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.
I love Bethesda, but putting TES6 on the back burner to make Starfield for eight years was an idiotic decision. They also took the wrong lesson from Skyrim, believing that streamlining the game through stripping of features was the reason for its success. They’ve done this same with each successive game since, and each has been more poorly received than the last. Go back to your roots and make a good, deep Elder Scrolls game. Continue to leave the shitty +5 modifier leveling system out, but at the very least restore attributes and birthsigns. Restore spellmaking. STOP FUCKING IT UP. You’re on your last strike here and I don’t have a lot of faith that you’re going to make the right call.
Hard disagree that taking the chance on a new IP was a bad call. It didn’t work out, but more of the same thing forever would be worse.
If they wanted to create something fresh then sure, but the end result was the same game they’ve released multiple times, except this time it’s with a new coat of paint.
They could’ve spent that time adding to an existing IP instead of creating a new IP to make the same thing again.
I don’t even know, if I would normally truly agree that simplification isn’t at least aiding their mass appeal, but Starfield did get absolutely stumped by a traditionally complex RPG (Baldur’s Gate 3)…
I think the sweet spot is finding a way to make tradition mechanics a bit more casual friendly without removing them outright. I don’t think Morrowind or Oblivion’s attribute and skill system was difficult to grasp, but the leveling system was pretty bad. You either played the way you wanted to, using the skills you believed your character should be using, and received low modifiers as a result, or you meticulously selected and planned out major/minor skills that weren’t reflective of your actual playstle, just so you wouldn’t blow your chance at earning +5 modifiers.
You couldn’t just comfortably advance to the next level. You had this paranoia that it would be a weak and wasted level-up because you didn’t spend enough time jumping or something. It poisoned the gameplay with this annoying meta that was purely about exploiting the leveling mechanics so you wouldn’t be at a huge disadvantage. They remedied this in Skyrim, but at the cost of making all characters feel generic. The heart was taken out of your character and who they were. You no longer had a class identity. Everything was just kind of same-ey.
If they could at least restore attribute points so I could give my character a deeper identity and allow more dialogue checks related to said attributes so these identities mattered, we’d be heading in the right direction. They don’t have to be so impactful that casual players are put off by them, but c’mon, man… I want to feel like there’s a deeper system at work here. I want to measure my character in more ways than “Good with sword” and “Good with heavy armor”.
Did I mention how much I miss skill checks too? Fallout 3 and New Vegas handled these superbly.
I have a hard time believing they spent one year on this game, let alone eight. Half of it, including the game’s engine, the leveling system, and the fucking dragonshouts in space, is pulled from existing sources, the writing sucks, the base building is a pointless perk sink, there’s maybe three dozen unique structures copy-pasted again and again, the enemies are spongy and boring as hell, and despite being Bethesda’s “Least Buggy” work to date, it’s still chock-a-block with bugs.
You know what I think? I think they jerked around exactly like Randy Pitchford did with DNF and they’re trying to pretend they didn’t.
To play devil’s advocate, Starfield is absolutely a better RPG than Skyrim when it comes to roleplaying, quest design, and more. They made huge improvements to complexity and options for the player.
They just also paired that with awful world design, and could no longer rely on lore written by GOATs no longer working for the company.
For contrast, 24 hour peak for BGS game since skyrim
Skyrim base + special edition = 28.5k
Fallout 4 = 18k
Fallout 76 = 8.3k
Starfield = 9.2kStarfield + fallout 76 can’t even surpass Fallout 4. They sure is losing the plot lately.
If enough people already bought it, I doubt they care.
Ohh they should, the sales doesn’t look too good.
I don’t think it sold nearly as much as they hoped.
But yeah, it probably made back what was spent on it’s making. And a bit more.
But as I understood it, they imagined it being their “Next Skyrim” in terms of success. And it’s nowhere near that.
I mean part of that is people just finishing the game. That’s fine.
But also the consensus seems to be the game is at best “okay”, and people won’t be going back to it like they do with Skyrim.
I’m not sure if anyone at Bethesda honestly expected it to be better.
People are still playing skyrim
I can see that side of things, but people often re-play games that they love.
Looking at Bethesda’s games being played right now, Starfield is 4th place, but the newest by far.
