I watched 2 hours of starfield gameplay and an hour of review
and I am really not impressed. I don’t want to know more about the story, don’t want to build a spaceship that I can fast travel with, don’t want to explore the universe.
Played 8 hours last night so this is a very early impression. I love clutter looters and didn’t expect much else from Bethesda’s Fallout/Scrolls main studio. The Bethesda crafted areas are excellent if you are looking for what I call a Fallout / Elder Scrolls clutter looter. Lots of stuff to loot, the FPS combat is much better than Fallout 4 or 76. Don’t expect a space sim like SC or NMS this is a Bethesda Fallout/Scrolls style game with a bunch of additional systems on top of it.
First person combat
I’ve played both SC and NMS. While exploring a station in Starfield I thought to myself… this is what SC should have been for their foot exploration. The derelict stations in NMS are rather static environments and never cared for them much. What surprised me about the Starfield AI is they will “flee” or “flank” by running past you at times. I’ve lost track of enemies at times because of this and have had to go hunting for them.
Ship travel
There is fast travel. If you are looking for a space flight sim this is not for you. I don’t have an issue with fast travel as I get no thrills from traveling in space 1:1. There is simulation and there is stupid… SC leans a bit too heavy into the latter. Don’t expect 1:1 space travel in Starfield, it isn’t made for that.
Ship combat
Again this is not a space flight sim. Most recently coming off Everspace 2 I do miss the strafing controls and pedal usage, but that game is star fighter like combat. Starfield does have a ship editor and seems to be more about load out than fighter style combat. Think a bit more like Expanse style combat. I don’t have much time in this area of the game so I can’t say a whole lot more about it.
Initial impression
I love Bethesda clutter looters and this one is in space. Going to eat up the Bethesda crafted clutter looter areas. The 1,000 worlds will likely function as a massive canvas for future mods.
There are strafing controls, but I think you have to have at least one rank in Piloting the game calls it thrusters. Hold space to enable strafing controls (on controller it’s hold RB and then use the left stick to strafe up, down, left and right. I don’t know exactly how it works on M+KB.)
It took me about 14 hours in to reveal a major game mechanic that Bethesda didn’t even mention. it’s wild how big this game is I did some goofing around and side stuff but not that much.
It’s not as open and “huge scale” as people seem to think it is.
It’s kind of “fake open” if that makes sense.
You cannot get into your ship and fly 500m east to your mission.
If you do that, a new instance is loaded and your mission is not there.
There’s no flying in atmosphere at all. To do what the parent commenter says would require going back to orbit (loading screen) then choosing a spot on the planet to land (another loading screen). When you land like that on planet, it generates an instance for you that is procedurally generated, but won’t contain any of your mission markers. (I haven’t actually tried that part, but I’ve seen others talk about it.)
The game is basically areas, separated by loading screens. You get in your ship, that’s a loading screen, you fly to orbit, another loading screen. Then in orbit if you want to go to another planet, you set course and do another loading screen. Once there, you choose a spot and land for another loading screen. There is flying in space, but it’s limited to small instances with some other ships, and POIs. Your ship’s speed is very slow, and as far as I’ve been able to tell you cannot walk around your ship while it’s in flight (this may be a limitation of the controller controls, I saw a streamer stand up in flight, but I don’t know if that was a bug or not. There’s no binding to stand up when you are in flight on controller.) I just wasn’t holding B long enough, you can stand up when you are in space, you just have to hold the normal binding for longer than I expected.
All that being said, I’m still enjoying the game. But I went in with low expectations.
I would have much rather play in a single star system where all of the worlds are carefully crafted than them having this kind of “infinite although not really” random terrain generation thing.
I mean the game is probably mediocre to okay, but why are they selling it for SEVENTY EURO? I mean wtf. If they want 70€ it should be outstandingly good. I would maybe buy it for 40€, but this greed is a hard pass for me.
I actually like exploring the universe, but I’ve been pretty disappointed from what I’ve seen so far. They tried to add space-sim elements to it, but did a half-assed job at it. To make things worse, the planets are mostly barren and not worth exploring either.
In saying that, it is a Bethesda gene, so I’m expecting some beefy mods that add more content and immersiveness to the game, and once that’s done, I may consider buying it when it goes on sale.
In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to finally playing Cyberpunk as it was meant to be, with the new Phantom Liberty DLC.
Bethesda have made some of my favorite games, especially Elder Scrolls but this time I’m just not very interested. I read they added procedural generation which seems like the worst choice possible when the strength of their games always has been environmental storytelling (as in you explore and stumble upon things that make the world feel “lived in”).
I’ll buy the game later, might as well wait for patches, mods and such!
Eh, for me, it has story and apparently I can romance people and shoot stuff. So it’s already up there for me. But can totally see how people will feel different. Especially if you felt any hype for this. Me however has had no hype for Bethesda games after fallout 76
It’s pretty decent if you liked Bethesda’s other AAA games. I was actually surprised that there was even some amount of spaceship piloting at all - I just assumed it would be 100% fast travel.
However, the game runs like dogshit - even on my decently mid-range system, it takes 15-30 seconds of loading between menus, and I swear I spent half the time I played waiting for the game to load. I assume that this is meant to take advantage of the Xbox and PS5’s faster memory and DirectStorage, but on PC it’s borderline unplayable
not the guy, but I have mine on a Sata SSD and I don’t think my loading times are the same as his, so I’d expect either slow CPU or on a Hard Drive (going against the minimum requirements that the game should be played on a SSD)
That seems pretty crazy, I wonder what the variance is. I have a 5800x3D on a B550 with an M.2 NVMe and the longest loading screen in game I’ve had is hardly 3 seconds. The actual longest loading screen is just the startup with the Starfield menu at maybe 5 to 8.
