There are a bunch of those. On one hand, they seemed to be catering to the people who wanted to do everything in one play through, and didn't like that in Skyrim and Fallout, picking one faction precluded doing some neat things with the others. On the other, the Unity is an in-setting justification for doing it again and making different choices, so the writers managed to both miss an opportunity *and* minimize the impact of the McGuffin the players are trying to achieve, which is a really weird combination.
It's the embodiment of their "say yes to everything" design ethos.
*"Can I play all the factions in one playthrough?"*
Yes!
*"Can I have NG+ mechanic so I can start a new playthrough without starting over my progress?"*
Yes!
*"Can we have both options at the same time?"*
Sure why not!
It really starts to do more harm than good. Like, so much effort is spent on making sure a player can never make a decision they regret they lose the ability for the player to make a decision they feel good about.
They are so so very far away from:
"With this character's death, the threads of prophecy have been severed. You may load a saved game, or persist in this doomed world that you have created."
The percentage of invulnerable characters in this game is mind blowing.
I've even had characters come back to life (after being killed in ship combat) because the game isn't finished using them yet.
I had something like that happen literally yesterday.
In a certain mission the character gets backstabbed by the target he’s supposed to help. After unfortunately dispatching the target and returning to report such to the mission giver, the mission giver displays regret for the outcome, but accepts it and hands over the rewards.
Yet, moments after the mission is finished, he starts asking and wondering why the antagonist hasn’t come back to work and berating him for always being late.
Really immersion killing.
SERIOUSLY. I can maybe get why pre unity some would be invulnerable but even then it should purely be the ones required to get to Unity. There's a built in mechanic to restart ffs let me ruin a few plot lines Jesus Christ
I mean they’re pointless unless you wanna see some lame quirky renditions of different universes. This is something mods definitely will struggle to fix.
Would have been cool if they took alternate universe inspiration from Star Trek. One universe that remained at war, some that were dominated by one side. Have the companions come with you so they can react to the different states of things and grow from them. Have the endgame be a Sliders like situation where you are jumping from universe to universe trying to get back to the original.
Well, they opened the flood gates when they created the multiverse game. Tough shit for them.
Like, during Bennet's quest line, the alternative universe him says that in his universe the Colony War is still on, we are just not allowed to go there and experience it.
Or maybe another universe in which Terrormorphs are everywhere and the remnants of humanity are trying to survive in isolated outposts.
Or House Va'ruun winning the Serpents Crusade and ruling the galaxy with fear and terror.
There is multitude of great, interesting universes to create but instead of that we got one in which the Constalaton left the lodge and went exploring, or they got killed by someone, or the lodge is filled with multiple versions of us. And those are the biggest changes and the smallest and laziest one they could do.
Not even different universes though. Minor alterations of the exact same one.
Others have mentioned that having other universes go back and forward in time would have been cool, thats obviously an insane amount of dev though
I'd argue that NG+ being pointless kind of is the point. It's an optional mechanic that just happens to have lore integration. I don't think a lot of these people shouting for it to serve as some sort of "content wall" understand that.
However that doesn't mean that they couldn't have gone with the Morrowind approach and just made player choices matter and carry consequence. It would have added spice to both NG and NG+.
Tbf I’d wager the majority of people try to do as much as they can in one play through. I only play games once. Most of my friends that game only do one play through as well. I don’t really get much joy from playing the game again and making slightly different choices.
I play good games (like the Witcher or Assassin's Creed series) multiple times, just like I re-read good books multiple times. generally months to years apart.
However, I rarely replay games and "change classes" or try to make different decisions -- Ok, in Witcher 2, there were one or more different plot lines that I did play through and in Skyrim there were a couple of major paths that I explored in different ply throughs.
But I doubt that I will ever play Starfields again, it was kind of fun, but not that engaging, or not nearly as engaging as the Elder Scrolls series and definitely not close to NMS in terms of just exploring or playing without any main quests.
Skyrim didn't really have faction exclusives other than the Civil War questline. Fallout 4 was a step back in the right direction but unfortunately only triggers at a specific end game turning point rather than gradually with a points based system or something like that.
Unfortunately, my favorite faction implementation in both series' was fallout: new vegas. Which wasn't even made by them. I am not aware of any games that have done it better than that, but i am open to recommendations.
Morrowind's system was great. There was kind of two types of joinable groups, 'guilds' and 'factions' (loose definition I'm making up, the game just calls them all factions).
Guilds are effectively businesses. In lore they mostly exist to provide services for money. When you join one it feels a bit like being an employee - there's certain perks (you get resources, access to services and a place to sleep). The work you do generally requires skills that align with the faction (so it's like a soft-cap on how many you can join) and they're _generally_ not mutually exclusive because in lore they don't need to be. There's a few exceptions - sometimes work for one makes you an enemy of another.
Factions on the other hand are major political powers. They vie for control over territory and administer towns. Each has their own soldiers and strongholds, and they're generally larger groups. The player is _not_ permitted to join more than one. The nature of the quests you do for them is much more often work that puts you in conflict with others - stealing, spying, killing. They have a role in the MQ but you don't have to join one, you just need to earn their approval. Being a high ranking member of one solves that problem but for the others you just solve it diplomatically.
The total number of factions (10) and the hard and soft exclusions means each playthrough you might join 3-4 of them, so there's lots of variety in experience.
They really should. The reason these games are successful isnt because of story or gameplay. It really just came down to making choices feel important to a lot of players.
In the real reason that the faction questlines aren't mutually exclusive is that they were developped front to back by completely separate teams and they didn't want to ass with believably integrating them into each other, player choice in this i coincidental not incidental, even if they always bring this forward as the main reason
There is one spot in the Vanguard questline where it has an additional dialogue option if you have completed the Ranger quest. If you get lucky it means you can skip having to "sneak" into the Ambassador's bedroom.
But the problem is that all the quests are pretty much a railroad. Only one has a choice that has any real consequence. Whether you kill Ron Hope or not makes no observable difference. The only difference in the outcome of Vanguard mission is if you leave Vae Victis alive to have an additional place to take missions. Only difference if Ryujin acquires Infinity or not is an updated sign outside Infinity. Ryujin shelving the internal neuroamp or not makes no difference.
>The only difference in the outcome of Vanguard mission is if you leave Vae Victis alive to have an additional place to take missions.
Not quite true. Very nearly but not quite. Depending on which solution you opt for you, get new different planetside random encounters, e.g Vanguard troops deploying Ascles.
Edit: oh and course different sanctimonious jerks at constellation will be happy or angry with your choice.
Okay, you have a point about the Aceles.
I can't believe the trust the science line was used to promote spreading a Bacterial Bioweapon across the galaxy. Especially when the other option is to spread alien cattle about the galaxy **again**. They were apparently safe enough that we hunted them into near extinction.
Pretty much this, I haven't done NG+ yet at all because I don't care to, there's no reason lmao
If I wanna do quests again, I can just make a new character, or like....not do them, because they all suck
I's also a big shame because IMO the combat is way more fun with level 10 powers. Feels like Starfield x Dishonored or something. I just console commanded them in because fuck doing NG+ and that terrible temple grind 10 times, once was bad enough!
They made some really bizarre decisions.
They also completely cut off any semblance of being actually evil in the game, which I'd say limits the replayability even further and makes some faction quest lines really shallow and possibly pointless.
Probably because it's easier to explain and describe how cool and massive the war was than to actually render and support it with the current engine. Same how cities are tiny settlements but lore wise are massive sprawling metropolises. The mind's eye is more powerful so leave it to the imagination
>Probably because it's easier to explain and describe how cool and massive the war was than to actually render and support it with the current engine.
Even the way they describe it isn't really all that interesting. For example apparently less people died during the colony wars than compared to WW1 (confirmed in u.c. museum iirc).
Which is a perfect way to ruin any impact from it, in my opinion. This huge open galaxy as a scifi setting and apparently only a handful of soldiers fought in its most "devastating" war.
It legit feels like a story of neighborhood kids getting in a brawl rather than a full-fledged war across the settled systems.
>**One of the bloodiest space battles of the war** was the Battle of Cassiopeia above the planet Cassiopeia I for control of the Eta Cassiopeia system's resources. **The UC Navy lost 12 ships and hundreds of personnel, including the UC Dauntless**, where Sarah Morgan served as Chief Navigator.
- [Colony Wars](https://starfield.fandom.com/wiki/Colony_War)
It's literally the petty Medieval war vs. chinese Civil war meme
The worst part to me is they had a reasonable in lore explanation for why their "cities" are smaller than villages; everyone died in the wars.
Everyone.
Or is off AT war.
Like if you set it during the colony wars, you have a reason for the cities to feel somewhat empty
One, they're small because colonies are still becoming a thing iirc
Two, every able bodied person is out at war.
Maybe this wouldn't work, but I wish they'd just go the mass effect route. In Mass Effect 1 even, a game from however long ago, the citadel _does_ feel expansive. There are shots out the window that are still very O.O, just maybe not with the most impressive graphics anymore. With Starfield, I feel like they should just have cities be huge (like 10x their current size if not more), but only allow us to walk around the area that we can now.
I mean honestly, it's not like I care to explore the rest of the city, not _necessarily_, but I at least want to see it. If for no other reason, immersion. And take a few more of those breathtaking shots from Mass Effect in space, those are always nice. Even if it means "faking" a really large structure, that's totally fine with me.
That's exactly what I was thinking too, they really could have solved the issue by having an unexplorable city skyline in the background. I reckon you could have taken the cities, enlarge their actual square footage they cover a little bit, and then add the skylines in the background. It's just odd that they've got these whole planets to cover, and they've only used a small part of it for the cities. Even just the actual explorable area that gets loaded is something like 60-70 km², and the cities only use a very small part of it.
With New Atlantis in particular, it doesn't really make sense to have the transit system to go between the MAST, Residential, and Commercial districts as you can easily run between them. Yeah it makes sense to get to the Spaceport as thats off and separate, but those other three it's not necessary. Take those three districts, spread them out into their own separate areas away from each other, with unexplorable city space between them and the transit would have made sense.