Skyrim (special Edition) https://steamdb.info/app/489830/charts/
26,600 players online when I made this comment.Fallout 4 https://steamdb.info/app/377160/
19,650 players online when I made this comment.The Eldar Scrolls online https://steamdb.info/app/306130/charts/
16.304 players online when I made this comment.Starfield https://steamdb.info/app/1716740/charts/
9,086 players online when I made this comment.Fallout76 https://steamdb.info/app/1151340/charts/
7,596 players online when I made this comment.Your point stands but The Elder Scrolls Online doesn’t count. The game studio is completely different and its akin to comparing an id game.
There are Bethesda games as in made by the studio and Bethesda games as in the game genre that only Bethesda (And Oblivion once) produces with their proprietary game engine. A major aspect of the game genre version of Bethesda game is that the “main” story is neither necessary or important for the player’s enjoyment. The main story is typically one of many things the player can do and is not usually what fans of the genre are most interested in. Finishing a Bethesda game means doing everything that’s in it or getting bored at some point before that.
There are still tons of people playing all Bethesda games from Morrowind to Fallout 4 to this day with active mod scenes and setting discussion communities keeping the playerbases of those games alive. People having a nice enough time after the story and quitting since there’s nothing else interesting to do is not what fans of Bethesda games want from a game like this. Compared to other linear shooters I’m sure it’s fine enough, but I don’t think this is what anyone wanted for Starfield.
This game is such a disappointment. Paused a bg3 game to test it. Did the tutorial rolling my eyes all the time. The first few missions hitting my head on the desk and finally, got back to Shadowheart.
It felt soooooo empty. So shallow.
Wait. It didnt help that Bethesda argued against reviews that said the game isnt fun by arguing “Yes it is fun”?
i think starfield looks just as uninspired and boring as the next guy, but i think we should take player retention with a grain of salt on linear single-player games. of course people are less inclined to continue playing when they’ve finished the main quest
anyway play resident evil 2 remake
It lost me after 20-something hours sometime during the week after release. What a pile of shit
Doesn’t matter because Bethesda still got their money.
Playing Starfield, and actually enjoying a good part of it, like the faction quests, side quests, radiant quests even, and the increased roleplaying potential, then seeing a huge backlash against it, made me replay Skyrim, Vanilla, in 2024. The results may shock you!
The TL;DR is that Skyirm only beats Starfield in world interactivity like NPC schedules, and the percentage of gameplay you interact with that’s hand-crafted vs procedural.
Comparing the faction quests of, say, the Dark Brotherhood and Crimson Fleet, you must play the Dark Brotherhood as a psycho assassin, while for the CF, you can be a fed, a brutal pirate, or someone walking that line, with your own background added for flavor.
The quest design in Starfield also gives more options, as well!
This overall means that, IMO, Bethesda game design itself is kind of shit without mods.
World interactivity is one of the most important things in open world games. Starfield is just completely empty
And because many of the sites you find on a planet are just RNG, there’s not much visual story-telling, either. Which is one the things they’ve always done pretty well until now. It’s just a place to find loot with no actual context or story behind it, which makes the exploration little more than “oh hey, there’s something here.”
yeah i miss the lore and sense of world building i get in Fallout. every little note adds to the story and overall feel
I don’t disagree. However, some of the absolute worst aspects of Bethesda games, like roleplaying mechanics, quest design, and more were actually improved in Starfield. BG3 still smokes it, same with New Vegas, but it’s also much better than Skyrim with those respects.
That’s why it’s interesting.
The game is pointless to return to. Base building has not point. There is no reason why anyone should even build a base. And the ship builder is cool, but it’s like a Lego, you can’t fly it.
This IP isn’t going to last a long time without that stuff.
How does that look for other singleplayer games that take some 50-100 hours to beat?
Compare Starfield(330.7k > 9.2k) to games like Spiderman remaster(66.4k > 5.1k) or RE4(168k > 2.9k) or Armored Core 6(156.1k > 1.3k) or even a game build with multiplayer and replayability like Elden Ring(953.4k > 47.3k), all in 5 months timeframe, i think it’s to be expected as starfield didn’t launch with mod tools. The score doesn’t looks good tho, as people really don’t like the gameplay loop and the loading.
Copied from above comment:
Skyrim base + special edition = 28.5k
Fallout 4 = 18k
Fallout 76 = 8.3k
Starfield = 9.2kThanks. I meant how many percent they lost after 6 months.
Lol