The entire population of starfield is like a few hundred people and an infinite number of space pirates.

Having a higher killcount than an intergalactic war after finishing the tutorial is a new level of murder hobo

Alternate Title: I spent two years playing Starfield and all I made was this crummy video

Starfield: This Could’ve been an Email

My personal theory about Starfield is that it's a game Todd Howard came up when he was a teenager. I think he's said he wanted to do it for a long time, and the concepts are so basic and rote that it's easy to imagine him coming up with it as a kid and then just being emotionally attached to it throughout his entire career. The core concept of the game is basically just Elite and it's pretty easy to imagine him just wanting his own version of that with one or two little twists.

22:45 I respect the effort of making an entire tier list of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes just to make a 3 second joke about Starfield.

The greatest disappointment is that despite coming built with an In-game excuse for New Game+, they still have unkillable NPCs. Like, what? Why are you worried about players derailing quest lines? Let the player live in the cursed universe they have created and then reset.

I admit them taking your guns away after getting arrested would actually be a cool mechanic because it would require you to do something in this game. But they know its a death knell because their loop sucks

"this is the most potential they've ever wasted" goes hard as fuck

"Due to earth losing its atmosphere it became just like mars but people still live on mars so I don't see what the problem is" - uhhh legit never thought about this till you mentioned it and it broke me.

I've reinstalled Starfield at least four times, opened it, stared at my character, and then just turned it off and uninstalled again. It's a weird phenomena. Like, my brain wants to play it, then gets bored instantaneously.

There are more 30-minute post-mortem video essays on Starfield than there are people playing Starfield

The NG+ sucks so much I still can’t believe it. Let’s review: what’s fun about finishing (or like 85%-ing) a Bethesda game? Re-exploring the world to see the lingering effects of your choices on locations and characters and factions. Collecting different outfits and armour and mixing and matching them to dress up your character. Settling into a cool player home or base and customizing it. Finally having enough resources to go all Creative Mode with the crafting and/or basebuilding. Some people like romancing the companions. In Starfield specifically: unlocking the highest tier of spaceship parts. The open world is your checklist, and after the main quest is done you can walk around that checklist and see everything you’ve accomplished and all the little side quests that might be left to do.

And the Starborn thing takes all of that away. One full-body style of armour that you can’t upgrade or customize. You can’t even wear a hat with it. One kind of ship with an empty interior and no custom modules to swap in. All of your decisions and choices and impact on the world erased. That time you spent building outposts? LOL. Whatever time you spent talking to the Constellation NPC’s was a waste. Your bestie/lover/spouse is gone forever. The mystery is solved. You’re stuck in an endless cycle of upgrading powers you’ll barely use, with mid and uninspiring gear, visiting the same 9 interiors on the same 7 kinds of planet, in a universe where nothing means anything because you can just hop to the next one.

Like so much about Starfield, it sounds cool on paper—like basically if you could turn into a dragon at the end of Skyrim; that would be awesome, right?—but then, like so much about Starfield, the execution is absolute dogshit.

"to be clear, video games do not exist as a cudgel for you to beat other games with" is an excellent line.

Constellation should've been a joinable side faction, that still allowed you to engage with the universe jumping gimmic. Imagine if that was something you just found, and wasn't railroaded into.

18:05 for those wondering, it’s the coordinates for Sus, France

Its insane that Bethesda released this right after Larian released Baldur's Gate 3. One game full of missed opportunities, and the other that still exceeds expectations 600 hours later.

I watched 5 minutes, took a 2 hours pause, watched Total Recall with family, came back and there's a reference to it, what a coincidence

I have read multiple plot summaries and watched multiple videos about this game and I still barely understand why the Starborn/time loop mechanics work the way they do. Which is a bummer, because "a previous murderhobo version of yourself" would be a really fascinating game antagonist - especially in a Bethesda game, where the common joke is that you end up ruling every faction by the end. Letting an RPG player loose into a game world they expect to rule like a protagonist, only to confront the ruin of a previous RPG player's grip on the world - and to confront the fact that past-them was basically a dictator - would be a fascinating kind of meta story.

“I’m looking forward to seeing how much potential they waste on Elder Scrolls 6.” Is really sad that it’s funny and true. Bethesda really needs to get their shit together.