Saturday Morning Gaming: Starfield
Okay, I have played Starfield for a few hours and I have managed to assemble a handful of opinions about it.
Before we get into spoilers, I’ll say that you can expect the usual:
Baffling design choices
Clunky dialog options that include stuff you’d never say in a million years but don’t include, like, the *OBVIOUS* option
Silly (BUT AWESOME) lockpick minigames
Sidequest options from walking down the sidewalk
Books, books, and more books (not limited to lore books but also joke books, poetry books, and meandering rants)
An open world (nay, universe) that not only makes you feel like there a hundreds of places to visit but you’ll despair a little because you know you’re definitely going to miss half the content
AND A FREAKIN’ AWESOME CHARACTER CREATION TOOL THAT YOU WILL SPEND A HALF HOUR IN!!!
Remember the whole “Hey. You. You’re finally awake.” opening?
Well, now we’re going to get into spoilers that are about the level of talking about riding in the cart and almost getting your head chopped off and having it interrupted by a dragon attack. So press back now if you want to be completely and totally unsullied by spoilers.
Still here?
Okay. Good.
This one opens with you being Generic Humanoid. You’re a miner. It’s you’re first day on the job. You get a quick orientation from the boss and her wiseacre sidekick and you’re off to mine some beryllium. You get a quick tutorial on how to mine minerals and then you’re off to The MacGuffin. Get the MacGuffin. Receive a vision. Hey. You. You’re finally awake.
SO LET’S MAKE YOUR DUDE! You have the usual assortment of faces, bodies, backgrounds, and traits.
They start by giving you something generic:
But then you can make it your own!
Give yourself the perfect face…
Make sure you have the right scar…
Give yourself the right body (and, *YES*, you can make a fat guy):
Figure out your background…
And give yourself your traits:
AND NOW YOU HAVE YOUR GUY!
And, yes, the MacGuffin. Shortly afterwards, you (somewhat hastily, if you ask me) have a spaceship and a mission: GET YOUR MACGUFFIN TO THE PEOPLE WHO WANT IT!
Where they will inform you that there are many other MacGuffins out there. Better start getting them.
And then I stopped playing to write this post.
I’m hooked.
Oh, my gosh. I’m hooked.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is one of the loading screens to Starfield. Ain’t it a beaut? All screenshots taken by the author.)
I’m a few hours ahead of you.
So far, I’m really enjoying it, but there seems to be a steeper learning curve than with other Bethesda games.
From the spoiler-free reviews I’ve read, the game is massive and it seems like it will be 100-200 hours to the main quest and all the faction questlines. That’s insane.
I’m now level 10, have been to the main cities through the main quest, and have so many quests.
I can understand some of the criticism in several reviews though – it really does take quite a while for the game to get into a rhythm. The main quest doesn’t seem compelling at first and it certainly lacks the sense of urgency of Fallout 4 or Skyrim, where the narrative wants you to beeline the main quest but the gameplay doesn’t. I think it’s good that here there isn’t a similar sense of narrative urgency here with the main quest.
That said, I’d recommend following the main quest for your first few hours. It seems like it acts kind of like a tutorial in that it introduces you to some mechanics, as well as companions and the main areas. I think I’m about at the point now where I’m going to start leaving the main quest aside for a while. And, again, the nice thing is that works narratively – there isn’t a narrative time crunch – at least so far – to get the bottom of the MacGuffin.
Considering I’m a middle-aged dad with a job, family and lots of responsibilities, who knows how long it’s going to take me to “complete” this game. I’m not sure whether I should focus on the main story to get to NG+ or just meander. It’s nice to have the choice, though.
Oh, and pictures you take with photo mode will be rolled into loading screens – nice!Report
I just finished walking through the museum and checking out all of the exhibits.
This is, very much, a game for dorks.
I *LOVE* it.Report
One of the things I really don’t like is the lack of any kind of map. You mentioned a museum – so I went to look for it. After about 30 minutes I gave up and googled the location.
Another thing I don’t like are all the loading screens. Thank goodness I have a fast M.2 SSD. And thank goodness there is a good fast travel system once you get used to the quirks.Report
I remain convinced that there is a market for games to release their character creation engine as a separate entity. In fact, I seem to recall a game within the last 10 years which did exactly this (for free, of course). I know I’ve spent time using some pretty amazing online tools to create rafts of D&D characters, so…
I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to hear absolutely NOTHING about this game until a couple of weeks ago when a fellow gamer at work started talking about the Starfield release date. I, of course, had to stop him and ask what Starfield was…Anyway, I’ll put Starfield on my wish list but it’s Baldur’s Gate 3 for the foreseeable future for me.Report
I may get Starfield at some point, but not yet. Having just spent a whole $100 on Baldur’s gate 3, I’m not dropping another $130 on Starfield. I’ll probably wait until it goes on sale, that should give us time for some of the more egregious bugs to be patched out.
