For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you’ve already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!
Discuss all things Starfield below!
I’ll let you know in 2 years when it is on sale for at least 50% off.
and has quite a few decent mods that fix the annoying things like inventory
Boy oh boy everyone hates inventory limits and tedious management but devs still feel the need to make sure we have a reason to return towns and what not as the excuse.
Like fuck you, give me a better reason than inconveniencing the fuck out of me while I was out in your world having fun.
cough Baldur’s Gate 3 cough. Why impose an inventory limit if I can just send all the loot I’m gunna sell back to camp? And why no quick “send to camp” hotkey?! Right clickin n shiiittt
Mods are the very first thing that turns me off in a game. I want to play a game, not go stack mods on top of mods just to fix the shit the studio didn’t feel like working on.
It’s $120 in Australia, even at 50% off it’s still more than I’d ever spend on a game. Just gonna keep waiting
Yeah we pay an 80% markup just for existing and I hate it, but the gaming industry has been dropping quality while simultaneously increasing prices for some time now.
The only games in the last couple years I’ve paid full price for are CP2077, BG3 and Battlebit. Everything else is bought during the sales, usually at a steep discount, where many of these games should be priced by default.
Fuckin corpo dogs, they’ll ruin anything and everything they can to make a buck.
Thanks. I might look into the endless things from 2+ years ago that are on sale now. Probably not though. Too many books to read. 😵💫
Oh wisest spender of 60 dollars, you are the light. How will I ever decide to expend that amount over the next 24+ months. Lmao. Get your goofy ass on
Being a patient gamer isn’t strictly about money. It’s about not getting caught up in hype and making more calculated decisions. Even so, wanting to pay what you think something is worth is just good practice.
I’m not going to wait two years – though I’m opposed to preordering – but there are other benefits too. Two years down the line:
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A bunch of bugs are patched. Even if Starfield is relatively free of bugs, there will be some.
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The wikis for the game have been written up. Some obsessive person will have sat down and figured out the quirks of game mechanics and documented them. Understanding stuff like the relative merits of armor-piercing, bleeding, and so forth in Fallout 4 was complicated.
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Starfield’s expansion packs will be out.
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Mods will be out, and there will probably be some pretty “must have” ones.
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You’ll have more hardware oomph to throw at the game, make it smoother/higher res.
What if I told you it’s possible to have money and not want to waste it on dumb shit?
Fuck preordering
The original post is incorrect, you didn’t have to pre-order to play early. I bought my copy after reviews dropped.
Just played 4 hours. Not saying whether the game is good or bad, but I’m not seeing the point of the spaceship yet.
It’s looks like merely a medium for the fast traveling mechanic. You can’t really “move” in space (as far as ive tried), and can’t use it to fly within a planet.
I expected being able to manually travel from planet A to planet B and finding cool stuff along the way. If you wanna actually move you need to fast travel.
I also expected to be able to get in my ship and go from place A to place B within the same planet (also finding cool stuff along the way). It seems that also is just done by fast traveling only.
This is one of the more biting criticisms I’ve heard of the game. It results in a lack of feeling of scale and scope. The universe just feels like connected places, instead of worlds within a galaxy. No Mans Sky got this right, and it’s surprising that Bethesda would fumble such a core mechanic. It looks like they tried to cover up this wart by… removing city maps.
Oblivion has towns behind loading screens too. Even Kvatch. There are mods that break them out into the world but they’re instanced by default.
Particularly annoying with the Imperial City.
Look at Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. They have completely seamless transitions between entire dimensions. They use Direct Storage, which is a Microsoft API. It’s not a good look when a Sony studio is able to achieve seamless transitions on a Windows game but a Microsoft game can’t.
If you ignore the server performance issues and bugs, star citizen is completely playable on my system and I have below reccomended specs (for starfield & star citizen). If star citizen can have no loading screens with most planets as populated (or more populated) then starfield’s planets while also having to manage server resources, then starfield has almost no excuse to have loading screens.
So the space exploration is more like Mass Effect Andromeda instead of No Man’s Sky?
Sounds disappointing. I’m definitely unnaturally excited with the idea of “Large vehicles” - being able to walk inside with your character, take casual actions like crafting/talking while it transports, then stepping out. It’s why I enjoyed Sea of Thieves and Subnautica, and it’s what I mainly want out of trains in games.
Reducing them to interaction prompts and cutscenes sort of undersells them to me.
Damn, I guess we’ve been spoiled by No Man’s Sky. I was expecting it to be a completely open, manual traversal universe.
I did read that landing on planets is just a cutscene rather than a seamless transition, but I thought for sure you can actually fly it in space - isn’t there even combat with other spaceships or random locations to check for resources?
