No.32740
I recently finished getting every achievement for Starfield on Steam without mods and kept track of my thoughts while playing, so I figured I'd write them down here. Rather than Skyrim or Fallout 4 in Space think of it more like Daggerfall in Space (or maybe more appropriately Arena in Space, since you can't really travel between spots on planet surfaces and points of interest are procedurally generated). If you really enjoy the Bethesda style you can get it now and probably be happy with what you get. For everyone else, maybe in a few months to a year when modding is easier, and/or if they have a Phantom Liberty-style turnaround in a year or two it will be worth it.
TL;DR: The level of quality is hugely variable from one moment to the next, there are genuinely enjoyable parts but every aspect of the game has flaws, sometimes major flaws, some of which can be easily fixed and others which are unlikely to be.
Technical Aspects
I didn't have any crashes but there are bugs. It really is the least buggy Bethesda release, believe it or not. Every faction/main quest can be completed, but three side quests completely broke for me. I managed to complete one of those side quests by using a different bug to undo the quest bug. I played on a potato so some areas of the game (the main cities and planets with dense foliage) ran like shit. There's also an unresolved bug where long saves (200+ hours) run into a dynamic formID bug where old formIDs aren't getting recycled and saves start to break, but I started a new game+ right before it became an issue.
Tutorials
The tutorials in this game are terrible. I still don't fully understand how environmental hazards work and just accept that I'll get injuries randomly while running around on planets. I didn't realize I could tell the local planet's exact time from the tab menu, fast travel without using the map and scan the cargo of other ships by using the scanner while in space, or toggle spacesuits/helmets in settlements and breathable areas until more than 100 hours in. A ton of stuff regarding surveying, outpost management, and resource families are never explained to the player. There's a weapon that does more damage when the trigger is held down, but I had no idea until I was almost done with the game and couldn't figure out why the damage output wasn't matching the item description. I didn't realize you could purchase items directly to your ship's cargo bay until today.
Art and Design
I don't have a great aesthetic sensibility but for what it's worth I like the art design overall. The planet map UI is cool too. I was really impressed by the system map accounting for day and night on the planet itself but unfortunately it doesn't accurately map where planets and moons are in their orbits, even if it does so when you're on the planet itself. Every planet has its own local time, and when you wait on that planet it waits in that planet's hours, so 1 hour on Venus would make 100 hours of universal time pass. I also enjoyed the soundtrack and was surprised at how many voice actors they used, and they're pretty good overall. The facial animations and gestures seem dated and don't hold a candle to games like Cyberpunk, but the few interactions that are motion captured are surprisingly well done. There's an extremely annoying quirk where most NPCs can't be engaged in conversation unless they're standing in a neutral position, so you have to wait for them to get up from a chair or finish their idle pose before they can talk which can take 3-5 seconds. This was possible in Skyrim and Fallout 4, I don't know why they've taken a step back here. Worth noting this also extends to hostile NPCs, you can unload an entire magazine into them while they take the time to stand up from their chair and they won't react until they've stood up completely. The randomly generated unnamed citizens wandering around cities are very, very weird looking, like they're rendered in lower detail to save processing power. Might be my own personal taste but I think a lot of NPCs talk for way too long. The game mostly ignores the physiological and architectural implications of living on planets and moons with wildly varying climates and gravity, which is a shame. Named NPCs don't have any kind of schedule and cities are populated by the randomly generated citizens (who do have schedules, interestingly) so things feel somewhat lifeless. Maybe a minor point for others but I intensely dislike that enemies are no longer shown with their equipped gear but instead have faction uniforms that show regardless of what they're wearing, and have only a 10% chance of dropping any of their armor (which doesn't reflect in their appearance when you loot it). Also, there's a pirate graffiti font the game uses all over the place and once you realize it, it becomes distracting.
