Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Starfield is lame - Bg3 is going to win GOTY - Taking bets.

You quoted me before I changed the gif! I'VE BEEN HAD!

I think it's doing fairly well. Not sure what their expectations were. But as I posted earlier it surpassed 6 million players in 2 days. Best launch for a Bethesda game.

It has the benefit of being on Steam and Game Pass for PC and Xbox.

That's certainly a fair point. I'm just not sure what to make of the game pass numbers.

And really, I'm having a hard time reconciling those numbers with the much smaller number of concurrent players on steam.

There's something about it all that feels very PR'ish.

We're not going to know for a while. When BG3 came out, it was only on PC marketplaces. We can track those. When Starfield came out, it was on Xbox as well as PC. Given it is a semi-exclusive, a large portion of sales will be through Microsoft, which cannot be observed or interrogated. Bethesda is also notoriously opaque about their sales numbers. If you go to the Wikipedia page for the list of best-selling video games, you'll note the lack of Skyrim, which makes no sense as it has one of the greatest longevities of any singleplayer game ever. If you go to the Talk page, you get a straight answer: Bethesda is vague about its sales numbers, and the sources of those sales. Why? I don't know, but that's how it is.

Starfield is likely not performing as well relative to this current age as Fallout 4 or Skyrim in their times, but this can easily be attributed to the lack of IP fame, a disinterest in the setting, or, yes, the quality of the game. But we will not know for sure for some time. Then again, the numbers on Xbox could be revolutionary, and we just don't know.

Gamepass really skews the comparison, though. With that in mind, calling it the "biggest Bethesda game launch of all time" sounds rather disingenuous to me. Is 6 million a good number on gamepass? (Is it even strictly true, if it's only an unverified claim from Bethesda?) The only thing you can really directly compare it to are stats for other gamepass games.

The setting is actually the one thing I saw about Starfield that got me intrigued, funny enough. I actually appreciate them taking a risk on a new open-world setting, and one that actually feels a bit unique, science fiction that feels a bit more grounded than it often does in video games.

Is it puffery? Who knows? But isn't that something that could be verified?

According to GameSpot, Steam charts had it as the top selling game. And it's #4 on the Top 100 most played games.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/s...biggest-launch-of-all-time/1100-6517567/

Another site had it beating out Fortnite on Gamepass.

I'm not entirely sure.

They need to exclude the Game Pass players - Bethesdah got called out on this in a recent interview. They got called out on a lot of stuff...

Oh and the game has officially gone from "Very Positive" down to "Mostly Positive" on Steam since over 20% of the reviews are negative. In fact a full 1/4 of all reviews are negative but steam will only let a game lose 1% a day, and the user score on metacritic is around 5.5.

StarField isn't getting review bombed. That's just what the Industry reps say when they fail to meet expectations or outright lie to people about the game they were making.

Don't worry, bethesduh will make money.

Ouch. That’s terrible. 5.6 user review score, and I skimmed them: it’s not just a bunch of 0 scores, it’s a lot of people giving 4-6, saying that the more they played, the less they enjoyed. The most common criticism was a fundamental lack of risk taking from Bethesda. They promised an experience like none other, but just delivered yet another iteration on the same game they’ve been making since Oblivion. That was very much the impression I got from the game based on the trailers, and why I was never enthusiastic about this one.


I’ll amend my initial statement. Instead of waiting for this game to hit $35, I’ll check it out for $10 in a few years. It’s not like I don’t have an abundance of amazing games to play right now. Between BG3 and AC6, I’m very happy.

Well it’s a Bethesda game. People should really expect it to have a fair bit in common with previous titles. Given the outrageous success of Skyrim in particular, you’d think there must be something in their way of doing things.

Getting massively hyped about upcoming games usually ends in tears. People build up an idea of what the game will be like based on limited information (mostly PR) and feel let down when it doesn’t meet their expectations.

Personally I paid almost no attention to this one until it released. But then I watched a YouTube stream by Outside Xbox called “being a space jerk in starfield” or something, which basically them just messing around and finding everything very funny. And I decided to give it a shot.

Still right at the beginning, but here’s some very first thoughts:

1. The opening sequence is quite poor. You touch a thing, have a vision, then a guy immediately shows up telling you to take the thing to his organization, but just stays behind himself and gives you his spaceship. WTF? There’s a whole bunch of ways of putting you in charge of the ship that could actually make sense. The classic is he goes with you, but is fatally wounded on route “must… take… MacGuffin to…constell… urrrggghh”. OK that’s been done a thousand times, but the reason it has is because it actually works narratively. Oh well.

2. Wandering around the main settlements talking to various people feels a lot like the Outer Worlds but so far without everything feeling quite so small (my main complaint with that game). Interesting to see they’ve reverted to voiceless protagonist and showing exactly what you say. It seems that what you say matters more than in FO4 with the persuasion mechanic being both important and quite an interesting take on it.

3. There seem to be a bunch of factions, businesses and organizations to get work from. I’m led to believe that the faction quests get quite involved after a bit, but so far I’ve only only accepted one survey job and one shakedown and haven’t started either yet.

