Starfield, a game mainly about space travel/exploration, couldn’t convince a chunk of its players to leave the surface of the tutorial planet.
Starfield has been out for long enough now that anyone interested in playing it likely already has. But just how many of the game’s millions of players stopped playing before finishing the first mission?
Well, according to achievement stats from TrueAchievements, around 25%! The For All, Into the Starfield achievement is awarded the first time you go to space, which happens maybe 30 minutes into the game. After a brief tutorial and some combat, you meet one of the game’s major NPCs, and he gives you his ship.
As soon as you leave the surface of the planet and take to space, the achievement should unlock. According to the numbers, however, 75% of players did that, which seems a little low considering how early into the game that happens, and how practically unavoidable the achievement is.
So the way I play, I bought a silenced rifle early and spent my perks on stealth and ballistics. Most humans a few levels above me are single headshots from stealth or 2-3 shots once they know where I am. To me, that TTK feels pretty good, and I tend to be able to use space to attack at range and the boost pack for position.
I could see other approaches feeling less good, but that specific style feels pretty comparable to the later Deus Ex games I liked or Cyberpunk, but with better mobility.
I don’t love the spaceship combat, at least that I’ve played so far (though it’s been kind of minimal through 20 hours), but I don’t like many. The only exception I can think of that really clicked for me was star citizen with a full stick and throttle, and I don’t love most others, so I can’t really evaluate that super well. I definitely don’t think it’s the focus, but it’s weird that people expected stuff that only a very small handful of pretty pure space sims do and they never promised (flying down to planets). I don’t love the number of loading screens, but on steam deck the length isn’t awful, so I live with them.
That would probably help, but I find stealth builds to be really dull in Bethesda games. I do agree though that the mobility is great, I just wish there was zero-g combat (if there is, and I haven’t gotten there yet, no spoilers plz)
And yeah star citizen has the best flight model and ship combat mechanics imo - it’s a shame about the rest of the game… And to be fair there, there’s only so much you can do that with a flight model when it’s primarily going to be played on KBM or a game pad, but some games manage to do pretty damn well (Everspace comes to mind as a game with really excellent gamepad controls for spaceflight)
to be fair regarding what was promised, the vast majority of gamers arent out here reading every interview about the game ahead of time, so you can’t blame them for seeing a game that takes place in space, with stuff like ship building being one of its big selling points, and then blame them for expecting it to have features on par with the other big name space games from the last decade. Just because it’s not promised, doesn’t mean it’s not missed 🤷🏼♂️ like I said though, it’s really not a deal breaker, it just would have been a big selling point for me personally.
There’s some zero G combat areas you can come across. Like other Bethesda games, the main quest isn’t where you have the best interactions.
Level up the ship building skills and turrets will kill in space battles sometimes too fast. I rarely get the chance to board and steal the ships unless I scale back and turn off weapons.
If you want to stay in the game, you can target planets and moons from the cockpit to travel without opening up the Star map. Only scanning has to bring up the map. Random space encounters can be more enjoyable than some of the Fallout 4 ones.
Just be careful not to kill the nice granny
No worries there, I’ve been focusing on faction quests and stuff like that for the most part, only occasionally dipping into the main quest for a few missions. One thing I feel like Bethesda did well with the writing of Starfield is that they finally made the main quest not world-saving urgent (at least not from the get-go). In practically every other bethesda game I can think of, the player starts off pretty much right from the start with a “Hurry! We need to do [Quest] before [Bad Thing] happens!”, which inevitably kills the immersion a bit when you go fuck around for a solid month just exploring and doing side-quests. But in Starfield it makes perfect sense that you’re not necessarily out there every single day chasing down artifacts, at the beginning of the game, they’re just a curiosity
It’s not something that’s close to regular for space games, either. I can name one game off the top of my head that has it (No Man’s Sky), and there’s very little else going for it. That one feature combined with endless planets less interesting than Starfield’s is close to the whole game.
Just off the top of my head
I’m sure there are others, but it’s really not as uncommon as you’re making it sound, especially for AAA titles. I’d also argue it’s disingenuous to say that No Man’s Sky has “very little else going for it”. It was shit at launch, but they’ve built a really solid game now.
Again (and I feel like I need to keep re-iterating this, because people on this site are so sensitive about any criticism to their favorite games) Starfield is fun. That just doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been better, and there’s nothing wrong with pointing out the areas we feel it fell short. Really, I think what Yahtzee Croshaw said about Tears of the Kingdom applies here - “If the game had these things, you wouldn’t be saying they didn’t matter”