Setting and Locations
The setting and worldbuilding doesn't pull you in like it would for Fallout or TES, nothing about it is very compelling or makes you want to learn more. It serves as a decent backdrop for space shenanigans but the space magic stuff comes out of left field and has nothing to do with the rest of the game. Cities are tiny, and there are only 3 of them with a handful of smaller towns on top. I'm not the first to mention that the game's cyberpunk-esque city Neon feels weirdly safe and not very cyberpunk; the entire game feels very "safe" overall. I do like that you can walk outside a city and explore the surrounding area, for what it's worth. Planets are in rough categories (with/without life, terrestrial, moon, ice) and within those categories it's pretty hard to tell one planet apart from another, there aren't many distinguishing features and no really interesting weather effects or unique fauna. The handcrafted dungeons and locations are good, and even the reused POIs are interesting the first time you see them.
Systems and Mechanics
>Landing areas and POIs
Planets have procedurally generated terrain, and if they have life they'll have flora and fauna scattered around as well. The landing area then gets populated with points of interest from a list, either manmade structures or natural landmarks. You're restricted to walking within the landing area, but I've never bothered walking to the edges to figure out where the boundaries are (it's pretty big, at least a 4kmx4km square). You end up seeing a lot of the same plants and animals reused and even buildings down to the detail. I didn't believe it was THAT bad when I started playing, until I found an abandoned research lab that was exactly the same I had seen a couple hours before, and had the exact same story down to character names in lore notes scattered around. I'm not totally against the idea of pulling from a list but I swear there's only like 30 locations max and you end up running through the same areas again and again, and the decision to have specific location backstories with specific characters' names reused multiple times is totally baffling, and sometimes you'll find locations that make no sense whatsoever, like a cave with mushrooms on a planet without atmosphere and a burning hellscape surface. If they're going to make it work they need at least a hundred more locations to pull from, maybe even hundreds more. The first time I saw a location reused it took me completely out of the game. POIs end up being both too far away and too close together as well. Even on remote inhospitable moons in barely populated systems, there are outposts and buildings everywhere and ships constantly landing and taking off, but they're far enough away with nothing to do between them that they're tedious to get to. Given their current design I don't know how they would address this. The NPCs you find at friendly POIs are all unnamed and give you radiant busywork quests (one told me to find their friend who had been attacked by a wild animal, this quest being given on a barren, frozen moon without an atmosphere and no life anywhere), and once you finish it they forget who you are and nothing changes at all. Nothing you do at any of these random locations matters.
>Surveying
Planets have resources, flora, fauna, and natural features the player can scan. I did it for a while and surveyed the entire starting area system but it was a huge time and skill point investment with very little payoff. I assume the intention is to have an exploration loop like other Bethesda games where the player is busy surveying, then sees something off in the distance, goes to check it out, clears a dungeon, goes back to surveying, etc. etc. It doesn't really work in practice, especially on planets without flora and fauna. Plus there are a lot of little annoyances with the surveying UI, like not being able to open doors or certain containers and not being able to use hotkeyed items.
>Fast travel
Unlike other Bethesda titles fast travel is absolutely essential. In other games, the trade off is that you would miss out on any exploration along the way to the destination. Here there is absolutely no reason not to except to make getting anywhere take 10x longer with nothing interesting in between. You often end up rapidly hopping between systems trying to find vendors to offload all your junk to and buy resources for crafting, and without fast travel this would be intolerable. The exploration-encouraging design from Skyrim and Fallout 4 fundamentally does not exist in this game.
>Leveling and perks
It works sort of like Fallout 4, where there's no level cap and the player can get all the perks if they play long enough. In practice, leveling slows down massively and by the time I finished every quest and a bunch of exploration on the side I was level 80, reaching level 100 was a slog. There are outpost crafting methods the player can use to get fast levels but I didn't want to use them. You get one skill point per level and each skill has 4 ranks, making the skill stronger each rank and usually adding something extra that the skill does. You have to perform tasks related to the skill (do x damage with laser weapons, persuade x people, etc.) in order to unlock the next rank for investing in, some of them are easy and will unlock easily as you play while others are a huge pain in the ass and require up to an hour of grinding out because you never do it otherwise. Skills are separated into categories (physical, social, combat, science, tech) and are sorted into 4 tiers, so you can pick one of 5 entry level skills in each category but need to invest more points into the category as a whole before you can unlock higher tier skills. I think the system is fine and wouldn't be mad if that's how TES6 does it, but I'd prefer if some of the skill challenges were reworked to be less time consuming. Some skills are pretty much mandatory for any playthrough, you can't use boost packs or even have a stealth meter without spending a skill point in either for example. A couple skills are completely useless unless you have an extremely specific playstyle.