4. Had a couple of gun fights. Seemed fine. Much like FO4 or Cyberpunk for all I could tell.

5. First space fight felt a bit like Elite Dangerous in terms of ship handling, allocating power etc, but probably a bit simpler. Might get more interesting with better ships? I think they missed a trick here though. Since the game doesn’t really try to be a space flight sim in any other way, they could have done something a bit different with space combat than world war 2 style dogfighting in space, which never made much sense.

6. Ship navigation very much not like Elite Dangerous. That game really nailed exploring a procedural galaxy full of real scale planets (unfortunately they spectacularly failed to do anything interesting with it IMO). Starfield on the other hand have made the awesomeness of space flight basically into fast travel. I think I can live with that. KOTOR and Mass Effect were still great while doing the same thing, and they didn’t even have the ship combat thing.

7. Haven’t looked into the procedurally generated stuff yet. I’ll check it out, but not that interested in just going to places for no reason other than to shoot and loot. I think the fun will probably be in faction missions, companion quests, and generally living my space life. Maybe even the main story (I’ve heard it’s worth advancing that to a certain point before getting too distracted). As the argument between procedural generation and hand crafted, I think it depends a lot on what you do with it. Honestly a lot of Skyrim and FO4’s handcrafted locations might as well have been procedural anyway.

The big question is the same as it’s been for every space game I’ve played since original Elite in 1984. Can I basically be Han Solo as we first saw him? A space rouge taking on dodgy deals to earn some scratch, trying to talk my way out of trouble and pulling a blaster when things go south. I need a cool ship, a best mate and maximum points in sexterity (sadly not a real stat).

Starfield looks like it might just let me do that. I’ll keep you posted.

On point 5, if I had to describe the game to anyone it would be Fast Travel: The Game. It's not a great feeling when you travel between planets in different systems by simply clicking through a few overmaps.

The uninteresting way you can leave a planet's gravity well, and zip between places lightyears apart is a bit disheartening.

I'm hoping the enterprising mod community will be able to fix this game, adding in a real economy and more travel management.
I wasn't expecting a hard sci-fi game, but I also wasn't expecting something seemingly uninterested in the genre.

I think saying it’s a Bethesda game, what do you expect? is really letting Bethesda off the hook. You can see a clear creative legacy from DOS1 to DOS2 to BG3, but it’s not just legacy, it’s evolution. Larian have a set style, which many companies do, but they are challenging themselves to do more with it.

I had no expectations for Starfield, and I’m still disappointed. Bethesda keep making what I view to be the wrong creative decisions, and putting time and energy focusing on the wrong things. Skyrim was a lot of fun, but that was a long time ago, and Bethesda feels like they’ve stagnated.

I mean...I love BG3. But the clearest pattern I see from DOS1 to DOS2 to BG3 is "They keep on dropping the ball in the back half of the game."

I’ve been away for a month just quietly playing BG3, and I’d be surprised if it didn’t win.

The reaction to Starfield is a lot more tepid than I expected. Even my brother who is usually day 1 for Bethesda games held off on Starfield due to people mentioning how badly the game runs even on high end computers, because of something to do with how unoptimized it is for Nvidia graphics cards due to lacking a certain option or something.

In my mind GOTY is between Zelda and BG3 this year. If Starfield is in the contention at all, it’s probably far more likely to eat into the votes for Zelda since they’re both open world action RPGs.

Update: Starfield has 6M unique players in total, but that includes Gamepass, which does not involve a purchase.

Starfield has gone to 26% of reviews being negative on Steam, but is showing as 23% negative - if this continues it will drop to "Mixed" in 8-16 days. The more people play it the more they realize how hollow a game it is.





What the hell was this company "working on" for 7 years?

I checked a few videos on the game and the first thing that stuck out is Oblivion tier NPCs. Their movements, replies and actions are incredibly bad for a game released this year, and as usual we will soon have thousands of 'dumb AI' memes all over the internet from it. Also no swimming animations in water and the usual 'look under the water / over the water' glitching graphics, or if there is actual swimming its completely bugged. I'm optimistic in getting another 'NPC bugged into swimming action while on a ship' meme like TES games had.

Also you fast travel between planets, from what I saw there doesn't actually be an option to fly around all the space like in No Man's Sky and such games.

The planets are 'left empty by design' to make the game feel more vast like space should be? But thats completely ruined by just fast travelling everywhere.

Or people could just be review bombing it. Wouldn't be the first game that got review bombed.

As I posted earlier someone gave it a 1 two or three months ago. Also people who have a PS5 are upset they can't play the game.

Just like BG3 had negative reviews only because it was beating Zelda:TOTK on metacritic.

So take metacritic with a grain of salt.

I'm not saying Starfield is a great game. It's OK. I'd probably give it a 7. I just don't look at metacritic numbers.

I mean, isn't it more than likely someone has written a review on metacritic without actually playing the game?

Yikes man, you need to let this go. It's okay, Starfield isn't for you. BG3 IS for you. Enjoy it! I haven't even played Starfield, but it's obvious that it did well financially and a lot of people enjoy it. That's great too.