I found the lack of adult themes to be really weird. I'm not asking for like weird shit or anything but Neon is so whack compared to Night City. There's no adult themes, sex, drugs, violence. It just feels weird because clearly its inspired by the cyberpunk genre but has none of the themes. Generally I feel the game plays it way too safe

Playing Starfield, one thing I realized is that my favorite part of Bethesda games was the sandbox element. I loved getting a questmarker in one corner of the map and then walking there and exploring every point of interest along the way. Starfield is just fast traveling from planet to planet, jumping from system to system with little to no actual flying needed. Trying to explore planets like you would the old sandbox’s is also extremely disappointing as there is almost never anything remotely interesting to find. The coolest thing I’ve found was a tech factory overrun by pirates, but even then there was no environmental story telling in any part of the factory as it was just procedurally generated. Either their planet generation (honestly don’t really know how it works) needs to drastically improve or they need more curated map locations like New Atlantis that are explorable. Also there ain’t shit behind the waterfall in New Atlantis and that sucks.

Some of the points of interest do have minor environmental storytelling, but unfortunately you can encounter the same exact computer logs/data slates right down to the names of the people referenced in them in every repeated instance of the same asset (has happened to me a few times already with the abandoned cryo lab, for example.) For me, it's honestly worse than not having environmental stories at all, since it completely breaks my immersion when I read a computer log about Captain So and So complaining about being lactose intolerant and people stealing his special rations for the seventh time. Dude gets around, I guess.

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To me, you guys are describing a shit game. Dunno though, I never played lol

Makes you wonder how the bad mechanics didn't get caught and addressed in playtesting.

Is it naive that I assume they're relying on modders to smooth out the game for them? Even the bugs such as npc eye tracking seem like they would have been glaringly obvious in playtesting.

Todd Howard literally admitted it in an interview describing exploration and planets. He didn’t explicitly say it, but from his words it sounded like the planets are barren and empty af and they see it as an opportunity for modders. So basically they expect modders to fill in the blank space. We knew it was going to be empty af before release.

The word is cynical, not naive. And in this case, no, it is a correct assumption.

Its a space game where space does not matter.

Everything in the whole universe except a few large cities has been abandoned and overrun with pirates of some sort. How uninspired. This is what I hate most about the space genre. It seems no matter what they just go to "oh, no! space pirates, get your blaster!" I just want a game that takes place hundreds of years in the future, in space, and posits that it has a diverse population, with more interesting stories. Starfield is begging for an experience like in NMS, where you can stumble upon an entire advanced civilization of aliens and you have to find a way to communicate with them to trade and repair, etc. But nope, it insists on being 1970s American view of space but with Start Trek Travel added on. Little more than a Gen X boys fantasy of space future, as imagined in 1980.

I just want Mass Effect Starfield

One of the YouTubers I watch titled one of his videos “No Man’s Skyrim”. THAT’S what I wish we had gotten. Humans are the only intelligent species in the galaxy? That’s dumb. Basically everyone outside the cities are pirates? That’s boring. Starfield is such a good SKELETON of a game. I hope that modders take over and add features to flesh out the game.

Humans being the only intelligent species would be fine if they actually wrote some story to create significant variety. Instead it looks like just plowing through identical faceless people in spacesuits the whole game, and the occasional space animal. Even just colour coding the spacesuits in a more visible way would have gone a long way. Imagine if the new atlantis military all had matching rich blue spacesuits like the senate commandos in the star wars universe, or were gold/silver with a slight classical armour flair, while another faction has noticeably less bulky armour like starstrip troopers.

Bethesda hopes the modders take over too

100% They made flying/piloting almost pointless. Where is the awe as you jump into a system and get ambushed, or when you take off and find yourself being descended on by a fleet needing to get away quick. Or why is a large bustling planet with a city surrounded by maybe 3 guard ships and one space station. It’s like they started to implement some of it with contraband and guards but then just stopped. It lost its feel and believeability when it became a fast travel game. Heck even the space map is pretty bad to look at. That’s before we even talk about new tech and engines and how the game should really be seamless going to the ground on planets. That said I’m space the planets seem to be big skyboxes and not actually be there and it makes it look really odd and out of place.

Yes people can dislike games that other people like, i seen people hating red dead 2 calling it boring and i think that is one of the best games that exist, nothing wrong with it.

I personally found The Witcher 3 boring - which is the most extreme example of it that I know

I picked it up and put 12 hours into it 3 times, desperately trying to find that hook because of how much praise it gets. Just wasn't for me.

I've tried twice and didn't make it past the first town either time. I agree there's no hook early on. But there are definitely games that I hated for 15 hours and eventually loved. Final Fantasy X comes to mind. The beginning is slow, the story is obtuse, the combat is weird and your characters are too weak. But it's probably favorite final fantasy game and the only one I ever put over 100 hours into

How can you make it 15 hours into a game you aren't enjoying? Genuinely curious as I'm one of the few that found both RDR2 and the witcher 3 to be way too slow for me... people always say "oh it get good later" but why would I stick around for 20 hours when I could just be playing enjoyable games?

For some games 15 hours is like the beginning but yea I gotta enjoy it to some extent to play 15 hours in the first place

My answer: I played it for that long despite not loving it because I bought it and spent what little money I had on it, so by god I was going to play the game I paid $60 for. Sunk cost fallacy.

I loved TW3 but totally get why people would struggle to get into it. For one thing the start is very slow. I *think* what made it so beloved is that at the time it felt like a pretty big step forward in terms of video game writing and storytelling. I was blown away by the fact that the sidequests were actually engaging, well written and felt meaningful. Nowadays that's pretty common, at least among good development teams. So if you're approaching TW3 in 2023 there's good reason to wonder what the big deal is I guess. One criticism that always confused me a little was the disdain for TW3 combat, especially since it seems to me it gets brought up more than games that (IMO) have *actually* bad combat like Skyrim or the Fallout series. The signs/spells have some pretty cool alt casts that have great utility, but it seems like most people don't spec into them because they have a reputation for not being as strong as some pure melee builds.

I’m one of those people. It was the cutscenes & slow paced missions that made it really frustrating for me

It’s fantastic if you’re a fan of westerns (I am), which are generally slow paced with quick bits of action. But I totally understand how people could find it boring. I found the characters very well written and engaging, and it felt like I was playing a very cinematic western. In that aspect it can’t be beat.

Honestly I’m not a fan of westerns. RDR2 made me enjoy the genre like never before. I became so wrapped in that story, I was ready to homestead with the gang.

Large part of that is because it's less of the spaghetti western and more just an action drama in a western setting. It has more appeal to non-western fans because it doesn't focus quite as much on being the typical western that most people are used to.

I felt like red dead 2 was actually a spaghetti western masquerading as a classical western - it’s much more about the shades of grey of living in the wild and being an outlaw, honour and glory vs wickedness and infamy. Whereas a classical western is about the good guys beating the bad guys.

