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Are the current expectations for Starfield too high for it to reach?

Are current expectations for Starfield too high for it to reach?

  • Yes

    Votes: 182 60.5%
  • No

    Votes: 119 39.5%

  • Total voters
    301

Laptop1991

Member
As long as it's not Fallout 76 and has modding support that's fine by me, i'm not expecting a bug free, graphically great game, just a good SP one like they use to make all those year's ago lol.
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
I mean eve if its junk people will play it. Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 76, was ever anything out of Bethesda Studios (not publishing) which wasn't total mess?
 

Northeastmonk

Gold Member
Are Bethesda games even relevant after Fallout 76? What was their last major release, Fallout 4? Are they suppose to magically be amazing cause they’ve got better hardware. Wasn’t Fallout 4 suppose to be amazing and I remember a lot of people on here calling it the worst Fallout in years. I’m skeptical. I’d rather play TESVI than Starfield. I’m not getting this feeling like they’ve nailed the storytelling and what not. It felt like the hype we had for No Man’s Sky in a way, but my guess is that Starfield will be better.
 

jigglet

Banned
No, cause I think most reasonable people have tempered their expectations. It's safe to assume it will be bug ridden, but will it be to the point where it's broken? I think that's all that's left to answer really.
 

Ristifer

Member
I’m looking forward to it. But I also don’t hype games to the moon. No game would live up to that kind of expectation.

And in typical video game forum fashion, even if the game was critically acclaimed and had insanely good fan reviews at launch, it’ll be called an overrated game in six months.

It’s a no-win situation. Just play the game and enjoy it. Or don’t.
 
I just want space Skyrim. And everything I have seen tells me I’m getting exactly that. That plus a nice healthy modding community and we are in for a fun time
 

iQuasarLV

Member
I feel it is going to pull another Cyberpunk 2077 in the hype to failure ratio. It has been delayed too many times, baking in the oven for too long, and left to people's imagination on what to expect.

Anyone beyond the die hard Elder Scrolls / Fallout fans are going to hate on this game hard for what it DID NOT do instead of what it brought to the table.
 

legacy24

Member
I feel it is going to pull another Cyberpunk 2077 in the hype to failure ratio. It has been delayed too many times, baking in the oven for too long, and left to people's imagination on what to expect.

Anyone beyond the die hard Elder Scrolls / Fallout fans are going to hate on this game hard for what it DID NOT do instead of what it brought to the table.
it's only been delayed once though?
 

bender

What time is it?
People tend to overlook the many shortcomings in Bethesda games and their open world formula in a new setting will make that doubly true.
 

skit_data

Member
As someone who just now played through Skyrim for the first time ever (yeah, they got me at last) my expectations are pretty damn high because I found Skyrim still pretty good overall despite being over a decade old. If this indeed will be ”Skyrim in space” it will definitely be cool.

But also, playing Skyrim also made me remember why I never cared to finish Fallout 3 and 4: the glitches.

Throughout my times with Bethesdas games I’ve always had a really good time up to that point when something breaks (like, a critical form of breaking). It’s totally fine with game having glitches and bugs etc. and of course shit gets infinitely harder to fix when you have such an immense amount of variables BUT it’s fucking crazy that one of the big side quests in Skyrim (the one involving taking side in the ongoing civil war) still after at least 4 re-releases and a decade later runs a big risk of glitching to the point that progressing the quest is not possible.

I know, that’s what I get for playing on console I guess but yeah, I don’t have a lot of hopes regarding Starfield being bug/glitch free at release. If anything I expect it to suffer more in this regard than previous releases because shit just gets more and more complicated in games in general.
 
What I want to see is a whole sequence that would take place through normal gameplay. Getting the quest, the travel, combat and interaction with the environment, etc.
The consequences of choice and all that.
 

Fredrik

Member
I just hope it’s still mainly a RPG. I get worried when they show so much action, and I do hope there is some magic or cybernetic abilities or something. CoD with astronauts would be disappointing.
But I guess they showed action in Skyrim and Oblivion trailers too, action sells.

I think it looks great anyhow and they’ve made me curious to go explore the planets, I’ve put in 500+ hours in NMS and what I miss there is essentially some role-playing so Starfield could really be the perfect game for me. In the end I think it’s Bethesda’s role-playing magic that will make it truly awesome.

Hoping for a VR version on PC as well, playing Skyrim VR with mods is a transformative experience.
 

Robb

Gold Member
If they are I feel it’s only Bethesdas own fault. They’ve been advertising it as their magnum opus.

Personally I’m not really sure what to expect. People keep saying Fallout in space, but I don’t like Fallout. From the footage I’ve seen it looks more like Outer Worlds, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Although if there’s no humor in this game I guess I might not like it as much.
 

