Recent reviews by Meshuggener

I'm so done with Bethesda

10 years of development and its still clunky and boring.

Bethesda is at it again. Years ago, after receiving nearly unanimous outrage for monetizing mod content, such that they had to immediately stop and reconsider potentially alienating the only people who keep their games alive, they have bitterly waited for us to forget and are now trying again.

As if Bethesda couldn't resist breaking BOTH their game AND tens of thousands of amazing DLC-tier mods with an update meant solely to monopolize the content that fixed their game for them when they chose no to do it themselves.

Absolutely greed-riven. Many mods will thankfully eventually be updated, whether by their original creators or one of the many dedicated nerds out there. Unfortunately many amazing mods, some with tens of millions of downloads, will simply no longer be available just so we can have $5 horse armor and a $20 duffel bag (Fallout 76 reference haha...)

Where to even start? There are billions of things I could say about Starfield, but I really don't want to get into everything.

Suffice to say this is not a good game. My playtime definitely betrays that perhaps I've squeezed the content dry and that I'm just acting surprised that this isn't an endless dopamine pump, but I'll also admit that I can play through a lot of disappointment and general boredom.

Hot take: I genuinely believe that the only good thing about Starfield is its graphics. Everything else is worse than mediocre or just so pointless that you might as well ignore it. It's like Oblivion and Fallout 4 had the dumbest ugliest worst possible baby with so few of the redeeming qualities of its parents. The only reason this game did so well is its brand-reputation, its novelty, and its shiny presentation.

The bad: Boring lazy ambiguous inconsequential repetitive and half-baked main story with a painfully pretentious ending and pretentious NG+ that I don't personally find very amusing or creative.

Boring dumb robotic irritating condescending morally-superior NPCs and companions, all identical with no characterization.

Boring Fallout 4-tier illusion of choices dialogue, with perhaps every conversation containing redundant questions that were already answered in a previous line -- everybody, and I don't exaggerate here, I mean EVERYBODY... is RUDE TO YOU.

Boring empty lifeless useless repetitive 1000 planets, no exploration to do, all separated by endless loading screens.

Boring useless copy-pasted Skyrim "shouts" that serve as the only reason to do the main story.

Boring buggy useless watered-down empty Fallout 4 settlements system (without settlers, decorations, or any REAL uses).

Boring unimaginative and limited guns and combat system. Fallout 4 had more weapon variety and there isn't a SINGLE unique weapon -- just barely re-skinned ordinary weapons with lame effects. Combat is brain-dead easy though so obviously Bethesda didn't care about the weapons.

Lots of recycled useless RPG features that are still hollow and useless: useless and inconvenient food/chems, incredibly repetitive and unfun lockpicking that will dominate 25% of your total playtime (I would prefer even Fallout hacking to this!), uncreative perks that lock away features for no reason, and often don't usually introduce creative gameplay (but sometimes they unlock dialogue that is often pointless and kind of poindexter-sounding cringe-text, even the NPCs cringe at it most of the time).

Literally 100% impossible to be bad/evil, 9 out of 10 times your options are to be the good guy with the other 1 out of 10 times just being a murder-hobo. Joining the Crimson Fleet (evil space pirates) is not even evil, half the time I get a role-playing option of being a [Pirate] in a random conversation it's to do some kind of selfless heroic intervention; insane.

Bethesda had every capability of making this game the best they've ever made. I don't think that their scope was too big as many have said, I don't think that they were too ambitious as many have said, and I don't think they were limited by procedural generation as many have said.

The sad truth is that Starfield has been under development for a very long time and insiders say it had to be redesigned numerous times to appease an ever widening consumer demographic. There's in-game evidence of removed features riddled throughout dialogue and screen tips. The scope was too flexible to the whims of business-brained idiots and fears of doubtful development leads that want to play it safe and create Fallout 5 in Space.

It took 7 months after initial release for Creative Assembly to release Immortal Empires, the MAIN GAME, in an awful buggy state.