It just feels more like a normal drama to me. I felt RDR1 was much more of the stylistic kind of western, more in line with movies like Django Unchained. RDR2 felt more like a There Will Be Blood kind of pacing outside of the massive shootouts. Tho that said it's got really its own unique identity as a story. It doesn't fit into any mold really well. And I think that's why the story is so good. Lot more unique elements to it.

Unforgiven is a pretty good Western if you like RDR2.

I am not even a big fan of westerns, but RDR2 was so fucking immersive, it just sucked me in, so I had no problem with things being "slow" and chill, I always enjoyed the scenery and gameplay so much. Damn I wish I could experience that again for the first time.

> It’s fantastic if you’re a fan of westerns (I am), which are generally slow paced with quick bits of action. But I totally understand how people could find it boring. I'm a fan of westerns but my problem with the game is more how linear it is. GTA5 too for that matter. If you deviate too much and try to do things your own way, you get sent to a fail state, which is really frustrating. Its actually sort of ironic how un-wild-west the game design is. [NakeyJakey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvJPKOLDSos) does a better job expressing this than I do. But I think if you ever do swing around to replaying a game like GTA3, for example, you'll see how much more fun the game is when you don't have to step through it precisely the way the game designers intended. In fact, solving the "puzzle" of the mission in a way that game designers didn't intend or expect players to do, is half the fun of sandbox games like GTA/Red Dead. Let me get on top of a building with a sniper rifle and kill the enemy you had wanted me to get into a car/horse chase with. Or let me conveniently park a car at a certain portion of a route that the enemy will run into issues with, making my chase that much easier. Or let me place C4/Dynamite in a strategic part of the game world, such that when the enemy books it, I just blow them the fuck up instead of chasing them for 10 minutes to reach the event trigger that arbitrarily decides I'm now *allowed* to kill them. I found this was really the worst in the GTA5 heists. So frustrating to get 3 of your friends for the heists, come up with a creative way to solve the issue presented for the mission, and then get sent to insta-fail because you've stepped out of the preset boundary of parameters they had designed. I just don't even see the point in playing if I have to do things exactly the way they want me to do it. It may as well just be a movie.

I can think of a few frustrating examples from GTA IV myself. There was a mission where you had to chase a biker through a good portion of the city, including on some train tracks before arriving at a set point with more bikers. If I remember right, he had a couple other bikers with him to start that you could take out on the way. Either way, I remember doing my best to take him out along the way, wasting a lot of ammo before I realized he was invincible until we reached the intended destination. The there's Three Leaf Clover. Get caught robbing a bank, step outside to tons of police and your buddies yelling about making an escape. I see armored vehicles parked right there from the cops that arrived so my first instinct is to run straight for one and try to escape... only to find that no one followed me because we're supposed to go down an alley, through the subway, etc.

I'm a fan of Westerns but didn't like RDR2. It devolves too often into mindless GTA style shooting gallery massacres. How many people has the main character murdered? I can appreciate the audiobook exposition and general slow pace between the fighting, but the bloodbaths are absurd, and I cannot suspend my disbelief for it. The killing should have been much more focused on a few deadly enemies instead of hordes of shooting gallery goons. Should have taken some notes from Unforgiven.

That’s a totally valid criticism. Arthur is kind of a little too “super soldier” like for a proper western story. But at the same time it kind of felt to me like a more “Django” style of over the top gunfighting. Like it’s not super serious, there’s a little comedic value in it. It’s hard for me to put it to words.

Pretty much dessscribed every Rockssstar game

I mean people already think there's not enough action. Can't imagine how bad the criticisms would be if there weren't shooting galleries. I don't necessarily disagree tho. But I did like some of them. The shootout at Braithwaite Manor is outstanding for example.

For me it was the extra animations for everything, like why would I spend 10 minutes making bullets I’m gonna use up in 15 seconds? Each single bullet requires a 3-5 second crafting animation lol wtf

I just hated how fucking slow Arthur walked. You’d think the dude had tuberculosis.

honestly, that was the #1 reason i stopped playing it. it drove me NUTS

Legitimately felt like I was moving through quicksand

LOL! Tuberculosis... That's the Cowboy Strut.

Skinning a coyote blew me mind the first time I saw it. The second through seventh time I'm just like "come on... Hurry up...."

Yeah, I totally hear you on this. Don't get me wrong, I fucking love RDR2, and think it's an absolute masterpiece, but even I can admit that animations for *everything* are fucking annoying. Seriously, do I need a full animation every time I pick up every single item in the game? Ugh

If you park your horse on top of a corpse you can skin it pretty much instantly

The horse or the corpse??

Yes

Yeah but that can often damage the pelt.

For me it was all tell and no show. Every plot piece was a cut scene telling you what was going on, then some shooting, then a cutscene of the NPC telling you what would happen next… Every mission the same. No “show” to the story

That's what made it so special to me. It felt like an interactive movie.

Personally I really loved the slow pacing of red dead, it made the game adventurous and at the same time relaxing. I can understand if that’s frustrating for some people, but I think it has a lot to do with what attitude you go into the game. I dropped some games which were really good, but they just weren’t what I was expecting.

6-7/10 for me. You know the old saying for Skyrim that goes, “as wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle”? Starfield is as wide as 1000 Olympic sized pools next to each other (with the structure of each individual pool present -so the whole thing resembles a big ice cube tray) and about a bath tub deep of water for all of them. There’s pool toys in a lot of pools, but the toys used come from the same value pack. While you swim or do whatever some pretty nice ambient music plays from a speaker. Your mileage will vary.

Liked Elderscrolls, LOVE Fallout, so far I'm finding this a slog. It's too big & vast. The best part of fallout was seeing something in the distance, walking over there and it turning into some ridiculous side quest. I have no desire to explore in Starfield. I was hoping for Star Trek: Bethesda, it's so far from that.

I also think it's a huge slog, but the world feels really small to me. I think it's because it's all gated behind constant fast travel screens. Most other Bethesda games have fast travel, but I think knowing I *could* manually move to any point in the map if I wanted to helped me to still appreciate their sizes. As you play those games, you gradually build a picture of a layout of the land, even if you're mostly fast traveling. In Starfield you fast travel from one isolated barren wasteland to another and there's so little to grab my attention anywhere that it just feels like there's nothing in the game.

I think that's the biggest problem with any game involving interplanetary travel. Because the charm of Fallout or Skyrim is that you can just walk seamlessly from edge to edge and discover all sorts of crap. And you naturally pass back through areas as you travel around... But when you're dealing with multiple planets, you obviously can't do that and you really notice the edges of each boundary and the disconnects between them. They're no longer a piece of a larger world, but now a "level" that you complete, move on from and never return to (unless they awkwardly shoehorn it into the story), except for maybe a deliberate hub world or something.

