Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the past. Some of the reviews sum up quite nicely what is wrong with this DLC…
Less content than any skyrim DLC. Less than The Fallout 4 story DLCs. Doesn’t change of the complaints people had with the base game, writing is still at a 4th grade level.
Quick: If you are looking to buy my answer is no, you aren’t missing much content. I was really hoping to enjoy this DLC. Took about 4 hours for the main story and maybe 2 more hours to 100% the achievements.
These two reviews I think really summed up what Starfield has become, $70 for an AAAA title that has extremely little buy-in from the community, horrifically low amount of replayability and can be breezed through easily. It’s mind-boggling to see this
worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time
Are we including Horse Armor here?
Remember, folks: Microsoft kept these people, and fired the ones who made Hi-Fi Rush.
That, alone, was my signal the entire console was going to slowly burn down.
Microsoft is a fucking ghoulish, evil company. The only reason they bought Bethesda was to own their IP. They have Elder scrolls, Fallout, and Doom Because of ID games. That alone is going to bring them so much money, if they ever want to sell any of those franchises in the future, they can sell them for a fortune. That’s probably the reason why they acquired Bethesda to begin with. Laying off Hi-Fi Rush after they delivered an excellent product was just pure evil.
Still better than Horse Armor. So no, not Bethesda’s worst DLC.
At least horse armor was good for the memes. This is so bland no one even cares to meme about it.
Still better than Horse Armor. So no, not Bethesda’s worst DLC.
The difference is that Oblivion wasn’t bad at all. It was terrific. Starfield was trash from the beginning, then delivers a trash DLC. That’s much worse. No improvement.
There are 2 important words there that you’re missing.
Shattered Space is one of the Bethesda DLCs of all time.
(cough) Horse Armor (cough)
This was exactly my first thought. Not surprised that the pioneers of shitty dlc made shitty dlc.
Yeah…
Basically every Oblivion DLC that was not Shivering Isles (and MAYBE Heroes of The Nine or whatever) was god awful. And Fallout 3 (aside from the last two hours of the story DLC) was only really tolerated because it was mostly sold as a season pass. Operation Anchorage was a cool novelty that made stealth trivial and the rest… existed.
I would argue that all the fo3 and oblivion DLC were decent. Some obviously better than others, but they weren’t just soulless cash grabs. They had effort go into them, and were fairly new into the DLC space so some trial and error is to be expected. They had a pretty good amount of content for the price relative to the base game, compared to the starfield DLC/ current AAA norms.
According to UESP, Oblivion had
- Orrery: A few spells and a player house with a fetch quest attached
- Wizard’s Tower: a mage player house with a few spells and a fetch quest
- Thieves Den: A few spells and items and a very small dungeon
- Mehrunes’ Razor: Decent sized dungeon to get a dagger
- Vile Lair: A few spells, a player house, and a fetch quest
- Spell Tomes: Literally just spells
- Fighter’s Stronghold: A short dungeon and, you got it, another player house
Then we have Knights of the Nine (really mediocre) and Shivering Isle (arguably the best DLC Bethesda ever made)
Oh. And…
MOTHA FUGGING HORSE ARMOR!!!
People tend to be more favorable to Fallout 3’s DLC than I am (most are incredibly tiny dungeons but with a new tileset). I suspect in large part because Operation Anchorage channeled how amazing storming the memorial was in the base game and… I genuinely don’t know why people are so obsessed with flipping The Pitt. And Broken Steel itself was one of the worse examples of “We’ll finish the game later” of the era… and I played ALL the Blizzard games.
To me, it wasn’t so much about each DLC making a huge impact or the story being amazing. It was more about already playing the game to death and then gaining access to more content to explore. Kind of like eating a delicious cake, still being hungry, and then finding another slice of that cake that was sitting out all day.
Then the Starfield DLC is just like that, it’s just more of a bad cake.
Exactly. It is the same logic as “This game is great if you play it with friends”.
Different people have different tastes. EYE Divine Cybermancy is still one of my favorite games of all time.
But also? Guess what game I will point out is objectively bad and has massive amounts of jank and UX issues?
Very creative game though, but player hostile lol.
Which was exclusive to…Microsoft! Full circle.
Microsoft really knows how to pick the winners, don’t they?
they are a reverse midas. Anything they touch doesn’t turn into gold but into shit
Mierdas touch
They do ESO makes anything else the company does largely irrelevant. Same as Blizzard back when Activision bought them.
And it was something people were hoping would save the game. But, it’s unfortunately more confirmation that Bethesda can no longer produce quality games.
Bethesda was obviously already toast to anyone paying attention when Fallout '76 came out. They certainly haven’t improved since.
…And I can’t believe that these are the motherfuckers who own the rights to Doom now.
Thankfully, they’re not the ones who develop Doom. They can publish it all they want as long as they stay the hell away from the actual games.
saying 76 hasnt improved since just shows everyone you dont know what youre talking about
Hey im all for giving Bethesda shit for publishing an incredibly bland game, but 8 reviews hardly seem like a solid foundation to make that title.