Paasei

Member
I expect a Fallout/TEs game in space. Including the “features” these games are known for. Not to mention 16x the detail.
 

Fredrik

Member
If they are I feel it’s only Bethesdas own fault. They’ve been advertising it as their magnum opus.

Personally I’m not really sure what to expect. People keep saying Fallout in space, but I don’t like Fallout. From the footage I’ve seen it looks more like Outer Worlds, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Although if there’s no humor in this game I guess I might not like it as much.
Fallout is it’s own thing, I think Starfield looks more like No Man’s Sky or as you say The Outer Worlds. They could probably make a post-apocalyptic Fallout-like planet though. It’ll be fun to see how far they go with the planets. Hoping for some crazy alien infested hell planet where the most awesome resources can be found. That’s where I’m making my base!
 
I know Toddricks gotta be feeling the pressure this time around. They put an entire platform on their shoulders with this game. Probably the first time they’ve ever significantly delayed a BGS game also
 
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MadPanda

Banned
And that's the part I don't understand.

To me, they are not fine.

A few, yeah they're expected and forgivable. But Bethesda, and their customers, seem to revel in them. Like it's some kind of endearing trait.

It's bullshit.
You can either have a game with high player agency and persistent systems like Bethesda makes them and deal with bugs, or you can have a highly polished but very limiting game like many others.

Bethesda could polish Starfield for the next three years and they still couldn't predict and find what tens of millions of people would do and find when they play it.

Let's just hope they aren't game breaking bugs.
 

Robb

Gold Member
[…] I think Starfield looks more like No Man’s Sky […] It’ll be fun to see how far they go with the planets. Hoping for some crazy alien infested hell planet where the most awesome resources can be found.
Yeah NMS seems like a good comparison as well.

Hopefully there’s plenty of handcrafted planets that are great to explore. I’m always a bit skeptical when devs talk about procedural generation and having thousands of planets, but we’ll see.

The concept art for most of the stuff looks super exciting though, but then again concept art tend to outshine the final product in most cases.
 

PillsOff

Banned
What high expectations?
People loved Skyrim. Treated it like an actually decent game, spend HUNDREDS of hours in it.
Then they bought millions of copies of Fallout 4 n called it pretty good with kinda bad dialogue system.

The bar for people to enjoy Bethesda game is really fucking low.

All Bethesda needs to do is linear, badly written, bug field, half animated piece of shit n draw a couple of good vistas n come for the money.
 
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iQuasarLV

Member
it's only been delayed once though?
One delay too many after 25 years of no delays.
18 months from announcement in 2021 to release (November 2022) was not enough time to polish this game? This tells me they are in way over their heads. Also, doing the math, it is that Cyberpunk and Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 et. al. have jaded the consumers to jank ass day one releases that Todd just cannot shit out a game anymore and let the modders do the fixing for him if he wants to sell it. Also, Microsoft probably had a lot of word for him about his tried and true method of game development forced his hand.
 

GymWolf

Member
Everyone who ever played a couple of bethesda games knows what this game is gonna be, bethesda is not gonna change his formula, strong\weak points all of a sudden.

I think this is one of those game where expectations are realistic because after 20 years we know how bethesda work.

Great open world with rewarding exploration
Acceptable writing
Mediocre\acceptable combat with a lot of variety
Meh animations and digital acting
Decent graphic full of bugs and glitches

I expect no more than that.
 
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winjer

Gold Member
I have low expectations for Bethesda. They haven´t made a good game in over a decade.
And Fallout 76 marked a very low point for the studio. Between the technical problems and the lies from Todd Howard, they have sullied their reputation thoroughly.

But even before Fallout 76, their studio was marked for releasing broken unpolished games, with too many bugs.
Even Skyrim, after all the re-re-re-releases is still paved with a myriad of bugs and problems that the studio refuses to address.

What was showed in the Startfield presentation didn't impress. For the most part, it looked like a PS4, running at 30 fps or lower, but with higher resolution.
And considering they are still using their old, broken game engine, chances are it's going to be another buggy launch.
I would like to be wrong, but my expectations for Bethesda are low.
 

nemiroff

Gold Member
Yeah but this true for pretty much any game. Trying to act like you know exactly how this game plays at this stage is dumb.

Edi: With that said, listing traits and give an opinion around it is of course fine.
 
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ToTTenTranz

Banned
It's obviously not going to meet current expectations, but it's also obviously going to be bought and played to death.
If Fallout 4 was so mediocre and still sold like hot cakes, there's no reason to believe this is going to be any different.
 

NahaNago

Member
My expectations have dropped the more I heard about the game. I do think the game will be alright but also a buggy mess.
 