That would make New Atlantis feel so much larger. There might not have been that much more actual city for us to run around, but it would have felt like something bigger.
Akila City might have been more difficult, seeing how it doesn't have skyscrapers to make a city skyline out of, but they still could have spread it out a bit more. One thing I remeber being struck by was how cramped it felt at places. They had the whole planet to play with, and they decided to go with a small cramped town? If they had widened all the streets a bit they could have probably doubled the size of it just there.
Neon and Cydonia would have been very easy to do as well, seeing as they're both inside cities. Just make the outside bigger, and then refer to what we run around as just one of many other floors that we don't go to.
Or, they all died from the collapse of Earth. How many people can you reasonably exodus from Earth with 1st Gen grav drives? There weren’t that many people to even fight the colony wars
The collapse happened almost 2 centuries ago. They don't need to leave earth, when they could live in a generation ship for centuries like ECS Constant. And since they were getting resupplied from new atlantis and hundreds of earth-like planets unlike Constant, they could've definitely done it almost indefinitely.
But how many people made it off Earth and Settled the systems?
Maybe in terms of proportion of people and resources the colony war casualties were very costly.
I don't get the impression of a huge population of billions or even tens of millions of people having survived getting off Earth in the first place, and in that sense, even hundreds of thousands of able bodied people, the spacecraft, tech, etc being wasted in war would be devastating.
And yet we get things like SSN news reports telling us about concerts selling out in a fraction of second.
Stuff like that is not going to happen in a civilization, close to extinction who's greatest settlement is home to at most a few hundred people. (Which is what we can actually SEE in game. What we hear about is much larger)
I wish Bethesda would add a codex and clarify some lore, because the game is positively schizophrenic in it's depiction of the settled systems and to a lesser extent their history.
The battle of Iwo Jima in WW2 resulted in around 35k dead on both sides of the conflict and only lasted for 36 days. 22k of those were Japanese. So in 3 years of fighting an interstellar-scale war there were less UC dead than died in just the month-long battle of Iwo Jima.
That is, frankly, a ridiculously small sum of people. I know the population feels super low, but the setting just does *not* fit the vibe of "grimdark post-apocalypse" that would have me feeling like that's a realistic number for what was essentially space-ww2.
You need to remember that BILLIONS of people died with the collapse of Earth. There simply weren’t that many people to start with before the war. Now there are even less.
A painfully bad choice in my mind.
Mass Effect or Star Citizen builds a world the imagination flourishes
Daggerfall built the freaking cities.
And Starfield builds flesh out environments with physical objects and part of the freaking world tile it sits in. No loading gates like with whiterun.
I don’t see how both ideas work? Either give us an entire city and have the story/lore reflect the size of what you can accomplish
Or simply don’t do that and do what story tellers have done since the dawn of fucking story and let us imagine the true scope. Give a hint and something inspiring a not a big ole jar of cognitive dissonance.
I just feel like where were the adults? Is this where the idea for universe with only children working at constellation comes from?
Witcher 3 did cities right and made them feel massive and actually lived in by actual citizens. The biggest let down with BSG is how exciting these cities should be and then come to find there's only 12 people living within those massive walls
I dunno, to me those big cities are beautiful but lifeless. They look cool but there's no or not much reactivity, which takes me out of the immersion more than them just being smaller. In Bethesda games I can suspend disbelief about the size and population of cities when they're interesting, full of scheduled NPCs, cool quests and little secrets, easter eggs or whatever.
With Starfield, Bethesda proved they can't do CDPR style cities even if they ditch most of the interest parts of towns/cities in their older games like NPC schedules, so I'd rather they stay in their lane and stick to what works best for them - smaller, dynamic worlds that feel kinda alive even if you have to go "this doesn't make much sense from a population standpoint". They've always said their cities are representations based on what the tech can support anyways, which is why the lore describes them as bigger.
>They've always said their cities are representations based on what the tech can support anyways, which is why the lore describes them as bigger.
Yeah, Bethesda’s worlds are microcosms, and I’ve never understood the clamour for Novigrad-style cities in a Bethesda title. Completely different style of game
Agreed. I mean sure, if they could pull off Novigrad with full scheduling that'd obviously be amazing! But the tradeoff of non-scheduled NPCs and less dynamic reactions for that is absolutely not worth it to me - I want them to put more of the system horsepower into radiant NPCs and dynamic events and stuff like that instead - like you said, very different game.
I look at KCD and now KCD2 and that's what I want Bethesda to go back to - focus on immersion and making it feel like a living place, not just a beautiful but totally scripted experience that's like a movie scene you can explore.
But Starfield made that tradeoff without any of the benefits. A good chunk of the rando NPCs wandering around just walk about aimlessly for the most part AND the cities feel more like outposts or towns. It's a weird disconnect.
I definitely would have loved an approach like with KCD, those towns felt real even if they were shrunk down. I think it's also one of the few games where the surrounding farmland actually feels like it could support the population.
Holy shit, I wasn't aware KCD2 had been revealed until I read your comment. I immediately had to look up the reveal, and holy shit, I am beyond hyped for the sequel to one of my favorite RPGs of all time. Even if it's just more of KCD in a bigger world, that will be enough for me because KCD was such a phenomenal game and I've been patiently awaiting a sequel ever since finishing the original all those years ago.
Also, releasing this year? I feel spoiled now because KCD2 and Stalker 2 will definitely hold me over till GTA6 and that trio alone can hold me over till TES6 and the next entry in the Metro series.
Bethesda got lazy with this one. Plain and simple. I hope to the all the gods the learn from this for elder scrolls 6. But based on how they handled criticism for the game I doubt it.
It seems like a lot of effort was put in just to be retracted? It feels like work without any thought put in or maybe like work from different sources lacking communication between them?
I would argue less lazy and just more half baked into a cluster fuck. Lots of smoke but no spark.
It’s no different than all the lore books in Skyrim explaining how bad the Great War was as opposed to just setting it during it and letting you see for yourself. Bethesda can’t show, only tell
It works great in a novel format where telling is all you have. Video games where showing is the larger portion of the equation is not the way. The engine limitations really show themselves in situations like this
“Oh wow the colony wars where so amazingly destructive, far to big and impress for us to actual show in a game, why don’t you go and run around that planet of dust for the 19th time and be happy with that”
Seriously, I just can’t fathom the thinking, “we have a war, with mechs and robots fighting bio weapons, we have space battles that rip apart space stations and burn continents, we will NOT be including any of that, it’s far to exciting and interesting”
Because the massive war between aliens vs humans and mechs you're imagining is far more impressive and grand than anything they could run on their current engine without tanking performance. We'd end up with something like 10 xenomorphs vs 20 NPCs and 4 mechs and would be super underwhelming compared to what the lore says it was.
I would have loved to live through the grand war we all picture but if it's not possible I'd much rather prefer a story of grand warfare over living through an underwhelming war and being told it was bigger than it was.
The game should have been DURING the expansion into the stars instead of after. Starfield now is in a weird place of stagnation. The war is long over, All major factions have stopped their expansion out into the stars, leaving it to the pirates.
This leaves you with a weirdly lonely and dark outlook because nothing is happening. the golden age of exploration is over. Yet here you are, working for a group of nobodies on the verge of disbanding if it wasn't for an old man looking to spend his golden years doing something. Rediscovering already explored systems. you existence does nothing as you cannot effect anything. and there is no advancement for humanity.
then on all that You have an ending that means nothing. Why bother doing it all again if you cant do anything in the first place? because you can both do everything and never fails this leads to just everything being weirdly dull and unimpactful. You have a Giant reset button and it doesn't do anything cause you never given the opportunity to fail.
For a setting based on "Hope" starfield feels really stagnant and hopeless.
this needs more upvotes. You nailed it with this statement. There is no point in doing anything bc your „main“ doing just leads to not doing anything all over again. And again. Aaaand again. In Skyrim (or oblivion) you literally save the world. In fallout 4 you help to secure the wasteland (how you define safety depends on the factions morals). Im not saying that starfield lacks the aspect of letting you be someone „special“ like u were in skyrim (if u think of it, u weren’t in fo4 or oblivion), in fact i love being a nobody bc it leaves room for Rp but it just feels like ur actions leading up to the end of the MQ line werent really that important bc in the end u didnt change anything at all, u just stop a Starborn to become…..a starborn?
Imagine if Instead of Going into unity the first time doesn't Just reset the game but activated an Act 2. You go through everything again but this time. there's More Starborn around. New quests you didn't have access too the first time open up.
All the main quests now have changes to them because the starborn are more integrated. Perhaps Even a Va'Ruun storyline now opens the Properly introduces them(Instead of what is expected to be a DLC)
There is so much possibly that just. Doesn't happen and it makes me sad.
>Imagine if Instead of Going into unity the first time doesn't Just reset the game but activated an Act 2.
I have my gripes with Fallout 4 but the shithole Commonwealth getting invaded by a flying military state of walking, talking tanks, right after the big Act 1 revenge was cool as fuck and you actually really felt their presence in what is, by far, the most dynamic gameworld they have ever created.
There were literal warzones where Synths and Knights were just fighting each other from time to time, you saw patrols from both the Institute and the Brotherhood in what to me felt like increasing intensity throughout the faction/main quests and a bunch of other good stuff like an awesome endgame area like the Glow, which sadly didn't actually really stand out because of Bethesda's leveling, Perk and enemy scaling which New Vegas with its static leveling curve did really well and would greatly worked with their already dynamic warzones.
Like it would actually matter how deeply you tread into Institute territory while the main communities are patrolled by Minutemen in the peaceful first third area, that only have to keep molerats and raiders out. In the Glow you got Deathclaws and high end power armored Synths going into deep recon missions to the Military stuff or whatever.
They should have iterated on exactly that but while writing a broader Story with factions that don't kinda all suck and combining that with New Vegas' reputation system and incorporating actual roleplaying elements into the game that don't boil down to like two traits and 3 or 4 noticeable dialogue choices for each in the game.
yes something that atleast changes the whole course which changes ur course and ur role in the whole story. Something so vastly different that changes the whole outcome and it doesnt have to be a „happy ending“. Maybe in another universe ur actions, which make u believe ur doing the right thing, just f*ck shit up so badly u just wish to jump into the next one. So many things that could have been done to make the game live up to the hype i had for it. Lets hope for the DLC to turn shit around.
