Starfield's Worldbuilding: A Galaxy of Wasted Potential
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- čas přidán 2. 07. 2024
- My final video on Starfield for a good long while.
Here’s links to the mods I used in this video:
StarUI Inventory
PC: www.nexusmods.com/starfield/m...
StarUI HUD
PC: www.nexusmods.com/starfield/m...
StarUI Workbench
PC: www.nexusmods.com/starfield/m...
StarUI ShipBuilder
PC: www.nexusmods.com/starfield/m...
StarUI Outpost
PC: www.nexusmods.com/starfield/m...
Music tracks used, in order (all from Starfield's OST): Tenacity of Life, Deep Freeze, Field of Vision, Within the Walls, Akila City, A Home in the Galaxy, Cutthroats
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:33 1. Starfield's story is cripppled by its engine and Bethesda's antiquated design
7:35 2. Starfield's lore is inconsistent and poorly thought out
15:04 3. Starfield says nothing lest it offend somebody
19:54 Outro
my pay-treon: / pancuronium - Hry
the astronauts on the moon werent bored because they werent playing starfield
Perhaps because they were launched into the cold, hard vacuum of space on a pillar of fire strapped to the tip of a missile, landed on and returned from the surface of the moon with only just enough fuel for the task and did all this themselves without a single load screen?
They never went to the moon. You CANNOT leave footprints in a substrate without water, any tracker knows this. Moon landing was a bad fake
Meme comment, I know.
But in all seriousness.
Its because those 3 gentlemen were engaged in their task. Real space travel is deadly. One wrong move, and they're dead.
Space travel in starfield is not only safe, ita boring and unengaging.
You cannot leave foot prints in a substate without moisture. WATER. Any tracker knows this. Unless there's water on the moon the "landing" was ...
@@DJWeapon8 You can't leave footprints in a substrate without water. It was not real
Bethesda is so scared of locking players out of content that they wont even let you fail a job interview in a game where you can reset the whole universe and try it again.
Yeah. That is absolutely hilarious. Why have a "reset universe" mechanic in the game if the reset doesn't even matter. You should be allowed to fail at every single point. You should be allowed to be serious or outright messing with everyone. It is the central selling point of such a game, and yet they refuse to do it.
Players are not harmed by being given limits. You actually get better games by giving limits than just removing them.
@@EcardEcardianI kind of disagree with that assessment. It is simply because that isn't how Bethesda design their games. That is the classic Fallout three cornerstone design, but that design isn't isn't implemented by Bethesda.
The three cornerstones are the following:
1. Diplomacy. Talk your way through a problem.
2. Violence. Path of least resistance, just shoot your way through.
3. Stealth. Sneak your way through and do the mission without a shot being fired.
Every main quest should include all of these options, and every side quest should at least have 2. This is why the classic Fallouts have the premade character that suit each option.
Bethesda do not use these options, or this design. They mostly just have set pieces with some of them, but they are heavily restricted.
Take the Thalmor Embassy quest in Skyrim. This is a main quest and is a pretty important one.
- You start out with having all your equipment removed.
- You get are forced to join a party where your job is to cause a distraction to slip away. This is no way to fight your way through and this is no way to sneak out of sight when no one is looking. You can not even go into the party dressed as a member of staff and avoid the whole party.
- You then get some of your gear back and is told to find some documents in the embassy. You can do this by sneaking your way through and you can go all in blazing, but you can not talk your way through.
- When you find the documents your plan will have been discovered no matter how sneaky you have been until that point. Your partner is always caught and they always find you in the prison.
In this quest they follow none of the cornerstones. They have all components but they invalidate them all at some point in time.
During the party they invalidate violence and stealth.
During the search they invalidate diplomacy and stealth as being stealthy doesn't matter much.
You can talk to people. You can have skill checks. But they do not actually implement them in a way it matters. Bethesda do not follow these three options. They pretty much only have violence and then they have the other two when they want to basically skip some parts of the violence.
@@EcardEcardianI don't think that quest is an exception. There is literally no diplomacy in the quest were you get the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller. Or in the quest to find Esbern. In both of those quests there is only violence. And Stealth isn't stealth. It is just another facid of combat mechanics. I am pretty sure you can go down the list of quest and find that all of them pretty much always rely on combat over everything else. This is the way Bethesda design their quest. It revolves around violence and then have ways to skip segments of it.
@@Cloud_Seeker But it safes time in programming if you can't fail and the quest runs like on railroads. That was probably more important than the risk of frustrating players who fail at a quest.
@@elmercy4968 Apart from that there is one problem here. You are playing a RPG, a Role Playing Game. The player is supposed to have a level of autonomy in a RPG where what they do and say matters. I am sure that it is safe and easy to put everyone on rails and force a quest to play out exactly like you want it to. But you also remove the player from the equation when you do that. There is no point in even pretending that I have a choice or any autonomy when you put me on rails for your convenience. If I did this in my D&D campaign, I should expect that my players should leave. At that point they are just viewers to my fanfic stories and can't really participate in it.
There is a game that has done this just fine without any issues. It is actually highly regarded to this very day. Its name is Fallout New Vegas. There is very few NPC's that can not die in that game. Yet people had no issue with that fact failing a quest is possible in that game. It is even a joke that you fail 10 quests by killing some random NPC. It is often a very active choice and there are ways to redeem your actions to a point.
watching someone telling how Starfield is bad has become my new addiction
which shows how stupid and toxic gaming community is
shame on you
I've spent 20 minutes in the game and about 4 hours watching videos on it 😅
I was literally just thinking this lol I love videos shitting on this game in particular for some reason
There is a nice schadenfreude to be had from Starfield, lol.
Agreed. Bethesda deserves the criticism for making such an uninspired game.
Starfield broke the number 1 rule of game design.
Your game can be bad, buggy or even broken. But never EVER make it boring.
FNV dev time = 18 Months
Starfield dev time = 7 YEARS
For real.
There is no way that that this game was developed in 7 years worth of actual development time lol. They say that though.
@@Rpgreat There's apparently evidence that the entire game got scrapped 2ish years before launch. A modder was talking about it on a post explaining how difficult mod development for Starfield is. Still doesn't excuse how bad this game is though.
It may have been in development for 7 years, but I'd wager most of that time was spent fucking around with their engine. There is no way the actual game (Story, content, missions, etc) got more than 2-3 years.
@@SirMacNaughtYeah that sounds about right. Respawn made Jedi Survivor in 3 years and while that has only 6 planets it has around 50 hours of content and none of that is procedural generation. It's also about 5 times more advanced on a technical level and the story is also much better thought out.