Is there anything else to do on the spaceship, does it feel like a home base where you keep your gear, crafting benches, companions to talk to, etc? I really want that cozy starbound/kotor ebon hawk vibes if possible 🥺
So you can fly in space, and fight space battles there, but you can’t really fly fast enough to fly from one planet to another in real time. To move to a different point of interest in the system, you need to fast travel to it. So the meaningfully interactable part of space is just the immediate area around each fast travel point.
I’m not far enough yet to know if the interior gets more interesting after you add more modules to the ship; the starter ship is basically an RV: bed, galley, cockpit.
Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games. I get it might be harder between solar systems the way E:D does it but kinda sad it’s not real travel within one. Maybe they patch it in one day in the future? Who knows
Your ship is basically a TARDIS. You pick a destination from your star map and then your ship magically disappears from one place and appears at another. There is “space” but it feels completely fake, like they tacked it on at the end. Really, so many of the games mechanics feel fake and the effort it takes to suspend disbelief is really high.
There is spaceship battles, not sure about random locations, but I’m guessing you’d also need to fast travel to those.
Also the spaceship is VERY customizable, so much in fact that I found it overwhelming lmao. Not saying that’s bad thing, but you’d definitely need to come up with a lot of credits /loot first.
Again I only have 4 hours in game, so I don’t really know much yet.
I had this complaint early on. It was very disheartening.
20 hours in, I love that I can fast travel from one planet to another in an entirely different solar system, to the building I need to get to.
Tbh I have had a lot of fun with this game (35h in). It’s an RPG first and space explorer second, nothing necessarily wrong with that.
I also learned that if you’re tracking a quest you can use the grav drive right from the ship’s HUD by selecting the locstion marker. It does help immersion a tiny bit more.
Overall it’s what they promised, modders can anyways “fix” the shortcomings.
Y’all I thought we agreed as a society to not preorder anymore?
I didn’t pre order. I waited for review embargo to lift, then I bought it today.
This isn’t “early access”, this is Bethsda squeezing money out of game pass subscribers
I actually have no problem with this, I even almost like this.
If you want, you can spend extra cash to play it a few days earlier, otherwise you can wait and get it for “free”. This drives sales, “forces” the most hardcore players to purchase the title, and ensures that gamepass players can enjoy first party titles on day one even in the future.
I got the premium edition when I bought a new CPU and it came bundled, so I still have my Hardcore Gamer Badge.
…I also got Overwatch 2, but I’m not even going to bother redeeming that one.
I see exactly what I expected. I didn’t bought the hysteria on Youtube/insta/TK.
And I didn’t preorder the game because of that hysteria. The Hysteria looked a lot like the Cyberpunk Fiasco. Realistic expectations, we seem to have lost that capability with upcoming video games. When something sounds too good, It is.
I don’t know what you saw Todd say where but I just read some interviews like this one: https://www.ign.com/articles/todd-howard-interview-starfield-sgf-2023 And in nothing i’ve red from him even slightly resembles the hype around this game.
TH: “We do lock it at 30 [FPS], because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff.”
That means 1 thing: not a real action game, more in line of FO4, maybe NMS like but more like RDR. A dogfight @30FPS is over before it starts. Beauty is more important then speed for this game.
Speaking about RDR, TH: “So I think it also as a flow, probably has more of a feeling of a [Red Dead Redemption 2]”
Here you have it literally: a game like RDR. Not NMS. Not Elite. Not StarCitizen. But like RDR. That means that the ships are more of a means of transport then a real gameplay mechanic. And space is just the theme.
TH: “this is like five or six games in one, right? It’s the spaceship game, it’s the on the ground game, it’s just a dialogue game, it’s an outpost game, it’s a crafted game. It does all of these things, and so… And it always is tricky for us to get a good game flow where those things don’t feel like they’re separate game”
That means the spaceship part is not front and center. All these things he states are just pieces for a standard RPG:
- Ground game: Loot and shoot.
- Dialogue game: standard RPG.
- Outpost game: base building.
- Crafting? Standard part of every RPG in the last decade.
Add to that it’s build with the Bethesda engine. We know it’s capabilities for what… 2 decades? We flew in FO4. But we didn’t steer… It was on rails
This all meant in my mind that the spaceship part had to be a transportation mini game.
So reading the official stuff, I always expected a mix between FO4 and Mass Effect. With a mobile “base” (your ship) with maybe some light spaceship combat. Sprinkled with some exploration.
Not a game which morphed all those separate game types. Just an FP/3rd p ARPG set in a cool science fiction universe.
I think we’re finally getting Firefly.