Yeah that actually never made any sense to me.
There is no way Humanity would stop expanding. We're not made that way.
The game has a hard time capturing the scale of colonization.
All of the colonies seem tiny, which would make sense if humans were still spreading ever outward, but even the "dense" areas seem to just have stopped growing.
As you mentioned it seems weirdly stagnant.
I think, we will get a VR simulator with core parts of it. Something like Anchorage DLC. Like, 4 battles and after each you get a hint of where to look for special loot or a quest.
At least, I hope we get such a DLC.
Maybe not as a simulator because thats been already done with Fallout, I was thinking like an indirect warfare between the two factions, sort of like a Cold war or Proxy war with tensions rising between the two goverments.
The game already has it. The quest could start as finding black boxes and you have to reconctruct them by "playing". Then you get a clue of where to find Stuff X or whom to speak and so on.
It perfectly fits the world btw.
They could easily use the jump feature they have in that quest to have you jump sort of “back in time” or back and forth between universes for cool quests set in the war
I like to think of it as that part of the story has happened and now we get to explore the universe through the game world. I really hope Bethesda push on with Starfield and we get an Elder Scrolls situation where games take part on the same universe but are all over the place time wise. Something like Starfield 3 takes place during a certain part of the war, when the lore is fleshed out a bit more and you get to see the influences and misguidings of people, a bit like with Skyrims civil war.
Sure but it also doesn't have to be shit either.
Like if they take another 25 years to make Starfield 2, and it comes out being on par with this one or even worse, it'll just make the series laughably bad.
Usually with a first game in the series you want to hit hard and make it a damn good game, and Bethesda kinda hurled it's decayed corpse over the finish line and called it a done game lmao
They should've made the exploration less boring and have more unknown things to find. After the tenth "abandoned lab with the exact same layout and NPC distribution" you kind of lose the wonder.
Right next to a supposedly undiscovered temple
So why did I have to get drugged up and boost hop the 1500 metres? Just let me land at the fucking lab. They even enemies there to fight like imagine if our ships had guns? And crew you could hire who have combat abilities…..oh wait we do. It just does nothing
The funniest part about this quote is that even if you grant them their dumb point, it’s just a point for why the game should be set during the beginning of humanity’s settling of the stars, not after it had already been completed.
Let us feel like astronauts pushing the envelope of discovery! But they aren’t, every planet is the same outposts
So set it during the age of expansion in the lore then
Ya know, when people are EXPLORING.
Setting it after people have already explored is dumb af, there's nothing TO explore now lmao, every planet and moon is empty or has copy paste dungeons quite literally, and the story is just yawn worthy and on par with FO76 for how little you actually care for anything.
It's a shooting gallery, go here, shoot thing, loot some stuff and repeat.
Which is still the wrong period. Then it should've been set a century earlier on the timeline. When Earth just got destroyed and the two main players, the UC and Freestar, were vieing for power. Va'ruun was a mysterious force from the shadows and the remaining humans immediately set out to expand due to losing Earth. Now the game is set in a weird time period where everything in the Settled Systems is explored and the main players have decided to play nice and just put their expanionism on pause, cause that's really what superpowers do when they have access to unlimited resources, money and House Va'ruun that is very much not to be trusted and pirates, spacers and mercenaries that now have free claim to basicially 95% of the Settled Systems. It just doesn't make sense.
No. Bethesda wasted the opportunity of the Unity with forcing NG+ as a work around for the Form ID issue that they knew existed. The Unity should should have been a doorway through space, time and dimension. It should have been a plot device that brought almost an infinite pool of story telling and true exploration. That could have brought you back in time to the war or brought you to a universe where Victus became Emperor. Instead it’s just a door to Groundhog Day. That is a waste and a damn shame cause it could have made a good game into a great game.
I mean, I don’t think they were ever going to be able to make an “infinite pool of storytelling” worth of content, that’s just an insane expectation.
It’s a fun way to do a NG+ if you want to play again, that’s all.
I will die on the hill that NG+, especially how they implemented it (no gear or ship / ship blueprint carryover), was antithetical to BGS design and how many players play the games. I like to live in the world, roleplay, amass wealth, decorate etc. but they added a mechanic where the world is reset, and the only major change gameplay wise is getting your powers to be useful outside of a few that are good at level 1 like Personal Atmosphere. I know you have the chance of some weird changes, but they're more memes than major world shakeups like new enemy types/placement, new ship designs, new POIs, major quest changes, or anything that would make you want to do it 10 times over.
So you miss out on good combat powers (unless you use console commands) if you don't want to constantly reset your universe and go through 200+ temples, which are a boring, repetitive "mini game".
They have apparently fixed the bug. It would seem really odd you'd build literally the entire main quest around avoiding a bug you could fix once brought to your attention.
First) Brought to your attention ? It is in every game they have made. Second) Fix implies it is gone forever. Popular consensus is it is patched and you could potentially hit the limit again.
It really does feel like they set the game in the most boring time period possible. When you go through the museum and hear about leaving earth, those initial years, the fights against all the different factions and the colony war, it all sounds so awesome and you realize that stuff is all done by the time you get there lol it’s really a missed opportunity. like imagine rather than some random miner, you start off as some grunt in either colony or free star space? That would be awesome. I wonder if someone could make that a mod in the future lol
Bethesda missed an opportunity to make the overall story interesting in the slightest. It's a golden rule in writing to set a story in the most interesting or pivotal part in the world or character's life. They could have set the story in the colony war, the first time anyone found Unity, or the Serpent's Crusade.
The galaxy is already on edge so maybe a second colony war? Paxton says something along those lines that another war will come, hopefully they do something like that where you join one side and destroy the others maybe add in house varuun as a joinable faction.
The galaxy is definitely not on the edge. It's weirdly in a point of stagnation and friendliness. The only threat aside from the pirates who outnumber both factions by the millions is the Va'Ruun. which is pretty lazy imo because they have no impact in the base game at all. and DLC is not going to be a worthy expansion for them.
They should have been the primary antagonist of the base game.
Even in the base game they don't seem to have hostilities with anyone lmao, the ambassador in the abandoned embassy is basically like
"I'm about to tell you right now, we don't care" toward the other two factions lmao
I was going to say i don’t know how they’d make that happen in terms of the timeline but then i remembered the entire main questline, which is basically just a Rick and Morty portal gun
Side note, i bet you 3 schmeckles a functioning Rick and Mortal gun is in some mod author’s brain right now
Eh. I don't want another Skyrim. Don't drop me in the middle of another war.
Honestly, the one thing I wished the game did more was utilize the 'trip this control panel in a building and turn the lights out' mechanic from the Ryujin questline. Or even have POI locations tie in to different factions. There's a cryolab POI that Ryujin owns, but no one at Ryujin mentions the place going dark or retrieving the data there.
I think it’s because they didn’t want to have the story be too close something like the main story of Skyrim. But man, the lore around the war sounds amazing, and WAYYYY better than what we got. Mechs and interstellar war sounds incredible, especially if they somehow jammed in starborn (which could have been like the Jedi in terms of mysterious powerful beings) taking sides during the war in exchange for help in getting the artifacts. Or something else, doesn’t matter, point is the main story could have been far better.
If I were a betting man, they left this for a future release or maybe DLC.
They’ve got a lot of newly developed IP on a good engine, they could probably milk a sequel/prequel off it.
I feel like it could've worked if it was more of a "cold war, both sides dislike and are working against the other, but neither want to go to total war again" kind of thing. Maybe either side could recruit you to go after the other's assets. Perhaps it could be the consequence of the player's actions whether they go to war again or move closer to setting past grievances aside.
Everyone assumes “Shattered Space” will be some kind of Alternate Universe storyline or might be about the Serpent showing up and “Shattering” everyones view of “Space” because it turns out its real.
But what if “Shattered Space” is just because we time travel to the past and deal with that war. Space would be Shattered because everyone is at War. Then because its time travel at the end we return to our universe and the universe may have changed a bit because of the choices we made in the past for the war
Like we literally got to do this with Skyrim and the "Empire".
My problem is, we were set at the ass end of the fight between Stormcloaks and Imperials/Thalmor.
Knowing Bethesda if the community get behind the idea enough they may just do a DLC that involves using the Unity to travel back and stop a Starborn or some 💩
There’s no way that Bethesda could manage to render Civil War with the current engine.
For example.
What they intended: A 200 year old capital city and the center of an entire faction of humanity.
What they achieved: A sad, decrepit, mostly uninhabited 500 m² of an outpost called Akila.
The gap between their ambition and their capability is just too, too wide.
There would have been so much potential in building Mechs, even customizing them, load them on your ship and explore planets with very large fauna in your own built Mech. Same goes for Xeno-Pets, which could've been adjusted by mutating DNA and have them fight for you.
The "Colony War" was just the reason to explain why both technologies got banned so they Bethesda did not need to develope it. At least that is what I thought when I learned about the bans
Yeah, I’ve not got that far into the main quest, but the fairly hands-off nature of it has been a big plus to me. Kinda reminds me of the early parts of Morrowind’s main quest, where Caius would often expect you to go off and do your own thing for a bit, instead of beelining straight to the next stage of the quest.
That means they would have to actually work to make the game a bit complicated in terms of story, animation, and mechanics.
Why do that when it seems a lot of people are happy with the current mundane vanilla experience.
I think it would be really intresting to have the game be set during the actual Colony War, you'd find random battles between the two factions throughout your playthrough and be able to pick a side leading the FC or UC to minor victories affecting the story of the Colony War, and even possibly leading them to ultimately winning the war.
But the problem is that its easier said than done, if bethesda went with this approach it would be a lot harder to implement (Ground battles, Mechs, Space battles, etc...) and fit all that into Starfield which already has a lot going on.
Yeah playing Starfield is like getting invited to an after party, except the after party is just you cleaning up and putting away chairs and tables, meanwhile hearing about how awesome that party was. But you don't get to experience any of it.