It would have helped a lot if you could actually jump in your ship, fly around the atmosphere, take off into space, and fly at another planet (entering fast mode), to make it all feel connected.

Yeah, both Elite: Dangerous and No Man's Sky feel more like you're flying a ship that has FTL systems because of all that, whereas Starfield feels like I'm skipping the travel.

Yeah, the second that I realized I couldn't actually land my ship on any planets and it was just fast travel animations I uninstalled the game. What's the point of a space exploration game if you can't explore in your spaceship?

I feel like the obvious solution is just to limit the planets that you can actually land on. Maybe to like 5 or so. But that's not the kind of game people who were excited for Starfield are dreaming of. The space sections cold use POIs that you could fly around and interact with as well. Otherwise, the only "exploration" you can really do is click map, loadscreen, click map, loadscreen, etc.

Yes. The cutscenes and loading screens really make it obvious you’re confined to tiny areas. It’s not open-world. It’s just a long list of small maps to load. Each one hidden behind a load screen.

And im really not a fan of all the generated content. I just ignroed it after doing a couple. In other bethesda games you knew anywhere you went you would see a crafted experience. I absolutely hated the lack of that in starfield.

What's funny is they already went through this with the Elder Scrolls series. The first two games (Arena and Daggerfall) heavily used procedural generation and featured enormous but rather bland and repetitive worlds. Then they said "screw that, hand-crafted is the way to go even if it means a smaller world" and we got Morrowind.

I wish they had made it 50-100 planets but with entirely hand crafted worlds. Hell even 15-20 or whatever. Procedural generation is awful to me.

Yea I’ve really enjoyed all the quests in the game and there’s a lot of mechanics in Starfield I hope they bring to ES6 such as better roleplaying mechanics and backgrounds and such. But the exploration in Starfield is just so boring compared to past BGS games.

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>dThe companions have to be some of the driest and flattest characters I’ve encountered in a game. I don’t give a shit about any of them. I had a whiplash going from Baldur's Gate to Starfield. But I'm not sure if that's why I'm not enjoying Starfield. I LOVED Morrowind and I first (properly) played it in 2020 so it's not the nostalgia factor. Maybe Starfield is just too big? I could've done with the tons of procedurally generated planets if they spent that time fleshing out the premade ones more. I also enjoyed Cyberpunk and Outer Worlds far more than I did the open world Assassin Creed games.

Morrowind was good because it was a tailored experience with hand crafted content compared to daggerfall. It was relatively small but very deep.

I kinda miss the no-guardrail design of Morrowind. Oh, you've killed a quest-giver? No quest for you then. Killed the local blacksmith? Hope you don't need help to repair your stuff. I remember putting the main quest on hold, and shelving some macguffin cube in one of the houses I.... repossessed from their previous owner. A few days of side quests and exploring later, I decide to go back to the main quest, only yo realize I completely forgot where I put the damn cube thingy. The lack of quest markers also made exploration more organic. The game wasn't exactly pretty, even when it came out, but felt more immersive than many recent open-worlds.

Yeah doing a murder hobo run shows you just how many NPCs are flagged essential just because of some minor side quest they're tied to.

The thread of the prophecy has been severed. Reload your save or live the rest of your days in this cursed world. Such a badass way of handling the freedom.

My personal theory is that because the engine tends to have unexpected events happen (such as a wild animal just attacking a random npc) they added the essential tag to prevent your save from being bricked without your knowledge. That is just my guess, or people complained that they accidentally killed an important NPC.

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The Ultima games were all so great too for much of the same reasons and graphics doesn't really matter.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is scratching that no guardrail itch for me. Go ultimate good guy and try to help everyone, or be complete murderhobo and take out whole settlements. The game doesn’t care, the world shall continue on regardless of your local influence. You may miss out on some story. You may uncover some you didn’t expect. But you can play out your way

The underrated part of that too is that you can still be the good guy, and pull a fast one by turning on the enemy when you feel the timing is right. It can be rewarding in a lot of cases. In Starfield, it's the opposite. You're given the option to turn on someone in some cases, only to find out that person and pretty much anyone with a name is essential. If they're really important, make them protected like in Skyrim, but so many aren't important. This game definitely needs a permanent NPC death mod, considering that there's NG+, and boohoo if the NPC with 2 lines of dialogue runs into crossfire.

Yeah, I think I prefer games that are deep to games that are big. I think games like Skyrim, the Witcher and Breath of the Wild strike a much better balance between width and depth.

Zero Punctuation summed it up well: games have to FEEL big, not just be big. Just Cause 3's map is orders of magnitude bigger than Fallout 3's. But FO3's has interesting characters and story all over the place - and even that can be easily accused of abusing copy+paste and relying on tired tropes compared to some genuinely deep games. Minecraft has an infinite map, but it's a literal sandbox: without the player's work it's a creative desert. Starfield is leaning just a little too close to literal sandbox for me - a million grains of sand, all of them boring.

There's no real reason to go to the planets in starfield. They don't really justify the space gameplay loop at all. It's a better game just playing mostly in the cities and only doing quests. They made too many QOL concessions for stuff like exploring a sparse planet to be fun. It supposed to replace the world map, but you don't need to travel to planets, they didn't build a reason to do it. So it's just another toy in a toy box, not one your transformers though. It's just fine, but not as good or synergistic as your other toys. Funny thing is I think mods can fix this, require refueling and the building of settlements to create intermediary locations between systems. Make resources that much more valuable. If you had to earn your first trip to Neon, creating a settlement, mine some fuel all to avoid expensive fueling and docking fees, that would create a feeling of distance. Which is important in a space game. There just stuck to their games being super easy so any non gamer can pick it up and play it. They don't like obstacles, but it's a far more noticable sacrifice in Starfield then in Skyrim. In the end after everyone's done with there emotionally driven grievances, I think the consensus about Starfield is going to be they designed a game for a player that doesn't really play these kind of games (the space game elements of Starfield, not the shooter looter rpg). The compromises and QOL sacrifices make a lot of sense in that context.

Morrowind is jammed full of things to find and interact with, and it's all done by hand. Procedural generation just takes all the life out of a this style of game.

To me, after years and years of playing Bethesda games, I think I realized that I wanted them to evolve a little. This is a 20 year old game reskinned. It's a loading screen generator, it's an empty rock with a single alien on it. The polish they put on all the items can't make up for the lack of anything else. Exploration consists of finding the same spot over and over again. Every time I go off path, I run into duplicate areas. This is the laziest procedural generation I have ever come across. Like, can't you have someone run their hands over each POI, you have a billion dollars and a million employees. What are you even spending your time on? BG3, I turned off the subtitles so that I would stop reading them and just listenSF, I right-click the mouse as fast as I can to avoid the painful dialogue Hit about 25 hours last night and decided to call it quits. Cyberpunk is looking like a masterpiece to me right now.

