, will win the videogame war. it has become a unicorn...;)

The thing about barren planets is that it CAN be fun but really on in the context of a game where the space sim aspects are the focus (i.e. Elite Dangerous). Flying around as a space trucker to a largely empty world works there because you're actually doing the flying.

Even Oblivion had a horse because they figured walking everywhere would be tedious. 1000 full-scale planets and they didn't figure it.

That crash reminded me of a friend who played Oblivion on his Xbox 360 waaaay back when and it crashed. Not all that uncommon, but not only did it crash it seemed to completely wipe his Xbox Live account clean. It appeared to be just gone... Not sure if that was ever resolved for him or what actually happened but i've never seen anything like that before or since. Truly a Bethesda moment.

Wake me up when they rewrite the entire story and characters, fix exploration, and make ship combat more interesting.

Putting some flowers on a pile of trash ain't gonna make it any better

The new map system does not magically reveal all POI, you still have to explore for them to show up. That is why the map appears so empty at first. Do some exploring and then show what it looks like. Instead of a rover that will get stuck on rocks etc. give me boots to use in conjunction withe the jet pack that let me slide over terrain as in the Tribes games.

The fact that they even lie about your movement speed kills me; no matter how much you upgrade your skills, jet pack and starborn powers you will only go as fast as the games animation allows! Cant believe people gave this a "most innovative game award" where? Innovated once maybe but come on, this whole game is a wad.

They can easily fix that "map" stuff by just adding some fog of war - once you visit area it will reaveal on that minimap

And this is exhibit A on *why* people who stream should have a dedicated machine for that

on the map POIs, they show up when you get close enough, so your map section/critique is a little off. ALSO the map moves with you, IE if you go far enough a new square map will generate. This means the old maps, where there were only 3 or so POIs to look at are now proper large maps with dozens of POIs if you go find them. That being said, each POI is still a 3-5 minute slog of running around. I haven't had it kill my PC yet though lol that being said my favorite change is the difficulty adjustments...you can now do the fallout 4 style survival mode where both you and the enemy do tons of damage, no more bullet sponges.

Man I can’t wait for people to start worshipping Bethesda again for doing the bare minimum while completely ignoring all of the lies and disappointments

I recently found out i have over 100 hours in starfield, if you asked me i woulda said i had less than 50, and i can hardly remember playing it at all. i also recently got around to playing cyberpunk, ive played less than 50 hours and the game is so dense it feels like ive played over 100.

6:30 - True, but at the same time, it would have been very easy to have the maps just available in cities. The lack of maps on planets would have been easy to justify since these are uncharted territories. I don't know why they didn't do this at launch.

One thing to note...you can find more poi when out exploring. They don't all show up right away. So those empty spaces will have more things to discover. I mean, they're still the same random things over and over. But, I imagine the maps could fill up a bit more the further out you go.

I genuinely forgot this game is a year old

So it went from 3/10 to 3.5/10.. yeah, that's definitely an improvement at least.

They need to heavily optimize this game. That would give it a ton of improvement in the performance portion. I'm not sure how it's so terrible optimized since they reuse assets everywhere. Looking at the planet map. They could cut the area around out, so it's not loaded as unneeded empty space.

Need more no mans sky integrated. Here's what I want from starfield. I go to a new system, pick a planet, fly to it, no loading screen, let me fly along over the surface for a bit and see if something looks interesting. Ok I land. Now at this point perhaps I get on a rover that's stored in my ship or I deploy some suitcase device that unfolds into a buggy. Or some orbital drop thing. Ok I start driving and not far for the moment because I parked my ship near something. I investigate for a bit. I fight some enemies for a bit. I get some goodies. I look up at the next hill and something looks interesting so I get in my car and drive to it. It's an ancient artifact or landmark or something else mysterious. I keep going for a bit after I get there because the terrain there is fun. Perhaps some jumps over small canyons or driving through canyons. I've been going in a zigzag pattern around the world. For miles and miles. I start thinking about making a base on this planet because of the resources I've found here and the cool shape of the terrain. I bring out a scanner and find something useful nearby and walk to it. I hear something. A ship lands between me and my buggy. They get out, take my buggy and start shooting at me. I trick them and kill one of them and take their "keys" to their ship. I board their ship while they chase me and kill the two guarding the ship. I get into the cockpit and use their ship to fly back to my own. I gut a few useful things from theirs and essentially break their ship. I fly back to that area and gun down (from my ship) the remaining enemies that had tried to hunt me down. One of them was riding my buggy that they took from me. I park there. i make a quick base. And I deploy a new buggy to continue roaming aimlessly for 20 miles. I find all kinds of small settlements, abandoned ones and populated ones, and creatures and loot. If you're going to procedurally generate worlds, don't half ass it. Keep going. Make it interesting and dense and fun. Go find out out minecraft and no mans sky did these kinds of things and replicate the concepts. I should be able to pick any world in that game and have fun for 20 hours on just one planet. More if I want. Perhaps it's a good mix of proc gen rules on that world so I find I can spend 200 hours there and not get bored (think, minecraft, you don't get bored on the one planet there). My issue with starfield is feeling like I'm just in the fishbowls as you call it and in loading screens between everything.

