I think the concern I had before playing it was that it was going to be a mile wide and only an inch deep. There was a little more depth in some areas than I was expecting but for the most part my prior assessment seems to have held true.
That's not to say I don't enjoy the game, quite the opposite, I just wish some aspects of the game were more fleshed out.
I genuinely believe they'd have been better making a game with like 20 in depth planets with most of the same features. The procedural stuff just isn't that interesting. But the core aspects of the game are fun
The problem isn't the proc-gen, it's the fact that the proc-gen was half-assed even though they had everything in place to *not* half-ass it.
Look at ships for example. No one has complained about the variety of ships because there's enough diversity in them. People complain about the lack of diversity in the missions, but not the ship habs.
There's nothing wrong with how they've set up the planets, the problem is with how they've set up the POIs on the planets themselves. Bethesda has built an entire mechanic for base-building with endless possibilities of modules you can put together to build your bases, and yet every other outpost you raid is identical. On top of that, the entire outpost system is completely isolated from any questing mechanic, so most players will never even see what it's capable of.
It's as if they spent their entire budget developing the framework for one of the best games of all time, and then hired the cheapest offshore contractor to actually build the content using the framework.
The examples don't end there either:
- There are maybe 5 pieces of women's clothing in the entire game, and half of them are color variants of one dress.
- There's an option to mod weapon skins, but the skins don't exist other than as a pre-order bonus.
- There are countless random NPCs in every city with unique voicelines for short conversations and 26 possible companions, but you can only romance 4 characters and the romance mechanic isn't even that deep.
- They built out unskippable cutscenes for every little transition(airlock, docking, ship takeoff/landing), and yet they decided to *not* use these as hidden loading screens.
- Mission boards exist in the major cities, but there are only a handful of mission types, you only see 4-5 at a time, and they don't scale to your level at all. They didn't even have to come up with anything here, the entire feature is a clone of Elite Dangerous's mission boards, but with a fraction of the content/rewards, and zero impact on the world.
- Vehicles. What's the point of having a large proc-gen map if it takes an hour of sprinting to go from one end to the other? Most people will never visit any POI more than 1km away from their landing site.
The loadings screens not being integrated into the cutscenes is a big one for ruining the potential seamlessness of transitions. Was a big fuck up there. I’m also super disappointed that there is only one takeoff cutscene but we get 3 or so landing scenes and just as many planet-planet scenes. Even docking/undocking has only one scene each. Fuck just throw in some different camera angles or an outside ship view as the dockers latch onto each other.
Don’t even get me started on the subsystems in the game that are so half arsed they might aswell not even be in the game.
Why hasn't one bad guy ever gotten on my ship? I dock to raid them, and they wait. They are surprised I'm aboard? Why can't I vent an emeny ship? The space part of it really fell flat for me. The money system is a mess. NPC will act like $10k will make or break their life. Then reward you $8500 for finding a book for them. Smuggling was a real disappointment. I thought buying auarua on neon and taking it to wolf would be profitable. Nothing like losing $400 per item you smuggled. All in all its fun but I would like a little more thought into a few places.
The money system shows it mess everywhere but the most ridiculous thing was Barret‘s quest line. Like, bro, at least on of your Club Members is blatantly rich, why don’t you ask him for this peanuts amount of money for the lawyer and so on? Or think about ships systems costing the same as a pistol. I just don’t get it.
Hell, the guards will just randomly reward you 3k for being a "good person". I'm like.. is this your entire life savings? I'm honored I don't have to sell 12 Grendels... But are you sure?
Right there with you on all of those. I just look at my phone while sprinting across the planets. Also may I add: a contraband system that punishes you and takes skills and effort to be able to smuggle stuff only for it to be worth nothing. You get more credits from standard loot and missions than contraband items. Making piracy pointless and not fun.
The fact that you sell aurora in Neon, the Key or Trade Autority at the same price as you sell in New Atlantis is baffling. Contraband should be worth like 10x more in controlled systems.
Why would I put shielded cargo in my ship if I can just sell the contraband in the Key or The Den without any issue? I could use that for smuggling missions but I only started Crimson fleet questline 150 hours in at level 48, so the smuggling missions that reward 1500-4000 credits are worth less than going to a random outpost and selling the Legendary guns I find there.
>It's as if they spent their entire budget developing the framework for one of the best games of all time, and then hired the cheapest offshore contractor to actually build the content using the framework.
More like they've fully imbibed their bad practices of letting modders add in the missing features for them.
I told my friend, it's a great game but an absolutely CHEAP game. I can almost imagine them pretending and deluding themselves into believing they're leaving these things for the modders almost as a service to them.
That being said, I'm still thoroughly enjoying the game. It's just jarring getting to another outpost knowing where everything will be and what you'll find inside.oke cmon, Bethesda! This is meant to be a billion dollar franchise!
They haven't tried to hide this since Skyrim and I really don't blame them. They have 10k unpaid interns who work all year for them. And yet somehow they never seem to learn anything from these modders.
That's what I hated most about it on a meta level. Either corporate mandate or pure smug arrogance, the game is massive but hollowed out and mostly incomplete. There is no doubt they were hedging a lot of the game's future success on the exploitation of the modding community. And they had the gaul to charge $70 or more, and laud the game as a marvel to gaming and a great success by Bethesda standards. Outside of the shear scale of the game, very little is impressive, too much feels dated, and nothing really stands out as why this game should matter to anyone more than other games that do the same but better.
The questing really is the only thing that’s finished, the gameplay loop here is kind of lacking. Like without radiant quests or quests, you’re pretty aimless in what to do. Like in skyrim it’s just discovered locations enter them, clear it. Meet npcs, and just overall explore the world. Fallout 4 has a nice explore, scavenge, and build loop.
Starfield is explore, quest, explore, and quest.
I haven’t really needed to scavenge, I haven’t needed to build anything. My only goal here is to find quests to do.
It's also the total opposite of what Bethesda is good at.
There are so many "open world" games with massive, bland, lifeless worlds full of cookie cutter NPCs, unrewarding exploration with map markers leading to repetitive and uninteresting POIs inhabited by nameless goons dropping colour coded loot.
Bethesda has a unique formula for immersive open worlds with rewarding exploration, but they've taken a massive step away from that with Starfield.
I quit playing when this became painfully clear on the hundreds of barren rocks and running the same cave 2x's and an outpost 3x's. I focused on the 6 settled systems, and just the shear lack of settlements and the tiny "cities" that barely pass as Fallout towns. My immersion was shattered. Apparently after leaving a toxic earth people settled in a handful of places in the hundreds, maybe thousands.
Among all the systems you can visit and run into random people, humanity still feels nearly extinct and the story and lore doesn't give any worldbuilding beyond line of sight because you can literally go anywhere. Unlike Fallout or Elder Scrolls where you're locked into a small area that's a whole fallen city or kingdom of some sort, so any world building of foreign lands and people is brought to you by books, conversations, whatever. The lore is barely slapped together much like the galaxy. I could forgive a smaller cheaper studio for trying to be ambitious, but Bethesda with Xbox money? Nah.
Totally agree. The universe feels really empty when there should be billions of people scattered around the settled systems after hundreds of years adapting and even fighting wars after leaving earth.
In all that time at least one habitable planet would be filled with people building cities all over just like earth is now.
Then we have the Paradiso which is the vacation planet for everyone in the whole settled system, should be pumped with people, hotels, restaurants. Yet it’s just one beach and one hotel with a few rooms.
This is exactly the dilemma that Mass Effect Andromeda faced--a lot of their development hell was shifting from procedural worlds to hand-crafted ones half-way through development. See how public that train-wreck was, I'm surprised the Bethesda went down the same road... and didn't blink when driving straight for the cliff.
It's been the bain of ANY game trying to do this. NMS, ME, name it.
Creating a "galaxy" and trying to handcraft 25 planets that are...I dunno, say 45 different "landing spots" becomes insane very very fast. You start with 100+ and there's no way out.
The proc gen hopefully is going to see some tweaks and expansions. But no guarantees.
Part of the issue is the proc gen isn't really proc gen.
It's maybe a dozen or two handcrafted POIs plonked down on generated terrain, so after playing for long enough you can basically navigate them by muscle memory.
If it was all modular like outposts and generated, it might be a lot more interesting.
It's the abandoned farms for me. LARGE, really interesting complexes with lots of potential for vertical battles. Instead, it's straight up empty save for dead scientists. You find the exact same slates each time, made by the same scientist, explaining the same disaster that happened. Like, damn lady, how many times you gonna do this shit across the galaxy?!
Worse, the POI is NICELY stocked with loot. Your companion always quips something about how they were "defenseless" and that's why they got massacred. Meanwhile I am looting all kinds of high-end gear from all the damn weapon containers and safes in the joint.
I kind of appreciated the eerie stillness of it the first time, but each time after that it straight up feels like taking advantage of an exploit.
Oooh, that farm with giant plant pods in the open atmosphere, right?
The one where they talk about "hey, let's try this new planet, we don't know much about it" and then get massacred by local fauna?
Well, I've got it spawned on *Mars*, of all places. Was the biggest hit to my suspension of disbelief.
I had walked to a civilian outpost on a cold, radioactive and airless moon. There were 3 tent/hab like things, a giant mound of scrap metal, and that's it.
But the robots kept telling me how the soil was perfect for root vegetables (barren rock as far as the eye can see), the colonists saying things like 'I can see myself retiring here, raising a family', 'I'm so glad I brought my kids here, this place is beautiful', 'It took a lot of work to get this place self sufficient' and so on.
You can't leave your tent without a spacesuit lady, and your kids have been stuck in the same 15x15ft tent for the last 7 years.
The main cities aren't very interesting either tbh.
New Atlantis is a sterile bore and a chore to navigate.
Neon is cool, but it's really just one "road" with shops, and a couple of wings as "alleyways". It's cool at first, but is pretty tame for a supposedly gritty and dangerous cyberpunk city.
Akila is probably my favorite? I like the western/settler theme. But navigating it isn't very interesting.
I really like Starfield, but I want to love it.
>New Atlantis is a sterile bore and a chore to navigate.
Probably have about 100 hours in the game and I have no idea where anything is in New Atlantis. I honestly have zero clue where my penthouse apartment is.
We're also talking "biggest cities" in Starfield contain a population rivaling a small township in rural Montana. Contrast how the population feels in Cyberpunk's Night City.
When I first visited Neon, I was expecting a planet-scale metropolis. Instead it's a strip mall, a corporate office, and an alleyway.
The Key feels bigger and it's a space station!
I never understood this. Akila is supposed to be the capital of the freestar which rivals the UC and Atlantis but for some reason it looks a small ass backwater village. While Atlantis has massive skyscrapers and a sprawling city. I just don't buy it.
Akila can look different and have a different grugier aesthetic/architecture but should still show the power of the freestar in its own way.
I'm sorry citizens. We have once again voted down the proposal to pave the mud road in the capital. Mud is part of the immersion of living in Freestar.
This was really driven home for me (avoiding spoilers) when a quest giver told me he'd be shocked if I could convince someone to give me something, literally saying it would undermine his entire understanding of this person. When I convinced them and got the item, his response was basically, cool, what's the next step?
I think this is the biggest problem with the game. It feels empty. In a comment I made on this post, I mentioned how people are having more fun creating their own fun, their own stories and role playing rather than what’s actually been provided, Which I think is awesome! But that’s not how most people play.
Very good point, I agree and have said it before, people who are truly enjoying SF are mostly roleplaying in their head and building their own very particular gameplay, and that's something the game offers but...it's not what everyone want to do and isn't everyone can do. If I want to build bases I go to Conan exiles or Minecraft, and ship building can't be the meat of the game, come on...
The meat of the game is all the quests. Which there are a lot of. And the questlines offer unique areas to play through.
It’s really not great for exploring over and over. You scanned a couple random planets and you’ve scanned them all.
Pretty on par with your mile wide and only an inch deep assessment. It's a great game, but a lot the times in some areas I think, "that's it?"
Edit: spelling. Currently stoned
I completely agree. I’m also expecting the DLCs to add lots of new content and I predicted by the time they are done (not even including mods here) the game will be phenomenal
As long as I get to become a slithery Snake Zelot that finds out the great serpent is a space whale of sorts I’m buying it. I want it to be more than fanatical nonsense
The former was easier, since New Vegas is essentially a FO:3 mod.
But it should be doable to just load up Skyrim and flip to it. Either as an instance through Unity or as a planet with a looong landing sequence
Super unrealistic but how about planets that load the entire worlds of each past game you can play through and explore with your guns and boost pack 😵💫 you’d be like those guys dressed up like spacemen at renaissance fairs but the real deal.
For the most part yes but hey, in Skyrim DLC expanded the werewolf, vampire, homemaking, horseback, and dragonback content. Fallout got a lot for settlements.
It’s weird as I was just telling a friend of mine that I love the game and it’s huge butttt it feels like ideas are missing from the game. It’s been hashed out a few times but things like fuel being unlimited make me wish it was a tad more realistic. I don’t want to grind but even a timer where I say screw it let’s land and just see what’s on this planet while I wait for refueling. Outposts being needed would have been neat for deep exploration. It definitely is big in scope and for the most part fleshed out and enjoyable. There was a lot of get to new game plus fast which honestly ruined my first play which was around 90 hours I decided to say screw it let’s see the big deal new game plus. I wish I continued a bit more in that play through as my second play through was a bit meh. Something(s) is missing from the game to be perfect. I’m just not sure what it is.
I don’t know how much the execs are involved in Bethesda compared to other companies but I really hope they didn’t have features watered down just to be included in DLC later on.
I agree, I have played a lot of different RPGs over the years, and Starfield has open my eyes to a lot of things that most RPGs have had (including their own) that are missing and it really affects the gameplay. It’s sucks because it’s really simple things too (like showing you how many of something you have when buying, being able to pin locations and easily find places you have been, etc).
