Starfield - Bethesda's new space IP: will probably be full of fun and easily trackable bugs

How do you think Starfield will turn out?

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Heres my rambling impressions of the game so far. I have played for about 37 hours and am level 36. I did not expect to put these kind of hours in and neglect my life, but the game has been an utter pleasure to immerse myself in.

My biggest complaint about the game is the romanceable companions. Bethesda gives you an entire pirate faction, and doesnt give you a single main story companion that can overlook crimes. Every single one of them dislikes crime in some way, and they will all threaten to leave you multiple times if you side with the pirates. Its really annoying and basically made me stick with Vasco the entire time

Not done with all of these. I completed Crimson Fleet and Rangers.

The fleet was fun, I really liked the pirates and the search for the treasure, great reward at the end as well. The last quest was intense, make sure you have a decent ship for it, and all of your choices in that quest line leading up to it can make it a helluva lot easier. I liked killing the Sysdef glowniggers at the end.

Rangers, standard big city trying to take my land story. Was good, but predictable, rewards kinda sucked and felt shorter than the fleet

Ryujin, I am in the middle of. Sems like they are the thieves guild equivalent, lots of sneaking and corporate espionage

UC, I skipped and just started. Seems like its the fighters guild equivalent, lots of fighting monsters

Main quest, I am almost done with. Rewards are great, the spells are pretty over powered, especially FUS RO DAH (gravity push). The push has single handedly carrieed me against some much higher level enemies

Love this. Its not a sim like X, its very arcadey. Laser down shiels, blast down the hull with physical. It can get very hectic when its you against 5 or 6 other targets. Do not skimp on upgrading your ship, money is fairly easy to get, make sure you levelyour ship skill so you can pilot higher class vessels. You will be given a lot of free ships as well, I just randomly landed at a planet, found a merc base, and stole their class b ship, you will end up having a small collection after a few hours.

Melee blows. Its strong as hell, but its like skyrim if you only used 1 hand with a dagger. Theres no shields, no 2 hands, no variety. You can get some crazy knives that knock guys down, or axes that put random debuffs on guys, but its so boring. You end up running up to guys and shanking them like its a prison yard.

The guns are a different story. I am still discovering new ones and they all feel great. You can tell they took the criticisms of FO to heart and worked on improving the shooting. Some guns are just pallet swaps of fallout weapons (theres a straight up las rifle), but some like the shot guns just feel so good to shoot. I wish there were more physics on them, I feel like the shotgun should literally blow a guy into space at low grav.

I have not experimented with the customization at all. I keep finding new legendary guns to play with and havnt stuck with one long enough to mod it.

I keep getting distracted with new quests. The side quests can range from 2 minutes to 2 hours, and they throw a lot of these at you. I will be running through neon and overhear like 5 rumors that all get added to my log. I HIGHLY recommend maxing persuasion, you can talk your way through basically every side quest, avoiding either combat, bribes or doing some busywork. Ive enjoyed the writing for a lot of it, no real complaints besides the voice acting which ranges from great (Sheogoraths VA)to pretty fucking bad (basically every asian NPC)

Because the game throws so many side quests at you I havnt gotten a chance to do any real exploration. I will sometimes land on a planet just to see and then find a small dungeon or something. The game likes to trigger events when you arrive in system, so theres generally something to do everytime you gravjump in.

This is where the grinding comes in. I havnt touched this shit, I also hated the settlement stuff in FO4. I have tons of stuff waiting to use on my ship but I always find I am missing some base component. Once I get through the main quest I am going to sit and get a few going.

Lets start with the UI. It blows. I wish I could see the galaxy like a list and not have to navigate this 3d plane to figure out where the hell I want to go. Luckily the game gives you a button to just press and fast travel. I use this a bit to much, it can feel a bit strange jumping from Neon to Akilla city.

The graphics are a mixed bag for me. I am on series x, so 30 fps. I have stockholm syndrome with it after 30 hours though, and havnt been bothered by the low fps, although seeing people playon PC makes me REALLY want to pick it up on there. I will see though, I mainly got it on xbox to play on xcloud on my steam deck.

The game has a funny habit of putting in low poly shit in random places. Like this wall and brazier below.

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Its bethesda, its buggy as shit. I have had 2 hardcrashes on series x, both while loading a new area. My personal favortite glitch has been taking off in my space ship and watching my companion get flung from it at a million miles an hour.

Theres some not fun ones though. NPCs in chairs are still glitchy, like old games. NPCs assigned to you rship can get locked into dialogue loops with NPCs that are still trapped at the lodge. Ive had to redo entire combat sections because my ship wouldnt dock. I also get a lot of underground camera shots like the ones below.
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TLDR; Its fun. Is it perfect? No not at all. But playing it makes me feel like I am playing Oblivion or Skyrim again, its hot chicken soup on a cold day. When people say "cozy" games, these are the kind of games I think of. Its totally enveloped my life this weekend, and I can anticipate putting another 100 hours into it easily. The companions suck, the side quests are fun, and the gameplay loop keeps asking you to stay for just "one more system".

BONUS: Heres Mr. Snead, he oversees security for a rich women that is building a town for ex cons to rehabilitate them.

