Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the past. Some of the reviews sum up quite nicely what is wrong with this DLC…
Less content than any skyrim DLC. Less than The Fallout 4 story DLCs. Doesn’t change of the complaints people had with the base game, writing is still at a 4th grade level.
Quick: If you are looking to buy my answer is no, you aren’t missing much content. I was really hoping to enjoy this DLC. Took about 4 hours for the main story and maybe 2 more hours to 100% the achievements.
These two reviews I think really summed up what Starfield has become, $70 for an AAAA title that has extremely little buy-in from the community, horrifically low amount of replayability and can be breezed through easily. It’s mind-boggling to see this
Microsoft really knows how to pick the winners, don’t they?
they are a reverse midas. Anything they touch doesn’t turn into gold but into shit
Mierdas touch
This makes me feel better about them being exclusive to Microsoft now. I’m not missing anything at all.
Well…except the next installations of Fallout and Elder Scrolls. Let’s be honest, that’s what Microsoft were really buying, and neither are anywhere near a release.
Judging by how Starfield turned out, will missing either of those games (which are almost certainly going to be using the same incredibly outdated engine) be much of a loss?
For those of us that miss the lore and story/atmosphere of this games, absolutely.
Don’t get me wrong, Starfield has made me truly worried about the next installment, and I truly believe that milking Skyrim has ultimately left Bethesda in a position where open world gaming just leapfrogged them. The likes of TOTK and Elden Ring have absolutely shattered what they can show to deliver in a supposedly improved generation.
All I can hope is that Bethesda really look at the feedback they received, and take the time to make the necessary changes to their engine. That alone might be enough to at least give a retro feel to the games. I’ll still eagerly await them, but my hopes for them being GOTY are long gone.
The engine isn’t why Starfield sucks. Sure, the constant loading isn’t great but it isn’t the reason there’s nothing fun or interesting to do. It’s also a solvable issue, but they haven’t made the investments they need in the engine.
Starfield is just soulless. The characters are boring, the stories aren’t interesting and don’t let the player choose fun options. The universe is static and nothing matters. There’s just no reason to be involved in the world, so there’s no reason to want to be in it.
They could fix this. I’d say the way they need to go to do so is to stop targeting literally every player. They need to figure out who they’re making the game for and target them. I’m a big sci-fi fan, and I like older Bethesda games. I should have been an easy target for Starfield, but I hated it, not because of the engine but because the stories, characters, and universe weren’t engaging. The engine is an easy target to complain about, but it isn’t what’s holding them back. Indie games can do more with worse engines.
The engine really isn’t suited for the kind of game Starfield wants to be, so it really works against it. But you’re right, even if it were a new shiny engine with the same writing and characters, it would still suck. Likewise, if it had the same creaky engine but actual good stories and characters the constant loading would be easier to overlook. It just has the worst of both worlds.
Neither of which will matter.
Bethesda’s game design is just too old. Playing Starfield felt like playing an RPG from a decade ago. Bethesda just got complacent from back when they were one of the only companies that could seriously do an open-world RPG, now we have CD Projekt-Red and FromSoftware with wildly different, significantly more innovative gameplay experiences. Hell, even other AAA devs like Capcom have been able to outperform in the open world space, Dragon’s Dogma 2 was a ton of fun.
No, sadly I think the design is too new. Morrowind was 22 years ago. It is the direction I’d like to see them go again. A complex world that feels lived in, and actually gives players options to play how they want and figure things out for themselves. The newer boring “design for everyone” approach sucks. There’s no soul and nothing interesting.
FromSoft is somewhat notoriously old-school. Their game design has directly evolved from their older games. Look at King’s Field and then look at Dark Souls. There’s so much similarity. Yeah, ER is more cleaned up with a fuck-ton more money and technology available, but it’s essentially the same design.
Obviously Balder’s Gate 3 is just an evolution of classic RPG design, and it did very well. I’d argue CDPR also has taken classic RPG inspiration more than modern ones. A modern RPG design wouldn’t do half the stuff Cyberpunk did, because it’s not targeting everyone (and no one).
Modern AAA design doesn’t pick a target. Their target is everyone and everything, so they do nothing well. Classic design is knowing who your game is for and making a game for them and not anyone else. Bethesda is doing the former.
now we have CD Projekt-Red
Holy fuck gamers really do have the worst memories. Cyberpunk is still a shit game after 4 fucking years of patches. CDPR has like 5 titles and one of them is pretty good. FromSoftware has a legacy of bangers a mile long. These 2 companies aren’t even in the same wheelhouse.
Can Cyberpunk even be considered an RPG? Lmao.
Why not? You have different builds and choices affect your ending and quest outcomes, what more do you want?
Cyberpunk is very much not a shit game, it’s a pretty good RPG with a great variety of character builds and fantastic writing. The devs did an absurd amount of work in order to make the gameplay significantly more fun. I’d also make the argument that Witcher 2 is a really good game, and is what popularized the series enough for Witcher 3 to be such a colossally known hit. The two companies make very different RPGs to one another, for sure, but you’re just being a contrarian if you think the pedigree of the two companies is vastly different.
but you’re just being a contrarian if you think the pedigree of the two companies is vastly different.
