It seems like a pretty big deal since it is Bethesda's first foray into new original IP in twenty five years. Furthermore it seems to have good press and popular reception. I haven't tried it out myself yet since I'm waiting for more word of mouth to make my decision for me.
Or is it?
Let me sample the headlines of popular YouTube Video Reviews.
Yes thank you everyone... Now I'm even more confuzzled then before. So any hot takes out of The Sietch's RIGHT Field?
It's Fallout 4 in space. Not even a proper RPG (it's as much an RPG as Far Cry 3 is), and really showing the limits of what Bethesda can make.
A good attempt by Bethesda, but for a 2023 release it's embarrassing that Outer Worlds has a superior RPG system, given that Outer Worlds sucks compared to Fallout 3 of all things.
It's Fallout 4 in space. Not even a proper RPG (it's as much an RPG as Far Cry 3 is), and really showing the limits of what Bethesda can make.
A good attempt by Bethesda, but for a 2023 release it's embarrassing that Outer Worlds has a superior RPG system, given that Outer Worlds sucks compared to Fallout 3 of all things.
Yeah, for better and for worse, it is the most ambitious Fallout 4 mod out there. Shame about the ridiculously bad optimization and not keeping the power armor system to vary the combat more (could have also reskinned it into small mechs, but either would work).
Yeah, for better and for worse, it is the most ambitious Fallout 4 mod out there. Shame about the ridiculously bad optimization and not keeping the power armor system to vary the combat more (could have also reskinned it into small mechs, but either would work).
I'm honestly disappointed by the lack of any gore/dismemberment. You can nail someone in the head with a grenade and as far as you can tell, they were merely knocked out.
Every Bethesda game has had dismemberment in some degree since FO3, but shockingly 2023 technology just doesn't have the Ghz to do it anymore.
I'm honestly disappointed by the lack of any gore/dismemberment. You can nail someone in the head with a grenade and as far as you can tell, they were merely knocked out.
Every Bethesda game has had dismemberment in some degree since FO3, but shockingly 2023 technology just doesn't have the Ghz to do it anymore.
I'm thinking of waiting for a few months or a year or whatever just to see if Bethesda can optimize the game and/or patch the games many presumed flaws that were apparently evident upon release. That is if I bother buying Starfield in general.
The most annoying thing about the game is just how fucking boring it can be. When its shooty shooty bang bang time? Hey, it's kinda fun. Fallout 4 combat isn't great, but it's competent enough. I much prefer it over Skyrim for example.
But A good 80+% of your game will be walking around, loading screens, and going back and forth because some twat wants you to persuade some dude to give him something.
It wouldn't be too bad if not for the fact that these quests often feature zero combat (ya know, the point of the entire character's inventory, why else would we have a gun?), and requires you to go in and out of multiple buildings/planets/locations. And EVERY time you go into a building you need to wait for everything to load.
It turns a 10 minute quest into an almost hour-long slog as you have to physically drag your ass around to get a measly 11k credits and MAYBE if you're lucky, a hat with no real stats.
Edit: Also, the claim that 'the game gets good after X hours!' is absolute nonsense. You want to know what you will be doing X hours into the game? The exact same stuff you were doing in the start, just with larger numbers. Shooting bandits/monsters, talking to people for credits, and being someone's slave because they themselves can't be assed to buy a taxi service and believe it's totally in that renowned adventurer's interest to ask some guy to deliver a simple package or ask for the release of information or some other small-time task...
Been playing it some more, and still doing the same crap you start off doing. Haven't made any settlements on planets yet, but I can imagine how 'engaging' plonking down some houses can be. Woo.
Ship combat is dead simple, shoot at it until it dies. Builds focusing on agility/speed basically doesn't work because it's just a big tank-fest. So slap on the beefiest shield module you can find, and make sure you have repair materials (where do you find those? NO FUCKING CLUE BECAUSE I HAVEN"T SEEN ANYBODY SELL ONE YET).