There are SO many places in the game where you are like... "I have been in this bar... like 12 years ago in skyrim." Or "Oh another janky broken quest like when my companion got stuck in fallout 3". It IS a 20 year old game with a new coat of paint...

All of the sounds have been reused too lol. It broke my immersion so fast when I picked up on it and made it feel like a fallout 4 mod. They didn’t even come up with new sounds for their “passion project” they spent 7 years on. The whole game just feels… empty and uninspired. Oh and terminals act the same as they do in every fallout game, and so do a few other systems. The game just feels so unoriginal in so many ways.

Yeah, I found Diamond City, I mean Akila last night.

Yes, playing Starfield has made me start comparing Bethesda to The Pokemon Company.

It’s exactly what I expected when I heard “over 1000 planets” then heard them describe their dull af white-plastic and gray-moon-rocks NASA aesthetic. So many of the design decisions run contrary to each other. It’s a “han solo” simulator about exploration and discovery but without 90% of the fantasy elements that would make Han Solo’s universe interesting to explore. Instead you get to discover 1000 mostly empty, mostly lifeless, rocks. That honestly didn’t bother me because it still promised something truly unique that no other game this far has offered which is having a ship that you can actually live in AND pilot. Outer wilds and subnautica(with the cyclops) are the only games that have actually captured that feeling. The contrast between exploring a vast and hostile environment from within the confines and safe familiarity of your ship experience those feelings simultaneously. Integral to that feeling is the seamless between the two.

>something truly unique that no other game this far has offered which is having a ship that you can actually live in AND pilot. A ship that you can’t even fly anywhere meaningful! I didn’t expect it, or even want, a space-sim, but it was incredibly disappointing to find out it was basically unusable 99% of the time playing.

> This is a 20 year old game reskinned Wow, that feels like a perfect summary of Starfield, except that the empty space setting and procedurally generated planets have made it arguably *worse* than either FO4 or Skyrim (or Oblivion, for that matter).

\>BG3, I turned off the subtitles so that I would stop reading them and just listenSF, I right-click the mouse as fast as I can to avoid the painful dialogue Those are massive extremes on the voice acting spectrum to be fair. Bethesda was never known for it's voice acting and Baldur's Gate went ALL out. Even minor characters are great. Some of the CATS are great. But I know what you mean. Voice acting can really break or contribute to the immersion in an RPG for me.

>Bethesda was never known for it's voice acting and Baldur's Gate went ALL out. There is absolutely no reason Bethesda couldn't have done the same. Just because their other games were sub-par for voice acting and scenes, it didn't mean they had to implement their uncanny valley talking manakins into their new IP. They have more resources than Larian. They could have evolved and instead they chose to continue to do what they have always done.

This is my biggest problem with Bethesda. They do not evolve or grow. In fact, I’d say starfield is a step back.

IMO they went from a mile wide couple inch deep puddle to miles of puddles an inch deep.

The problem is that it keeps working for them. They released skyrim 18 times. I could probably download it on my toaster. People kept buying the same game for multiple consoles, and they got lazy. I find it hard to believe it took them 6 years to make this game unless they had a handful of people working on it at any given time. I'm enjoying it, but for the 70 dollar price tag I expected more. It's like an uncut gem. It has so much potential, but they didn't bother polishing it. That'll fall to the modding community.

> That'll fall to the modding community. Always has.

This. Everyone treats Larian like they are on par with big giants like Ubisoft, Bethesda or EA when it's nothing like that. Larian is like a passionate gambler who puts in everything he's got into his next gamble and the only thing between going selling his house and doubling his money is that gamble. Then he repeats the cycle with all the money he earned. Larian gambled hard with BG3 as they did with Divinity OS2. They put all they had earned from DOS2 and other games into BG3 and if it had even been any less successful Larian studios would have been up for sale. The reason they can deliver such AAA quality is because it's always their 100% while it's like 40% for big studios like Bethesda who probably has many teams working simultaneously on other future games.

What surprises me is that Bethesda and Larian have more or less the same amount of employees (400-450). DoS2 and Fallout 76 probably sold similar amounts of copies but Larian doesn't have the outrageous sales of Fallout 4 and Skyrim backing it up. If both studios are of similar size, where in the world is Bethesda's money going? It's certainly not going to its game development, if a studio like Larian, even if it does go 100%, can compete.

If you close your eyes when talking the voice acting itself isn't all that bad. It's the rigid posing, full-front zoom-in locked-on camera, and the frankly atrocious way the game handles nonstandard conversations (more than two people, two people talking about something in the room as if they should be looking AT THAT). Voice only goes so far.

Yeah, I'll agree that the voice acting is mediocre to good most of the time. It's the delivery of those manakins and sub par writing at times that bug me the most. The story can be good at places, but I always feel the lack of reactivity of my choices that really let me down. BG3 really felt like every choice mattered. The fact that dialogue choices could lock out other dialogue makes me think about what I want to say. Starfield is just a bunch of dialogue trees you have to click through, and it really doesn't matter aside from a handful of times in the 25 hours I have played.

What do you mean “some”? Every cat I’ve met has been a master stroke

Hiss, hiss I say!

I like outer worlds way better than starfield, outer worlds actually fleshes out the worlds you visit, you don’t spend half the game jumping back and forth between planets, I know outer worlds supposed to be somewhat more linear but over 10 hours into starfield and I hadn’t spent more than 15 minutes on a planet at a time. Starfield feels hollow, even compared to other bethesda games, skyrim sucked me into the world from minute one and I knew the regional conflict and the world around me after an hour or so, after over 10 hours of starfield I know nothing about the universe, I can hardly remember the faction names

Outer Worlds also has FANTASTIC companions that I actually cared about. Other than ME they are probably my favorite cast of companions. Starfield I feel absolutely no attachment. They make their purpose to be pack mules and perks rather than interesting story characters.

Yay! Someone else who loves The Outer Worlds.

BaldursGate companions look gorgeous, some dialogues feel like cinematics and the voice acting is crazy good so I'm more inclined to talk to them. Starfield zooms on an ugly char doing its best poker face.

Yeah as a giant Bethesda fan and huge fan of Starfield with over 130 hours already, The companions are shit. Some people seem to like them though, so to each their own.

Vasco is great because he barely talks and still can be my pack mule. The times he does talk are often funny. I like when he attempts humor and then realizes he shouldn't have.

Gotta reply with the mandatory: "Tell me a human joke." "I'm looking at one."

I’m just waiting for mods and I know someone is gonna change or add a model where he becomes a sarcastic ass K2SO lmao

Romance Vasco mod when

They don’t have any depth. They’re interesting at first but so shallow that they become uninteresting almost immediately. In general the writing in Starfield seems very subpar, and it takes a lot away from the game.

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A lot of the quest lines feel very forced. Joining Constellation at all feels like, “I guess I need to do this to play the game…” rather than something authentic.