Even if we ignore all the other bootlicking and fanboying in the above comment, this statement alone is completely absurd. FromSoftware has developed over 50 games and CDPR has…4? Maybe 10 if you count mobile trash? By the year 2000 FromSoftware had released more successful games than CDPR has released total, good or bad, to date.
It’s no wonder that cyberpunk is such a piece of garbage really when you realize every other game CDPR ever developed has “the witcher” somewhere in the title.
Cyberpunk is not at all a shit game, what are you even on about?
You’re not. I pirated it on release and was very glad I didn’t buy it.
But but, we’ve been told Bethesda hears us and was fixing it!
Thats just usual Microsoft speak while plugging their ears and finding new ways to milk you.
worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time
Are we including Horse Armor here?
Bethesda literally invented shitty DLC
I’ve given up on every major developer/publisher, so-called AAA garbage, except for capcom for monster hunter and square enix for final fantasy. I’ll be extra sad the day they too go the way of every other greedy lazy “AAA” game company…
At least indie devs care to make a good game and not try to make a money printing IP machine with some game like aspects in it.
I agree with you. Want to remind people this is NOT AAA, is AAAA which is $70. Not $60, but $70 when it’s not on sale. $10 more for this worse quality
“AAAA” isn’t a thing. That was just Guillemot being an idiot and flailing on an investor call.
$70 is going to be the new normal price for AAA. Prices haven’t increased in decades. I don’t like it, but that’s what it is. It’s not AAAA because of the price, nor is that even a thing.
AAA comes from credit rating scores. It essentially means nearly guaranteed returns. It was used to identify games that need to be stocked for game stores. AAA is going to sell. AA is slightly less but still good. Etc. There is not AAAA credit rating. That was just stupid marketing buzzwords that don’t matter.
as a hige indi/small developer fan i see great times ahad. AAA will fail, clmpanys will close and developers will find new homes in smaller teams. by 2030 i predict a golden age for AA and and perhabs also a new golden age for indi.
Nintendo’s games are still usually very good, even though their business practices suck ass.
oof ffxvi? the “rpg” which is just a action game. ff vii remakes are at least good.
Even Capcom I’m not preordering. If wilds is getting good reviews a couple days after launch I’ll get it. (Even though I’m pretty sure it will be a good game)
I feel like monster hunter is kinda hard to mess up, unless they suddenly decided to make it turn based with micro transactions for extra turns or something lol
The “story” is: omg big monster messing up the ecosystem, go fight! So it’s really all down to gameplay lol
Cool Bethesda, just dump the Gamebryo source code off to us before you get liquidated by Shittersoft since you’re basically budgeted into making half-baked shit until you go bankrupt anyway.
Remember, folks: Microsoft kept these people, and fired the ones who made Hi-Fi Rush.
That, alone, was my signal the entire console was going to slowly burn down.
Microsoft is a fucking ghoulish, evil company. The only reason they bought Bethesda was to own their IP. They have Elder scrolls, Fallout, and Doom Because of ID games. That alone is going to bring them so much money, if they ever want to sell any of those franchises in the future, they can sell them for a fortune. That’s probably the reason why they acquired Bethesda to begin with. Laying off Hi-Fi Rush after they delivered an excellent product was just pure evil.
I don’t think this means ES6 is doomed. Did anyone play the Civ space game? It was an offshoot one-off experiment that wasn’t really well recieved and they quietly moved on.
My guess is that this game pivoted during development and they ended up with something that didn’t really work and shouldn’t have shipped. The failure to find something good in this experiment may be isolated to this game.
The fact that they released it in the state they did could be more about their workflow and project pipeline/target milestones they need to hit than it is about their ability to execute.
The failure here is in design, ES6 has a tried and true design to follow.
My sister loves Beyond Earth; I still prefer Alpha Centauri.
What we wanted: Alpha Centauri 2
What we got: Civilisation in a $2 shop Halloween costume.
Yeah they need to get rid of that cokehead.
If ES6 is just a refreshed Skyrim I really see no reason to buy it. There are much more interesting RPGs than the Bethesda style nowadays.
Story and worldbuilding wise, ES6 has a very bleak future ahead. Emilio Pagliarulo, the de facto director of Starfield and lead writer, has shown that no hole is deep enough that he won’t dig it further down when it comes to lack of quality and consistency. Not that Skyrim’s main story was good, but it was certainly better than Starfield’s. There’s also the disturbing indifference of “the world” to everything happening around it. Literally nothing you do in Starfield affects anything outside its own storyline. Hell, shooting up in the air or using fucking space magic in the middle of a city generates no reaction from npcs if nobody is hit.
The problem is Starfield isn’t a one off. It’s the latest in a line of progressively worse games. Every game they’ve released since Skyrim has been worse than the one that came before it.