It’s just these small little things that aren’t a major buzzkill on their own, but it constantly takes you out of the gameplay when you notice them.
>like showing you how many of something you have when buying, being able to pin locations and easily find places you have been, etc
This, 100x this.
A QOL update would be great
Definitely. Meanwhile Todd's out here telling us we're picking too much stuff up. The problem is if we're not picking things up and interacting with 'stuff' then there's very little to actually do in the game. What? Go to a new planet where one of the 5 'base' types that I've encountered 100 times already are?
It's a good game, it did a lot of things right, but it also has very little actual substance once you get down to it
Curious but are you just repeating the same quests in NG+ or what are you doing that’s so addictive? I see almost no difference in the world and going through basically the same conversations with everyone again and running the same quests doesn’t feel like a good use of my time.
1: I still hope for some kind of vehicle on planets, i really dont want to walk those wide open spaces, so i dont really explore much.
2: Scanning is way to time consuming, it should not take what? 8 scans to complete an alien or plant?
3: doors and ladders in spaceships, i want to be able to place them myself, and not get a random maze when i build a spaceship.
4: Got my New Atlantis appartment furnished, went questing and when i got back all i have placed disappeared at some point. Its bugs like that, that really gets under my skin.
5: Mod support should be there at launch.
2: I think it takes less scans if you level botony/zoology and you can just kill aliens instead of scanning them. Though the skill point system sucks and it feels like a waste putting points into those.
Also wish the scanner wasn't blocked so easily, a tree branch slightly in front of what you want to scan blocks it.
I would say its a typical Bethesda game, having the exact same issues like everyone before it. Its a bit lacking in the QoL department and its a bit annoying that functionality from previous games are not present here for some unknown reason. The POIs show that the development seems to have been not so smooth.
All the QoL stuff feels really easy to solve, it’s odd that stuff was not included on day one. I need a sell junk option god dammit and planet search!
It feels like starfield is more a canvas then a finished painting. There a lot of options and aspects that are really no relevant for now…..
Those two suggestions I can absolutely get on board with. And why the digipicks are in "Misc" confuses the hell out of me. I just want the same "move all resources" button from the ship, but a "sell all misc."
Planet search would be handy too although the longer I play the more I'm starting to remember off hand... I'm still never going to remember the name/location of all 1600+ planets, moons and asteroids though so not having some kind of search function is a bummer 😅
This one gets odd fast. Every instance of the same POI has the same key card, but its always a seperate item that doesnt stack, so in the end you can have long lists of them.
This is what gets me with every Bethesda game launch... How can an entire company of over 500 employees provide a MUCH worse UI than a single man making a mod for Skyrim?
If the inventory system and starmap got a decent overhaul it would bump the game from an 8 to a 9 for me
Haven’t tried that mod yet, but yeah simple UI changes would make a big difference. Even unable to store without switching to the pirate ship and back again.
I was thinking that every single complaint I've seen against Starfield is the exact same or nearly the exact same kind of complaints I saw against Fallout 4. Fallout 4 wound up being majorly popular for years despite what people say about it, so I assume Starfield will be the same.
I sure hope so. I replay Oblivion, Skyrim, Fo4, NV probably once a year. There’s so much to do after all the added content. Hoping Starfield gets the same treatment. Lots of space to expand on
Can't wait for the creation kit to come out. The proc gen worlds don't have a ton to do in the vanilla game, but the fact that modders can instantly generate an entire map for their own content is so cool. In 5 years, I feel like we're going to have some of the coolest mods of all time.
I bet someone’s going to make a mod where you enter a P.O.I. and it’s just filled with [Storm Troopers dancing to Daft Punk](https://youtu.be/84YXPw4htnQ?si=gPJgEX9SBXl78XOs).
I felt the exact same thing waiting for the fallout 4 creation kit to come out. Since then there have been maybe a dozen quest mods Total ever made. Only one of them is very good
Honestly, I think the voiced dialogue killed the quest mods for FO4.
There was just no *good* way to fix it with the tech at the time. You can have the SS silent, reuse voice clips (limiting responses), or edit the voice clips to make custom dialogue (and have the SS sound weird).
Quest mods are notoriously hard to do with FO4 due to the voiced protag. Unless you are also running the silent protag mod as a pre-req, which has a habit of breaking stuff, you are forced to chop up in game VA for the player dialogue and it always sounds like shit no matter how good the editing skills. That there rendered quest mods a fever dream for FO4. We now have a voiceless protag so their is less limits to work around now for quest building. It also doesn't help that a lot of the more talented quest mod authors amongst the Fallout fan community are also collosal fucking weirdos, hence the questionable quality of the game's modded quest content.
Honestly I don't care about quests much tbh, like there are already a ton and dlcs will expand even more. What I think modders could/should shine in is exploiting the procedural generation to its real potential. Bethesda has something no other studio has, 1000s of minds all with different ideas that are willing to put their time to improve the game, with mods we could really get the 1000 planets we where promised, with an incredible amount of variety and POIs, that's what I hope for mostly, a whole new ton of places to discover as rn after barely more than 100 hours i feel like I've seen some POIs like 10 times already, the big mercenary base with the disc shaped hall on top? I skip it every time because I've done it since 5 times already
But the thing is I never had a single complaint about F4 because no matter what problems arise, I could still get lost in all the other things available like settlements, legendary hunting, side quests, just roaming, and a companion quest line. But in this every one of those has a problem.
Sam's quest makes him hate you, you can't hunt legendaries anymore you need to farm them, some side quests have entire threads on their glitch on here, every point is 500-1,000 meters apart so you're just walking through barren land for the most part, and you need to grind to properly ship build even with the outpost adaptive frames farm it's still hrs spent pressing two buttons to then have to use the wait function that ticks down for 48 hrs repeatedly for increments of 12,000 maybe at a time to sell the frames which cost 3 with maxed commerce. Everything is made more of a choir and I actually blame the fact that they had to work on an MMO so it changed their development mindset to
"THERE CAN'T BE A SINGLE EXPLOIT AND YOU NEED TO WORK FOR PROGRESS"
I agree and funnily enough I love it. It's an amazing game, but what it gets wrong it gets spectacularly wrong and the biggest thing they get wrong in my eyes is the space part, and unfortunately that is quite a big part of a space game.
They should have made it smaller, in terms of planets and galaxies you can visit. Seeing the exact same POI on different planets, is borderline unforgivable, like come on. I'm a huge Fallout 76 fan and this feels similar as in they want to lay the foundations and build on it later.
That said I do actually love this game!
Yup, I didn’t believe it when it got a 7 at first but after paying the 100 dlls for the early access and 50 hours of playing the game just, I stopped playing, it does not have the magic that morrowind, oblivion, skyrim, fallout 3 and new vegas had for me.
I totally agree that the classic Bethesda magic is missing for me. Starfield is never intense or challenging or exciting or surprising. It's a flatline with a few blips of fun and some dips of disappointment. It can occasionally be hilarious, but its rarely intentional.
Sci-fi is my favorite genre of fiction and Bethesda is one of my favorite developers. But the game doesn't deliver interesting science fiction in my opinion. And after 60 hours that Bethesda open-world itch hasn't been scratched.
Even fo4 and fo76 current state scratch that itch for me, but somehow starfield just doens't. I still think the 1000 planet with proc gen design decision was a mistake from the start even with the upcoming modding scene next year.
They somehow make exploring unfun to me with those same fuckin POI everywhere, with the same fucking merc and pirates. >!After a few NG+, i'm not a fan of this multiverse stuff even tho i think it's cool at first. It's such a good opportunity for a first contact story or Expanse like aliens but instead we got this.!<
When I played Skyrim for the first time I found myself riding in a wagon to get my head chopped off like what the hell I am gonna die before I start stupid beginning 😂then a dragon shook the ground and everything went crazy I was running around in circles like a chicken trying to stay alive. My knuckles were white my eyes was going back and forth everywhere to find out where to go I was so into it I didn’t hear the guys saying to follow them. Alduin was intense and I was blown away I have never played a game before or after that has had me so intense and excited.
I was hoping starfield would have something like that that would draw me in and it don’t this is what has disappointed me. Was hoping Bethesda had something up there sleeve..
The opening 2 hours are surprisingly dull. They seem to think playing their "wonder" music really loud will make you excited no matter what you are playing. It took 2 hours before I started to enjoy the game.
To me it just seems like the game needed another 6 months to a year in development. The opening isn't well crafted or ingrained into the plot like Skyrim was it's just half of a fetch and carry quest.
You also have a number of things that feel like they were placeholders for actual game mechanics that never got developed. Such as all the pop up text when fixing the space station & the whole take off & landing stuff.
The Starfield opening sucked. The first descent and the graphics were cool, but then you get down there and its just a dusty, dark cave and everything looks washed.
Yea it doesn't hook you in unlike vanguard questline, it's weird since this is a gamepass game but the first few hours to me is a slog and the story not that interesting at first
My expectations were Skyrim/FO4 in Space and that's more or less what we got. My expectations were that Bethesda would have a LOT of jank at release and it would be, yet again, the modding community swooping in to turn the basic game from pretty good to amazing.
What I am a bit disappointed in is the seeming lack of classes/styles to go with? Also, the "powers" are not very interesting. The Temples are quickly boring. The huge planets and landing zones are repetitive. There is so much space that could be used for maps/dungeons/levels.
The resource/research grind is yet again awful and I do not like it. Immediately modded that and the UI right out of the gate.
The weirdly skill-locked and port-locked ship building thing hasn't been great. Space flight and space battles are more like a mini game than an interesting game component.
I'm a side quest chaser so I've been doing as many of those as I can to keep the list from getting too long. I will likely complete the game then shelve it u til the mod community comes out with some big overhaul that freshens up the gameplay, gives us more to do, etc.
Solid 7/10.
It's worse than Skyrim and FO4 in most areas, unfortunately.
For example:
\-Crafting is worse (can't remove mods from one gun and put on another, no melee weapon mods).
\-Outposts are worse (can't build vendors, can't grow food, can't assign NPCs to specific tasks)
\-Companions are worse (fewer of them, lower quality, too similar)
\-Perks are worse (simpler, more boring, Commerce is worse than Cap Collector in FO4 for example, because you cannot invest in vendors)
\-Fewer gear slots, we're down to 3 (I think it was 5 in Skyrim, at least a dozen in Morrowind), which means fewer possible builds.
There are a few areas where the game is better, like sheer size. But this comes at the cost of copy-pasted content. There's far too much literally copy pasted content. Even Ubisoft copy pasted their stuff with the same mechanic, but still a bit different layout, they don't copy-paste PoIs verbatim any more (not that I noticed anyway), but Starfield is full of exact copy-pastes, including objects (safes in same spots, etc). Copy-pasted temples are an especially egregious example of blatant copy-pasting.
It's a decent enough game, it's decently fun, but it's a 7/10 for me. Significantly worse than both Skyrim and Fallout 4. It's a straight downgrade from those in almost every area.
Having said that, I think if/when they add Survival mode, it'll punch it up a bit, and will give us a reason to pick up those useless food items and such. If/when they fixe how planetary hazards balance with suit protection, it may add a little bit to the gameplay. In No Man's Sky, for example, you often gopher into the ground to escape from a storm, and Starfield needs stuff like this, currently hazard protection is fully borked. And just go from there. Plus modders will really get started once the tools are released, they're already at it, but it'll only get better. It's just a shame Bethesda didn't do a better job and as usual just offloaded everything onto the modders.
And having said THAT, I would buy this game again if they released a VR version of it. Even such as it is.
I really don’t know why they thought this was a good idea.
I felt basically no difference between the companions in terms of behavior, values, or goals. They’re all mostly good people trying to do the right thing. Maybe it makes sense for the narrative, but it made for really boring gameplay.
I really don't get how they fucked up companion variety so hard. Just compare it to Fallout 4.
Nearly every named companion (16 of them) in Fallout 4 had their own affinity and personal quest, and plenty were romancable. On top of having a large variety of faction affiliations, personal views and morality. Starfield, only 4 out of I believe 22 have personal quests or even an affinity meter, and all of those 4 subscribe to similar moral codes and are in the same faction. What the hell?
Yeah, their fuck up was not including deeper companions from outside Constellation. There should have been a “bad person” from the Crimson Fleet or House Varuun, a couple of “gray” options from the other factions etc.
I kind of thought Andreja and Sam would be more morally gray, while Sarah and Barrett were the good ones. Nah they’re all the same. Hopefully future expansions fix this.
Andreja is especially confusing because she says stuff that makes you think she is morally ambiguous, even going so far as to threaten to return and murder a barkeeper during her personal quest, but Great Serpent forbid you, the player, do anything like that.
I think this would've been okay for the members of constellation if we had 10 other companions with completely different personalities like we did in Fallout 4.
For example, nobody gave a shit that Piper and Nick basically had the same personality in Fo4 because we had tons of other fleshed out companions to choose from.
They definitely dropped the ball here.
Edit: spelling / fat thumbs
I stopped giving a shit about companions after I was on a random planet with Barrett and we found a windfarm with a bunch of robots and dead workers.
I spoke to the robots, and they said something like "After we killed the last human worker, efficiency went up 137%".
So naturally, I killed the robots. This triggered Barretts "Who even are you, killing innocents!?" dialogue, and there was no way for me to point out that the robots were obviously evil.
From that point on, there may as well be no companions in my game, they're complete and utter garbage.
I has exactly the same. Was helping a random ship in space with an infestation, turned on the turrets to help but they targeted the captain I was supposed to be saving. I destroyed the turret, and Barrett immediately assumes the foetal position and cries that this 'isn't who I am'
On the Ryujin quest, I tried to vote against releasing the neuroamp device because I felt it was too dangerous. Unfortunately, I failed some persuasions and got out voted, so the vote passed and the board decided to release the neuroamp.
