Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hater. I actually was really excited for the game. But so far I am just not having fun.
For a little bit of reference, I just finished playing thru Cyberpunk 2077 and then jumped right into Starfield. Maybe that was a mistake because I kinda just want to go back to Cyberpunk (and I will in a few weeks when the DLC comes out).
But I’m noticing two really big issues with Starfield: first, the gunplay/combat is… let’s call it underwhelming. I realize it’s quite probably a skill issue and I need to just git gud, but holy crap, everything is a bullet sponge and I don’t have that many bullets! Stealth seems to be pretty worthless at early levels as I don’t have any high-alpha guns that can take advantage of it and, most of the time, I’m detected before I even see the bad guys. I’m just not enjoying this aspect of the game at all.
The second big issue for me is that there’s a loading screen every five seconds! Again, probably a me thing, but OMG, it’s driving me nuts. Get into ship, loading screen. Launch from planet, loading screen. Fly to next planet, loading screen. Land on planet, loading screen. Leave ship, loading screen. I just want to go shoot things! Let me shoot things!
Okay, found some spacers, time to… oh shit, out of ammo. Let me swap to a worse gun that still has ammo. Sigh. Okay, they’re dead. Let me just heal up… oh shit, out of med packs. Sigh.
Oh and wrestling with the UI is exhausting.
Anyways, I realize that this probably isn’t the place to find a lot of like-minded people. But I really do want to like this game. Any tips on maybe at least ways to make the combat less of a chore?
I hate that people feel the need to say they’re not a hater in order not to get abused for not liking a game. People out here treating games like a religion.
I totally agree with this. I have always been able to empathize with people not liking a game that I’m obsessed with. Every game has flaws, and games are like music genres- if I like EDM, you may like country, and that’s ok.
People get really closed-minded about games, even past the point of “fanboy”. It’s like some sort of hero worship.
Yeah, those people are so heavily invested in this game that it has to be great at all costs. I mean dropping $100 just to play a few days early and the subsequent justifications made after the fact really speak to that.
I’ve heard people talk about how this is the greatest game ever released. Like dude, this isn’t even the greatest game released so far this year.
I agree about the loading screens. It didn’t drive me crazy but would have been better if there were fewer.
In regards to combat, I like it. Even many of the reviewers felt combat was one of the good things.
I’m still pretty early game, but I also like it. The sponginess means I can’t just fire a few shots at a guy’s head and call it a day, I might need to cycle through weapons, be pretty careful about taking breaks for cover, watch my health. It means my ammo gets used up a lot more, and same with health items.
Actually, Ive noticed a bit of a trend in Starfield where it seems like Bethesda is trying to push back a bit against having a massive overage of ammunition and money (without bringing the scavenging skill into it).
Having spongey enemies and a ton of different kinds of ammo means no one weapon has an absurd amount of ammo, and not having a ton of easily burgled apartments or houses means I cant just have a huge city stealing spree and come out the other end richer than I know what to do with only ten hours in.
I initially hated that there weren’t huge apartment blocks ripe for stealing, but I can sort of understand why that’s the case now and I can appreciate having a larger wind up time to becoming stupidly rich, especially with there being much higher money sinks compared to older Bethesda games between ship and outpost building. It really seems like, to me, Bethesda is purposefully trying to have a functioning economy compared with their older games where making money a non-issue was basically a part of the early game.
I heard that it’s possible to steal spaceships and sell them. It’s a long process, but seems to be worth the time. Some spaceships bring lots of cash.
Was i made a fool of?
I just discovered yesterday that you need a systems targeting skill to be able to target enemy engines, which enables boarding, which enables ship capture, and then boom, you can sell ships. So yes, I’m sure I could get rich that way, but it’s not nearly as alluringly easy as going to one town in Skyrim and just looting absolutely fucking everything in one in-game day.
