Starfield

I am going to try and say something I haven't yet seen in this thread.

1. The ship builder gets a big like for me because I always wanted to wander around big spaceships. I really like the fact that I can walk around the interiors and build my own designs, even if I'm bad at it.
2. The POIs are identical, and that's horrible. As much emphasis was put on exploration, this is even a bigger disappointment, because once you've seen one X, you'seen every X, down to every single entity placement. This really kills the joy of the entire game for me and I feel angry thinking back to Howard's words about how the game could be played for hours, months, years - like, doing what, exactly?

Aside from that, yeah, pretty much what everybody said: dialogue is boring and censored (like, advertiser/stakeholder friendly), the game is very "take it safe" in important regards, but there's enough story and quests to have fun with the mechanics that actually work.

Overall, it's flawed, but a definite 6/10 - it's just not the game Bethesda made us think it is, again.

60 hours playtime here. It's alright. A typical Bethesda game, nothing more, nothing less. It has some fun stories and side quests, but the main quest line and the associated companions are just bland. Random outposts are the same old standard abandoned buildings as in FO4 with a few different textures. Outpost building and ship flying feel like unnecessary bolted on additions. Base building in FO4 was better. Ship building is a fun gimmick, but doesn't add anything of meaning to the game. And there's the myriad of small and big bugs, some of which date back to Skyrim or even Oblivion (like looting things off a table which causes nearby stacked non-lootable items to fall over or launch at the ceiling). Not sure if I'll finish it. I'd give it a 6/10.

It's okay. There's a lot to do and I do like the world but the gameplay is really disconnected and there's no exploration to be had, just teleporting from quest objective to quest objective.

I might not finish it, the entire time I was low-key wishing I was playing Fallout. Even Fallout 4 felt much more fun.

The dialogue quality is also pretty boring even by Bethesda standards. Everything's just really predictable and nobody has anything interesting to say. I feel like I can write dialogue as good in 5 minutes at times.

Pirate boss: We need to find the treasure. I need you to go get clues for me in planet X and meet Guy.

teleport to planet X

Guy: Ah, so the boss sent you? I have the key, but this is a really risky job. What's in it for me?

[Persuade]

Guy: Fine, here's the key. Just put in a good word for me, yeah?

Use the key to get an item, teleport back

Pirate Boss: Well? Show me what you've got!

Pirate Boss: Interesting... This means that the treasure might be in planet Z... This is a very important step for us pirates. I need you to go to planet Z-

I'm just getting really bored most of the time. The game has its moments but more than half of the gameplay really is teleporting from A to B, walking from B to C, and talking for a long time about things that aren't interesting.

People are calling it a typical Bethesda game but I highly disagree. I played Skyrim not too long ago and that was so much more exciting. Fallout 3 also left a much bigger impression on me.

Overall it was a very good game. Just finished my 150 hour character and I see this game as another Bethesda classic that will be replayed over and over for years just like fallout/elder scrolls.

It obviously had its flaws, but they weren't a deal breaker for me, and for many besides a very loud minority.

The good:

• Massive amount of quests, questlines, companion quests, and places to explore. I doubt fully completing this game is feasible unless you just grind, which will turn dull. I didn't do any freestar, red mile, and many other quests/companions. On a future playthrough I will go back to it.
• Multiple ways to approach quests. Not everything is gun your way through. Items from other quests, your perks, your traits, and your companions offer unique dialogue options.
• This is more subjective, but thank god outpost/ship building isn't shoved down your throat. I hate that part of FO4 where settlements are constantly a chore. You can do those at your own pace like I did without being nagged to do it.
• The NG+ mechanic gives the story a new spin and brings a few plot points to life. I also enhances the replay value. Can't say much more without heavy spoilers.

The bad:

• Planet exploration is lacking. I can't see a reason as to why we need to land and point X and walk a mostly barren place when we have a ship. It takes most usefulness away from the ship
• Lack of local maps
• Neon was disappointing. We were promised a cyberpunk-like town where anything goes and full of shocking stuff, but all we got was a dirty shopping mall. The main thing causing this was this games's total avoidance of any sexual theme.

Overall a 8/10 for me. I'm sure modders will in time improve whatever is lacking.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad, but I really couldn't get into it. It feels... old already. Like if it came out 5 years ago, it would have been great. But now, it just feels tired. Old graphics, recycled mechanics I've played 100 times before, and all done worse than in other games... the poster child for wide but shallow.

I dunno. It's not bad, but not very good either. I'll check back in a year or two after they've crowdsourced improvements from the community.

