I have quite a few hours into the game, and honestly not that many complaints. The comments about vast empty worlds are spot-on, though. When I finished my initial playthrough, I did most of the quest lines, but I still hadn’t visited the majority of the solar system.
There are something like 100 planets, but the game doesn’t give you any reason to go to most of them.
That was the atmosphere they wanted in the game. It’s space, it’s large and empty, they wanted you to feel that.
Unfortunately, they didn’t do a good job, or it just doesn’t work with the play style people want.
I can definitely understand that. I think my complaint in more about the fact that all these big empty planets exist in the game, but there’s no reason to go there. How about adding another dozen artifacts and making the player search around the planet for them (land vehicles would be nice here). Or have a few crashed ships where you can scavenge epic weapons or ship upgrades, if you find them.
There’s so much they could have done while still keeping the “empty” atmosphere. It kind of feels like the added so many planets just to make the map bigger.
It wouldn’t feel as empty or as “realistic” if there was remnants of civilization everywhere. I don’t entirely agree with it either, but that’s their vision. Some people will enjoy the ambiance while others want little cookies everywhere.
That’s fair. I also just realized that the game is set just a few hundred years after the invention of interstellar travel. It wouldn’t exactly be realistic to have stuff everywhere. Even real human civilizations on Earth still have areas of untouched land.
I’m sure they could have figured out something lore wise to make it more interesting, but than they would be going against their vision unfortunately.
I was hoping this game would have better space battles myself.
Sucks that making the game fun and engaging was contrary to the vision, but I dont find that defense overly compelling.
If it was a quick 1-6 hour max art game? Maybe. But for a bethesda game billed as having thousands of hours of content and “the last game you will ever need” style marketing? Probably not a good idea for that to have been the products vision.
I completely agree. I’m not attempting defending them or anything, merely providing their perspective.
I could excuse the lack of exploration if getting there was a journey myself, but yes for the scope and what they peddled the game to be. Empty isn’t conducive to other parts of their vision. Almost seems like the choose the lesser of two evils in a sense.
I mean every planet has something interesting or unique about it.
Could look for signs of water, of extinct life, try to find the cause of weird rock formations. Prospect for rare materials.
Like we do with every planet atm irl.
I finished my time with the game after 150 hours. Enjoyed the hell out of it, but it has flaws.
It’s not as bad as many will have you believe.
The two games with the most play time in my library are Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077, both of which received some serious negative reviews. I think that for AAA titles that are significantly hyped up before release, people will shit on the game no matter how good it is.
To be honest, it makes me angry at times. I write software; not games, mostly utilitarian programs for a specific business-related task or for my own use at home. I know how much time and effort goes into developing and testing a program so that it doesn’t explode when users of varying technical skill levels use it. The fact that people are so critical is really disrespectful to the countless programmers, visual artists, audio engineers, etc that go into making a full-scale game. Just enjoy the fact that you have a visually stunning and fun experience.
I’m also a swe and I think this is a dishonest take. I agree there is so much work that goes into game making, more so than I could ever imagine at my job, but at the end of the day they are making a promise and putting out a product. If the product is unfun, buyers have the right to be upset (within reason of course). I put about 40 hours into starfield and not a single one of them I would consider fun. I even googled “when does starfield start being fun” because I’ve played plenty of games that get fun after hour 10 or whatever. Just as an aside I put collectively over multiple consoles and pcs 1000+ hours into skyrim so I’m no stranger to Bethesda
I agree completely with you. I’m also a software developer.
It’s super “mid.”
Also, the “loading breaks” are ass. Specifically, the load screen you have to go through to enter Constellation.
The lack of remote quest turn in forced so many loading screens too. Poor design.
I’m using an SSD to play Starfield and the amount of loading screens is absolutely insane. I can’t complete a simple quest without sitting at the loading screen multiple times. I stopped playing because I felt like I was sitting at loading screens (or simply traveling places) rather than shooting, looting, or talking.
The first ~30-45 of the game was really broken. NPC’s didn’t care if you shot them/had not effect, voice lines were poorly thought-out, and it felt extremely hallow. The rest of the game is okay. I’m a big what Bethesda makes with their engine (antiquated as it might be), and while I hated FO76, the map was really neat. I’m a big fan of the amount of interactivity you can have with objects in their games. Their quests are usually interesting, and their worlds are typically filled with interesting characters. I love how they make the environment feel “lived in”, little things, like items stored in containers that make sense given the diary entry an NPC wrote.
This game is not fun. The shooting mechanics are okay, but the space battles feel like a mini-game, and the exploration is less satisfying than NMS by a mile.Trading is a joke, object value doesn’t seem to matter to vendors, vendors don’t have enough money. Apart from some very specific faction quests, the quests are not very entertaining and add little to the overall game experience. There are tons of bugs. I loaded my save the other day, since I have put down the game for a couple of months, not only in about 10 minutes of playing did one of my companions not know how to travel in my ship, they didn’t wear their suit in an unbreathable environment, I also could not find the “distortion” field while trying to find a monolith. It never triggered. I tried for 10 minutes and gave up. Performance is bad, and it’s even worse for Nvidia users. I have been the staunchest defender of the loading screens, as they didn’t bother me for the first ~50 hours, but it gets old. I end up using fast travel all the time to get back to my ship not because I am trying to hurry, but travel on inhabitable planets feels like a chore.
Previous games like FO3, FO:NV, and FO4, felt like the player had more freedom to explore because you could pick a direction and just starting walking, and know you are going to find something unique and fun to explore/learn/fight. SF does not have that feeling. The procedural POI’s feel like tech demos. After you have found a couple space farms/labs/oil rigs, etc. you have seen them all.
I heard POIs even had identical journal logs
Yes, a lot of POIs are exact copies, down the same same loot, building layouts, and audio logs.
If I were to take a guess, they are probably “randomly” rotating between a few manually-generated logs, but I haven’t spent the time investigating every corner of duplicate sites.
some suits must be doing a lot of yelling lmao
I’ve put about a hundred hours into Starfield so far and I’ve really enjoyed it once I sort of realized how you’re “supposed to” play the game, but yeah, it has serious flaws.
It’s just disappointing because Starfield has truly awesome potential - I love the ship-building, the combat feels great, exploring the unique dungeons (specially the space stations) is almost as fun as exploring dungeons in an Elder Scrolls game.
But all enemies basically feel the same; they’re guys with guns. And while different enemy types are more likely to use different types of guns, it doesn’t appear that any enemy type (pirates, ecliptics, va’ruun, even UC and Freestars) is hard-locked into certain weapons, which would help the different enemy types have more uniqueness.
The aliens are also horribly boring, especially since the vast majority aren’t even hostile and practically none pose any kind of threat.