I came across an old comment I put on the very first gameplay reveal trailer from years ago that seems quite prophetic now. "You can't even walk into a cave in Skyrim without a loading screen. How are they going to manage travel in a whole galaxy?". If only I knew :)
That is a very good point. It is almost as if the consumers know exactly were the limits of Bethesda are, and how they ignore anyone trying to tell them what their limits are.
I just don't see how they could launch a game with this many loading screens in 2023. The main selling point of the Series X and PS5 was the lack of loading screens. It was the entire selling point of the most recent Ratchet and Clank and Bethesda actually thought that people wouldn't care.
@@ArcAngle1117 it's not a hardware limitation it's the Creation engine which is over 20 years old now. Sure they keep updating it but it's still fundamentally the same core engine as evidenced by the fact that there are bugs in Starfield that are identical to ones in fallout and skyrim (and still aren't fixed). Oh and they've already confirmed Elder Scrolls 6 will be using the same engine..
it's also not the engine issue as well. They can get away with all those bugs in Skyrim and Fallout because those are good games.
First 5 minutes of this video describe it pretty well. They have a good concept, but they can't pull it out. So they made up everything along the way with hope that people will like it. This game is all about themselves, not the players.
@@AntASurvivalWe need to stop excusing bugs. Skyrim is good but I don't think anyone would say it would be worse if they fixed the bugs. But they don't. They've re-released the game multiple times and have never bothered to do any bug fixes beyond stuff that would make the game unplayable. Fuck it, good enough is their mantra.
Fans: can’t wait for writing improvements
Bethesda: how about lifeless procedurally generated worlds?
the sad thing is people tried to warn then against this stupid idea, nobody wanted more of NMS at the time because NMS was shit at launch and had an endless sea of pointless exploration, actually i would say in many ways it's still worse than starfield, however the only thing it has going for it that is better than starfield is the fact that you can fly your ship in and out of planets and it's not being separated via constant load screens.
i suppose bethesda deserves some credit in the load screens, in past games the load times were very long, but in starfield they are really quick, it's just annoying that it's a load screen simulator.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4wNMS also has multiplayer so there's that, and Vehicles to traverse the landscapes of the planet's.
@@thelizard556
yeah but you have to get passed so much damn grind of the main mechanics to get to these features from a new game that it often feels monotonous and pointless.
i suppose if you have put in 500 hours into your save, maybe that's a good deal, but damn dude that takes forever before you can access that shit, also the game is confusing as hell, i suppose starfield is also confusing as hell too when it comes to some mechanics.
look i have tried multiple times to get into NMS and i have had the game since it was in early access, and though it's got a lot of features added onto it, the game is so damn hard to get into though, the gameplay loop is mindbogglingly bad, like i make this point for bethesda games as well, but damn near everything is all about resource extraction and procedural generation, like i just can't get into that kind of thing because it's just too annoying and the game also has no story at all, like that stuff wouldn't be all that bad if it wasn't so damn monotonous all the time.
i feel like people with autism are making these games, they fill their games with a bunch of pointless shit that only offers value for people who have that disability and are prone to like such monotonous trash.
both games are trash in my eyes, they have some good mechanics but both suffer from some of the same issues when it comes to being confusing as hell or they have too much grind or they are too procedural, what's funny is starfield's procedural stuff is nowhere near as bad as NMS, i still believe they should have focused on a far smaller planet list in starfield, because a 1,000 really seems like a dumb idea, and in NMS if i remember correctly it was something like a billion planets, like that's just too damn much overkill.
starfield at least has a story and combat, granted not a very good written story but it has a story where you sort of role play, it has far higher potential in that area but that would require bethesda to find a damn good writer on their staff lol.
Problem is, that those procedurally generated worlds are only useful if the focus is on exploring. But Starfield's focus is on quests.
Still crazy to me that Starfield had about 400 people (this number doesn't include any workers outside of Bethesda) working on it but has as many quests as base game Skyrim. Bethesda should have stuck to tight and focused worlds they could completely handcraft.
That's not even the craziest part. What's crazy is that Starfield has like 20 dungeons that just keep repeating... Skyrim had 198.
Or downgrade the graphics to fallout 76 levels. Pancuronium talked about it in one of his videos and I completely agree with him
size doesn't matter... bigger teams more complex communication and logistics = slower and messier development. Few companies can actually take advantage of a massive work force, most just throw numbers at the game untill it's finished, then wonder why it didn't work out and lay off most of them after the fact.
@@ThisIsGlitchand compound on top of that the fact that Bethesda is proud to not have centralized documentation…
Bethesda is a large company that thinks they are a small company.
They think they can get away with stuff just because they are still “small”.
when they made the claim that the game was 25 years in the making, i assumed this at the very least meant they had a strong story and a very good idea for a game.
As someone who was black pilled with Bethesda some time ago I never considered this was going to be good. If you look at how they make their games you find that each game is a lesser product of the previous one. They already were not great at writing so it will not improve.
16 time the detail...
@@yahya_elistinsary
25 years in the making, 16 times the detail, it just works lol.
I think 20 of those years was "we want to make a space game"
16 times the sbi employees
I beat this game and for the first 40 hours I thought it was pretty cool, but after you get to the mid game you realize… this is all there is. You try to find reasons to keep playing but you can’t. There’s barely any weapons to grind for, uninteresting legendary effects, boring quests, boring exploration, boring main quest. The only thing I found kinda cool were the Starborn powers until you realize they are just SKYRIM shouts reskinned. I stopped playing at like 80 hours and was genuinely SICK of the game, like part of me wanted to keep playing and hoping it gets better but it never does.
I forced myself to complete every mission in Start Game, then forced myself through the Unity 4 times... 200+ hours sunk into this. And apart from one quest line (that had wasted potential) and one or two quest sections (again, wasted potential), the whole mess was boring. 200+ hours... and I bet some muppet out there would tell me that "once I get to NG+10 it 'gets gud!'" A game should be "gud" from the first moment. You shouldn't need to put more than an hour in for it to have grabbed you. This game is boring - technical issues aside... it's BORING.
I had the same issue. It felt like "fun" was right around the corner, but I could never get to it.
