Starfield (2023)

How do I level up in this game?

I don’t mean “where’s the menu?” I mean, like, what is effective? I’m level 22 and I have ten skill points unspent because I feel like I wasted the first twelve and I don’t want to commit any more without understanding how to use them effectively, but they don’t let me see the higher tiers of things until I have committed enough points.

It seems so easy to commit points uselessly

Just had an exciting "Bethesda moment" during the mission High Price to Pay in which I opted to fight an opponent in an urban setting. The guard AI is so good that they offered no assistance as I was attacked but I did happen to shoot an innocent, which then caused the entire city to begin attacking me while I had to fight and flee!

Then, to top it all off, I made it to my ship, as I opted to defend the Lodge, and immediately upon the end of my conversation with The Hunter I was attacked by every single UC ship as well as a Gal Bank ship???

Anyways, getting blown the hell out of the sky for defending myself wasn't what I was expecting lol so I surrendered an when I walked out of the UC station the place was blown up? What's going on!?!?

I've played this enough now to give this four stars.

It's a good game. I would even go so far as to say it's a very good game. But I can't call it a "great" game.

I've read some of the thoughts from other Grouveers and echo many of them. I like, don't love, this game, but at the same time, I want to keep playing. It's strange.

The good? The graphics are beautiful. The music is awesome. The sheer amount of content is amazing. You definitely get your money's worth.

The bad? The controls are a mess. There seems to be no soul. I don't care much about the other characters, and I don't care much about the other lands.

But yet, I want to keep playing, so this game is doing something right.

Enjoying my time with starfield but the "exploration" is something i'm really struggling to get to grips with. Specifically, the procedural generation on planets. I remember Bethesda advertising this game as having vast, procedurally generated environments with hand made locations scattered throughout the world. Whilst the cities are certainly something to marvel at and offer a lot of variety, the locations and buildings outside of the cities are repeated far too often. Technically these locations are hand crafted, it's just that they seem to have only crafted one or two variants of each factory and then repeated those throughout the universe...I know for a fact that i've seen this helium-3 plant before during a main mission but on a different planet.

Another big issue is the fact that there are no streets or paths in this game... just vast, open, usually dead, planets. Hopefully this picture puts into perspective how barren and far apart "locations" are - one factory is on the far left, the other the far right.

This kind of approach to environmental design and exploration is fine for people wanting endless loot and enemies to shoot, but as someone who adores the unique buildings, roads, and quirky locations in older Bethesda games, this is a really hard pill to swallow. Personally I believe they've used procedural generation in the wrong way here and perhaps relied on it too heavily whilst not allowing for enough variation.

Starfield is such a mixed bag. (~25 hours in)

I love the setting and the graphics and the gritty NASA look they went for. I do mostly side content and the quests make sense but I do not have much of an emotional response to them, even when it is about a child trying to make overworked people smile in a dystopian place.

I love looting and stealing active security people their guns right out of their hands without them noticing, but it takes me forever to go from A to B because of that and even I feel that there are too many loading screens, I can't imagine how players deal with them that follow the main quest and go straight to the next thing, they must feel this is "Loading Screen The Game".

The character I had the biggest emotional response too, so far, was a two wheeled tiny security bot that had no other function than to roll around in a small circle but whistled a melodie when I clicked it. I went "awww".

And I still want to play more of this not knowing why. I have yet to read criticism of the game that I would not consider legit. I also do fully understand that people like it, I do too in a strange way or I would not want to go back to it.

Help?

Soooooo....

I've been playing this for a bit in between moments of playing BG3 and I have to say the following:

• It seems pretty clean and polished
• Movement, interaction and combat all feel good
• Even space combat feels good
• Both first- and third-person PoV are quite nice
• KB/M and Controller input both seem well thought out
• The universe of the game looks great
• The menus are straightforward and I don't have any issues with them
• Inventory management is acceptable

Overall this seems like a perfectly well made and acceptable game.

Buuuuuttttt...

I'm not feeling it. I'm not feeling any sense of joy from anything I'm doing in the game. I don't know if it's just that I don't enjoy the Bethesda formula, or if there's simply nothing here for me. The latter is odd though, because I love Sci-Fi, I love space exploration and I love everything about this game in concept.

Well. I am still only an hour or two in... playing on Xbox Series S...

All I can say is that so far, they've managed to make exploring space very tedious and boring... it brings me no pleasure to report this feeling.

I don't think it's even up for debate that the UI/UX is abysmal, tear inducing at worst and leaves a great deal to be desired for at best.

I won't give up but it was clear within the first hour: this is not the game I had hoped for... even after doing my part to not engage in any hype train at all prior to release, this just falls so far short of already low expectations.

I was hoping this could change my view of Bethesda design or even gaming just a little bit, and I am certain it will, but not in the way that I felt I needed it to.

Elder Scrolls 6... we are getting worried about you...

Played a few hours on my dad's xbox series x. I stayed mostly away from following this, but obviously could not avoid my expectations being colored partially by the hype in article headlines I read. The hype train literally inflated this game to the point of blocking out the sun as it pulled closer to the station.

That being said, I didn't find anything special or different about this game. It is the most current Bethesda game, and it happens to take place in space and on other planets. It's the same formula that I tired of around 2015. It is a wonderful formula, but once you've poured yourself into a world built by Bethesda, you burn yourself out more quickly each following time if you are anything like me.

I can't help but wonder if playing on PC would help make the controls and menus a little less frustrating in this particular game. I might pick it up on PC someday, but definitely not before it gets a hefty discount.

(Edited to make my sentences less poorly constructed.)

I really wanted to like Starfield. I went into it imagining space fantasy where I could play as a Malcolm Reynalds- esc character. However after 4.5 hours (an admittedly short amount of time for this style of game) I decided to put it down for now.

The space travel is basically non-existent. You can pilot your ship in the space near planets, moons, etc., but anything else and you have to fast travel. Land on a planet, fast travel, move to a different planet in the system, fast travel. Jump to another system, fast travel. I typically don't use fast travel in Bethesda games until I have many dozens of hours under my belt. Traveling between points is where I discover most of my adventures! I understand that the distances are too great to travel at normal speeds between planets/systems, but removing any real traversal took a lot of the fun out of it for me.

My time on the ground was limited, but in the exploring I did I found that the points of interest on the planets were very far apart. There were lots of interesting things once you were somewhere, but there was nearly nothing between.

Anyway, the point is that this was one of the very rare instances where I decided to set a game down. I may come back to it in a few months. Perhaps without my preconceptions of what I wanted it to be, I could enjoy it for what it is.