>Combat
Pretty much like Fallout 4 but with jetpacks and variable gravity. Zero-G fights are a lot of fun but there are 3 or 4 in the entire game, criminally underutilized in my opinion. There are rudimentary cover mechanics which are helpful but unreliable, where you can aim and poke your head out from cover from some things but not others and it isn't clear when it'll be the case. Both the player character and enemies get extremely spongy as they level up, where low level enemies can't even make a dent in your health. Combat AI is pretty braindead and sometimes enemies seem to just "switch off" right in front of you and stop moving. On the other hand, they do have demoralization mechanics and will run away if things are panning out, which I think is pretty cool. Unlike other weapons, melee and unarmed don't scale and aren't viable.
>Difficulty
The usual for Bethesda, it tweaks outgoing damage and boosts enemy health. Also increases the number of legendary enemies encountered so you get more rare gear. I kept the game on the highest difficulty the entire time and (ground) combat was for the most part extremely easy, I invested only a couple points into combat skills and didn't have any issues for the entire game. I don't mean that in a bragging way, the scaling on gear and health is all out of wack and you get aid items in abundance, I only died if I was being lazy and standing there unloading on enemies instead of taking cover, and even then it was rare. Getting armor piercing weapons (and the skill, if needed) helps deal with spongy legendary enemies. There's also some other mechanic where enemies who outlevel you seem to do more damage based on how large the disparity is so you could quickly die from a couple shots if the level gap is huge. Space combat on the other hand is a lot more challenging and is the only time I considered turning down the difficulty, but I'll get more into that later.
>Gear
Again similar to Fallout 4 but this time weapons and armor have quality tiers of base, refined, calibrated, and advanced, while armor has an additional final tier of superior. Legendary gear is in the game too, but this time there are rarity levels of common, rare, epic, and legendary, where each rarity tier has its own perks it pulls from and includes random perks from tiers below it (so a legendary weapon will also have epic and rare perks). Players can't add quality or rarity to weapons and need to find them out in the world. Some of the perks are extremely strong, at level 70 I found an advanced magsniper (the strongest rifle in the game) with perks that did double damage to enemies at full health and had extra armor penetration, meaning it could one shot most enemies even without investing any skills into stealth bonuses or rifles. Armor mods are very weak and not worth the investment and there seems to be a bug where none of the armor you loot is modded anyway. Weapon mods on the other hand are extremely useful and well worth the skill investment. For whatever reason melee weapons lack both quality tiers and the ability to mod them so they scale extremely poorly past level 15 or so, but at the same time they have an outsize drop rate on the rare gear drop table so you'll be swimming in useless legendary axes and knives. A couple other weapons (including the only non-ballistic heavy weapon) lack quality tiers as well. Grenades also have no damage scaling or quality tiers so by level 30 or so you're safer just staying in cover and tanking it than you are trying to avoid them. Some mines on the other hand have unavoidable CC abilities like stunning or freezing and are extremely useful throughout the game. Enemy mines are so slow to detonate that you'll rarely ever take damage from them. There are ballistic, laser, particle beam, and EM weapons, but ballistic weapons are by far the most plentiful and powerful. There aren't many laser or particle beam weapons and I think there are only two (base) EM weapons, though other weapons can be modded into EM type. EM weapons can do non-lethal stuns, which is interesting but poorly implemented, as not many combat-related quests give you the option of not killing quest targets.
>Space combat
I enjoy space combat, but encounters tend to be very one-sided. At its best, you spawn into an asteroid cluster against multiple enemies and weave through them picking off enemies one by one until you board the last one, kill everyone and taking their ship. At its worst, after traveling to a planet's orbit you get thrown into empty space in a 4v1 with no time to react and get torn apart. Like regular combat, you have multiple weapon systems to choose from but here particle beams are far and away the best choice, only using EM if you need to disable and board ships. Boarding and taking over ships is a lot of fun but it becomes cumbersome once you actually take the ship, as you can't sell it right away, can't just take it while using your normal home ship, need to pay money to register it before you can change anything about it, and your cargo gets all messed up. You really can't skirt along with just the basics here like you can with regular combat, this is one area where you really need to invest skill points in piloting and ship design on the higher difficulties so you can pilot more powerful ships and install better components. At that point most encounters will be a breeze while you'll run into others where you just get stomped and there's nothing you can do about it. Legendary (class M) ship fights are a fun challenge.