I created a melee build on my first playthrough because I wanted to make some kind of Sardaukar warrior type character, but that was a huge mistake. Never been so disappointed in my life with a game. Why is the melee system even in this game, it's so barebones and boring 😭
Something I don't see talked about much is that Bethesda has kind of always had fairly uninteresting loot. The legendary effects in Fallout 4 did manage to spice things up a bit, but what actual interesting loot was there to find in Skyrim? Fallout 3? Even supposedly legendary Daedric quest rewards all had really boring enchantments (outside of a couple exceptions). You'd go through an entire dungeon in Skyrim just to sell all the loot you found in the chest (or hung it up on the wall if it was somehow unique). Dungeon diving in Skyrim always bores me pretty quickly specifically because it quickly becomes apparent how there's nothing to find that's any more useful than what you're already using.
It kind of hides this fact by letting you refine and enchant equipment yourself, but with how much they limited the enchant system after Oblivion, there's also not even a whole lot of interesting enchantments you can put on your equipment.
They had a blank paper to come up with whatever universe they wanted and this dishwater was the result. They are creatively bankrupt.
Oh hell, they've been bankrupt for quite some time. Skyrim was probably their best product. That's why Todd keeps going back to the damn thing. It has the same level of awkwardness as Homer harping on is 300 strike score at bowling in that one episode of The Simpsons.
@@EcardEcardian There's a reason why Morrowind has had renewed interest in players over the two decades since its release, whereas Skyrim hasn't been relevant for ten years now.
The thing that gets me about this setting is that it doesn't have a cohesive vision to unify it the way say Mass Effect did. The different faction quests all feel like very different types of science-fiction. The UC Vanguard is Aliens, the Freestar Rangers is Firefly, and the stuff with Neon feels like Cyberpunk.
@@amanawolf9166 Their best product was Morrowind. Skyrim is extremely washed out compared to Morrowind. Bethesda didn't make the mods that make Skyrim great.
@@amanawolf9166best selling, but far from their best work. Their mainline IP hierarchy is Morrowind>Oblivion>Skyrim>FO3>FO4>FO76>Starfield, if I omitted anything it’s because I haven’t personally played it.
The backend shenanigans they pulled with the engine also ensures the modding scene will be severely stunted for at least another year if not more.
You would think after every modder and mod user under the sun cursed them for precombines they would have learned their lesson about adding unavoidable features to the engine that restricts modders.
if they gave a shit about it this game wouldn't exist. Bethesda has ridden a popularity wave that realistically is more to do with the popularity of the Xbox 360 and quality of Obsidian's New Vegas than it is anything they as a company personally created (even including nostalgia for Morrowind).
I'm 100% sure they just assume people will come regardless, and they will continue to monetise other people's mod work, and keep raking in the cash from their crippled MMO games.
@@LomographyTromographylmao that first sentence is so fucking succinct and just beautiful my man
It's so funny to me how they're constantly paying lip service to how important their modding community is but are also so completely out of touch with it. They spent so much of the pre-release talking about all the great things modders would be able to do with Starfield, only to release their most mod-unfriendly game ever. (And then, as if to drive home the point even further, nearly immediately afterward released a sudden Skyrim update that broke many existing mods.)
Bethesda’s games up until now have been seriously flawed but have had fun and unique explorable worlds. This time they decided to make a game without the one thing they actually do well in it.
what do you mean up until now, they have been flawed since the beginning of bethesda.
And if we are being honest...one of those worlds they didn't actually create. The world of Fallout was already done. They just bought somebody else's IP
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w the OP said the previous games were flawed. They just had interesting worlds. Starfield lacks the interesting worldbuilding that makes the earlier games interesting and gives a reason to bother modding it in the first place.
@@somethingbrite8484 And all the people who created the original lore of the Elder Scrolls have been gone for 20 years at this point. Nobody at current Bethesda has ever created something original.
@@-tera-3345 They should fire Emil, but we all know they won't.
It's actually incredible how stagnant Bethesda has gotten. No ambition (creative, technical etc.). Antiquated world design and gameplay. And don't even get me started on the writing. No desire to improve on anything.
some of that is due to what the fans wanted, like the example is the non voiced protagonist, some people hated it in FO4 so bethesda did the silent protagonist with no other choice on the matter and people liked the idea of the Oblivion camera making a comeback, so bethesda added that, sadly the FO4 camera was still far superior to what they used in starfield, then people wanted more facial animations for NPC's and they added this but it's even worse looking than FO4 because the animations are way to exaggerated, especially the eye brow animation, when you notice it you can't forget it lol.
then there are other issues that every bethesda game suffers from, the issues that always exist as bugs that were patched out, my guess is, by not having a design document they were always going to run into these issues in every new game they release which is why we are seeing many of the same glitches and bugs that have existed for decades of their passed bethesda games showing up in this new game.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w the issue runs deeper than simply opting for silent protagonist and archaic dialogue system. The whole game design approach feels old af. Gameplay feels dated. The writing is pure garbage. There's no edge or soul. It's a soulless game.
Starfield existence only made Outer Worlds 6-7* into a 7 or 8*
💀
Genuinely forgot mechs existed in starfield. They got powerarmor in Fallout 4 working really well but didn't even try transposing that system onto mechs.
Power armor would be insane in starfield. But I assume Vasco and the mechs used to be humans who decided to upload their brains into mechs. Like cyberpunk 2077 to the extreme. Current nasa iss research shown 3 days ago in the news shows cancer loves space.
Picture it: turn into a cyborg to save money on food. Upload your brain to a cpu to prevent cancer growth. People who decided to do so, those in cities loving their phones. As opposed to others who refused.
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yoPretty sure they did not because that should have just been hitting the players over the head with "This is a fallout clone".
@@Cloud_Seeker bro they had power armor in Stargate.
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo Stargate has nothing to do with this. Also. Why are you make up strawmen?
@@Cloud_Seeker stargate had power armor
The best thing to say about starfield is that i cant wait to use an E-11D, Phaser, and halo Sniper Rifle while dressed as commander shepherd
Large tits. on everything. The cred sticks will have large tits. with jizzle™ physics.
The companion robot? Large tits.
My rifle? A small pair of large tits.
Women with large tits already? Tits front and back. Large.
6:50 - Yeah, exactly. That's also what I was thinking.
I actually do get Bethesda's hesitance to lock you out of content. It does certainly add replay value, but sometimes people don't want to start over all the way with a new character. They just want to do certain quests. So I get being hesitant to make this a thing. And I especially get it with essential NPCs, since you could easily kill one on accident whom you didn't know was important.
But in "Starfield" they had the ultimate "best of both worlds" card that they could play. Being able to reset the universe but still maintain your exact character and in a in-universe, lore-consistent way is such a good solution to this.
