It’s a Bethesda game with all the qualities and flaws of a Bethesda game. It will only get better with mods. I believe the modding scene will be even stronger this time around.
Personally… I think it had a whole lot of potential…but tripped, fell, and faceplanted just before the finish line.
So many systems feel either half finished, or that they had massive design changes danger close to press date, and it lacks tons of polish and I have no idea how some ideas managed to get through QA without being throttled to death, Like not being able to dictate where doors and ladders appear on ships you build/modify, or the fact that your carefully designed interior just gets dumped unceremoniously into cargo if you change ships, also an alarming lack of variety in the PoIs on planets, and in the PoI’s themselves. See that PoI? That looks like one you saw before? This ones exactly the same, down to every single hand placed sheet of paper and corpse locations.
I have more critiques, about the ridiculous number of, and the bland sameness of certain spoiler content, but thats about as much as I’ll discuss that .
I also question their priorities when one of their first patches was to remove the vendor chests from the game, because some people were playing their single player game wrong, and making Bethesda look bad due to their horrible economy and under funded vendors.
I’m sure there are lots of people who can squeeze fun from it, and more power to them. Hope they have a hog wild time with it, but that doesnt change the fact that its fundamentally flawed, in a similar to possibly worse way than Cyberpunk was at launch… and I seriously doubt Bethesda will dedicate 3 years to patching it and fixing it before trying to further monetizing it with a expansion.
I got over 100 hours in it before I pushed the end and beat it, and immediately quit playing… and to be honest, the only reason I got that far was a mix between forcing myself to play and a friend having it and venting to eachother about all the ridiculousness and annoyances.
Spoilers for a few random encounters below. I can’t figure out how to spoiler tag via mobile.
I love it. It’s obviously got some flaws here and there, but for me personally it’s been an enrapturing experience my 20+ hours so far (nothing compared to some of you, I know). I love the exploration of planets primarily, surveying them and then selling said data to Vladimir again. It’s a strangely compelling loop I find myself returning to.
The “procedurally generated” areas have story behind them like one having the heating system malfunctioning and reading the stories of the crew attempting to get them fixed. Another was of an invading parasite species not native to the planet taking over. One even was a heartbreaking log of a crewmate recording his final words for his wife and family, which I just found randomly exploring a planet searching for “supporting life” for a mission. I get people’s frustration not every planet is like Boston or Skyrim … but there’s some seriously good stuff here if you just put your boots to the ground and explore.
Ship building is amazing. I love customizing my ship, the different habs, and assigning the crew I run with. This also extends to outpost building which feels manageable. Not a requirement like Fallout 4, but also deep enough to be entertaining when I desire to do so (primarily for Helium 3 plants). Piracy and ship combat is great, as blowing out the engines of a ship, boarding said ship, taking it over, selling said ship (I have a mod which reduces the cost of the registration fee which is pretty exorbitant in vanilla IMO) and then using that money to improve my own is another compelling gameplay loop that makes me seek out combat instead of avoiding it all together.
Overall, I love it through and through. There’s some hitches like the aforementioned registration price, the combat AI of enemies being rudimentary (standing in the line of fire for 5 seconds is not a good look) and the maps in cities are inexcusable and will need a fix. But altogether it is easily my GOTY.
Good: It’s a Bethesda game.
Bad: It’s a Bethesda game.
It’s been a fun experience so far, and I really want to like this game, so that means we need to be honest with its flaws.
Frankly, Bethesda has still managed to bring back their already beaten-to-the-dead mummified-corpse of a horse and beat it again like a carnival drum surrounded by cheering buddies who all had too much caipirinhas during their trip. No, I’m not talking about Todd’s vacation. It’s the gamebryo engine.
Everything else follows smoothly from that point. The expected bethesda glitches, the expected community patches, the expected list of QOL mods even if you want to play vanilla, and so on. Worrying as many TES fans are expecting TES6 after Starfield.
And if you are aware how Fallout 76 has fared in comparison to Fallout 3/4/NV… imagine what happens if any Bethesda or Microsoft executive decided to pull a similar stunt with Starfield. “Less risk of angering the audiences because it’s a new IP” they’ll justify in their internal memos.
I’m very much enjoying it. The longer you play the more things open up to you. The story is probably the most interesting story I’ve ever played in a Bethesda game. It is absolutely overwhelming for the first 50 hours or so. But the longer you play the more it opens up the more you learn. And on top of all of that the mods. My God the mods for this game are going to be amazing.
