Because a lot of gamers don’t feel fooled. They expected a Bethesda game and got a Bethesda game for all the good and ill that entails.
You’re entitled to dislike the game, but complaining that it’s not something else is silly. It’s like the people who complain about a lack of easy mode in Dark Souls. Sometimes a game isn’t for you and it’s ok to move on and play something else, but trying to convince other people they’re wrong for enjoying it is a fools errand.
They expected a Bethesda game and got a Bethesda game for all the good and I’ll that entails.
That’s also all we were promised. No false advertising here. Bethesda knows what Bethesda fans want, and they make the game Bethesda fans want. It’s literally the only gaming experience left where I don’t feel like I have to over-research and pirate-demo to figure out if I should buy a game.
Yeah, I was willing to concede with Cyberpunk that although it was a good game on PC/Next Gen from day one, it had a lot of issues on the formats most people own, and CDPR had overpromised the level of detail and systems in the city.
However I can’t recall anywhere where Todd, Bethesda or MS promised stuff more than “Bethesda RPG, but in space”.
Yeah. But I love that about CP. I got it dirt cheap when everyone was bitching, and just waited for them to fix it before I started playing. Best $17 I ever spent for a new AAA game! I can be patient.
I like the idea of space as a frontier, the vast lifeless expanses and the few habitable parts in between. The fact that Bethesda found a way to make all those lifeless planets actually explorable, even if there is nothing to do there than ambient open world content and resource gathering.
I always find it funny that Hello Games over promised and the backlash was such that GOG extended its refund policy, but Bethesda does the same thing every time they release a game and gamers just call it a Bethesda game and that’s the end of it or “modders will fix it”…
This is what I don’t get, Bethesda were very clear about what the game was and wasn’t in the lead up to release, yet some people seem to have convinced themselves it was going to be something entirely different and are now angry about that.
It’s driving me crazy how many people are claiming Bethesda overpromised. I could have written an accurate review (critiques and all) of the game based upon what I saw/heard before its release.
Bethesda promised Skyrim in space and that’s what we got, a game exactly like the one they released 12 years ago but in space. They should have just called it Skyrim: Space Edition.
i don’t entirely agree with that statement about it being identical to a 12-year-old Skyrim. But if it were true, what’s the problem? This whole “bleeding edge stupidity” thing was the first reason we all started to hate AAA games 20 years ago.
Maybe you’re too young, but “can it handle Farcry” was an insult to AAA. Now if it doesn’t use every graphics acronym under the sun at once, and have multi-phased smell reflection when you walk into the bathrooms, then it’s shit.
Also, for the record, a 2014 Engine (UE4) remained the top engine for basically anyone to make games in until last April. Improvements in graphics have slowed down because we’re getting closer and closer to the limit.
Right, but the problem with your logic is in thinking your viewpoint is concrete and everyone else’s is wrong. Fun is subjective, you can’t tell people they didn’t have fun with the game
You can throw as many buzzwords at it as you like, but that doesn’t diminish the lived experience of people who had fun with the game. Why are you so insistent on convincing people they didn’t enjoy it? There must be a buzzword for that mindset too.
I agree with all your points but cannot disagree more on the inclusion of a difficulty slider for Souls games. I have been very adamant about a difficulty slider “cheapening the experience” or “jeopardising the artistic intent”, but it really doesn’t make a difference - at all.
If your enjoyment of the game stems from the fact that the game is difficult and the inclusion of a difficulty slider cheapens your “sense of accomplishment”, then you might have to reevaluate your priorities.
Consider people with disabilities, for example, who are interested in the lore of Souls games and want to experience them themselves but can’t because the games present themselves to be too difficult (for example in the way some bosses in Elden Ring have seemingly endless attack chains that give you no breathing room at all, requiring very precise input on the player’s side), thus gatekeeping the experience from a potentially enthusiastic and interested player.
Or consider people who are just not interested in a hyper tense and difficult time and just want to experience the story and atmosphere of the game. What’s wrong with that? How does that impact your enjoyment of the game if their experience is completely separate from yours?
For reference, I have platinumed numerous FromSoft Souls games and would not feel any less “proud” of that if the games had difficulty settings.