Since Skyrim? I’d say their quality has been slowly declining since Morrowind. It wasn’t that noticeable at first, since oblivion, fallout 3, and Skyrim were still quite good and fallout 4 was decent. But then fallout 76 was a mess at release, TES blades was shit, and starfield just seems lazy.
Skyrim was at least an improvement over Oblivion. It showed they had the ability to recognize and fix the mistakes of Oblivion and still create an interesting world.
I think ES6 will have the advantage that it won’t be a procedurally generated world, or at least I don’t hope so.
But it will probably still run on the shitty Bethesda engine that they cling onto for dear life for some reason.
I think it will never actually live up to the hype, expectations are so insanely high, and the longer it takes the higher these expectations rise it seems.
And I bet it will turn out to be another half-assed game that they hope modders will fix. Like the last bunch of games, they all require mods to be even remotely playable, but even mods can’t fix core issues.
My expectations for Bethesda dropped to bare minimum with everything that came after Skyrim.
It definitely will be running on the same old tired engine. It’s listed on the wiki as the engine in use already.
I actually liked beyond earth 🥲
and they ended up with something that didn’t really work and shouldn’t have shipped.
That sure didn’t stop the marketing department, as this game was being shoved in our faces left and right as if it was the end-all-be-all game we’d be playing with our grand children in 50 years.
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Beyond Earth but I see your point, Civ has had several of these https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Civilization_(series)#Spinoffs
Point being that they can experiment and do something a little different, I don’t think that the quality of the spinoff indicates the quality of the main franchise.
Hey im all for giving Bethesda shit for publishing an incredibly bland game, but 8 reviews hardly seem like a solid foundation to make that title.
EDIT : I’ve realised that autocorrect might have gotten you since around 1, 1k user reviews still sit at around 42% positive
Not really. It isn’t as good as Far Harbor aeven though the world building is better and more interesting. Of course it’s way worse than Dragonborn. But it’s definitely better than Nuka World and Automaton. And also better than the Pitt and Mothership Zeta even though it’s difficult to make comparisons with Fallout 3
Hard disagree. Enjoyed all of those dlcs.
Glad I didn’t buy the DLC and decided I’ll wait for some sort of definitive edition to play Starfield again. I hope by that point it will be a better overall game and have enough new things to make it worth the time.
(cough) Horse Armor (cough)
This was exactly my first thought. Not surprised that the pioneers of shitty dlc made shitty dlc.
Which was exclusive to…Microsoft! Full circle.
Yeah…
Basically every Oblivion DLC that was not Shivering Isles (and MAYBE Heroes of The Nine or whatever) was god awful. And Fallout 3 (aside from the last two hours of the story DLC) was only really tolerated because it was mostly sold as a season pass. Operation Anchorage was a cool novelty that made stealth trivial and the rest… existed.
I would argue that all the fo3 and oblivion DLC were decent. Some obviously better than others, but they weren’t just soulless cash grabs. They had effort go into them, and were fairly new into the DLC space so some trial and error is to be expected. They had a pretty good amount of content for the price relative to the base game, compared to the starfield DLC/ current AAA norms.
According to UESP, Oblivion had
- Orrery: A few spells and a player house with a fetch quest attached
- Wizard’s Tower: a mage player house with a few spells and a fetch quest
- Thieves Den: A few spells and items and a very small dungeon
- Mehrunes’ Razor: Decent sized dungeon to get a dagger
- Vile Lair: A few spells, a player house, and a fetch quest
- Spell Tomes: Literally just spells
- Fighter’s Stronghold: A short dungeon and, you got it, another player house
Then we have Knights of the Nine (really mediocre) and Shivering Isle (arguably the best DLC Bethesda ever made)
Oh. And…
MOTHA FUGGING HORSE ARMOR!!!
People tend to be more favorable to Fallout 3’s DLC than I am (most are incredibly tiny dungeons but with a new tileset). I suspect in large part because Operation Anchorage channeled how amazing storming the memorial was in the base game and… I genuinely don’t know why people are so obsessed with flipping The Pitt. And Broken Steel itself was one of the worse examples of “We’ll finish the game later” of the era… and I played ALL the Blizzard games.
To me, it wasn’t so much about each DLC making a huge impact or the story being amazing. It was more about already playing the game to death and then gaining access to more content to explore. Kind of like eating a delicious cake, still being hungry, and then finding another slice of that cake that was sitting out all day.
Then the Starfield DLC is just like that, it’s just more of a bad cake.
Exactly. It is the same logic as “This game is great if you play it with friends”.
Different people have different tastes. EYE Divine Cybermancy is still one of my favorite games of all time.
But also? Guess what game I will point out is objectively bad and has massive amounts of jank and UX issues?
Welp, guess I can officially uninstall Starfield. Bummer.
I am really enjoying this downfall of Bethesda, Blizzard, Ubisoft and EA, more than I enjoyed anything they published in half a decade. I wish death also to Gearbox. It’s coming and after Randy bought and promptly ruined RoR2, my schadenfreude is tingling.
I would have enjoyed it a lot more if they had kept making good games!
I have no hope for The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. It was a good run but like all things. Everything comes to an end.