Bethesda games are always janky messes full of bugs, dodgy graphics and piss poor combat but outside of FO76 I always end up playing them 300+ hours as, for me, the good stuff eclipses the bad stuff.

They are one of the few developers (with Rockstar) that make an open world that I want to play around in and explore thanks to great world building rather than an open world that feels completely artificial like Ubisoft and most Sony stuff.

I replayed Skyrim and FO4 this year and there are still bugs in there that were there day one but I was finding stuff I'd never seen before despite already having 100s of hours in each which is something I love about Bethesda games. Even these days with the (over the top) quest markers they don't spoon feed you every single piece of content and still cater for people that like to discover stuff on their own.

I think Bethesda games will start reviewing much lower going forward as there seems to be more push back from reviewers on technical stuff these days (unless you are called the Pokémon Company) but I'll be there day one enjoying the jank.
 

anthony2690

Banned
I personally don't think so, heights are only as high as you personally allow yourself to be hyped up for/expectations.

I'm just hoping I find the game fun and enjoy it, but my expectations are not the highest as I didn't enjoy other big Bethesda titles like fallout 4 or new Vegas what others were insanely hyped for, resulting in me buying and sadly not enjoying.

Hopefully I enjoy the gunplay, as I really disliked it on them other games, what I think really impacted my enjoyment, I might retry fallout 4 when the 60fps/upgrade comes out, that should help a bit with gunplay.
 
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Daymos

Member
I expect it will be boring and run poorly.. however I think Microsoft will make Bethesda fix the bugs before launch. Perhaps the bug fixing is expecting too much.

After a couple years of dlc and a big price drop the game might be worth a play.. that's kind of my plan. After fallout76 I'm not buying a Bethesda game on launch, that would be illogical.
 

acm2000

Member
this applies to every AAA game as people get hyped to tits over nothing and for no reason, just wait for launch and make your mind up then, its really not hard.
 

Elysion

Banned
I‘m already disappointed that there‘s no seamless planetary traversal; I hope that’s something that can be modded in. It would be cool if someone makes an ‚open planets‘ mod, similar to how Skyrim and Oblivion got ‚open cities‘ mods.

And we still don’t really know how planetary exploration is gonna work (unless I missed something). Is it like Mass Effect or the Outer Worlds, where we can only explore certain areas on each planet (though probably significantly bigger than in the aforementioned games), or can we traverse the whole surface of a planet (which means there‘s gonna be a lot of procedural generation)?

Btw, isn’t the game supposed to come in the first half of next year? I wonder if they‘ll be able to keep that; I wouldn’t be surprised if we get another delay.

Anyway, despite the lack of seamless space-to-planet traversal, I think Starfield will be one of the defining games of this gen, just like Oblivion and Skyrim were defining games during the PS360 generation. No one else makes games quite like these.
 
Hopefully with Microsoft money the game will come out in a more stable fashion than the last couple of Bethesda games. If it doesn't what was the point.
 

Inuteu

Member
obiviously yes

I wonder why big companies dont work in total secrecy and then release the material when its done

no pressure, no expectations, huge impact (like PT, matrix demo etc)
 

Soodanim

Gold Member
Its life and long term success will be determined, at least in part, by modding. If it's got the strong support expected of it, especially after consoles getting mod support, then it will live forever like Skyrim and F4. If not, then it's only got itself to rely on and Bethesda aren't known for polish.

However, what's often overlooked is how good Bethesda are at making worlds you want to explore. This is a bit of a departure, but hopefully they keep their usual world building quality high.

Either way I'm sure it will get the marketing push to get it lots of sales.
 

Kacho

Member
The hype is pretty muted compared to Todd Howard’s past games. After Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 expectations are tempered.

The real question is whether Starfield delivers an experience that’s more like Skyrim or Fallout 4. Their marketing says it’s Skyrim in space, but thems some big shoes to fill. We won’t truly know until it drops and we sink dozens of hours into it.
 
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You can either have a game with high player agency and persistent systems like Bethesda makes them and deal with bugs, or you can have a highly polished but very limiting game like many others.

Bethesda could polish Starfield for the next three years and they still couldn't predict and find what tens of millions of people would do and find when they play it.

Let's just hope they aren't game breaking bugs.
This. The way they build things can make things unpredictable like simulating a settler moving between settlements and getting into combat on the way and having to navigate around obstacles instead of just teleporting there like what any other game would do. Or having conversations that take place in the world in real-time that can be interrupted. But that same randomness can lead to unforeseen issues.

They could build the games like Rockstar or Ubisoft to be less sim and more scripted and they would be a lot less buggy for it, but it simply wouldn’t feel like a Bethesda game anymore and it would lose a lot of it’s charm in the process.
 
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