Weapon balance is all out of whack as well, 99% of weapons you find are about as strong as the ones at the start of the game, but occasionally you'll find some monster gun that outcompetes everything else by about a magnitude.
Example? I found an explosive revolver that fires fully automatically and has more damage per shot than the .50 cal rifles. It shoots the entire 6 round cylinder in about a quarter of a second but it also one hit kills just about everyone.
Vendors have a whopping 5-11 thousand credit storage, which is anywhere from 11 thousand to 1 item, depending on how valuable it is. What this means is a full inventory often requires over 2 merchants to sell everything to. Which is inconvenient as all hell. And the higher level you get, the more shit is worth. I dread to think what a level 80+ item is worth, seeing as level 15 stuff is already breaking 1k pretty often.
Vendors take 48 hours to refresh (roughly 1-2 minutes IRL time, if you wait on a chair/bed), but warping across the galaxy is instant.
This doesn't sound like a problem until you realize you can clear like 4 bandit bases with only ten ingame hours passing.
So if you're doing lots of combat, you find that a good 70% of the time you're playing is looking for someone with money.
It's also very immersion breaking, a business selling items worth 30 thousand+ items only has 5000 in reserve?
That's retarded, that's like going to a high class ferrari dealership who has a couple hundred backs in the back.
Even weirder is that ship merchants have a LOT of money, but there's no way to make use of it really. If you could just dump everything on them, it'd be mostly okay, but apparently all they want to sell is glorified space-legos.
Yeah it's definitively a step down from what you guys are you telling me :
No gore ? Either they are lazy (which is possible because they have watered down their main developements since FO4) or they have sanitized it... if so...Do they realize that real-life dismemberament looks infinitely worse than what their previous products made it look like?
I will wait for a better pc and when it is on sale. I fell for buying up FO3 and FNV four times (first the base editions then the complete versions with all the DLC, not to mention I bought the "special" editions) and do not intend to do that AGAIN.
What pisses me off is most of the game's problems are problems that have been in Bethesda games since OBLIVION.
Merchants especially sucked ass in Skyrim, where rapidly you'd be having items worth thousands while most merchants had a mere pittance. Hell could we at least get STORE CREDIT in return!?
Yeah it's definitively a step down from what you guys are you telling me :
No gore ? Either they are lazy (which is possible because they have watered down their main developements since FO4) or they have sanitized it... if so...Do they realize that real-life dismemberament looks infinitely worse than what their previous products made it look like?
I will wait for a better pc and when it is on sale. I fell for buying up FO3 and FNV four times (first the base editions then the complete versions with all the DLC, not to mention I bought the "special" editions) and do not intend to do that AGAIN.
Vendors take 48 hours to refresh (roughly 1-2 minutes IRL time, if you wait on a chair/bed), but warping across the galaxy is instant.
This doesn't sound like a problem until you realize you can clear like 4 bandit bases with only ten ingame hours passing.
So if you're doing lots of combat, you find that a good 70% of the time you're playing is looking for someone with money.
It's also very immersion breaking, a business selling items worth 30 thousand+ items only has 5000 in reserve?
That's retarded, that's like going to a high class ferrari dealership who has a couple hundred backs in the back.
Even weirder is that ship merchants have a LOT of money, but there's no way to make use of it really. If you could just dump everything on them, it'd be mostly okay, but apparently all they want to sell is glorified space-legos.
The inventory system and the menus and the vendors are all utterly hostile toward the player trying to do something as simple as sell off their vendor trash to make room. I had to turn my ship into a big, sluggish cargo hauler with 10,000+ cargo units (after Payload skill bonuses) just to be able to carry all the resources and loot I found.
This is my current ship, the Chuckwagon:
Starfield is a bit of a mixed bag for me.
Pros:
Amazing sound effect design.
Inon Zur's kickass soundtrack.
Some of the companion questlines are kind of touching.
Nice ship/building art and hard surface modeling, but the heightmapped terrain can be a bit muddied and flat at times, and foliage doesn't really stick out. There are times where you will zoom into a console and all the little screws and buttons and be like "What poor 3D contractor in war-torn Ukraine slaved over this for hours?"