Nailed Souls on the head. I’m an older gamer and my reflexes are dead. I never really liked hard games. I like the story. I bought Bloodborne for the lore, and fully regret it. Hours of fighting the same area with zero progress is NOT why I wanted to play it. I bought Elden Ring after I found out there were cheat mods, tried to play it without them and enjoyed nothing, so added the Easy mod knowing I risked screwing up my Elden Ring account (whatever that means to me), having to play offline the whole time.
I regret buying Elden Ring because I don’t want to have to almost pirate the game I bought just to play it because they want to make it hard.
Thing is you’re trying to compare two different things, one is the (lack of) quality of the product in general compared to what was promised, the other is a design choice.
Could you quantify “riddled with bugs that need to be fixed by modders” regarding Starfield?
Every complaint I’ve seen so far has involved bullets, physics, or the AI. In my own experience, I’ve seen exactly 1 bug (the outpost-won’t-respond bug) and it only hit me once and was easy to fix.
My first issue with Elden Ring was crash-bugs and screen-stutter. It didn’t like my monitor streaming (all my other games were fine, including games using raytracing). And crashing every couple hours sucked. I haven’t had one Starfield crash yet.
Also, have you ever ridden torrent across the sky? I have.
I don’t claim my experience is everything, but I’ve seen far more bugs in Elden Ring than in Starfield.
I’m not talking about a game specifically, I’m talking about the way the studio works in general.
If you go back to the comment chain the original complaint is about a lack of quality control (releases full of bugs, missing features, bad UI, bad optimization), the other complaint is about a design choice (the game is hard because the devs intentionally made it so). My point is that it’s two different things and saying “Your complaint about Bethesda’s game is the same as complaining about Fromsoft not including a difficulty setting.” is a false equivalency.
I meant to discuss Souls games’ exclusion of difficulty sliders in a vacuum, separate from the Garfield discussion.
As prefaced in my comment, I agree with your points about Garfield: the developers should definitely be held accountable for their shortcomings and for hyping up a product that falls flat of its promised contend.
But I don’t agree with difficulty sliders being shunned by the “hardcore” community. I feel like this nurtures an elitist environment that doesn’t do its fanbase any good other than gatekeeping and separating fans.
Again, just a separate discussion altogether, not related to the Garfield discussion.
I love how people keep asking this question, yet nobody is answering us when we do. Almost like they can’t name a single thing Bethesda promised that we didn’t get.
But OMG, the landing sequence isn’t seamless. Let’s burn the game to the ground.
I haven’t played the game myself, tbf - just mirroring other people’s opinions of the game. The game could be amazing for all I know - I just know that the reviews haven’t been stellar and that the community response to the game isn’t all too great.
Reviews seem to have hovered around 7 which is think is fair and by far from a bad title. I’d probably be a bit more lenient and go to an 8 due to the subject matter since I’m a huge sci-fi fan.
Reaction depends on the community, of all my big gaming friends in real life are enjoying it, as are the hosts of several podasts I listen to.
I get it for “free” because I sub to xbox service. I’d have paid $70 for it, though. As for time, I could have spent it in other games, but it’s the first really fun gaming experience I’ve had in quite a while.
It’s easy to make accusations against Bethesda fans like this, but they’re unfalsifiable. You could make the same accusations of people enjoying any other game and there’s nothing they could do to prove they actually enjoy the game. Except that they DO actually enjoy the game.
I’ve played about 20 games this year. If I had to pick only 1 to play (which isn’t far from the truth anymore with my second job), it would be Starfield. And you might be surprised at the names of games that rank below it on the list. Like Elden Ring (which I will never touch again after my cheat-easy-mode run), Hitman WoA, etc. Maybe I won’t be playing it in a year, or two years. Maybe I will.
I think it’s interesting you brought up Souls Games. Quite literally your first paragraph, I feel about them. I have 100% buyer’s remorse about Bloodborne, and lesser buyer’s remorse about Elden Ring. Neither will I ever touch again. To some extent, I kept trying to convince myself the story is worth their unwillingness to give gamers the controls that would actually make the game fun… and I gave up trying to have fun playing it.
Huh? Starfield is the best RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind, because it’s an actual RPG. It has the best quest design since Oblivion, with almost none of the quests boiling down to “Go there, kill guys”, but actually needing to talk to people, pay attention to the environment, interact with the world and make choices (and your Background, Traits, Skills and faction membership all add new ways for you to go about a quest.) The weapon design is an incredible improvement over Fallout 4. Almost everything in Starfield is either a massive step up or a return to form compared to their previous work and you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.