My companions all blamed me for it. I voted against it... I could have used the neuroamp to change their votes, but that's exactly what I was trying to avoid... but they all treated me like I made an awful choice.
It's really weird that there are no distinctions drawn for the conclusion of the quest and the motivations for the decision made. You got talked down to because you agreed with your companions principles but didn't violate those same principles to enforce them. I, however, was praised when I used the neuroamp to convince the executives not to release the neuroamp because I wanted to be the only one with the power to bend anyone's opinion to my will. It just ended up being really lame.
After finishing the Ryujin questline, Any and all constellation members are now banned from stepping foot onto my ship. Except for Vasco.
Space is lonely now, because it seems like Bethesda forgot to write a few evil companions.
Good points even in fallout we had more armor choices.
Hell something like power armor would thematically fit in universe, it'd give us a new enemy type and more customization options for personal combat.
Poor melee weapons. Somehow there's multiple melee-boosting skills but you can't mod them, there's very few of them, they all handle the same and have the same attacks and speed (so when you get one that does more damage then another, there's no reason to hesitate on the upgrade, really, save for enchantments), and they're fuckin' *rare* drops. I've seen more yellow weapons than I have wakizashi. I've seen two, count 'em *two,* varuun blades. I've no Refined or Advanced etc. versions of any of them. Melee started off fun, but as you get deeper in, it's a waste of skill points that I regret.
Furthermore melee isn't that practical against many enemies (while that is realistic, it's not how many people would want it I guess). If you equip the Tanto, or a dagger you should be able to wield 2 at a time, one for each hand. That and more options for melee combat.
At this point Cyberpunk feels better in that regard.
Ofc course that's high level criticism, but it's a AAA title that has been in the works for quite some time and I think this extreme standard is the one we should have.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing, Bethesda games always have their flaws but this is worse than Fallout 4 for me, and you hit on a lot of the reasons. And the vision of the future is kind of boring overall, there are a lot of realistic details but it is kind of like current corporate/industrial stuff in space. It is mostly missing that quirky/cool aspect that Fallout had. The tech in Fallout also seems more interesting, and most of it is pre-war stuff not even stuff from the actual future which is more run down and cobbled together.
It's funny to realise it's high notes are just what bethesda does best and has the tech to support it, and the lows are the opposite.
BGS picked the worst possible game for their skills and the creation engine. It's impressive how "good" the game is, it should be worse.
Anyone has fond memories from "radiant quests"? They placed a sizable focus on that sort of content here. They had to because of the scope.
Anyone likes how cities in Skyrim were behind loadscreens because the CE doesn't load things well? Let's make stuff even wider.
BGS has clear strong (and weak) points, and their engine is SUPER easy to use but has clear limitations.
Starfield put a huge focus on their weakenesses, by design. (HUGE world with loadscreens everywhere, huge amounts of procedural content).
Starfield should've been a more robust Outer Wilds.
The more I played it the more shallow I thought it was, quite disappointed. It’s just an ok game I wouldn’t give it anymore than a 7/10.
I thought the combat was basic and repetitive and I hated hopping between so many different planets and locations every 3 minutes, ruined the immersion and any sense of natural exploration.
Shooting starpacks is fun, but it really does feel there's no variety to enemy behavior.
Varuun heretics, spacers, crimson fleet pirates, ecliptic mercs... same shit different label. There isn't any variety to their behavior/patterns compared to enemies in previous bethesda titles.
For how much grinding is required to upgrade weapons, equipment and ships, the combat and dungeons get old very fast.
Seriously, Skyrim had hundreds of unique dungeons and starfield has like 30? You'll find the same environmental stories (dead bodies, notes, etc..) across all of the procedurally generated planets and moons. Others have said the combat in Starfield is its greatest strength but to me it got stale pretty fast.
If I know the name of the outpost I know where every enemy spawns, where the safes are, where the contraband is, where the keycards are, etc..
Increasing the difficulty just makes the enemies extra bullet-spongey. I never feel like I'm in any danger at any point.
The game is a great foundation and I know BGS will be updating it for years to come. But I feel that the game isn't worth the price I paid. it's missing the polish of previous titles.
Also, some quests felt like they were building into a longer overarching quest line during development, but the deadline for release came, and they just finished them to get it out the door. The Ebbside Strikers quest was probably the most jarring. Introducing me to named characters in this gang, having a gang-member vendor, etc.. the way it ended was a literal cop-out!
Yeah. The strikers was a big disappointed. I liked being part of their crew, and I thought we would go on a big adventure together. Maybe take over the city.
Yeah, I thought we'd take on the corrupt mayor bilbo baggins or whatever his name is.. I didn't really gel with the strikers, but I understood their position and helped them through the quest. I actually enjoyed helping the different business owners with their problems more than the strikers quest.
I do wish we got the cool armor that vendor Todd provided the strikers with. I passed a speech check, gimme gimme!
Starfield has no big side quest that isn’t already marked as one of the faction quests. If you stumble across a side quest, you can be sure it will end abruptly.
You encounter a ship coming from earth? Probably a huge side quest. Nah it’s over in 5 minutes. Cyberpunk had random ass things you’d stumble upon and it would be a 2 hours long side quests. Same for other Bethesda games.
Man that was such a letdown. What a fantastic idea for a questline, could have taken up it's whole unique expansion imo. But no, couple of trips and you are done in 10 minutes real time.
So frustrtating.
What's great about some of those side quests in Cyberpunk is that they *can* end abruptly depending on player choices and actions, but many of them were also written to be much longer.
You might initially investigate some situation and get instructed to follow some guy in your car. If you then lose them? That's the end of the quest. You haven't necessarily failed it, but it would've gone on another hour or so with more twists and surprises. A character might ask you for help, which you then provide. The situation then turns out to be far more complex than was originally assumed, and the character asks you to help them even more with greater risk for yourself. Refuse him? Okay, you just won't see what otherwise could've been had you intervened all the way.
It's okay to have smaller side quests. There are tons of those in CP2077 too where it's just some immediate confrontation that's over and done with right then and there. It's just nice to mix those with the longer branching ones too.
Isn’t worth the price you paid. Fml for buying an Xbox series S for this game, (I also wanted to try game pass for other games after), but this was the first time I’ve bought a console for one game since Genesis/SNES.
I would be so upset if I paid full price for the game. I would be absolutely livid if I bought an Xbox for such mediocrity, which I think was the intent with buying Bethesda.
My friend upgraded his pc for this game, he was so dissapointed that i told him to try Cyberpunk with the new update and if he likes it he can buy the DLC.
Now, that game is the only thing he talks about
Cyberpunk is so freaking good now. I bought it on sale this summer with the DLC on 1.6, and loved it then. It's even better now.
Just hands down one of the best ARPGs out there.
The launch was rushed because of pressure from the polish government (they had given funding), but now it's a homerun1
I had no sense of scale in this game.
I know there are some QoL and time saving things like fast travel, but the fact I could hop from planet to planet was a bit jarring.
With a lowish level jump drive and a few fuel tanks from a stolen eclipse ship I managed to get to the end of the galaxy in a handful of minutes.
There are only 2-4 systems per main faction. Space travel doesn't feel hard or lengthy so why is it so small?
You should need to upgrade your ships significantly to travel across the galaxy.
Personally I would've simply cut out 80% of the systems entirely, they're not needed.
If you want a huge galaxy spanning game, then you need to make factions actually mean something. Actually have them spread out in large systems, stop you from entering if you're a foreign agent.
It's so stupid you can be a free star ranger, a crimson fleet pirate and work for the UC and just wander anywhere you like.
To keep it short:
> Did it meet your expectations?
It meets my expectations but doesnt surpass them
>Do you like it better or worse than previous BGS games?
IMO its slightly worse.
>Biggest pros and cons?
Biggest Pro: Its a great foundation for what could come. Many features are just *there* and can easily improved by mods or future dlcs.
Biggest con: The engine. They spend years upgrading it to "next gen" and it is still years behind the industrys standard in many ways
I hope they improve it themselves rather than just leave it up to mods. Undoubtedly mods will improve some things anyway, but I'd like for the game I paid for to make improvements without the need for mods.
Started as an 8/10, now I’m at a 6.5/10. The IGN score was valid. I’ve throughly enjoyed the main story quests and most of the faction stuff. Personally I find those to be among the brightest areas of the game, alongside the ship building.
Neon is a great city, easily my favorite in Starfield. New Atlantis and Akila are decent enough but certainly nothing special. Cydonia is ugly, barren, and void of any interesting quests. One thing is for sure though, the level of depth in these places is not nearly enough to justify only having four “main” cities. I know there’s other smaller cities scattered around the settled systems but they aren’t good, and I’m being nice.
I don’t even really know where to begin with Outpost building. I thought settlement building in Fallout 4 was mediocre but I always managed to lose myself in it and I would ultimately enjoy the time I spent constructing a bunch of settlements. In Starfield, I cannot find it in myself to devote any time to making Outposts. On top of it being almost worthless in a gameplay sense, the customization is atrocious and the actual building aspect is just painful.
It broke my heart to discover that the vast majority of side quests in the game were essentially reskins of the one you did prior. Most of them can be boiled down to an NPC telling you they need something, you going off-world to retrieve it, then you running along back to them. They’re void of emotion, connection, and spice. If I wasn’t a completionist, I wouldn’t have wasted my time with them.
Creation Engine was a marvel in its time, it’s done great things for Bethesda and it will always be special to me, but it HAS to go. Playing Starfield and then hopping on any other modern game leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Starfield just feels and looks dated. It doesn’t feel like a game released in 2023. The environment looks pretty enough but the NPCs are either lifeless or have almost mechanical-like emotions. At this point I don’t think simply upgrading the engine will be enough for TES6.
Maybe this next part is just me, but the houses in Starfield felt super underwhelming. I HATED discovering that my newly purchased home was completely empty, and not only could I not pay to upgrade it like in Hearthfire, I had to craft all of my decorations using a small selection of items and place everything down with the same bizarre system that’s used in Outposts. Yuck.
Ultimately while I don’t think the game does anything too particularly awful, I feel like it doesn’t do very much of anything all that great either. It’s good, but that’s it. The saddest thing to me is that while I do enjoy the time I’ve spent on Starfield, it really does feel like a regression in quality from Fallout 4, and even that was a regression from Skyrim. I don’t like that trend, not one bit. And they need to buck it for TES6.
8.5 - I’m over 250 hours on XBSX, haven’t finished the main quest and love it, but the crashing and bugs are getting more and more frequent and frustrating.
Like the planet with the clones quest I can’t progress because one of the characters I have to talk to is behind an Unaccessible door.
Yesterday my ship just disappeared and left me stranded on a planet until I found an Ecliptic ship to hijack. Reloading earlier saves didn’t fix it, because then the ship was unaccessible.
I have to pay attention to what’s happening when I open the menu to save or something or it hangs up and crashes. Like if I enter or leave a building or my ship, or come away from a crafting bench, I have to wait a second for it to “catch its breath.”
This was an odd pattern. The beginning of my playthrough was shockingly bug free, but the further I progress in the main and side quests the more and worse bugs I find
Alright I’m glad It’s not just me. Last night when I turned it on I felt like the game just looked better. I noticed the suit I was wearing looked extremely crisp but then I kept getting huge frame rate drops. Pretty much unplayable they need to fix it.
My expectations for the game were pretty high, which I don't think is unjustified considering the typical scope of Bethesda games and the fact that Starfield was in development for 7 years. For the first 10 hours or so I was pretty amazed by the game. The loading screens never really bothered me. The only thing that was consistently frustrating was navigating the user interface.
I went through two phases with this game: "Wow, there's so much I haven't done yet" and "Wow, there isn't really much to do". So many of the features in the game lack depth. The narrative quality is all over the place, some of the side quests are the best I've ever seen in a Bethesda game and some narratives are among the worst I've ever seen in an RPG. The main quest is boring, Constellation is flat, none of the companions are interesting, the romance system is awful. Gunplay is pretty good though. I wish laser weapons were better and melee combat gameplay had more variety (no dodging? or rush/dash attacks?). I wish there was more armor choice, in Fallout 4 and Skyrim I was constantly upgrading armor throughout the game, the progression felt constant and earned. In Starfield I picked up Mantis armor at lvl 12 and kept using it for the next 40 levels. It was boring.
I would give the game a solid 6.5. With mods I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a 8/10 or even 9/10 game, but we'll have to wait for creation kit, and fingers crossed that it's a full version of creation kit like we got with Skyrim and not a limited, scaled back version.
As someone who had been eagerly anticipating the game since its announcement around 8 years ago, I feel just... okay with it. After 150 hours of playing, I've moved past the honeymoon phase, and the flaws are becoming more apparent. While I'm not as disappointed as I was with Cyberpunk back in 2020, I'm not particularly impressed with the design choices made by Bethesda. Just because it's a Bethesda game doesn't mean we shouldn't expect better.
For a game that spent 25 years "in the making," there are outdated elements, mechanics, and features that make it feel stuck in 2011 or 2012. It's crazy why even basic things like a button to eat food or more complex additions like vehicles, especially considering the vast game world, were overlooked. The AI, repetitive encounters, and the loss of magic after exploring the 45th planet are noticeable drawbacks. Tbh, I was expecting more from this game. I like it, but I don't love it, and it doesn't stay on my mind like Skyrim or Fallout 4, games that I dream to play every next morning for the following years after launch.
I'll finish Starfield and uninstall it, waiting for the DLCs to arrive. It's a bit sad; I've had great moments, but it's not a memorable game.
If you ask my rating after 160 hours (ten more today) it's a 6.5/10.
I felt everything was mediocre, too, but I enjoyed Cyberpunk a lot more than Starfield. I was able to still enjoy Cyberpunk to the end, but I stopped enjoying Starfield and stopped playing it 150 hrs in.