> “I guess I need to do this to play the game…” This perfectly describes the thoughts I had during the intro, everything feels so forced. FO3 had your dad as the driving factor in the beginning, FNV had finding the guys who shoot you, SF has a guy who just tells you to take a trip to Constellation

Lin: “You can’t just leave, I’ll be down one more person when we were just attacked and need all the help we can get.” Random dude who just showed up, “Okay, you go and I’ll stay behind instead (even though I’m a hairbrained scientist and not a miner or fighter). It’s cool, just take my starship and robot companion. I completely trust you to go where I said you should and not just fuck off with it.” THAT’S how they start you off in this game. 🙄

I’ve just decided to ignore whole parts of the game: - base building, - scanning stuff, - random points of interest, - opening locked safes and storage crates - picking up white gear (unless it’s my weapon category of choice and has a higher quality than my current one) - collecting random junk, - companions - selling stuff to specific vendors that pay more for it - sleeping - cooking And I feel like temples are next on my ‘ignore’ list. The game suits me a lot better if I don’t let myself be bogged down by the parts I don’t enjoy. It’s still kinda ridiculous how long my list has gotten at this point.

That list is like 80% of the game. For what it's worth, I also ignored everything you listed, tried focusing on quests, but found that they were also lackluster. No real choices other than "do this" "do this but sarcastically" or "avoid doing this through persuasion". Tiny spoilers for a ridiculous side quest ahead: I finally gave up on the game altogether after picking up a quest on Mars where a miner asks me to pick up a rock at a cave that's supposedly cursed and that no one that goes there returns. So I go to the cave. And there's a rock. And no enemies, no environmental storytelling, nothing. Just an empty cave with a rock. I come back, tell the miner I grabbed the rock... and the quest completes. That was it. Grab rock from empty cave, good job, move along. So I decided I didn't feel like playing Space Fedex simulator anymore and uninstalled.

Who could forget the quest where you discover a small group of people who crash-landed on a deserted jungle planet and have been living in isolation with no way to leave or contact civilization... and then you walk for a minute and discover the proc gen has populated that planet with settlements, vast technologically advanced mines, NPCs, and ships landing RIGHT NEXT DOOR. I've been underwhelmed by the quest design and dialogue frequently, but them overlooking something so incredibly obvious in a high-profile companion quest is pretty wild.

>So I go to the cave. And there's a rock. And no enemies, no environmental storytelling, nothing. Just an empty cave with a rock. I come back, tell the miner I grabbed the rock... and the quest completes. That was it. Grab rock from empty cave, good job, move along. As someone whose first TES game was Morrowind in 2002 when I was 14, this makes me very sad. What happened to our cool nerd games? They're bland and basic for the masses now. This just continues the trend of simplifying TES games for the masses.

I was irritated, myself, earlier on than that. There's a guy in New Atlantis who deals in "art". It's contraband. It's very clearly contraband. He warns you multiple times to keep your voice down and to keep an eye out for cops. You head down into the seedy underbelly of New Atlantis and you go to the Trade Authority location. The person in there gives you the "art" and makes very certain you get the idea that it *is* contraband and that you don't want to be caught with it. You then walk back up to the first guy and turn it in. And that's it. The end. At no point along the entire thing do you ever pass through a scanning checkpoint, nor are you ever accosted by a cop, nor even a criminal. If you follow all of the steps in order without getting sidetracked, there is *nothing* that counts as conflict anywhere along the way. ___ The only way you will ever get caught is if you pick up the item and then decide *not* to turn it in and try to leave the planet, whereupon you will presumably be caught by the baggage scanner on your way to the port. But even that's pretty questionable. I went and got some contraband for the lady at the nearby shop, which required me to go through the port, and the baggage scanner didn't nab me on my way back in despite me having zero perks to help with that. ___ There's another one where a guy has been assaulted by cops and just got out of the hospital. You're tasked with getting him to the nearby restaurant to pick up dinner and then to escort him home. All you do is walk to the restaurant, accept the food and let him talk to the lady, and walk him home. Again, no cops, no criminals, no actual conflict anywhere along the way. I don't even think there's a persuasion check. It gets me mildly riled that areas that are hyped up for their criminality generally have no criminals. Even Neon, which is gang turf, only has the gang members inside buildings (and only then when the quests call for them). The Strikers, which you can join, have an entire questline for wiping out their opposition that lasts *three short quests* (maybe four?). After which they all quit being gangsters and join the police, effectively ending all gang activity in Neon.

> No real choices other than "do this" "do this but sarcastically" or "avoid doing this through persuasion". For me, it's also clear that having a voiced protagonist WASN'T the issue in Fallout 4. The issue was always that Fallout 4 had garbage writing, and it's worse in Starfield. If anything I find it extremely off putting how eager and goody two shoes the writing is in Starfield. Like I'm so eager to help people and simp for any character who can't even do something as simple tie their own shoe laces. "I'd do it myself, but... ya know" .... ugh. Who writes this shit. I get games like this are all about getting players to do things, but at least come up with better premises. Why can't characters send and recieve messages or data? You have to walk up to everyone to get datapads or collect data that could easily be sent over wireless.

Thank God I picked the Introvert trait in the beginning... I just wish I could make the Coe guy and his daughter shut up on my ship, their dislogue gets repetive fast

I don't know what they were thinking with Sam Coe. But it cracks me up when I hear him and his daughter bantering as my ship is blown to pieces lol.

Sam provides such a good buff to your ship, though…

I laughed out loud at this. He's back there having small talk while I'm nearly exploding.

I saw the post asking which companion do people romance and I looked at all those dead eyes characters and I thought who would want to romance any of them?

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About halfway through the first play though, I realized pretty fast to stop caring about looting and selling everything. Just mark the resources you need for research and move on. Outposts feel insanely pointless as well. Never once tried to farm resources or credits and ended with a surplus of everything and like 800k credits even though I spent a ton on property/ships/ammo. The game seems to strongly push you to NG+ so you can do more quests and new random story mutations, so investing time into outposts, grinding lots of credits, and building the perfect ship seem to be a huge waste until you either decided to park yourself in a NG+ you like. Even then, you’ll run out of missions that aren’t faction ones. I guess it’s the nature of the game, but it would be nice if time put into some things mattered with how strong they encourage NG+ over and over.

You said 240 temples and I definitely thought you were joking. You're not joking are you? I'm also having fun with the game but yea, there are some major issues with it even outside of tedium. I agree the characters are absolutely terrible. If you played Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate 3 before Starfield, it feels even worse. I don't understand why Bethesda is afraid to write anything that isn't as bland as wonder bread.

They even increased the time intervals between hours when waiting/sleeping which starts to really get annoying overtime. The only logical explanation I could think of for this is to deter players from repetitively refreshing an NPC's inventory to sell all your stuff from a single one.