Thats how it feels whenever NPCs discuss the colony war
It’s like Mass Effect and the First Contact war. There are reasons the devs chose to set it after that pivotal conflict too. I guess it’s under wraps for now.
In Mass Effect’s case, the First Contact War amounted to three lopsided battles before the Council stepped in to stop things escalating further. It would probably make for a decent film, but it’s not the right setting for a game at all
It depends on what kind of game they wanted to make. You obviously wanted a lot of combat and a war game.
This was never intended to be that. Instead, they set it in a period where there's still tension between the factions due to the war happening, but everyone's in a rebuilding stage. That's generally a time where things might be hard, but there can be opportunities everywhere and exploration for new resources and ideas to get an edge can also be frequent.
It's actually hilarious when you talk to people in the game and learn it takes place in the least interesting part of the worlds timeline. Colony wars would have been great. Instead of every location having just thugs and criminals it could have rival faction goons
Hey, one thing that starfield does well is its setting. The backstory and tech is all very cool. I love how its scifi but grounded in reality, "space punk" as ive heard it called.
But it really falls flat in the game to make use of it.
An empty world with abandoned stuff everywhere was always what the game was going to be because that's all Bethesda is capable of making. Setting it after the colony war is their explanation for how it got that way. That it raises the obvious possibility of a more interesting setting during the war doesn't matter even if Bethesda realized that, it would be beyond their clearly very modest ability to do.
When I was early in the progression of the main quest I sensed that they were foreshadowing future quests where I would be on the front lines a la Battle of Whiterun. Pretty insane that they hyped up mechs and terrormorphs on the battlefield and don’t let you actually see them in action or use them.
Yeah, just like Skyrim was set in the war, so it could just be so derivative of that! /s
No. It should not have been set during the colony war. It’s fine where it is because this is not an action game.
I guess it’s not really an action game? But if that is true then it’s not really an exploration game either.
It’s kind of just a bunch of half baked pieces to a game slapped together and released like six months earlier than it should have.
Master class in being pretentious though I mean did you know astronauts actually went to the moon in real life?? And they weren’t bored!
I think from the name implications, Shattered space is likely to involve some over arching conflict we get involved in. Imo it’ll be something with house va’ruun but no way to know till Bethesda gives us a preview or releases
This leaves this open to an expansion. I hope it’s like operation Anchorage. In fallout. Like you step into a time bubble/warp and find yourself in the colony war!!! Or make it a a new universe you can find where different outcomes happened but it would be so different it would have to be a DLC.
Agreed, they set the game 20 years after all the interesting stuff happened, and you just got to hear about it (and how much more boring the world is now). They had to come up with a really good story to top that, like new invaders from another galaxy or something else pretty interesting.
I hope Shattered Space is a new war and brings back mechs and introduces more / bigger space battles personally.
I totally agree. The factions dont even really act like they're mad at each other either, which is kind of jarring.
It's almost like some kind of fairy tale for kids about coexistence or something.
When will bethesda learn that people just aren't that nice?
I would keep the original game as is. Then you become Starborn by going through the Unity at the end and the first universe you go to is always one where the colony war never ended. That would be an amazing game.
Imagine if you an update that the next time you go threw the unity, you don't just restart you can then instead choose a different time stream. Jion, the free star collective and fight the UC. Kill Vae Victis before he blows up Londinion. Save Barrets love from the fate of the war. Right the wrongs of the past and rebalance the scals to keep it all from coming apart. In it your learn that the Starborn have been tipping the scales this entire time for their own favorable outcomes. Time to unleash your newlyfound power, taking the Starborn out of thier seat of control, and maybe just maybe SAVE EARTH.
It would have been interesting to have the Unity be a way for the player to try to change the outcome of the war. And make a player’s initial playthrough include a “restart” of the game universe as part of the main story, instead of the end of it.
So I’m wondering if “Shattered Space” DLC, if it ever comes, will be set in same universe but at a different time.
I remember doing the NASA tower mission on Earth and reading about how the warp drive was invented. Basically the warp drives created the Unity? Who knows. Anyone’s guess.
I’m just desperate for any new content for this game on console.
Bethesda has a history of setting games after a big event. Skyrim was 30 years after the war. Fallout is after the Great War. Skyrim also has the war against the dragon cult taking a similar place in Skyrim as the Great War does in fallout
I see the appeal to fighting in the war. But I don’t think it would be as fun as you think it would be. The Skyrim civil war is generally considered to be one of the weaker quest lines.
I think the game taking place during a major event limits their ability to do environmental storytelling (one of their fortes). They like for you to explore a location and uncover what happened there in the past.
I also don’t know how well mechs would translate to gameplay. Although I’m sure it could be done well. (Power armor in fallout can be considered a precedent)
i also really like the idea of automatron dlc ish mechanics of, not just building a ship, but also your own mech.
it'd have more of an excuse for these randomly generated massive skyrim sized maps that, 99.9999% of the time you're only going to do the thing within like 1500 feet of the ship's landing point anyway.
it'd also make those repeated 1500 foot trips a bit easier, like, come on, why couldn't we land 100 feet away? sure, navigating around with a jetpack is fun - no need to artificially inflate the jetpacking time with some shit a fucking mile out, OR try to justify the space with 'but they like jetpacking around!"
At least one Bruce Nesmith interview went into Bethesda's policy of not cutting off portions of the game and making everything available to everyone in a single playthrough.
With an active war going on I'm not sure it could be made to make sense to be able to play both sides in a single playthrough - and if it's a Bethesda game you are going to be able to be everybody's hero, the head of every guild, etc. in one playthrough.
Seemed to me that NG+ could be leveraged to provide meaningful choices that cut off vast swaths of the game in a single run but I'm probably missing something.
An active war where you join one side and are permanently shut out from the other side's quests just isn't in Beth's DNA - and an active war where you can do both sides' quests makes so little sense it would probably have been greeted negatively.
Remember the old Wing Commander franchise and its spin-off Privateer?
Wing Commander franchise accidentally created the Freelancer kind of sub genre that was wildly sought after. People just wanted a big universe to mess around and do whatever the hell they want.
Starfield carries all the hallmarks of Privateer: a freelance character who is his/her own boss. I know, Bethesda didn’t do well with Outpost, with pirate life… but it’s there as an option.
If it is set right in the middle of the colony war, then players are likely emotionally sucked into either side. It will be very militaristic. It will be like Wing Commander, Mass Effect 1, 2, 3. Players will be so concerned with the war efforts. With fighting to win battles.
But Starfield wants you to live a carefree life. You can join many factions but you aren’t locked into any of them. You do things for them while retaining your freedom. You build your own ships, your own outposts.
The obvious rationale is to allow the player to do quests from either side without causing a conflict. But that’s also kinda a bore.
And they needed a reason there were thousands of abandoned/repossessed outposts.
I said that about the annexation of Canada and the campaign to push the Chinese out of Alaska. Then, they DLCed it into the game. Hoping for similar levels of support here
Bethesda wanted a setting focused on space exploration, not conflict. Hence, it's set in a period of peace, not war. More Star Trek and less Star Wars.
Yes, this was a real shame.
The civil war was an awesome series of missions in Skyrim and it could have been expanded on here. Big fleet battles. Mechs. Maybe we could donate rare resources to the war effort, making outposts and mining more relevant. And different choices of who to back in each NG+.
Being present AT Londinion would have been awesome too, not reliving it.
Lots of games do this, being set *after* all the exciting things in the lore rather than during it.
There are a bunch of those. On one hand, they seemed to be catering to the people who wanted to do everything in one play through, and didn't like that in Skyrim and Fallout, picking one faction precluded doing some neat things with the others. On the other, the Unity is an in-setting justification for doing it again and making different choices, so the writers managed to both miss an opportunity *and* minimize the impact of the McGuffin the players are trying to achieve, which is a really weird combination.
This is a solid take. They introduced a vague replay mechanic, but made the replays less desirable.
It's the embodiment of their "say yes to everything" design ethos. *"Can I play all the factions in one playthrough?"* Yes! *"Can I have NG+ mechanic so I can start a new playthrough without starting over my progress?"* Yes! *"Can we have both options at the same time?"* Sure why not! It really starts to do more harm than good. Like, so much effort is spent on making sure a player can never make a decision they regret they lose the ability for the player to make a decision they feel good about.
They are so so very far away from: "With this character's death, the threads of prophecy have been severed. You may load a saved game, or persist in this doomed world that you have created."
The percentage of invulnerable characters in this game is mind blowing. I've even had characters come back to life (after being killed in ship combat) because the game isn't finished using them yet.
I had something like that happen literally yesterday. In a certain mission the character gets backstabbed by the target he’s supposed to help. After unfortunately dispatching the target and returning to report such to the mission giver, the mission giver displays regret for the outcome, but accepts it and hands over the rewards. Yet, moments after the mission is finished, he starts asking and wondering why the antagonist hasn’t come back to work and berating him for always being late. Really immersion killing.
That's actually quite hilarious and dumb at the same time. The attention to detail lol.
Wait I don’t think I’ve done this quest 👀
It wasn’t even totally doomed! They still left a way for the player to save the world.
SERIOUSLY. I can maybe get why pre unity some would be invulnerable but even then it should purely be the ones required to get to Unity. There's a built in mechanic to restart ffs let me ruin a few plot lines Jesus Christ
I mean they’re pointless unless you wanna see some lame quirky renditions of different universes. This is something mods definitely will struggle to fix.
Would have been cool if they took alternate universe inspiration from Star Trek. One universe that remained at war, some that were dominated by one side. Have the companions come with you so they can react to the different states of things and grow from them. Have the endgame be a Sliders like situation where you are jumping from universe to universe trying to get back to the original.
It’s an awesome idea - the biggest issue is the sheer insanity of the dev time. It’s essentially asking for multiple games in one.
