For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you’ve already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!
Discuss all things Starfield below!
Just played 4 hours. Not saying whether the game is good or bad, but I’m not seeing the point of the spaceship yet.
It’s looks like merely a medium for the fast traveling mechanic. You can’t really “move” in space (as far as ive tried), and can’t use it to fly within a planet.
I expected being able to manually travel from planet A to planet B and finding cool stuff along the way. If you wanna actually move you need to fast travel.
I also expected to be able to get in my ship and go from place A to place B within the same planet (also finding cool stuff along the way). It seems that also is just done by fast traveling only.
This is one of the more biting criticisms I’ve heard of the game. It results in a lack of feeling of scale and scope. The universe just feels like connected places, instead of worlds within a galaxy. No Mans Sky got this right, and it’s surprising that Bethesda would fumble such a core mechanic. It looks like they tried to cover up this wart by… removing city maps.
Elite dangerous did it better. A mix of both maybe.
I had this complaint early on. It was very disheartening.
20 hours in, I love that I can fast travel from one planet to another in an entirely different solar system, to the building I need to get to.
Tbh I have had a lot of fun with this game (35h in). It’s an RPG first and space explorer second, nothing necessarily wrong with that.
I also learned that if you’re tracking a quest you can use the grav drive right from the ship’s HUD by selecting the locstion marker. It does help immersion a tiny bit more.
Overall it’s what they promised, modders can anyways “fix” the shortcomings.
I did read that landing on planets is just a cutscene rather than a seamless transition, but I thought for sure you can actually fly it in space - isn’t there even combat with other spaceships or random locations to check for resources?
Is there anything else to do on the spaceship, does it feel like a home base where you keep your gear, crafting benches, companions to talk to, etc? I really want that cozy starbound/kotor ebon hawk vibes if possible 🥺
So you can fly in space, and fight space battles there, but you can’t really fly fast enough to fly from one planet to another in real time. To move to a different point of interest in the system, you need to fast travel to it. So the meaningfully interactable part of space is just the immediate area around each fast travel point.
I’m not far enough yet to know if the interior gets more interesting after you add more modules to the ship; the starter ship is basically an RV: bed, galley, cockpit.
There is spaceship battles, not sure about random locations, but I’m guessing you’d also need to fast travel to those.
Also the spaceship is VERY customizable, so much in fact that I found it overwhelming lmao. Not saying that’s bad thing, but you’d definitely need to come up with a lot of credits /loot first.
Again I only have 4 hours in game, so I don’t really know much yet.
Your ship is basically a TARDIS. You pick a destination from your star map and then your ship magically disappears from one place and appears at another. There is “space” but it feels completely fake, like they tacked it on at the end. Really, so many of the games mechanics feel fake and the effort it takes to suspend disbelief is really high.
Y’all I thought we agreed as a society to not preorder anymore?
I didn’t pre order. I waited for review embargo to lift, then I bought it today.
This isn’t “early access”, this is Bethsda squeezing money out of game pass subscribers
Watched a streamer play for quite a while and my primary takeaway is that I wish Bethesda would just scrap their engine and start fresh.
It’s got the same stiffness, gliding movement, butt-ugly NPC’s, and just the general feel of 15 year old Bethesda RPGs. I expect I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for the same reason I struggled with fallout 4.
Careful. The last time I spoke ill of Gamebryo+++++++ I was the subject of a short-lived harassment campaign. Bethesda fans are bizarrely protective of this Frankenstein engine. Get this: you still can’t climb ladders! It’s fucking 2023.
Something about how luminescent their eyes are bothers me. But their engine is starting to show it’s age, that’s for sure.
They’ve never been able to get player models and expression right. I can totally forgive it if you get the same level of open world exploration and interaction we got in New Vegas. I personally can trade quality for depth and interesting gameplay (rimworld and dwarf fortress come to mind in the extremes of this). But it does seem like they struggle to achieve standards that were set even 5 years ago.
Bethesda is a funny company. When they are on it and get it right you end up with some of the best games ever made (Skyrim) but when they’re off it just becomes this jumbled mess that got duct taped together and released at full price (fo76).
