As a huge sci-fi fan, and fan of most of Bethesda’s games in the past, I disagree. Turd rating is accurate. It just all felt like a waste of time. Like you said, the base building seems like it could be good, but it is never relevant. It’s like this for almost every piece of content. They’re just all on islands that don’t interact.
My biggest issue though is the writing. It’s so boring. It’s like they watched a bunch of sci-fi and put tropes from them in the game, but then they never explore the consequences of them. They just exist for a quest and are gone. Why sci-fi is good is because it uses these stories to explore humanity, which would be made even better with an RPG where the player has agency. They just don’t though. You get a few boring options that don’t actually effect anything and everything goes on as normal. It’s just a bland game that doesn’t respect your time.
There’s a Star Trek Voyager game out at the moment which is basically what Starfield should have been, but set in the Star Trek universe.
I think the big problem Starfield has is that it tries to be really big, but they don’t really have that much content so it’s just all spread out. While at the same time you don’t actually get to feel that bigness because moving between locations is just a loading screen. You don’t get the long quiet sections like you do in something like Elite Dangerous. So they made a really big, really spread out world, with fast travel, it’s the most pointless game ever made.
Again you’re describing a not excellent game but a turd, there are real turds out there but this is just a middling attempt which is particularly disappointing from a formerly excellent studio
You can disagree, but no, I feel it’s a turd. I felt like best thing I can say about it was that it was a waste of time —and that’s not a positive thing. I’ve played really bad games that I still feel respected my time more than Starfield, which in my opinion is one of the worst sins of video games. I’d put it up there with Ubisoft games for not respecting the player’s time, but at least their gameplay is good (or used to be, but I haven’t played one in a decade or more).
I agree with you. People have a tendency to be too kind to things in ratings, but anything that literally feels like a waste of time is not even worth a rating. Turd is accurate. I see this with movies and TV-shows a lot, where people say “it’s not very good and you feel like you wasted your time at the end of it but 5/10.” What???
In college I took some classes on Brecht (for those who don’t know: extremely important 20th century play-right and theater theorist), and one thing he wrote always stuck with me. I can’t quote because I have a shit memory, but it was something like this: if the guy sitting in the front row takes a cigar out during the beginning of your piece, by the end of the piece he should be sitting there with his cigar still unlit.
What he means by this is simple, and he says it more clearly in his Kleines Organon: the single most important thing, before anything else, is that what you make creates “Unterhaltung” for the audience. “Unterhaltung” is am interesting word choice; it can be translated as both entertainment and conversation. The old school of Brecht only saw the latter, but today it is believed that he meant both.
Thus, even the great Brecht agrees with your sentiment: if it is not entertaining and creating conversation, if you really feel like you wasted your time, it is a complete and utter failure!
Okay, that went on a little longer than I expected… but it’s all just to say that you’re well justified!
As a huge sci-fi fan, and fan of most of Bethesda’s games in the past, I disagree. Turd rating is accurate. It just all felt like a waste of time. Like you said, the base building seems like it could be good, but it is never relevant. It’s like this for almost every piece of content. They’re just all on islands that don’t interact.
My biggest issue though is the writing. It’s so boring. It’s like they watched a bunch of sci-fi and put tropes from them in the game, but then they never explore the consequences of them. They just exist for a quest and are gone. Why sci-fi is good is because it uses these stories to explore humanity, which would be made even better with an RPG where the player has agency. They just don’t though. You get a few boring options that don’t actually effect anything and everything goes on as normal. It’s just a bland game that doesn’t respect your time.
There’s a Star Trek Voyager game out at the moment which is basically what Starfield should have been, but set in the Star Trek universe.
I think the big problem Starfield has is that it tries to be really big, but they don’t really have that much content so it’s just all spread out. While at the same time you don’t actually get to feel that bigness because moving between locations is just a loading screen. You don’t get the long quiet sections like you do in something like Elite Dangerous. So they made a really big, really spread out world, with fast travel, it’s the most pointless game ever made.
Again you’re describing a not excellent game but a turd, there are real turds out there but this is just a middling attempt which is particularly disappointing from a formerly excellent studio
You can disagree, but no, I feel it’s a turd. I felt like best thing I can say about it was that it was a waste of time —and that’s not a positive thing. I’ve played really bad games that I still feel respected my time more than Starfield, which in my opinion is one of the worst sins of video games. I’d put it up there with Ubisoft games for not respecting the player’s time, but at least their gameplay is good (or used to be, but I haven’t played one in a decade or more).
I agree with you. People have a tendency to be too kind to things in ratings, but anything that literally feels like a waste of time is not even worth a rating. Turd is accurate. I see this with movies and TV-shows a lot, where people say “it’s not very good and you feel like you wasted your time at the end of it but 5/10.” What???
In college I took some classes on Brecht (for those who don’t know: extremely important 20th century play-right and theater theorist), and one thing he wrote always stuck with me. I can’t quote because I have a shit memory, but it was something like this: if the guy sitting in the front row takes a cigar out during the beginning of your piece, by the end of the piece he should be sitting there with his cigar still unlit.
What he means by this is simple, and he says it more clearly in his Kleines Organon: the single most important thing, before anything else, is that what you make creates “Unterhaltung” for the audience. “Unterhaltung” is am interesting word choice; it can be translated as both entertainment and conversation. The old school of Brecht only saw the latter, but today it is believed that he meant both.
Thus, even the great Brecht agrees with your sentiment: if it is not entertaining and creating conversation, if you really feel like you wasted your time, it is a complete and utter failure!
Okay, that went on a little longer than I expected… but it’s all just to say that you’re well justified!