It’s alright. My biggest complaint is that it’s a regression from Fallout with the level of violence and no gore.

For a rated M game it feels really….”safe.”

I'm really enjoying it for what it is, but nothing about Starfield makes me believe there will be a Starfield 2.

I've got credit roll. I know there's a lot of replayability in a few aspects, but I doubt I'll play more til there's more baked-in mod support.

For a space game, the world... universe felt small, and I think that's mostly down to the fact that travel is almost entirely a menu affair. There's nothing between the quest start and the quest zone but a menu and a load screen. Or 3. The major faction quest lines were fun enough but not super varied or long. I didn't do the UC questline to be fair, seemed like it was gonna be a lot of space fighting and I had enough by that time.

Bethesda design choices abound. Annoying inventory management, bad UI. Companions calling out random crap incessantly, I bloody know I'm carrying a lot Sarah, you told me 14 items ago. And 13. And 12. Loot seemed pretty lack luster, too, particularly for not-weapons. I found some legendary armor pretty early that I had no incentive to change until near the end. That made looting anything that wasn't a weapon feel uneventful, and weapons were only marginally better, just due to larger functional variety.

Good things.. Definitely the ship building. I wish the ships were more than a glorified chest and some weapons, but the designing itself was fun, if a bit clunky on controller. Gunplay was fun. Generally playing the game itself was enjoyable enough.

Overall, it's a Bethesda game. It's a space opera. It's not a space exploration and flight sim. If that checks your boxes, it's pretty aight.

I can accept the style they went for overall but yeah the disjointed nature and having to root through menus to fast travel to your next destination in a questline is beyond cumbersome.

Truly wish you could just get in your cockpit and confirm “travel to the next mission destination” was an option and then just have the ship take off, get into orbit and hit hyperspace then land at your destination…all pretty quick, handling the destination loading during the hyperspace jump animation.

It feels pretty poorly thought out for 2023, would be acceptable in the 2000’s with limited tech but nowadays we can do better I think…and industry leaders like Bethesda should strive to.

Game has no soul.

It's pretty average to me. (Positive leaning)

The low performance of the game relative to other large, good-looking games definitely makes me less eager to play it.

Also I'm irked at Todd for his comments about people needing to upgrade their PC for the game. JayzTwoCents even showed that his 4090 didn't get great frames. (comparatively that is. Like he was getting ~90fps @ 1080p which would be a pretty smooth experience, but I'd expect much more given how powerful that card is)

Honestly I'm not super far into the game. (A couple hours at most?) But it hasn't really grabbed my attention like other games have - which probably means I'll have to start the game a couple times before I legitimately play it through and then I could probably give a better score.

At the moment I wouldn't recommend paying $70+ for the game - but to use game pass if possible.

Not that anyone cares, but if I feel different about it after playing some more I'll update my comment haha

Amazing in 1000 ways, flawed in 100 ways.

I’m having a great time. Don’t really have much time to play, but I played for about 30h since early release. I really appreciate that I can fast travel everywhere, because if I don’t have much time, I can just instantly be wherever. If I want to take my time, I can just travel by ship. On the other hand, exploration on foot sucks, and I would really love to see some kind of vehicle to travel faster between points of interest.

But 9/10 from me as space game enthusiast.

Its a standard Bethesda RPG, but without the quality lore. It's not terrible, but it's not great. It just is. And unlike every other game they have put out until now and absolutely loving the genre, I just can't seem to get into it. It's so dull and uninteresting. I've been going around just learning about the world the game is set in and there are some things that sound cool at first, but then you get details and the most detailed info is a history lesson, told just as dryly as a real one would be in a class room, maybe some sci-fi sounding jargon to wave away the fact they didn't really think of anything about why some of the technology in the world actually exists.

It's a Bethesda game with all the qualities and flaws of a Bethesda game. It will only get better with mods. I believe the modding scene will be even stronger this time around.

I think its been a solid 6 or 7. Im not going to binge it like i did fo4 and am taking a bit of a break to restart Monster Hunter World since the last time I played was on PS4.

There’s a good game there, but I prefer the crafting systems from FO4 or even 76. Same with the looting. I can’t kill someone for their hat and its really annoying that enemies don’t always drop their gear like they did in prior Bethesda titles.

I uninstalled it last week, which I did not see coming when I picked up the game. I knew it wasn't going to meet all my expectations/hopes, but I was assuming the floor was a gameplay loop at least as interesting as Fallout 4. I never got to that point.