I’m hoping this is more of the former but we will see. I suspect the modding community is going to take starfield and turn it into something magical. That ship building engine plus copyrighted space ships from pop culture, sign me up.
I’ve never understood this argument, most game engines are based on 20+ year old technology and have been updated throughout the years. Can the creation engine be improved upon? Definitely yes, but the engine’s age has almost nothing to do with it.
Their point is that the engine doesn’t show signs of being improved upon during that time and is still stuck feeling like a 20 year old engine.
If you mean just the Creation Engine, that was 2011.
If you trace it back to Gamebryo, then Morrowind was 20 years ago, but I don’t think that one can say that even Skyrim looks much like Morrowind.
Skyrim literally had some of the same exact problems that Morrowind had.
Personally I want them to keep the creation engine, if only for the stellar mod support. But let’s not kid ourselves, it desperately needs an overhaul.
What specific functionality is it that you want?
I listed one feature that I’d like to have (dynamic generation of polygons in curved surfaces), which I do not consider to be a very important limitation in another comment.
But if you strongly feel that the engine imposes constraints, then I’m curious what particular functionality it is that you’re after.
EDIT: Another: I don’t think that the game can generate billboards for player-built structures (so you can see the structures you’ve built in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 many cells away). I don’t think that that’s actually a fundamental engine limitation – you could probably do it with the existing engine, just that the game doesn’t do it today. Instead, stuff like that is generated via offline map-generation tools. But again, it’s not really a huge deal in either of the above Fallout games.
Yeah, they can just append a number to it like unreal does and call it a new engine but that’s not what you actually want. It’s not a matter of a “new engine”, it’s them not investing enough into the existing one to make it feel more modern. I know some things like physics and animations are part of the “bethesda charm” but it stopped being charming after skyrim :P
Old or not it’s clear it needs a fundamental reworking if the same complaints persist across literal decades.
scrapping their engine is a terrible idea, and folks need to stop repeating it
just shows that you dont know what engines are, do or how they evolve
I did not bite and will avoid it until 75% off GOTY edition all DLC in etc. Patient gamer through and through, burnt way too many times. So far what I read about it, it not optimized, it’s shallow, lacks polish, etc etc. Basically, a standard AAA fare, something we sadly grew to expect from major studios. Will be watching it for a while to see what I’m missing.
There’s no reason for studios to behave better when they get a bazillion pre-orders and games make a profit before they’re even released. When that dynamic is in play there will always be an army of MBAs who point out that the purpose of the company is hyped releases and everything else is strictly secondary.
So to sum up, I agree. I won’t be touching this until it’s mature, stable, and on sale.
This is how I roll.
I’ve never been unhappy either.
I’ve got Game Pass and it comes with it. So no waiting for me!
I have no arguments against it. Do your part and let us know if we’re missing out on anything. How does it stack against No man’s sky?
I hated NMS so I think starfield is kind of better but not at all in any sense of a space sim / 4x aspect. Space is mostly just a minigame with arcadey feel in a not great way imo.
It’s a bethesda RPG first and foremost and honestly it plays mostly like a fallout 4 total conversion mod. Instead of a map (there are none) you just get a bunch of fast travel points. Planets have 1-3ish “biomes” which are individual rng maps with POIs which are very far apart and often meaningless.
I really loathe the equipment system in Starfield. Attachments require very specific resources and if you have two identical guns side by side, one with an extended magazine and one with a reflex scope there is absolutely NO way to combine those attachments or weapons in any way. They are always unique. Plus as you level up the same weapons get new prefixes that are simply higher damage versions of the same thing, same ammo and everything.
Oh and for fun when you mod a weapon to be full auto it loses ~60% of it’s per hit damage because DPS is the only stat they balanced on. Semi-automatic weapons and weapon mods are the only way to reasonably play. There isn’t much in the way of fully automatic skill tree items that make up for the huge ammo costs of fully automatic weapons and frequent reload times either- after all that 80 round mag simply does 3 times the damage when your weapon is semi auto instead of fully auto.
Just too much carbon copy crap for me. I wanted innovation and I got a fallout mod.
