I spent 20 hours exploring one solar system alone. Yea some planets are empty. Not many though. The complaints so far are really shallow.
Man you can spend so much time digging through a base to find neat shit and story
shallow isn’t what I’d call these complaints, I’d call them childish. I’m having a ton of fun
Right? There’s so effing much to do. I’m about to dive into building my first outpost and I’ve already put in 30 hours into the game in the first 3 star systems without tackling more than a couple side quests. Doing the alben quest line right now and it’s so much fun.
Someone said go play NMS because it’s better? Ffs no it’s not.
I don’t get any of the complaints yet. Except for the local map. Wtf were they thinking. I thought it was a bug. And maybe the item menus. I need to see more.
thIS gAme iS lIke a pUdDle cUz itS SHalLOw
I’ve heard this phrase, or iterations of it, so many times over the years, especially in regards to space games, that I’m convinced the people spewing it constantly have absolutely no idea what a deep space game actually is. I think they’re just there to complain regardless of how much depth there is.
Yeah… People are complaining about features of a game they already knew existed.
The people having fun aren’t the ones writing these knee-jerk critiques. They’re the ones engrossed in the game atm and their opinions will be better reflected once they’re done.
There’s a lot of reason for the haters to hate on this one. Bethesda game, no space travel like NMS, no PS5 release. All things which were either a given or should have otherwise been obvious, but still, clicks are clicks and so any reason to hate is reason enough.
That’s at least a step up from No Man’s Sky, which promised unexplored universes. It then delivered every planet already having a base of at least one alien race.
At this point I would welcome literal empty planets.
That did actually get fixed later on (like in 2018) - there’s now undiscovered systems that you can stumble across, along with abandoned systems. Can kinda see why it took a while to get added - undiscovered systems are kinda…boring.
The sentinels are there, but that’s because they’re basically semi-divine beings and seperate from everything
It doesn’t fix the main problem I have with it. There’s no magic to finding a new species of plant or animal because every other system has like 30 of them per planet/moon. Like whats the point of naming anything when you’ll find something near identical to it in an hour?
I really can’t decide if I agree or not. Only had a chance to play 4 hours or so. My main impression so far is the menus are clunky and I hate how reliant travel is on the menu system. Doesn’t feel like I’m actually piloting anything
My argument for why landing on the moon wasn’t boring is they actually got to pilot the ship, landing it safely on the surface. If the astronauts had a cut scene where they were suddenly landing safely just so they could then fast travel home, having nothing to do on the surface would’ve been far more of an issue.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this game and do the other things, not because they are easy, but to watch the cutscene”
I thought that fast-travel-via-menu was clunky too after 4 hours. Then I realized you don’t need to use the menus to fast travel, it’s just perhaps clunkier to do so from your cockpit. Aim at a planet, go into scan mode, then tap A and hold X (on controller). Here’s a video demoing it.
There are several less than intuitive features in the game that I’m slowing discovering by paying more attention to the prompts at the bottom of the screen. I may have missed a tooltip but it seems this is a very common one based on negative feedback.
The person that made FallUI (a solid UI mod for Fallout 4 that fixes inventory management amd other stuff) released a mod for Starfield’s inventory last night.
https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/773?tab=description
200 million dollar budget, as large as a summer blockbuster film, yet a dude with his free time fixed an issue that was the devs responsibility. Remind me why this game is $70?
UI elements are usually designed to work on the lowest common denominator. Small screens, struggling cpus, etc. Modders don’t care about any of that.
This game runs like poop on anything but newer hardware so I highly doubt the crappy UI was developers being considerate of small screens and struggling CPUs and instead it’s probably because Bethesda games always have a shit inventory UI. This game’s inventory UI is a small step up from Fallout 4 but still no where near as good as the DEF_HUD or FallUI mods for Fallout 4.
My GPU is actually below the minimum specs. The game auto-adjusted itself to look kinda ugly with a lot of blurring, but I will admit, they manage to still make it run decently given what it’s working with. (I am thinking of switching over to my Series S though)
It’s rough on CPUs and GPUs. If CPU is below a certain threshold you are never getting above 30-40 fps no matter what. There are some performance mods you might want to try out. Most of them are just ini settings but some recompress textures and stuff. In a few months it should be possible to run Starfield while not looking too ugly on a low end system with mods.
This is the real answer
The people who’re emotionally invested in something will almost always make something better than the developers themselves.
Part of that is the ability to focus on improving on all of the work that already exists and the other part is being able to unilaterally make decisions while being emotionally invested.