It took 2 months for Creative Assembly to release a fix for a very flagrant bug that was fixed by a player in mere minutes.

Creative Assembly has released statements implicitly stating that their continued support for this title is dependent on their customers going forward with their new price-gouging policy.

Based on their abandonment of their recent title Total War: Three Kingdoms for that exact reason, it is reasonable to say you should avoid purchasing this game or any of its expansions.

Creative Assembly has been disingenuously claiming their substantial price increases are due to increased production costs and inflation. They are saying this and simultaneously having wider profit margins than ever, reporting record growth, and receiving LOTS of government subsidies (they have censored people for pointing that last one out, its an inconvenient fact that makes their excuse look more like a half-hearted lie).

The truth they expect most people to be unaware of is that this game is being developed by a skeleton crew of maybe a couple dozen developers on a meager budget, while the other few hundred developers at Creative Assembly waste this game's profits on titles that will with absolute certainty not be as successful as Total War: Warhammer III, if they even manage to break even in the first place (prediction: they won't).

Because of poor pricing, poor product management, and a disgraceful backslide back into old self-destructive habits, screw this game -- I wish I could have all my money back.

This seems massively unpopular, especially due to the grind required to even access what you've purchased. Just unlock the items, FatShark, we already bought 'em...

This game is a break from the usual fast-paced action most gamers are accustomed to -- one that is guaranteed to help you explore the more casual and relaxed side of our recreational sport.

I love this video game please buy, yes!

As of right now, this game is in a sorry state and I could not recommend anybody to purchase it.

Maybe a few months back I could've suggested this game despite the many major inbalances and the even more uncommon game-breaking bugs or glitches, some of which brought to question how well we could trust Ubisoft to develop an adequate first-person shooter, but at this point it is clear that the developers of this game are not trustworthy and that they do nothing but create more issues and ignore them.

+ The game's graphics are spectacular and it runs better than games of comparable visual fidelity
- of course, this depends on the map (on Favela/Yacht I get 20 FPS while on House/Oregon I get more than 100 on Max)

+ Strong multiplayer community
- Enjoy playing with ping abusers (i.e. players from foreign countries who edit their .ini to play on your servers to gain a competitive advantage), teleporting enemies add an extra dimension of fun to the game; simply pretend that they're extra-dimensional demons with the ability to teleport and eat a magazine-full of bullets and WA-BAM you have a tactical shooter/survival horror.

+ Operation Health AKA "Operation 'We Couldn't Make the Polish Operators in Time so Instead We'll Fix Like One or Two Bugs and Pretend Like This Was All Just a Blessing In Disguise"
- Hey, at least they added Alpha Packs so that you spend all of your renown before the next season and have to buy the operators with real money through the season pass.

+ Easy Bug Reporting
- Simply go to Ubisoft's forum and navigate through more than thousands of pages of nonsense until you realize that the only ostensible way to get Ubisoft to fix the game is to hold their families hostage (that is unless their families didn't purchase the Season Pass, then they'll have to wait one week first).

+ Ubisoft Listens To Your Feedback
- Such as when thousands of players were begging for Blitz to be buffed and they went ahead and... instead they buffed the already powerful Fuze and turned his hostage-slaying Cluster Charges into WMDs that would leave even Saddam Hussein in tears and they "buffed" Glaz by giving him a sniper rifle that's made useless by the fact that its hit-registration is insanely broken (you will have to shoot an enemy with the full magazine before at least one shot is registered) and the magical CLIENTSIDE SMOKE that renders his scope obsolete.


- but if you're still having problems seeing through smoke -- if you're still having trouble looking outside of the windows because it looks like you're staring directly into the sun -- don't worry, I found a guide on Steam that literally lets you lower your graphics so much that it disables smoke, lighting, clutter, and grass so that you can see your enemies no matter where they hide! It's not an exploit if Ubisoft put it there!

Good replay value