People are moaning online that Starfield didn't get nominated. I'm like... what... BG3 blew the doors off this one. Pretty much other nominees are just to fill in gaps.
I'm curious about BG3, but I think it can never live up to the hype that surrounds it. My instincts tell me give it a very wide berth. I see more than one red flags about it. I'll wait until price drops to around half before trying it, so I don't feel so bad about the money wasted if my spidey senses are proven right yet again.
Unless there is a category for ship building, Starfield doesn't deserve a nomination for game of the year. There is absolutely nothing about the game which would qualify it for such consideration.
I disagree. Game of the year is subjective, there are no objective metrics that would qualify a game for consideration. It's all about how much you enjoyed the game, and for me there are two titles that stood out this year: Starfield and Jagged Alliance 3. So those are my two nominees for GOTY. Granted I have not tried BG3 or Phantom Liberty (CP2077 2.0) yet, but even so Starfield and JA3 would still be in the running if I did try those and found them to be amazing.
I actually enjoy Starfield for the most part, but the fact of the matter is it would be entirely mediocre were it not for the ship builder. Bethesda is still making games like they did in 2005 but somehow failed to deliver the same quality of sandbox experience it usually does which is saying something. Some of Bethesda's design decisions are baffling to say the least and their game mechanics are woefully outdated.
I agree about the woefully outdated mechanics, but the game is more than the sum of its parts. I actually found the sandbox experience far better than in Skyrim (which did win numerous GOTY awards). It is also better than FO4. FO3 and Oblivion might still have it beat in the sandbox, but overall, I prefer Starfield even to those.
I like the ship builder, but it is far from being the only thing that stands out about the game. I use it more as an occasional distraction than the main focus.
The ship builder is a stand out feature for me in the game and it has a lot to do with why I've sunk so much time into the game. Even then, I would have dropped that earlier were it not for the mod community making things much more interesting. The space combat isn't as plentiful as it needs to be once you are at higher levels. The combat is serviceable but not very interesting. The enemies are spongy and the weapons imbalanced to a point where only a few feel viable in any way narrowing down an already narrow list of weapons.
The only problem I have with vanilla ship builder is how expensive it is, I've never even hit the max build size once. The only "mod" I'm using is changing the vendor buy price to 50% in console and giving traders more money so I can flog my loot. Why am I not skipping all that and just give myself the money? Because I'm enjoying the gameplay loop as is, it just needs some balance tweaks.
I find the combat oddly satisfying both on foot and ship to ship. I usually dislike spongy enemies, but here where everyone wears armored spacesuits it is not immersion breaking. And the combat feels fair, I'm in control and never feel like the AI / game is cheating.
I agree about weapons though, most of them feel useless, you find one good weapon and end up using that for the rest of the play through.
You spend a lot of time doing administrative tasks which aren't fun. Managing 800 self-replicating dumbells and other stupid **** that magically appears in my ships cargo bays is tedious to the point on bordering on maddening. Then there are the bugs. The most annoying of which is the one that causes save files to take about 8-10 minutes to load even on a higher end system. That's absolute bullshit. It may have launched in a better state than Bethesda games usually do, but the game is still a buggy mess. Bethesda's patches have introduced more problems than they've solved. (That's not hyperbole, that's ****ing true.)
It isn't magical, when you modify your ship all the junk that your crew hoards gets moved to the cargo hold. I see it as free credits, you leave your **** laying around, I'm selling it
At least Bethesda's DLSS implementation is far better than the mod was, the FPS is better and the IQ is also better. But their other solutions are so incompetent. Like they added the eat button, but it only works for food laying around in the open. If it is in a container or on an enemy, you still have to move it to the inventory and can only use it from there.
Baldies Fate 3 isn't even on my "interested in playing some day" list.
It's on my list, but I'm kind of more interested in it as a form of catastrophe tourism, to see how bad it actually is. Because every fiber of my being is screaming at me: Don't buy that game, you'll hate it.