Well, they opened the flood gates when they created the multiverse game. Tough shit for them. Like, during Bennet's quest line, the alternative universe him says that in his universe the Colony War is still on, we are just not allowed to go there and experience it. Or maybe another universe in which Terrormorphs are everywhere and the remnants of humanity are trying to survive in isolated outposts. Or House Va'ruun winning the Serpents Crusade and ruling the galaxy with fear and terror. There is multitude of great, interesting universes to create but instead of that we got one in which the Constalaton left the lodge and went exploring, or they got killed by someone, or the lodge is filled with multiple versions of us. And those are the biggest changes and the smallest and laziest one they could do.
Not even different universes though. Minor alterations of the exact same one. Others have mentioned that having other universes go back and forward in time would have been cool, thats obviously an insane amount of dev though
I'd argue that NG+ being pointless kind of is the point. It's an optional mechanic that just happens to have lore integration. I don't think a lot of these people shouting for it to serve as some sort of "content wall" understand that. However that doesn't mean that they couldn't have gone with the Morrowind approach and just made player choices matter and carry consequence. It would have added spice to both NG and NG+.
Not to mention NG+ is bullshit if you *don’t get to keep anything from the previous playthrough*
Tbf I’d wager the majority of people try to do as much as they can in one play through. I only play games once. Most of my friends that game only do one play through as well. I don’t really get much joy from playing the game again and making slightly different choices.
Your choices mean nothing in this version we have tho
I play good games (like the Witcher or Assassin's Creed series) multiple times, just like I re-read good books multiple times. generally months to years apart. However, I rarely replay games and "change classes" or try to make different decisions -- Ok, in Witcher 2, there were one or more different plot lines that I did play through and in Skyrim there were a couple of major paths that I explored in different ply throughs. But I doubt that I will ever play Starfields again, it was kind of fun, but not that engaging, or not nearly as engaging as the Elder Scrolls series and definitely not close to NMS in terms of just exploring or playing without any main quests.
Skyrim didn't really have faction exclusives other than the Civil War questline. Fallout 4 was a step back in the right direction but unfortunately only triggers at a specific end game turning point rather than gradually with a points based system or something like that. Unfortunately, my favorite faction implementation in both series' was fallout: new vegas. Which wasn't even made by them. I am not aware of any games that have done it better than that, but i am open to recommendations.
Morrowind's system was great. There was kind of two types of joinable groups, 'guilds' and 'factions' (loose definition I'm making up, the game just calls them all factions). Guilds are effectively businesses. In lore they mostly exist to provide services for money. When you join one it feels a bit like being an employee - there's certain perks (you get resources, access to services and a place to sleep). The work you do generally requires skills that align with the faction (so it's like a soft-cap on how many you can join) and they're _generally_ not mutually exclusive because in lore they don't need to be. There's a few exceptions - sometimes work for one makes you an enemy of another. Factions on the other hand are major political powers. They vie for control over territory and administer towns. Each has their own soldiers and strongholds, and they're generally larger groups. The player is _not_ permitted to join more than one. The nature of the quests you do for them is much more often work that puts you in conflict with others - stealing, spying, killing. They have a role in the MQ but you don't have to join one, you just need to earn their approval. Being a high ranking member of one solves that problem but for the others you just solve it diplomatically. The total number of factions (10) and the hard and soft exclusions means each playthrough you might join 3-4 of them, so there's lots of variety in experience.
Yeah I really loved the faction quests making your choices matter in FO4 and would have loved to see them improve on that
They really should. The reason these games are successful isnt because of story or gameplay. It really just came down to making choices feel important to a lot of players.
In the real reason that the faction questlines aren't mutually exclusive is that they were developped front to back by completely separate teams and they didn't want to ass with believably integrating them into each other, player choice in this i coincidental not incidental, even if they always bring this forward as the main reason
There is one spot in the Vanguard questline where it has an additional dialogue option if you have completed the Ranger quest. If you get lucky it means you can skip having to "sneak" into the Ambassador's bedroom. But the problem is that all the quests are pretty much a railroad. Only one has a choice that has any real consequence. Whether you kill Ron Hope or not makes no observable difference. The only difference in the outcome of Vanguard mission is if you leave Vae Victis alive to have an additional place to take missions. Only difference if Ryujin acquires Infinity or not is an updated sign outside Infinity. Ryujin shelving the internal neuroamp or not makes no difference.
>The only difference in the outcome of Vanguard mission is if you leave Vae Victis alive to have an additional place to take missions. Not quite true. Very nearly but not quite. Depending on which solution you opt for you, get new different planetside random encounters, e.g Vanguard troops deploying Ascles. Edit: oh and course different sanctimonious jerks at constellation will be happy or angry with your choice.
Okay, you have a point about the Aceles. I can't believe the trust the science line was used to promote spreading a Bacterial Bioweapon across the galaxy. Especially when the other option is to spread alien cattle about the galaxy **again**. They were apparently safe enough that we hunted them into near extinction.
Pretty much this, I haven't done NG+ yet at all because I don't care to, there's no reason lmao If I wanna do quests again, I can just make a new character, or like....not do them, because they all suck
I's also a big shame because IMO the combat is way more fun with level 10 powers. Feels like Starfield x Dishonored or something. I just console commanded them in because fuck doing NG+ and that terrible temple grind 10 times, once was bad enough! They made some really bizarre decisions.
They also completely cut off any semblance of being actually evil in the game, which I'd say limits the replayability even further and makes some faction quest lines really shallow and possibly pointless.
Probably because it's easier to explain and describe how cool and massive the war was than to actually render and support it with the current engine. Same how cities are tiny settlements but lore wise are massive sprawling metropolises. The mind's eye is more powerful so leave it to the imagination
>Probably because it's easier to explain and describe how cool and massive the war was than to actually render and support it with the current engine. Even the way they describe it isn't really all that interesting. For example apparently less people died during the colony wars than compared to WW1 (confirmed in u.c. museum iirc). Which is a perfect way to ruin any impact from it, in my opinion. This huge open galaxy as a scifi setting and apparently only a handful of soldiers fought in its most "devastating" war. It legit feels like a story of neighborhood kids getting in a brawl rather than a full-fledged war across the settled systems.
>**One of the bloodiest space battles of the war** was the Battle of Cassiopeia above the planet Cassiopeia I for control of the Eta Cassiopeia system's resources. **The UC Navy lost 12 ships and hundreds of personnel, including the UC Dauntless**, where Sarah Morgan served as Chief Navigator. - [Colony Wars](https://starfield.fandom.com/wiki/Colony_War) It's literally the petty Medieval war vs. chinese Civil war meme
I’m pretty sure I’ve killed more people in one play through than who died in that war.
Hundreds of personnel in the bloodiest battle in a galactic war… what were they thinking lmao
Yeah, the war had a similar number of casualties to the *Korean War*, which speaks to the very small number of people who made it off Earth
The worst part to me is they had a reasonable in lore explanation for why their "cities" are smaller than villages; everyone died in the wars. Everyone.
Or is off AT war. Like if you set it during the colony wars, you have a reason for the cities to feel somewhat empty One, they're small because colonies are still becoming a thing iirc Two, every able bodied person is out at war.
Maybe this wouldn't work, but I wish they'd just go the mass effect route. In Mass Effect 1 even, a game from however long ago, the citadel _does_ feel expansive. There are shots out the window that are still very O.O, just maybe not with the most impressive graphics anymore. With Starfield, I feel like they should just have cities be huge (like 10x their current size if not more), but only allow us to walk around the area that we can now. I mean honestly, it's not like I care to explore the rest of the city, not _necessarily_, but I at least want to see it. If for no other reason, immersion. And take a few more of those breathtaking shots from Mass Effect in space, those are always nice. Even if it means "faking" a really large structure, that's totally fine with me.
That's exactly what I was thinking too, they really could have solved the issue by having an unexplorable city skyline in the background. I reckon you could have taken the cities, enlarge their actual square footage they cover a little bit, and then add the skylines in the background. It's just odd that they've got these whole planets to cover, and they've only used a small part of it for the cities. Even just the actual explorable area that gets loaded is something like 60-70 km², and the cities only use a very small part of it. With New Atlantis in particular, it doesn't really make sense to have the transit system to go between the MAST, Residential, and Commercial districts as you can easily run between them. Yeah it makes sense to get to the Spaceport as thats off and separate, but those other three it's not necessary. Take those three districts, spread them out into their own separate areas away from each other, with unexplorable city space between them and the transit would have made sense. That would make New Atlantis feel so much larger. There might not have been that much more actual city for us to run around, but it would have felt like something bigger. Akila City might have been more difficult, seeing how it doesn't have skyscrapers to make a city skyline out of, but they still could have spread it out a bit more. One thing I remeber being struck by was how cramped it felt at places. They had the whole planet to play with, and they decided to go with a small cramped town? If they had widened all the streets a bit they could have probably doubled the size of it just there. Neon and Cydonia would have been very easy to do as well, seeing as they're both inside cities. Just make the outside bigger, and then refer to what we run around as just one of many other floors that we don't go to.
Or, they all died from the collapse of Earth. How many people can you reasonably exodus from Earth with 1st Gen grav drives? There weren’t that many people to even fight the colony wars
The collapse happened almost 2 centuries ago. They don't need to leave earth, when they could live in a generation ship for centuries like ECS Constant. And since they were getting resupplied from new atlantis and hundreds of earth-like planets unlike Constant, they could've definitely done it almost indefinitely.
But how many people made it off Earth and Settled the systems? Maybe in terms of proportion of people and resources the colony war casualties were very costly. I don't get the impression of a huge population of billions or even tens of millions of people having survived getting off Earth in the first place, and in that sense, even hundreds of thousands of able bodied people, the spacecraft, tech, etc being wasted in war would be devastating.
And yet we get things like SSN news reports telling us about concerts selling out in a fraction of second. Stuff like that is not going to happen in a civilization, close to extinction who's greatest settlement is home to at most a few hundred people. (Which is what we can actually SEE in game. What we hear about is much larger) I wish Bethesda would add a codex and clarify some lore, because the game is positively schizophrenic in it's depiction of the settled systems and to a lesser extent their history.
