very early game soft spoilers
I managed to play an hour or so of the game. The early part feels really boring. Disregard that I tried to fly my spaceship to Kreet for five minutes without realising that I had to press A and select it to land on it because I probably skipped some tutorial prompt. When I get to New Atlantis the game feels really lifeless. There are many interactable characters around with good voice acting but the combination of the atmosphere, the music, the way that conversations go, the generic chosen one plot, it feels really boring.
Does it get better?
Also my diplomat character cannot persuade for shit.
my thoughts after about a week of playing:
- It’s definitely one of the least buggy Bethesda games I’ve played at launch, but it’s still a Bethesda game so you’ll see the usual “npc vibrating into a wall” type bugs. An amusing one I just encountered was my companion getting stuck talking with that spacesuit filter on her voice, so even though she’s standing right next to me and we’re not wearing spacesuits her voice she still sounded like she was talking over a radio lol.
- I’ve seen a lot of complaints about performance, and I don’t know if I just got really lucky with my PC config but the game runs really well for me (max settings, 1440p with FSR2 enabled and it never goes below 60fps).
- Loading screens galore. I’m playing on an SSD so they only take like 1-3 seconds max but it’s still annoying to see so many. I feel like Bethesda needs to just bite the bullet and create a brand new engine from scratch (which would take a ton of time and resources so it will probably never happen).
- The “fast travel everywhere” system is strange. I agree that it’s a little immersion breaking to fast travel light years away with a short loading screen. I don’t really know how you’d get around it though because manually traveling everywhere in a space game would get boring very quickly.
- I like the ship builder. They make it pretty easy to snap parts together and it’s really satisfying to design a cool looking ship that actually has useful features on the inside (like the workshop for the crafting stations or the armory for showing off rare weapons). I just wish the ship builder controls were a bit better. It’s also pretty neat to put windows on your ship and then go out in space and look through them at a huge planet or other ships flying around you, or come back to your ship and see members of your crew hanging out in the living area or engineering bay.
- I like customizing guns too but it’s really easy to make guns that are super overpowered, especially if you start with one that has really good effects. That’s kinda expected in a Bethesda game though.
- I’m not sure how I feel about the procedural generation on planets. On one hand, a lot of the “random” structures you can walk to are actually pretty detailed and some are WAY bigger than they look from the outside. In fact some of my best pieces of gear came from exploring them. On the other hand, the longer I’ve played the more I find reused set pieces. It’s also strange that even on severely inhospitable planets there are still NPCs living there or ships landing and taking off.
- After I did a specific side mission, I now see a random encounter related to it all the damn time and they have the exact same dialogue every single time. I don’t know if it’s a bug but if not it’s a really strange design choice.
- Visually the NPCs don’t look that great, and the environments are okay, but the items like guns and miscellaneous objects are very detailed. The ships also look (and sound) incredible. At one point I climbed on top of my ship and noticed there are a ton of small details all over it that most players won’t even see
- I haven’t played a ton of the main story, but the side quests are usually pretty interesting. IMO they’re the best story-related parts of the game. However I agree with another comment here that Akila city is weird because it’s like the 24th century and they still have dirt roads.
- The companions are okay. I like Andreja and Vasco.
- I think people will make some really cool mods for this game. Once the creation kit is released I plan on making a few myself (I really want to add an infinite-volume storage container near the crafting stations on my ship).
Overall I don’t think this game is GOTY material or anything, but I usually have a good time with Bethesda games (with the exception of Fallout 76) so just like Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout I’ll probably come back to it every once in a while and have fun, especially once more mods start rolling out.
bethesda is prob just making the bugs on purpose to keep their place as the world’s gamedev with the most BPM(bugs per minute)
It’s definitely one of the least buggy Bethesda games I’ve played at launch, but it’s still a Bethesda game so you’ll see the usual “npc vibrating into a wall” type bugs. An amusing one I just encountered was my companion getting stuck talking with that spacesuit filter on her voice, so even though she’s standing right next to me and we’re not wearing spacesuits her voice she still sounded like she was talking over a radio lol.