Developers are often spending the majority of the time making sure whatever gameplay exists passes testing without breaking the overall compromise vision that is limited by time and money for deadlines. Companies don’t allow enough time for polish and frequently have decisions made based on the added cost of labor and testing tha mods don’t have since mods having bugs is an acceptable situation for people while a company putting out bugs is generally met with hostility. Different levels of standards and costs have a huge impact on why many mods vastly improve the game in ways that don’t fit into the game development process.
Plus a lot of mods are focused on a specific part and don’t appeal to the playerbase as a whole.
Do Nexus mods disable steam achievements, or is there a mod that prevents that? I’m a filthy achievement hunter and at least for my first playthrough I want to grab as many as I can. But I don’t consider mods like this to be cheating.
There’s a mod which reenables achievements
Thanks! I checked the other day and couldn’t find it.
Yea that’s my main problem so far, I don’t understand how NMS and space engineers both allow seamless travel from space to atmosphere but this major studio game forces me to open up the map and select land. Hopefully a mod fixes it because this is pretty atrocious for $70
It’s an engine limitation. The Engine that Bethesda holds onto with an iron fist is what hampers their games.
However, the opposite side of the coin is, that it makes them super easy to modify, so people can make their own additions. Because Starfield is using the same engine as Skyrim and Fallout 4.
I don’t know if a better, modded flight system would be possible really. That looks like something so ingrained into the foundation of Starfield it would have had to be changed during production
This is why I cut them slack. I’d rather have the clunky mechanics than lose the vibrant modding platform.
I haven’t played NMS, but watched a lot of videos regarding simulating planets, atmosphere (and transitioning to-from space) around the time it was hyped, and assumed that’s what NMS is doing. Which is (maybe? I haven’t played) why you can walk around the whole planet, and take off and turn around and see that same planet from space without loading, etc.
NMS as I understand it is a simulation first, sandbox second.
Starfield sounds like Spacerim if anything, with instanced planets that are separate from space. At ground level, planets are just flat planes and you only explore a small, generated chunk at one loaded instance. It’s not actually a spherical planet when on the ground.
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4 hours is not enough time to get a sense of it.
I’m pretty blown away, while at the same time recognizing why the first 15 hours are disappointing a lot of people.
In Skyrim, you see on the map something interesting and then start heading there discovering things along the way.
In Fallout, maybe you see a tower of a building or a bridge.
In this game, everything is ‘hidden’ behind navigation screens.
It’s probably the largest distribution of open world content across an open world to date, but it feels very much like you are walking around with blinders on.
But a lot of the issues I had early on were with approaching it like it was a Skyrim or a Fallout, as a map to be fully explored, looking in every crate or looting every enemy, etc.
The entire paradigm of the game is different from anything I’ve played before.
Space is a backdrop for the establishment of a living RPG universe. It throws in radiant system stuff for small missions to pick up credits here and there if you like, and tons of handcrafted side quest distractions.
It’s a brilliant play by Bethesda particularly for Microsoft, as this is effectively a live service single player game, that subscribers to GamePass will continue to stay playing for months. The opportunities for additional content being worked into it is literally endless.
The problem is that it’s very hard to communicate that scale and scope in the first few hours. So you are running around a more linear tutorial phase without the mystery and enticing that a viewable open world delivers.
It’s pretty wild to see the shift from players of “this is disappointing” to “this is incredible” as the number of hours in the game increases.
I actually wonder in terms of the ratings what the actual playtime was for each review relative to the score.
It might not be a game for everyone, but it’s probably more of a game for everyone than any previous Bethesda RPG. It just takes a while to find that scope for any given player.
Some of the criticisms are ridiculous though. Like I saw a new piece that actually claimed navigating the universe would be more fun if it worked like Elite: Dangerous, which it said was immersive and quick with its FSD.
I can just imagine having a quest at Hutton Orbital (takes an hour and a half real time) and watching the reviews had they needed to actually leg it to the destination.
It is its own thing.
“Everyone’s concerned that empty planets are going to be boring. But when the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.”
Um, yeah, because going to the moon was a novel thing in 1969. It isn’t 360 years later. Reminds me of the Futurama pilot when Fry was excited to go to the moon and it was just another boring trip for everyone else.
Also, they actually went to the moon, not play a game where they went to the moon, being on an empty moon would be way more thrilling of an experience than playing a video game.
It’s true, some of them ARE empty by design…but the problem is, a world with life on it in Starfield is barely more interesting than the barren rock. It is still almost ALL randomly generated, there just happens to be more wildlife to scan while you run across the boring landscape, and maybe an animal will try to kill you.