And that’s not even to mention things like the ship building system, which is genuinely extremely impressive.
We must be playing different games. Every storyline quest I’ve done has been:
Go to this random place
Gun down everyone in sight because my mandatory companion can’t stealth.
Talk to the named bad guy.
See if I win a coin flip.
4a. Walk out with a McGuffin.
4b. Gun everyone down again, then walk out with the McGuffin.
It’s nothing but, “Go there, kill guys,” as you call it. Everything is a fetch quest with faceless mooks between me and whatever fifth turn I need to take to get to the end of the corridors in the space dungeon.
And comparing the game to Morrowind is laughable. Morrowind was an amazing feat of world building based on actual player choice. Starfield is a bunch of boxes to tick to see the next space cliche.
To me this reads like you havent done the Ryujin plotline which has a lot of stealth involved, and the UC/Crimson Fleet one that has some detective work/stealth
its sorta the same idea as like metal gear solid (5 in particular). You COULD kill people during missions, its just not the optimal option for rewards. You 100% could go guns ablazing if you really hated stealth, but it kinda ruins the point of the game.
Half the damn quests don’t even require me to leave the city they started in. Maybe you just had bad luck picking all of the quests that are like that and none of the others and I had the opposite. Or maybe you did 3 quests and are talking out of your ass. I don’t know, I wasn’t there when you played the game. I mean, did you even do anything other than main story? Join a faction, do sidequests, anything? Because I could point you to half a dozen quests just in early game New Atlantis that are entirely reliant on dialogue, choices etc. without any killing and that do not give you a mandatory companion. Like, do the UC Security quests, investigate the brownouts in the well, talk to the preacher guy, the art guy in Jemison Mercantile, the collector guys in Terrabrew, the bartender at Viewport, the scientist by the tree. The game will literally put half of these quests in the quest log from ambient dialogue, and the other half you get from just engaging with the world and talking to NPCs in the first city you visit. It’s not like these are incredibly hidden quests you have to go out of your way to find. Hell, when you go to Akila the game just plops a hostage negotiation right in your face. I mean, come on, you’re either being wilfully disingenuous or you played that game blind as a bat.
And if you don’t believe me and don’t want to bother playing the game yourself again, just look at the playthrough of somebody like Many A True Nerd. He did a lot of the quests I just mentioned.
I’m curious, you mentioned the hostage scenario at Akila. Does talking down the Shaw gang give you a peaceful method of obtain the artifact near the end of that quest? I try not to save scum so when that whole ordeal went south I had to gun my way through everyone outside of the cavern, then of course only after half her people were dead did Shaw bother striking up a conversation. Not trying to be an ass here, I’m genuinely curious as to whether or not that would’ve actually changed with prior gameplay.
I tried a few side quests and none of them were at all compelling, though I’ll admit I didn’t bother going too deep with most of the factions. I don’t know, each one I tried consisted of walking back and forth and listening to people talk about trees being too loud or some shit I couldn’t care about. Maybe if I’d gone to Space Tokyo or signed up with the space pirates that would’ve been different. But following the main storyline and tooling around the first few planets was repetitive and just more Bethesda-style gun in, then take the shortcut out after getting the thing. I gave up on the game after around 20 hours of not enjoying the experience.
If you’re liking the game then good for you but my experience was that none of the choices I made actually mattered and the world Bethesda built was bland and cliche. And the game mechanics themselves were nothing ground breaking at all, except maybe ship building but that took way too much effort to grok. I tried to like the game but couldn’t.
I don’t know. I didn’t manage to talk them down on my first playthrough, so who knows, but I don’t think so. But I also don’t think every game or even every RPG needs to be designed with a complete pacifist route in mind. The Shaw Gang mission is also about the only one I can think of that actually fits completely with the “formula” you described, outside of maybe the tutorial.
Also, yeah, Space Pirates might actually be a quest for you, or rather being an undercover agent in the space pirates. You just get straight up thrown out of UC SysDef and have them as your enemy if you run and gun those missions, so you have to sneaky, use your persuasion and actually look around your environments if you want to stay with the good guy faction. The part on the cruise ship is especially good for this. Your choices there definitely matter in that regard.