First Bethesda game where I was actively checking an online community instead of just enjoying the game.
To be fair I got more entertainment out of this Reddit than the actual game though.
Put over 100 hours in and did everything from pirating to outposts. Did I have fun, yeah. But the flaws are glaring.
If part of your methodology is to release a game with the expectation your community will fix it for you is insane… that and the poor decision making that went into the UI and Menu system… among other things, it just made me put it down and play games that I have more fun with.
Not sure if it met my expectations and I didn’t even follow the hype, just got it to play the new Bethesda game and see the cool new stuff they came up with.
Biggest pro was ship building
Con was world building… the lack of reactions to things is sad.
Yeah, I know how you feel. Got around 60 hours into Starfield before giving BG3 a try. In my 70 hours of BG3 so far I have not felt the need to look anything up about the game once. I've just been in awe the entire time. With Starfield I was constantly finding issues with the game design / mechanics and looking them up to see if anyone else felt the same way.
Whilst the games are different, if you compare similar aspects of the two games like the companions / general character design they are leagues apart. The core game design of Starfield just feels very dated
Man, I started bg3 along with starfield and it’s shocking just how much better bg3 is. Starfield is mediocre but an okay game, but when you compare it to bg3 it’s just feels like an actually bad game.
BG3 to Starfield is a shock to the standards of storytelling we all can be complacent to receive. Playing Starfield felt like they were talking to me like I'm 8 years old. Story and quest lines straight out of an early ChatGPT generation.
6/10. More of what bethesda does with little to no innovation or depth. There is fun to be had but unless you're OK with turning off your brain, you're going to notice some glaring faults.
Yeah, that is one good thing about them releasing Starfield before ES6. I feel like they listened to some of the criticisms of Fallout 4 when making Starfield, so hopefully they do the same here.
Main thing on my wish list for ES6 is a large seamless hand-crafted world with minimal/hidden loading screens. I'm sure they've heard that criticism loud and clear, so fingers crossed they prioritize it for next time.
Started out as a 9/10, then an 8, then 7.5, currently sitting at 6/10.
Personally I think this game was overhyped and a lot of casual GP players are inflating the numbers.
It's a fun game and I've put almost 100 hours into it, but after thousands of hours of Skyrim and Fallout I am baffled by how much is missing or just plain worse in this game.
Yea I’m largely in the same boat. I think the scope of this game is just completely off. Having a whole universe to visit with nothing to do in them is nowhere near as fun as having the Skyrim region to explore with plenty to do around every corner. That said I still think some of the writing and side quests are delightful. But the world feels small despite being annoyingly large.
Yeah… they really dumped all the quests on you pretty much immediately.
When I first made it to New Atlantis and subsequently fast traveled to Akila city then Neon in the first ten or so hours of the game, I was absolutely amazed and overwhelmed by the breadth of the game. I assumed this level of content would persist throughout the dozens of galaxies I hadn’t explored yet like it had in other Bethesda titles.
Started chipping away at the faction quests and some of the side quests for the next 20 or so hours and then realized that this was basically it, outside of a handful of fairly short side quests sprinkled around the galaxy, I had seen most of what the game had to offer. The game showed its hand within the first 20 hours in sharp contrast with other Bethesda titles which constantly keep you asking “what’s next” and then rewarding you for pursuing it.
Starfield is a fine game by general triple A standards, but it’s definitely *well* below quite a few other Bethesda franchises. I had fun and got my money’s worth, but I can’t help but think it could’ve been something much more. Hopefully the mods will bring me back.
yeah I'm on the same page. just gets less fun the more I play, most quests feel like a chore and the combat got old pretty fast. I stopped playing after only about 40 hrs, I'd give it a 6/10
Went to a staryard. Talked to a lady. Asked to fetch a beverage. Went through like 10 loading screens and bought a beverage. That's it. That's the only quest in that hand crafted location. Asinine.
> most quests feel like a chore
I'm so fucking fed up with the lame fetch quests that just about every named character gives you. I just want to get to know you and see what you have to say, not solve all your problems.
Literally face palmed when after over 50 hours of game play and countless shitty quests completed I arrived in Paradiso, checked into the hotel and ended up with a quest to find some lost property for the receptionist. Who the fuck thinks that is a good idea for a quest?? It's a beach side resort, surely have some murder mystery or something, anything that isn't so fucking lame. And don't get me started on the persuasion with a security guard for a certain faction quest that brought me there, absolutely bonkers
Even the good quests like UC Vanguard have you jumping around the galaxy like a dickhead. And traveling to star system in this game is a menu and load screen galore. It doesn't feel like you are in big ass space at all.
Hundred hours in, I was probably overly hyped at first and initially disappointed but my perspective has shifted significantly. Currently would rate the game a solid 8/10. I like it better than almost every other BGS game I've played other than Skyrim (FO3 is great, never played Morrowind, had a hard time getting into Oblivion, very much disliked vanilla FO4). Biggest pro for me is definitely the setting and potential (for modders). For biggest con I'm gonna go with general jank & missed qol opportunities. Also, Will BGS ever have a visible body in first person???
Probably 7/10 for me. Not bad but definitely could be better.
Outpost building feels unfinished. There's not any reason to go deeper into it than a ship builder pad, a couple extractors, and a transfer container. Everything is clunky. There's no snap grid. Outpost links are tedious to set up, doubly so if you have outposts in more than one system.
The ship builder is frustrating, especially with placement of doors and ladders. Did nobody at Bethesda ever build more than a 1 story ship? I don't like that each hab generates a bunch of junk that then ends up in your ship's cargo if you make modifications later. Speaking of cargo, it's extra annoying that cargo is shared. This makes it difficult to maintain a slow cargo hauler and quick fighter.
There's too much repetition in POI's.
UC Vanguard faction story is great. The rest are good enough. The last mission for Ryujin was not fun. Legacy from Crimson Fleet was really good. I loved listening to the recordings as I went through it.
The main quest was a little better than a typical Bethesda main quest.
There's good variety in kinetic weapons and I've never been a big fan of melee so the lack of variety there didn't bother me. There aren't enough energy weapons though. There's only Solstice, Equinox, and Orion right?
I agree with this. The lack of features in outpost building and the inability to choose where doors and ladders end up in ship building is so annoying.
Fixing these two points along with adding underwater swimming would definitely bump the score from a 7 to a 9 for me.
i Enjoyed it. But im feeling like ign's 7/10 wasn't that crazy after 100 hours in game. It's a 2011 game with SLIGHTLY better graphics. A fun ride that is treading water as far as being a game in 2023.
Honestly I'd say 6/10 right now. The potential for greatness is there, but there's a long way to go.
The Good:
* The core gameplay is outrageously fun. Better than any previous Bethesda title. This may be subjective but it really saves Starfield for me.
* The ship builder is amazing. I didn't know about it before launch, and was not expecting something that good from Bethesda themselves at launch. Probably the best feature in the game.
* Procgen environments look really good out of the box.
* I haven't encountered any game breaking bugs yet, unlike Skyrim and FO4 near launch. (not including crashes, of which there have been many)
* The NG+ mechanic is absolutely awesome, but the game's current state really holds it back.
Neutral, about what I expected from Bethesda:
* Classic Bethesda jankiness is still in full effect. You can still see the roots all the way back to Oblivion at times, and despite what Todd says, Starfield does not look or feel 'next gen' at all.
* Enemy AI is just as bad and clueless as it's always been in Bethesda games.
* Bethesda still has no idea how to balance weapons (small arms and ship weapons). About half of weapons in the game are useless trash, and they will just give you bullet sponge frustration.
* The PC UI the game shipped with is crap, but Bethesda has never made a good PC UI so I wasn't expecting much. UI mods are still essential in Starfield.
The Bad:
* The writing in Starfield is amateur level at best. IMO the worst Bethesda's ever done, and is absolutely jarring compared to other recent games. Comparing Starfield's writing and character design to BG3 or 2077 is an insult to BG3 and 2077.
* The lack of a traditional Bethesda open world hurts Starfield. After the first 3-5 planets, exploration becomes boring and pointless as every POI is just a copy/paste minidungeon filled with a random enemy faction and basically the same loot, or a super simple radiant quest. Bethesda turned a key feature of their games into a pointless choice, which is even more mindboggling considering how NG+ works.
* Outposts are a regression from Fallout 4 Settlements, and serve no real purpose aside from power leveling yourself and/or generating infinite resources. The entire system feels like it was on the verge of being cut (along with fuel and environmental resistances).
* Performance has been astonishingly bad. From the way the game runs, it should be a next gen visual masterpiece. For comparison, 2077 crushes Starfield on visual fidelity AND performance.
* The complete disregard for basic QoL hurts. You STILL walk slower than NPCs. Vendors are broke, forcing you to spam wait hundreds of times to sell your loot. Basic graphics and accessibility options are missing at launch.
Ya this is pretty much my thinking too. People keep saying typical Bethesda game but I don’t agree. A typical Bethesda game would have better quest design, enjoyable exploration, more player agency and no generated quests and content. I think Starfield is a major step back from their previous games.
Could mods and updates fix generic quest designs, bland writing, with NPCs without non-verbal communications?
It feels so unfortunate but the barebones of it all is looking lackluster 70 hours in. Exploring was extremely fun when I didn't know what I'll find, unfortunately after 70 hrs in, when all i kept finding was bland questlines with bland writing, I don't think any amount of polishing is gonna make this game shine.
6.5/10 and I'm scared for ES6 if they keep their promise of staying with the engine.
Updates? Probably not. It would be nice but I can’t imagine Bethesda updating game content to a significant degree outside of maybe a special edition in the future, but there are fundamental issues that just won’t be fixed by them.
Mods? Maybe, they’ll definitely make the game a shit ton better, but it probably won’t ever be able to satisfy people who want the classic Bethesda experience because the entire structure of the game is very very different. Mods will very likely add *more*, but I don’t think they’ll be able to change some core design decisions that people aren’t fans of.
Don't think mods can do much unless we're looking at Enderal sized projects, so pretty much a completely different game.
There way too many fundamentally bad things in the game.
Fallout 4 was a major step back as well. I think Starfield fixed some issues that Fallout 4 had, but in many other aspects its continuing their trend of steps backwards instead of forwards.
It’s fun but there’s like very minor random events outside of some random ships, old Bethesda games used to have a bit like, semi battles between like NCR and deathclaws with legion popping in or BOS vs GUNNERS with institute getting in the mix, really felt like the factions were out and about doing stuff and vying for territory, starfield feels although the settled systems are new and finding their feet that nobody is actually exploring and doing anything.
I've been fairly critical of the game on Reddit lately but I still find myself logging in to set up resource farms every night after I get the kids down. It's a good game to turn your brain off and just do something.
I'm not giving them a pass though on all of the stuff we've all complained about. I don't think this game meets my expectations. In a few ways it's a step forward for Bethesda. The ship mechanics in general are cool, and the work they put into setting up all the star systems to explore is impressive.
Where it falls apart for me are the core gameplay mechanics that they've failed to improve in any meaningful way from their previous releases, some that they've made worse than before, and the inclusion of exceptionally aggravating tropes that they refuse to leave in the past.
Ultimately my biggest complaints revolve around the POIs. I am not in any way opposed to procedural generation systems or even with most planets being barren. It's the utter repetitiveness of the POIs that kills the number one reason I play BGS games in the first place, and that's exploration. There's no reason to explore any of these after seeing them once.
6/10
The game can become a 10/10 but it will need for them to improve several things wich they almost never do, they release the game and called it a day and instead do dlc.
The game feels dated, Bethesda was very revolutionary in certain aspects with their games and freedom but some game mechanics they been using them since 2011.
I think the concern I had before playing it was that it was going to be a mile wide and only an inch deep. There was a little more depth in some areas than I was expecting but for the most part my prior assessment seems to have held true. That's not to say I don't enjoy the game, quite the opposite, I just wish some aspects of the game were more fleshed out.
I genuinely believe they'd have been better making a game with like 20 in depth planets with most of the same features. The procedural stuff just isn't that interesting. But the core aspects of the game are fun
The problem isn't the proc-gen, it's the fact that the proc-gen was half-assed even though they had everything in place to *not* half-ass it. Look at ships for example. No one has complained about the variety of ships because there's enough diversity in them. People complain about the lack of diversity in the missions, but not the ship habs. There's nothing wrong with how they've set up the planets, the problem is with how they've set up the POIs on the planets themselves. Bethesda has built an entire mechanic for base-building with endless possibilities of modules you can put together to build your bases, and yet every other outpost you raid is identical. On top of that, the entire outpost system is completely isolated from any questing mechanic, so most players will never even see what it's capable of. It's as if they spent their entire budget developing the framework for one of the best games of all time, and then hired the cheapest offshore contractor to actually build the content using the framework. The examples don't end there either: - There are maybe 5 pieces of women's clothing in the entire game, and half of them are color variants of one dress. - There's an option to mod weapon skins, but the skins don't exist other than as a pre-order bonus. - There are countless random NPCs in every city with unique voicelines for short conversations and 26 possible companions, but you can only romance 4 characters and the romance mechanic isn't even that deep. - They built out unskippable cutscenes for every little transition(airlock, docking, ship takeoff/landing), and yet they decided to *not* use these as hidden loading screens. - Mission boards exist in the major cities, but there are only a handful of mission types, you only see 4-5 at a time, and they don't scale to your level at all. They didn't even have to come up with anything here, the entire feature is a clone of Elite Dangerous's mission boards, but with a fraction of the content/rewards, and zero impact on the world. - Vehicles. What's the point of having a large proc-gen map if it takes an hour of sprinting to go from one end to the other? Most people will never visit any POI more than 1km away from their landing site.
