Starfield

I wasn't going to write this at first because I was so 50/50 on recommending it or not but after Bethesda started replying to negative reviews about why the reviews they've written are wrong I feel compelled to write something. I would not recommend this game for $70. I would recommend waiting until the game is fully released with all of its DLCs *on* *sale* to buy it. To me there was just not enough there to justify the price. It feels like a game that's only had a few years of development rather than seven and it's just kind of under cooked. The game itself is just boring and uninspired. It's sterile and safe, built to appeal to the widest possible audience and not offend anybody. The characters sometimes have their shining moments but for the most part are bland and your companions are the worst of these offenders because they all have the same opinion on everything, they're all the same. The characters also don't look great, they have this dead eyed uncanny valley effect to them made worse by the skyrim style zoom in whenever they talk. The quests themselves with the exception of a few, are so uninspired and boring and offer no moral dilemmas or require any serious thought. Compare the Ryujin quest line to the thieves guild quest line in Oblivion. With the thieves guild quest like there is a gradual progression which teaches the player not only how to be a thief but what to expect as far as how challenging a given assignment will be. Ryujin gives you three childishly easy quests that are so easy that they neither teach you how to be a thief nor give you an idea of what's to come then the difficulty meter suddenly jumps with the next quest to really quite difficult. Thankfully I happened to have enough levels saved up to dump some points into stealth otherwise I would have had to fail or just leave the quest, level up, and come back. This quest comparison also highlights another issue because Ryujin takes place in one of the saddest areas in the game, Neon. Locations. What is Bethesdas engine really good at? It makes it relatively easy to hand craft huge worlds. So what does Starfield do? They hand crafted a few locations and left the rest up to procedural generation of course!... Oh, well... the few hand crafted locations are great right? No? Oh okay then. New Atlantis is kinda cool but it's so small, it's close to having some literal and figurative depth to it with the well but that's barely explored. New Akila looks cool but again is far too small. The Key is not a city. And Neon... Oh Jesus Christ Neon... Neon is "we have Nightcity from CP2077 at home." It's suppose to be this cyberpunk, blade runner-esque city rampant with crime and drug use. You basically get the DisneyLand (not even DisneyWorld) version of that. There is no crime to witness. There are no daily schedules like Oblivion npcs had. Just the same blank faces staring at you like your cock is out but you don't know it like all the other cities. They hype up a drug that can only be bought in a particular very talked up club in Neon and the club is one of the saddest things i've ever seen in a game. It's one relatively tiny room with flashing neon lights and out of shape spandex wearing conehead cosplayers gyrating uncomfortably. Keep in mind this is one of the few hand crafted locations, pretty much everything else is procedurally generated. You also can't even smuggle the drug out for any profit, it's worth the same no matter what planet you bring it to which doesn't make any sense. So locations are not great which brings me to exploration... Exploration in Starfield is not great. In a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls game you can stumble upon countless interesting hand crafted locations and encounters in the game to the point that getting lost is a good thing. In Starfield you won't stumble upon anything because you fast travel from planet to planet, system to system. So to explore that has to be your express goal. Okay, fine. Except everything is procedurally generated so after you've done it once you're just going to see it copy and pasted on different looking planets. You're not going to find anything new in that cave because it's the same cave. You're not going to find anything interesting on that planet because it's going to have the same stuff as the last one, just with different plants around it and the grounds a different color. Just go system to system looking for content until you get bored with that. They made some decent random encounters that you can have while out in space but not enough of them, I've run into Grandma half a dozen times by now. And as far as things to do... the ending: Spoilers ahead obviously. It's another multiverse story. I understand 7 years ago when the game began development this concept wasn't quite as tired and cliche as it has become but good God am I sick of multiverses. The whole point of the game is to just replay it again, that's how it ends. I wish I was joking. It's message is basically it's not about the destination, it's about the journey, which is fine but the journey is not good... Unfortunately the game has, to me, no replayability until new content in the form of DLC drops. Which I may not even buy until it goes on sale because I just don't care. The story is that uninteresting. This is not to say that everything about Starfield is bad. The gun play is actually pretty great though not worth it alone to buy the game. The ship building is actually really fun despite it being janky, probably some of the most fun i've had in the game. Some of the quests are fun like the UC quest line and other shorter, one off quests. They all have the same problems though: if they do offer any interesting ideas they do not fully explore them, they acknowledge them and that's about it. Things like the Well, tensions between the UC and Rangers, and the UC being a fascist state are all explored in only the most superficial terms. Bethesda has always had the problem of being wide as a lake but deep as a puddle and Starfield is unfortunately a prime example of how this problem has only gotten worse with every subsequent Bethesda release since Morrowind. I did enjoy parts of this game but I cannot recommend it for $70. It is so frustrating to see Bethesda finally get a crack at creating a unique IP that isn't another Elder Scrolls or Fallout game and they make this boring, uninspired whimper of a game. This game is all of Bethesdas bad habits, everything they're bad at and nothing they're good at, finely distilled. One of the most frustrating things to me is that this game is mediocre, it's not bad like No Mans Sky and it didn't ruin Bethesdas reputation like CP2077 did on release so it's not going to get the attention it needs to be made into great game like those studios did. Chances are post launch will be handled very much like FO4 where we'll get a couple of bug fixes but not nearly enough and a couple of nickle and dime DLCS then one or two really solid ones. They have ES6 to get to work on after all. This means the game will probably not have a miracle come back like those games did and will probably always be mediocre, which I think is a shame because it does have good bones there's just no meat on them.

Starfield is a game that has an excess of nothingness. An open world RPG that is so overstuffed with meaningless content that the seams are starting to split and the empty calories are spilling out. Starfield is big, both physically requiring 125 GB to install, but also in activities. Planets, cities, missions, NPCs, combat, research, space travel, space combat, space research, ship building, base building, relationship building, main story, side stories, factions, jobs, and cooking. And all of it beautiful, grand, silent, serine, action packed, and ultimately unfulfilling. A tremendous lack of focus makes each individual part of the game hollow. In the modern Glittering Era of entertainment; Starfield is another spec of shine, so concerned with bland mass appeal that it makes any individual gameplay mechanic as empty as the space we’re flying through.

the story is as generic as it gets and the gameplay gets boring. i wish there was a reason to even bother exploring planets and building outposts. everything is fun until you do it once, then it's all a repeating, soulless chore.

Half cooked game that spent too much time trying to be far reaching than creating a good cohesive universe with in depth stories. The development team failed to learn what worked in Fallout 4/New Vegas/Skyrim and decided to half ass a new universe.

i was coping. i paid 100 dollars to play this slop before anyone else due to my consoomer mental illness and even told myself and others i was enjoying it, up until the point where i played another game again, then i realized exactly how unfun, unpolished, and unacceptable starfield is. we do not have to settle for games like this any longer. (there are good things in this game spread thin and far between that kept me going but i'm telling you right now as a whole package it is so disappointing.) leather jacket moment. edit: what i enjoyed about the game was dogfights and most things surrounding the ships. the problem is i am sad the only place you ever get to fly is in orbit and everything you do with them, including getting in and out, is a loading screen. it's much like being stuck on a roller coaster ride and it's very restrictive. but hey the backdrop always looks cool and bethesda only asks that you BELIEVE in order to make this all work. so if you're ok with loading screens being the way in which you navigate this world, which most of the content does not make up for, then it might Just Work. i also really liked the photo mode in this game and taking pictures of my ship and sarah's big butt (it looks great when she leans over on the counter). loading screen moment