I do like the ship-building and habitat construction, but I honestly wish there were a lot more parts. This is very simplistic compared to what I'm used to, and the colony management shares the same horrible inventory problems as the player character and their ship.
The gunfights are pretty fun and Fallout 4-esque. Boarding always makes you feel like an unstoppable badass, especially if you've got a Magstorm and are just Metal Storming everyone into Swiss cheese.
The ship combat is decent, kind of Freelancer-esque, but with a power redistribution mechanic (I've honestly never been a fan of those). All the ships are very sluggish to turn, however. They turn like boats; there's a sweet spot mid-throttle where they turn faster, but at full or zero throttle, they turn slowest. There are no "light fighters" in this game. The smallest ship you can fly is still basically an interstellar-capable gunship with a turning radius like a school bus.
Cons:
Retarded Woke ESG bullshit and sneering, clay-faced, hormonally imbalanced, uncanny valley NPCs with giant chins speaking horrible, flat, phoned-in, Netflix-level snarky dialogue written by utterly incompetent shit-hack non-writers.
The writing of the intro sequence is the most boring shit I have ever seen. This is from the company that gave us the iconic cart ride and dragon attack of Helgen. What the fuck is this Mass Effect ripoff shit? It's like touching the Prothean Beacon, but without the intrigue of Saren shooting his friend Nihlus. It's fucking STUPID. Why should I care about these artifacts? There's no practical matter here of any concern to the audience. It's forced plot coupons just because. Fetch another artifact, receive more plot. Fuck you! Go die in a ditch!
A few glaring bugs remain (sometimes, the sounds from in-flight 40mm grenades will play in a loop, for instance), but I only had one CTD so far. I've encountered floating NPCs, enemies clipped outside ship hulls (especially in the hostage rescue missions; there's one ship hab where, if enemies spawn in it, they will spawn outside the geometry), floating objects, asteroids stuck to my ship and following it around across multiple jumps (I used the console to disable them), and, in some cases, entirely missing geometry upon cell load (like the desk missing from the ship technician's shop in Akila, or the HVAC housings missing from the vent fans in an alley in Neon).
Dialogue that still has the old in-production names for certain locations in it, and subtitles that often don't match because they re-scripted so many parts. Fucking sloppy.
The UI is atrocious radial menu console garbage and has too much tabbing back and forth.
The inventory management is a chore. Between the stupid vendors having such limited currency and the sheer lack of Skyrim-like infinite chests, loot is hard to get rid of without just plain dropping it somewhere. Storage boxes at outposts have a teeny tiny capacity and you have to build dozens of them just to be able to gather a respectable quantity of material, especially for the shipyard material dropoff mini-quests and stuff.
Lots of missed opportunities here and there.
Badly unoptimized, but it runs fine on my system (I have a supercomputer with a 4090, all-SSD storage and 192 gigs of RAM, it doesn't count).
No super ultrawide support (32:9 aspect ratio) without hex editing that leaves nasty letterboxing here and there and scope overlays with the edges of the texture cut off and the world still visible.
STARBORN!?! Bethesda, you lazy motherfuckers.
The plot in this game is often completely pants-on-head retarded. Yes, hard-R retarded.
So, I'm going to put this behind spoilers, but I just have to say it, because of how stupid it is.
I just beat the Freestar quest line, and there's an entire plot line where we find out that Ron Hope, the head of HopeTech, one of the ship manufacturers in the game, was involved with a conspiracy to poison farmland with a compound that transmutes soil into valuable minerals at the cost of making it barren, and then hiring mercenaries to force people off their farms and then mine these minerals. The whole thing is dripping with Outer Worlds-style full-blown smug Marxism and environmentalism, where the player is invited to beat up on a rich, elitist, exploitative entrepreneur (voiced by Wes fucking Johnson) just because they can, and then, when the inevitable happens and you refuse his attempted bribery and try and arrest him, he goes down in a gunfight like a chump, and there are no repercussions for the player at all.