I’m even planning to wait until the game is out on GOG, which could be several years from now.
Coming fresh off BG3, the quality of the writing and the amount of character expression in dialog is like night and day. Honestly there was even one moment fairly early on when I said to myself “Fallout 4 would have let me extort this guy” and then I realized how egregious it was that I felt I had less agency in this quest than in FO4.
the side quest lines are giving me a few interesting options. try the corpo one
Upsides:
- side quests other than the radiant ones are mostly cool so far
- stealth archer isn’t so good that you can just play that way straight out, but the tree makes it looks eventually strong
- zero g combat in a derelict space station was cool. I hope there’s more of that
- base building seems fine, I’m not sure what it’s for, but it seems fine
Downsides:
- ship stuff feels bad. I don’t care about fast travel, but it’s just about the weakest ship-to-ship combat that I’ve played. Its early yet, though. Boarding a ship was cool at least.
- combat AI is not good. Enemies never seem to take any initiative, they mostly just crouch behind wherever you found them
- the setting has no… flavor? The factions feel like fallout analogues but without fun or verve. Maybe I just haven’t found the weird shit yet, but I’m not optimistic.
Spent a few hours trying to fix the broken ultrawide support. Eventually, the good old hex edit fix for aspect ratios on the EXE did the trick. After that, the FOV was messed up, but the game doesn’t have an FOV slider (or HDR, or DLSS)… so eventually I managed to fix that with a custom ini.
The next few hours was spent shooting pirates like I was playing Far Cry in Space, and struggling with the game’s horrifically designed UI, menus, and inventory. So far, I am feeling very angry about the game. Like we were flat-out lied to about what the game was. There is no exploration. There’s barely even “space”. You just teleport from map to map shooting pirates… with a little scanning creatures and mining rocks mixed in. I don’t understand how anyone is okay with this.
Won’t play it until the modding scene becomes bigger
I’ve been playing Bethesda games vanilla for my first playthrough since Oblivion. By the time I finished my first run, usually a healthy modding scene had already developed.
Unless Bethesda fucks anything up behind the scenes, I think this modding scene is gonna be BIG.
I like it. Still has some classic glitches, enemies jumping high into the air after you kill them, grabbing weapons out of a locked container because part of the gun was sticking was sticking out, you know, Bethesda things.
I found that it looks really blurry if I don’t have it on Ultra settings, that’s my only real complaint.
You might want to check the FSR scaling if the screen looks blurry below ultra. Basically the graphics preset also changes the resolution scaling IIRC with Ultra with the highest percentage.
I7-11/3070/32GB and I have been having a lot of fun. I play all games on very hard and this one I was thinking maybe I should tone it down. I didn’t and I didn’t regret it.
30+ hours in and after reading this thread I feel like some people just got unlucky or were expecting something like SC or SpaceBourne 2. This isn’t those games and weren’t promised to be. I play both of those games and SC is a mess 12 years and $600k later and SB2 is awesome and only made by one guy! But this game is way polished and ready by comparison. By far imo.
I was maybe 4 hours in and got sidetracked in a solar system surveying everything. I forgot about the original quest to scan a moon and just traveled to every planet and not only had a great time scanning and scouting across different moons and planets but was also helping randoms with distress calls and 3 on 1 battles against Spacers in spaceships. By the time I was done with that solar system I was 18 hours in.
I would scan a planet, find a spot to land and drop in. Scout every place that popped up and then set another course on the same planet and repeat. Never did I feel bored or that I was going to see the same assets. Every spot felt unique and well designed. One planet felt like the American Southwest, it was so beautiful.
I highjacked a landed vessel during my surveying mission and upgraded and redesigned it for more maneuverability and storage and I have to say that the ship editor is so well done. I have 1000+ hours in FO76 and the camp building in that was really great and Bethesda has made the industry standard camp building format in SC. It is really an improvement from FO4 to current. I cannot wait until the mods really open this masterpiece up.
I haven’t even touched the base building yet btw.
