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

Kidding about the bets because I probably can't legally do that, but BG3, despite its flaws, is going to be GOTY.

I spent the last 4 days waiting for the Minthara patch to play EA Starfield and wow- what a pile of trash that game is. Bethesda is going all out trying to buy up all the marketing it can paying off Reddit, Metacritic, twitter etc...so it will do well amongst the mouth-breathers but the gaming community is disappointed and for good reason.

The fact is Starfield is being compared unfavorably to Bg3 and being held to that new standard. Larian shouldn't have been worried about Starfield stealing it's thunder, but Bethesda was right to be worried about being held to a higher standard because of Bg3.

I judged this game based on the development team size and the money bethesda had to sink into it, plus the 7 year build cycle - given those factors Starfield is a huge disappointment. No Man's Sky is a much better game - despite the bugs and wonky colors.

The only things I liked about starfield is the relative lack of bugs, the homage to other sci-fi books and movies, the ship design system and the aesthetic.

The bad:
1. The universe is fake - it's just a series of gates. You can't fly from Earth to Mars, you have to loading screen there. If you fly you will just run into the "MarsPixelSolarSystem.img" graphic which is flat. You can't fly into the sun, or manually fly into a planet. Apparently this technology was lost in 2003 after Freelancer was released.
2. The characters and writing are terrible, boring, basic bitch overused tropes.
3. Endless fetch quests, that lead to more fetch quests. I hope you love those loading screens.
4. Gatekeeping through skill point level ups. The opposite of Skyrim exists in this game - at least on your first playthrough. You have to do all these low level quests to really unlock the ability to just go anywhere and explore and build bases.
5. The ship combat and the first person combat are mediocre at best. Maybe this gets better the more skills you unlock.
6. You are going to spend a lot of time micromanaging inventory. The inventory system is horrific.
7. You can't swim, the NPC's are mostly non-reactive with awkward facials or no facial expressions.
8. One last thing that REALLY bugged me - the ship design system is actually a neat aspect of this game but is held back because Bethesda couldn't be bothered to label the ship modules to explain what is in them. No way to tell if a ship module contains a specific crafting station or any crafting station because they couldn't spare the minute it would take per item to do this apparently. It's like they didn't playtest the game at all.

It's like Bethesda looked at the open world aspect of Skyrim and how people loved to play it and just said "well fuck that, we need to make people play a specific way"

Anyway, there is a lot more wrong. Trust me, go buy No Man's Sky if you want a decent space game, or go dig up Freelancer on GoG.

BG3 100% will win GOTY. It has shaken up the industry in much the same way Elden Ring did last year and while Larian has a lot of work still to do, it remains an amazing game that is streets ahead of anything else released this year...and Starfield is streets behind.