Maybe it’s just a game for people that are really into space in a specific way. Like, sometimes I’ll just look at pictures of the surface of Venus or Mars and think about the fact that there’s billions of these worlds just existing with no observer. Just rocks, dust, storms, rain, volcanoes, all types of things being there and happening, even though no one can see it.
Haven’t done Ryujin yet myself, but I hear it’s great. Supposedly lots of covert stealth stuff. I personally also enjoyed the Freestar Rangers quest. It’s got more political intrigue than the others I’ve done. (Also leads you to the Porrima system, which has one of the more interesting and bigger sidequests in it.)
One compliment I will also give the factions as a whole is that you don’t immediately become the leader or second in command. Hell, you stay a Deputy until the end of the Rangers quest and only then become a full ranger. It actually feels like an earned promotion.
Oh yeah you do not become Marshall. In fact I haven’t became leader of any faction while completing it just “really important guy that accomplished a lot”. Bethesda really learned from Skyrim here on just making you King of factions.
So tell your mandatory companion to “wait here” when you plan to Stealth Archer. Or give her a chameleon suit. Ironically, the “stealth archer” meme is the most valid critique of Bethesda games, and you’re complaining because it isn’t working well for you.
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Because a lot of gamers don’t feel fooled. They expected a Bethesda game and got a Bethesda game for all the good and ill that entails.
You’re entitled to dislike the game, but complaining that it’s not something else is silly. It’s like the people who complain about a lack of easy mode in Dark Souls. Sometimes a game isn’t for you and it’s ok to move on and play something else, but trying to convince other people they’re wrong for enjoying it is a fools errand.
That’s also all we were promised. No false advertising here. Bethesda knows what Bethesda fans want, and they make the game Bethesda fans want. It’s literally the only gaming experience left where I don’t feel like I have to over-research and pirate-demo to figure out if I should buy a game.
Yeah, I was willing to concede with Cyberpunk that although it was a good game on PC/Next Gen from day one, it had a lot of issues on the formats most people own, and CDPR had overpromised the level of detail and systems in the city.
However I can’t recall anywhere where Todd, Bethesda or MS promised stuff more than “Bethesda RPG, but in space”.
Yeah. But I love that about CP. I got it dirt cheap when everyone was bitching, and just waited for them to fix it before I started playing. Best $17 I ever spent for a new AAA game! I can be patient.
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It’s pretty fun nowadays honestly. Definitely worth more than I paid :)
thousands of planets to explore would imply exploration is going to be exciting I’d personally assume
They also said that most of them would be desolate and procedurely generated. They never promised a thousend hand crafted planets.
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I like the idea of space as a frontier, the vast lifeless expanses and the few habitable parts in between. The fact that Bethesda found a way to make all those lifeless planets actually explorable, even if there is nothing to do there than ambient open world content and resource gathering.
I always find it funny that Hello Games over promised and the backlash was such that GOG extended its refund policy, but Bethesda does the same thing every time they release a game and gamers just call it a Bethesda game and that’s the end of it or “modders will fix it”…
No Mans Sky was nothing like what Hello Games promised.
Starfield is exactly what Bethesda promised.
I don’t see the discrepancy.
This is what I don’t get, Bethesda were very clear about what the game was and wasn’t in the lead up to release, yet some people seem to have convinced themselves it was going to be something entirely different and are now angry about that.
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It’s driving me crazy how many people are claiming Bethesda overpromised. I could have written an accurate review (critiques and all) of the game based upon what I saw/heard before its release.
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What did Starfield overpromise that we didn’t get? As far as I can tell, we got exactly what we expected - Skyrim in Space.
Take my money, Bethesda, and give me more Skyrim in Space please.
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Bethesda promised Skyrim in space and that’s what we got, a game exactly like the one they released 12 years ago but in space. They should have just called it Skyrim: Space Edition.
i don’t entirely agree with that statement about it being identical to a 12-year-old Skyrim. But if it were true, what’s the problem? This whole “bleeding edge stupidity” thing was the first reason we all started to hate AAA games 20 years ago.
Maybe you’re too young, but “can it handle Farcry” was an insult to AAA. Now if it doesn’t use every graphics acronym under the sun at once, and have multi-phased smell reflection when you walk into the bathrooms, then it’s shit.