You don't have to delete your character, but you also can face actual consequences for making mistakes. Even big consequences that resonate across the entire universe because you can just reset it.
It's crazy to me that they introduced this universe-hopping idea into the game and then did absolutely nothing with it aside from some jokes like Sara Morgan being a potted plant.
While it can be seen as harsh to allow entire quest chains to fail and factions to hate your character forever, it's an issue that has had a solution for years: save scumming. Bethesda games already auto save every 10 mins, so if you accidently kill a super important npc you wouldn't lose much if you load your last save. Morrowind even had a pop-up that would let you know that your game is broken because you killed the wrong person.
If someone doesn't want the consequences of their mistake, a quick load of a save fixes it. Or if they prefer they can let it play out and reset the universe later on.
@@atomictacco You could EVEN still complete the game if you got that pop up if you tried hard enough and found what you needed to. They made a fail safe.
@@AbstractTraitorHero And more recently, Larian did the same thing with Divinity: Original Sin 2, and later Baldur's Gate 3, both to extremely high praise. I get being afraid players aren't going to want to bother starting over or having to load a much earlier save if they didn't realize they'd fucked something up, but I'm not really seeing people actually complaining about it.
Or if they are, they're complaining about their own fuck up, not about the game fucking them over.
I assume that years ago, Bugthesda's staff went into Starfield expecting to let their imaginations run wild and create the next great sci-fi mythology. But it turns out they're creatively bankrupt, and had little of value to add to the genre.
It also seems like they don't even really want to make RPGs anymore. Instead, Bugthesda prefers to join the rest of the big-budget gaming industry in converging their game designs into an optimized and streamlined design that's dialogue-heavy, open-world, action/adventure, and has RPG elements to create a player power progression grind. Bugthesda will never make a great RPG again if they continue down that road.
A specific thing that baffles me about SF's worldbuilding is credits.
Credits, money, is stated as being fake, virtual. The government doesn't even print it, it just codes it into existence.
However, credits are also physical. Credsticks contain fluctuating amounts of credits, and on the Legacy, there's an entire atrium of a room solely dedicated to storing barrels of credits - data.
What?
Also, why does the UC and the FC use the same money? That doesn't make any sense, particularly when, like I said, any one of either factions can just "print" infinite money and just tank the economy.
None of Bethesda's games have economies that make sense. BGS's FO uses the bottlecap system (even FO:NV introduced other currencies) when it makes no sense for them to use the currency of a different country on the other side of the continent, and TES series has a bunch of NPC dialogue contradicting statements about how their economy even works in the first place. It's a nitpick but I think it's a really funny trait all their games have.
That's not how virtual currency works. You can't tank an economy by generating more, any more than you could with counterfeit physical money in real life. Virtual and cash currencies go through a very difficult, traceable process of creating them.
Only a single regulatory body can print or generate a specific currency. For Starfield to work that means the credits would be capped at a certain amount like real life, so it has a value, (like land and real estate markets) and would have to be generated and protected by a neutral banking system/military. Galbank, (an apolitical group, so theoretically immune to coercion) is exactly what would need to happen. Comstar from Battletech is the same thing, only they created the C-Bill system, not the Credit system.
Cost of transmission would be huge over interstellar distances. This is because capitalism, finite resources, supply and demand, and bandwidth are still clearly limitations they include in the game. Cred sticks are probably the local way of transferring money and making purchases in a single system without interstellar transmission cost. Think prepaid mobile phone card as opposed to a much more expensive bill pay plan.
Bethesda doesn't think much further beyond the first layer of any onion for their concepts, you shouldn't either being honest. That whole paragraph above is just hypothetical bullshit, but it's more effort than Bethesda put in.
@gavinpowell4607 Your wrong. Article 1 section 10 of the US Constitution, money is defined as gold or silver coin. What you call money is counterfeit currency. What is bound to happen is hyperinflation. The US is technically bankrupt and has been since 1933.
You’re aware that all economies are held by the imagination. At anytime we could all say 100 bucks isn’t a 100 bucks and that governments could print money indefinitely until resources are dry
@@Tate_THG you're just wrong.
"Keep it simple, stupid!” - Emil Pagliarulo.
25 years in the making of "keeping it simple stupid" lol.
The mastermind behind creative short quests and boring short quests. Definitely found the balance between making you feel fun for a while and then taking it away from you with the lazy writing.
It's very good advice in a lot of contexts. Game development in this genre is not one of those contexts.
It would fit perfect in a children's book, but definitely not in a videogame where deep, mature issues can happen. @@sambeckett2428
Then having a rant on Twitter when people criticizing his magnum opus.
I love watching videos that poop on starfield. It's a passion.
nothing to be proud of, really
@@Kris.G I sense Sweet Baby Inc is strong in you. The dark side you are.
@@OrbitalShell that literally makes no fkn sense, but tbh I should've expected it from someone like you
Crazy how the cultists are everywhere
So do I, and the latest Bethesda game I've played is Oblivion!
I had an idea just now. Communication tech hasn’t evolved past global broadcasting, so people wanting to send a message from planet to planet would take months or even years depending on how far.
This can cause miscommunication and confusion between populations, a UC Navy veteran npc you could’ve talked to would mention how a colony was wiped out and its people taken by pirates to be enslaved. By the time they got there, the distress signal finally got to them and it was like hearing ghosts. For him he gave up and left the service after feeling he wasn’t doing anything good, but folks thanking him for his service.
You see I managed to come up with a world building idea, that would only require an npc and some va to say some lines. Something any modder could do.
damn if communication was that slow, they might as well use gravdrive speeds to communicate lol.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w they would use ships to hold data. The more ships travelling between systems, the faster the communication and data. The grav jump speed seems to be almost instant.