Oh, and the pointless radiant quest you get will be from a solar farm on the nice planet, instead of a mining platform on the barren one. There is very little difference.
I do not understand Bethesda’s insistence on “Radiant” quests.
I don’t necessarily mind them, but they seem to be out of control in this one. I ran from the UC place in Atlantis to my ship, landed on Mars, ran into the town to a quest giver, and when I opened my map next, I had dots ALL OVER IT.
I popped open my quest log, and there were 11 random quests I didn’t even realize I had hoovered up just running from location to location. The thing that kind of bothers me about it is that that’s more than double the amount of quests I had intentionally picked up.
It’s okay if I explore and uncover some of these myself, Todd.
A lot of those come from you “overhearing” NPCs talk. But often you’re completely out of range, or there’s so many NPCs brabbling that you can’t make anything out anyway and suddenly the questlog fills up with “talk to so and so” quests, with no relation of its context (which imo is the real crime here).
That’s not what radiant quests are tho
Radiant quests are just finding 3 slurm-slushes for the NPC, and they are in 1 of 5 predefined locations, and the reward is either 25 gold or 75 xp.
The next quest is a quest to kill a randomly generated NPC, also in 1 of the same predefined 5 locations, for 34 gold or 99xp.
It’s just a few objects getting called in a class in order to keep things “fresh”. But I’d argue that it’s bad game design in order to make the world feel more alive. Deep Rock Galactic took the AI director from L4D2, the randomness of minecraft and its materials, and the classes of TF2, and took radiant quests to their ultimate conclusion. And it’s great.
Which is how the mission boards in Starfield work, the random ones you get from NPCs talking around you are almost always more in-depth then that from my almost 40 hours in Starfield thus far.
I’m very aware of what a radiant quest is as I’ve put thousands of hours into Bethesda games and they’ve done a much better job with Starfield in my experience thus far.
Additionally, comparing Starfield to L4D or Deep Rock Galactic simply doesn’t make sense. I’ve played both (L4D quite a bit more out of the two) and you literally can’t compare the gameplay objective between those and Starfield or beth games in general
“HYUCK! BUY SLURM-SLUSH! GET 5 FOR 3, A LIMITED TIME ONLY!”
Objective added: Buy Slurm-Slush.
Ugh, they are bringing back radiant quests? Did they learn nothing from Skyrim? Bare minimum, radiant quests have to be BETTER than Deep Rock Galactic missions. But better to just not have them at all, a la Baldur’s Gate 3.
Hey thanks to radiant quests I now know that there is “wildlife” on Luna. Isn’t that awesome?!
It doesn’t matter if you are on Jemison right next to New Atlantis, the capital of the universe, or on some random moon in nowhere, you’ll get the same abandoned buildings with spacers/pirates/mercenaries in them. And literally zero of them will have any sort of story or writing attached to them. Walking around on random planets is unbelievably repetitive.
I just played two hours and called it quits as I was walking, jumping, and hovering in “mid air” on Luna. No Sun to see, but the Luna Surface was … illuminated and the features threw somehow shadows? Where is the light coming from? Why is there no conversation of moment? This is truly Skyrim in space.
I feel like Starfield should have removed the space travel mechanics. It could instead have opted for Mass Effect style travel menu…
Also, they could have gone for a handful of highly detailed planets.
I think the most fun I’ve had has been the spaceship building. I’ve only done a bit of space combat, but the spaceship builder while not perfect (like the inability to rotate parts) I quite liked.
the spaceship builder while not perfect (like the inability to rotate parts)
Please tell me you’re exaggerating for humorous effect
No, best you can do is flip a part so that the connector is on the other side. But if a part is meant to connect on a side connector, there’s no way to attach it to a top connector or bottom connector. Parts cannot be rotated.
Nope, you can flip some parts. But you can’t rotate them. So, for example some parts can only be attached to the sides and others to the top or bottom. (or sometimes just the bottom)
There’s quite a few videos on youtube showing this now.
I have the Frontier module at the back and its blank ass is just sticking out with absolutely nothing to attach to it that wouldn’t look like an eyesore or remove the shower. Like, just give me the ability to slap my fuel tank there or maybe a little radiator or something. There definitely need to be more options.
Still, I agree. While it has some shortcomings (like lacking descriptions & previews), the ship building and consequently being able to walk & fly around in and with your ship is amazing.
Outer Wilds had a few planets but it was still fun
Removed by mod
Yep. It was because Outer Wilds’ planets were all hand-crafted. There are barren portions of each of them, but that just exists to showcase the parts with people, ruins and clues on them.
