It's been awhile, and I've clocked into this game hard. Like, anything that can keep busy, has exactly done that from exploring, doing quests, shooting up pirates, looting, crafting, researching, cooking, serenading with the ladies and gents, fighting off wildlife, farming, dogfighting in space, etc.
Why it took several of these to put an 'etc.' on it? Because I don't feel as if am done playing the game, there's just a lot to uncover, and I already feel like my 40hrs spent into it wasn't enough. I didn't even go that in the main story. That being said, this is a rant post, so why should I be complaining? Well, it's Bethesda, and they're getting way too comfortable under their skin.
Starfield is an amazing single-player experience, but nothing that innovates much because it pretty much borrowed what other games did, and turn it into Fallout but in space. There are problems that can easily be changed in another update, but other glaring issues I wish were never in here.
Getting Into The Basic
Getting through what seems to be a robust, detailed character creator, I wanted the game to throw me right into the action, and it did. There are multiple scenarios possible to take down the pirates invading our mining colony. There are explosive barrels all around, the mining cutter is fun to use as a close range laser beam, and I could melee them, but my crew will die faster if that's only the case.
Right after learning how to run and gun, I then get a boostpack and now my war is somewhere above the ground, goodbye boots on the ground and hello to extra verticality. Now with ledge grabbing. P.S: I don't understand the drama around the pronoun issue, just pick one or don't.
In one hour, I finally learned the baby steps of playing on the ground, and then piloting my space ship. Last bit had one red flag. There's a way to distribute reactor power to parts of my ship, the weapon types come in three and using the arrow keys or d-pad takes me out of the battle.
It's slow, doesn't work well because I slip at times. I entered my first dogfight with a Crimson Fleet crew and soon as I blasted their ships off, I get to pick their cargo clean. And you know what's funny? Starfield seems like a streamlined game, but this part is just stupid. I have to aim at the cargo and reach 2-5 feet, before picking them up and stabilizing the ship. This is borderline ridiculous.
Why not just hold the interact button and let me have the inventory option? I have some strong words for the space combat as well, but I can only guess that it gets better soon as I progress through and unlock the ability to pilot higher class ships via skill. Which, took me a really long time.
Reaching my first city, New Atlantis I got to bask into the view, Bethesda didn't false promise around this one part at all and that is the visuals. NPCs and planets I have to discover, explore are procedurally generated and to a degree this works well. Even if you get out of city limits.
Of course, repetition, and sort of the hollowness of the areas of each planet and NPC face generation do come up. Even then, there are interesting locations like human stations, factories, digging sites, abandoned or not, then the planet relic zones where Hank Schrader's lifelong mineral obsession is fully realized. All that owed to the visual fidelity, they REALLY stepped it up on this one.
That is if you get there and not be busy surveying the planet while walking a kilometer or less to the scanned locations, this is the part that is borrowed from No Man's Sky, at a much basic level and only serves to turn me into a loot hoarder. Yes, that's the key word, loot hoarding.
Fallout 4's bass building also comes back, but it isn't that a lot of it is locked out, it's just that the they require minerals that I have yet to acquire. And to get there, I played passively through whatever content I got my hands on, and manage to acquire almost everything I needed. But I never got around to fully building an outpost and turning it into my revenue stream yet.
(I'll update this when I do get around to build a fully operational outpost with everything set up)
The Gazillion Other Things
To surmise how big Starfield is, it's huge, gigantic, really lives to the scale that it has promised. There are so many things to get invested in, a lot of busy work, and to the effect that their other games had, but somewhat acclimated to the modern climate for video games. Hence, not building that outpost.
Like, where do I start? One of my major companions, Sarah Morgan gave me her quest to find her lost subordinates that crashed landed on a planet 10 years ago. Outside the big surprise that there were survivors, the planet was very lush, despite the planet seems like mostly handcrafted.
There are various random NPC intercoms in space, one in particular is an old woman being super nice and asking me to dock. I went in with my guns ready, and actually it was a nice old woman. I looted her ship, and no indication that it would be stolen, so I took free stuff. She said it was fine, how generous. The next one was a teacher with her kids asking for repair parts to fix her grav drive.