EDIT : I’ve realised that autocorrect might have gotten you since around 1, 1k user reviews still sit at around 42% positive
I’ve given up on every major developer/publisher, so-called AAA garbage, except for capcom for monster hunter and square enix for final fantasy. I’ll be extra sad the day they too go the way of every other greedy lazy “AAA” game company…
At least indie devs care to make a good game and not try to make a money printing IP machine with some game like aspects in it.
Even Capcom I’m not preordering. If wilds is getting good reviews a couple days after launch I’ll get it. (Even though I’m pretty sure it will be a good game)
I feel like monster hunter is kinda hard to mess up, unless they suddenly decided to make it turn based with micro transactions for extra turns or something lol
The “story” is: omg big monster messing up the ecosystem, go fight! So it’s really all down to gameplay lol
oof ffxvi? the “rpg” which is just a action game. ff vii remakes are at least good.
I’m not a purist lol I enjoyed the hell out of FF16. I think 8 and 13 were the only ones I didn’t really care for
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“AAAA” isn’t a thing. That was just Guillemot being an idiot and flailing on an investor call.
$70 is going to be the new normal price for AAA. Prices haven’t increased in decades. I don’t like it, but that’s what it is. It’s not AAAA because of the price, nor is that even a thing.
AAA comes from credit rating scores. It essentially means nearly guaranteed returns. It was used to identify games that need to be stocked for game stores. AAA is going to sell. AA is slightly less but still good. Etc. There is not AAAA credit rating. That was just stupid marketing buzzwords that don’t matter.
So Tears of the Kingdom was AAAA?
Nintendo’s games are still usually very good, even though their business practices suck ass.
I have no hope for The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. It was a good run but like all things. Everything comes to an end.
I don’t think this means ES6 is doomed. Did anyone play the Civ space game? It was an offshoot one-off experiment that wasn’t really well recieved and they quietly moved on.
My guess is that this game pivoted during development and they ended up with something that didn’t really work and shouldn’t have shipped. The failure to find something good in this experiment may be isolated to this game.
The fact that they released it in the state they did could be more about their workflow and project pipeline/target milestones they need to hit than it is about their ability to execute.
The failure here is in design, ES6 has a tried and true design to follow.
Story and worldbuilding wise, ES6 has a very bleak future ahead. Emilio Pagliarulo, the de facto director of Starfield and lead writer, has shown that no hole is deep enough that he won’t dig it further down when it comes to lack of quality and consistency. Not that Skyrim’s main story was good, but it was certainly better than Starfield’s. There’s also the disturbing indifference of “the world” to everything happening around it. Literally nothing you do in Starfield affects anything outside its own storyline. Hell, shooting up in the air or using fucking space magic in the middle of a city generates no reaction from npcs if nobody is hit.
The problem is Starfield isn’t a one off. It’s the latest in a line of progressively worse games. Every game they’ve released since Skyrim has been worse than the one that came before it.
Since Skyrim? I’d say their quality has been slowly declining since Morrowind. It wasn’t that noticeable at first, since oblivion, fallout 3, and Skyrim were still quite good and fallout 4 was decent. But then fallout 76 was a mess at release, TES blades was shit, and starfield just seems lazy.
Skyrim was at least an improvement over Oblivion. It showed they had the ability to recognize and fix the mistakes of Oblivion and still create an interesting world.
I actually liked beyond earth 🥲
I think ES6 will have the advantage that it won’t be a procedurally generated world, or at least I don’t hope so.
But it will probably still run on the shitty Bethesda engine that they cling onto for dear life for some reason.
I think it will never actually live up to the hype, expectations are so insanely high, and the longer it takes the higher these expectations rise it seems.
And I bet it will turn out to be another half-assed game that they hope modders will fix. Like the last bunch of games, they all require mods to be even remotely playable, but even mods can’t fix core issues.
My expectations for Bethesda dropped to bare minimum with everything that came after Skyrim.
Honestly, if anyone actually has high expectations for ES6 at this point, it’s totally on them.
Yeah they need to get rid of that cokehead.
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Beyond Earth but I see your point, Civ has had several of these https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Civilization_(series)#Spinoffs
Point being that they can experiment and do something a little different, I don’t think that the quality of the spinoff indicates the quality of the main franchise.
My guess is that this game pivoted during development
Nah, the game matches pretty well with what Lyin’ Todd said he wanted to make almost 20 years ago
It’s also very clearly their usual design decisions but in a new setting
If anything the issue is that they stayed stuck in EXACTLY their usual development methods: no design document because Emil doesn’t like them, their writers make their quests too, and use an engine that’s absolutely not meant for the kind of game they’re making ON TOP of being ancient and garbage
I’m enjoying it.
I am really enjoying this downfall of Bethesda, Blizzard, Ubisoft and EA, more than I enjoyed anything they published in half a decade. I wish death also to Gearbox. It’s coming and after Randy bought and promptly ruined RoR2, my schadenfreude is tingling.
I would have enjoyed it a lot more if they had kept making good games!
Welp, guess I can officially uninstall Starfield. Bummer.
Your storage drive will thank you.
Glad I didn’t buy the DLC and decided I’ll wait for some sort of definitive edition to play Starfield again. I hope by that point it will be a better overall game and have enough new things to make it worth the time.
But but, we’ve been told Bethesda hears us and was fixing it!
