The lack of actual continuous gameplay being shown is kinda alarming this close to release
I mean, we never got more than half a minute of gameplay before they jumped to something totally different. Nothing to gauge what the actual gameplay loop is like and how all those systems feed into each other. The bigger previews are all kept under closed doors and hush-hush.
I am not saying it is end of the world, I will still buy the game Day 1 since it is Bethesda, but it is kind of unheard of to have no actual gameplay showcased so close to the release in modern gaming era. It definitely do not radiates confidence in the game from MS. It is supposed to be their big game, yet they just show bits here and there
Last time I trusted Bethesda, we got Fallout 4, a game I still believe is just straight-up unfinished and lacking in story content. I think I'm just gonna hold off and wait for a few patches anyway, it's not like I'm a speed runner or anything that needs the bugs.
Fallout 4 biggest issue was that it was just Skyrim with guns. And releasing 4 years after Skyrim, most people already felt the Skyrim fatigue by that time, me included. Starfield has at least that advantage it is not looking like carbon copy of Fallout/Skyrim formula, after all, it is a space game foremost and that can pour some new life into bethesda game design.
I'm a bit confused by that take. Fallout 4's character progression works differently than Skyrim, the weapon and armor modification is completely different due to the gathering and breakdown of materials, and the way those populate the world dramatically changes the gameplay loop, the world itself was totally different, there was settlement construction, voiced protagonist, I mean shit, even the pure fact that the main combat gameplay was "finally enjoyable" gunplay makes the moment to moment gameplay fundamentally different from magic, arrows, and swords.
You can extremely whittle that down to "Skyrim with guns" but aside from being open world power fantasies with certain bethesda trappings like Radiant quests and AI schedules it's absolutely not just a skin of paint on Skyrim, those games scratch a different itch.
If anything Starfield is absolutely taking a lot from those Fallout 4 specific innovations such as settlement construction expanding to ship construction and weapon and armor modification through materials coming along.
There will be bugs. Lots of them. If there is no progress halting bug in the game someway halfway through the main quest, that will be miracle and I will question whether it is Bethesda game at all. All bethesda games are bugfests on release, but at least they give the community keys to the game and then we got unnoficial patches, that fix like thousands and thousands of bugs over time
Eh, if it disappoints at launch I’ll sink back into AC VI and get S rank on most levels. Hopefully by then they would’ve fixed starfield enough so it’s playable.
I'm not expecting much myself. Another Skyrim or Fallout launch most likely.
To give (dubious) credit where it's due though - Bethesda has a history of not providing pre-release copies. Doom is a good example: the press was not given copies before day 1, yet the game came out really good.
(In all honestly I suspect they did that for the very reason to be able to say later: don't panic, all's good, remember, doom was the same)
I wonder if part of that is due to the capture issues mentioned in the Digital Foundry podcast the other day - essentially the captured footage of the game we've seen doesn't look as smooth as the actual gameplay when they demo'ed it at Gamescom. It's unclear why that is but whether it's a resolved issue in a newer build of the game or still present but only observed in captured footage, I can imagine them wanting to minimise the amount of longform captured footage that's out there pre-release to avoid showing the game in a way that portrays it as having performance issues which aren't actually present during gameplay. Particularly with the controversy surrounding 30fps on console