Post by Tig on Mar 30, 2024 5:14:31 GMT -5
I bought Starfield earlier this month and my first big regret is I paid full price for it. Don't get me wrong; I'm glad I bought into what Bethesda considers their magnum opus but, guess what, it ain't their magnum opus. That falls to Skyrim or Fallout: New Vegas. Starfield is a fun open-world (open universe?) experience but the lack of compelling plot and poor environmental design definitely puts it behind past games that made us fall in love with Bethesda. I'm over 20 hours deep into this game, closing in on the mid-point of the main plot, and I have to tell you I regret dropping $70 for this when Hogwarts was only $40.
The game starts out somewhere in the 24th century. Earth died a horrible painful death (I blame Trump!) and factions of humans splintered and took to the stars. Lightspeed travel has been conquered and Alpha Centauri was colonized at many locations. Some environments are harsh and demand protective gear, others are earth-type and most hospitable. Oh, and there's spiders. A couple different types of spiders, from the looks of it. Yeesh. So it sounds like a potential for explosive creativity across a myriad of worlds, right? I was expecting No Man's Sky variance (which isn't too much when you figure out their formula) or even the small but colorful "worlds" of The Outer Worlds. Nope. What you get is rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. I've been to several star systems and landed on several plants and everyone has gray rocks with maybe one or two funky types of foliage. I'm SURE the game gets better, especially when one of the main cities in Alpha Centauri is beautifully rendered to the point of jaw dropping (and impossible to navigate but we'll get to that), but for now I'm over 20 hours in and all I've seen everywhere else is either rocks, cave interiors, or white space station interiors. Come on, guys, you're losing me.
Don't get me wrong. The graphics themselves are incredible. The game certainly makes use of next-gen cards where the closer you look at something the more detail you spot, from stitching to scratches to chipped paint. Everything has maker's marks and labels on it, bad guys carry their own customized weapons and armor, and maybe that's why the environments suck so bad is so you appreciate the NPC's and the half-eaten sandwich they're protecting with their lives. Ships are gorgeous, facial features are spot on, the graphics look good up close.
Mixed in with the banal environment is the most mediocre plot I think I've heard since Fallout 4. "Hey, we're an explorer club, like those old Dutch and British guys with pith helmets that enslaved the Congo, you wanna go on a scavenger hunt with us?" To advance the plot you go "derrrrrp OK" and off you go. No "hey that one piece you found is now a part of you and you'll go mad without finishing the puzzle" or "we hear you're a smuggler, we need you to move these pieces for us". Nope, just "wanna join our fruity club" and there you have it. I picked Ronin class for my fighting style, before quickly learning "classes" don't mean @#$% in this game, and I don't see how anyone belonging to a combat class would go along with these clowns but here we are.
A saving grace are some, SOME, of the side missions. One in particular that takes place on Mars is the most ridiculous grocery run I've ever done with minimal payoff. I wanted to shoot everyone on Mars when I was done. That one aside, the rest are pretty cool, with rescue missions and treasure hunts. I was randomly exploring a mine I stumbled across and the shaft led us down into this HUGE room with towering structures under a stone ceiling. The planet had a lesser gravity ratio so when a fight broke out it turned into this surreal ballet of people jumping and sailing back and forth, shooting at each other in mid-air. I have to say it will be one of my most memorable game combat experiences ever. The combat AI is pretty amazing too. One bad guy decided to flank me and ran alllllll the way around a big room that had all sorts of junk in the middle and managed to sneak up behind me. I was proud of him, then I shot him in the face. Characters fall realistically when they're hit and sometimes even float away. For a game company that doesn't specialize in shooters, Bethesda nailed the mark on this one.
Then you remember physics is a thing and the immersion starts to crumble. Ballistic weapons are the top seller in space, with laser and energy weapons a distant second in availability. That's fine except what do you think happens when you fire a .50 cal in low gravity? Newton's Third Law demands that you go flying the opposite direction. Nope. Your reticule bumps a little and you're back in the game. I can run and jump halfway across the map in low gravity but my concussive ballistics bear no impact on my motion whatsoever. Big fail.
There's also base building and management as well as NPC crew management but, so far, it has zero impact on the game so I'm not sure why they put it in. Oh, and you can't fly the ship in the atmosphere. When you land it's a cutscene and when you take off it's a cutscene but when you land 500m from your base you can't just bump the thrusters and inch closer because there's no flying in the atmosphere. When No Man's Sky has that part down pat there's no excuse for Bethesda failing to implement it. Ship combat in space is fun, however, and quite satisfying once you get the hang of it. Ships are also fully customizable but, like base building, it serves little to no purpose. Going with the lack of low-atmo traversal, there's no maps in this game. Let me say that again, in a massive open-environment game there is no map. You get a non-textured screen with waypoint markers showing you direction and that's it. Try finding your way around a city or huge base interior with no map. What you DO have is fast-travel that is available to you just by pointing on the waypoint marker in your HUD and selecting it, bypassing all the environment between you and the destination and destroying any sense of exploration. I spent half an hour looking for a gun shop to dump my pile of loot and even with the help of a walkthrough I still couldn't find it because THERE IS NO F-ING MAP!