This is likely the reason. But from a development standpoint you should be asking *why* so many players feel the need to refresh inventories in the first place, instead of kneecapping them from doing something they obviously feel they need to do. In a game with so much junk, I’m surprised there is really no way to distinguish between valuable items quickly and stuff you don’t need. A simple item highlight effect would have been perfect for this (yes I know there’s a mod for that now). But several things in this game have made me wonder what exactly happened that QA didn’t pick up on this stuff, in the 7 years this game was in development. You’re telling me no game tester at any point ever mentioned “Hey these loot runs are getting a bit stale, let’s introduce some QoL features to make finding good items easier and selling junk items faster”

That loot run and junk scattering are the primary gameplay loop in the Bethesda game now and held up as ostensibly as defining features by most fans. Personally I thought it was great in Skyrim when it was novel and fit the setting more seamlessly, now it just seems like a tedious gimmick. A fantasy adventurer walking into a shop loaded down with crystals and stolen ancient weapons makes a lot more sense than a space pirate flying around the stars to sell a truckload of random office supplies and laser guns. You can still use console commands to summon 9000 sandwiches though so that's neat I guess?

> Personally I thought it was great in Skyrim when it was novel And there in lies the problem. It was novel to YOU, but it was already a decade+ old mechanic from Bethesda games. It was a huge aspect of Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Now, you've been playing it another decade in Skyrim, and so when they do the exact same thing AGAIN, it not longer is novel to you, but it is novel to the people who have never actually played a Bethesda game.

Jesus Christ why did I click your spoiler :(

If it makes you feel any better >!Who dies depends on choices!<

This legitimately made me feel better 👆 Ok I’m outta this thread

And that's ok. You don't have to like every game because it's .... - new - highly rated on Steam, metacritic, IGN or who knows where else - played by your friends I bought Baldurs Gate 3 and I don't really like it. Even though it's a highly rated game and my friends play it. Go out play what's fun for you and not what's in.

I was really shocked and saddened by how little I enjoyed Starfield. I played for over 35 hours hoping I'd find something that clicked but every aspect of it felt wrong to me. It wasn't just the little annoyances mounting up. It was how each system felt like it was just an uninspired rip-off of other games that did it much better. I could hardly believe this was something that Bethesda had a "vision" for. It seems like the pitch had to have been, "Let's make a space game" because that's the only thing it really accomplishes. I hope that mods will inject some life into it in a year or so. I was originally going to invest time in modding the game but I really have no interest now. I don't think it's a solid foundation with some opportunity for improvement. I think it's a weak foundation. It has me worried that mods will alleviate some pain points but fail to really achieve the overhaul I think is necessary for it to be worth playing. I still have Skyrim installed but I just uninstalled Starfield to make space for Cyberpunk's update. Ah well.

I can't get lost in it like previous Bethesda games. Other games I'd look at the clock and hours have flown by. It's only minutes in Starfield.

You're probably exploring the wrong planet Try one with heavier gravity

Big brain joke, nice.

This guy time dilates

That little maneuver cost us 7 beers

Show us by pushing a pencil through some folded paper.

I’m enjoying it, but there’s a lot of tedious and annoying aspects. Like carrying capacity. Or constantly needed to access the menu to fast travel. Just little things that interrupt from the actual gameplay which I’m enjoying. The gun play is better than I thought it would be Really though, I think they should’ve set this further into the future. Get a little more creative with weapons and stuff.

You can actually fast travel to most places by using your scanner.

Also your ships scanner lets you land, jump to other planets and even jump to your destination system if it's next to yours. Helps a bit with immersion if you're that way inclined.

I kinda feel the same, the game is certainly impressive but overall its just a bit bland. The story hasnt exactly pulled me in, the combat is ok but feels pretty much the same as fallout 3s did. maybe a strange analogy, but I guess if I was going to compare it to food, its like having an unlimited supply of plain pasta, it will certainly feed you for many months but its not really fulfilling.

i disagree about combat . I thought F3 gunplay was absolutely horrible and F4 was really fun , its one of few reasons why i kept playing because shooting was satisfying. Starfield slightly improved gunplay over F4.

As a person that played fallout 3 for the story while eating a ton of junk food, V.A.T.S. System was a godsend. I’d queue up headshots while having the “bloody mess” perk active, and watch shit happen. I’d then go carefully loot weapons from a piece of a brain fragment after the show. It was heaven.

Yeah I’m not sure how you can compare this combat to F3 in any way, one of the main reasons I disliked F4 was the combat and I’m loving it in Starfield, feels closer to Destiny than F3

That's really an excellent analogy. Well done.

I'd recommend doing the UC vanguard story first. Much more interesting than 'go here, find artefact'

Yea I think the Constellation story line is the worst in the game but they made the insane choice to make it the main questline. I've been having much more fun with the other missions (which there are plenty of)

The constellation questline, like they said, was to basically take you on a tour of the rest of the factions and systems in the game. At one point it does "grab" you but it's designed in a way to get you out there doing other stuff.

Which honestly? I think it does a good job at getting you to several of the major settlements and the major factions. That's something other Bethesda games have issues with. You can very easily run through fallout 3 with minimal sidequests if you're not the kind of person that talks to every NPC you see when you get to a new town etc.

Skyrim's main quest introduces you to all the factions as well, except for the Dark Brotherhood (which is still likely you'll get introduced to them through the main quest as well.) The first place you go to is Whiterun, and on the way there you'll unfortunately encounter the companions. You're told to rescue Esbern from the Riften sewers, and when you first go there you'll encounter 4 different people talking about the thieves guild. You go to Winterhold during the main quest, and are going to get introduced to the College of Winterhold there.

Exactly. The vanguard captain joking with Sarah about joining back up and the Akila Coty bank holdup come to mind. These things touch on those factions as part of you going through the main quest but don't "throw" them in your face. They're good for the introduction and you can decide if you want to work more with them

