very early game soft spoilers
I managed to play an hour or so of the game. The early part feels really boring. Disregard that I tried to fly my spaceship to Kreet for five minutes without realising that I had to press A and select it to land on it because I probably skipped some tutorial prompt. When I get to New Atlantis the game feels really lifeless. There are many interactable characters around with good voice acting but the combination of the atmosphere, the music, the way that conversations go, the generic chosen one plot, it feels really boring.
Does it get better?
Also my diplomat character cannot persuade for shit.
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my thoughts after about a week of playing:
- It’s definitely one of the least buggy Bethesda games I’ve played at launch, but it’s still a Bethesda game so you’ll see the usual “npc vibrating into a wall” type bugs. An amusing one I just encountered was my companion getting stuck talking with that spacesuit filter on her voice, so even though she’s standing right next to me and we’re not wearing spacesuits her voice she still sounded like she was talking over a radio lol.
- I’ve seen a lot of complaints about performance, and I don’t know if I just got really lucky with my PC config but the game runs really well for me (max settings, 1440p with FSR2 enabled and it never goes below 60fps).
- Loading screens galore. I’m playing on an SSD so they only take like 1-3 seconds max but it’s still annoying to see so many. I feel like Bethesda needs to just bite the bullet and create a brand new engine from scratch (which would take a ton of time and resources so it will probably never happen).
- The “fast travel everywhere” system is strange. I agree that it’s a little immersion breaking to fast travel light years away with a short loading screen. I don’t really know how you’d get around it though because manually traveling everywhere in a space game would get boring very quickly.
- I like the ship builder. They make it pretty easy to snap parts together and it’s really satisfying to design a cool looking ship that actually has useful features on the inside (like the workshop for the crafting stations or the armory for showing off rare weapons). I just wish the ship builder controls were a bit better. It’s also pretty neat to put windows on your ship and then go out in space and look through them at a huge planet or other ships flying around you, or come back to your ship and see members of your crew hanging out in the living area or engineering bay.
- I like customizing guns too but it’s really easy to make guns that are super overpowered, especially if you start with one that has really good effects. That’s kinda expected in a Bethesda game though.
- I’m not sure how I feel about the procedural generation on planets. On one hand, a lot of the “random” structures you can walk to are actually pretty detailed and some are WAY bigger than they look from the outside. In fact some of my best pieces of gear came from exploring them. On the other hand, the longer I’ve played the more I find reused set pieces. It’s also strange that even on severely inhospitable planets there are still NPCs living there or ships landing and taking off.
- After I did a specific side mission, I now see a random encounter related to it all the damn time and they have the exact same dialogue every single time. I don’t know if it’s a bug but if not it’s a really strange design choice.
- Visually the NPCs don’t look that great, and the environments are okay, but the items like guns and miscellaneous objects are very detailed. The ships also look (and sound) incredible. At one point I climbed on top of my ship and noticed there are a ton of small details all over it that most players won’t even see
- I haven’t played a ton of the main story, but the side quests are usually pretty interesting. IMO they’re the best story-related parts of the game. However I agree with another comment here that Akila city is weird because it’s like the 24th century and they still have dirt roads.
- The companions are okay. I like Andreja and Vasco.
- I think people will make some really cool mods for this game. Once the creation kit is released I plan on making a few myself (I really want to add an infinite-volume storage container near the crafting stations on my ship).
Overall I don’t think this game is GOTY material or anything, but I usually have a good time with Bethesda games (with the exception of Fallout 76) so just like Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout I’ll probably come back to it every once in a while and have fun, especially once more mods start rolling out.
the libertarian city not having roads is funny as fuck tbh
bethesda is prob just making the bugs on purpose to keep their place as the world’s gamedev with the most BPM(bugs per minute)
Speaking of bugs I was surprised at how smoothly it ran. I recently got a 4k monitor that goes above 120 hertz and playing even more mid-range games makes my fans run at top speed because of this. But on Starfield, my computer was its usual quiet self. And I was able to run on medium at a good framerate, def 60 at least (I could get the video settings on high but I would get some fps drops here and there). I understand the game adjusts resolution dynamically and I didn’t have it set at 100% either way, but it was never shocking or noticeable.
yeah I guess the delay from last year helped out a lot
It’s definitely one of the least buggy Bethesda games I’ve played at launch, but it’s still a Bethesda game so you’ll see the usual “npc vibrating into a wall” type bugs. An amusing one I just encountered was my companion getting stuck talking with that spacesuit filter on her voice, so even though she’s standing right next to me and we’re not wearing spacesuits her voice she still sounded like she was talking over a radio lol.