This is stupid. It's beyond moronical. The writers have contrived a conflict while ignoring the facts of their own setting. Three things immediately come to mind.
A substance that turns soil into industrial quantities of metals is scientifically implausible. This is Tiberium-level handwavium. Either the elements are there, or they aren't. In fact, the setting has abundant fusion reactors, so industrial transmutation and recycling of materials should be entirely feasible and cheap... in fixed locations, in a factory setting. Look up Bernard Eastlund's fifty-year-old paper on the Fusion Torch.
If you do have such a magical substance, why in the maximum fuck would you distribute it on farmland, instead of one of the many uninhabited (and, indeed, uninhabitable) planets all over the goddamn place?
THERE ARE METALS EVERYWHERE. Blow up an asteroid. It's full of iron. Hell, do a few jumps, and you'll encounter enough recyclable station debris from the Colony War to build hundreds of ships. It's free fucking metal! HOLY FUCK! Ron Retard would have been money ahead if he'd just hired the garbage scow guys from Planetes to scoop up all the FREE METAL.
So, in the end, I didn't shoot Ron Hope because he was a capitalist. I shot him because he was a moron.
There are so many things that the game flirts with, here and there, in little radiant encounters, that should be full-fledged features. One time, I landed on Toliman II, ignoring the warning in orbit about the Terrormorphs, because I wanted to go hunting Terrormorphs so I could pose for a selfie with their carcasses. You know, the usual. I encountered a Survivalist NPC whose partner was lying dead on the ground next to him who wanted help getting back to his ship while avoiding the Terrormorphs. Cue two-kilometer trek through the deadliest frozen-ass boreal forest in the Settled Systems while escorting an NPC and shooting any wildlife that get near. That one little bit was more immersive than most of the repetitive Travel from Point A to Point B, Kill everyone at Point B, return to Point A murderhobo quests that the actual quest-givers pawn off on you.
After playing Stormworks and seeing the appeal of a Search-and-Rescue gameplay loop, it would actually be cool if Starfield, perhaps as a DLC questline, incorporated an SAR faction that you could join and made it so that ship infirmaries actually had "casualty slots", and you could find people who'd sent distress calls, treat their injuries (literally just use the same minigame as the Persuade mechanic but with your medical skills and different dialogue), and then cart them back to your ship and then back to a hospital, like The Clinic. For a game obviously written by SJWs with a full-blown liberal humanist bent, where every villain has some Freudian excuse for villainy like being abused and abandoned as a child, and every aesop is aimed at teaching the player the intrinsic value of human life, it's ironic that most of your actual interactions with this world involve artfully pasting people's brains all over the ceiling with a rifle with a stock sculpted by a woodworking god. Speaking of which, damn, the guns sure look cool.
Also, in Akila, there is a shopkeeper who inexplicably looks like Terry O'Quinn.
People have been saying the game's "graphics are bad". What the fuck? Are we playing the same game? The cities look amazing! Get a new GPU. Well, admittedly, some of the planet terrain is very drab and fogged-over and covered with an annoying color cast, but the hand-created areas have all sorts of fine details.
This game is not just an ordinary shitpile. It's a glorious shitpile with glimmers of greatness peeking through, right underneath. It will take legions of modders an absolutely herculean effort over many years to unfuck it.
The inventory system and the menus and the vendors are all utterly hostile toward the player trying to do something as simple as sell off their vendor trash to make room. I had to turn my ship into a big, sluggish cargo hauler with 10,000+ cargo units (after Payload skill bonuses) just to be able to carry all the resources and loot I found.
This is my current ship, the Chuckwagon:
Starfield is a bit of a mixed bag for me.
Pros:
Amazing sound effect design.
Inon Zur's kickass soundtrack.
Some of the companion questlines are kind of touching.
Nice ship/building art and hard surface modeling, but the heightmapped terrain can be a bit muddied and flat at times, and foliage doesn't really stick out. There are times where you will zoom into a console and all the little screws and buttons and be like "What poor 3D contractor in war-torn Ukraine slaved over this for hours?"