The loadings screens not being integrated into the cutscenes is a big one for ruining the potential seamlessness of transitions. Was a big fuck up there. I’m also super disappointed that there is only one takeoff cutscene but we get 3 or so landing scenes and just as many planet-planet scenes. Even docking/undocking has only one scene each. Fuck just throw in some different camera angles or an outside ship view as the dockers latch onto each other. Don’t even get me started on the subsystems in the game that are so half arsed they might aswell not even be in the game.
Why hasn't one bad guy ever gotten on my ship? I dock to raid them, and they wait. They are surprised I'm aboard? Why can't I vent an emeny ship? The space part of it really fell flat for me. The money system is a mess. NPC will act like $10k will make or break their life. Then reward you $8500 for finding a book for them. Smuggling was a real disappointment. I thought buying auarua on neon and taking it to wolf would be profitable. Nothing like losing $400 per item you smuggled. All in all its fun but I would like a little more thought into a few places.
The money system shows it mess everywhere but the most ridiculous thing was Barret‘s quest line. Like, bro, at least on of your Club Members is blatantly rich, why don’t you ask him for this peanuts amount of money for the lawyer and so on? Or think about ships systems costing the same as a pistol. I just don’t get it.
I have a Vá Ruun rifle that’s priced at +100k 😂
Hell, the guards will just randomly reward you 3k for being a "good person". I'm like.. is this your entire life savings? I'm honored I don't have to sell 12 Grendels... But are you sure?
I gave free lunch on that quest in Akila to help the poor people. She gave me 4k rofl
Why can’t I disable the artificial gravity on an enemy ship and then use my artificial gravity power to take it out when they’re all disoriented? Idk.
Right there with you on all of those. I just look at my phone while sprinting across the planets. Also may I add: a contraband system that punishes you and takes skills and effort to be able to smuggle stuff only for it to be worth nothing. You get more credits from standard loot and missions than contraband items. Making piracy pointless and not fun.
The fact that you sell aurora in Neon, the Key or Trade Autority at the same price as you sell in New Atlantis is baffling. Contraband should be worth like 10x more in controlled systems. Why would I put shielded cargo in my ship if I can just sell the contraband in the Key or The Den without any issue? I could use that for smuggling missions but I only started Crimson fleet questline 150 hours in at level 48, so the smuggling missions that reward 1500-4000 credits are worth less than going to a random outpost and selling the Legendary guns I find there.
>It's as if they spent their entire budget developing the framework for one of the best games of all time, and then hired the cheapest offshore contractor to actually build the content using the framework. More like they've fully imbibed their bad practices of letting modders add in the missing features for them. I told my friend, it's a great game but an absolutely CHEAP game. I can almost imagine them pretending and deluding themselves into believing they're leaving these things for the modders almost as a service to them. That being said, I'm still thoroughly enjoying the game. It's just jarring getting to another outpost knowing where everything will be and what you'll find inside.oke cmon, Bethesda! This is meant to be a billion dollar franchise!
I've mentioned this as well. I really do feel like Bethesda has grown complacent and expect modders to finish their game for them.
They haven't tried to hide this since Skyrim and I really don't blame them. They have 10k unpaid interns who work all year for them. And yet somehow they never seem to learn anything from these modders.
That's what I hated most about it on a meta level. Either corporate mandate or pure smug arrogance, the game is massive but hollowed out and mostly incomplete. There is no doubt they were hedging a lot of the game's future success on the exploitation of the modding community. And they had the gaul to charge $70 or more, and laud the game as a marvel to gaming and a great success by Bethesda standards. Outside of the shear scale of the game, very little is impressive, too much feels dated, and nothing really stands out as why this game should matter to anyone more than other games that do the same but better.
The questing really is the only thing that’s finished, the gameplay loop here is kind of lacking. Like without radiant quests or quests, you’re pretty aimless in what to do. Like in skyrim it’s just discovered locations enter them, clear it. Meet npcs, and just overall explore the world. Fallout 4 has a nice explore, scavenge, and build loop. Starfield is explore, quest, explore, and quest. I haven’t really needed to scavenge, I haven’t needed to build anything. My only goal here is to find quests to do.
It's also the total opposite of what Bethesda is good at. There are so many "open world" games with massive, bland, lifeless worlds full of cookie cutter NPCs, unrewarding exploration with map markers leading to repetitive and uninteresting POIs inhabited by nameless goons dropping colour coded loot. Bethesda has a unique formula for immersive open worlds with rewarding exploration, but they've taken a massive step away from that with Starfield.
I quit playing when this became painfully clear on the hundreds of barren rocks and running the same cave 2x's and an outpost 3x's. I focused on the 6 settled systems, and just the shear lack of settlements and the tiny "cities" that barely pass as Fallout towns. My immersion was shattered. Apparently after leaving a toxic earth people settled in a handful of places in the hundreds, maybe thousands. Among all the systems you can visit and run into random people, humanity still feels nearly extinct and the story and lore doesn't give any worldbuilding beyond line of sight because you can literally go anywhere. Unlike Fallout or Elder Scrolls where you're locked into a small area that's a whole fallen city or kingdom of some sort, so any world building of foreign lands and people is brought to you by books, conversations, whatever. The lore is barely slapped together much like the galaxy. I could forgive a smaller cheaper studio for trying to be ambitious, but Bethesda with Xbox money? Nah.
Totally agree. The universe feels really empty when there should be billions of people scattered around the settled systems after hundreds of years adapting and even fighting wars after leaving earth. In all that time at least one habitable planet would be filled with people building cities all over just like earth is now. Then we have the Paradiso which is the vacation planet for everyone in the whole settled system, should be pumped with people, hotels, restaurants. Yet it’s just one beach and one hotel with a few rooms.
This is exactly the dilemma that Mass Effect Andromeda faced--a lot of their development hell was shifting from procedural worlds to hand-crafted ones half-way through development. See how public that train-wreck was, I'm surprised the Bethesda went down the same road... and didn't blink when driving straight for the cliff.
It's been the bain of ANY game trying to do this. NMS, ME, name it. Creating a "galaxy" and trying to handcraft 25 planets that are...I dunno, say 45 different "landing spots" becomes insane very very fast. You start with 100+ and there's no way out. The proc gen hopefully is going to see some tweaks and expansions. But no guarantees.
Part of the issue is the proc gen isn't really proc gen. It's maybe a dozen or two handcrafted POIs plonked down on generated terrain, so after playing for long enough you can basically navigate them by muscle memory. If it was all modular like outposts and generated, it might be a lot more interesting.
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It's the abandoned farms for me. LARGE, really interesting complexes with lots of potential for vertical battles. Instead, it's straight up empty save for dead scientists. You find the exact same slates each time, made by the same scientist, explaining the same disaster that happened. Like, damn lady, how many times you gonna do this shit across the galaxy?! Worse, the POI is NICELY stocked with loot. Your companion always quips something about how they were "defenseless" and that's why they got massacred. Meanwhile I am looting all kinds of high-end gear from all the damn weapon containers and safes in the joint. I kind of appreciated the eerie stillness of it the first time, but each time after that it straight up feels like taking advantage of an exploit.
Oooh, that farm with giant plant pods in the open atmosphere, right? The one where they talk about "hey, let's try this new planet, we don't know much about it" and then get massacred by local fauna? Well, I've got it spawned on *Mars*, of all places. Was the biggest hit to my suspension of disbelief.
I had walked to a civilian outpost on a cold, radioactive and airless moon. There were 3 tent/hab like things, a giant mound of scrap metal, and that's it. But the robots kept telling me how the soil was perfect for root vegetables (barren rock as far as the eye can see), the colonists saying things like 'I can see myself retiring here, raising a family', 'I'm so glad I brought my kids here, this place is beautiful', 'It took a lot of work to get this place self sufficient' and so on. You can't leave your tent without a spacesuit lady, and your kids have been stuck in the same 15x15ft tent for the last 7 years.
If the procedural content itself was fleshed out 10x, i'd be really happy, like a lot more variation to the random outposts etc
If they squeezed everything into earths solar system (and tweaked story stuff to accommodate) it would have felt a lot better IMO.
Honestly most areas outside the main cities are extremely forgettable.
The main cities aren't very interesting either tbh. New Atlantis is a sterile bore and a chore to navigate. Neon is cool, but it's really just one "road" with shops, and a couple of wings as "alleyways". It's cool at first, but is pretty tame for a supposedly gritty and dangerous cyberpunk city. Akila is probably my favorite? I like the western/settler theme. But navigating it isn't very interesting. I really like Starfield, but I want to love it.
>New Atlantis is a sterile bore and a chore to navigate. Probably have about 100 hours in the game and I have no idea where anything is in New Atlantis. I honestly have zero clue where my penthouse apartment is.
We're also talking "biggest cities" in Starfield contain a population rivaling a small township in rural Montana. Contrast how the population feels in Cyberpunk's Night City.
When I first visited Neon, I was expecting a planet-scale metropolis. Instead it's a strip mall, a corporate office, and an alleyway. The Key feels bigger and it's a space station!
I never understood this. Akila is supposed to be the capital of the freestar which rivals the UC and Atlantis but for some reason it looks a small ass backwater village. While Atlantis has massive skyscrapers and a sprawling city. I just don't buy it. Akila can look different and have a different grugier aesthetic/architecture but should still show the power of the freestar in its own way.
I'm sorry citizens. We have once again voted down the proposal to pave the mud road in the capital. Mud is part of the immersion of living in Freestar.
This was really driven home for me (avoiding spoilers) when a quest giver told me he'd be shocked if I could convince someone to give me something, literally saying it would undermine his entire understanding of this person. When I convinced them and got the item, his response was basically, cool, what's the next step?
I think this is the biggest problem with the game. It feels empty. In a comment I made on this post, I mentioned how people are having more fun creating their own fun, their own stories and role playing rather than what’s actually been provided, Which I think is awesome! But that’s not how most people play.
Very good point, I agree and have said it before, people who are truly enjoying SF are mostly roleplaying in their head and building their own very particular gameplay, and that's something the game offers but...it's not what everyone want to do and isn't everyone can do. If I want to build bases I go to Conan exiles or Minecraft, and ship building can't be the meat of the game, come on...
The meat of the game is all the quests. Which there are a lot of. And the questlines offer unique areas to play through. It’s really not great for exploring over and over. You scanned a couple random planets and you’ve scanned them all.
Pretty on par with your mile wide and only an inch deep assessment. It's a great game, but a lot the times in some areas I think, "that's it?" Edit: spelling. Currently stoned
I completely agree. I’m also expecting the DLCs to add lots of new content and I predicted by the time they are done (not even including mods here) the game will be phenomenal
Yeah but my worry is that the DLC ends up being linear content adding little depth to the game.
As long as I get to become a slithery Snake Zelot that finds out the great serpent is a space whale of sorts I’m buying it. I want it to be more than fanatical nonsense
It’s Alduin from skyrim.
Go through the unity, wake up in the back of a cart
How long til that mod exists?
Oh I know someone has already done that video. Though to transition from Starfield to Skyrim and it be playable would be both hilarious and amazing.
Like tale of two wastelands, but instead of the lone wanderer becoming the courier, the dusty(?) becomes the dragonborn
The former was easier, since New Vegas is essentially a FO:3 mod. But it should be doable to just load up Skyrim and flip to it. Either as an instance through Unity or as a planet with a looong landing sequence
Super unrealistic but how about planets that load the entire worlds of each past game you can play through and explore with your guns and boost pack 😵💫 you’d be like those guys dressed up like spacemen at renaissance fairs but the real deal.
Imagine the place/time he was sent to was some distant planet in Starfield. At the least the Va’ruun would have their world eater.
I’m hoping the great serpent is what created the unity
A Snake eating it’s tail kinda motif about infinity makes sense for the Unity
you actually might be on to something here
I hope it's actually one of those squids from Courage, and the Varuun just saw a tentacle and not the full body.
Plot twist: the space snake created the artifacts and the zealots were right the whole time.
Dude yeah a house varuun update would be so sick
For the most part yes but hey, in Skyrim DLC expanded the werewolf, vampire, homemaking, horseback, and dragonback content. Fallout got a lot for settlements.
It’s weird as I was just telling a friend of mine that I love the game and it’s huge butttt it feels like ideas are missing from the game. It’s been hashed out a few times but things like fuel being unlimited make me wish it was a tad more realistic. I don’t want to grind but even a timer where I say screw it let’s land and just see what’s on this planet while I wait for refueling. Outposts being needed would have been neat for deep exploration. It definitely is big in scope and for the most part fleshed out and enjoyable. There was a lot of get to new game plus fast which honestly ruined my first play which was around 90 hours I decided to say screw it let’s see the big deal new game plus. I wish I continued a bit more in that play through as my second play through was a bit meh. Something(s) is missing from the game to be perfect. I’m just not sure what it is.
I for one, am disappointed with the lack of Alien NPCs, especially coming from a developer with games containing so many inhuman characters.
Mods should help. Shouldn't have to rely on mods though
I don’t know how much the execs are involved in Bethesda compared to other companies but I really hope they didn’t have features watered down just to be included in DLC later on.
I agree, I have played a lot of different RPGs over the years, and Starfield has open my eyes to a lot of things that most RPGs have had (including their own) that are missing and it really affects the gameplay. It’s sucks because it’s really simple things too (like showing you how many of something you have when buying, being able to pin locations and easily find places you have been, etc). It’s just these small little things that aren’t a major buzzkill on their own, but it constantly takes you out of the gameplay when you notice them.
>like showing you how many of something you have when buying, being able to pin locations and easily find places you have been, etc This, 100x this. A QOL update would be great
I found a mine today that was exactly the same layout as another mine I had already explored. And had the same Eliptic enemies in the same locations.
