What is going on with Starfield?

what is going on with Starfield just weeks ago the game was being hiled as a return to form from Bethesda it received glowing reviews and initial fan reactions were largely positive and we even heard how Starfield was the biggest launch in Bethesda history it really looked like everything was going right for the game but here we are just a few weeks remov from that and Starfield is now mixed in its recent reviews on Steam and rated even lower than Fallout 76 on a near daily basis you could find highly uploaded Reddit post setting disappointments with the game it just feels like if Starfield comes up in online discussions it's either fans saying it's the greatest game ever or users talking like it had a completely disastrous launch so what on Earth happened here how did this shift occur from a ton of praise to it almost looking like Starfield is a controversial release right at the bat I think it's important to establish here that this isn't just a review bomb although yes there definitely were some designated efforts to lower starfields review scores at the same time there definitely is just a general dissatisfaction that has spread throughout the community where many have went from feeling like Starfield is a pretty good or even a great game to just being kind of okay and it really seems like one of the biggest issues here is just how cumbersome the gam is to play at some points so like yeah Starfield definitely has some bugs there are definitely some questionable story moments but what I think is the Cornerstone issue for a lot of people are these load screens and I think it's this singular design choice that can be extrapolated to explain a lot of the fan dissatisfaction with Starfield as it exists right now in Starfield the vast majority of content will be locked behind at least one and realistically several load screens this due to the planetary hopping nature of Starfield if you want to go do a quest or check out a cool location you'll need to get to your ship and fly over there this is the Cornerstone to travel in Starfield and that process almost always features several load screens throughout it but I know some of you are probably thinking this is dramatic tons of games have load screens why would it be such an issue for this one well as much as seeing the load screen and having that brief pause does take you out of the game and it is just generally kind of annoying I really think the larger issue is with the load screen represent in Starfield with its content distribution Starfield is paradoxical in that it has the most handcrafted content of any Bethesda game studios game ever and the argument could even be made that Starfield has some of the best quests that Bethesda has ever made for one of their games but due to how all of this is packaged it just doesn't feel as good to play in Starfield as you're going through some of the quest lines and doing some of the content it almost feels like you're siphoned off a lot of the time when you do a quest you just stick to that Quest you're going to fast travel to your ship to fast travel to a planet to finally land and then you actually get to the content and then after that you fast travel on to the next quest in Starfield overall it feels like you're really going from point of interest to point of Interest things are very directed and pointed comparatively in Starfield and even Fallout 4 when you had to go somewhere you would be pleasantly greeted with a ton of other stuff along the way as you're walking up to the new Quest location you might find a few Random Encounters get distracted by a side quest that pops up or even a random Enemy Fight so that journey to do the next main quest turns into several hours of being sucked into side activities and general Intrigue but Starfield the content feels way more concentrated sure around new Atlantis and Aila City you could find tons of distractions your quest log will immediately fill up when running through these cities but it's almost so overabundant it's to the point where you just ignore it like when you get one interesting side quest that's one thing but when you get 10 all at once while running through a city you just kind of ignore them and stick to whatever you're doing and from a very early Point into Starfield you're almost encouraged to go straight to the destination fast travel directly to the lodge inste of running through all of new Atlantis to get there and I think a big reason that many players are sticking to this type of play is how many load screens there are naturally in Starfield if you just play naturally not going out of your way to jump around a lot but just following some of the main quest lines and doing General activities you're going to see a ton of load screens and as such a lot of players are going to look for ways to avoid those load screens which basically means beining to Quest objectives or other locations and I think this could be part of the explanation for why you're seeing some of these reviews with a ton of hours in Starfield that aren't super happy with the game the load screens and the Persistence of them almost have this cumulative stacking effect you put 50 hours into the game and they start to get really annoying after a while Starfield can just feel frustrating to play due to these load screens or at least that is something I've started to notice as my played hours get higher and higher it's not that I'm not actually enjoying the content as I'm doing Quest and even sometimes Outpost building I'm having fun but it's the low screens and some of the packaging around it that are just kind of annoying and I get tired of dealing with them and particularly when you play a different game or even go back to some other Bethesda games then return to Starfield you realize wow there are a ton of load screens in this so it creates this weird situation where despite the fact that Starfield does have the most content of any Bethesda game it just doesn't really feel like it due the design you are more segmented in what you're seeing and the content is so spread out that it almost feels sparse at times like yeah you have this gigantic star map with tons of locations but the vast majority of these will have nothing but procedurally generated content in them it feels like with Starfield somebody early on decided the game needs to have tons of planets to explore and that became a guiding Mantra to the game but I honestly feel like the game is a little bit less fun as a result of this like imagine if Starfield had only 50 planets instead of over 1,000 and what if among those 50 planets about two or maybe even three were handcrafted or at least had significant portions of them being handcrafted like what if new Atlantis had all of the major United Colony settlements on it and you could actually walk from one to another and perhaps stumble upon miscellaneous things in between but then at the same time you still could go off planet to explore a Barren Moon after some time on the main planets obviously it's too late now to do that but I honestly think Starfield suffers from a packaging problem of sorts this game really does have some of the best content Bethesda has ever made but due to how the game plays at points it could just be really annoying to get to the good stuff I think of many of the existing quest lines were a bit more concentrated location wise so you only had to go to a few planets the load screens and all the other aspects around this would be a lot less of an issue and I think a lot of people would be having a lot more fun with the game because when it comes to new Atlantis despite it being the biggest city Bethesda game studios has ever created it doesn't really take