I had one where my companion was wearing only her normal clothes
which would be fine normally but…
She was on the surface of the moon
Lol I actually just had another one today where I was doing a mission on Neon and told my companion to wait in one of the air ducts because she kept alerting the guards when I was trying to sneak around. I totally forgot about her in there and during the next mission I was talking to an NPC and my companion interjected with something… from a totally different floor, partially obscured by shadows of an air vent she was standing near. Gave me a good laugh imagining her standing in a dark air duct for hours and then somehow hearing our conversation from multiple floors below us and giving her thoughts on it.
It seems like Fallout 3 merged with No Man’s Sky.
I have not played Fallout 3 but Fallout 4 did also have a similar resurrected zombie feel to it.
No Man’s Sky
I have actually never played this game before. But I am 99% sure in this game you get into a spaceship and fly from one planet to another. Starfield has a modified version of this mechanic where they strip down all the fun parts and leave the tedious bits in between. I haven’t gotten a handle on it yet because it is very confusing but currently non-warp speed travel looks like this. You get into you spaceship, you press Y to embark. Now you in space. Here sometimes you can do space combat. Now you aim your crosshair at the planet/moon you want to land on and you press A. Then you select a landing spot and the ship lands there automatically. I actually don’t want to fly the spaceship at all. I would just like to select the landing spot and fast travel there without all the tedium in between. The design in really baffling.
Fuckers should just do ES 6 like literally everyone wanted but they churn out some weird experiments one after another. Though comparing Morrowind-Oblivion-Skyrim-Fallout4-Starfield i no longer hype for ES6.
I found myself testing the game for 2 hours and i need some mods already - well this is the moment Starfield will be superior to NMS, now if only the devs could found a bit more of colour palette in NMS space is at least pretty. Also i found comparing it to NMS way more than to Skyrim, not a good sign.
Bethesda was open that they wanted to make Starfield before the Elder Scrolls 6, which is now supposedly in actual development now instead of pre-production.
Yeah, but entire thing was such a hilarious fuckup.
Bethesda just kept churning out wolfensteins and whatnot while cutting the coupons of Skyrim (hell they even did a few updates in last year completely shitting out on modders). Then they made that utter garbage of failout 76, which instantly exploded straight in their faces, and soon after they release that first teaser of ES6 and pretended it was already in production, it was clearly a complete lie and most likely the decision of actually making ES6 was made right then.
I’m enjoying Starfield so far, but admittedly I haven’t played it as much compared to Destiny 2.
I have actually never played this game before. But I am 99% sure in this game you get into a spaceship and fly from one planet to another
I have. A lot. Here’s how it works in NMS:
You get into the spaceship. Press button for liftoff - it causes the ship to “jump” above the ground. Now you’re in flight. From there on you’re pretty much free to fly about. You can technically even go to other planets in the current system this way, it would just take awhile. Want to land - go where you want to land, press land button. Either you’ll land or get a message why not (flying too fast, area not clear). Want to go to another system - open galaxy map, select system, warp. Rinse and repeat. There’s a hidden loading between planetary area and space, but on a good machine you won’t notice the lag
The Starfield hype made me craving a new space game (Outer Wilds got me in so hard) so I bought NMS and I really love it. It’s just pretty overwhelming, there’s a lot to do. But you actually feel like dwelling in space
at least fallout 3 had the franchises previous worldbuilding carrying the game 😂
Theoretically, but for me it only crashed harder because of that, definitely worst part of series.
I’ve never been interested in Starfield in the first place, but I like how you guys have genuine criticism of it.
The only other criticism I’ve heard of it is “wOkE pRoNoUnS!1!1!1!”
Same, with the exception of Mass Effect, I have little to no interest in space exploration games
Starfield demonstrates a complete lack of any cohesive vision in story, themes, and gameplay.