Also, for the record, a 2014 Engine (UE4) remained the top engine for basically anyone to make games in until last April. Improvements in graphics have slowed down because we’re getting closer and closer to the limit.
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You’re sensing a bit of bias? Because they’re telling you that they like the game?
I’m sensing a bit of bias from you, being completely unable to understand someone else’s point of view once you’ve made your mind up
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Right, but the problem with your logic is in thinking your viewpoint is concrete and everyone else’s is wrong. Fun is subjective, you can’t tell people they didn’t have fun with the game
I didn’t buy the game, and I am enjoying it immensely.
You can throw as many buzzwords at it as you like, but that doesn’t diminish the lived experience of people who had fun with the game. Why are you so insistent on convincing people they didn’t enjoy it? There must be a buzzword for that mindset too.
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What about the people who played it on Game Pass and still enjoyed it.
I’m just happy you got to use the new term you learned! Color me impressed!
I agree with all your points but cannot disagree more on the inclusion of a difficulty slider for Souls games. I have been very adamant about a difficulty slider “cheapening the experience” or “jeopardising the artistic intent”, but it really doesn’t make a difference - at all.
If your enjoyment of the game stems from the fact that the game is difficult and the inclusion of a difficulty slider cheapens your “sense of accomplishment”, then you might have to reevaluate your priorities.
Consider people with disabilities, for example, who are interested in the lore of Souls games and want to experience them themselves but can’t because the games present themselves to be too difficult (for example in the way some bosses in Elden Ring have seemingly endless attack chains that give you no breathing room at all, requiring very precise input on the player’s side), thus gatekeeping the experience from a potentially enthusiastic and interested player.
Or consider people who are just not interested in a hyper tense and difficult time and just want to experience the story and atmosphere of the game. What’s wrong with that? How does that impact your enjoyment of the game if their experience is completely separate from yours?
For reference, I have platinumed numerous FromSoft Souls games and would not feel any less “proud” of that if the games had difficulty settings.
Nailed Souls on the head. I’m an older gamer and my reflexes are dead. I never really liked hard games. I like the story. I bought Bloodborne for the lore, and fully regret it. Hours of fighting the same area with zero progress is NOT why I wanted to play it. I bought Elden Ring after I found out there were cheat mods, tried to play it without them and enjoyed nothing, so added the Easy mod knowing I risked screwing up my Elden Ring account (whatever that means to me), having to play offline the whole time.
I regret buying Elden Ring because I don’t want to have to almost pirate the game I bought just to play it because they want to make it hard.
Thing is you’re trying to compare two different things, one is the (lack of) quality of the product in general compared to what was promised, the other is a design choice.
The irony is, I feel that sentence is more applicable if “lack of quality” is assigned to Soulslike games and “Design Choice” to Bethesda games.
Weird design choice to have games riddled with bugs that need to be fixed by modders 🤷
Could you quantify “riddled with bugs that need to be fixed by modders” regarding Starfield?
Every complaint I’ve seen so far has involved bullets, physics, or the AI. In my own experience, I’ve seen exactly 1 bug (the outpost-won’t-respond bug) and it only hit me once and was easy to fix.
My first issue with Elden Ring was crash-bugs and screen-stutter. It didn’t like my monitor streaming (all my other games were fine, including games using raytracing). And crashing every couple hours sucked. I haven’t had one Starfield crash yet.
Also, have you ever ridden torrent across the sky? I have.
I don’t claim my experience is everything, but I’ve seen far more bugs in Elden Ring than in Starfield.
I’m not talking about a game specifically, I’m talking about the way the studio works in general.
If you go back to the comment chain the original complaint is about a lack of quality control (releases full of bugs, missing features, bad UI, bad optimization), the other complaint is about a design choice (the game is hard because the devs intentionally made it so). My point is that it’s two different things and saying “Your complaint about Bethesda’s game is the same as complaining about Fromsoft not including a difficulty setting.” is a false equivalency.
I meant to discuss Souls games’ exclusion of difficulty sliders in a vacuum, separate from the Garfield discussion.
As prefaced in my comment, I agree with your points about Garfield: the developers should definitely be held accountable for their shortcomings and for hyping up a product that falls flat of its promised contend.
But I don’t agree with difficulty sliders being shunned by the “hardcore” community. I feel like this nurtures an elitist environment that doesn’t do its fanbase any good other than gatekeeping and separating fans.