>Ship building
A very strong aspect of the game, where you can tear your ship apart and completely rebuild it to your liking as long as it has the basic essentials for flight. It also functions as an effective gold sink that pushes you to go out and make money to upgrade your ship, at least until you have everything you need and don't feel like editing any of your other ships.
>Injuries
Probably a holdover from when Starfield had a more survival bent, they happen only rarely (usually from doing something stupid like jumping off a cliff or standing in a cloud of toxic gas). Treatment for them is handed out like candy and weighs barely anything, but if you're lazy they also heal on their own. They have a severity and a prognosis, which determines how many debuffs there are and how long it'll take to go away. Most of the time they're mild cases and not a real inconvenience. Oddly enough you generally can't get injuries from normal combat when there are things like flammable rounds and cryo mines and swords, although some fauna have special abilities that can cause injuries.
>Crafting
In order to craft anything, first you need to have the skill level and then you need to do research (spend resources) to unlock that specific type of crafting. I don't know why this is the case, it seems like they had two different systems for gating higher tier crafting and ended up using them both. Weapon crafting is extremely useful and after some investment chems can turn you into a (drug addicted) god. Cooking is not very useful at all, the progression is strange with higher tier foods being strictly worse than lower tier ones, there are only a handful of recipes the player can automate ingredient production for, and potatoes and carrots are harder to find than hardcore drugs so the vast majority of useful recipes are never going to be readily available to the player. Resources for crafting are in general annoying to get, and while you can track resources for mods/research it won't actually tell you how many of the resource you need and there's no way to find out what you're tracking the resources for until you actually craft/research it. For most of the game I had aluminum highlighted as tracked because I mistakenly toggled tracking on a weapon mod for a weapon I sold a long time ago, but I couldn't remember which weapon it was and had no way to turn it off without finding that weapon again. The player can craft injury curing items but oddly not healing items, or ammo, explosives, or repair parts for ships. Ammo in particular is a major money sink throughout the game and would be extremely useful to automate production for, seems like a big missed opportunity. There's also no way to scrap items unlike Fallout 4, so you'll end up leaving a lot of valuable stuff on NPCs because you don't want to take the time or inventory space to sell it and have no other use for it.
>Outposts
Hard to overstate what a letdown this part of the game was. My impression given Fallout 4 and a faction within Starfield called LIST (comprised of colonists on remote outposts which the player can even recruit members for) was that the player would be able to build up settlements and attract colonists, but the game instead ends up being a much more frustrating version of Factorio. There are 75ish resources in the game and 30 or so manufactured components the player can make, but to set up an industry for even the basic level of manufacturing is a huge time and level investment and the in-game information and UI for this is terrible. If you want to build any building on any planet you need at least 10 levels invested, but if you want to make the process bearable and efficient you'll need at least 30 levels. The player will need to spend a while looking for proper locations for inorganic resources across systems, but scouting out organic resources is even worse: you need to invest two levels into scanning flora and fauna to be able to build the production facilities, then you need to fully scan each plant and animal to find out if you can produce their resources at an outpost; if you can, you can only produce their resources on that specific planet and if it's fauna you'll also need a production chain to produce food for them, and if that food resource for some reason not available on the planet (as is often the case; what the fuck do they eat?) you need to ship it in from another planet. You can scan a planet to find out where inorganic resources are but there's no similar system for organic resources: you need to spend the time surveying everything and then just remember where everything is and whether you can produce it at your outpost. I ended up consulting a community guide for all the resources and needed to make a flow chart to plan out how to make stuff and I still only made two out of the three tiers of manufactured goods because the third level was a whole new level of frustration. And unlike Fallout 4, cargo links are one way and only for the specific resources linked, there is no shared inventory between linked outposts. Incoming cargo can't be sorted either so you'd better hope you don't end up with resource imbalances that eventually break your production chain. There's also no way to see what you're actually building at each outpost unless you're at the outpost. Add to this no way to favorite a planet or system for easy finding later on. Plus each part of production requires different resources to build so this means constant trips back and forth and then to cities when you don't have everything and then you need to dump cargo from your ship because you don't have room but then you need to go to multiple cities because the one didn't have what you needed and now you're overencumbered and can't fast travel and FUCK
The process of getting an outpost producing anything useful at all is a huge pain in the ass and I really hope they fix it. Building placement sucks too. Once you get a chain of outposts producing useful stuff it's pretty satisfying but not at all worth the effort, since shops have whatever you want (even otherwise extremely rare and valuable resources) in abundance anyway.