The artstyle has that generic “hard” space sci-fi look. I could just as well be looking at Star Citizen, Interstellar, or The Expanse. The locations might sound interesting in theory but are executed in the most bland way possible. It’s kind of hilarious to think that these tiny settlements are supposed to be interplanetary capital cities. I do understand that unrestricted player movement means that they can’t really place a massive city in the background like in the Mass Effect Trilogy but explicitly calling the places you visit capitals is absurd.
Bethesda tries hard to ape Serenity-esque space westerns with Akila. An interplanetary capital without paved roads in its main thoroughfare. It really clashes with the rest of the game’s attempts at being seen as a believable “hard” sci-fi. A vision of a car free future brought to you by the limitations of the Creation Engine. The game engine is no excuse for not having a space horse though. Traversing procedurally generated terrain on foot is a waste of time.
The vaguely utopian corporate solarpunk of New Atlantis is soulless and not in the satirical good way. Which is ironic because it seems to be inspired by Starship Troopers.
Neon, the cyberpunk offworld oilrig tries and fails to be a hip seedy dystopia. It looks more like the Outer World’s Groundbreaker Promenade than Mass Effect 2’s Omega. It doesn’t illicit feelings of despair from the callous disregard of humanity as a consequence of greed without limits. It’s just a shopping mall with boring corporate suits who try to sound edgy.
The same goes for the music. It doesn’t convey any emotion and isn’t uniquely identifiable. Inon Zur’s work for the Bethesda Fallouts weren’t this forgettable so it’s probably down to Bethesda’s lack of direction. The music doesn’t build into the atmosphere of any location or any story moment. I don’t think Jeremy Soule would’ve made a difference, and it’s good that Bethesda doesn’t associate with an accused rapist. That said I’d still say his work with Oblivion was one the best soundtracks of any game.
Ship combat has controls like Freelancer except it plays terrible. The ships feel heavy and are unresponsive to control so it doesn’t really work as an arcade space combat game. The mouse first controls with no flight stick support, fast travel, and the inability to actually dock/land manually make it an automatic fail as a spaceflight sim. The ability to fast travel instantly to any previously visited location is good though. With its quest design, it would be painful to play Starfield if they went the sim route.
The gun play is identical to Fallout 4 but plays worse due to procedurally placed enemies and levels. It has to rely on the AI, weapons and enemy design. None of those elements are able to make the fights interesting. It’s still a lot better than any of the other spaceflight games with ground combat though.
The bar is being dropped so hard that Mass Effect Andromeda is retroactively becoming a great game. In the universe that Starfield is an 87, Andromeda is at least a 97.
I’ll still play Starfield over Elite Dangerous, or No Man Sky since it has actual content. It isn’t all procedurally generated and has an actual story with characters. I’ll finish the main quest at least, the game isn’t aggressively bad in anyway. It’s just all around sterile and uninspiring. I still have the hope that somewhere out there I might find a branching side quest that is remotely as good as those in Oblivion, or New Vegas.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is unironically the best Mass Effect game.
I dont have the means to play it myself right now, but I have watched some videos from people and that seems to be the same kind of impression I get. I could absolutely love actually play it myself, because watching somebody play a game is obviously not the same, but I get the same kind of lifeless feeling.
Maybe part of that are the two games I have been playing lately are Baldur’s Gate 3 and No Man’s Sky, which are both REALLY good at what they do. Starfield almost feels like the two combined but not quite as good? NMS gives me that endless universe exploration feeling, and BG3 gives me what I am looking for with a living world full of interesting characters/roleplaying.
Nothing about Starfield seems bad persay, but maybe not for me in the end. Let us know if your opinion on that changes though.
