this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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Starfield
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Really, really wanted to like this game. Morrowind was like, my entire childhood. Bethesda have been on a downward spiral for so long to me and I've completely lost my faith in their titles. Starfield felt soulless to me when I played. A game that's supposed to be about an organization of explorers, where the exploration consists of fast travel and loading screens. Starfield did a lot of things and it didn't do any of them phenomenally, and only a few of them adequately.
Haven't played the game.
I'm curious as to how exactly the space exploration differs from Elite Dangerous.
Because in that nearly decade old game, space exploration does largely consist of fast travel warping to systems, scanning them and potentially any planets from your ship, scooping fuel from the stars, avoiding white dwarfs and neutron stars... And its absolutely enthralling.
Curious as to how they screwed up a proven formula.
The weird one to me is that they made it sound like a space survival game where the ship and its maintenance was going to be a primary game element, but other than the ship builder and random encounters outside a planets, it seems like it's hardly a thing.
The space exploration for Starfield only happens in orbit of another planet. From the few hours I played before I gave up on it you couldn’t even fly to a station nearby the planet, you had to fast travel to it which was a loading screen then you had a loading screen for docking on to the station and then another loading screen for getting into the station
Basically Warframe minus any of the good parts from the sounds of it
That's like comparing gold to literal dog turds.
Elite has a sense of scale and seamless transitions between places (even if they are just well-disguised loading screens). The planets feel planet sized, and you can move around them or between them freely in hypercruise (or whatever the system for traveling inside systems was called). There isn't any fast travel system as far as I'm aware -- if you want to get to the other side of the galaxy, the journey will take you days or weeks, even with a kitted out exploration ship. This, combined with the sense of scale and incredibly well made map system, makes it feel like an expedition, even if the journey itself is extremely lonely and repetitive. Despite Elite's many, many flaws - they absolutely nailed this aspect of a space game.
Starfield feels like clicking through menus to get to boring minigames with different skyboxes. It cannot be overstated how non-immersive the travel and "exploration" is compared to ED.
*Edited disclaimer: I gave up a couple of hours in. If there's a good game in this mess that you get to after 100 hours, as some people have said, I'm sure as fuck not sticking around to find out. More likely it's just the sunk cost coping mechanisms kicking in.
These two games might both be set in space but they are in wildly different genres.
I wanted to like it too. I did like my first playthrough after I learned to navigate its ridiculous menu diving, I thought it had some cool concepts and I liked the gameplay well enough for how I played it. Some aspects clearly had cool intentions then just forgot about, like unique NPC followers.
Then after over 100 hours or so I tried out NG+.
It shows all the flaws of the game at 10,000 nits, they are blinding. My first realization that things were bad was one of the first dialogue options that was different was pretty close to, "hey, i already know all of this lets move this along". And the response is, like, "wow, well okay then.".
My second realization it was going to get worse was that continued style of dialogue choice for each follower you can play with - which by the way if you don't like some of them then you're gameplay time is severely limited. I didn't really care about Sam or the religion guy, and the characters that were interesting were locked behind quests that I'd already done and decided whether I wanted them or not.
My third and final realization was that all the items and customizations I put into my ship are also worthless, since now I have to re-find each part and rebuild my ship. Could have done a save mechanic for shipbuilding...
I stopped not long after that. There is just no point to the game after the first playthrough because everything that was interesting about the game was the philosophy. But it's not that motivating as a game. Especially when you're going through copy-paste maps that are totally like that one other place. It's. All. The same.
Also from like a gameplay perspective, what the fuck? You're trying to tell me that *I have all of my knowledge of previous interactions, but none of my blueprint knowledge?" How does that track? It doesn't, and it's bullshit. There were so many ways the NG+ could have played out and they took the absolute laziest possible one.
P.S. the scrooge dream sequence ending of seeing the future of your outcomes was buggy and boring.
And yet it was still better than Rebel Moon...
Hello (I have never played it)