I didn't have enough left, but then I found out somewhere online that she tricks people. I got almost bamboozled, even the kids were believable. At one point, me getting arrested by the UC officers for stealing got me forced into doing a job that involves going undercover into the Crimson Fleet.
And that mission alone takes over 10hrs to do, but hey, I can now sell Contraband to these guys. Not only that, my main mission was to rescue on the Constellation members, another companion of mine who got held up by a Crimson Fleet. In some irony, I got him out because of my role.
Starfleet has so many moments to gawk upon, but even the good stuff couldn't distract me from the awful looking U.I. Especially during dialogues, only through reading can be understood what they represent. Yet, it's uninteresting and flaccid looking setup.
Sure, I get indicators like I picked empath or cyberneticist, which brings unique dialogue options. But that is about it. It's by design seemingly rudimentary. The voice acting and facial animation in general is amazing, even helps the bad writing in some parts be tolerable. These aspects are leaps and bounds better than prior Bethesda games.
Then again, kind of missed the design from Fallout 4, or maybe one modders made. It's going to be one of those games isn't it? And then there's the skill and inventory menu design. Inventory one I can sort of work with, despite me making mistake of accidentally changing my clothes. But the skill one? I don't know which to unlock or rank up. Don't get me started on the challenges.
Actually the big issue with the skill tree is the way it's designed, and how difficult it is to progress before putting points into the good stuff needed. I still haven't gotten around to driving a class B or C based ship. There's a lot of gameplay features being tucked way in that. It isn't even a nitpick, I played over 40hs already and I didn't get far enough, am probably doing wrong.
Least the gunplay is amazing. Not only because of the boostpack hovering and shooting, but rare and modified weapons can inflict different kind of ailments that illicit reactions from enemies like being temporarily stunned, taken down, even non-lethel weapons can put them to sleep. Soon as I unlocked sliding, it was shotgun blasting time. Again, took me so long, but least am happy I got far enough to do stuff like this. Also huge variey of weapons to test. A.I. needs a bit of work, though.
Really Bethesda?
Exploration here is actually a mixed bag, the interesting areas are far away, and only thing engaging through walking around is collecting rocks all the time. What gets worse, is that all the game needs me to do is scan wildlife and plants, painfully slow at first till skill unlocks. The other sad part, there's no codex to review what I found in each planet the survey has been done on.
You know what's more egregious? There's no mini-map or good surface map that shows where vendors are, like ones in Skyrim or Fallout. Why is this omitted in the design? Every town, citadel, metropolis, and so on that I've been to, I've become lost. Not knowing where the stores or mission boards are, and I have to memorize the info despite how BIG the world is.
Bothers me a lot more at times, because of me hoarding so much. Even Looting after engaging with enemies then makes me overencumbered. Happens so many times, even my companion carrying my stuff gets her cargo maxed out. So either selling them or keeping in unlimited chest fixes it.
Also, for the love of god, put a bookmarking system. Metroidvanias do that, Zelda games do that, even Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed games as well as latest open-world titles have done that too. How are you this out of touch and out of date? But, hey, it's still the best open world game out there.
Wanna be a smuggler and pirate? You got it. Want to go beyond and even trek in spooky places including an abandoned space station? Sure. Help a lost colonizer ship who hasn't contacted humanity over 200 years to find a place to settle down? I sure can if only person in charge wasn't so obnoxious. Steal ships from other factions and sell them, yep. Even craft, upgrade weapons to sell.
Look, this is a Bethesda title, there is stuff to do here. Like a ton of them, and it's built to cater towards all kinds of people. Even with that said, the underwhelming and irritating parts also quite drag it down. But I do believe those can be patched out. Some implemented, maybe in future DLC.
Also, add a rover please? Like get over yourself Todd, I can ride horses in Skyrim. If I can have space magic in this game, why not rovers to drive through planet surfaces? Oh yeah, I can make enemies lose gravity. With MY FREAKING MIND. Ahh, finally used that joke for good.
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