If it was boring, nobody would want to visit the Moon or Mars IRL, and yet… People do want to do that. 🤷🏻♂️
Of course, in the game even the “empty” planets are not actually empty. There are plenty of POIs to find from wrecked spaceships to clandestine bases to naturally forming caves. You just can’t find them without landing and walking around. Sometimes for hours, because the planet is huge and you can only explore it on foot.
You understand there are scientific pursuits on mars and the moon IRL that don’t translate to Starfield in any shape or form, right?
That’s what my entire second paragraph is for.
Insist all you want, Bethesda, it doesn’t make it true
I purchased this game last week but I have not had a chance to play yet. Will Xbox/Microsoft refund my purchase? These reviews are making it pretty clear that I don’t want to play this game.
Maybe play the game yourself and draw your own opinions?
Honestly, play it for yourself. People love to hate.
I’m loving the game and am over 50 hours in.
Then why did you buy it lol
You should ask xbox/Microsoft about their refund policy.
Dude don’t listen to these shmucks. I’ve had no expectations and this is easily one of my favorite games I’ve played in a long time. Everything is amazing and beautiful. It’s stunning. If you liked skyrim and fallout you’ll love this game.
There’s going to be a few tweaks needed with mods (local maps and better menus) but other than that you can’t ask for much more. This game is immaculate. People complain and then say there’s more depth in no man’s sky lol
Yeah, I was just able to get about 3 hours of gameplay yesterday. Here are my observations so far.
Combat is excellent for a Bethesda game. I’ve done the flight tutorial, showed a lot of promise until I found out you cannot control the ship’s approach or landing on the planet. I can only pick a predetermined spot to land on. That’s a bummer. Maybe later in the game I’ll have more control of the ship.
Everything has to load. I don’t understand why except others have mentioned it is a limitation of the engine. So be it. The constant loading screens break the immersion for me.
The ship and parts of the game feel like a rip off of NMS and Elite Dangerous. Specifically the ship system management.
The visuals are excellent.
The beginning of the story seemed kind of weak. I touch a piece of metal, blackout and then this complete stranger just hands over his ship.
However, I’ve been made aware that the first 15 hours or so of gameplay are tedious, so, I’ll keep at it in hopes that things get better.
I am also well aware that playing this game 2 hours at a time doesn’t help. Unfortunately, that’s the time I have. So I should reach the 15 hour mark in about a week or two.
I never played elite dangerous but I did NMS. I’ve also played tons of space themed games and I guess ship design gets kind of mushed together, it’s hard to come up with something unique.
The beginning of all Bethesda games have always been a little weak in my opinion. Other than new vegas. It’s one of those “the story opens up” kind of scenarios for me. It’s rich if you have the time to read and listen to the dialog.
As for the loading screens I’m baffled of your experience. I literally have ZERO loading times. Everything is nigh instant. The only time I get a loading screen is on fast travel and that gives me hardly enough time to read the one screen tip. But I’m also playing on a 6900 xt video card and a Samsung NVME 1TB ssd. I wish I got a 2tb one lol.
You are correct! I was wrong. I’ve made it to the first terrormorph and have explored 80% of the outposts/planet and I find the story to be pretty good so far.
I also misrepresented my experience with the loading times. What I should have said is that traveling to and from the surface with loading screens breaks the immersion for me. Additionally, I don’t think it’s a deal breaker.
The visuals and the atmosphere is fantastic.
And lastly, I agree the beginning was pretty weak.
Haha you’re exploring literally just the surface of your first planet.
What I recommend for you and everyone playing this game is to just focus on the main quest up to the 3rd quest “into the unknown” and once you finish that then do side quests. While doing all of that I still explored a dozen or so POI and looted everything I can. Sold everything I can in Atlantis. If I have over 10k of loot to sell I go to trading authority in the well.
But yeah Atlantis! 3rd quest. Once that’s done everything is going to start becoming revealed. Including how important and game changing skills are. So many open up tons of new playstyles! Just unlocking security opens up tons of items in unlocking. Which I actually don’t mind compared to skyrim lockpicking. Then I unlocked level 1 persuasion and that opened new dialog in certain areas.
Oh and for sure get boost pack training!!! That should be your very first skill.
Piloting allows new classes of ship to be p piloted.
Starship design (and oh yes you can make your very own starship!)
Weapon engineering. Omg so much. I’m only lvl 20 and I’ve put in over 25 hours already. I love this game. So immersive
Thanks for the tips! I’m happy I was wrong about my initial impressions.
@Aermis @Fapper_McFapper This all sounds like great advice, but I can’t get past that simmulator training thing. 😞
Like the first beginning of the game? The mining mission? What’s stopping you?