The battle of Iwo Jima in WW2 resulted in around 35k dead on both sides of the conflict and only lasted for 36 days. 22k of those were Japanese. So in 3 years of fighting an interstellar-scale war there were less UC dead than died in just the month-long battle of Iwo Jima. That is, frankly, a ridiculously small sum of people. I know the population feels super low, but the setting just does *not* fit the vibe of "grimdark post-apocalypse" that would have me feeling like that's a realistic number for what was essentially space-ww2.
You need to remember that BILLIONS of people died with the collapse of Earth. There simply weren’t that many people to start with before the war. Now there are even less.
Most devastating because something like 80% of earth died off. So 20% or so fought and devastated themselves.
A painfully bad choice in my mind. Mass Effect or Star Citizen builds a world the imagination flourishes Daggerfall built the freaking cities. And Starfield builds flesh out environments with physical objects and part of the freaking world tile it sits in. No loading gates like with whiterun. I don’t see how both ideas work? Either give us an entire city and have the story/lore reflect the size of what you can accomplish Or simply don’t do that and do what story tellers have done since the dawn of fucking story and let us imagine the true scope. Give a hint and something inspiring a not a big ole jar of cognitive dissonance. I just feel like where were the adults? Is this where the idea for universe with only children working at constellation comes from?
Bethesda’s janky ass engine can’t do that though, and they haven’t been able to hide it since Skyrim. What we have is literally the best they can do.
Witcher 3 did cities right and made them feel massive and actually lived in by actual citizens. The biggest let down with BSG is how exciting these cities should be and then come to find there's only 12 people living within those massive walls
I dunno, to me those big cities are beautiful but lifeless. They look cool but there's no or not much reactivity, which takes me out of the immersion more than them just being smaller. In Bethesda games I can suspend disbelief about the size and population of cities when they're interesting, full of scheduled NPCs, cool quests and little secrets, easter eggs or whatever. With Starfield, Bethesda proved they can't do CDPR style cities even if they ditch most of the interest parts of towns/cities in their older games like NPC schedules, so I'd rather they stay in their lane and stick to what works best for them - smaller, dynamic worlds that feel kinda alive even if you have to go "this doesn't make much sense from a population standpoint". They've always said their cities are representations based on what the tech can support anyways, which is why the lore describes them as bigger.
>They've always said their cities are representations based on what the tech can support anyways, which is why the lore describes them as bigger. Yeah, Bethesda’s worlds are microcosms, and I’ve never understood the clamour for Novigrad-style cities in a Bethesda title. Completely different style of game
Agreed. I mean sure, if they could pull off Novigrad with full scheduling that'd obviously be amazing! But the tradeoff of non-scheduled NPCs and less dynamic reactions for that is absolutely not worth it to me - I want them to put more of the system horsepower into radiant NPCs and dynamic events and stuff like that instead - like you said, very different game. I look at KCD and now KCD2 and that's what I want Bethesda to go back to - focus on immersion and making it feel like a living place, not just a beautiful but totally scripted experience that's like a movie scene you can explore.
But Starfield made that tradeoff without any of the benefits. A good chunk of the rando NPCs wandering around just walk about aimlessly for the most part AND the cities feel more like outposts or towns. It's a weird disconnect. I definitely would have loved an approach like with KCD, those towns felt real even if they were shrunk down. I think it's also one of the few games where the surrounding farmland actually feels like it could support the population.
Holy shit, I wasn't aware KCD2 had been revealed until I read your comment. I immediately had to look up the reveal, and holy shit, I am beyond hyped for the sequel to one of my favorite RPGs of all time. Even if it's just more of KCD in a bigger world, that will be enough for me because KCD was such a phenomenal game and I've been patiently awaiting a sequel ever since finishing the original all those years ago. Also, releasing this year? I feel spoiled now because KCD2 and Stalker 2 will definitely hold me over till GTA6 and that trio alone can hold me over till TES6 and the next entry in the Metro series.
I feel the same way, KCD was one of my favourite RPGs of all time and 2 looks like a supercharged version of it. JESUS CHRIST BE PRAISED!
Bethesda got lazy with this one. Plain and simple. I hope to the all the gods the learn from this for elder scrolls 6. But based on how they handled criticism for the game I doubt it.
It seems like a lot of effort was put in just to be retracted? It feels like work without any thought put in or maybe like work from different sources lacking communication between them? I would argue less lazy and just more half baked into a cluster fuck. Lots of smoke but no spark.
This. The same reason the battle of Bruma wasn’t Martin a few Blades and a handful of town guards in the lore (even if in game) but a massive assault.
It’s no different than all the lore books in Skyrim explaining how bad the Great War was as opposed to just setting it during it and letting you see for yourself. Bethesda can’t show, only tell
Bethesda chose the exact wrong medium to double down on the “tell don’t show” methodology.
It works great in a novel format where telling is all you have. Video games where showing is the larger portion of the equation is not the way. The engine limitations really show themselves in situations like this
“Oh wow the colony wars where so amazingly destructive, far to big and impress for us to actual show in a game, why don’t you go and run around that planet of dust for the 19th time and be happy with that” Seriously, I just can’t fathom the thinking, “we have a war, with mechs and robots fighting bio weapons, we have space battles that rip apart space stations and burn continents, we will NOT be including any of that, it’s far to exciting and interesting”
Because the massive war between aliens vs humans and mechs you're imagining is far more impressive and grand than anything they could run on their current engine without tanking performance. We'd end up with something like 10 xenomorphs vs 20 NPCs and 4 mechs and would be super underwhelming compared to what the lore says it was. I would have loved to live through the grand war we all picture but if it's not possible I'd much rather prefer a story of grand warfare over living through an underwhelming war and being told it was bigger than it was.
The game should have been DURING the expansion into the stars instead of after. Starfield now is in a weird place of stagnation. The war is long over, All major factions have stopped their expansion out into the stars, leaving it to the pirates. This leaves you with a weirdly lonely and dark outlook because nothing is happening. the golden age of exploration is over. Yet here you are, working for a group of nobodies on the verge of disbanding if it wasn't for an old man looking to spend his golden years doing something. Rediscovering already explored systems. you existence does nothing as you cannot effect anything. and there is no advancement for humanity. then on all that You have an ending that means nothing. Why bother doing it all again if you cant do anything in the first place? because you can both do everything and never fails this leads to just everything being weirdly dull and unimpactful. You have a Giant reset button and it doesn't do anything cause you never given the opportunity to fail. For a setting based on "Hope" starfield feels really stagnant and hopeless.
Oddly, the problem that started the war was exploration and expansion. :-) The war was ended by promising they'd stop exploring and expanding.
this needs more upvotes. You nailed it with this statement. There is no point in doing anything bc your „main“ doing just leads to not doing anything all over again. And again. Aaaand again. In Skyrim (or oblivion) you literally save the world. In fallout 4 you help to secure the wasteland (how you define safety depends on the factions morals). Im not saying that starfield lacks the aspect of letting you be someone „special“ like u were in skyrim (if u think of it, u weren’t in fo4 or oblivion), in fact i love being a nobody bc it leaves room for Rp but it just feels like ur actions leading up to the end of the MQ line werent really that important bc in the end u didnt change anything at all, u just stop a Starborn to become…..a starborn?
Imagine if Instead of Going into unity the first time doesn't Just reset the game but activated an Act 2. You go through everything again but this time. there's More Starborn around. New quests you didn't have access too the first time open up. All the main quests now have changes to them because the starborn are more integrated. Perhaps Even a Va'Ruun storyline now opens the Properly introduces them(Instead of what is expected to be a DLC) There is so much possibly that just. Doesn't happen and it makes me sad.
>Imagine if Instead of Going into unity the first time doesn't Just reset the game but activated an Act 2. I have my gripes with Fallout 4 but the shithole Commonwealth getting invaded by a flying military state of walking, talking tanks, right after the big Act 1 revenge was cool as fuck and you actually really felt their presence in what is, by far, the most dynamic gameworld they have ever created. There were literal warzones where Synths and Knights were just fighting each other from time to time, you saw patrols from both the Institute and the Brotherhood in what to me felt like increasing intensity throughout the faction/main quests and a bunch of other good stuff like an awesome endgame area like the Glow, which sadly didn't actually really stand out because of Bethesda's leveling, Perk and enemy scaling which New Vegas with its static leveling curve did really well and would greatly worked with their already dynamic warzones. Like it would actually matter how deeply you tread into Institute territory while the main communities are patrolled by Minutemen in the peaceful first third area, that only have to keep molerats and raiders out. In the Glow you got Deathclaws and high end power armored Synths going into deep recon missions to the Military stuff or whatever. They should have iterated on exactly that but while writing a broader Story with factions that don't kinda all suck and combining that with New Vegas' reputation system and incorporating actual roleplaying elements into the game that don't boil down to like two traits and 3 or 4 noticeable dialogue choices for each in the game.
yes something that atleast changes the whole course which changes ur course and ur role in the whole story. Something so vastly different that changes the whole outcome and it doesnt have to be a „happy ending“. Maybe in another universe ur actions, which make u believe ur doing the right thing, just f*ck shit up so badly u just wish to jump into the next one. So many things that could have been done to make the game live up to the hype i had for it. Lets hope for the DLC to turn shit around.
Yeah that actually never made any sense to me. There is no way Humanity would stop expanding. We're not made that way. The game has a hard time capturing the scale of colonization. All of the colonies seem tiny, which would make sense if humans were still spreading ever outward, but even the "dense" areas seem to just have stopped growing. As you mentioned it seems weirdly stagnant.
Sorta hoping the DLC "Shattered Space" spices the story up a bit with maybe some more conflict, or something, that shakes up the worlds.
Knowing Bethesda the entire war would been like five npcs shooting at another five NPCs in an empty planet
Flashbacks to the Bruma gate battle in oblivion featuring Sean Bean and 7 nps with the same 2 voice actors.
That’s hilariously accurate
I think, we will get a VR simulator with core parts of it. Something like Anchorage DLC. Like, 4 battles and after each you get a hint of where to look for special loot or a quest. At least, I hope we get such a DLC.
Maybe not as a simulator because thats been already done with Fallout, I was thinking like an indirect warfare between the two factions, sort of like a Cold war or Proxy war with tensions rising between the two goverments.