I do like the ship-building and habitat construction, but I honestly wish there were a lot more parts. This is very simplistic compared to what I'm used to, and the colony management shares the same horrible inventory problems as the player character and their ship.
The gunfights are pretty fun and Fallout 4-esque. Boarding always makes you feel like an unstoppable badass, especially if you've got a Magstorm and are just Metal Storming everyone into Swiss cheese.
The ship combat is decent, kind of Freelancer-esque, but with a power redistribution mechanic (I've honestly never been a fan of those). All the ships are very sluggish to turn, however. They turn like boats; there's a sweet spot mid-throttle where they turn faster, but at full or zero throttle, they turn slowest. There are no "light fighters" in this game. The smallest ship you can fly is still basically an interstellar-capable gunship with a turning radius like a school bus.
Cons:
Retarded Woke ESG bullshit and sneering, clay-faced, hormonally imbalanced, uncanny valley NPCs with giant chins speaking horrible, flat, phoned-in, Netflix-level snarky dialogue written by utterly incompetent shit-hack non-writers.
The writing of the intro sequence is the most boring shit I have ever seen. This is from the company that gave us the iconic cart ride and dragon attack of Helgen. What the fuck is this Mass Effect ripoff shit? It's like touching the Prothean Beacon, but without the intrigue of Saren shooting his friend Nihlus. It's fucking STUPID. Why should I care about these artifacts? There's no practical matter here of any concern to the audience. It's forced plot coupons just because. Fetch another artifact, receive more plot. Fuck you! Go die in a ditch!
A few glaring bugs remain (sometimes, the sounds from in-flight 40mm grenades will play in a loop, for instance), but I only had one CTD so far. I've encountered floating NPCs, enemies clipped outside ship hulls (especially in the hostage rescue missions; there's one ship hab where, if enemies spawn in it, they will spawn outside the geometry), floating objects, asteroids stuck to my ship and following it around across multiple jumps (I used the console to disable them), and, in some cases, entirely missing geometry upon cell load (like the desk missing from the ship technician's shop in Akila, or the HVAC housings missing from the vent fans in an alley in Neon).
Dialogue that still has the old in-production names for certain locations in it, and subtitles that often don't match because they re-scripted so many parts. Fucking sloppy.
The UI is atrocious radial menu console garbage and has too much tabbing back and forth.
The inventory management is a chore. Between the stupid vendors having such limited currency and the sheer lack of Skyrim-like infinite chests, loot is hard to get rid of without just plain dropping it somewhere. Storage boxes at outposts have a teeny tiny capacity and you have to build dozens of them just to be able to gather a respectable quantity of material, especially for the shipyard material dropoff mini-quests and stuff.
Lots of missed opportunities here and there.
Badly unoptimized, but it runs fine on my system (I have a supercomputer with a 4090, all-SSD storage and 192 gigs of RAM, it doesn't count).
No super ultrawide support (32:9 aspect ratio) without hex editing that leaves nasty letterboxing here and there and scope overlays with the edges of the texture cut off and the world still visible.
STARBORN!?! Bethesda, you lazy motherfuckers.
The plot in this game is often completely pants-on-head retarded. Yes, hard-R retarded.
So, I'm going to put this behind spoilers, but I just have to say it, because of how stupid it is.
I just beat the Freestar quest line, and there's an entire plot line where we find out that Ron Hope, the head of HopeTech, one of the ship manufacturers in the game, was involved with a conspiracy to poison farmland with a compound that transmutes soil into valuable minerals at the cost of making it barren, and then hiring mercenaries to force people off their farms and then mine these minerals. The whole thing is dripping with Outer Worlds-style full-blown smug Marxism and environmentalism, where the player is invited to beat up on a rich, elitist, exploitative entrepreneur (voiced by Wes fucking Johnson) just because they can, and then, when the inevitable happens and you refuse his attempted bribery and try and arrest him, he goes down in a gunfight like a chump, and there are no repercussions for the player at all.
