Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hater. I actually was really excited for the game. But so far I am just not having fun.
For a little bit of reference, I just finished playing thru Cyberpunk 2077 and then jumped right into Starfield. Maybe that was a mistake because I kinda just want to go back to Cyberpunk (and I will in a few weeks when the DLC comes out).
But I’m noticing two really big issues with Starfield: first, the gunplay/combat is… let’s call it underwhelming. I realize it’s quite probably a skill issue and I need to just git gud, but holy crap, everything is a bullet sponge and I don’t have that many bullets! Stealth seems to be pretty worthless at early levels as I don’t have any high-alpha guns that can take advantage of it and, most of the time, I’m detected before I even see the bad guys. I’m just not enjoying this aspect of the game at all.
The second big issue for me is that there’s a loading screen every five seconds! Again, probably a me thing, but OMG, it’s driving me nuts. Get into ship, loading screen. Launch from planet, loading screen. Fly to next planet, loading screen. Land on planet, loading screen. Leave ship, loading screen. I just want to go shoot things! Let me shoot things!
Okay, found some spacers, time to… oh shit, out of ammo. Let me swap to a worse gun that still has ammo. Sigh. Okay, they’re dead. Let me just heal up… oh shit, out of med packs. Sigh.
Oh and wrestling with the UI is exhausting.
Anyways, I realize that this probably isn’t the place to find a lot of like-minded people. But I really do want to like this game. Any tips on maybe at least ways to make the combat less of a chore?
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It definitely feels “meh”.
The characters are flat and tropey, the story itself isn’t very compelling, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of narrative freedom in the quests and the quests themselves are fairly cookie cutter. I was told the “First Contact” quest was really cool and well done. Nonsense! I’d like to be able to go back and talk to the NPCs about the progress of the quest, take their temperature on the options available. It didn’t feel like there was much of a point in getting the opinions of the entities aboard the ship as they had zero say in the outcome.
The game feels very much like a fantasy setting wrapped in sci-fi aesthetics, especially with the way the main quest doles out powers.
I like building a ship. I wish the ship had more functionality. I like building outposts, though I have no idea what for, I can’t see much of a use for harvesting and automating the production of resources.
The gun combat feels alright, but it seems health scales up really quickly on enemies.
I dislike how so much content is gated behind perk level ups, but it does keep me playing to see if the next unlock is cool.
there doesn’t seem to be a lot of narrative freedom in the quests
I’ve been playing more since I originally posted this and I’m enjoying myself more but the game still feels pretty meh. But this point above I think is the biggest sin the game commits. It’s an RPG but it doesn’t really feel like my decisions effect anything other than my companion’s view of me. I don’t think there are branching storylines or anything like that.
Hate to do it, but gonna compare to Cyberpunk again. In Cyberpunk, there are multiple ways to solve quests and multiple endings with multiple endings! BG3, of course, also has branching quests that effect the state of the world. The lack of a feeling of agency in this game feels like the biggest fault.
I can get used to the loading screens EVERYWHERE (a loading screen to enter a tiny store? really??), the weak gunplay, the watered down mechanics and wide but shallow world. But this game is an RPG first and if the RPG mechanics are bad, what is left??
I haven’t played CP2077, but I may have been spoiled by the characters and autonomy in BG3. The writing and choices are just so stellar in that game, it set a new standard. I remember in BG3 being so appalled by one NPC that I decided to just kill them instead of taking any of the games multiple dialogue routes to handle them and there were unique consequences and dialogue lines for taking that course of action!
A lot of the story telling in Starfield just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny if you look at it too closely and you have to closely follow the set paths or else it kinda breaks. Really disappointing in that aspect. Maybe if it had released prior to BG3, it wouldn’t seem so unpolished.
It’s not just you.
In the past Bethesda was innovent. With Starfield they are just stuck in the past.
The game is so close to a loading screen simulator that it kills emmersion.
It is very whelming, yes. It’s exactly what I expected, and yet… I want more. At least for the things it does to be done better. Give me a reason for base building. Make the AI not just stand there like dopes and be bullet sponges when you want them to be hard (seriously, “legendaries” have 3 fucking HP bars and it’s dumb). Actually have dialogue choices that are a bit more meaningful and change things.
I’m tired of it just working. I want it to work fantastically.
No sir, you are not alone. The horrendously weak opening combined with bullet sponge gunplay, so many loading screens, a horrendous UI, boring worlds with little to nothing to do on them…I managed to make myself play for 12 hours before I gave up for good. It simply didn’t catch me at all, despite multiple attempts. Maybe in 2 years with mods, but for now it’s just time to move on for me.