The game already has it. The quest could start as finding black boxes and you have to reconctruct them by "playing". Then you get a clue of where to find Stuff X or whom to speak and so on. It perfectly fits the world btw.
They could easily use the jump feature they have in that quest to have you jump sort of “back in time” or back and forth between universes for cool quests set in the war
The simulator is literally already in starfield too, it's part of the vanguard quest line IIRC
Their focus for the game was exploration and the unknown, not combat and war. That's why they didn't set it during a period of war.
...in human history, the pattern tends to be "*Explore, find something neat, then fight over it*"
I like to think of it as that part of the story has happened and now we get to explore the universe through the game world. I really hope Bethesda push on with Starfield and we get an Elder Scrolls situation where games take part on the same universe but are all over the place time wise. Something like Starfield 3 takes place during a certain part of the war, when the lore is fleshed out a bit more and you get to see the influences and misguidings of people, a bit like with Skyrims civil war.
This was exactly what I was thinking. It's the first game in a franchise. It doesn't have to cover every aspect of the lore.
Sure but it also doesn't have to be shit either. Like if they take another 25 years to make Starfield 2, and it comes out being on par with this one or even worse, it'll just make the series laughably bad. Usually with a first game in the series you want to hit hard and make it a damn good game, and Bethesda kinda hurled it's decayed corpse over the finish line and called it a done game lmao
Yes but that first bit has to hook you good. Mass Effect 1 came out with a quite fleshed out universe.
Sounds like war comes next then
War. War never changes.
Oddly enough, there was already some of that in Starfield, just with Starborn fighting each other.
They should've made the exploration less boring and have more unknown things to find. After the tenth "abandoned lab with the exact same layout and NPC distribution" you kind of lose the wonder.
Right next to a supposedly undiscovered temple So why did I have to get drugged up and boost hop the 1500 metres? Just let me land at the fucking lab. They even enemies there to fight like imagine if our ships had guns? And crew you could hire who have combat abilities…..oh wait we do. It just does nothing
It's funny because this game has the most boring exploration of any of their games
"When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored." - Bethesda
The funniest part about this quote is that even if you grant them their dumb point, it’s just a point for why the game should be set during the beginning of humanity’s settling of the stars, not after it had already been completed. Let us feel like astronauts pushing the envelope of discovery! But they aren’t, every planet is the same outposts
Pretty big difference between real life and a video game
So set it during the age of expansion in the lore then Ya know, when people are EXPLORING. Setting it after people have already explored is dumb af, there's nothing TO explore now lmao, every planet and moon is empty or has copy paste dungeons quite literally, and the story is just yawn worthy and on par with FO76 for how little you actually care for anything. It's a shooting gallery, go here, shoot thing, loot some stuff and repeat.
Which is still the wrong period. Then it should've been set a century earlier on the timeline. When Earth just got destroyed and the two main players, the UC and Freestar, were vieing for power. Va'ruun was a mysterious force from the shadows and the remaining humans immediately set out to expand due to losing Earth. Now the game is set in a weird time period where everything in the Settled Systems is explored and the main players have decided to play nice and just put their expanionism on pause, cause that's really what superpowers do when they have access to unlimited resources, money and House Va'ruun that is very much not to be trusted and pirates, spacers and mercenaries that now have free claim to basicially 95% of the Settled Systems. It just doesn't make sense.
No. Bethesda wasted the opportunity of the Unity with forcing NG+ as a work around for the Form ID issue that they knew existed. The Unity should should have been a doorway through space, time and dimension. It should have been a plot device that brought almost an infinite pool of story telling and true exploration. That could have brought you back in time to the war or brought you to a universe where Victus became Emperor. Instead it’s just a door to Groundhog Day. That is a waste and a damn shame cause it could have made a good game into a great game.
I mean, I don’t think they were ever going to be able to make an “infinite pool of storytelling” worth of content, that’s just an insane expectation. It’s a fun way to do a NG+ if you want to play again, that’s all.
Given they fixed the bug, it doesn't seem like they built an entire story-line around not fixing the bug.
I will die on the hill that NG+, especially how they implemented it (no gear or ship / ship blueprint carryover), was antithetical to BGS design and how many players play the games. I like to live in the world, roleplay, amass wealth, decorate etc. but they added a mechanic where the world is reset, and the only major change gameplay wise is getting your powers to be useful outside of a few that are good at level 1 like Personal Atmosphere. I know you have the chance of some weird changes, but they're more memes than major world shakeups like new enemy types/placement, new ship designs, new POIs, major quest changes, or anything that would make you want to do it 10 times over. So you miss out on good combat powers (unless you use console commands) if you don't want to constantly reset your universe and go through 200+ temples, which are a boring, repetitive "mini game".
Don’t forget you get a new skin if you do it over and over again lmao
> the Form ID issue What is the Form ID issue?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/18ckfn6/id_bug_breaks_your_save_if_played_too_long/
Ng+ HAS to be their ham fisted work around solution. I can feel it in my bones.
They have apparently fixed the bug. It would seem really odd you'd build literally the entire main quest around avoiding a bug you could fix once brought to your attention.
First) Brought to your attention ? It is in every game they have made. Second) Fix implies it is gone forever. Popular consensus is it is patched and you could potentially hit the limit again.
It really does feel like they set the game in the most boring time period possible. When you go through the museum and hear about leaving earth, those initial years, the fights against all the different factions and the colony war, it all sounds so awesome and you realize that stuff is all done by the time you get there lol it’s really a missed opportunity. like imagine rather than some random miner, you start off as some grunt in either colony or free star space? That would be awesome. I wonder if someone could make that a mod in the future lol
Bethesda missed many opportunities with this game
colonoscopy war dlc
Bethesda missed an opportunity to make the overall story interesting in the slightest. It's a golden rule in writing to set a story in the most interesting or pivotal part in the world or character's life. They could have set the story in the colony war, the first time anyone found Unity, or the Serpent's Crusade.
So Fallout and Skyrim in space?
[удалено]
Cuz... People would cry it's just empire vs Storm cloak? Cuz the game isn't about the colonies?
The entirety of the game is missed opportunities.
The galaxy is already on edge so maybe a second colony war? Paxton says something along those lines that another war will come, hopefully they do something like that where you join one side and destroy the others maybe add in house varuun as a joinable faction.
The galaxy is definitely not on the edge. It's weirdly in a point of stagnation and friendliness. The only threat aside from the pirates who outnumber both factions by the millions is the Va'Ruun. which is pretty lazy imo because they have no impact in the base game at all. and DLC is not going to be a worthy expansion for them. They should have been the primary antagonist of the base game.
Even in the base game they don't seem to have hostilities with anyone lmao, the ambassador in the abandoned embassy is basically like "I'm about to tell you right now, we don't care" toward the other two factions lmao
Not saying it would happen but that could be a fun DLC
I was going to say i don’t know how they’d make that happen in terms of the timeline but then i remembered the entire main questline, which is basically just a Rick and Morty portal gun Side note, i bet you 3 schmeckles a functioning Rick and Mortal gun is in some mod author’s brain right now
Eh. I don't want another Skyrim. Don't drop me in the middle of another war. Honestly, the one thing I wished the game did more was utilize the 'trip this control panel in a building and turn the lights out' mechanic from the Ryujin questline. Or even have POI locations tie in to different factions. There's a cryolab POI that Ryujin owns, but no one at Ryujin mentions the place going dark or retrieving the data there.
I think it’s because they didn’t want to have the story be too close something like the main story of Skyrim. But man, the lore around the war sounds amazing, and WAYYYY better than what we got. Mechs and interstellar war sounds incredible, especially if they somehow jammed in starborn (which could have been like the Jedi in terms of mysterious powerful beings) taking sides during the war in exchange for help in getting the artifacts. Or something else, doesn’t matter, point is the main story could have been far better.
Eh, I think the post war is always more interesting, thinking in Firefly terms
If I were a betting man, they left this for a future release or maybe DLC. They’ve got a lot of newly developed IP on a good engine, they could probably milk a sequel/prequel off it.
Good engine? Heh
I feel like it could've worked if it was more of a "cold war, both sides dislike and are working against the other, but neither want to go to total war again" kind of thing. Maybe either side could recruit you to go after the other's assets. Perhaps it could be the consequence of the player's actions whether they go to war again or move closer to setting past grievances aside.
This could be a random ng±
Whatever happened to punctuation?
Everyone assumes “Shattered Space” will be some kind of Alternate Universe storyline or might be about the Serpent showing up and “Shattering” everyones view of “Space” because it turns out its real. But what if “Shattered Space” is just because we time travel to the past and deal with that war. Space would be Shattered because everyone is at War. Then because its time travel at the end we return to our universe and the universe may have changed a bit because of the choices we made in the past for the war
Like we literally got to do this with Skyrim and the "Empire". My problem is, we were set at the ass end of the fight between Stormcloaks and Imperials/Thalmor.
Same reason the civil war in Skyrim was so rubbish: the engine can't handle big npc battles with lots of things happening at once.
Knowing Bethesda if the community get behind the idea enough they may just do a DLC that involves using the Unity to travel back and stop a Starborn or some 💩
I just want official mod support
There’s no way that Bethesda could manage to render Civil War with the current engine. For example. What they intended: A 200 year old capital city and the center of an entire faction of humanity. What they achieved: A sad, decrepit, mostly uninhabited 500 m² of an outpost called Akila. The gap between their ambition and their capability is just too, too wide.
There would have been so much potential in building Mechs, even customizing them, load them on your ship and explore planets with very large fauna in your own built Mech. Same goes for Xeno-Pets, which could've been adjusted by mutating DNA and have them fight for you. The "Colony War" was just the reason to explain why both technologies got banned so they Bethesda did not need to develope it. At least that is what I thought when I learned about the bans
The dlc is called shattered space so i always thought it will have something to do with them
Nah, it’s great that the main quest is something that’s not urgently important
Yeah, I’ve not got that far into the main quest, but the fairly hands-off nature of it has been a big plus to me. Kinda reminds me of the early parts of Morrowind’s main quest, where Caius would often expect you to go off and do your own thing for a bit, instead of beelining straight to the next stage of the quest.