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Mega Black said:
Absolutely not. What Bethesda wound up doing was utterly destroying a passionate and totally unique subculture that had sprung up around modding their game, exploiting and alienating everyone who wanted to create mods or download them. Like most passion projects, the second you introduce money it all goes to complete shit.

And the cut modders would get was ridiculously low. Most of the money was going straight to Bethesda/Valve

Honestly there wasn't enough blowback. Shit like the creation club should have gotten the same treatment.
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Couldn't agree more. Creation Club is also pretty much paid mods, or at least everyone saw it as Bethesda's second attempt at the time. Somebody did the math or dug something up and they found that the CC authors weren't paid very much (iirc they got a lump sum before working on it, not paid by the hour), that and the time they had to develop the content is likely why the CC's offerings are so unimpressively small in scope despite some of these authors being very talented.
 
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Gravity resets to normal inside large buildings on low-gravity planets. God forbid players will be having fun with their jetpacks.
 
I need to grab a screenshot of it, is fucking vitilago in this game? I came across an NPC where in some lighting it looked like they had a skin disease. How come they can cure eye issues (no glasses) but not the disease that caused MJ to bleach?!
 
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CHARizard said:
I need to grab a screenshot of it, is fucking vitilago in this game? I came across an NPC where in some lighting it looked like they had a skin disease. How come they can cure eye issues (no glasses) but not the disease that caused MJ to bleach?!
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Yes, its the latest ESG pander.

New Game Plus is at least a little bit changed. The story ends with reddit transhumanism, as expected. Story really tries to be some big thing but it just sucks. Those leaks about a ringworld are fake, and the creators of the artifacts is not the humans, its 'up for interpretation', which is essentially a quote from yourself, that you meet at the center of the universe
 
CHARizard said:
The guns are a different story. I am still discovering new ones and they all feel great. You can tell they took the criticisms of FO to heart and worked on improving the shooting. Some guns are just pallet swaps of fallout weapons (theres a straight up las rifle), but some like the shot guns just feel so good to shoot.
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Name 5 criticisms of the gunplay in FO4 and, more importantly, how they improved upon these criticisms in Starfield.
 
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NPZCC said:
Name 5 criticisms of the gunplay in FO4 and, more importantly, how they improved upon these criticisms in Starfield.
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I would need to go back to FO4 and compare on controller (and 30 fps lol). Guns feel "snappier" here if that makes sense? The enemies do feel like they react to getting shot more, at least the human ones. They definitely sound better, I love the mag guns zippy noise.

Its still not amazing, the FOV in particular kills me. I would love to see comparisons between the guns of FO and Starfield, because I know that the laser rifle is just a copy paste job.
 
CHARizard said:
I would need to go back to FO4 and compare on controller (and 30 fps lol). Guns feel "snappier" here if that makes sense? The enemies do feel like they react to getting shot more, at least the human ones. They definitely sound better, I love the mag guns zippy noise.

Its still not amazing, the FOV in particular kills me. I would love to see comparisons between the guns of FO and Starfield, because I know that the laser rifle is just a copy paste job.
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Dunno what "snappier" means, but the aim down sights feels worse compared to FO4, it's a "jerky" transition instead of a smooth one.

In "modern" shooters, guns usually have multiple reload animations based on whether or not the mag is empty or still has rounds in it, Starfield doesn't bother with this. FO4 had mods that added this system years ago. Some of the animations modders have made for guns in FO4 look and sound better than all of the gun animations for Starfield. Example. This video is 2 years old.

In terms of "enemy reactions" in FO4 you could shoot people in the arms and they would drop their guns, or shoot them in the legs and it would cripple them, shoot one leg and they would limp, shoot both and they would fall to the ground. If they had stimpacks they would use them to fix themselves. Is any of this in Starfield?

How do you feel about the complete lack of visuals in terms of damage to enemies? None of the "elemental" attacks do any actual visual damage to enemy models. Even the bullet holes are barely visible. FO4 had an entire limb explosion/slicing system. Shotgun a guy in the head, and it would explode. Do any of the laser weapons disintegrate people in Starfield? When you shoot robots, do giant chunks of them fall off? In FO4 if you blew off an enemy robot's legs, they would crawl towards you and try to self destruct. Do the robots in Starfield do anything like this?

How does the enemy variety compare to FO4?
 
NPZCC said:
How does the enemy variety compare to FO4?
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Humans with the occasional mounted turret or robot. There are alien creatures but they are only on planets with life and they seem pretty basic with spit attacks and melee, and they are never in any of the dungeons I did.

You lose all your items in NG+ btw, you only keep your level and skills, everything else gets removed.


Here is one last bug the game gave me. I'll probably play it in a couple years after there are a bunch of mods, but as of right now the game is too gameplay loop driven and everything is 'radiant', so I just find it boring. Just the main quest was 10-12 hours total.
 
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God the colors in this game as so washed out I find it hard to be able to see shit in front of me, its like early 2000's cod brown or complete darkness 90% of the time
quaawaa said:
Dr Disrespect wasn't sponsored by Bethesda because he is too based:
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Kinda expect this to deliberately avoid people like jim sterling trying to make this hoggywartz 2.0 due to that one schizo employee, but Bethesda doesn't realize that dealing with influencers like this made any shit unavoidable

 
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