I was trying to finish research and upgrade a few weapons and visited a few frozen lifeless rocks in a row. It was starting to get repetitive, so I decided to pick a random level 70 system at the limit of my jump range. One planet had a lot of life so I landed. There were a few of these level 10 giant beetles the size of an elephant with lizard skin (their muscles rippled when they moved, they were animated really well). I shot one to see what resources they dropped. Like a movie, an entire line of those things popped over a ridge and charged me. Level 45 to 70.
It was a tough fight. Exploring is rewarding, and focusing on planets and moons that have life show off more of the awesomeness of this game.
The animals are definitely pretty impressive. I wasn’t expecting much in that department but they did a great job. I’ve seen the AI do a lot more than I was expecting. Once I saw a heard if passive creatures swarm a predator and kill it then all of them started celebrating their kill. Lol
Agreed. Been finding the main story, dialog, companions, etc. to be spectacularly unengaging, but have found myself to be surprisingly addicted to surveying life and resources on planets, which is typically not my kind of gameplay loop.
Just hit a planet with one predator and one prey species - the prey species were these Dimetrodon - looking lizard things the ended up one shotting me a bunch of times by breathing fire. Seeing a little bit of repetition with the animals but in general I’ve really been enjoying this aspect of the game.
The low performance of the game relative to other large, good-looking games definitely makes me less eager to play it.
Also I’m irked at Todd for his comments about people needing to upgrade their PC for the game. JayzTwoCents even showed that his 4090 didn’t get great frames. (comparatively that is. Like he was getting ~90fps @ 1080p which would be a pretty smooth experience, but I’d expect much more given how powerful that card is)
Honestly I’m not super far into the game. (A couple hours at most?) But it hasn’t really grabbed my attention like other games have - which probably means I’ll have to start the game a couple times before I legitimately play it through and then I could probably give a better score.
At the moment I wouldn’t recommend paying $70+ for the game - but to use game pass if possible.
Not that anyone cares, but if I feel different about it after playing some more I’ll update my comment haha
Everyone should be irked at Todd for his comments.
We shouldnt have to build super computers to get stable, playable FPS, because hes too stupid to give up this game engine they’ve been absolutely obsessed with for over 20 years, cause Creation engine is nothing more but Gambryo, and Gamebryo is nothing more than NetImmerse… They’ve just slapped a lot of ducttape and bullshit on it to make it look better, at the cost of bad optimization and performance.
Cyberpunk is a far more visually impressive game, and I get 50% more frame rate in that, than Starfield…and I’m on AMD, Which isnt facing the same issues nvidia cards are in starfield.
I can accept the style they went for overall but yeah the disjointed nature and having to root through menus to fast travel to your next destination in a questline is beyond cumbersome.
Truly wish you could just get in your cockpit and confirm “travel to the next mission destination” was an option and then just have the ship take off, get into orbit and hit hyperspace then land at your destination…all pretty quick, handling the destination loading during the hyperspace jump animation.
It feels pretty poorly thought out for 2023, would be acceptable in the 2000’s with limited tech but nowadays we can do better I think…and industry leaders like Bethesda should strive to.
It’s a Bethesda game. The stuff that works about their games works here. Looting is fun. Exploring is fun. The gun play this time around is actually pretty enjoyable. The skill tree is really interesting. It’s not just 10% more this and 5 more that but a lot of actual fun new perks. The handcrafted missions are usually pretty interesting and fun. The ship builder is awesome.
Flawed: The procedural generation should affect more things. After exploring countless of planets I’ve come across the same structure dozens of time. Oh there’s the room I go into to turn off the turrets. They should have made these structures modular like the ship builder and generated them.
Conversations while improved still have that weird stare in your face. It’s tough to see this after how good cyberpunk conversations were.
Bad: Caves fucking blow. They’re dark, easy to get lost in and I don’t think I’ve found anything interesting outside of missions.
I was pretty conflicted about the game. The story and world was a bit cookie-cutter but enjoyable. I really enjoyed the combat but I often had trouble finding… well, trouble. Then a friend spoiled the ending of the game and the NG+ stuff and (without spoiling) it was a lot like another game which was also a pretty boring ending.
After having it spoiled the day after Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 released I decided to switch to that and (I need to stress this is my opinion!) it’s a such a better game. Characters, world building, writing and combat are just so much better, I even cried at the first major character death again!
Maybe I’ll go back to Starfield eventually but not for a while at least.
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