I think the travel to new areas is the biggest problem. When you're going to a new system or planet, it's a tap on a map. So much of the magic in these games is preparing for the long hike to a new area, looking at that spot on your map, heading out, and then before you know it you've spent an hour doing something totally different because of surprise encounters along the way. Starfield has hails and some hostile ships, but for the most part, the surprises have been offloaded to the cities/stations (and you rarely get outright stopped by those). The planet/moon surfaces are where that same walking around vibe is, and there are zero encounters on them unless you're going out of your way to a structure (or you poke an alien bear).

I really think this game needed in-sector--or even just in-system--live player transit. Having those encounters while you're hauling around your whole stash and multiple party members opens up a lot of new ideas and also raises the stakes. It's also pretty easy from that point to cater to the "space trucker" player crowd that's out there. If the proc gen is why they couldn't do this, then I think the proc gen was a mistake.

It also really didn't help that the game didn't look great and I couldn't hold a steady framerate on top of all that. I still thought it was at least passable for a while, until I had my first "oh no" moment when I got to Neon. Putting up something directly comparable to Cyberpunk 2077's visuals is so bad for this game.

That said, I thought the main story was brilliant and that this is the best character writing I've seen out of the Beth RPGs I've played. I also loved the soundtrack and would definitely love to see it played live if I ever had the opportunity. But I don't think I'm coming back to this until a DLC is released.

150 hours and still playing. Having a lot of fun. But it took a while.

I think, like a lot of Bethesda games, learning how to play the game is a big part of the game, it's taken me a while, but I'm finally at the point where I can look at a a fight, ground side or space, and think "this is going to be fun". Would have probably been there sooner, but I hit the bug where you sell a ship on a station and all the ground disappears in New Atlantis and ended up restarting.

It's not without it's flaws. Bugs aside (and there are a few of those) I think my biggest gripe is the lack of a fuel economy. They gave us a space exploration game, and then removed the one mechanism that made exploration at all challenging. We don't have to work to visit a new system, and so we don't value the discoveries we make. I have high hopes for a survival mode.

That said, the number of things there are to do in the game is astonishing, even by Skyrim standards. I'm not even close to having done everything in New Atlantis, much less been everywhere. I can see this keeping me going for a while yet.

I was pretty conflicted about the game. The story and world was a bit cookie-cutter but enjoyable. I really enjoyed the combat but I often had trouble finding… well, trouble. Then a friend spoiled the ending of the game and the NG+ stuff and (without spoiling) it was a lot like another game which was also a pretty boring ending.

After having it spoiled the day after Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 released I decided to switch to that and (I need to stress this is my opinion!) it’s a such a better game. Characters, world building, writing and combat are just so much better, I even cried at the first major character death again!

Maybe I’ll go back to Starfield eventually but not for a while at least.

Good: It's a Bethesda game.
Bad: It's a Bethesda game.

It's been a fun experience so far, and I really want to like this game, so that means we need to be honest with its flaws.

Frankly, Bethesda has still managed to bring back their already beaten-to-the-dead mummified-corpse of a horse and beat it again like a carnival drum surrounded by cheering buddies who all had too much caipirinhas during their trip. No, I'm not talking about Todd's vacation. It's the gamebryo engine.

Everything else follows smoothly from that point. The expected bethesda glitches, the expected community patches, the expected list of QOL mods even if you want to play vanilla, and so on. Worrying as many TES fans are expecting TES6 after Starfield.

And if you are aware how Fallout 76 has fared in comparison to Fallout 3/4/NV... imagine what happens if any Bethesda or Microsoft executive decided to pull a similar stunt with Starfield. "Less risk of angering the audiences because it's a new IP" they'll justify in their internal memos.

Good:

It's a Bethesda game. The stuff that works about their games works here. Looting is fun. Exploring is fun. The gun play this time around is actually pretty enjoyable. The skill tree is really interesting. It's not just 10% more this and 5 more that but a lot of actual fun new perks. The handcrafted missions are usually pretty interesting and fun. The ship builder is awesome.

Flawed:

The procedural generation should affect more things. After exploring countless of planets I've come across the same structure dozens of time. Oh there's the room I go into to turn off the turrets. They should have made these structures modular like the ship builder and generated them.

Conversations while improved still have that weird stare in your face. It's tough to see this after how good cyberpunk conversations were.

Bad:

Caves fucking blow. They're dark, easy to get lost in and I don't think I've found anything interesting outside of missions.

Personally.. I think it had a whole lot of potential..but tripped, fell, and faceplanted just before the finish line.