Want to know where this is also common? BATTLETECH. Want to know the solution of battletech? Neo fucking feudalism. You have government effectively compartmentalized, to where the nearest allied system or planet will help. You don’t have to wait for high command to receive the message. Additionally, they had a pony express setup going on for communications.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4wafaik that’s exactly what happens in the dune universe. Couriers become essential because they can’t transmit data super luminal. Although it’s kinda grating imo to think that If a ship with mass can be super luminal that somehow abstract data cannot. However it does service the plot well in some settings. Edit: not that Emil knows anything about sci-fi. I’m not sure he’s ever read a book at all
@@russellg1473
you know it's kind of weird, Emil seems to only be good at narratives in the Fantasy settings, not so much sci-fi, i mean his own logic is to follow what he's best at, and that seems to be Fantasy , although some didn't like the story of FO4, i liked it, but i did find some holes in the story here and there that didn't quite add up, but i did mostly enjoy the game's story and some of the gameplay aspects.
and i don't mind his style in the Fantasy setting games, because games like skyrim are set back in a time of mystery and a lot of unknowns exist that stuff is communicated through rumors and text from a lost civilization and architecture of a lost people who were far more advanced than you would think for their architecture used.
but yeah sci-fi really isn't his strong suit, i also get the feeling they were bribed to make a certain game during it's development and these things that were added possibly made the story worse because they didn't really belong in the story, but it was added for modern audiences reasons which made the whole story just poorly written trash as if bethesda were taking the safe route keeping their game as sanitized as possible so nobody is offended.
meanwhile they offended everybody who cares and who matters the most as these same people are the ones who purchase their games on mass in the first place, not the people who they are pandering to.
If im being honest I'd completely forgotten about this game.
Which speaks volumes to the fact that I was so hyped about the game for the latter half of 2023.
It has been some time since release so i had a look at mods for the game to see what is available. It was a sorry sight to be honest. Everyone was banking on mods fixing this pile of garbage but i don't think even they can from the stuff i've seen.
Watching your video reminded me of The Expanse. That show only has two goverments (at the start) and both are ok-ish democracies, both are tense but mostly at peace, yet it manages to be so much more compelling, and that setting limits itself to just the solar system. Even Bethesda were married to just the United Colonies and Freestar Collective, they could have done so much more with it.
One of my biggest gripes was how your companions would get mad at you over nothing. I'd ask them what I did to upset them and they'd just say I knew what I did. Sorry san I really have no clue and I'm sure it will happen again since you won't tell me what upset you
Bethesda thought that the gravy train from the success of Morrowind and Oblivion and Skyrim would just keep on rolling and that they wouldn't ever have to change or improve. Well, guess what Bethesda? The Gravy has run out.
They changed AND got way worse. Comparing Starfield to Morrowind is a horrible thing to do lol. Morrowind is 10/10, Starfield is 2/10 if lucky.
@@Rpgreat No question about it. I absolutely love Morrowind you could never ever pay me enough to play Starfield.
It's been almost 10 years since Fallout 4 (what I would consider their last halfway decent title), and even that game was shaky on release. It's only made a comeback over the years because of how poorly Fallout 76 was and now the failure of Starfield has pushed even more people to Fallout 4. The gravy has been dried up for a long time for Bethesda, they just never realized because they were too busy trying to sell everyone another copy of Skyrim.
Your favorite games are now made for the lowest common denominator.
Oh that has already been the case for over a decade. Your favorite game was most likely also made for the lowest denominator. I started to play TTRPGs in 2017 because of all bad games.
Made for the lowest common denominator by the lowest common denominator.
I hadn't really thought about the writing actually being cut dramatically. The Mechs, House Va'run ... so many things I was like, why are they here? What point do they serve? I also thought it was Suss when IN STORY, mechs and bioweapons are forbidden, but apparently you can violate the bio weapons flagrantly, but nobody violates the Mech Ban?
It's not sus, they are there for those comprehend the themes.
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo Hey, thanks for the insult cloaked in unsolicited feedback.
I honestly thought forbidden mechs were going to be the start of a major game quest, especially when you go to the junkyard guy building effing mechs. Here we go. Bethesda has mechs hiding in the game. We are going to get a mech and freak out all the factions. But no, whomp whomp. Just more lipstick on the pig.
Yeah, it surprising that the 1st of Freestar doesn't have a mech boss considering they are camped in a mech base or none of the criminal gangs use mechs either. It is very strange considering you can collect banned mech parts which makes you think you could potentially build your own repurposed mech.
I was really expecting a lot of space mysteries for the main quest ( if it makes sense ). I thought that theses temples would have been dungeons like Skyrim for example ^^
Damn they could have go crazy with the story, so much potential.
We'll see with the next DLC I guess. Maybe one day they will give us some news about it and the Creation Kit who knows ?
winner of best innovative gameplay!
Another piece of evidence that shows that people are either morons or awards are rigged.
One of the best critiques of the game; thank you
Great review.
Babe wake up pancuronium uploaded
I think Starfield came out exactly as planned. This is what Bethesda thought was acceptable. It wasn't.
I’m happy they released this mess sandwiched between Baldurs Gate and Cyberpunk’s soft relaunch. The sheer quality of those titles really puts a spotlight on Starfield’s pitfalls. People, now more than ever, are seeing the dated, aimless, and creatively bankrupt design decisions of Bethesda.
Bethesda still thinks they did a good job
The sad part is how hard they are trying to defend this steaming pile of garbage. Emil has been trying to gaslight everyone into thinking they are playing the game wrong or that they don't understand science fiction. They should just admit their mistake and fix the game like CP2077 or No Man's Sky. Won't happen though because it's Bethesda.
@@atomictacco you are 100% correct sir
Doubt it. Some design decisions are strange if the outcome was planned from the start.
This game should have had WAY more restrictions for a character's build. Locked quest paths, skill/perk checks on interactable events or scenarios, faction restrictions and even characters who only engage with the player under certain circumstances. That way when you "reroll" on your next multiverse jump you actually want to seek out things that were previously locked to you. It would actually make the multiverse thing seem worth pursuing.
Yes! The comparison with New Vegas is absolutely important. To not have your actions affect other factions in any meaningful way is shite.
A very simple world building change could easily explain the small cities and settlements found on various planets. Instead of taking place in our own solar system, have it take place very far out, like an outer rim colony. At least then, that would explain lack of tech, sparse population and how forgotten Earth is to them. Oh well, even that line of thinking is too much for Bethesda now.
Would also explain why there is such a rampant pirate problem. Frontier garrisons would likely be few and far between and understaffed, so they can't properly patrol most places except the most critical of shipping routes.
I feel one element that makes the release of Starfield so hard to swallow is that it came out right after Baldur Gates 3 and Phantom Liberty and the RPG elements in those games, surpass it on so many levels. Considering all the delays, this game needed to be good and when Todd came out to say how big the scope of the game would be and how many planets there would be to explore, I was sadly getting Fallout 76 vibes once again. I played about 30 hours, and sadly I haven't had much drive to play Starfield again since November. In an odd way, Starfield only made me come to appreciate The Outer Worlds a little more, which I didn't expect to happen.