All this said, I'm still playing it, and I will to the end. It's nowhere near as boring as Red Dead II was but for $70 I'm disappointingly unimpressed. In Skyrim and even Fallout 4 you were lured to the horizon to see what's on the other side, and every valley was a new vista of cool stuff to look at promising great adventure. Starfield has rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. I hope it gets better.
The game starts out somewhere in the 24th century. Earth died a horrible painful death (I blame Trump!) and factions of humans splintered and took to the stars. Lightspeed travel has been conquered and Alpha Centauri was colonized at many locations. Some environments are harsh and demand protective gear, others are earth-type and most hospitable. Oh, and there's spiders. A couple different types of spiders, from the looks of it. Yeesh. So it sounds like a potential for explosive creativity across a myriad of worlds, right? I was expecting No Man's Sky variance (which isn't too much when you figure out their formula) or even the small but colorful "worlds" of The Outer Worlds. Nope. What you get is rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. I've been to several star systems and landed on several plants and everyone has gray rocks with maybe one or two funky types of foliage. I'm SURE the game gets better, especially when one of the main cities in Alpha Centauri is beautifully rendered to the point of jaw dropping (and impossible to navigate but we'll get to that), but for now I'm over 20 hours in and all I've seen everywhere else is either rocks, cave interiors, or white space station interiors. Come on, guys, you're losing me.
Don't get me wrong. The graphics themselves are incredible. The game certainly makes use of next-gen cards where the closer you look at something the more detail you spot, from stitching to scratches to chipped paint. Everything has maker's marks and labels on it, bad guys carry their own customized weapons and armor, and maybe that's why the environments suck so bad is so you appreciate the NPC's and the half-eaten sandwich they're protecting with their lives. Ships are gorgeous, facial features are spot on, the graphics look good up close.
Mixed in with the banal environment is the most mediocre plot I think I've heard since Fallout 4. "Hey, we're an explorer club, like those old Dutch and British guys with pith helmets that enslaved the Congo, you wanna go on a scavenger hunt with us?" To advance the plot you go "derrrrrp OK" and off you go. No "hey that one piece you found is now a part of you and you'll go mad without finishing the puzzle" or "we hear you're a smuggler, we need you to move these pieces for us". Nope, just "wanna join our fruity club" and there you have it. I picked Ronin class for my fighting style, before quickly learning "classes" don't mean @#$% in this game, and I don't see how anyone belonging to a combat class would go along with these clowns but here we are.
A saving grace are some, SOME, of the side missions. One in particular that takes place on Mars is the most ridiculous grocery run I've ever done with minimal payoff. I wanted to shoot everyone on Mars when I was done. That one aside, the rest are pretty cool, with rescue missions and treasure hunts. I was randomly exploring a mine I stumbled across and the shaft led us down into this HUGE room with towering structures under a stone ceiling. The planet had a lesser gravity ratio so when a fight broke out it turned into this surreal ballet of people jumping and sailing back and forth, shooting at each other in mid-air. I have to say it will be one of my most memorable game combat experiences ever. The combat AI is pretty amazing too. One bad guy decided to flank me and ran alllllll the way around a big room that had all sorts of junk in the middle and managed to sneak up behind me. I was proud of him, then I shot him in the face. Characters fall realistically when they're hit and sometimes even float away. For a game company that doesn't specialize in shooters, Bethesda nailed the mark on this one.
Then you remember physics is a thing and the immersion starts to crumble. Ballistic weapons are the top seller in space, with laser and energy weapons a distant second in availability. That's fine except what do you think happens when you fire a .50 cal in low gravity? Newton's Third Law demands that you go flying the opposite direction. Nope. Your reticule bumps a little and you're back in the game. I can run and jump halfway across the map in low gravity but my concussive ballistics bear no impact on my motion whatsoever. Big fail.
There's also base building and management as well as NPC crew management but, so far, it has zero impact on the game so I'm not sure why they put it in. Oh, and you can't fly the ship in the atmosphere. When you land it's a cutscene and when you take off it's a cutscene but when you land 500m from your base you can't just bump the thrusters and inch closer because there's no flying in the atmosphere. When No Man's Sky has that part down pat there's no excuse for Bethesda failing to implement it. Ship combat in space is fun, however, and quite satisfying once you get the hang of it. Ships are also fully customizable but, like base building, it serves little to no purpose. Going with the lack of low-atmo traversal, there's no maps in this game. Let me say that again, in a massive open-environment game there is no map. You get a non-textured screen with waypoint markers showing you direction and that's it. Try finding your way around a city or huge base interior with no map. What you DO have is fast-travel that is available to you just by pointing on the waypoint marker in your HUD and selecting it, bypassing all the environment between you and the destination and destroying any sense of exploration. I spent half an hour looking for a gun shop to dump my pile of loot and even with the help of a walkthrough I still couldn't find it because THERE IS NO F-ING MAP!
All this said, I'm still playing it, and I will to the end. It's nowhere near as boring as Red Dead II was but for $70 I'm disappointingly unimpressed. In Skyrim and even Fallout 4 you were lured to the horizon to see what's on the other side, and every valley was a new vista of cool stuff to look at promising great adventure. Starfield has rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. I hope it gets better.