Starfield, the space role -playing gamefrom Bethesda Game Studios, has concluded its second day after theo fficial launch date with more than six million
I've been enjoying the game quite a bit, honestly. There are some shortcomings, namely the menu navigation can be cumbersome to learn since hotkeys bring you between some menus but not all. But after a couple days I've gotten most of them sorted - in space you can select the objective marker and fly to it in space, no menu required and it's not full fast travel.
Right now, my biggest persisting issue is simply that quests aren't categorized by planet and so it's a lot of menu swapping to get between them and plot out a the most efficient route between galaxies. However, technically that doesn't matter very much because grav-jumping has a lenient distance for the quests but it still feels nice and so I'd appreciate a better sorting system.
Quests are visible through the mission menu (hotkey L) and on the planetary map's (hotkey M) settlement/outpost locations in small subtext when you go to the planet in the map. For the mission menu, there's a key to show on map but it's a little time consuming, and for the planetary map it's nice to see there's a quest there but it's not optimal for planning out the order of your quests.
Aside from all that map/menu shenanigans though, which again by now (~4 days with 2d 10h in save time) I've honestly gotten mostly used to, the game feels pretty solid. With RayTracing on a 5800x3D and a 10GB 3080 with a variable refresh rate I've found the framerate to be acceptable, large areas will slow down the framerate but responsiveness is still fine. I've yet to come across a combat scenario where frames dip. Smaller to medium areas all run phenomenally.
In the total time I've played I've come across 1 quest with somewhat bugged logic. Without spoilers, there's a hidden-ish settlement that has a leader and residents who can turn against you. If you kill any of the residents, the rest of the friendly AI will eventually turn on you, making the quest on console likely to be completely bugged. However on PC this is solved with console command to turn that faction's bounty ID reset to 0. I believe in efforts to solve this I also caused some crashing, as a couple times the game crashed around the remedies. But, I completed the quest as I wanted to with overall less than 30 minutes of bug-troubleshooting. This could very well be fixed as part of the day 1 patch as well, we shall see.
Other than that instance of the quest bugging and the game crashing, the game entirely before then was bug free. An AI pathing issue here and there, one instance of an NPC I was talking to starting to float to the ceiling mid conversation. And since the completion of that semi-bugged quest there have been no lingering effects so far it seems, no crashing and the remaining people and area seems fine.
All in all, I've been pleasantly surprised with the game. The quests are interesting and pretty well varied, the faction interactions are abundant and not very limiting but lots of potential for alternative style playthoughs regardless of what you level into. Not sure if there's a level cap but theoretically you can fill out your perk skills quite far. However the traits and factions you align yourself with give you a lot of different options and could bring lots of replay value. (Brief example, there is a religious group that attacks non-sensically. You can start as one of these, and I'm assuming learn the sense of their attacks.) I am a space scoundrel who is wanted with parents, I'm a corporate espionage agent, undercover CIA agent who is tasked with taking down a space pirate faction, and I became a space ranger amidst all this. Honestly, it's sick.
There's a few varied actions that are locked behind perks, similarly you could go the entire game without building an outpost or using the ship builder. I'd suggest seeing which locked skills you may be interested in, but otherwise the outposts feels like a decent iteration of FO4 (which I wasn't huge on). So far, outposts are OK, I don't need them but I can see value in them. The idea of building a home is more fun which can also be done. Ship building is actually tons of fun, but that's something I'm also interested in. I found a ship that I love, I upgraded it and then expanded upon it and damn, it's rewarding. It did take some time to build, but it was time I enjoyed and on PC there were some quirks but they were minimal and I adapted to them quickly.
It's a fun game with some a few minor menu-flow that can add up to feel more annoying than they might actually be. I've gotten used to it by now though.
P.S. thoroughly inspect your first housing situation, you can't miss the residence at the Lodge but you can miss the infinite storage space safe tucked away in the far left corner. Anyone complaining about storage didn't quite look hard enough! I also am a collector but I've been adamantly avoiding the misc. items in this game, only going for everything else. Inventory management really isn't that bad. Plethora of 150kg followers who are affected by equipped items (say, +50kg -40% resource weight modifiers) plus ship cargo and upgrades and weapon/armor displays... Overencumberment also scales, so if you're +5 over it's almost nothing if you're +100 or more over your stamina drains quickly. As someone who was genuinely annoyed in FO4 and set inv weight often in Skyrim, I genuinely haven't felt the need to in Starfield. It gives you every opportunity to hoard so you can sell store and display to your hearts content. I should probably start leaving weapons behind, I have 300k credits...
Both figures count “players” rather than sales because the RPG is included in Xbox Game Pass , where it can be played via the cloud with the Ultimate subscription, and in PC Game Pass.
There are more than 25 million gamepass users, according to a quick search. With that in mind, I’m not sure how to feel about the success of this launch compared to older titles. It seems incomparable with such a giant pool of players who can play the game for no additional cost.
No judgement about the game itself, just observing that the circumstances here are different
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