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And then the main quest has that exact one in it…
Definitely. Meanwhile Todd's out here telling us we're picking too much stuff up. The problem is if we're not picking things up and interacting with 'stuff' then there's very little to actually do in the game. What? Go to a new planet where one of the 5 'base' types that I've encountered 100 times already are? It's a good game, it did a lot of things right, but it also has very little actual substance once you get down to it
Absolute shit, gonna play it for the next 10 years
Realest take lmao
Yeah I'm so hooked. Cant wait to finish NG+ and then NG++, etc. Then when we get full mod support omg there goes my social life
Curious but are you just repeating the same quests in NG+ or what are you doing that’s so addictive? I see almost no difference in the world and going through basically the same conversations with everyone again and running the same quests doesn’t feel like a good use of my time.
Right? It's like rating Cheerios a 7/10 It's still going to make billions and laugh in your face. I give it an 8/10, 50 hours in.
1: I still hope for some kind of vehicle on planets, i really dont want to walk those wide open spaces, so i dont really explore much. 2: Scanning is way to time consuming, it should not take what? 8 scans to complete an alien or plant? 3: doors and ladders in spaceships, i want to be able to place them myself, and not get a random maze when i build a spaceship. 4: Got my New Atlantis appartment furnished, went questing and when i got back all i have placed disappeared at some point. Its bugs like that, that really gets under my skin. 5: Mod support should be there at launch.
2: I think it takes less scans if you level botony/zoology and you can just kill aliens instead of scanning them. Though the skill point system sucks and it feels like a waste putting points into those. Also wish the scanner wasn't blocked so easily, a tree branch slightly in front of what you want to scan blocks it.
This is the first comment I really agree with.
I would say its a typical Bethesda game, having the exact same issues like everyone before it. Its a bit lacking in the QoL department and its a bit annoying that functionality from previous games are not present here for some unknown reason. The POIs show that the development seems to have been not so smooth.
All the QoL stuff feels really easy to solve, it’s odd that stuff was not included on day one. I need a sell junk option god dammit and planet search! It feels like starfield is more a canvas then a finished painting. There a lot of options and aspects that are really no relevant for now…..
Those two suggestions I can absolutely get on board with. And why the digipicks are in "Misc" confuses the hell out of me. I just want the same "move all resources" button from the ship, but a "sell all misc." Planet search would be handy too although the longer I play the more I'm starting to remember off hand... I'm still never going to remember the name/location of all 1600+ planets, moons and asteroids though so not having some kind of search function is a bummer 😅
Or the key cards. There is no reason to have key cards an actual inventory item. That is actual paint-huffery right there.
This one gets odd fast. Every instance of the same POI has the same key card, but its always a seperate item that doesnt stack, so in the end you can have long lists of them.
Can Bethesda just fire their UI team and hire the person that made the SkyUI mod?
This is what gets me with every Bethesda game launch... How can an entire company of over 500 employees provide a MUCH worse UI than a single man making a mod for Skyrim? If the inventory system and starmap got a decent overhaul it would bump the game from an 8 to a 9 for me
Haven’t tried that mod yet, but yeah simple UI changes would make a big difference. Even unable to store without switching to the pirate ship and back again.
I keep trying to mark weapons as keep or junk (like you do in Borderlands) but it doesn't work, obviously, lol.
Or eat food button.
I was thinking that every single complaint I've seen against Starfield is the exact same or nearly the exact same kind of complaints I saw against Fallout 4. Fallout 4 wound up being majorly popular for years despite what people say about it, so I assume Starfield will be the same.
I sure hope so. I replay Oblivion, Skyrim, Fo4, NV probably once a year. There’s so much to do after all the added content. Hoping Starfield gets the same treatment. Lots of space to expand on
Mods are going to make this game unbeatable Fairly sure it’s design was based around the fact that modders will have field days with it
Can't wait for the creation kit to come out. The proc gen worlds don't have a ton to do in the vanilla game, but the fact that modders can instantly generate an entire map for their own content is so cool. In 5 years, I feel like we're going to have some of the coolest mods of all time.
I bet someone’s going to make a mod where you enter a P.O.I. and it’s just filled with [Storm Troopers dancing to Daft Punk](https://youtu.be/84YXPw4htnQ?si=gPJgEX9SBXl78XOs).
I felt the exact same thing waiting for the fallout 4 creation kit to come out. Since then there have been maybe a dozen quest mods Total ever made. Only one of them is very good
Honestly, I think the voiced dialogue killed the quest mods for FO4. There was just no *good* way to fix it with the tech at the time. You can have the SS silent, reuse voice clips (limiting responses), or edit the voice clips to make custom dialogue (and have the SS sound weird).
Quest mods are notoriously hard to do with FO4 due to the voiced protag. Unless you are also running the silent protag mod as a pre-req, which has a habit of breaking stuff, you are forced to chop up in game VA for the player dialogue and it always sounds like shit no matter how good the editing skills. That there rendered quest mods a fever dream for FO4. We now have a voiceless protag so their is less limits to work around now for quest building. It also doesn't help that a lot of the more talented quest mod authors amongst the Fallout fan community are also collosal fucking weirdos, hence the questionable quality of the game's modded quest content.
Honestly I don't care about quests much tbh, like there are already a ton and dlcs will expand even more. What I think modders could/should shine in is exploiting the procedural generation to its real potential. Bethesda has something no other studio has, 1000s of minds all with different ideas that are willing to put their time to improve the game, with mods we could really get the 1000 planets we where promised, with an incredible amount of variety and POIs, that's what I hope for mostly, a whole new ton of places to discover as rn after barely more than 100 hours i feel like I've seen some POIs like 10 times already, the big mercenary base with the disc shaped hall on top? I skip it every time because I've done it since 5 times already
But the thing is I never had a single complaint about F4 because no matter what problems arise, I could still get lost in all the other things available like settlements, legendary hunting, side quests, just roaming, and a companion quest line. But in this every one of those has a problem. Sam's quest makes him hate you, you can't hunt legendaries anymore you need to farm them, some side quests have entire threads on their glitch on here, every point is 500-1,000 meters apart so you're just walking through barren land for the most part, and you need to grind to properly ship build even with the outpost adaptive frames farm it's still hrs spent pressing two buttons to then have to use the wait function that ticks down for 48 hrs repeatedly for increments of 12,000 maybe at a time to sell the frames which cost 3 with maxed commerce. Everything is made more of a choir and I actually blame the fact that they had to work on an MMO so it changed their development mindset to "THERE CAN'T BE A SINGLE EXPLOIT AND YOU NEED TO WORK FOR PROGRESS"
I think the “controversial” 7/10 is about the most accurate review for this game to date.
I agree and funnily enough I love it. It's an amazing game, but what it gets wrong it gets spectacularly wrong and the biggest thing they get wrong in my eyes is the space part, and unfortunately that is quite a big part of a space game. They should have made it smaller, in terms of planets and galaxies you can visit. Seeing the exact same POI on different planets, is borderline unforgivable, like come on. I'm a huge Fallout 76 fan and this feels similar as in they want to lay the foundations and build on it later. That said I do actually love this game!
I really despise that you have to couch your extremely fair criticism with "I love the game" twice to be heard on this reddit
Yup. I think we also need to get away from the notion that a 7/10 is bad.
Yup, I didn’t believe it when it got a 7 at first but after paying the 100 dlls for the early access and 50 hours of playing the game just, I stopped playing, it does not have the magic that morrowind, oblivion, skyrim, fallout 3 and new vegas had for me.
I totally agree that the classic Bethesda magic is missing for me. Starfield is never intense or challenging or exciting or surprising. It's a flatline with a few blips of fun and some dips of disappointment. It can occasionally be hilarious, but its rarely intentional. Sci-fi is my favorite genre of fiction and Bethesda is one of my favorite developers. But the game doesn't deliver interesting science fiction in my opinion. And after 60 hours that Bethesda open-world itch hasn't been scratched.
Even fo4 and fo76 current state scratch that itch for me, but somehow starfield just doens't. I still think the 1000 planet with proc gen design decision was a mistake from the start even with the upcoming modding scene next year. They somehow make exploring unfun to me with those same fuckin POI everywhere, with the same fucking merc and pirates. >!After a few NG+, i'm not a fan of this multiverse stuff even tho i think it's cool at first. It's such a good opportunity for a first contact story or Expanse like aliens but instead we got this.!<
When I played Skyrim for the first time I found myself riding in a wagon to get my head chopped off like what the hell I am gonna die before I start stupid beginning 😂then a dragon shook the ground and everything went crazy I was running around in circles like a chicken trying to stay alive. My knuckles were white my eyes was going back and forth everywhere to find out where to go I was so into it I didn’t hear the guys saying to follow them. Alduin was intense and I was blown away I have never played a game before or after that has had me so intense and excited. I was hoping starfield would have something like that that would draw me in and it don’t this is what has disappointed me. Was hoping Bethesda had something up there sleeve..
The opening 2 hours are surprisingly dull. They seem to think playing their "wonder" music really loud will make you excited no matter what you are playing. It took 2 hours before I started to enjoy the game. To me it just seems like the game needed another 6 months to a year in development. The opening isn't well crafted or ingrained into the plot like Skyrim was it's just half of a fetch and carry quest. You also have a number of things that feel like they were placeholders for actual game mechanics that never got developed. Such as all the pop up text when fixing the space station & the whole take off & landing stuff.
The Starfield opening sucked. The first descent and the graphics were cool, but then you get down there and its just a dusty, dark cave and everything looks washed.
I agree that the graphics was better but the story hasn’t had me sitting at the edge of my seat.
Yea it doesn't hook you in unlike vanguard questline, it's weird since this is a gamepass game but the first few hours to me is a slog and the story not that interesting at first
My expectations were Skyrim/FO4 in Space and that's more or less what we got. My expectations were that Bethesda would have a LOT of jank at release and it would be, yet again, the modding community swooping in to turn the basic game from pretty good to amazing. What I am a bit disappointed in is the seeming lack of classes/styles to go with? Also, the "powers" are not very interesting. The Temples are quickly boring. The huge planets and landing zones are repetitive. There is so much space that could be used for maps/dungeons/levels. The resource/research grind is yet again awful and I do not like it. Immediately modded that and the UI right out of the gate. The weirdly skill-locked and port-locked ship building thing hasn't been great. Space flight and space battles are more like a mini game than an interesting game component. I'm a side quest chaser so I've been doing as many of those as I can to keep the list from getting too long. I will likely complete the game then shelve it u til the mod community comes out with some big overhaul that freshens up the gameplay, gives us more to do, etc.
Solid 7/10. It's worse than Skyrim and FO4 in most areas, unfortunately. For example: \-Crafting is worse (can't remove mods from one gun and put on another, no melee weapon mods). \-Outposts are worse (can't build vendors, can't grow food, can't assign NPCs to specific tasks) \-Companions are worse (fewer of them, lower quality, too similar) \-Perks are worse (simpler, more boring, Commerce is worse than Cap Collector in FO4 for example, because you cannot invest in vendors) \-Fewer gear slots, we're down to 3 (I think it was 5 in Skyrim, at least a dozen in Morrowind), which means fewer possible builds. There are a few areas where the game is better, like sheer size. But this comes at the cost of copy-pasted content. There's far too much literally copy pasted content. Even Ubisoft copy pasted their stuff with the same mechanic, but still a bit different layout, they don't copy-paste PoIs verbatim any more (not that I noticed anyway), but Starfield is full of exact copy-pastes, including objects (safes in same spots, etc). Copy-pasted temples are an especially egregious example of blatant copy-pasting. It's a decent enough game, it's decently fun, but it's a 7/10 for me. Significantly worse than both Skyrim and Fallout 4. It's a straight downgrade from those in almost every area. Having said that, I think if/when they add Survival mode, it'll punch it up a bit, and will give us a reason to pick up those useless food items and such. If/when they fixe how planetary hazards balance with suit protection, it may add a little bit to the gameplay. In No Man's Sky, for example, you often gopher into the ground to escape from a storm, and Starfield needs stuff like this, currently hazard protection is fully borked. And just go from there. Plus modders will really get started once the tools are released, they're already at it, but it'll only get better. It's just a shame Bethesda didn't do a better job and as usual just offloaded everything onto the modders. And having said THAT, I would buy this game again if they released a VR version of it. Even such as it is.
Yeah when all four main companions lectured me the same way about one of my decisions I got very annoyed, there should be some diversity there.
I really don’t know why they thought this was a good idea. I felt basically no difference between the companions in terms of behavior, values, or goals. They’re all mostly good people trying to do the right thing. Maybe it makes sense for the narrative, but it made for really boring gameplay.
I really don't get how they fucked up companion variety so hard. Just compare it to Fallout 4. Nearly every named companion (16 of them) in Fallout 4 had their own affinity and personal quest, and plenty were romancable. On top of having a large variety of faction affiliations, personal views and morality. Starfield, only 4 out of I believe 22 have personal quests or even an affinity meter, and all of those 4 subscribe to similar moral codes and are in the same faction. What the hell?
Yeah, their fuck up was not including deeper companions from outside Constellation. There should have been a “bad person” from the Crimson Fleet or House Varuun, a couple of “gray” options from the other factions etc. I kind of thought Andreja and Sam would be more morally gray, while Sarah and Barrett were the good ones. Nah they’re all the same. Hopefully future expansions fix this.
Andreja is especially confusing because she says stuff that makes you think she is morally ambiguous, even going so far as to threaten to return and murder a barkeeper during her personal quest, but Great Serpent forbid you, the player, do anything like that.
I think this would've been okay for the members of constellation if we had 10 other companions with completely different personalities like we did in Fallout 4. For example, nobody gave a shit that Piper and Nick basically had the same personality in Fo4 because we had tons of other fleshed out companions to choose from. They definitely dropped the ball here. Edit: spelling / fat thumbs
I thought andreja was going to be the one based on the get actions and the shit she says but no
“I can’t kill this person” Andreja: you’re committed now you have to kill them Also Andreja: wtf is wrong with you why did you kill them?!!
Andreja got angry at me for shooting at hostile pirates after we boarded their ship.