I’m getting close to the end of my first run through Baldur’s Gate 3, and I really appreciate what the narrator does for the game, in a lot of ways it reminds me of how Disco Elysium used narration to add detail and let your knowledge skills actually contribute to the game.Report
Oh, yeah. I’m over budget until *AT LEAST* the Steam Christmas Sale. And I’m on thin ice for that.Report
It’s $100 for early access and the first DLC, $70 for the base game.
One of the reasons I choose to wait on BG3 was because of the too much money and too many long games – so I made a different trade off.Report
Maybe in your currency it is.Report
Apologies for my wrong assumption!Report
No problem.Report
Yeah, as a fanboy for these games, I’m totally hooked. I’ve played about 12-14 hours already, upgraded my ship a bit, worked my way through a bunch of corporate espionage, and even roamed across an icy planet. Some folks were complaining about the potential for invisible walls in planet areas, but I roamed pretty far and had a range of points of interests that were all at great distances. I think it’ll be good.
You do feel a bit lost as you get slammed with many side quest options, but that’s the nature of these games. The persuasion dialogue is pretty clunky, too, but it can be fun, especially when you get a critical success.
After spending a lot of time knee-deep in a faction questline (the corporate espionage gig), I’m about ready to do a bit of the main quest stuff. There is sooooooo much to do in this game–I haven’t even touched the outpost building stuff yet.Report
I got a side quest to survey a planet.
I like surveying planets. Find interesting new rocks, find interesting new plants, find interesting new animals.
While out wandering around collecting copper, palladium, and silver, I met a group of homesteaders who asked me to take them to a different, nicer, homestead. Okay, fine. Took them there, came back, continued surveying. Found a different group of people who asked me to clean out the pirate base nearby. Okay, fine. Cleaned out pirate base.
I JUST WANT TO LOOK AT ROCKS, PEOPLE.Report
Yeah–sometimes, I’m like, “Leave me the Eff alone. I’m not going to talk to this store owner about his problems.” (and one thing I didn’t like were all the long convos I had to have with the shop owners just to get to their inventories)
Just like in real life, sometimes you gotta focus on you. Self-care is part of this rpg.Report
Finished the planet survey about 20 minutes ago.
It’s not enough to visit the touristy sites that you can see from your spaceship. You have to visit the parts of the planet that you can only get to by specifically saying “I want to go *THERE*”. Out in the middle of the sticks.
It was awesome.
Now I’m back to one of the semi-main quests.
Apparently, I’ve been asked to go into deep cover with the space pirates.
Goody. I was worried that I’d miss out on the whole piracy thing in my first goody-two-shoes playthrough.Report
I’ve been playing the new American retro-JRPG Sea of Stars. Seeing a JRPG story line as told by Americans is interesting. Nearly every JRPG has a romance subplot or several and usually our loving couple gets introduced fairly early in the game. Sea of Stars seems to be eliminating the romance entirely and treating the lead boy and lead girl as more of a brother and sister in spirit thing than any romance.Report
Oooh! Try Fate Stay Night next!Report
My non-spoiler impressions:
Pros: It’s like other Bethesda games you’ve already played.
Cons: It’s like other Bethesda games you’ve already played.
Biggest complaint thus far: Bethesda’s continued disrespect of the ESC key.Report
Off-hand observations.
Sleeping all night will give you a 10% exp bonus.
I have a miner on my ship. I have no idea where she wants to go. I have no missions to take miners anywhere.
I find ammo for every single gun in the game except for the two I’m carrying.
My boss asked me “Did you get (spoiler) yet?” and I answered “I didn’t know that the game had (spoiler)!” He told me to leave sidequest heaven/hell and just play the main storyline for a while. So I have abandoned sidequest heaven and am doing the main storyline for a few missions. I have not yet received (spoiler).Report
I’m glad I listened to the advice to work on the main story before getting too distracted by all the shiny things.
The miner on your ship can be used at an outpost when/if you decide to build one. You can “store” the miner on your ship but they don’t help you. Or you can just setup a really simple outpost to store those characters until you get more into outpost building. I have two now producing raw resources but I mainly made them test out the outpost feature and to give the miners I found someplace to be.So far the outpost building is a great improvement over Fallout 4.
