I haven’t run into any major bugs but also don’t really care about that. What I do care about are these million little short stories that Bethesda games usually have. But in Starfield they just aren’t that good.
Early on I ran into an AI controlled drone called Juno that had accidentally developed consciousness. I had the choice to kill her or free her. Since Curie from FO4 has given be strange feeling towards AI I freed her, thinking that I would run into her again, we would fall in love, get married and grow old together. Nope, read the wiki, that short interaction was all I would get from her.
When I got to The Red Mile I was expecting something cool, like The Gauntlet from Nuka World are something. Nope, you just run up a hill, press a button, run back. There are acid spitting creatures that are kind of tough but you can just run past them.
Then I cane across the ship above Paradiso. It’s a generation ship that left earth before the invention of the grav drive so they have been flying for 200 years. They planned to settle on Paradiso but a hotel already owned it.
Think about it, you are the first outsider these people see after 200 years. They just learned that their entire mission ended up pointless because the rest of mankind overtook them ages ago. They should be curious about the universe, about you, they should be happy, sad, devestated, anything.
But nope, I only found two NPCs that really had anything to say to you, the captain and the historian.
Starfield feels like a game with a million rabbit holes, all just a few inces deep
I didn’t buy this one. However, the biggest problems here are tied to the setting - there’s just not really a good way to do “Skyrim in space” that doesn’t just turn into “Skyrim with more loading screens”. “Space” is just too big and empty of a setting for that kind of game. Setting a sci-fi game on one planet would be fair game, or maybe even limiting to three or four fleshed-out worlds but this game tried to be set in “space”.
The next Elder Scrolls or Fallout will not be set in space. Even if the combat and role-playing systems and character writing stay Starfield / FO4 / Skyrim levels, the strengths of Bethesda rpg design won’t be completely incompatible with the setting the way they are in Starfield.
I played it for several hours when it first came out. It’s ok. The little bit of story I saw was engaging. I’m interested in the world - more so than Elder Scrolls. The gameplay is what I would expect from a Bethesda RPG. But it’s definitely lacking polish.
The thing is there are other games out there worth playing so there’s no reason to jump into unfinished Starfield right now. BG3 is sucking up a lot of gamers’ time. I’m still working on P5R that’s been in my backlog for awhile. The Cyberpunk expansion came out and that’s solid. There’s a bunch of stuff out there to play.
I will eventually play Starfield because what I saw has potential, but I’m going to do it after it’s had some improvements. I don’t think there’s too much reason for concern. This is about par for the course with Bethesda. It’s not like they were ever knocking it out of the park with great releases on day one. There are always elements of their games that draw you in, but it’s always been a little bit of a mixed bag. Considering the staying power of their previous games, I think this one will eventually get as good as the others in time.
I doubt it, the main issue with Starfield is that everything is hidden behind a bunch of UI and you can’t get further than ten feet without another loading screen.
It’s a space game where the spaceship doesn’t matter, since you can only fly it in small skyboxes and it essentially gets used as a fast travel hub. They took all the most interesting aspects of Elite or SC and removed the parts that made it fun. Yeah I can land on a planet, but it was just a loading screen. Now I can explore, but only for a bit before I have to walk back to my ship. No ground vehicles or anything to speak of.
They shouldn’t have even bothered, because they couldn’t actually commit to it.
It’s… A good-ish game in my opinion. Unfortunately, thanks to it’s lack of polish, I’m at endgame with many hours in and have been hit with multiple game breaking bugs. These items can actually be fixed via console command… Which then automatically disables all achievements. This can be fixed by a simple mod and… At the end of the day, I want to play a game, not submit my resume to be a developer/tester to Bethesda.
This means its player count isn’t propelled by the competitive landscape of leagues and ladders keeping gamers in their seats, unlike modern titles like Overwatch or Counter-Strike.
Starfield feels exactly like Skyrim did. Which is the problem. This isn't 2011 anymore and their faults that they refused to learn from or fix aren't cute but annoying. Bethesda is your college boyfriend who never learned to do the dishes or cook and they're 40 now.
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