Again, just a separate discussion altogether, not related to the Garfield discussion.
What shortcomings, what did Bethesda promise in Starfield that isn’t there?
I love how people keep asking this question, yet nobody is answering us when we do. Almost like they can’t name a single thing Bethesda promised that we didn’t get.
But OMG, the landing sequence isn’t seamless. Let’s burn the game to the ground.
Which I had seen Todd confirm to be the case months ahead of time. It was never going to be an Elite/NMS style game.
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I haven’t played the game myself, tbf - just mirroring other people’s opinions of the game. The game could be amazing for all I know - I just know that the reviews haven’t been stellar and that the community response to the game isn’t all too great.
Reviews seem to have hovered around 7 which is think is fair and by far from a bad title. I’d probably be a bit more lenient and go to an 8 due to the subject matter since I’m a huge sci-fi fan.
Reaction depends on the community, of all my big gaming friends in real life are enjoying it, as are the hosts of several podasts I listen to.
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I get it for “free” because I sub to xbox service. I’d have paid $70 for it, though. As for time, I could have spent it in other games, but it’s the first really fun gaming experience I’ve had in quite a while.
It’s easy to make accusations against Bethesda fans like this, but they’re unfalsifiable. You could make the same accusations of people enjoying any other game and there’s nothing they could do to prove they actually enjoy the game. Except that they DO actually enjoy the game.
I’ve played about 20 games this year. If I had to pick only 1 to play (which isn’t far from the truth anymore with my second job), it would be Starfield. And you might be surprised at the names of games that rank below it on the list. Like Elden Ring (which I will never touch again after my cheat-easy-mode run), Hitman WoA, etc. Maybe I won’t be playing it in a year, or two years. Maybe I will.
I think it’s interesting you brought up Souls Games. Quite literally your first paragraph, I feel about them. I have 100% buyer’s remorse about Bloodborne, and lesser buyer’s remorse about Elden Ring. Neither will I ever touch again. To some extent, I kept trying to convince myself the story is worth their unwillingness to give gamers the controls that would actually make the game fun… and I gave up trying to have fun playing it.
Huh? Starfield is the best RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind, because it’s an actual RPG. It has the best quest design since Oblivion, with almost none of the quests boiling down to “Go there, kill guys”, but actually needing to talk to people, pay attention to the environment, interact with the world and make choices (and your Background, Traits, Skills and faction membership all add new ways for you to go about a quest.) The weapon design is an incredible improvement over Fallout 4. Almost everything in Starfield is either a massive step up or a return to form compared to their previous work and you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.
And that’s not even to mention things like the ship building system, which is genuinely extremely impressive.
We must be playing different games. Every storyline quest I’ve done has been:
It’s nothing but, “Go there, kill guys,” as you call it. Everything is a fetch quest with faceless mooks between me and whatever fifth turn I need to take to get to the end of the corridors in the space dungeon.
And comparing the game to Morrowind is laughable. Morrowind was an amazing feat of world building based on actual player choice. Starfield is a bunch of boxes to tick to see the next space cliche.
To me this reads like you havent done the Ryujin plotline which has a lot of stealth involved, and the UC/Crimson Fleet one that has some detective work/stealth
You’re absolutely right and if I can muster up the energy to start the game back up then Ryujin is probably going to be my first stop.
You’re expected not to kill anyone during the entire Ryujin storyline as it’s “bad for business”. It’s all social and sneaky stealth.
its sorta the same idea as like metal gear solid (5 in particular). You COULD kill people during missions, its just not the optimal option for rewards. You 100% could go guns ablazing if you really hated stealth, but it kinda ruins the point of the game.
The Ryujin quest line could be done by running straight through it.
Stealth in the game is an absolute joke.
Half the damn quests don’t even require me to leave the city they started in. Maybe you just had bad luck picking all of the quests that are like that and none of the others and I had the opposite. Or maybe you did 3 quests and are talking out of your ass. I don’t know, I wasn’t there when you played the game. I mean, did you even do anything other than main story? Join a faction, do sidequests, anything? Because I could point you to half a dozen quests just in early game New Atlantis that are entirely reliant on dialogue, choices etc. without any killing and that do not give you a mandatory companion. Like, do the UC Security quests, investigate the brownouts in the well, talk to the preacher guy, the art guy in Jemison Mercantile, the collector guys in Terrabrew, the bartender at Viewport, the scientist by the tree. The game will literally put half of these quests in the quest log from ambient dialogue, and the other half you get from just engaging with the world and talking to NPCs in the first city you visit. It’s not like these are incredibly hidden quests you have to go out of your way to find. Hell, when you go to Akila the game just plops a hostage negotiation right in your face. I mean, come on, you’re either being wilfully disingenuous or you played that game blind as a bat.