It makes me wonder how different Starfield could have been if they had went the route of The Outer World, or even Mass Effect, where the scope is smaller, but you flesh out the few worlds you are able to visiting.
I can accept all of the flaws of the game. Except the world building and lore. To really immerse yourself in its world is to intentionally make oneself stupid. It crosses the line between guilty pleasure and ‘you have to be stupid if you think any of this is even decent’.
You can subjectively enjoy silly things, but taking it seriously is another matter. This game is an exercise of cognitive self-flagellation.
It’s a constant insult to your intelligence. It patronizing and disrespectful, frankly. And they think I’d pay for that? Thank god for library share and whales
As I played the game, the one phrase that kept playing in my head was, "This doesn't make any sense." My brain still hurts from trying to find logic where there is none.
Its disgustingly corporate as well.
The rule of bethesda games (except oblivion and before): is you can't use your brain, or you'll lose enjoyment.
Honestly, most worldbuilding issues could be resolved by jsut saying "we're in a distant region of space. First colonists got here 20 years ago through a wormhole that has soon collapsed". This explains absence of Earth, tiny cities, space cowboys, lack of progress, pirates having fleet comparable to a nation, disabled mechs (they jsut ran out of spare parts) and so on.
but we already got Starfield. it's called the Outer Worlds
The outer worlds? Ew
On Point, thanks for elaborating
I like how there's Z fighting on textures on the first couple of scenes
that's pretty typical when splicing textures together with another texture, it doesn't exactly play well and ends up doing that shit.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w good old bethesda magic
a creation engine classic
When the two pirates fought the first time I entered The Key, the one that gets shot spaghettified.
Classic Bethesda.
@@juvenilia_in_hell that is not something exclusive to ce lmao
Starfields universe is as technologically stagnant as the engine they made it in lol.
Imagine if Starfield just took place in like 1 or 2 solar systems instead of dozens. We couldn't just had the Sol system with New Atlantis on Earth, Akila on mars, and Neon on Jupiter or something. Then each planet could be more fleshed out and built up with a unique quest line for each.
I played Starfield through all the main/faction questlines, so i was pretty happy with it, then I played Cyberpunk 2.0 and realized how much i could've gotten from starfield if Todd had the balls to say he isnt the best ceo
One thing that really annoyed me was the lack of darker companions. I get if everyone at the lodge would be against terrible actions like murdering innocent people or other big crimes, but I wish there were companions from the crimson fleet who would actually like when you commit crimes and dislike when you were a goody two shoes
They just released an update and lol it's like bug fixes and QoL stuff. Still no maps.
i figure all the good stuff is still being worked on and won't likely come out for a long while, so they release a bunch of shit almost nobody cares about in these updates because the big shit that everyone cares about is still being worked on or troubleshooted.
my opinion is that the game won't be a good game up until the next 3 to 5 years from now.
It doesn't need maps.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w I seriously doubt it will ever be a good game. It may become more entertaining but at the core there are to many backed in problems for the game to ever be good.
Wow, love how you named your character IneedBrollforthisvid
I hope for an entire overhaul one day, where there is real conflict between United Colonies and FSC, and where it takes a much more Galactic war of taking hold of planets
Imagine 13 years old game built in 3 years is better in every way than game came out 13 years later with 8 years of development and hundreds of millions costs,l.
I have no words for this ,its like literally devolves, years later Bethesda will return to monkey i think
Yeah I got bored and went back to Fallout 4 and New Vegas...
Went back myself to play FO3 and FONV which I had never done (FONV is a gem of a game!). Imagine my surprise to find myself swimming underwater! What a concept. Why can't we swim underwater in Starfield with so many planets with oceans? So lame. How are oceans not explorable in a game supposedly about exploration?
nice vid
Lunch break ✅
Taco Bell Bean and Rice Burritos Add Guacamole Remove Cheese and chipotle sauce ✅
New Pancuronium video ✅
Yup… I think we’re gonna be okay 🙏
it just works
I can get why essential NPCs exist. As NPCs aren't static as they were more or less were in Morrowind and such, they can move. As such, they could be killed by random attacks. Ergo, through no fault of their own, quest givers or recipients or merchants could be killed at random which could piss players off, and only so many NPCs can take up a role after one is dead
A good example is the traveling merchants in Fallout 3. They eventually cross the path of high level enemies and are bound to be slaughtered. But the Protected flag has existed since Skyrim and solves this problem handily.
Yeah, that is true. IE make it so, unless its relevant to a quest or the like, having it so only the player can deal the final blow.@@PancuroniumB
Bro you really should make some Borderlands 2 content. Your personality is perfect for it.
I get more enjoyment out of listening to people rag on Starfield than I did out of the game. I feel your pain.
Ty
In my opinion open world RPGs that are predominantly proc gen in multiple facets are just bad games. Don't get me wrong, I love Daggerfall but I can burn out very quickly due to the proc gen nature of well, everything. When you do your umpteenth quest to deliver something to a woman with the last name buckingsly or yeomwing, or kill your hundredth werewolf in a maze dungeon that you can't reach because the proc gen broke the dungeon, making it inaccessible without no clip enabled, or aimlessly walking around an empty world with nothing to interact with, That shit just gets stale. Starfield is really no better, especially for a 2024 open world rpg.
I feel like they did great marrying proc gen and hand made content in Morrowind and Oblivion, even though the proc gen caves got old quick.
yeah it pretty much becomes a pointless slogfest of the same shit at way too a repetitive rate.
like as much as people praise NMS, it's still very bad in it's use of proc gen, hell it's worse than starfield in many ways, the only thing they did right in that game in my opinion is the flight in your ship from planet to space to space to another planet without a stupid load screen.
It gets stale because you're waiting for someone to cut your food and shove it in your mouth.
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo there's a difference between wanting to be spoon fed and not wanting to grow a wheat field to make the cereal. I don't mind making my own bowl of cereal and feeding myself.
@@grimvisionz91 your great grandparents got their land stolen by the bank so that you could have your cereal...
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo lol real cute
Starfield makes a point about information being transfered between systems on slates becuse of the speed of light limitations.
But every city leader across the galaxy knows who you are instantly.
Especially funny when you fast travel somewhere right after completing the quest and some npc tells you how they've been told everything about that quest conclusion.
Bethesda seems to think that replayability means being able to play the same character for as long as possible
22 minute video, Les go
I told my friends months prior to release “I don’t know about procedural generation in a space exploration game. It’s way too risky and I’ve seen the alternative of less, handcrafted worlds work really well in a certain indie game that is an absolute masterpiece! Procedural generation is going to eliminate that human touch that makes these games special”
They replied “nah, it’ll be fine, look at all the time and money that’s gone into this!”
