Yes, I'm surprised the internet is still talking about Starfield and hasn't moved on to hyping Elder Scrolls 6 yet...
I've played a bit and explored the first major city. I love sci-fi games and am definitely starting to get a feel for the world and kinda like it. Not sure at this stage I'd call it "good" though, the gameplay is a bit clunky and the UX could do with a lot of improvements. Gunplay is pretty floaty and the default pistol iron sights are awful. My initial impression is: if you want a Fallout-style space RPG with good writing and characters, and have not yet played Obsidian's Outer Worlds, then that would likely be a better choice.
I also love flight games, but space combat seems very bland. It seems you're mostly big and slow, so there's not much manuevering going on that makes these games fun. Even a simple variation of Star Wars Squadrons boost>drift mechananic would make it much more engaging. You get an opportunity to see what a larger ship feels like and it still only has forward-facing weapons so it feels like you just try to out-DPS whatever is in front of you. If you try to use the environment, like giant asteroids, for cover or to split up enemies, said asteroids get blown up in seconds, a weird design decsion IMO. I've not messed with ship customisation yet. I did really like getting to a traffic zone and just hailing other ships to trade and chat though!
There are things I'm liking about the writing. This is, so far, the only game I've played which lets you choose they/them pronouns as a third option for voiced dialogue, which is really neat and something I've wanted to see for a long time, as opposed to just male/female OR gender neutral everywhere. The first major city has some interesting places and a history walkthrough from the local faction's perspective, which heavily hints at there being a lot of bias to unravel by visiting the others. I quite like the religeous centre books which discuss the idea of faith being core to human experience in a broader sense than just belief in gods and spirituality. I'm generally enjoying getting immersed into the world so far.
The game's opening is crazy fast-paced though, a thing happens and a guy gives you his ship within like, 10 minutes excluding character creation. I can't help but wander if the writers are relying on you having read lore on their website or something, because at creation you get choices for which faction you were raised by, but ZERO context about any of them. Could also just be a thing for repeat RP playthroughs, but I don't play games this large that way.
Another thing I'll add is graphically the game is pretty weird. It has some of the worst luminance balancing I've ever seen in a game. You'll see what I mean if you fire a mining laser in the first cave, the laser is dark. They seem to heavily rely on screen colour filters that add a grey/brown tint to everything and crush the dynamic range, Their first big outdoors reveal with a musical flourish is a brown landscape with a grey-tinted sun from the filters lmao. It's slightly improved on PC by tricking the game into using Windows Auto-HDR (which, amusingly, involves renaming the executable to farcry5.exe), but not by much. For a game that largely sells itself on exploring and finding beautiful vistas (I think at least, I avoided marketing and got the game with my new GPU) this is an alarmingly bizarre art direction choice to me.
Otherwise, the game feels like it's from 2016. It's lacking a lot of basic options like FoV sliders (can be edited in a config file, but still). Space travel is a series of black screens presumably because they couldn't get any kind of seamless loading to work. Besides equipping weapons from the ground, they don't seem to use alt-actions for anything else like eating food in front of you or reading a book without taking it (the former requires going through menus). Shop inventories do not show how much of an item you already have, etc. After installing the lastest AMD drivers, it runs well on my Ryzen 3600x RX 7900XT, 32GB system on High (not Ultra) settings, but in a way that suggests performance is significantly worse on lower-end hardware (and I am aware consoles are locked to 30fps!). I have yet to see the game justify its intense performance requirements given that, again, it does not look next-gen to me nor does there seem to be much complexity behind the scenes that affects gameplay from the player's perspective.
Overall I like it, but I would NOT have gotten it if it wasn't free with the GPU I got from my last one failing. I'm generally happy with playing an immersive space RPG so far, but would not recommend it over The Outer Worlds based on a more objective view of it so far.
Bethesda games are always like that.
7/10, clunky controls, poor optimization, looks like garbage, 3000 hours played.
Man I am like the biggest obsidian fan boy and I hated outer worlds. Damn near made me cry cause I expected to love it.
Outer Worlds is a bit bland. It's like Fallout 4 in space, but not as open-world and has shallower RPG and gameplay mechanics. For space RPGs, I very much preferred Mass Effect 1-3 and KOTOR. ME and KOTOR were were very cinematic and like playing in an epic space movie, but maybe I'm just nostalgic. Haven't played Starfield yet. I think I'm going to wait a year or two for updates, expansions, or mods to get fleshed out. It looks like they tried to shoehorn a Skyrim-type experience into a No Man's Sky boring, endlessly repetitive, procedural world :(
I listened to the Besties on it. Which is Justin and Griffin McElroy, Chris Plante, and Russ Frushtick talking video games.
They said it was mostly bad. The key part of Bethesda games people like are the explorable world littered with fun stuff to see. But outside a few tailored areas it's mostly procedurally generated and therefore boring.
Bethesda isn't known for engaging RP elements, deep combat, or good main stories. And Starfield doesn't seem to buck that trend. But they've also lost the thing that makes them popular.
But they said making spaceships was fun.
I'm 10 hours in and having a blast with it. The space travel aspect is way undercooked but other than that it's like a fallout game in space, and their writing got better from previous games.
Even the procedurally generated areas are pretty cool with random buildings and caves to explore, plus there are surprise semi-secret quests that are also fun to play.
I can see the argument that it's a Bethesda game with more loading screens though. They really should've put more emphasis on the in-space gameplay to help replace the on-foot exploration from previous games. The ship is more like a mobile house/storage bin than anything else.
I love the McElroy brothers, but their takes on a lot of stuff is just dog shit. There are so many times that they say shit that makes he me roll my eyes.
I've been having a blast with starfield. To me it sounds like they had preconceptions about how the game would be and are disappointed that it's not what they expected. Idk what they're talking about, it absolutely feels like a Bethesda game, barring that it wasn't a mess on launch.
And, lol, one of the biggest complaints of Bethesda games was how barren they felt. Like, the popular description of a Bethesda game is "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle."
That's not what that means. Wide as an ocean means there's a ton and variety of content. No one calls Bethesda games barren. They are packed with content. Deep as a puddle means while there's s lot, it's all very simple. Uninteresting quest chains, simple systems, rote stories, etc.
Wide as an ocean means there's a ton and variety of content.
No, it doesn't. It means that the game seems huge, because of the size of the playable map.
The lack of content is what makes it as shallow as a puddle.
No one calls Bethesda games barren
Google literally ANY Bethesda game and add "barren" and you'll find tons of complaints. Hell, add critical reviews, even some of the good ones call them empty.
I think this is the issue I have with it as a long time fan of Bethesda games. It was the dense and interesting world that made it all mesh together.
Without that...you realize that 80% of their quests are just "loot, kill, return" or "talk to this person, talk to this person, done" and you realize that the faction quests and somewhat the main quest are the only meat of the game...
I have been forcing myself to play it the last couple days (I sailed the high seas it to see if it worked on PC, but just kept playing because the intro felt so bad) only because my girlfriend is watching over voice chat and commiserating with me.
There is something there for the people who loved settlement building and customization, with the ship building and outposts. But if you want immersion...play a space sim. If you want procedural stuff...play No Man's Sky. It just doesn't have that Bethesda energy. It feels tired and sterile and uncomfortable to explore.