>Companions and crew
Companions are core characters who are part of the main quest, and crew are other characters who are mainly recruited in bars. You get 5 companions early on in the main quest who have a large amount of dialogue and all of them except the robot have companion quests and can be romanced. Then there are named recruitable crew members who have some dialogue and backstory but no quests, romance, or likes/dislikes, and their dialogue is a lot more restricted. Then there are unnamed generic characters with one skill. You can assign any of them to be on your ship or man your outposts, and companions and non-generic crew can accompany you as well. They all have different skills that give buffs to space combat or outpost production, but some skills share names with player skills and don't have the same effects. It isn't really clear what some of the skills do or what their bonuses are, but companions and crew do provide very strong buffs to ship combat. The companions aren't Baldur's Gate 3-level but they're a nice addition, although Barrett isn't very consistently characterized and is sort of all over the place.
>Inventory and economy
There never seems to be enough inventory space or ship cargo space and managing inventory is a frustrating game all to itself, but you are given a container with infinite storage early on (which is still inconvenient to get to). None of the vendors have enough money so you end up hopping planet to planet hoping to sell half of what's in your ship, and eventually you start jettisoning cargo because it's not worth the time. Once you reach a high level your only real expense is ammo, so you stop looting anything except ammo and med packs and end up with millions of credits with nothing to spend it on except vanity ships.
>Crime
The lockpicking minigame sucks and I stopped picking locks above advanced because I loathe it. Smuggling isn't worthwhile because vendors don't have any money, and money is a lot easier to come by through other methods. Piracy is enjoyable. There's a trespassing mechanic that is underutilized, even quests that involve trespassing rarely use it. I still don't understand how crime and bounties work. Sometimes I'll attack hostile robots in an abandoned settlement in a remote system and end up with a murder bounty for one of the factions.
>Stealth
It's a lot harder than in other Bethesda games, and is nearly impossible in a spacesuit (due to its weight) unless you invest heavily in skills and use the right gear/chems. As mentioned above you don't even get a stealth meter unless you spend a skill point.
>Speech
Persuasion and other speech options are surprisingly useful and prevalent in quests, sometimes even overpowered (there's one Crimson Fleet quest in particular where it's fucking ridiculous). There are social skills for CC abilities like pacifying, fearing, and mind controlling but the game doesn't tell you they also play a role in the persuasion minigame. Character background, traits, and skills all play a role in speech checks and conversations, which really impressed me. This is probably the most reactive Bethesda game since Morrowind, but it still drops the ball in a lot of places.
>New game+
You lose literally everything except your level and skills. In return you get a shitty spaceship and garbage tier armor which both get slightly better with each iteration up to 10, and get to hunt down your powers (explained below) all over again to make them even stronger up to 10 times. Enemies also get slightly stronger each iteration, capping out at +10 where they do twice as much damage and take half as much. The main quest has variations every new game+ but I've never seen them, and you can expedite the main quest if you want to in successive new games. I might end up taking it to +10 but I'll probably mess around with mods first. Weirdly you can't choose a new background or traits with each new game+, I think it'd add a lot more reason to replay quests each iteration to see what new options are presented.