I had one where my companion was wearing only her normal clothes
which would be fine normally but…
She was on the surface of the moon
Lol I actually just had another one today where I was doing a mission on Neon and told my companion to wait in one of the air ducts because she kept alerting the guards when I was trying to sneak around. I totally forgot about her in there and during the next mission I was talking to an NPC and my companion interjected with something… from a totally different floor, partially obscured by shadows of an air vent she was standing near. Gave me a good laugh imagining her standing in a dark air duct for hours and then somehow hearing our conversation from multiple floors below us and giving her thoughts on it.
Every Bethesda RPG since Morrowind is less interesting than the last. I think Starfield is incredibly bland in my experience so far. At its core, its got all the systems of any Bethesda game in the past two decades, but you can’t even get the experience of finding cool things on the path to a mission because most of the exploration is done through a menu with planets and when you land on the planet, the only interesting thing around is your objective. It does a lot of things No Man’s Sky does to pad out the typical Bethesda stuff, but it does all of that worse than No Man’s Sky. I’m having an… okay time with it, but it’s probably my least favorite game they’ve put out. Which has been true every time they’d put out a game since Morrowind.
What makes Morrowind good? It is a bit dated but I wanna try playing it someday.
Let me tell you when you booted that game up back in 2003 as a kid there was nothing else like it. The graphics especially were incredible for the time, nothing had ever come close. Stepping off that ship and into a murky town where you instantly were left to your own devices to do whatever the heck you wanted to… it’s difficult to recapture this.
Atmosphere, writing, characters, and freedom to completely break the game with your character’s abilities if you choose to.
It’s well written and the world feels truly alien. There’s a lot of freedom in what you’re capable of if you put your mind to it. Like you can cast spells that will let you jump across the entire map in one go. You can levitate over mountains. You can enchant a pair of daedric gauntlets that have a single fireball charge that will engulf an entire town. The world is full of mysteries and NPCs. The guilds feel more fleshed out, because they actually are in conflict with one another. For instance, a thieves guild mission could lock you out of another guild entirely. Joining one of the three great houses will lock you out of the other two. There’s a much greater variety in equipment. Quests can have a lot more text, because every line doesn’t have to be voiced. There’s wild stuff like literal Gods roaming around some of the cities.
It just feels more fully realized for me.
I’m sure it’s hard to pick it up for the first time these days, because the combat is odd. It’s first person, but every attack is also still a dice roll under the hood. Just because you were close and your cursor was on an enemy doesn’t mean they’ll be hit. I think that’s the primary thing that will turn off newcomers. Sorry about the rambling post, I’m not great at describing why I enjoy something and I also fully acknowledge there’s an element of nostalgia with me and Morrowind.
The writing is what makes it good.
Starfield demonstrates a complete lack of any cohesive vision in story, themes, and gameplay.
The artstyle has that generic “hard” space sci-fi look. I could just as well be looking at Star Citizen, Interstellar, or The Expanse. The locations might sound interesting in theory but are executed in the most bland way possible. It’s kind of hilarious to think that these tiny settlements are supposed to be interplanetary capital cities. I do understand that unrestricted player movement means that they can’t really place a massive city in the background like in the Mass Effect Trilogy but explicitly calling the places you visit capitals is absurd.
Bethesda tries hard to ape Serenity-esque space westerns with Akila. An interplanetary capital without paved roads in its main thoroughfare. It really clashes with the rest of the game’s attempts at being seen as a believable “hard” sci-fi. A vision of a car free future brought to you by the limitations of the Creation Engine. The game engine is no excuse for not having a space horse though. Traversing procedurally generated terrain on foot is a waste of time.
The vaguely utopian corporate solarpunk of New Atlantis is soulless and not in the satirical good way. Which is ironic because it seems to be inspired by Starship Troopers.
Neon, the cyberpunk offworld oilrig tries and fails to be a hip seedy dystopia. It looks more like the Outer World’s Groundbreaker Promenade than Mass Effect 2’s Omega. It doesn’t illicit feelings of despair from the callous disregard of humanity as a consequence of greed without limits. It’s just a shopping mall with boring corporate suits who try to sound edgy.