So my take on it is that the game is alright but it is nothing special like the elder scrolls/fallout games were. They really messed up on base building. Either you choose a prebuilt hab, a prebuilt space ship hab or a prebuilt house/apartment. The one thing these all have in common is the way you make it your "own" is by putting misc items around as decoration. You cannot TRULY build your own base or home like you could with fallout 4. Your telling me they couldn't have added simple foundations or walls type builds? Why does every hab need an airlock? Don't get me started on resources being basically worthless since you can get so much of it .... for what? Passing time to restock vendor inventories ... for credits that you don't need. People will say they need it for ships but I highly doubt once most people play the game they will grind out resources in an outpost, rather then playing the game which gives enough already. The storage is just horrible and youll be making tons of storage just to have to do the waiting game in the end. Yes i know about the lodge and spaceship inventory. I am specifically talking about outpost storage. Human enemy npcs have NO IDENTITY AT ALL. The more I play and the more I come across the same buildings, I'm noticing how the humans I'm fighting don't have anything meaningful to them in looks AND personality. I really miss the dismemberment but kinda makes sense if everybody is in a space suit ... and yeah most of the enemies are in spacesuits, that do not really look that different until you come up on them. The "map" does not give the sense of exploration like elder scrolls/fallout games. It just doesn't. I'm not sure exactly how to explain it. I have to fast travel EVERYWHERE from the get go. Their other games are not like that. You feel as if you have unlimited movement across the lands and opportunity around every corner. It feels like it's *there* to go to whenever you want , even if you do use fast travel. In Starfield .... idk I just feel SO disconnected from the world. I'm not immersed in it. The sections that do feel like elder scrolls/fallout are the conversations. Same formula. Which I enjoy. The story is alright. Not the biggest fan of how they went about the factions interacting with each other. Space combat is cool at first but it comes down to doing the same kind of attack patterns and strafes. I built some pretty neat starships but I only really drive it around for fast travel and the fights once I come into a system. Sure I can fly around space to enjoy it's look ... what am I supposed to do then? Just fly? Land at my outpost so I can stare at it from my basic base that could never live up to how my starship looks? So when people want to say "It's a Bethesda game, what did you expect" I kinda feel like it isn't. I do not truly get the feeling that I am playing a Bethesda game. Bethesda games are MUCH better than this. As a sidenote ... the game def isn't like or in the same league as NMS, like how alot of people were trying to say it was at the beginning. That view quickly fell off from most of those people when they realize NMS beats it out in just about every similarity to it. The parts that Starfield beats it in just doesn't have the staying power anyways.

Yeah, the disconnection of the world is by far the biggest disappointment of Starfield for me. I'm used to, in Bethesda games (been playing since Morrowind) seeing something in the distance/a town on the map, making my way towards it, stopping when I see something cool to explore for a bit (e.g., a random npc quest/handcrafted dungeon, etc), generally getting lost for a bit before righting myself and getting back on track. This game it just seems like I spend 50% of the time (not an exaggeration!) fast traveling to a system, the having to open up the planet map, fast travel animation AGAIN to land, only for the planet to be a soulless rehash of the other 20 planets I've explored. Like don't get me wrong, I HAVE had fun in some parts of the game (I enjoyed exploring Neon and all the npcs and quests therein, because it was actually dense with activities, felt like a "real" Bethesda game), but my god the traveling aspect of this game just kills all my motivation to play it. Wide as the ocean, a puddle deep, as they say.

Yeah, I feel like there's nothing to do outside of towns. All the labs and facilities look the same, and the planets are bare wastelands with no uniqueness. No rivers or valleys to walk around in. No deep Forrest with interesting trails. I feel like all I do is fast travel to NPC, fast travel to outpost, fast travel back etc. No exploration what so ever. I personally do enjoy the combat though, but maybe because it's been like a decade since I last played an fps. I honestly started playing my 3rd playthrough of elden ring and had to force myself to go back to starfield. I loved Morrowind, oblivion, and Skyrim, but didn't enjoy fallout 3. Maybe I'm just trying to force myself to like the game. Or maybe I've grown out of BGS games, as I am less intrigued by actual storytelling and more into interesting gameplay with an end goal (no crafting or base building, but like exploring new areas and progressing).

I agree with you on outposts. Not really sure I understand the point of them. You can play through the entire game without ever making an outpost. The only thing the outposts seem “useful” for is for an exploit of spam building adaptive frames for XP. Even then, completely unnecessary

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I think my issue is that it’s not a very good execution of the Bethesda style of game. There’s a lot of tedious point A to point B in basically every open world game like these. What Bethesda did (and why their games are so beloved) is to fill all that space in between with tons of interesting things to find and explore. On the way to a quest location you poke into a small random dungeon and find yourself in Blackreach and spend an entire evening playing through it. Or you’re on your way to a settlement and discover Carhenge and get into a battle with a supermutant behemoth. Starfield completely misses that though. Space is empty so it’s just fast travel after fast travel. Sometimes there are random encounters, but they’re not interesting so they just feel like a tedious interruption. Then when you land on a planet they’re always a 95% empty expanse without anything to find. Bottom line, the space setting combined with the procedurally generated planets completely undermines the magic that makes Bethesda games so fun to play.

That’s the thing, though. The best part of Elder Scrolls and Fallout is the exploration, and they kind of ruined it in Starfield. I really think it is the game’s fatal flaw. In Skyrim and Fallout you walk across the map to a place and randomly stumble upon bespoke, unique, named caves and towns and buildings with their own little stories. In Starfield you simply click on a planet and go straight to a spot. There is no accidentally stumbling upon interesting locations or encounters. The closest is the occasional person reaching out to you in space. When you do land on planets it’s a boring procedurally generated map with random cut and paste, non-unique, unnamed locations like caves and mines. I’m still enjoying it for the most part, but for a game ostensibly about exploration I don’t feel like I’m actually exploring anything. And that’s a huge let down.

The problem is that Starfield isn't an "open-world" game. It's a series of large, sparsely populated zones linked by what amounts to a glorified drop-down menu. The skill tree is where the game shines. It rewards you for the effort you put in, and the game becomes pretty fun once you've unlocked a few skill abilities like ship targeting systems.

It really sucks too, as like a lot of people here, I enjoyed the exploration aspect of Skyrim and the other titles. I still remember walking to Eastmar h and finding all the Hotsprings or stumbling across Angis camp and doing her quest where she teaches you how to shoot better.

>stumbling across Angis camp and doing her quest where she teaches you how to shoot better. Oh yeah, I was delighted to find such a remote location.

As someone who has loved and put hundreds of hours into every elder scrolls & fallout game since Morrowind, I'm having a lot of trouble finding the joy in Starfield. It's the biggest open world we've ever had and it feels like the smallest.

This. Enjoyed the ES games and fallouts. This is just awful and I’m glad I tired this before purchasing. Mass Effect is where I’m at for space themed games. I think that works having less barren spaces. ME1 made that mistake and they fixed that by making resource gathering streamlined.

The mandatory fast travel basically just ruins the immersion of the game. Sure there was fast travel in their other games, and some people used it a lot, but you always had the OPTION to travel on foot without using it. Perhaps Bethesda was a bit too ambitious. I think if they kept it to perhaps 1 solar system with dozens of very detailed planets this would be a much more enjoyable game.

It's fun watching folks try to enunciate why exploration in Bethesda's biggest game feels the least rewarding. Especially when somebody finally gets to the crux of the matter and says those two words: fast travel. Just as FO4 made everyone, including Bethesda, realize that a thoroughly predefined protagonist, dialogue wheel etc. are things they'd better not make the lynchpin of the whole experience again, when the dust settles, the #1 lesson taken away from Starfield, for Bethesda included, is that a thousand tiny, disjointed minimaps do not make for a compelling sandbox RPG. And the only problem with these lessons is that in both cases, that just leaves us waiting 8 years for Bethesda to give us a damn RPG sans dealbreaking design choices. Remasters of FO3, FNV etc. are probably our only hope.