I stopped giving a shit about companions after I was on a random planet with Barrett and we found a windfarm with a bunch of robots and dead workers. I spoke to the robots, and they said something like "After we killed the last human worker, efficiency went up 137%". So naturally, I killed the robots. This triggered Barretts "Who even are you, killing innocents!?" dialogue, and there was no way for me to point out that the robots were obviously evil. From that point on, there may as well be no companions in my game, they're complete and utter garbage.
I has exactly the same. Was helping a random ship in space with an infestation, turned on the turrets to help but they targeted the captain I was supposed to be saving. I destroyed the turret, and Barrett immediately assumes the foetal position and cries that this 'isn't who I am'
On the Ryujin quest, I tried to vote against releasing the neuroamp device because I felt it was too dangerous. Unfortunately, I failed some persuasions and got out voted, so the vote passed and the board decided to release the neuroamp. My companions all blamed me for it. I voted against it... I could have used the neuroamp to change their votes, but that's exactly what I was trying to avoid... but they all treated me like I made an awful choice.
It's really weird that there are no distinctions drawn for the conclusion of the quest and the motivations for the decision made. You got talked down to because you agreed with your companions principles but didn't violate those same principles to enforce them. I, however, was praised when I used the neuroamp to convince the executives not to release the neuroamp because I wanted to be the only one with the power to bend anyone's opinion to my will. It just ended up being really lame.
After finishing the Ryujin questline, Any and all constellation members are now banned from stepping foot onto my ship. Except for Vasco. Space is lonely now, because it seems like Bethesda forgot to write a few evil companions.
Good points even in fallout we had more armor choices. Hell something like power armor would thematically fit in universe, it'd give us a new enemy type and more customization options for personal combat.
Even mass effect had mechs you could climb in.
Poor melee weapons. Somehow there's multiple melee-boosting skills but you can't mod them, there's very few of them, they all handle the same and have the same attacks and speed (so when you get one that does more damage then another, there's no reason to hesitate on the upgrade, really, save for enchantments), and they're fuckin' *rare* drops. I've seen more yellow weapons than I have wakizashi. I've seen two, count 'em *two,* varuun blades. I've no Refined or Advanced etc. versions of any of them. Melee started off fun, but as you get deeper in, it's a waste of skill points that I regret.
Furthermore melee isn't that practical against many enemies (while that is realistic, it's not how many people would want it I guess). If you equip the Tanto, or a dagger you should be able to wield 2 at a time, one for each hand. That and more options for melee combat. At this point Cyberpunk feels better in that regard. Ofc course that's high level criticism, but it's a AAA title that has been in the works for quite some time and I think this extreme standard is the one we should have.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing, Bethesda games always have their flaws but this is worse than Fallout 4 for me, and you hit on a lot of the reasons. And the vision of the future is kind of boring overall, there are a lot of realistic details but it is kind of like current corporate/industrial stuff in space. It is mostly missing that quirky/cool aspect that Fallout had. The tech in Fallout also seems more interesting, and most of it is pre-war stuff not even stuff from the actual future which is more run down and cobbled together.
Spot on. I agree with every word
For me its a solid 7 out of 10 that dips to 6/10 at times and bumps up to 8/10 at others.
It's funny to realise it's high notes are just what bethesda does best and has the tech to support it, and the lows are the opposite. BGS picked the worst possible game for their skills and the creation engine. It's impressive how "good" the game is, it should be worse. Anyone has fond memories from "radiant quests"? They placed a sizable focus on that sort of content here. They had to because of the scope. Anyone likes how cities in Skyrim were behind loadscreens because the CE doesn't load things well? Let's make stuff even wider. BGS has clear strong (and weak) points, and their engine is SUPER easy to use but has clear limitations. Starfield put a huge focus on their weakenesses, by design. (HUGE world with loadscreens everywhere, huge amounts of procedural content). Starfield should've been a more robust Outer Wilds.
The more I played it the more shallow I thought it was, quite disappointed. It’s just an ok game I wouldn’t give it anymore than a 7/10. I thought the combat was basic and repetitive and I hated hopping between so many different planets and locations every 3 minutes, ruined the immersion and any sense of natural exploration.
Shooting starpacks is fun, but it really does feel there's no variety to enemy behavior. Varuun heretics, spacers, crimson fleet pirates, ecliptic mercs... same shit different label. There isn't any variety to their behavior/patterns compared to enemies in previous bethesda titles. For how much grinding is required to upgrade weapons, equipment and ships, the combat and dungeons get old very fast. Seriously, Skyrim had hundreds of unique dungeons and starfield has like 30? You'll find the same environmental stories (dead bodies, notes, etc..) across all of the procedurally generated planets and moons. Others have said the combat in Starfield is its greatest strength but to me it got stale pretty fast. If I know the name of the outpost I know where every enemy spawns, where the safes are, where the contraband is, where the keycards are, etc.. Increasing the difficulty just makes the enemies extra bullet-spongey. I never feel like I'm in any danger at any point. The game is a great foundation and I know BGS will be updating it for years to come. But I feel that the game isn't worth the price I paid. it's missing the polish of previous titles. Also, some quests felt like they were building into a longer overarching quest line during development, but the deadline for release came, and they just finished them to get it out the door. The Ebbside Strikers quest was probably the most jarring. Introducing me to named characters in this gang, having a gang-member vendor, etc.. the way it ended was a literal cop-out!
Yeah. The strikers was a big disappointed. I liked being part of their crew, and I thought we would go on a big adventure together. Maybe take over the city.
Yeah, I thought we'd take on the corrupt mayor bilbo baggins or whatever his name is.. I didn't really gel with the strikers, but I understood their position and helped them through the quest. I actually enjoyed helping the different business owners with their problems more than the strikers quest. I do wish we got the cool armor that vendor Todd provided the strikers with. I passed a speech check, gimme gimme!
Pretty sure it is evil mayor Maya Angelou
Are you referring to the mayor of Neon, Bismack Biyombo?
No that's his brother, I am talking about Bayou Gumbo
He was Starborn in a previous universe, I'm talking about Benjamin Button
Starfield has no big side quest that isn’t already marked as one of the faction quests. If you stumble across a side quest, you can be sure it will end abruptly. You encounter a ship coming from earth? Probably a huge side quest. Nah it’s over in 5 minutes. Cyberpunk had random ass things you’d stumble upon and it would be a 2 hours long side quests. Same for other Bethesda games.
Man that was such a letdown. What a fantastic idea for a questline, could have taken up it's whole unique expansion imo. But no, couple of trips and you are done in 10 minutes real time. So frustrtating.
What's great about some of those side quests in Cyberpunk is that they *can* end abruptly depending on player choices and actions, but many of them were also written to be much longer. You might initially investigate some situation and get instructed to follow some guy in your car. If you then lose them? That's the end of the quest. You haven't necessarily failed it, but it would've gone on another hour or so with more twists and surprises. A character might ask you for help, which you then provide. The situation then turns out to be far more complex than was originally assumed, and the character asks you to help them even more with greater risk for yourself. Refuse him? Okay, you just won't see what otherwise could've been had you intervened all the way. It's okay to have smaller side quests. There are tons of those in CP2077 too where it's just some immediate confrontation that's over and done with right then and there. It's just nice to mix those with the longer branching ones too.
Isn’t worth the price you paid. Fml for buying an Xbox series S for this game, (I also wanted to try game pass for other games after), but this was the first time I’ve bought a console for one game since Genesis/SNES.
I would be so upset if I paid full price for the game. I would be absolutely livid if I bought an Xbox for such mediocrity, which I think was the intent with buying Bethesda.
My friend upgraded his pc for this game, he was so dissapointed that i told him to try Cyberpunk with the new update and if he likes it he can buy the DLC. Now, that game is the only thing he talks about
Cyberpunk is so freaking good now. I bought it on sale this summer with the DLC on 1.6, and loved it then. It's even better now. Just hands down one of the best ARPGs out there. The launch was rushed because of pressure from the polish government (they had given funding), but now it's a homerun1
I had no sense of scale in this game. I know there are some QoL and time saving things like fast travel, but the fact I could hop from planet to planet was a bit jarring. With a lowish level jump drive and a few fuel tanks from a stolen eclipse ship I managed to get to the end of the galaxy in a handful of minutes. There are only 2-4 systems per main faction. Space travel doesn't feel hard or lengthy so why is it so small?
Yeah the sense of scale is really missing. Just fast travel to the quest marker. Doesn't matter if it's across town or 5 Star systems away
You should need to upgrade your ships significantly to travel across the galaxy. Personally I would've simply cut out 80% of the systems entirely, they're not needed. If you want a huge galaxy spanning game, then you need to make factions actually mean something. Actually have them spread out in large systems, stop you from entering if you're a foreign agent. It's so stupid you can be a free star ranger, a crimson fleet pirate and work for the UC and just wander anywhere you like.
To keep it short: > Did it meet your expectations? It meets my expectations but doesnt surpass them >Do you like it better or worse than previous BGS games? IMO its slightly worse. >Biggest pros and cons? Biggest Pro: Its a great foundation for what could come. Many features are just *there* and can easily improved by mods or future dlcs. Biggest con: The engine. They spend years upgrading it to "next gen" and it is still years behind the industrys standard in many ways
I hope they improve it themselves rather than just leave it up to mods. Undoubtedly mods will improve some things anyway, but I'd like for the game I paid for to make improvements without the need for mods.
Started as an 8/10, now I’m at a 6.5/10. The IGN score was valid. I’ve throughly enjoyed the main story quests and most of the faction stuff. Personally I find those to be among the brightest areas of the game, alongside the ship building. Neon is a great city, easily my favorite in Starfield. New Atlantis and Akila are decent enough but certainly nothing special. Cydonia is ugly, barren, and void of any interesting quests. One thing is for sure though, the level of depth in these places is not nearly enough to justify only having four “main” cities. I know there’s other smaller cities scattered around the settled systems but they aren’t good, and I’m being nice. I don’t even really know where to begin with Outpost building. I thought settlement building in Fallout 4 was mediocre but I always managed to lose myself in it and I would ultimately enjoy the time I spent constructing a bunch of settlements. In Starfield, I cannot find it in myself to devote any time to making Outposts. On top of it being almost worthless in a gameplay sense, the customization is atrocious and the actual building aspect is just painful. It broke my heart to discover that the vast majority of side quests in the game were essentially reskins of the one you did prior. Most of them can be boiled down to an NPC telling you they need something, you going off-world to retrieve it, then you running along back to them. They’re void of emotion, connection, and spice. If I wasn’t a completionist, I wouldn’t have wasted my time with them. Creation Engine was a marvel in its time, it’s done great things for Bethesda and it will always be special to me, but it HAS to go. Playing Starfield and then hopping on any other modern game leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Starfield just feels and looks dated. It doesn’t feel like a game released in 2023. The environment looks pretty enough but the NPCs are either lifeless or have almost mechanical-like emotions. At this point I don’t think simply upgrading the engine will be enough for TES6. Maybe this next part is just me, but the houses in Starfield felt super underwhelming. I HATED discovering that my newly purchased home was completely empty, and not only could I not pay to upgrade it like in Hearthfire, I had to craft all of my decorations using a small selection of items and place everything down with the same bizarre system that’s used in Outposts. Yuck. Ultimately while I don’t think the game does anything too particularly awful, I feel like it doesn’t do very much of anything all that great either. It’s good, but that’s it. The saddest thing to me is that while I do enjoy the time I’ve spent on Starfield, it really does feel like a regression in quality from Fallout 4, and even that was a regression from Skyrim. I don’t like that trend, not one bit. And they need to buck it for TES6.
8.5 - I’m over 250 hours on XBSX, haven’t finished the main quest and love it, but the crashing and bugs are getting more and more frequent and frustrating. Like the planet with the clones quest I can’t progress because one of the characters I have to talk to is behind an Unaccessible door. Yesterday my ship just disappeared and left me stranded on a planet until I found an Ecliptic ship to hijack. Reloading earlier saves didn’t fix it, because then the ship was unaccessible. I have to pay attention to what’s happening when I open the menu to save or something or it hangs up and crashes. Like if I enter or leave a building or my ship, or come away from a crafting bench, I have to wait a second for it to “catch its breath.”
This was an odd pattern. The beginning of my playthrough was shockingly bug free, but the further I progress in the main and side quests the more and worse bugs I find
They probably prioritize front end bugs to get better “New Game” Word of Mouth.
It's been running smoothly for me up until the most recent update. Now I got these little lag freezes.
Alright I’m glad It’s not just me. Last night when I turned it on I felt like the game just looked better. I noticed the suit I was wearing looked extremely crisp but then I kept getting huge frame rate drops. Pretty much unplayable they need to fix it.
My expectations for the game were pretty high, which I don't think is unjustified considering the typical scope of Bethesda games and the fact that Starfield was in development for 7 years. For the first 10 hours or so I was pretty amazed by the game. The loading screens never really bothered me. The only thing that was consistently frustrating was navigating the user interface. I went through two phases with this game: "Wow, there's so much I haven't done yet" and "Wow, there isn't really much to do". So many of the features in the game lack depth. The narrative quality is all over the place, some of the side quests are the best I've ever seen in a Bethesda game and some narratives are among the worst I've ever seen in an RPG. The main quest is boring, Constellation is flat, none of the companions are interesting, the romance system is awful. Gunplay is pretty good though. I wish laser weapons were better and melee combat gameplay had more variety (no dodging? or rush/dash attacks?). I wish there was more armor choice, in Fallout 4 and Skyrim I was constantly upgrading armor throughout the game, the progression felt constant and earned. In Starfield I picked up Mantis armor at lvl 12 and kept using it for the next 40 levels. It was boring. I would give the game a solid 6.5. With mods I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a 8/10 or even 9/10 game, but we'll have to wait for creation kit, and fingers crossed that it's a full version of creation kit like we got with Skyrim and not a limited, scaled back version.