The same goes for the music. It doesn’t convey any emotion and isn’t uniquely identifiable. Inon Zur’s work for the Bethesda Fallouts weren’t this forgettable so it’s probably down to Bethesda’s lack of direction. The music doesn’t build into the atmosphere of any location or any story moment. I don’t think Jeremy Soule would’ve made a difference, and it’s good that Bethesda doesn’t associate with an accused rapist. That said I’d still say his work with Oblivion was one the best soundtracks of any game.
Ship combat has controls like Freelancer except it plays terrible. The ships feel heavy and are unresponsive to control so it doesn’t really work as an arcade space combat game. The mouse first controls with no flight stick support, fast travel, and the inability to actually dock/land manually make it an automatic fail as a spaceflight sim. The ability to fast travel instantly to any previously visited location is good though. With its quest design, it would be painful to play Starfield if they went the sim route.
The gun play is identical to Fallout 4 but plays worse due to procedurally placed enemies and levels. It has to rely on the AI, weapons and enemy design. None of those elements are able to make the fights interesting. It’s still a lot better than any of the other spaceflight games with ground combat though.
The bar is being dropped so hard that Mass Effect Andromeda is retroactively becoming a great game. In the universe that Starfield is an 87, Andromeda is at least a 97.
I’ll still play Starfield over Elite Dangerous, or No Man Sky since it has actual content. It isn’t all procedurally generated and has an actual story with characters. I’ll finish the main quest at least, the game isn’t aggressively bad in anyway. It’s just all around sterile and uninspiring. I still have the hope that somewhere out there I might find a branching side quest that is remotely as good as those in Oblivion, or New Vegas.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is unironically the best Mass Effect game.
I found just travelling system to system planet by planet is great because you run into all sorts of encounters. Ditched the main quest line and joined the vanguard so now I go around the galaxy murdering spacers, bugs and pirates. I am playing on hard so I spend quite a bit on remote worlds trying to scavenge enough credits to pay for ship repair kits and meds.
Honestly you can choose to skip the monotonous getting out of your cockpit/going to the airlock and being able to teleport when your 2km away from your ship is nice if you don’t have the patience.
It reminds me of season 1 Star Trek.
YOU HAVE TO PRESS A??? Bruhhhh I flew for like ages, and then couldn’t figure it out so I left the chair and went to the table thing and had to use that. This helps so much.
I am not sure if you are making fun of me which I don’t mind but it took me a long time to figure out because it clearly looked like the ship was moving and I wasn’t sure if the celestial body was really far away or just not coming closer to me at all.
I’m not. I literally flew at it for ages using the boosters. And then I legit did leave the cockpit and use the table to land. I knew it was weird but lots of people told me the flying was weird so I was like umm alright. It makes way more sense that I can click into it somehow.
All the Constellation characters deserve the wall and the game won’t even acknowledge me shooting them
Sarah “i don’t know why the poor miners aren’t out there exploring” Morgan
You don’t like the wholesome British Elon Musk trillionaire CEO funding your space exploits?
It seems like Fallout 3 merged with No Man’s Sky.
at least fallout 3 had the franchises previous worldbuilding carrying the game 😂
I have not played Fallout 3 but Fallout 4 did also have a similar resurrected zombie feel to it.
No Man’s Sky
I have actually never played this game before. But I am 99% sure in this game you get into a spaceship and fly from one planet to another. Starfield has a modified version of this mechanic where they strip down all the fun parts and leave the tedious bits in between. I haven’t gotten a handle on it yet because it is very confusing but currently non-warp speed travel looks like this. You get into you spaceship, you press Y to embark. Now you in space. Here sometimes you can do space combat. Now you aim your crosshair at the planet/moon you want to land on and you press A. Then you select a landing spot and the ship lands there automatically. I actually don’t want to fly the spaceship at all. I would just like to select the landing spot and fast travel there without all the tedium in between. The design in really baffling.
I have actually never played this game before. But I am 99% sure in this game you get into a spaceship and fly from one planet to another
I have. A lot. Here’s how it works in NMS:
You get into the spaceship. Press button for liftoff - it causes the ship to “jump” above the ground. Now you’re in flight. From there on you’re pretty much free to fly about. You can technically even go to other planets in the current system this way, it would just take awhile. Want to land - go where you want to land, press land button. Either you’ll land or get a message why not (flying too fast, area not clear). Want to go to another system - open galaxy map, select system, warp. Rinse and repeat. There’s a hidden loading between planetary area and space, but on a good machine you won’t notice the lag
The Starfield hype made me craving a new space game (Outer Wilds got me in so hard) so I bought NMS and I really love it. It’s just pretty overwhelming, there’s a lot to do. But you actually feel like dwelling in space
Fuckers should just do ES 6 like literally everyone wanted but they churn out some weird experiments one after another. Though comparing Morrowind-Oblivion-Skyrim-Fallout4-Starfield i no longer hype for ES6.
