New Vegas has no technical issues if you mod it properly these days!

One of the most unjustified review bombings in recent years, IMO. The game is very much a standard Bethesda game, and is fine. Mods and DLCs are what people buy Bethesda games for, anyways.

Don’t get me wrong, Bethesda themselves are very mediocre game devs, but their specific style of game lends itself well to modding.

Starfield is just as mediocre as Skyrim and Fallout 4, everyone who made Morrowind great is gone, Bethesda games ride on the success of their modding communities.

Fallout 4 was even worse, that’s kind of a point I raise, that Bethesda has been riding the coattails of better lore. There are dumb fetch quests in every Bethesda game.

Bethesda has been going downhill ever since Morrowind, to be fair. It’s just that with each release, the number of disgruntled people have been growing, and with Starfield its finally the majority opinion.

It really isn’t, which is funny. It does many things far better than Skyrim or Fallout 4, such as quest design and role playing, it just can’t rely on fantastic lore written by people that either no longer work for the company or never did. Now that they are given the opportunity to be wholly original, the issues they’ve been having ever since Morrowind are shown at full force.

Hot take: Starfield isn’t “dated,” it’s actually a much better RPG than anything they’ve made since Morrowind. However, because they can’t rely on the world building and writing of people who have either left the company or worked for a different company they acquired the IP for, Starfield has highlighted just how bad Bethesda game design and writing truly is when done in a wholly original manner.

It’s still going to be a modder paradise.

I think “dated” is a terrible concept to apply to game design, despite being able to divide FPS games into pre- and post- Half-Life, boomer shooters are experiencing another boom.

However, Bethesda game design is simply “bad” in my opinion. The RPG mechanics are very surface level and uninteresting, typically an end-game character plays similarly to a beginning character but bullets hit harder or other such styles. Contrast that with games like Cyberpunk, and you unlock new ways to actually interact with combat in meaningfully unique manners.

That’s a very underdeveloped point, but it’s in the right direction I believe.

IP in general is a very difficult idea to support. In theory, it’s supposed to reward innovation, but in practice it results in stagnation and price gouging.

Starfield’s biome and planet generation is extremely barebones, but placing that in a single player RPG with the radiant quest systems is fairly innovative. Imagine STALKER Anomaly style tasks, but with proc-gen landscapes.

This combo allows any character to have more content available to suit that character style far more than Skyrim or Fallout 4 style faction radiant quests.

Still needs far more work though, it’s half-baked.

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100% agree! Thankfully, Bethesda games function almost similar to FOSS, and will be fixed by the community. As I’ve demonstrated, the fixes for Starfield meaningfully boil down to a well-balanced survival mode, and reducing the locus of exploration and adding more locations to the proc-gen pool. These are 100% achievable via mods.

DLCs are planned in abundance for Starfield, and will similarly go a long way in adding more hand-crafted content.

The cities are more dense, actually. The open space is far less dense though.

Skyrim and Fallout 3/4 were games where you could pick a direction and find something fun. New Vegas isn’t, but it more than made up for it with roleplaying and quests, which Starfield generally does better than Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4.

The procgen content is 5-10% of the game, Starfield just fundamentally isn’t a Skyrim clone. Trying to play Starfield as though it is is just determination to be disappointed.

Do I think Starfield is perfect? Absolutely the fuck not, it’s just not an imperfect game because it isn’t Skyrim, it’s an imperfect game on its own merits.

Shipbuilding doesn’t need to be rebuilt, just add the fuel mechanic back to give drive upgrades weight and add more space content.

Gun Modification is fine, it doesn’t need to be overhauled. It can be better, and cosmetic paints could be added I suppose.

Food and Drink just need the previously hinted at survival mode, so you actually have to plan trips. Not rebuilt from the ground up.

Base building is fine-ish, just needs more benefits.

Research just needs rebalancing, it’s fine as a gate for progression.

The map just needs distances cut in half for proc-gen formulas and more locations added to the pool.

The game doesn’t really need to be rebuilt, it just needs a survival mode, some new assets and uses for base building (reinforced by survival mode), and distances cut in half for proc-gen.

It attempts to have a ton more proc-gen content in a single player, massive sandbox RPG. That’s about it, really.

Starfield frustrates me, because in many ways its a major step in the right direction. It has much better roleplaying mechanics than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but at the same time the lore is half-baked and the skill system is fairly weak. It has great potential, but a lot of it feels toned down and less “real” because of it. Space exploration has a lot of potential as well, but setting every objective so far apart on planets ruins exploration by filling it with monotonous procgen.

That’s why I’m fairly confident that once properly patched, and mods/DLCs are in full swing, it will probably be remembered very fondly despite the release state. It’ll pull a Cyberpunk.

🤌

What’s good and what’s popular do not necessarily align. Removing “complicated” features for the sake of mass appeal makes the game worse, but more profitable, much of the time.

Because mediocrity and popularity go hand in hand, it’s the profit motive at work. Being largely inoffensive and generally palatable is profitable.

Asterra’s and WMIM have bugs associated with them.

VNV is very lightweight, and VNV extended is unnecessary if you don’t want to do the whole guide. It really is the gold standard for a reason, the input is as low as it can be for a maximum output, which I’d argue is important for most people, especially considering the problems the Vanilla game has.

It’s all up to you, of course! You can probably use Wabbajack if you wanted to, I don’t actually have a Deck yet but that’s what I’ll do once I grab the OLED model today and it finally arrives.

Sure. I think big budget gaming needs to die, and games need more dev time for less work and higher pay, with worse graphical fidelity and better art styles.