"Finding THIS box was the most exciting thing in this video. That should say a lot..."

Light a Todd candle, Luke fired up SF again!

Luke you are not right about terrain maps and markers. If you move further outside of the initial bubble more markers would pop out.

I cannot handle the amount of loading screens.

Luke is simply one of them voices like Vin Scully, Dr Cornell West and Chris Russo that no matter what is being said, it's just easy to listen to. And super enjoyable haha

I genuinely hope they call it a buggy, it's too fitting

The amps boggle my mind too, the fun of open world space games is that you can go anywhere to discover new things, it's supposed to update with new stuff as you discover it.

The changes that would bring a solid amount to Starfield are encounters. - Sentient alien species (preferably bipedal, and even easter eggy like the aliens from Fallout) - Reasons to be in space and not fast travel - More space battles or anomalies (derelict ships, scavengers, raiders, pirates, bounty hunters, authorities that seek to board the ship, not always destroy) - Possibly building out own space station which we sometimes must defend (scavengers, raiders, pirates, bounty hunters, authorities that seek to board the ship, not always destroy) - General anomalies and incidents amongst the NPCs. Elder Scrolls and Fallout have had so many random fights between the inhabitants of the world. Starfield has some animals fighting sometimes, some space factions space fighting sometimes, always around populated areas, not exploring themselves.

Thank you for the video. You know, I wanted to dive into the game again after the release of the new patch, but after seeing these tiny maps that were deceiving us all this time, I decided to forget about this game forever. This is not a game about space exploration, it's a joke about space.

Now im not on pc (im on xbox) and fallout 4 got me into modding and after years of seeing all the things modders do eith thr game that devs wont, i fully stand by my statement that the modders are the REAL bethesda. I know this is a Starfield video, but still i think the modders do all the heavy lifting when they release a game

The fact the small amount of anything "interesting" to discover on planets draws from such a small pool of assets to procedural generate also hurts massively - you know it's a problem, when you can not only recognize the assets from just glaring at them from a distance, but also remember the exact location of landmines and other things.

All I really want are some actually empty planets with no random POI's, perhaps with quests associated to help start new colonies or something...that could be pretty cool. I mean I loved that quest for the east empire company in Morrowind to help set up a new colony in the bloodmoon expansion.

You tried the dialogue cam in first person. Do it in third, that's where it makes the difference.

Exploration being better in Starfield could’ve made it more comparable to Skyrim and Fallout 4

7:44 I think Stephen is spot on here. The map on planets suddenly make planets just look like a small cell of very little, not like an explansive planet of many things to find. It's literally like removing the curtain and seeing it really isn't that great.

You do know that the fishbowl area adds POIs as you walk around in random directions, right? I'd bet $ that if you picked a direction and walked it would add more to the map than you currently could see.

Ah, taking a page out of the Blizzard playbook by withholding vital features on release and repackaging them in a later update with a faux “we’re listening to player feedback!”

I really like Starfield. I hope they keep adding lots of Dlc and Mods.

What they should have done was make Starfield smaller like have 10 planets around the size of Skyrim map each with everyplace you go unique and interesting! Instead of repeat stuff that's boring over loads of planets you don't want to go!

I actually found out that with the map, POI's only show up within a certain distance of the character/ship. You actually do need to travel to "discover" a "possible" poi that you then approach an unlock. Wether those POI's are small things like caves (the way i found this mechanic) or larger actual interesting POI's is yet to be confirmed as i have only spent a short time on planet with the beta update. Gotta work after all.