I found myself testing the game for 2 hours and i need some mods already - well this is the moment Starfield will be superior to NMS, now if only the devs could found a bit more of colour palette in NMS space is at least pretty. Also i found comparing it to NMS way more than to Skyrim, not a good sign.
Bethesda was open that they wanted to make Starfield before the Elder Scrolls 6, which is now supposedly in actual development now instead of pre-production.
Yeah, but entire thing was such a hilarious fuckup.
Bethesda just kept churning out wolfensteins and whatnot while cutting the coupons of Skyrim (hell they even did a few updates in last year completely shitting out on modders). Then they made that utter garbage of failout 76, which instantly exploded straight in their faces, and soon after they release that first teaser of ES6 and pretended it was already in production, it was clearly a complete lie and most likely the decision of actually making ES6 was made right then.
I’m enjoying Starfield so far, but admittedly I haven’t played it as much compared to Destiny 2.
JERRY STARFELD
I’ve never been interested in Starfield in the first place, but I like how you guys have genuine criticism of it.
The only other criticism I’ve heard of it is “wOkE pRoNoUnS!1!1!1!”
Same, with the exception of Mass Effect, I have little to no interest in space exploration games
Same impressions for me, and it’s especially jarring when it’s in space. One note: you can only teleport to a city if you’ve been there once. Otherwise it’s just a matter of clicking on a few menu buttons.
This worked in skyrim because you still had to travel there in the first place and see stuff along the way, but nothing happens out in space so they just minimized the travel as much as they could to the point it’s comical. Traversing a solar system and showing up at the embassy on a planet thousands of light years away takes the duration of a loading screen lol.
Same compartmentalization as fallout too. Open a door, loading screen, get loaded into a different scene and you can pretend there’s still a bustling city outside and you just crossed the threshold, but there’s nothing actually outside the building you loaded into, except the void. The space station mission was especially weird, you dock on the space station (press a button) and “enter” through your ship’s docking door I guess (load a screen). Then inside the space station there are absolutely 0 windows anywhere, you can’t see your ship, you can’t see out in space, you can’t see planet far away. Everything is its own compartment.
This worked in 2008 but in 2023 we’ve come to expect more precisely because games did that before, sometimes with half the budget.
Edit: also everyone is peppy and happy and super eager to talk to you, it’s weird once you notice it. I guess they wanted to move away from the dystopian space tropes that are popular currently but like, I’m talking to a cashier. You shouldn’t be this happy to see me lol
I walked on the moon for 5 minutes before getting out of there. It’s the moon. In a video game. You’ve seen one spot you’ve seen them all. Also a travelling merchant was just taking a walk there for no reason it was super weird lol.
Edit2: One thing they did really well I guess (I stopped playing after 1 day because the game suddenly started consistently crashing in the capital city and I can’t leave because of this lol) is to give you a feeling of wanting to see what’s out there. The moon is obviously boring, but in space you can invent anything you want. I did want to go check out other planets and systems and see what they had in store for us, and it seems especially that the planet maps are huge.
also everyone is peppy and happy and super eager to talk to you
Isn’t that the case with TES as well?
they wanted to move away from the dystopian space tropes
Aren’t there a bunch of megacorps doing what megacorps always do? And some space pirates doing space pirate things?
Isn’t that the case with TES as well?
Depends on what TES you’re talking about. In Morrowind most people are neutral towards the player and you have to gain their trust or bribe them if you want something from them. Some just hate the player for various reasons and some NPCs are just straight up racist/spiecist. Some refuse to talk to you if you have contraband in your inventory (like skooma or moon sugar). I don’t know about the other games but I’ve heard that the “universally liked player” thing started with Skyrim.
Why is everyone shitting on NMS here instead of the Bethesda Cookie Cutter?