Yeah my experience is the same, I rarely mind all the loading screens since most places load almost instantly. And if you grab jump and stuff from the cockpit it does cut scenes for the loading screen kinda like mass effect.
People are getting pretty spicy with the responses. OP was just underwhelmed by a game getting a lot of hype. Like lots of people are going to like it, but not everyone. I think theyre just trying to generate discussion, not say “everyone who likes starfield is an CHUMP!!” or something.
Personally from the screenshots and the vids I didn’t feel like the game would be for me. Is there actual story? Are there fun characters to hang with?
Bethesda games have quite a recognizable formula, and this seems like their blandest implementation.
But hey, i am basing this on the other games and a handful of material. Ill probably crack it and wait for it to lower in price big time.
Yeah, the story/stories and characters are the actual meat of the game. It’s not a space sim like Star Citizen or NMS, it’s an RPG first and foremost, really.
Also, so far (~20 hours in) it’s way less bland than Fallout 4. It’s a way more of an RPG (I talked my way out of confrontations multiple times, sometimes even using my background and traits, when relevant). Sure, if you just keep landing on planets and going to the auto generated structures and scanning wildlife, it’s probably gonna be quite bland. But there’s way more actual content, way more actual quests that aren’t just clearing out bandits/raiders. The space sim-y stuff, that’s just there to sell the fantasy. Yes, you can be a bounty hunter or space trucker or whatever, but that content is of course going to be way more autogenerated, bland stuff. I’d recommend doing that stuff on the side, when you want a break from story heavy quests.
But even clearing out raiders is often waymore fun in Starfield, especially when it’s in space. For example, I came across an abandoned zero-gravity casino space station that spacers (one of this games version of raiders and bandits) were in, while I was on my way to the space cowboy city, and that was a very fun fight.
Another time, I was heading back to New Atlantis when I noticed a symbol for a ship in the same system. When I went to investigate, I first got into a dogfight with another ship, disabled their engine and borded them, then I noticed there was some kind of heavy freighter they were raiding, so I docked with that. On that ship, the engines were funky and as they were turning on and off the gravity was going, too, so I was fighting my way through a ship where the gravity was constantly fluctuating, which then also factored into small environmental puzzles, like waiting for the gravity to turn off to go up an elevator shaft. Eventually got to into the vault the space pirates were trying to get into, and although I couldn’t get all of it because I didn’t have a high enough lockpicking skill (the new lockpicking minigame is also kinda fun, ngl), but I did pick up some contraband. When I then finally actually went to New Atlantis, the contraband was caught by the scanners, I was arrested and then forcibly conscripted to go undercover into the Crimson Fleet (the space pirates), although I could’ve killed my way off the ship they brought me to if I wanted. Then the contact to get into the Crimson Fleet was actually the same person that gave the orders to attack that freighter I found! (There was an audiolog, because of course.) Sorry for going off on a tangent, I just felt like it would illustrate my point better than just saying “it good”
I also probably have like 5 other quests in my quest log to go join some faction, some big factions, some small factions. And that’s without even going to the cyberpunk city.
And so far I haven’t had to follow a dog for 20 minutes in search of a chainsmoker, so that’s already better than Fallout 4.
Honestly, I just keep kinda having that sort of look. Like, recently I was in need of Titanium, but all of the planets I found that had some were extreme environments I am not equipped for, so I couldn’t collect much. But I did stumble onto an an abandoned ship that just happened to be loaded with the stuff! Now, the crew on that ship also all died of a mysterious illness shortly after picking up the ore, but, hey, I need to mod my weapons.
I also may have genocided some dinosaurs for another resource I had a hard time getting.
Please don’t apologize for the tangent. It’s giving me high hopes that I’m going to like the game despite the flaws and (probably mostly legit) criticism of reviewers.
If you need a little more hope, I keep stumbling into cool and unique handcrafted locations and encounters all over the place, just doing side stuff, like, I just delivered two passengers and in doing so found two unique locations in the target star system. I originally feared it was mostly the three major cities getting the handcrafted stuff, but nope, there’s a ton of it out there.
Yes, there’s a lot of loading screens, but, honestly, I hardly even realize they’re there because they are legitimately just like 2 seconds on PC.
I agree it was very boring and the writing in the intro was incredibly weak. Every time I expected that wow moment (helgen, opening the vault) i just found disappointment instead. “Wow a fight! oh I’m just randomly handed a ship? ok sick time to fly, oh it’s just fast travel. New Atlantis is about to be crazy, oh it’s just a bland city” and everything being beige didn’t help. Fallout has the cool roleplaying in the wasteland factor, Skyrim has the cool fantasy aspect, Starfield seemed to just be ‘space’ but other games (Mass Effect, Outer Wilds, hell even the first half of The Outer Worlds) did it better.
It seemed p clear they don’t feel the need to innovate or have any ambition because their dedicated fan base is so large now that they don’t really have to. Which is fine but wasn’t for me.
A Twitch stream said Starfield was on. When I looked at the stream, the person who I assume was the streamer was sitting on her bed, DJing bad music, and talking about how she thought canals were natural, not manmade.
I muttered something rude and didn’t keep watching.
It is exactly as shitty as I expected it to be. Another crappy bethesda game in a long line of garbage. I think the last game from them I truly enjoyed was Morrowind. I don’t think New Vegas counts. Fallout 4 was depressing being so close to good. Every moment in that game screams half baked. That quest where you help the robots out with their ship showed me just how possible it was to make the game good, but then it was the only good quests besides maybe the silver shroud one.
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