Starfield (2023)

So encumbrance is just a bad system. It was bad in 2011 when Skyrim was released, and it is downright abusive in 2023.

I completely understand and agree that you due have to put limits of inventory in a game. But I find it very telling when most all games have moved away from the weight of items and instead just a number of slots available to store items. This system is so much better for the player when they do need to get rid of some items and free up space.

The UI in Starfield further exacerbates this by requiring you to drill down in multiple screens, manually sort by weight every time, and then evaluate each little one as a weight vs. reward. This system feels akin to when I fill up my hard drive and have to dig thru tons of folders to find the unneeded big and little files that are eating up disk space. Inventory management should be a single screen so I don’t have to waste so much time figuring this out.

I'm about 20 hours in to the game focusing solely on the main quest (how I haven't finished it yet I'm unsure) and I wanted to discuss the direction that the game takes after leaving Neon. I'll mark the rest of this post as spoiler.

Directly after leaving Neon in your ship you encounter the Starborn for the first time. They're in a ship the likes of which nobody has ever seen before, they have tech / materials that aren't recognisable, and they claim to know more about the artifacts than we do. They even speak of us as if they've been watching and consider us unworthy of the artifacts and must intervene.

When they asked me to hand over the artifact I made the decision to agree. Turns out a lot of people I've spoken to chose to keep it and fly off. My own crew mates in-game even gave me flack and lectures on why I shouldn't have handed it over.

To me it was obvious. Constellation is searching for higher beings connected to the artifacts, and we've just found them. To push against that and say we should have claim over these artifacts and the starborn are fake just seems incredibly irrational to me. In one breath constellation says they've never seen tech like it, and then in the other breath they say it's probably thugs and they must get to the bottom of the artifact mystery.

Weird ideologies aside, I was then further confused when I looked at what quests I had available to me. There seemed to be no option to explore this starborn element and instead I had to press on with the artifacts. After picking up the next artifact a humanoid like creature started shooting me as soon as I left the temple. No explanation or choice to be made, I guess I'm just at war with these creatures now? I know the starborn said to leave the artifacts alone, I'm just disappointed that I've born forced down this road of conflict.

When the starborn first approached and explained their reasoning for being cautious of humans I thought Bethesda were genuinely having a crack at some introspective story telling. "Are we the bad guys?" Type stuff. But no, so far it seems that there's just one agenda here which is the predictable 'colonisation at all costs approach'. I really hope I'm wrong here and that I've just jumped the gun with the story, but so far it seems like I've been forced into a conflict I had no desire partaking in. Guess constellation are making the same mistakes humans have been making since the dawn of time. Yawn.

I tried Starfield at a game store earlier, and all I can say that its literally a Bethesda game. I didn't finish Morrowind or Oblivion, but I've got my fair share of the experience to call my own. Starfield isn't a bad game by any mean, but its not that interesting to me. I'm also not interested in the concept of people saying it gets good after 15 hours or so. I could basically play any other game and finish them and have better experience in the same time frame and still couldn't have got to the good part of Bethesda's that the people describe online.

It's not a bad game, but I feel like this goes to someone who's very Very dedicated to one, and maybe only one game.

Really loving Starfields visuals and overall aesthetic. So here's some photo mode shots.

The 60's retro themes and colour palletes in some areas are super nice - the last picture is of the inside of the rangers lounge / outpost on Neon, the all-orange theme was very groovy!

Been very excited for this game. Love the graphics and the overall look.

I have only played this game about an hour and it has been in short 10-15 bursts. I fully appreciate this is a bad way to learn it and get accustomed to it, but man the UI is pretty bad. I look forward to modders enhancing the heck out of this game. In particular, I just don't care about all the near worthless notepads and other debris scattered around that my scanners highlights. I wish the scanner would only show me items greater than X credits, where X is some value I set. I would expect to increase it over the course of the game as I become more flush with credits and can ignore more and more items that are just not worth the encumbrance.

Will stick with it for now as I have heard it is better multiple hours in. I don't usually give games that much leeway but I want to see what the buzz is about.

The Fallout 3 undertones are strong in Starfield and i'm all for it. This location reminded me a little bit of Rivet City for any of the fine folks who remember getting utterly lost in that maze of a ship.