TBH I don’t see what’s written of NMS here as criticism really
Yeah I don’t even see where it is mentioned
Btw I got into NMS recently as a reaction to Starfield and I think it’s incredible, although not quiet for everyone
Check the skill tree for some epic wholesome capitalist propaganda, I love my shopping malls in space
Play Atomic Heart, liberals have no imagination and are creatively bankrupt
Isn’t Atomic Heart a negative portrayal of the USSR?
The protagonist is a dedicated communist horrified by the decisions made by Soviet leaders, very accurate and sympathetic portrayal of socialist ideology.
I haven’t gotten very far into it but the intro is amazing and other Hexbear users say it’s hiding it’s power levels.
The vibe is similar to how most communists look at Kruschev, Gorbachev and Chinese foreign policy.
Atomic Heart is ultimately still an anti-communist neoliberal game unfortunately, but the game’s portrayal of the Soviet Union is more sympathetic and fairer-handed than I expected. I like that the protagonist P3 is hilarious, despite being a total asshole. I feel like this game suffers from what Bioshock Infinite did; Neoliberalism about “both sides” and “communism is just as bad as capitalism because corruption” though.
I dont have the means to play it myself right now, but I have watched some videos from people and that seems to be the same kind of impression I get. I could absolutely love actually play it myself, because watching somebody play a game is obviously not the same, but I get the same kind of lifeless feeling.
Maybe part of that are the two games I have been playing lately are Baldur’s Gate 3 and No Man’s Sky, which are both REALLY good at what they do. Starfield almost feels like the two combined but not quite as good? NMS gives me that endless universe exploration feeling, and BG3 gives me what I am looking for with a living world full of interesting characters/roleplaying.
Nothing about Starfield seems bad persay, but maybe not for me in the end. Let us know if your opinion on that changes though.
I find it a bit surprising that when games like Disco Elysium and Baldur’s Gate 3 exist, the standard for player-NPC interactions in AAA RPGs is still the same as it was like ten or fifteen years ago. This game was supposed to be some kind of revolution but the loop still seems to be following map markers and shooting bad guys with some spaceship traversal thrown in between. I will give the game some more time though. Let’s see how it goes.
One issue is that games can take so long to develop and that development is (probably—I have no real idea) so bureaucracised, there’s no real room to keep up with what others are doing. I’ve not played Starfield yet, btw.
the standard for player-NPC interactions in AAA RPGs is still the same as it was like ten or fifteen years ago
Because those games are not RPG. Those are glorified shooter adventure games, it blur betweens games like Fallout 4, NMS, Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 5, souls-likes (F4 is the only one of those being an RPG though fairly simplicistic one).
Baldur 3 came and smashed all them aside as RPG proving that that genre did not died, it was murdered by publishers. Problem is, Baldur took years upon years of work and is still unfnished, so the devs WILL keep churning out shooters with RPG label because it is simply more cost-effective.
Disco Elysium also had a lot of work done post initial release. I consider myself incredibly blessed that I only paid attention to it after the Final Cut was out. The voice acting is stellar.
Yeah, Baldur will also be continued, devs confirmed for example the endings are being worked upon. And they should, the “best” ending is basically turning everything into warzone trying to turn back into status quo, and to get something actually positive out of it you need to jump the tricky hoops into few quests (basically impossible without accidentally stepping upon the correct combination of not signalled decisions or without game guide). Rest of endings are even worse, they barely count as any ending, just few short scenes and that’s it.
I think Baldur was rushed to come out before Starfield since the target audiences for both games are very overlapping.
I have 104 hours in BG3 and have not yet passed Act I LOL
Not to say the endings aren’t underdeveloped, you are almost certainly right there, I am just unsure if I will even see them before they’re updated!
Entire game took me 150 hours with trying to go everywhere and do everything and i’m a veteran who played nearly every single such game, so yeah, the size and scope of game is impressive. About the acts i think act 1 is the biggest with the matryoshka dungeons (and don’t forget to go to monastery to get the legendary Lathander morningstar!), lower city in act 3 is very big plus all the buildings and sewers. Act II is the smallest and it’s good since its pretty dreary and boring (do the harpers quest asap to get the freedom of movement).
Much of the reason it’s taken me so long is down to a combination of poor performance and constantly, constantly rerolling characters because something else seems so interesting at the moment. Oo, I’ve read Drow are treated very differently! How will the tiefling/druid conflict resolve in the face of a tiefling druid? I think I’ll try Wyll’s story! What if Karlach and Shadowheart fell in love? Bah! There is simply so much to enjoy.
