Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the past. Some of the reviews sum up quite nicely what is wrong with this DLC…
Less content than any skyrim DLC. Less than The Fallout 4 story DLCs. Doesn’t change of the complaints people had with the base game, writing is still at a 4th grade level.
Quick: If you are looking to buy my answer is no, you aren’t missing much content. I was really hoping to enjoy this DLC. Took about 4 hours for the main story and maybe 2 more hours to 100% the achievements.
These two reviews I think really summed up what Starfield has become, $70 for an AAAA title that has extremely little buy-in from the community, horrifically low amount of replayability and can be breezed through easily. It’s mind-boggling to see this
I don’t think this means ES6 is doomed. Did anyone play the Civ space game? It was an offshoot one-off experiment that wasn’t really well recieved and they quietly moved on.
My guess is that this game pivoted during development and they ended up with something that didn’t really work and shouldn’t have shipped. The failure to find something good in this experiment may be isolated to this game.
The fact that they released it in the state they did could be more about their workflow and project pipeline/target milestones they need to hit than it is about their ability to execute.
The failure here is in design, ES6 has a tried and true design to follow.
Story and worldbuilding wise, ES6 has a very bleak future ahead. Emilio Pagliarulo, the de facto director of Starfield and lead writer, has shown that no hole is deep enough that he won’t dig it further down when it comes to lack of quality and consistency. Not that Skyrim’s main story was good, but it was certainly better than Starfield’s. There’s also the disturbing indifference of “the world” to everything happening around it. Literally nothing you do in Starfield affects anything outside its own storyline. Hell, shooting up in the air or using fucking space magic in the middle of a city generates no reaction from npcs if nobody is hit.
The problem is Starfield isn’t a one off. It’s the latest in a line of progressively worse games. Every game they’ve released since Skyrim has been worse than the one that came before it.
If ES6 is just a refreshed Skyrim I really see no reason to buy it. There are much more interesting RPGs than the Bethesda style nowadays.
I actually liked beyond earth 🥲
I think ES6 will have the advantage that it won’t be a procedurally generated world, or at least I don’t hope so.
But it will probably still run on the shitty Bethesda engine that they cling onto for dear life for some reason.
I think it will never actually live up to the hype, expectations are so insanely high, and the longer it takes the higher these expectations rise it seems.
And I bet it will turn out to be another half-assed game that they hope modders will fix. Like the last bunch of games, they all require mods to be even remotely playable, but even mods can’t fix core issues.
My expectations for Bethesda dropped to bare minimum with everything that came after Skyrim.
It definitely will be running on the same old tired engine. It’s listed on the wiki as the engine in use already.
Honestly, if anyone actually has high expectations for ES6 at this point, it’s totally on them.
My sister loves Beyond Earth; I still prefer Alpha Centauri.
What we wanted: Alpha Centauri 2
What we got: Civilisation in a $2 shop Halloween costume.
Yeah they need to get rid of that cokehead.
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Beyond Earth but I see your point, Civ has had several of these https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Civilization_(series)#Spinoffs
Point being that they can experiment and do something a little different, I don’t think that the quality of the spinoff indicates the quality of the main franchise.
That sure didn’t stop the marketing department, as this game was being shoved in our faces left and right as if it was the end-all-be-all game we’d be playing with our grand children in 50 years.
Nah, the game matches pretty well with what Lyin’ Todd said he wanted to make almost 20 years ago
It’s also very clearly their usual design decisions but in a new setting
If anything the issue is that they stayed stuck in EXACTLY their usual development methods: no design document because Emil doesn’t like them, their writers make their quests too, and use an engine that’s absolutely not meant for the kind of game they’re making ON TOP of being ancient and garbage