This is stupid. It's beyond moronical. The writers have contrived a conflict while ignoring the facts of their own setting. Three things immediately come to mind.
A substance that turns soil into industrial quantities of metals is scientifically implausible. This is Tiberium-level handwavium. Either the elements are there, or they aren't. In fact, the setting has abundant fusion reactors, so industrial transmutation and recycling of materials should be entirely feasible and cheap... in fixed locations, in a factory setting. Look up Bernard Eastlund's fifty-year-old paper on the Fusion Torch.
If you do have such a magical substance, why in the maximum fuck would you distribute it on farmland, instead of one of the many uninhabited (and, indeed, uninhabitable) planets all over the goddamn place?
THERE ARE METALS EVERYWHERE. Blow up an asteroid. It's full of iron. Hell, do a few jumps, and you'll encounter enough recyclable station debris from the Colony War to build hundreds of ships. It's free fucking metal! HOLY FUCK! Ron Retard would have been money ahead if he'd just hired the garbage scow guys from Planetes to scoop up all the FREE METAL.
So, in the end, I didn't shoot Ron Hope because he was a capitalist. I shot him because he was a moron.
There are so many things that the game flirts with, here and there, in little radiant encounters, that should be full-fledged features. One time, I landed on Toliman II, ignoring the warning in orbit about the Terrormorphs, because I wanted to go hunting Terrormorphs so I could pose for a selfie with their carcasses. You know, the usual. I encountered a Survivalist NPC whose partner was lying dead on the ground next to him who wanted help getting back to his ship while avoiding the Terrormorphs. Cue two-kilometer trek through the deadliest frozen-ass boreal forest in the Settled Systems while escorting an NPC and shooting any wildlife that get near. That one little bit was more immersive than most of the repetitive Travel from Point A to Point B, Kill everyone at Point B, return to Point A murderhobo quests that the actual quest-givers pawn off on you.
After playing Stormworks and seeing the appeal of a Search-and-Rescue gameplay loop, it would actually be cool if Starfield, perhaps as a DLC questline, incorporated an SAR faction that you could join and made it so that ship infirmaries actually had "casualty slots", and you could find people who'd sent distress calls, treat their injuries (literally just use the same minigame as the Persuade mechanic but with your medical skills and different dialogue), and then cart them back to your ship and then back to a hospital, like The Clinic. For a game obviously written by SJWs with a full-blown liberal humanist bent, where every villain has some Freudian excuse for villainy like being abused and abandoned as a child, and every aesop is aimed at teaching the player the intrinsic value of human life, it's ironic that most of your actual interactions with this world involve artfully pasting people's brains all over the ceiling with a rifle with a stock sculpted by a woodworking god. Speaking of which, damn, the guns sure look cool.
Also, in Akila, there is a shopkeeper who inexplicably looks like Terry O'Quinn.
People have been saying the game's "graphics are bad". What the fuck? Are we playing the same game? The cities look amazing! Get a new GPU. Well, admittedly, some of the planet terrain is very drab and fogged-over and covered with an annoying color cast, but the hand-created areas have all sorts of fine details.
This game is not just an ordinary shitpile. It's a glorious shitpile with glimmers of greatness peeking through, right underneath. It will take legions of modders an absolutely herculean effort over many years to unfuck it.
As an avid gun fan, I really cannot agree on this aspect, the guns almost universally look retarded. Either they're malformed "bethesda'd" IRL guns like the M1911 or Vintorez, or they're abominations that look like legos and look like they weigh about 30 pounds.
Like seriously look at the above weapon, it's a 'caseless .50' rifle. Presumably not full .50BMG because of it's damage modifiers, so why does it need that absurdly thick barrel/barrel jacket? This apparent hunting rifle (hence the big stupid rail sight, ala a shotgun?) is overbuilt to the max.
You know what hunters like with their guns? LIGHTNESS. BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO CARRY THE FUCKING THING AROUND ALL DAY.
And to top it off, this future mega-gun has a wooden stock. +5 points for style but -10 for immersion unless it's a rare and valuable upgrade.
