When the review embargo first dropped, Starfield was sitting at something like an 88 on Xbox and an 89 on PC. Not 90+ the way I think Bethesda may have been hoping, and yet still extremely good.
I sat down to play it last night, got destroyed by spaceships I’m trying to kill to level up my piloting skill and access class B and C ships, went to the simulator in the UC base to get some free kills and realised I wasn’t having any fun with the game any more, so I closed the game and started playing High on Life. Had way more fun.
After the
spoiler
Starborn
reveal
spoiler
(which I saw coming as soon as the Starborn were introduced)
I realised it’s just not fun. I can’t get into the roleplay as all the characters are bland cardboard cutouts with weird facial expressions, the only fun I was really having was the shooting which grew stale once all the enemies became bullet sponges.
The lack of city maps, the boring cutscenes for everything, clunky console first interface, drab colours, bafflingly hideous item designs, lifeless procedural planets. The factions are all boring. Permanent skills, with no respec options?! And for god’s sake, let me eat food on the ground by long pressing E.
It’s actually worse than Fallout 4, and that’s 8 years old.
It’s at best a 5.5/10 for me.
I’ve been noticing that too recently. I’ve been hooked on the game, but not really in a good way. I’m not having fun, I’m checking boxes for quests or leveling and it scratches an ADHD itch where I can’t get off it until I finish what I’m doing, but there’s always a new thing that I’m doing. They have done a good job singing missions together so that it feels like you’re always doing something.
But it doesn’t feel fun. They have less than 10 unique buildings to discover throughout the 1000 planets, to the point where I had seen the same two buildings within the first 5 hours of the game. They somehow couldn’t come up with more than 6 different types of plants that repeat across planets. Running to buildings from landing spots is a real bore.
Progression is a real grind. 32 hours in and I’m only level 22, AND I feel like I don’t have skill points in basically anything compared to how big the skill tree is.
I’m disappointed in how shallow the game is. 1000 planets wide, an inch deep. I’ll probably finish the main story missions and be done with it.
Progression is a real grind. 32 hours in and I’m only level 22, AND I feel like I don’t have skill points in basically anything compared to how big the skill tree is.
Thank you. I’m in a similar situation and finding that the grind is really annoying with not a lot of payoff. And then you’ve got so many skills to invest in and you never quite know if you’ll actually need some of them.
I know planets don’t all have to be super interesting, but I dread landing on anything now, because they’re just… so boring to me.
Running to buildings from landing spots is a real bore.
Don’t know if you know this already, but bringing up your scanner and pointing it to your ship icon lets you fast travel to it.
Also, you can skip the whole “return to ship” thing altogether and open up the star map or whatever it’s called and immediately jump to space and set course/land on another planet. I think it only works if you’re unencumbered, though, but I’m not certain.
Edit: Lol, I accidentally misread that as “running from buildings to landing spots”, so ignore that last bit. Hard agree on running to the buildings. At least in TES/FO there’s interesting stuff along the way. Here, it’s just rocks and minerals and maybe a few animals.
They’re fixing the eating thing! https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/09/13/starfield-announces-nvidia-dlss-support-food-eating-button-future-city-maps/
The factions are all boring. Permanent skills, with no respec options?! And for god’s sake, let me eat food on the ground by long pressing E.
Apparently that last one is being added with an update soon.
I think the factions are okay, but not nearly as good as their counterparts in previous games (eg. NCR > Freestar Collective, although that’s probably more thanks to Obsidian than Bethesda).