The space combat is solid. From what I gather people don’t really know how to do space combat. Especially when in bulk freight ships or similar. You have to boost right at them guns blazing and then hard turn when you pass them so you can get behind them. Watch your throttle as you will only turn fast when it’s at halfway (within the white lines). I can take on 3 Spacer attackers on very hard difficulty with this method. If you can track the enemy (perk i think?) do it and just kill their shields and weapons. If you just kill their engines they love to just tumble in space and shoot at you. I usually kill two and then disable the third and board. It’s hard af and fun af.
I would like to be able to spacewalk but also see why it’s not included in Starfield. It’s fun but as I have experienced it in SC all of that extra functionality doesn’t really add to the game. It’s a pain to get out of your ship and fly over to the enemy ship and then try to gain access. I like the way Bethesda did it. Super easy.
Also the space travel is super easy. Fast traveling is great and keeps the game going without having problems finding where you want to go. SC has this problem. Their map of one solar system is terrible and doesn’t work half of the time. It’s only 1 solar system and barely works. Not to mention the navigation in SC and SB2 typically bug out and don’t work which calls for a reboot. Bethesda said fuck that and did better. Sure it’s not as immersive but immersion really has potential to take away from the game and progress.
The overall look and feel is what I was hoping in FO76. Vast improvement. The gunplay is on par with what I want and expect. Fighting on moon bases is fucking awesome. On very hard the enemies are harder, their tactics are okay, not great, but challenging enough to keep you guessing. Abandoned bases are always fun to attack. Loot is everywhere.
Some NPCs are bugged. It’s annoying but infrequent enough to not be a game breaker. The NPCs just talking to you randomly is weird, especially when you are walking through a city and your companion is already talking to you. Needs work.
I caught Shrouds stream and it looks like this game just gets better. I can’t wait to jump back in.
“Bethesda, FFS can you finish a functional, polished game for once? Bugs and performance issues are not cute anymore!”
Bethesda: “No Uwu”
It’s got some rough edges but it seems fine so far for me?
I’m having a great time, but I also love FO4 and No Man’s Sky. The toe-dip I’ve done into colony building shows that they put real thought into Astroneer-like automated manufacturing stuff, which is my crack, and something I missed in NMS and FO4. It’s also clear from the first city that they know how depressing FO4 is, and wanted to add more variety.
Story and characters are a cut above any other Bethesda game so far, but that’s not saying much. My wife is replaying BG3 next to me, and it makes Starfield’s writing look amateurish by comparison. It’s not the core of the game though, so eh.
Downsides so far have been that the minor planets/moons don’t have much to do, and that inventory management is annoying with how much crafting components weigh.
Ship combat is… Fine. It’s not as intricate as Elite: Dangerous or SW:Squadrons (for sim gamers, weapons are all on REALLY forgiving gimbals, which makes precision unnecessary), but not actively bad like NMS VR. I think it’s a good compromise, because not everyone wants to deal with a realistic sim in what is essentially a minigame.
It’s also complex, which is good, but adds some awkwardness to the beginning.
if ship combat was like those space combat games i would be avoiding any space fight like the plague. i barely survived the tutorial enemies 😂
I think they made the right call too. It’s better for almost everyone. A lot of flight sim types are also techies, so I bet the mods will bias that way.
I’m certainly enjoying playing. I just wish Bethesda could stop making potato people with weird talking animations and the whole muted, grainy, weird Bethesda art style, but that aside it’s pretty fun. I wasn’t watching a bunch of footage beforehand, so I didn’t build up expectations to get let down. I think paying too much attention to things said during development (which is where lots of changes happen) is pretty dumb.
Same. Loving my time with it. It’s great that they’ve captured the things I loved about their old games (no surprise) but too bad they can’t alleviate the immersion breaking issues of their old games (again no surprise).
Unfortunately it isn’t what I wanted out of this game.
Loading screen to land on a planet, loading screen to leave my spaceship, no seamless entry into caves or buildings. Planets and space having boundaries. Can’t use my spaceship to traverse.
Glad people enjoy it, but I was looking for something more akin to NMS or Star Citizen.
Absolutely loving it. 25 hours in and a lot more to come, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game. I’ve already got a second play through on the mind.
This is me. Starfield, warts and all, is more engrossing than anything else I’ve played this year.
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