What I think plagues this genre of game is that the sense of discovery is not there, like it is on a “2D” plane. What I mean by that is this:
In a game like Skyrim where you have essentially a 2D plane of area to explore, you can see in front of you all the things that are possible even without using a map. You can play the entire game without a map by following roads, seeing things that pique your interest, and just walking there.
However, in a game like Starfield, you can’t go anywhere without entering a menu and going through 4 or 5 loading screens. And you HAVE to use the menu to go places instead of just walking to something you see in the distance. It’s a huge barrier to organic discovery. And on top of that, purposely, there’s nothing to do on the vast majority of planets AND THEN, even the things that are on planets are so unimportant, they may as well not be there. An anomaly I found on a planet was 1000m away, I walked to it, and all I could do was scan it for half a second. It was just a waste of time. Buildings don’t actually seem to have anything to do in them. Caves are all empty.
It’s fun to think you can explore the galaxy, but making it too real makes it much too boring and much too difficult to feel that you’re actually discovering anything.
Edit: Another thought is that in Skyrim, you know there are things to discover, you just have to find them. In Starfield, Bethesda purposely made many of the planets devoid of anything of interest, so when you go to a new area, you’re not even sure it’s worth your time.
I could forgive bethesda games because I used to be able to look at them as “greater than the sum of its parts”
Fallout 4 with mods just barely got away with it.
Starfield has too many issues for me.
The biggest one, your second issue of loading screens, I don’t think mods can fix. There just will never be a seamless overworld because of the spaceship mechanic.
After about 20hrs, I couldn’t take it anymore. I popped open the console, increased my carry weight, added a bil creds, set my level to 666, and finally, tgm. Let chaos reign, baby.
I had already added a couple UI mods (because Bethesda still ships UI components at 30fps for whatever reason) and patched the achievement disablement function, so now I feel like I can actually kinda enjoy the game (when I’m not in a loading screen).
I’ve put another 20hrs in playing like this, and have zero regrets. It makes my time in the game feel arcade-like, in a good, nostalgic way. I went from being stressed out and annoyed, to relaxed and able to laugh at the endless jank that we’ve all come to expect from Bethesda. It’s like GTA back in the day… if you weren’t using cheat codes, you were straight up missing out on the fun.
All that said, overall the game does feel like Bethesda threw Fallout, Skyrim, and No Man’s Sky in a blender and then ran it all through a sieve to ensure that only the worst parts made it into the final release. I’m actually shocked by how much they seem to have outright copied elements from NMS (from UI, to gameplay mechanics, to storyline elements). I’ve got hundreds of hours in NMS spread across the last 5ish yrs, and I can’t help but feel kinda greasy when I play Starfield because of how much appears to be straught up lifted from NMS.
Ultimately, Starfield is a new(ish) experience and fun to fuck around in, but if I want to explore space, I’ll go boot up NMS.
I hate that people feel the need to say they’re not a hater in order not to get abused for not liking a game. People out here treating games like a religion.
Yeah, those people are so heavily invested in this game that it has to be great at all costs. I mean dropping $100 just to play a few days early and the subsequent justifications made after the fact really speak to that.
I’ve heard people talk about how this is the greatest game ever released. Like dude, this isn’t even the greatest game released so far this year.
I hardly run out of ammo, but I’m also the kind of person who levels up carrying capacity first and becomes a loot goblin.
And yes, ammo has 0 weight but more weight cap means more time for me to search every corner of every room
I can’t even get to “meh” yet. I’m currently trying to get over all the steps backward from Fallout 4. Can’t order companions in battle, can’t swap out weapon mods, can’t use/equip items on pickup without going into menus, and the local maps. Holy crap, the local maps are bad. All that is on top of having to mod the game as usual. StarUI helped a lot, and I had to grab a sound effects mod because there was painful, high-pitched tones in a lot of the interface stuff, but it needs a lot more help. Beth’s games are starting to remind me of a Civilization series or Paradox Interactive situation where the base game is worse than a predecessor at release and doesn’t yield incremental improvement until a robust mod scene/DLC arrives.
I’ve already written off the space gameplay (that was always a long shot for us space sim fans), and if I’m being honest, the loading screen pacing isn’t all that different an experience from how I played Skyrim and FO4. I’m also taking the bullet-sponginess as a challenge to focus on weapon mods. I’m hoping once I get into a self-directed gameplay flow and get used to the quirks of the UI and zone arrangement it’ll get better.