And if you don’t believe me and don’t want to bother playing the game yourself again, just look at the playthrough of somebody like Many A True Nerd. He did a lot of the quests I just mentioned.
I’m curious, you mentioned the hostage scenario at Akila. Does talking down the Shaw gang give you a peaceful method of obtain the artifact near the end of that quest? I try not to save scum so when that whole ordeal went south I had to gun my way through everyone outside of the cavern, then of course only after half her people were dead did Shaw bother striking up a conversation. Not trying to be an ass here, I’m genuinely curious as to whether or not that would’ve actually changed with prior gameplay.
I tried a few side quests and none of them were at all compelling, though I’ll admit I didn’t bother going too deep with most of the factions. I don’t know, each one I tried consisted of walking back and forth and listening to people talk about trees being too loud or some shit I couldn’t care about. Maybe if I’d gone to Space Tokyo or signed up with the space pirates that would’ve been different. But following the main storyline and tooling around the first few planets was repetitive and just more Bethesda-style gun in, then take the shortcut out after getting the thing. I gave up on the game after around 20 hours of not enjoying the experience.
If you’re liking the game then good for you but my experience was that none of the choices I made actually mattered and the world Bethesda built was bland and cliche. And the game mechanics themselves were nothing ground breaking at all, except maybe ship building but that took way too much effort to grok. I tried to like the game but couldn’t.
I don’t know. I didn’t manage to talk them down on my first playthrough, so who knows, but I don’t think so. But I also don’t think every game or even every RPG needs to be designed with a complete pacifist route in mind. The Shaw Gang mission is also about the only one I can think of that actually fits completely with the “formula” you described, outside of maybe the tutorial.
Also, yeah, Space Pirates might actually be a quest for you, or rather being an undercover agent in the space pirates. You just get straight up thrown out of UC SysDef and have them as your enemy if you run and gun those missions, so you have to sneaky, use your persuasion and actually look around your environments if you want to stay with the good guy faction. The part on the cruise ship is especially good for this. Your choices there definitely matter in that regard.
Maybe it’s just a game for people that are really into space in a specific way. Like, sometimes I’ll just look at pictures of the surface of Venus or Mars and think about the fact that there’s billions of these worlds just existing with no observer. Just rocks, dust, storms, rain, volcanoes, all types of things being there and happening, even though no one can see it.
Yeah, okay, between you and Dudewitbow I’m halfway convinced to give Ryujin and the Crimson Fleet a try.
Haven’t done Ryujin yet myself, but I hear it’s great. Supposedly lots of covert stealth stuff. I personally also enjoyed the Freestar Rangers quest. It’s got more political intrigue than the others I’ve done. (Also leads you to the Porrima system, which has one of the more interesting and bigger sidequests in it.)
One compliment I will also give the factions as a whole is that you don’t immediately become the leader or second in command. Hell, you stay a Deputy until the end of the Rangers quest and only then become a full ranger. It actually feels like an earned promotion.
Oh yeah you do not become Marshall. In fact I haven’t became leader of any faction while completing it just “really important guy that accomplished a lot”. Bethesda really learned from Skyrim here on just making you King of factions.
I’m not them, but yes you can talk you way through that encounter not firing a single shot and still get the artifact. Many quests are like that.
Yeah, that happens when you just skip dialogue
I haven’t skipped any dialogue and I agree with them completely.
Have you actually read the dialogue? Have you even played Morrowind?
Morrowind treats NPCs like theyre hyperlinks in a Wiki. Click on Balmora on any NPC and get the exact same blurb.
There’s like 10 characters that are actually unique and most of em still pull from the wiki when you click on a generic talk option.
So tell your mandatory companion to “wait here” when you plan to Stealth Archer. Or give her a chameleon suit. Ironically, the “stealth archer” meme is the most valid critique of Bethesda games, and you’re complaining because it isn’t working well for you.