This is how I thought everyone felt about Cyberpunk 2077, but even on launch it was a pretty sweet Bethesda-game by CDPR.
The entire time I was playing Starfield I was thinking “man, Cyberpunk 2077 was a really good open world RPG after all.”
Nothing quite like juxtaposition to make something shine.
Cyberpunk is a great open world RPG once you get past the 2-3 hours of mandatory railroaded story missions. Seriously I don’t know how they fucked that part up so badly. It’s like they saw the platinum chip storyline from New Vegas and said “You know that’s cool, but what if instead of letting the player choose we make them watch a feature length movie about this plot?”
They really need a “start me after Konpeki Plaza” mode with a few thousand €$ and a handful of perk points thrown in.
The story is genuinely good but really drags on after you’ve seen it once or twice. I have the “skip dialogue” button setup to a macro that spams it like 50 times and a quick button on my mouse to trigger it.
It’s all pretty baffling when you realize there are multiple genuinely good and well thought out builds in the game that are effectively mutually exclusive without a way to reset your perks, so you really need to restart the game to see them, but this is my third run through and I can’t imagine doing this again any time soon.
Yeah, it’s pretty underhwelming. There’s a lot of people who claim Starfield is a “great Bethesda game” but “people hyped it up too much.” In my opinion, it’s a terrible Bethesda game. The best thing those games do right is you can set off in a direction and along the way, find a world full of little things. Landmarks, unique little stories, side quests, and even just interesting items to grab. Starfield dropped all of this in favor of incredibly generic proc gen planets that have the same couple of outposts you’ll see on every planet. Like THE SAME. The interiors are THE SAME. Every safe, dead body, message log is THE SAME.
It lacks the one thing that brought me back to Bethesda games despite all their flaws.
God, I couldn’t put my finger on why I didn’t like it. I was just so bored, even with the exploration which I normally love. All of the fun parts of FO4 and Skyrim are missing. Just walking around and enjoying the world is completely missing, replaced by a pretty shitty space travel mechanic.
Fast travel to space, then fast travel to another planet. Fast travel to the surface and bunny hop to an objective through a boring city/space station/whatever. Fast travel back to your ship and do it all over again. I never made it far in the story because I couldn’t be bothered to give a damn. The characters were completely uninteresting at best. oh average they were mildly annoying.
Let me take off from the planets surface and fly in to space a few times before you lock me in to fast traveling. Let me fly from space and scream in to the atmosphere, shooting over the surface looking for a safe place to land, and navigate my way in to the city. Maybe 90% of the surface is uninteresting, that’s fine. But let me at least have some fun learning that.
They made every safe choice, and lost the sense of adventure. Because adventures aren’t supposed to be safe.
No Man’s Sky has you covered, in all the ways Starfield doesn’t.
No Man’s Sky was terrible at launch.