I gotta say though, even though it had its own share of bugs, Baldur’s Gate 3 coming out a month ahead of Starfield does not invite favorable comparisons. The dialogues and quest design in BG3 run circles around what I’m seeing in Starfield so far. The “Back to Vectera” quest in particular was shockingly bad. Having multiple moments where there’s no indication of what to do next until opening the mission log to find a stealth quest update is seriously rough. I’m guessing it was unfinished? I knew there were going to have to be sacrifices made at the procedural generation altar, but seeing even the bespoke elements on the main questline be this bad does not portend well for the overall quality of the game.
Yeah its a little unfair to compare anything to BG3 so bad timing there. I think when Phantom Liberty comes out and a bunch of people jump to Cyberpunk, it’s not gonna help this game much either. lol
It’s really not, lol. In the first hour playing this I kept thinking how dated the facial animations felt. CP2077 has the best faces I’ve seen yet, and it’s not going to have this grey filter all over the place either.
My main complaint is the writing and worldbuilding. So far I’ve been exploring new Atlantis and picked up exclusively fetch quests from NPCs so generic and uninteresting I don’t really feel like continuing to talk to them. And the uncreative worldbuilding of authoritarian capitalists Vs libertarian capitalksts vs religious crazies. Can Bethesda not even imagine an alternative to capitalism?
Name me one sci-fi that has had an alternative to capitalism without access to something god-tech level like Treks replicators, which would break the setting entirely.
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Out of those, The Expanse, Star Wars and Firefly all very much feature capitalism.
Battlestar doesn’t feature large scale capitalism due to most of the human race being destroyed but it definitely exists within the fleet, as we see in the episode where Lee investigated the black markets.
Starship Troopers and Warhammer are both authoritarian fascistic states where everything is controlled by the government, which granted is something different from capitalism, but not the time this game went for.
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It took like a 30 seconds of web search to find the dispossessed by Ursula le guin.
Your argument is actively supporting the other commenters point about boring world building in sci fi.
Capitalism works great with RPGs leveling system.
But I’d love to have seen a cashless society where the only way to get stuff was to trade other goods.
Or some sort of social credit system, where the nicer you are and the more quests you complete, the higher your status and the more free items you unlock.
Or some authoritative system that binds you into a contract whenever you make a trade it forces you to work off your debt in all matters of ways.
Capitalism is the best system you can really have when you have multiple factions who’s economies work together though. What you describe is great if the whole world trades in that manner, but when you have multiple factions you needs someway for commerce to work between them for world building. To be fair, it’s not like the factions in stafridls are just boring capitalists. The more I’ve learned about the UC, my assumption that they were just democratic socialist types has been undermined totally.
I have a rule about bethesda games - I don’t buy them until well after the first few patches, or the GOTY edition. I am starfield curious but also, hesitant because of No Man’s Sky. Allow me to elaborate:
NMS shipped and was garbage. But over the ensuing year, damned near everything players expected or wanted from it came to be with game altering updates that improved it’s content range enormously. It’s still not my favorite game, but every time I fire it up there’s new shit for me to do and most of it’s pretty well implemented.
I have absolutely zero expectations in this way for Starfield. They’re not going to rework space-to-ground flight or rng generated ground plots you can’t explore past; they may improve perf and qol over time, but I fundamentally doubt anything like No Man’s Sky updates are in the future.
So yeah, that makes me pause, and remember to be patient.
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I find the start kinda weird. Touchy tabloid, pass out. Wake up and akwardy get forced in to ship and spooky drone watching you. Got to the new atlantis and was bored already.
Even skyrim did this better.
Explored the first planet to see whats the deal. Terrorform was uglyass mf, but standing on 1meter rock glitches it completely, and then just empty all ammo on it.
I think it makes great use of the engine. The game is super fun, way better than Cyberpunk 2077 (which is basically just Grand Theft Auto). The worlds are cool. The stories are great.
I think it’s a great game.
The game is a mess. It’s totally lost trying to figure out it’s identity. I’ve got the answer everyone can’t quite put their finger on. Had this game came out 2 or 3 years after New Vegas it would have been heralded as the next generation in rpgs. The problem is we are well past that. Bethesda should have made this game instead of fallout 76. It would have totally fit the time frame and been forgivable.
The problem is we have multiple games that do this better in whatever aspect you prefer. Like realism space sim, that’s star citizen or elite dangerous. Want planetary exploration with life form scanning and base building? That’s no man sky.
I still find myself playing because I’m so hard gay for that Bethesda fallout choose your own adventure foundation that’s present here. But damn is it overall shit. Just embarrassing
I’m so hard gay for…
Really?? Good post up to this point… /smh
I red it takes like 12 hours for the game to get good. That’s like two weeks for me. Some people have to work and limited time.
There’s a 2 hour refund window. Bethesda misses it a tiny bit