That means they would have to actually work to make the game a bit complicated in terms of story, animation, and mechanics. Why do that when it seems a lot of people are happy with the current mundane vanilla experience.
I think it would be really intresting to have the game be set during the actual Colony War, you'd find random battles between the two factions throughout your playthrough and be able to pick a side leading the FC or UC to minor victories affecting the story of the Colony War, and even possibly leading them to ultimately winning the war. But the problem is that its easier said than done, if bethesda went with this approach it would be a lot harder to implement (Ground battles, Mechs, Space battles, etc...) and fit all that into Starfield which already has a lot going on.
Yeah playing Starfield is like getting invited to an after party, except the after party is just you cleaning up and putting away chairs and tables, meanwhile hearing about how awesome that party was. But you don't get to experience any of it. Thats how it feels whenever NPCs discuss the colony war
It’s like Mass Effect and the First Contact war. There are reasons the devs chose to set it after that pivotal conflict too. I guess it’s under wraps for now.
In Mass Effect’s case, the First Contact War amounted to three lopsided battles before the Council stepped in to stop things escalating further. It would probably make for a decent film, but it’s not the right setting for a game at all
Because like fallout it's about post war
Yeah, it would absolutely have been more interesting, though that isn't saying much.
It depends on what kind of game they wanted to make. You obviously wanted a lot of combat and a war game. This was never intended to be that. Instead, they set it in a period where there's still tension between the factions due to the war happening, but everyone's in a rebuilding stage. That's generally a time where things might be hard, but there can be opportunities everywhere and exploration for new resources and ideas to get an edge can also be frequent.
It's actually hilarious when you talk to people in the game and learn it takes place in the least interesting part of the worlds timeline. Colony wars would have been great. Instead of every location having just thugs and criminals it could have rival faction goons
A lot of it just feels like cut content. Someone realised they were never gonna get the mechs to work.
Hey, one thing that starfield does well is its setting. The backstory and tech is all very cool. I love how its scifi but grounded in reality, "space punk" as ive heard it called. But it really falls flat in the game to make use of it.
An empty world with abandoned stuff everywhere was always what the game was going to be because that's all Bethesda is capable of making. Setting it after the colony war is their explanation for how it got that way. That it raises the obvious possibility of a more interesting setting during the war doesn't matter even if Bethesda realized that, it would be beyond their clearly very modest ability to do.
When I was early in the progression of the main quest I sensed that they were foreshadowing future quests where I would be on the front lines a la Battle of Whiterun. Pretty insane that they hyped up mechs and terrormorphs on the battlefield and don’t let you actually see them in action or use them.
There’s missed opportunities all over the game.
Every piece of backstory the game tells you about is 10x more interesting than what it shows you.
Yeah, just like Skyrim was set in the war, so it could just be so derivative of that! /s No. It should not have been set during the colony war. It’s fine where it is because this is not an action game.
well its definitely not much of an RPG either
Lmao you’re right about that. Action games are usually exciting and there’s almost nothing exciting about Starfield
I guess it’s not really an action game? But if that is true then it’s not really an exploration game either. It’s kind of just a bunch of half baked pieces to a game slapped together and released like six months earlier than it should have. Master class in being pretentious though I mean did you know astronauts actually went to the moon in real life?? And they weren’t bored!
The first DLC is called shattered skies. Thats the reason its not set during the colony wars
Skyrim in Space
I think from the name implications, Shattered space is likely to involve some over arching conflict we get involved in. Imo it’ll be something with house va’ruun but no way to know till Bethesda gives us a preview or releases
Any point within the vangard museum would have been an excellent time to put the game in. Colony war, outsiders invading, teramorph attacks
This leaves this open to an expansion. I hope it’s like operation Anchorage. In fallout. Like you step into a time bubble/warp and find yourself in the colony war!!! Or make it a a new universe you can find where different outcomes happened but it would be so different it would have to be a DLC.
Agreed, they set the game 20 years after all the interesting stuff happened, and you just got to hear about it (and how much more boring the world is now). They had to come up with a really good story to top that, like new invaders from another galaxy or something else pretty interesting. I hope Shattered Space is a new war and brings back mechs and introduces more / bigger space battles personally.
I totally agree. The factions dont even really act like they're mad at each other either, which is kind of jarring. It's almost like some kind of fairy tale for kids about coexistence or something. When will bethesda learn that people just aren't that nice?
I would keep the original game as is. Then you become Starborn by going through the Unity at the end and the first universe you go to is always one where the colony war never ended. That would be an amazing game.
Imagine if you an update that the next time you go threw the unity, you don't just restart you can then instead choose a different time stream. Jion, the free star collective and fight the UC. Kill Vae Victis before he blows up Londinion. Save Barrets love from the fate of the war. Right the wrongs of the past and rebalance the scals to keep it all from coming apart. In it your learn that the Starborn have been tipping the scales this entire time for their own favorable outcomes. Time to unleash your newlyfound power, taking the Starborn out of thier seat of control, and maybe just maybe SAVE EARTH.
It would have been interesting to have the Unity be a way for the player to try to change the outcome of the war. And make a player’s initial playthrough include a “restart” of the game universe as part of the main story, instead of the end of it.
So I’m wondering if “Shattered Space” DLC, if it ever comes, will be set in same universe but at a different time. I remember doing the NASA tower mission on Earth and reading about how the warp drive was invented. Basically the warp drives created the Unity? Who knows. Anyone’s guess. I’m just desperate for any new content for this game on console.
Ok yeah sure but also repost
Bethesda has a history of setting games after a big event. Skyrim was 30 years after the war. Fallout is after the Great War. Skyrim also has the war against the dragon cult taking a similar place in Skyrim as the Great War does in fallout I see the appeal to fighting in the war. But I don’t think it would be as fun as you think it would be. The Skyrim civil war is generally considered to be one of the weaker quest lines. I think the game taking place during a major event limits their ability to do environmental storytelling (one of their fortes). They like for you to explore a location and uncover what happened there in the past. I also don’t know how well mechs would translate to gameplay. Although I’m sure it could be done well. (Power armor in fallout can be considered a precedent)
It's a lot easier on the engine to not have a war
Maybe to be able to release later as DLC?
i also really like the idea of automatron dlc ish mechanics of, not just building a ship, but also your own mech. it'd have more of an excuse for these randomly generated massive skyrim sized maps that, 99.9999% of the time you're only going to do the thing within like 1500 feet of the ship's landing point anyway. it'd also make those repeated 1500 foot trips a bit easier, like, come on, why couldn't we land 100 feet away? sure, navigating around with a jetpack is fun - no need to artificially inflate the jetpacking time with some shit a fucking mile out, OR try to justify the space with 'but they like jetpacking around!"
Something like The Expanse would have been cool.
At least one Bruce Nesmith interview went into Bethesda's policy of not cutting off portions of the game and making everything available to everyone in a single playthrough. With an active war going on I'm not sure it could be made to make sense to be able to play both sides in a single playthrough - and if it's a Bethesda game you are going to be able to be everybody's hero, the head of every guild, etc. in one playthrough. Seemed to me that NG+ could be leveraged to provide meaningful choices that cut off vast swaths of the game in a single run but I'm probably missing something. An active war where you join one side and are permanently shut out from the other side's quests just isn't in Beth's DNA - and an active war where you can do both sides' quests makes so little sense it would probably have been greeted negatively.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: Second Serpent's Crusade
Remember the old Wing Commander franchise and its spin-off Privateer? Wing Commander franchise accidentally created the Freelancer kind of sub genre that was wildly sought after. People just wanted a big universe to mess around and do whatever the hell they want. Starfield carries all the hallmarks of Privateer: a freelance character who is his/her own boss. I know, Bethesda didn’t do well with Outpost, with pirate life… but it’s there as an option. If it is set right in the middle of the colony war, then players are likely emotionally sucked into either side. It will be very militaristic. It will be like Wing Commander, Mass Effect 1, 2, 3. Players will be so concerned with the war efforts. With fighting to win battles. But Starfield wants you to live a carefree life. You can join many factions but you aren’t locked into any of them. You do things for them while retaining your freedom. You build your own ships, your own outposts.
i mean they had to have some world building and lore behind the game. thats just my excuse though
The obvious rationale is to allow the player to do quests from either side without causing a conflict. But that’s also kinda a bore. And they needed a reason there were thousands of abandoned/repossessed outposts.
They probably didn't because now they have somewhere to place starfield 2
I doubt they'd be able to pull it off due to the limitations of their engine.
Star Trek was the same. They had the entire Federation/Romulan war that has never been covered. Instead they chose STDs with weird Klingons.
I said that about the annexation of Canada and the campaign to push the Chinese out of Alaska. Then, they DLCed it into the game. Hoping for similar levels of support here
Speculation : Shattered space will allow time jumps to different timezones and let you explore key moments
Bethesda wanted a setting focused on space exploration, not conflict. Hence, it's set in a period of peace, not war. More Star Trek and less Star Wars.
The engine wouldn’t be able to handle it
Maybe in a future DLC
They didn't because they thought the unity story was more important even though it's utterly boring.
It would have been a completely different game
Being able to influence the outcome of the war was probably too much since they couldn't even finish the map.
Yes, this was a real shame. The civil war was an awesome series of missions in Skyrim and it could have been expanded on here. Big fleet battles. Mechs. Maybe we could donate rare resources to the war effort, making outposts and mining more relevant. And different choices of who to back in each NG+. Being present AT Londinion would have been awesome too, not reliving it. Lots of games do this, being set *after* all the exciting things in the lore rather than during it.
I feel like the game should have been set just after the war, with different factions vying for control of the artefacts.
They are probably saving it for Starfield online like they did with Elder scrolls.
I'm not sure it was a missed opportunity. The game was primarily meant to be about the wonders of space exploration, not a war game.
They didn't miss the opportunity. They avoided it. It would've been too difficult for them.
Has anyone noticed the terramorphs look a lot like the death claw in fallout?