No.32741
>>32740Factions>United ColoniesStarship Troopers played straight
>Freestar CollectiveSpace Texans, complete with cowboy larpers and rule by CEO oligarchs
>Crimson FleetPirates
>Ryujin IndustriesEvil megacorp
>SpacersPirates (not Crimson Fleet)
>House Va'ruunForeign-sounding cultist bad guys
Quests>OverallIn some parts there's an impressive amount of reactivity and player choice (not just for a Bethesda game, but in general), while other parts leave you going wtf why can't I tell this person something they clearly would like to know, or why doesn't this person have ANYTHING to say about this after the fact. For multiple quests there are unstated options to resolve them, which I appreciate a lot and was surprised to find. In the vast majority of cases when you complete the quests hardly anything changes, and people will still talk to you as if nothing's different, even after completing entire questlines. Many quests require you to accompany a walking NPC but they walk slightly faster than the player character. This gets irritating quickly.
>Main questI mentioned it earlier but it's surprising how little the main quest has to do with the rest of the game. I saved it for last and was blindsided when I realized you get magic powers since the rest of the game is fairly grounded scifi. It seems like this was added at the last minute or something. That said the main story wasn't bad, it builds toward something interesting but then ends pretty abruptly. There's an interesting narrative around new game+ that I wish they explored more. I think I used the powers one time so I didn't know enough to include a section about it in mechanics. The side quests to get all the powers and artifacts are shockingly bad. For the artifacts, you get sent to procedurally generated dungeons you've seen a dozen times before, and for the powers you 1) go to a planet and 2) do a braindead minigame, then repeat steps 1 and 2 23 more times.
>Faction questsThere are a lot of problems in-universe but none of the factions seem to tackle ones that really matter and are instead self-contained without any wider effects. You can join every faction without conflict, the Freestar Rangers and UC Vanguard don't care if you're a pirate, and UC and Freestar don't care if you join each others' factions even though they were just at war. None of them were bad, although they were pretty short. The Freestar Rangers questline ends as abruptly as the main quest does. The worst any are guilty of is false advertising and lack of consequences. You do absolutely no piracy in the Crimson Fleet questline, and the UC Vanguard implies you'll be doing a lot of piloting when none of their quests involve space combat at all. The Crimson Fleet and UC Vanguard quests feel the most complete of any of the faction quests. Ryujin's story is sort of all over the place and oddly enough the other factions have harder (optional) stealth missions than the actual stealth faction. You don't need to pick any locks harder than novice level. I understand why, but it's disappointing.
>Side questsSome are pretty good. Most are confined to the main cities and are meant to get you sightseeing or to give you background on the area. I think there are maybe 10 total unique quests outside the systems containing the cities and towns, which is 10 quests spread out over 100+ systems.
>Radiant questsOnly do mission board quests if you want quick landing spots for xp and loot. Best to just plug your nose and get it over with if you really want to grind. For some reason UC and Freestar radiant quests can take place WAY outside their settled areas.
Closing ThoughtsOne thing I noticed again and again is that a lot of the systems and stories don't interact with each other much, if at all. None of the crafting skills will help you with space combat, for example. Some parts of the game feel like they were in early while others seem rushed and half-finished. There are mods that change a lot of things I dislike about the game, but other more serious flaws seem pretty fundamental to its design. There are some major steps back that make me extremely nervous about TES6, especially with none of the old influential designers or developers working at Bethesda anymore. I got a ton of play time out of it but I'm ambivalent about the game overall, I don't know if I'll continue on with new game+ or come back to the game at some later time. It really makes me wonder what the state of the game was during its intended release window. There's apparently still 250 people working on the game, so we'll have to see where things go from here. People are whispering about a survival mode update that will save the game but I won't hold my breath.
Also I could do a whole write up about capitalist realism or unexamined settler-colonialism but I don't think there's enough interest in the game to warrant that.
No.32745
yeah, what the fuck was bethesdas strategy for this game. The x4 and star sector gamers arent going to play this in the long term, since star field doesnt have a economy. The elite dangerous and star citizen gamers arent going to play this in the long term because starfield doesnt really do first person combat or exploration better than these games. The no man sky, astrox, and avorion gamers wouldnt play this in the long term because nothing starfield offers wouldnt really appeal to them long term either.
The only thing going for this game would be the rpg mechanics, and appealing to the old bethesda gamers, but starfield seems to be worse or at least suffers a lot of the problems fallout 4 did in the rpg department.
WHAT WAS THE PLAN HERE>