Then I did a bunch of random quests. The “activities” quest list can be deceiving. They don’t look important since they’re listed at the bottom and the descriptions are often very perfunctory. Sometimes they are truly a simple a one-and-done quest, but others are much longer and very interesting questlines. And you don’t know which ones will be quick or which will lead to something much more interesting! It’s nice not knowing ahead of time where something will lead.
I’m now doing one of the main faction questlines- it’s super fun and interesting! But I’m pretty far into it, and the current mission I’m on requires being really stealthy, and I don’t have a stealth build. I may have to come back later to finish it after putting some points in stealth, which is disappointing.Report
I still haven’t encounted the (spoiler). I did the main mission where you went back to talk to your old boss and find the guy who let you borrow his ship. I did the main mission where you went out to the frontier planet where you had to resolve a sticky situation that Law Enforcement found itself in. I’m now doing the mission where I talk to Vladmir first.
I can’t wait to get my (spoiler) because, seriously, I need to get back to surveying planets.Report
Yes, proceeding further into the main mission helps with all sorts of things, including surveying. Because (spoiler).Report
Okay. I just now got (spoiler).
Yes.
It was worth getting.Report
I just wrapped up Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, and I’m sorry to say that it was pretty bad. I’m a sucker for this sort of murder mystery VN-style game, and this one still felt like a slog to get through. It has a lot of the same staff as the Danganronpa series, which carries through to the art, character designs, and music, in a way that begs constant comparisons, and those comparisons are not flattering.
Very mild spoilers ahead
The biggest problem, I would say, is the scenario writing. You have to solve five murder mysteries, and a sixth “ultimate mystery” that explains all the weirdness in the game’s lore and setting. Two of the five murder mysteries were actively bad–featuring culprits doing nonsensical things just to make things a little trickier–and none of the mysteries were actually noticeably good or memorable. The ultimate mystery is not so bad on its own terms, but is really dropped in your lap with very little foreshadowing from the earlier chapters. Instead of finally getting to answer questions that have been bugging you all game long, you mostly get to answer questions that were first posed five minutes ago in a series of info dumps.
Once you get past the disappointing plot and pacing, though, you have to deal with the characters, who come in two varieties: unmemorable, and extremely annoying. In particular, Shinigami, your constant companion through the mysteries, is grating in the extreme, providing unfunny comic relief and an unending stream of vicious, gendered insults directed at the other female characters. She gets a little growth towards the end, but not enough to make the supposedly sad parting with her during the denouement feel like anything but a relief. Also, you team up with four other detectives during your journey, and only one of them did anything interesting, instead of just embodying some archetype (cool veteran, irritating horndog, airhead) in an uninspired manner.
There were also cringe-inducing levels of fanservice.
All in all, I would avoid this one, even if you are a fan of the mystery VN genre like I am. Maybe even especially if you’re a fan, since this one will constantly be reminding you of other, better games.Report
I preordered starfield, but I didn’t pay the extra to start early, so I won’t get to dip in until Thursday. I might have time to make a character before I have to leave for work.
In BG:EE, I am in the catacombs. My playing has slowed a bit, because in the evening when I had been playing BG:EE by myself, I have been mostly playing BG3 with my wife. Together, we have reached the Underdark and started working on some tasks for the denizens there. Playing together is fun, but frustrating at times. I try to avoid quarterbacking the whole thing, which means I spend a lot of time in my head going “why is she doing that?” I suspect she has the similar moments in her head, too.Report
Perhaps a silly question: do you think this plays better on a console or on a PC? If there is a lot of fluid combat as in its predecessors Skyrim and Fallout, it feels like it almost has to be on a console.
So perhaps it’s good that I have recently dislocated my finger, can’t really use a console controller very well right now, and will have to wait for all the rush to die out (and to scrounge up enough spare $$$ to upgrade my console, because I don’t see that it’s back-compatible with my now-ancient Xbox One ).Report
I would guess that it plays best on console for 75% of the folks out there. It’s not out for PS5 so it’s optimized for Windows (and Xboxen) and I’m sure that they have the equipment in the X series X/S pegged.
But if you happen to have built a box over the last couple of years that was specifically made to play Cyberpunk 2077, you should probably get it off of Steam. It works like a charm on one of those.Report
How would you compare it to “Escape Velocity: Nova”?Report
Never played it. But my experience of Starfield is that 92% of my time is spent running around planets with the spaceship only used intermittently. I’m doing various quests and cataloging various plants and the spaceship is there to hold my stuff.Report