Suffice to say, it was not fine…
You can get vilified in F:NV and still interact with the faction. Like doing Lonesome Road before your first visit to the casinos, you can nuke both caesar and the NCR and they'll still come begging to you. And faction armor exists, too.
I'd just like something like a slider at the start of the game for essential/protected/ultra-invincibility of story NPCs
2:11 Very good appraisal of what probably happened with the game as the Devs were making it. Totally agree. Signs are pretty obvious.
17:59 actually there is a side quest on neon that does minimally make use of the idea: a guy decides to change his behavior and appearance to appear better to his partner, only to find out she liked him better as he was, so if you patch them up he’ll use the service again to change his face back
When Todd says "It just works" what he means is - We got it to compile !
They either should never let you land anywhere on a planet (just a hand crafted section) or let you scan planets before landing to find the hand crafted content (then noone would care about the procedural content being boring)
with the new update with maps and an ini edit you can see all the map tiles are connected without a loading screen, theres really no reason to beacuse its boring but its impressive and makes me excited for mods
the more I see about this game's writing the more I get the impression that Bethesda were going iut of their way to keep things totally apolitical and it just destroyed the entire narrative intrigue. Jessie Gender's video also goes into this.
Classic. They refuse to acknowledge that all art is political and end up writing a horrible dystopia of blandness out of their attempts at "not offending anyone".
We didnt gobble up the starslop.
Todd will punish us for our deeds by taking the FO west coast
It's ok. I'm expecting to be dead of old age by the time Bethesda get round to another Fallout. Which I'm sort of happy about. Looking at their trajectory it's probably a mercy that I wouldn't ever see it.
@@somethingbrite8484 Sadly we will probably see another Fallout before Elder Scrolls 6. TES is the last title Bethesda hasn't pissed on yet. They probably don't want to ruin the last thing their fans are holding on for. Most likely they will release another half baked Fallout or even a Starfield 2 as their next game. Or maybe they have lost all respect for the games they once made and will desecrate TES just like every other title they have released in the last 10 years.
Can't wait to find out!
the fact that they bothered working new game plus into the narrative from the start and didnt once consider giving the player a wide variety of choices is BAFFLING
To be honest, I really like Starfield, but I also totally agree with everything said in this video about the game's flaws.
If you believe most of what this guy said you're a moron lol
A perfectly fair opinion. It has never been necessary for something to be perfect or even good to be likeable. Unfortunately too many people tend to defend the things they like to the point of absurdity.
I have to say, after 100-200 hours of starfield I started to get bored when I realised everything was repeat and the dialogue and consequences are limited, and new game + is limited as well, and such a huge world as well with nothing to do, is like wow seriously should of been multi-player 100% I agree with this youtuber. I uninstalled starfield when I got bored of grinding credits with shitty shops that have 12k credits max.
Interesting theory about creation engine limitations forcing the strange design decisions. I think many of these problems could have been solved by changing the concept a bit.. but maybe if these features kept being promised until late in development… after all, the features could have been demonstrable on an awesome machine early on. It could be the optimisation that never delivered a version that could run on the targeted hardware.
If there's no consequence for choices why are there choices in the first place?
Bethesda seems to be speed running how quickly it can alienate lifelong fans and destroy any good graces they might have had. They are kicking and screaming in the past, asking where everyone went.
I can't wait for them to release a steaming pile of crap for Elder Scrolls 6 and then wonder why they are facing bankruptcy.
This game is so poor in terms of content and gameplay. So much loading screen, multi layered menu, too many star system but little to none information.
I once hate Cyberpunk 2077 so much, but when I play Starfield, I decided to give Cyberpunk another chance and boy that game really hooked me and makes me bought the Phantom Liberty expansion
I'm eventually gonna buy the game. But I'm gonna wait until all DLC is released (if they plan on releasing any more, that is.) And it's on sale. By then, modders will have got their hands on the CK2 and hopefully done some interesting stuff with it.
Same.
They won’t waste anymore money on DLC. They’re only putting out the one they are legally obligated to put out due to pre-purchases. They have lost way too much money on this I believe.
i'll buy it once the modder add more life to the universe. its like bethesda purposely left the universe empty for modder to fix it for them
I think that waiting has probably been the only rational approach with Bethesda games for a while now.
However, I also think a lot of people might be expecting a little too much from the release of the mythical Creation Kit. After all the CK is really only a database management software, it's not in itself a mod creation tool. All the main tools for modding are actually third party tools like 3dsMax and Paintshop. Community developed tools to unpack/repack archives or get mods into the game (xEdit) already exist. To be fair the only category of mods that truly need the CK are really map/cell edit mods and possibly navigating the Story Manager. (But if you wanted to script a quest you could already have done so in a third party tool because scripts are still basically "if this > then that" arguments and I've never used the CK to edit or create papyrus scripts anyway)
In short the CK isn't some silver bullet that will magically make modding possible. It's already possible. The truth is, the majority of mods for most games are really just re-skins or asset imports anyway and you don't need the CK for any of those. Deeper, more complex mods where the CK as a tool really comes into its own are much less common and also take a while to emerge.
The is also a class of mods that stands alone. These are the very technical mods like the script extender - these don't require the CK either because they work on a whole different level.
The fact that there isn't any substantial clothing or weapon mods this long after release is concerning for the future of Starfield. No one is even making super simple "silly" mods. Skyrim had exploding chickens near day one lmao. No one wants anything to do with this game. I'm not confident that the Creation Kit will fix the lack of interest.
Daggerfall mentioned
I believe the cutting was the result of the need it to be run on xbox. thus the limitations both technical and gameplay ones (nOt FuN to have FuEl and etc)
I would’ve been happy if they had kept it to one galaxy. With like 5 planets. And really fleshed out each planet. Making each one extremely unique and filled with places to explore and interesting things to do. If they had just made the game smaller in scope they could’ve done something amazing instead of spreading it thin
The Unity is the Dragonbreak in space - it gave them options to let players explore the world and screw up.
And FFS, let us fail quests.
Its a BGS game, so I didn't expect much. However, thats also why I'm not going to pay full price for this mid game. Even on sale its still too expensive currently. When it's on sale for 20 bucks, I might actually buy it. I'm just glad I got my €10 back from Microsoft for testing game pass for a month and checking out the game.