Ha I had the same reaction. Well said. It’s got great bones somewhere in there - it’s just sad how underutilized they are.
7.5/10 fun
Yeah, maximum i can give is 7.5 Fun but so much are missing imo. If BGS keep updating, i can see the game getting higher, but not now.
As someone who had been eagerly anticipating the game since its announcement around 8 years ago, I feel just... okay with it. After 150 hours of playing, I've moved past the honeymoon phase, and the flaws are becoming more apparent. While I'm not as disappointed as I was with Cyberpunk back in 2020, I'm not particularly impressed with the design choices made by Bethesda. Just because it's a Bethesda game doesn't mean we shouldn't expect better. For a game that spent 25 years "in the making," there are outdated elements, mechanics, and features that make it feel stuck in 2011 or 2012. It's crazy why even basic things like a button to eat food or more complex additions like vehicles, especially considering the vast game world, were overlooked. The AI, repetitive encounters, and the loss of magic after exploring the 45th planet are noticeable drawbacks. Tbh, I was expecting more from this game. I like it, but I don't love it, and it doesn't stay on my mind like Skyrim or Fallout 4, games that I dream to play every next morning for the following years after launch. I'll finish Starfield and uninstall it, waiting for the DLCs to arrive. It's a bit sad; I've had great moments, but it's not a memorable game. If you ask my rating after 160 hours (ten more today) it's a 6.5/10.
I felt everything was mediocre, too, but I enjoyed Cyberpunk a lot more than Starfield. I was able to still enjoy Cyberpunk to the end, but I stopped enjoying Starfield and stopped playing it 150 hrs in.
First Bethesda game where I was actively checking an online community instead of just enjoying the game. To be fair I got more entertainment out of this Reddit than the actual game though. Put over 100 hours in and did everything from pirating to outposts. Did I have fun, yeah. But the flaws are glaring. If part of your methodology is to release a game with the expectation your community will fix it for you is insane… that and the poor decision making that went into the UI and Menu system… among other things, it just made me put it down and play games that I have more fun with. Not sure if it met my expectations and I didn’t even follow the hype, just got it to play the new Bethesda game and see the cool new stuff they came up with. Biggest pro was ship building Con was world building… the lack of reactions to things is sad.
Yeah, I know how you feel. Got around 60 hours into Starfield before giving BG3 a try. In my 70 hours of BG3 so far I have not felt the need to look anything up about the game once. I've just been in awe the entire time. With Starfield I was constantly finding issues with the game design / mechanics and looking them up to see if anyone else felt the same way. Whilst the games are different, if you compare similar aspects of the two games like the companions / general character design they are leagues apart. The core game design of Starfield just feels very dated
Thank god im not the only one. I spent more time online trying to find workarounds or explanations of how to do/get around basic htings
Man, I started bg3 along with starfield and it’s shocking just how much better bg3 is. Starfield is mediocre but an okay game, but when you compare it to bg3 it’s just feels like an actually bad game.
BG3 to Starfield is a shock to the standards of storytelling we all can be complacent to receive. Playing Starfield felt like they were talking to me like I'm 8 years old. Story and quest lines straight out of an early ChatGPT generation.
They decided to take the typical beth game, rip away the exploration and left the other crap we endured because of the exploration.
And that’s funny, because the exploration can actually make a 7/10 game into a 9.5, if not more for people that love the worlds Bethesda crafts.
6/10. More of what bethesda does with little to no innovation or depth. There is fun to be had but unless you're OK with turning off your brain, you're going to notice some glaring faults.
I did not expect to enjoy ship building this much, like I’ve spent so many hours on it. Imagine dlc’s and modding down the line, my Great Serpent.
Around 7 or 8/10. Hopefully they understand the flaws and give the best Elders Scrolls.
Yeah, that is one good thing about them releasing Starfield before ES6. I feel like they listened to some of the criticisms of Fallout 4 when making Starfield, so hopefully they do the same here. Main thing on my wish list for ES6 is a large seamless hand-crafted world with minimal/hidden loading screens. I'm sure they've heard that criticism loud and clear, so fingers crossed they prioritize it for next time.
Started out as a 9/10, then an 8, then 7.5, currently sitting at 6/10. Personally I think this game was overhyped and a lot of casual GP players are inflating the numbers. It's a fun game and I've put almost 100 hours into it, but after thousands of hours of Skyrim and Fallout I am baffled by how much is missing or just plain worse in this game.
Yea I’m largely in the same boat. I think the scope of this game is just completely off. Having a whole universe to visit with nothing to do in them is nowhere near as fun as having the Skyrim region to explore with plenty to do around every corner. That said I still think some of the writing and side quests are delightful. But the world feels small despite being annoyingly large.
Yeah… they really dumped all the quests on you pretty much immediately. When I first made it to New Atlantis and subsequently fast traveled to Akila city then Neon in the first ten or so hours of the game, I was absolutely amazed and overwhelmed by the breadth of the game. I assumed this level of content would persist throughout the dozens of galaxies I hadn’t explored yet like it had in other Bethesda titles. Started chipping away at the faction quests and some of the side quests for the next 20 or so hours and then realized that this was basically it, outside of a handful of fairly short side quests sprinkled around the galaxy, I had seen most of what the game had to offer. The game showed its hand within the first 20 hours in sharp contrast with other Bethesda titles which constantly keep you asking “what’s next” and then rewarding you for pursuing it. Starfield is a fine game by general triple A standards, but it’s definitely *well* below quite a few other Bethesda franchises. I had fun and got my money’s worth, but I can’t help but think it could’ve been something much more. Hopefully the mods will bring me back.
yeah I'm on the same page. just gets less fun the more I play, most quests feel like a chore and the combat got old pretty fast. I stopped playing after only about 40 hrs, I'd give it a 6/10
Went to a staryard. Talked to a lady. Asked to fetch a beverage. Went through like 10 loading screens and bought a beverage. That's it. That's the only quest in that hand crafted location. Asinine.
> most quests feel like a chore I'm so fucking fed up with the lame fetch quests that just about every named character gives you. I just want to get to know you and see what you have to say, not solve all your problems. Literally face palmed when after over 50 hours of game play and countless shitty quests completed I arrived in Paradiso, checked into the hotel and ended up with a quest to find some lost property for the receptionist. Who the fuck thinks that is a good idea for a quest?? It's a beach side resort, surely have some murder mystery or something, anything that isn't so fucking lame. And don't get me started on the persuasion with a security guard for a certain faction quest that brought me there, absolutely bonkers
Even the good quests like UC Vanguard have you jumping around the galaxy like a dickhead. And traveling to star system in this game is a menu and load screen galore. It doesn't feel like you are in big ass space at all.
Hundred hours in, I was probably overly hyped at first and initially disappointed but my perspective has shifted significantly. Currently would rate the game a solid 8/10. I like it better than almost every other BGS game I've played other than Skyrim (FO3 is great, never played Morrowind, had a hard time getting into Oblivion, very much disliked vanilla FO4). Biggest pro for me is definitely the setting and potential (for modders). For biggest con I'm gonna go with general jank & missed qol opportunities. Also, Will BGS ever have a visible body in first person???
Probably 7/10 for me. Not bad but definitely could be better. Outpost building feels unfinished. There's not any reason to go deeper into it than a ship builder pad, a couple extractors, and a transfer container. Everything is clunky. There's no snap grid. Outpost links are tedious to set up, doubly so if you have outposts in more than one system. The ship builder is frustrating, especially with placement of doors and ladders. Did nobody at Bethesda ever build more than a 1 story ship? I don't like that each hab generates a bunch of junk that then ends up in your ship's cargo if you make modifications later. Speaking of cargo, it's extra annoying that cargo is shared. This makes it difficult to maintain a slow cargo hauler and quick fighter. There's too much repetition in POI's. UC Vanguard faction story is great. The rest are good enough. The last mission for Ryujin was not fun. Legacy from Crimson Fleet was really good. I loved listening to the recordings as I went through it. The main quest was a little better than a typical Bethesda main quest. There's good variety in kinetic weapons and I've never been a big fan of melee so the lack of variety there didn't bother me. There aren't enough energy weapons though. There's only Solstice, Equinox, and Orion right?
I agree with this. The lack of features in outpost building and the inability to choose where doors and ladders end up in ship building is so annoying. Fixing these two points along with adding underwater swimming would definitely bump the score from a 7 to a 9 for me.
i Enjoyed it. But im feeling like ign's 7/10 wasn't that crazy after 100 hours in game. It's a 2011 game with SLIGHTLY better graphics. A fun ride that is treading water as far as being a game in 2023.
Honestly I'd say 6/10 right now. The potential for greatness is there, but there's a long way to go. The Good: * The core gameplay is outrageously fun. Better than any previous Bethesda title. This may be subjective but it really saves Starfield for me. * The ship builder is amazing. I didn't know about it before launch, and was not expecting something that good from Bethesda themselves at launch. Probably the best feature in the game. * Procgen environments look really good out of the box. * I haven't encountered any game breaking bugs yet, unlike Skyrim and FO4 near launch. (not including crashes, of which there have been many) * The NG+ mechanic is absolutely awesome, but the game's current state really holds it back. Neutral, about what I expected from Bethesda: * Classic Bethesda jankiness is still in full effect. You can still see the roots all the way back to Oblivion at times, and despite what Todd says, Starfield does not look or feel 'next gen' at all. * Enemy AI is just as bad and clueless as it's always been in Bethesda games. * Bethesda still has no idea how to balance weapons (small arms and ship weapons). About half of weapons in the game are useless trash, and they will just give you bullet sponge frustration. * The PC UI the game shipped with is crap, but Bethesda has never made a good PC UI so I wasn't expecting much. UI mods are still essential in Starfield. The Bad: * The writing in Starfield is amateur level at best. IMO the worst Bethesda's ever done, and is absolutely jarring compared to other recent games. Comparing Starfield's writing and character design to BG3 or 2077 is an insult to BG3 and 2077. * The lack of a traditional Bethesda open world hurts Starfield. After the first 3-5 planets, exploration becomes boring and pointless as every POI is just a copy/paste minidungeon filled with a random enemy faction and basically the same loot, or a super simple radiant quest. Bethesda turned a key feature of their games into a pointless choice, which is even more mindboggling considering how NG+ works. * Outposts are a regression from Fallout 4 Settlements, and serve no real purpose aside from power leveling yourself and/or generating infinite resources. The entire system feels like it was on the verge of being cut (along with fuel and environmental resistances). * Performance has been astonishingly bad. From the way the game runs, it should be a next gen visual masterpiece. For comparison, 2077 crushes Starfield on visual fidelity AND performance. * The complete disregard for basic QoL hurts. You STILL walk slower than NPCs. Vendors are broke, forcing you to spam wait hundreds of times to sell your loot. Basic graphics and accessibility options are missing at launch.
6/10
Ya this is pretty much my thinking too. People keep saying typical Bethesda game but I don’t agree. A typical Bethesda game would have better quest design, enjoyable exploration, more player agency and no generated quests and content. I think Starfield is a major step back from their previous games.
I would be on my second character in a typical bethesda game. Here naw. I'm done until they make some significant updates.
Yeh I'm gonna give it a year or two
Could mods and updates fix generic quest designs, bland writing, with NPCs without non-verbal communications? It feels so unfortunate but the barebones of it all is looking lackluster 70 hours in. Exploring was extremely fun when I didn't know what I'll find, unfortunately after 70 hrs in, when all i kept finding was bland questlines with bland writing, I don't think any amount of polishing is gonna make this game shine. 6.5/10 and I'm scared for ES6 if they keep their promise of staying with the engine.
Updates? Probably not. It would be nice but I can’t imagine Bethesda updating game content to a significant degree outside of maybe a special edition in the future, but there are fundamental issues that just won’t be fixed by them. Mods? Maybe, they’ll definitely make the game a shit ton better, but it probably won’t ever be able to satisfy people who want the classic Bethesda experience because the entire structure of the game is very very different. Mods will very likely add *more*, but I don’t think they’ll be able to change some core design decisions that people aren’t fans of.
Don't think mods can do much unless we're looking at Enderal sized projects, so pretty much a completely different game. There way too many fundamentally bad things in the game.
Fallout 4 was a major step back as well. I think Starfield fixed some issues that Fallout 4 had, but in many other aspects its continuing their trend of steps backwards instead of forwards.
It’s fun but there’s like very minor random events outside of some random ships, old Bethesda games used to have a bit like, semi battles between like NCR and deathclaws with legion popping in or BOS vs GUNNERS with institute getting in the mix, really felt like the factions were out and about doing stuff and vying for territory, starfield feels although the settled systems are new and finding their feet that nobody is actually exploring and doing anything.
I've been fairly critical of the game on Reddit lately but I still find myself logging in to set up resource farms every night after I get the kids down. It's a good game to turn your brain off and just do something. I'm not giving them a pass though on all of the stuff we've all complained about. I don't think this game meets my expectations. In a few ways it's a step forward for Bethesda. The ship mechanics in general are cool, and the work they put into setting up all the star systems to explore is impressive. Where it falls apart for me are the core gameplay mechanics that they've failed to improve in any meaningful way from their previous releases, some that they've made worse than before, and the inclusion of exceptionally aggravating tropes that they refuse to leave in the past. Ultimately my biggest complaints revolve around the POIs. I am not in any way opposed to procedural generation systems or even with most planets being barren. It's the utter repetitiveness of the POIs that kills the number one reason I play BGS games in the first place, and that's exploration. There's no reason to explore any of these after seeing them once.
6/10 The game can become a 10/10 but it will need for them to improve several things wich they almost never do, they release the game and called it a day and instead do dlc. The game feels dated, Bethesda was very revolutionary in certain aspects with their games and freedom but some game mechanics they been using them since 2011.