So many systems feel either half finished, or that they had massive design changes danger close to press date, and it lacks tons of polish and I have no idea how some ideas managed to get through QA without being throttled to death, Like not being able to dictate where doors and ladders appear on ships you build/modify, or the fact that your carefully designed interior just gets dumped unceremoniously into cargo if you change ships, also an alarming lack of variety in the PoIs on planets, and in the PoI's themselves. See that PoI? That looks like one you saw before? This ones exactly the same, down to every single hand placed sheet of paper and corpse locations. Also having menus in menus in menus to do shit is just bad design and annoying.

I have more critiques, about the ridiculous number of, and the bland sameness of certain spoiler content, but thats about as much as I'll discuss that .

The main story takes what I feel is a dumb and entirely predictable plot turn towards the end, too.

I also question their priorities when one of their first patches was to remove the vendor chests from the game, because some people were playing their single player game wrong, and making Bethesda look bad due to their horrible economy and under funded vendors.

I'm sure there are lots of people who can squeeze fun from it, and more power to them. Hope they have a hog wild time with it, but that doesnt change the fact that its fundamentally flawed, in a similar to possibly worse way than Cyberpunk was at launch... and I seriously doubt Bethesda will dedicate 3 years to patching it and fixing it before trying to further monetizing it with a expansion.

After about 15 hours of play I was forcing myself to keep playing it, buoyed somewhat by a friend also playing it and us venting and bitching to eachother about our disappointment. At about the 100 hour mark, I just gave up and pushed to the end game and beat it.

I'm just glad I got it for free with my video card.

70 something hours into it and I'm really enjoying it. Just did the NASA main quest mission and thought it was awesome. But I don't think this is a good as Skyrim or FO4. It doesn't feel like it's going to keep me engaged like this two have. Right now. It's sitting at a solid 7/10, but that will probably go up once the CK comes out.

I'm very much enjoying it. The longer you play the more things open up to you. The story is probably the most interesting story I've ever played in a Bethesda game. It is absolutely overwhelming for the first 50 hours or so. But the longer you play the more it opens up the more you learn. And on top of all of that the mods. My God the mods for this game are going to be amazing.

Spoilers for a few random encounters below. I can't figure out how to spoiler tag via mobile.

I love it. It's obviously got some flaws here and there, but for me personally it's been an enrapturing experience my 20+ hours so far (nothing compared to some of you, I know). I love the exploration of planets primarily, surveying them and then selling said data to Vladimir again. It's a strangely compelling loop I find myself returning to.

The "procedurally generated" areas have story behind them like one having the heating system malfunctioning and reading the stories of the crew attempting to get them fixed. Another was of an invading parasite species not native to the planet taking over. One even was a heartbreaking log of a crewmate recording his final words for his wife and family, which I just found randomly exploring a planet searching for "supporting life" for a mission. I get people's frustration not every planet is like Boston or Skyrim ... but there's some seriously good stuff here if you just put your boots to the ground and explore.

Ship building is amazing. I love customizing my ship, the different habs, and assigning the crew I run with. This also extends to outpost building which feels manageable. Not a requirement like Fallout 4, but also deep enough to be entertaining when I desire to do so (primarily for Helium 3 plants). Piracy and ship combat is great, as blowing out the engines of a ship, boarding said ship, taking it over, selling said ship (I have a mod which reduces the cost of the registration fee which is pretty exorbitant in vanilla IMO) and then using that money to improve my own is another compelling gameplay loop that makes me seek out combat instead of avoiding it all together.

Overall, I love it through and through. There's some hitches like the aforementioned registration price, the combat AI of enemies being rudimentary (standing in the line of fire for 5 seconds is not a good look) and the maps in cities are inexcusable and will need a fix. But altogether it is easily my GOTY.

Im ~70 hours in and having a blast! I find the exploration satisfying, i love running around scanning things to survey a planet. There are multiple ways to complete most quests, including special dialog choices based on your background, traits and factions. I enjoy the worldbuilding, especially given its the first game in a new IP. The ship building is super nice, but also optional. The game has its flaws of course, i find the outpost mechanics a bit lacking and hard to use. Overall id say like 8.5/10

It's literally fallout with a space setting. I'm good with that. I'm having fun.

Personally, I like all the effort they put in, the ton of quests and whatnot, but the world is just dead.

NPCs never go off shift, there's no eating, no drinking, and it just feels hollow.

Also, they leaned hard on procedural generation, and it frustrates me that there's no roads or paths anywhere.