You could do AI voice and I don't think anyone would notice
"I bet 20 Quatloos on the new Starborn contender!"
Digipicks from the ECS Constant work on New Atlantis locks.
Constant is 200 years out of touch, how did they do it?
The battery packs and weapons and ammo are the same,
even the ship paneling is the same.
[edit]
To be fair the grav drive is a museum piece relic.
My biggest problem was the Paradise world was 99.9% empty,
why couldn't they coexist in two cities?
Or why couldn't I kill the corporates and give the planet to Constant?
Missed potential, that was my main feeling after playing Fallout 76 for 130 hours..
It could have been an awesome game, heck modders would have made it one of they were allowed to. But Bethesda wants that juicy live-service cash.
And I pretty much expected Starfield to be a letdown so I didn't even bother..
This was my first Bethesda game and ngl I liked it. However, I’m not playing it anymore (after about 120 hours) as there’s nothing really to do and I decided to get fo4 soon after finishing this game (I liked/ understood Beth games after playing SF so decided to try it) which I find so much more fun etc. I’ll probably come back to this game when it gets updated/ fully completed. Sad to see so much wasted potential but games shouldn’t be based on that
Hey, good to hear you had fun at least.
Haven't touched this game and am waiting a couple years for hopefully more content, fixes, and a big sale. What a shame...
Well that's sad.
the worst crime committed by the bethesda team is making the *mercury high-altitude flight suit*, something designed specifically for high altitudes and not THE VACUUM OF SPACE, *vacuum-certified*. Could they not have modelled the apollo spacesuits? seeing most of the spacesuits in the game it'd be piss easy to make something that looks like them, considering that the supposed old earth one somehow has more detail (and less vacuum practicality somehow) than any other spacesuit they have. The game is literally made to appeal to space buffs like me and SOMEHOW they have failed to READ THE FIRST FEW WORDS of the wikipedia entry for the mercury suit.
We can pretty much boil your entire video down to one quote:
"It's a joke."
Crazy they BGS wanted to release the game in 2022, but Microsoft forced them to delay it another year.
luckily we have no mans sky
I really don't understand why you would be able to do everything with one character, I mean NG+ should solve that for you since it makes it possible to do things differently.
Night city in Cyberpunk feels like a realistic size city. So I'd say it is possible, but only if it is the focus of the game. But it seems strange where those space ships are actually built in Starfield. I remember no industrial area of that size. Perhaps they should really have changed the lore, so that humanity is on decline and they use the old stuff from the exodus.
Actually faction quests being exclusive would give meaning to the new game plus stuff. Try a different faction in your new universe.
Speaking of wasted potentials. Here's how i would have wrote the world and story of Starfield.
I would have made the artifacts and temples remnants of an advanced alien civilization. The reason behind the disappearance of this civilization would be kept a mistery.
I would have made the factions of the settled systems culturally and linguistically distinct. When interstellar travel became a reality, the nations that could afford the technology begun to colonize planets and shape them to their own image. Kinda like how the British, Spanish and Portuguese shaped the American continent, when they colonized it.
I would have made the colony war a conflict that was started because two factions wanted to colonize the same planet. This war would have ended in a stalemate, and started a tense cold war between the major factions.
I would have made the Starborn a group of humans that were able to master the power of the artifacts and temples, but without the dimension hopping bit. Now they want to keep this power to themselves, because they think it would be dangerous in the hands of others. Ironically the Starborn would cause a lot of death and destruction to achieve this. So they wouldn't be a morally superior faction. Basically the philosophy of The Emissary combined with the ruthlessness of The Hunter.
I would have made Constellation a group of historians that were researching the civilization behind the artifacts and temples. They would be a relatively small faction and the only ones that are still interested in research of this nature. The rest of the settled systems would be more occupied with avoiding another war.
I would have made the hero of the story a mercenary who was hired by Constellation. He/She was hired to protect an artifact while it was transported on a spaceship. It was meant to be an easy job, but the Starborn attacked. After surviving the attack and delivering the artifact. Constellation makes you a new offer. Help them find more artifacts and protect them from any future attacks by the Starborn. They would pay after every succesful delivery.
I would have removed the option to join any of the major factions. Instead of joining them, each faction could hire you for all kinds of jobs. Plus, since your a mercenary, they can deny their involvement if things got messy.
I would have made the climax of the game a confrontation between Constellation and the Starborn. At first, the Starborn would only attack you on artifact hunts. They dont want to attack the Constellation HQ because its located in a large city, and their attack would bring unwanted attention. However, they will attack the HQ if you collected a lot of artifacts and came too close to the truth. After the attack on the HQ, Constellation decides to relocate the artifacts and themselves to a secret location. At this point the Starborn sends you a message. Things got out of hand and they want to resolve this situation. They want to know where the artifacts are now, and they would reward you handsomely if you help them. You would have three options here:
-Betray Constellation and help the Starborn.
-Refuse their offer and fight alongside Constellation in a final battle against the Starborn.
-Convince Constellation to give the Artifacts to the Starborn, to avoid further bloodshed.
Thats all i have for now. I hope you like my ideas.
It's better than what Bethesda came up with, but you still have to account for what happened to Earth, and why Constellation are the only ones who care about the artifacts.
@@PancuroniumB I would change the story behind Earth's demise into an unintentional tragedy. Instead of one man just allowing it to happen. The scientists at NASA were researching the artifact, which led to the creation of the Grav-Drive, but it also doomed Earth. I would also make the exodus happen after Earth already established a number of colonies.
I would make Constellation's research on the artifacts a relatively new thing, that was started after they found one during an excavation. Before that, the only ones who knew about the artifacts were NASA and the Starborn. The general public knew about the temples, but they are treated as ruins left behind by aliens. I would also change the purpose of the artifacts. Instead of them being a key to a multiverse, they are just technology left behind by the aliens.
I think the issue was that there was no high level design work done. They couldn't implement any cool ideas because they couldn't coordinate them across teams. I get the feeling that so much blandness is the result of a lack of decisiveness.
Imagine if you will, you're traveling over to the barren wasteland known as Earth.
Now imagine landing, exploring the areas of the Mojave, Capital & Commonwealth Wastelands, along with the other notable Fallout Wasteland territories.
But there's only like 6 marginally dilapidated buildings on the entirety of planet Earth. They could have made an enormously rich, fun to explore Earth, to battle familiar enemies from RobCo, Combat Mr Handy etc. But no, 6 building & some snow globe thingyz.
What a waste of unimaginable potential...