Todd is the reason Bethesda games have been steadily getting worse since Morrowind, as a game designer he’s largely a fraud riding on the coattails of much better designers.
To some degree, yes. Very few people are playing Skyrim in it’s vanilla format, these days. The same is likely true of Fallout 4.
I enjoyed Starfield but it’s definitely missing something Skyrim had which made me continue playing after I completed the MSQ.
I’ve put close to 500 hours into vanilla Cyberpunk but only around 80 into Starfield. My classic Skyrim, which I did play mostly vanilla, was roughly 250 hours. Where special edition is around 1500 hours purely due to mods.
But I already know I’m not chomping at the bit to mod Starfield like I was other games.
The IP holder at this point is Microsoft, so who knows. Microsoft has bought up a lot of big gaming outfits recently, so this is kind of new territory.
Simple as. I went back and replayed Vanilla Skyrim this year, and let me be the first to tell you that Starfield is legitimately a better game when it comes to roleplaying, choices, and quest design. Skyrim has a far more interactive and immersive world design, but to me that falls flat when the game is so fucking boring to interact with (hot take, I know).
Mods fix all of those problems with Skyrim, and that’s what people are playing now.
It’s not really a great sign for the developers if their game doesn’t have a ton of replay value I imagine. Consider Skyrim, it’s the same general type of game, but people play that game over and over and make modifications to it to keep it fresh and enjoyable even now, and as a result Bethesda has been able to resell it for other platforms or with extra content or related merch for years, because people like it enough to keep coming back. If Starfield isn’t managing the same despite being the same sort of game from the same company, then that both serves as a warning to those who haven’t gotten it yet that the game probably isn’t as enjoyable by comparison, and also doesn’t give the devs as much incentive to keep making any improvements to it.
Starfield was very bland and had very limited dialogue/storyline in comparison to skyrim, but skyrim was so repetitive and boring with so much of the game being spent in similar looking dungeons fighting drauger…
Even with mods, I never made it through a second playthrough because the gameplay just fizzled with the boring dungeon-crawling required for so many questlines/words of power.
At least in oblivion, most of the caves/oblivion gates were totally optional. So much of skyrim is spent in boring ass dungeons…
This isn’t an argument for Starfield replayability tho. Starfield doesn’t have enough storyline for much replayability. Felt so bare bones in comparison to skyrim or any other Bethesda game.
I mostly agree, but I can guess one reason why it’s useful. With a game that’s not that old, but well received, I’d expect new players to keep coming in for a while. Not to the degree of when it first came out, but someone like me will wishlist a game and wait until there’s a sale or I have time to play it to buy and play. If the drop off is huge, and sales don’t help much, it does reflect on the game somewhat.
I’ve never understood why that matters for anything other than purely multiplayer games.
People finish games and move on. It’s not some GaaS bollocks.
Skyrim is 13 years old and has many more players. It says “Starfield was not a return to form for Bethesda.”
Is it something to do with modding-community?
If that generates a load of free cool stuff people may play more for longer.
The main IP rights owner probably doesn’t really want this, they want to develop and sell a new game or expansion.
The main IP rights holder for Star field is the same as that of Skyrim (aka: Bethesda)
Nah, it’s just Todd Howard. His priorities are weird as hell when it comes to games.
Like, dialog and story is not prioritized.
While map size is highly prioritized.
It’s a bit backwards when the games in question are supposed to be RPGs.
16 times the details
4 times the size
Fallout 70 dicks
Todd is the reason Bethesda games have been steadily getting worse since Morrowind, as a game designer he’s largely a fraud riding on the coattails of much better designers.
To some degree, yes. Very few people are playing Skyrim in it’s vanilla format, these days. The same is likely true of Fallout 4.
I enjoyed Starfield but it’s definitely missing something Skyrim had which made me continue playing after I completed the MSQ.
I’ve put close to 500 hours into vanilla Cyberpunk but only around 80 into Starfield. My classic Skyrim, which I did play mostly vanilla, was roughly 250 hours. Where special edition is around 1500 hours purely due to mods.
But I already know I’m not chomping at the bit to mod Starfield like I was other games.
The IP holder at this point is Microsoft, so who knows. Microsoft has bought up a lot of big gaming outfits recently, so this is kind of new territory.
Vanilla Skyrim < Vanilla Starfield
Modded Skyrim >>> Vanilla Starfield
Simple as. I went back and replayed Vanilla Skyrim this year, and let me be the first to tell you that Starfield is legitimately a better game when it comes to roleplaying, choices, and quest design. Skyrim has a far more interactive and immersive world design, but to me that falls flat when the game is so fucking boring to interact with (hot take, I know).
Mods fix all of those problems with Skyrim, and that’s what people are playing now.
It’s not really a great sign for the developers if their game doesn’t have a ton of replay value I imagine. Consider Skyrim, it’s the same general type of game, but people play that game over and over and make modifications to it to keep it fresh and enjoyable even now, and as a result Bethesda has been able to resell it for other platforms or with extra content or related merch for years, because people like it enough to keep coming back. If Starfield isn’t managing the same despite being the same sort of game from the same company, then that both serves as a warning to those who haven’t gotten it yet that the game probably isn’t as enjoyable by comparison, and also doesn’t give the devs as much incentive to keep making any improvements to it.
I mean, Harry Potter was the biggest selling game last year, and that has also lost 97% of it’s players.
Not everything is meant to be played forever. I think Skyrim was a one-off tbh.
As I understand it, Starfield was supposed to be played for a long time. They literally made the game loop for this reason.
You finish the game by “going to a new universe” and starting over.
Starfield was very bland and had very limited dialogue/storyline in comparison to skyrim, but skyrim was so repetitive and boring with so much of the game being spent in similar looking dungeons fighting drauger…
Even with mods, I never made it through a second playthrough because the gameplay just fizzled with the boring dungeon-crawling required for so many questlines/words of power.
At least in oblivion, most of the caves/oblivion gates were totally optional. So much of skyrim is spent in boring ass dungeons…
This isn’t an argument for Starfield replayability tho. Starfield doesn’t have enough storyline for much replayability. Felt so bare bones in comparison to skyrim or any other Bethesda game.
I mostly agree, but I can guess one reason why it’s useful. With a game that’s not that old, but well received, I’d expect new players to keep coming in for a while. Not to the degree of when it first came out, but someone like me will wishlist a game and wait until there’s a sale or I have time to play it to buy and play. If the drop off is huge, and sales don’t help much, it does reflect on the game somewhat.