that long to find the barren Planet behind it at all points you're just a short walk away from the procedurally generated content and I really do think if there were some more connections between the handcrafted content and not having to deal with going in a spaceship and a bunch of load screens things would just flow a lot more naturally and what does make this feel a lot worse is just how bad exploration is in Star field like yeah there are tons of planets to travel to and explore but pretty quickly you'll start to realize that there isn't a whole lot of interesting things to do there firstly the points of interest are just way too far away after several load screens you finally land on a planet only to have a several minute long run to get to the actual new content and after that long run all you're going to find is likely a couple of enemies to take out and not much more starfields random encounter system is really cool in concept you land on a planet and a bunch of random handcrafted content will be placed around you so you never know exactly what you're going to find on a planet the problem with that content is most of it's incredibly forgettable in surface level there isn't that much variety between them after a few of these points of interest you get a pretty good idea of what all of them are and how the questing with each of these will go like yeah the first time a ship randomly lands near you it's really cool and interesting after the 50th time you kind of get over it and I think this is one of the biggest misses with Starfield going to random planets and exploring is incredibly unrewarding and even some of the far out planets and the outer reaches of the explor Galaxy are just not that interesting you realize some of the highle systems are basically the same as the low-level and Central systems they just have higher TI your enemies there's not much unique out there I know I was excited to see what was out in the far reaches of space but it turns out it's just pretty much the same as what's at the center of space random Pirates and the occasional scientist and ironically I would feel like one of the other issues with this is it's almost unfortunate that there are no Barren planets or very rarely any Barren planets like every Moon even that super far out one all the way in the edge of the galaxy has something on it I feel like it would have been a lot better to have some truly Barren planets that you're the first person to ever land on it and the baffling part about this all is I feel like Bethesda did create the solution their random encounter system is incredibly powerful and you could have some incredibly awesome moments like imagine you land on a random moon walk up to the small space Colony setup and genuinely get a branching side quest we could dive into the politics and backstory of this colony and whatever wacky beliefs they developed on this Moon that would be incredible having some select plot lines reserved for otherwise desolate planets would have been an awesome thing to randomly stumble upon like imagine you land on one of these distant far out moons and find a bunch of people who really thought they were the last surviving humans in the Galaxy you'd have this randomly placed using the random encounter system so you never know exactly which moon it'll be on and but as this specifically created certain quest lines for this I feel like it would have been a huge success and been really interesting perhaps there are some technical limitations as to why they can't fully dive into that but surely there's better than something like this right and I think this the core of why people are getting increasingly frustrated with Starfield this game has some incredibly good content but I think many are realizing that a big part of what makes up a desda game special is how that content is connected and some of the Random Encounters and stories you can create in between and due to how Starfield is designed that sense of exploration and wonder is just really neutered here like imagine this upcoming expansion they revealed that pretty much all of the content is taking place on just one moon to me that would be incredibly exciting not having to fast travel around anymore but instead just getting fully immersed in one place and hanging out there for a while another aspect of this is definitely the Cyber Punk effect shortly after the release of Starfield cyberpunk 2077 released its 2.0 update and a bit after that the Phantom Liberty expansion also came out and both of these were really really good and for tons of fans going from Starfield to the new cyberpunk content just immediately made starfields feel dated on PC visually and performance-wise this was a huge change like here in cyberpunk I'm getting 100 FPS with cyberpunk looking phenomenal but in Nilla City I can barely pull over 55 FPS here and of course things like animations and dialogue are just much better in cyberpunk emotions feel real there compared to the more surface level interactions you can have in Starfield and of course cyberpunk barely has any load screens overall I feel kind of mixed about these comparisons it definitely is coming up a lot in some of the major communities but Cy Punk 2077 definitely has its own flaws several of which are things Starfield does way better but I think the main reason cyberp Punk keeps coming up in comparisons with Starfield is the things Starfield does poorly just happen to be things that cyberpunk 2077 does really well so as you switch between these two games and return to Starfield a lot of those flaws become a lot more prominent and obvious and while Starfield definitely has other problems like some systems like even Outpost building being a bit underbaked or the main story Leaving a bit to be desired I don't think those are the big issues with the game I think those are just other problems that are there I really think a lot of the current fan frustration does stem from the content distribution load screens being so abundantly prevalent and really the fact that they get increasingly annoying the more you play it just never really goes away couple that with how disappointing Starfield exploration was and I think you have this weird phenomena where I think Starfield has all of the pieces to be a much better game but due to the design decisions and how the content is tied together the game is just really held back in some ways and don't get me wrong I still think Starfield is a phenomenal experience and if you're but thda game studios fan this is a must playay game but unfortunately it has different flaws compared to past games and I think the more hours you put in the more obvious some of those flaws become either way with mods updates and perhaps even some of the DLCs I'm sure these issues will be lessened or perhaps even outrate resolved in some cases but until then those are my thoughts on the Starfield situation why exactly we've started to see some of these scores drop and sentiment shift although if you are looking to upgrade Starfield check out this video where I go over some of the best mods available for the game right now enemy

Channel: JuiceHead

Views: 226,478

Keywords: juicehead, starfield, bethedsa, starfield details, starfield news, starfield features, todd howard, bethesda starfield, starfield gameplay, starfield music, starfield lore, starfield mods, starfield hands on, starfield secrets, starfield easter eggs, starfield impressions, starfield review, starfield review juicehead, starfield tips, starfield tips and tricks, starfield walkthrough, starfield best skills, starfield hidden details, starfield update, starfield patch notes

Id: 48TPebhrtWQ

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 14 2023