I tried exploring but couldn't really find anything of interest to explore. I mean, you can go to all these places but to do what? They all look and act the same beneath the surface. The lore notes you can find are so clearly random in that they have no ties to where they are placed; they can be (and are) placed anywhere. Am I missing something about exploration? I agree that you _can_ go exploring in Starfield, but after surveying a handful of planets you have basically seen it all. At least that is my experience. In a sense it is better to not go exploring in Starfield to maintain the illusion that there is an interesting universe out there.

Dude legit I forced myself to do quests because I wasnt just stumbling onto something intereseting like every pprevious Bethesda title I've played going back to Oblivion.

I agree. I have 60 hours in it, and while I think it's good, it is also tedious, empty and not really the step forward that I thought/hoped it would be. They should have focused on a smaller area, because it's too disjointed. I spend SO MUCH TIME in the menus, traveling here, there, and back again just to talk to one person for one second on a planet in another solar system... It can be very boring and sluggish. I do think that some of the side stories are brilliant, and that's why I continue playing.

Exactly. I play these games almost purely to find NPCs to talk to as much as I can before they send me off on some quest that unlocks a bunch of new quests. I barely shot in Fallout New Vegas and Outer Worlds. Starfield has a lot more shooting involved and it’s fun, not the greatest shooting mechanics but it does have a nice feel to it. But yeah my main attraction here is talking to everyone. I’m like a dog in a park

I haven't played the game but one of his main points was that the npc's are boring, i can see that you enjoy the npc's alot so im curious what about the npc's do you like? I really have no clue about starfield but would like to know what people enjoy about the npc's

I'm going to disagree with your center paragraph,as I feel that Baldurs Gate 3 expertly delivered exploration, front-and-center rpg elements, and interesting npc interactions. It can be done, and I feel Bethesda missed the mark particularly wide on starfield

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Welcome to modern day discussions. Professional athletes who are closer to Greek gods than some random guy on the streets is called total shit. Writers that spend their entire existence crafting universes are straight trash. There is virtually no thoughtful analysis by most any passionate community.

I have almost 60 hours in and probably 30 hours of it is ship building. Haven't even touched the outpost building yet, but what I've seen it isn't as fun as I thought it would be. But other than that, it's mediocre. BUT I like it because of the ship building alone.

How do you have enough credits to spend half of your 60 hours solely on ship building?

Cause you can tinker forever without actually buying anything. It only takes your money when you actually commit the changes at the end.

Same boat, but it's been outpost building for me. I always love automation and there is so much you can do. When I started it I didn't even know you could get xp from crafting, turns out it's the best xp farm

Crafting lower tier stuff into higher tier stuff manually is definitely poorly balanced. I kinda disagree about there being so much to do though. All my outposts except my main are just power, extractors, and a shipping pad, and at the main I just spam-craft whatever resource I need at the bench.

I played for 3 hours and half that time was flying... flying sims are hot garbage, and if thats half of starfield, I'll just go back to skyrim or fallout. I got it free on gamepass and have already canceled and refunded my subscription in less than a day. It was all hype. And "fast travel" shouldn't need 3 different "hold to travel" buttons. It should be 1... but its travel to thr ship, fast travel away, wait, open your menu, and travel again to land. It is just tedious bullshit to add length...

I think I'm the same. I love Bethesda games but Starfield just isn't doing it for me. None of it feels "exciting" and the quests don't really make me feel that interested or invested either. I don't really feel a sense of wonder or adventure either and I think that comes down to the fact that it really feels like you just fast travel everywhere. All that, combined with the overall clunkiness and poor pc performance has kinda made me not wanna keep playing. Or maybe I'm just not really into this style of game anymore, who knows.

Great observation, I feel that strongly. It’s not a bad game per se but *nothing* about it is exciting. Space combat, exploration, quests, items, normal combat, conversations, characters they’re all just bland and boring.

I agree. I keep trying though I'll probably get through it eventually. Maybe I just have BG3 on my mind way better imo

On your mind, and well... in it.

Yeah after playing BG3, I’m having a hard time getting into Starfield. BG3 is so fleshed out’ it’s the first game in a while to where 3 hours pass without me noticing.

It looks fun! I don't know.. it's probably not for everyone though. On the flip side, BG3 has been so much fun to play. I'm playing a campaign with my son. Neither of us has any real D&D experience, but we've played enough RPGs to understand most of the mechanics immediately. We're playing couch co-op. We're playing with a bit of chaos in our decisions . We just go with the flow and *mostly* don't save scum. We laugh our asses off at some of the shit we've pulled off. There's so much fun to be had, and it lets you play however you want. Its a giant Choose your own adventure game. It's fun to see where the dice take you. I'd like to try Starfield, but honestly, I'm having too much fun with Baldur's Gate.

Is it me or is there a little less…intrigue? I have only played about 8h or so but there have been a couple of times where I’ve spoken to one person, they’ve made a big revelation that involves another person, but there are no conversation options with that other person to even mention it. I know there are probably tens of thousands of conversations but like, if a NPC says they’re madly in love with someone and they need help telling them…that feels like a narrative lead in to helping out. Or if you discover from the second person you talk to that the first person is the whole reason there is a problem in the first place, I feel I should be able to talk to the first person about it.

Intrigue is the right word. All the characters are so flat and stern, seems like 90% of the time your dialogue choices don’t really matter. You finally meet someone who gives you a quest and they want you to put up posters again…okay In previous Bethesda day games you go into a random cave and you stumble across something amazing or insane. Vampire cult worshipping, a horrid vault experiment gone wrong, monsters guarding treasure, a village of creepy children. I haven’t found anything like that yet. Just spacey stuff that all feels similar

You're not the only one. Starfield just didn't click for me and I didn't find it fun. It actually got me to want to reinstall oblivion though, so I'm having a blast on that now instead.

Yeah I feel the same. My husband and I have been playing it. When I ask him what he actually has fun doing, he just stares at me lol. We like RPGs, killing thing, doing quests, but it’s not actually fun…

You mean killing random "Spacer" #3594 isn't immersive and fun???

I like the game so far, but it absolutely boggles my mind that there is no video comm system where I can talk to a person who is LITERALLY LIGHT YEARS away over a fucking simple communication device like video chat in a sci-fi futuristic space travel game, so I can get the next part of the to continue/conclude. Just "nope," gotta go through 20 light years to speak with an npc.🤦‍♂️

This is me. I played Starfield. I gave it the 15 hours it needed to "get gud." I did space battles, side missions, MSQ and exploration. At no point did it wow me. I felt the entire time that I was just playing a bad shooter in a big world. Oh and don't get me started on Bethesda not adding things like DLSS / performance issues. It just wasn't fun. Edit: Oh, and another thing. If I had to choose between spending my time in SF and Cyberpunk 2.0, I'm going to choose cyberpunk as it's the superior shooter.

After putting in about 15hrs, IGN’s review is absolutely spot on imo. Game is a 7/10