I find it a bit surprising that when games like Disco Elysium and Baldur’s Gate 3 exist, the standard for player-NPC interactions in AAA RPGs is still the same as it was like ten or fifteen years ago. This game was supposed to be some kind of revolution but the loop still seems to be following map markers and shooting bad guys with some spaceship traversal thrown in between. I will give the game some more time though. Let’s see how it goes.
the standard for player-NPC interactions in AAA RPGs is still the same as it was like ten or fifteen years ago
Because those games are not RPG. Those are glorified shooter adventure games, it blur betweens games like Fallout 4, NMS, Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 5, souls-likes (F4 is the only one of those being an RPG though fairly simplicistic one).
Baldur 3 came and smashed all them aside as RPG proving that that genre did not died, it was murdered by publishers. Problem is, Baldur took years upon years of work and is still unfnished, so the devs WILL keep churning out shooters with RPG label because it is simply more cost-effective.
Disco Elysium also had a lot of work done post initial release. I consider myself incredibly blessed that I only paid attention to it after the Final Cut was out. The voice acting is stellar.
Yeah, Baldur will also be continued, devs confirmed for example the endings are being worked upon. And they should, the “best” ending is basically turning everything into warzone trying to turn back into status quo, and to get something actually positive out of it you need to jump the tricky hoops into few quests (basically impossible without accidentally stepping upon the correct combination of not signalled decisions or without game guide). Rest of endings are even worse, they barely count as any ending, just few short scenes and that’s it.
I think Baldur was rushed to come out before Starfield since the target audiences for both games are very overlapping.
I have 104 hours in BG3 and have not yet passed Act I LOL
Not to say the endings aren’t underdeveloped, you are almost certainly right there, I am just unsure if I will even see them before they’re updated!
Entire game took me 150 hours with trying to go everywhere and do everything and i’m a veteran who played nearly every single such game, so yeah, the size and scope of game is impressive. About the acts i think act 1 is the biggest with the matryoshka dungeons (and don’t forget to go to monastery to get the legendary Lathander morningstar!), lower city in act 3 is very big plus all the buildings and sewers. Act II is the smallest and it’s good since its pretty dreary and boring (do the harpers quest asap to get the freedom of movement).
Much of the reason it’s taken me so long is down to a combination of poor performance and constantly, constantly rerolling characters because something else seems so interesting at the moment. Oo, I’ve read Drow are treated very differently! How will the tiefling/druid conflict resolve in the face of a tiefling druid? I think I’ll try Wyll’s story! What if Karlach and Shadowheart fell in love? Bah! There is simply so much to enjoy.
One issue is that games can take so long to develop and that development is (probably—I have no real idea) so bureaucracised, there’s no real room to keep up with what others are doing. I’ve not played Starfield yet, btw.
JERRY STARFELD
YOU HAVE TO PRESS A??? Bruhhhh I flew for like ages, and then couldn’t figure it out so I left the chair and went to the table thing and had to use that. This helps so much.
I am not sure if you are making fun of me which I don’t mind but it took me a long time to figure out because it clearly looked like the ship was moving and I wasn’t sure if the celestial body was really far away or just not coming closer to me at all.
I’m not. I literally flew at it for ages using the boosters. And then I legit did leave the cockpit and use the table to land. I knew it was weird but lots of people told me the flying was weird so I was like umm alright. It makes way more sense that I can click into it somehow.
I found just travelling system to system planet by planet is great because you run into all sorts of encounters. Ditched the main quest line and joined the vanguard so now I go around the galaxy murdering spacers, bugs and pirates. I am playing on hard so I spend quite a bit on remote worlds trying to scavenge enough credits to pay for ship repair kits and meds.
Honestly you can choose to skip the monotonous getting out of your cockpit/going to the airlock and being able to teleport when your 2km away from your ship is nice if you don’t have the patience.
It reminds me of season 1 Star Trek.
Why is everyone shitting on NMS here instead of the Bethesda Cookie Cutter?
TBH I don’t see what’s written of NMS here as criticism really
Yeah I don’t even see where it is mentioned
Btw I got into NMS recently as a reaction to Starfield and I think it’s incredible, although not quiet for everyone