I haven’t checked out a ton of reviews, just two or three from trusted reviewers. The very first one I watched said they didn’t like the combat but still really enjoyed the game overall. I’m hoping I can push through to the point where I’m enjoying the rest of the game…
I think part of this is what it’s being compared to. The combat is significantly better in starfield than past Bethesda (BGS) games. People who are saying it’s great are generally comparing it to their past games.
I don’t have experience with Cyberpunks combat yet (waiting for the update to finally play it) but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s better.
Shouldn’t you be comparing to other current games in the genre, rather than past games of the company? Because if the game is better than their past games, but nothing close to current games in the genre, then that just means it’s a bad game and their past games were worse.
I feel like there not being a single large map derives a bit from that BGS feel. In Skyrim if you need to go somewhere new you might trek across the map for a few minutes, and on the way come across a few random encounters and interesting places. In Starfield you teleport most of the way, and if you want to come across random encounters outside your ship you have to go out of your way or do some specific quests.
Yeah, this is my feeling as well. It makes it feel like a few disconnected locations, not one shared universe. If we could get into out ship and fly places without just teleporting there from the map that’d go a long way to fixing things. Maybe also make things happening in space to make it feel alive. As it is, the space stuff is mostly just another loading screen on top of the other loading screens. It doesn’t play a role in the rest of the game and just serves to disconnect us (rather than connect as it’s supposed to) from the world we’re in.
My main complaint is the writing and worldbuilding. So far I’ve been exploring new Atlantis and picked up exclusively fetch quests from NPCs so generic and uninteresting I don’t really feel like continuing to talk to them. And the uncreative worldbuilding of authoritarian capitalists Vs libertarian capitalksts vs religious crazies. Can Bethesda not even imagine an alternative to capitalism?
Name me one sci-fi that has had an alternative to capitalism without access to something god-tech level like Treks replicators, which would break the setting entirely.
Out of those, The Expanse, Star Wars and Firefly all very much feature capitalism.
Battlestar doesn’t feature large scale capitalism due to most of the human race being destroyed but it definitely exists within the fleet, as we see in the episode where Lee investigated the black markets.
Starship Troopers and Warhammer are both authoritarian fascistic states where everything is controlled by the government, which granted is something different from capitalism, but not the time this game went for.
Capitalism works great with RPGs leveling system.
But I’d love to have seen a cashless society where the only way to get stuff was to trade other goods.
Or some sort of social credit system, where the nicer you are and the more quests you complete, the higher your status and the more free items you unlock.
Or some authoritative system that binds you into a contract whenever you make a trade it forces you to work off your debt in all matters of ways.
Capitalism is the best system you can really have when you have multiple factions who’s economies work together though. What you describe is great if the whole world trades in that manner, but when you have multiple factions you needs someway for commerce to work between them for world building. To be fair, it’s not like the factions in stafridls are just boring capitalists. The more I’ve learned about the UC, my assumption that they were just democratic socialist types has been undermined totally.
I haven’t played that much yet, but I’m not hooked at all. It just feels like a bunch of games I’ve already played. The core gameplay is fallout or Skyrim, great games, but we’ve seen the formula plenty of times. Space combat is like a watered-down version of elite. The planet concept has already been done by NMS and so far I think they did it better. I don’t think it’s bad, but how is it supposed to compete for my attention with all the games that just came out?
The space combat and flight capability in general being a watered down version of Elite’s is definitely my biggest complaint. I’m perfectly happy doing space-chores as gameplay and have really enjoyed bumbling my way between radiant quests and random buildings I find while scanning planets, but I want to land the ship dammit. So much of Elite I found incredibly boring but kept coming back for a long time for the flight/space combat.
I get why they did it that way to make it more accessible to a wider audience (my partner for instance cannot begin to agree with me wanting the flight to be more complicated), but the space genre has often had a huge overlap with flight sim fans for good reason. I hope a very capable modder with far more time and skill than me can implement a more robust space flight experience in there one day.
There are about a million things you can critique Elite but they fucking nailed combat, it was super satisfying in that game. That is the bar for subsequent space games and it’s definitely something that can be improved upon but so far idk if anyone has been able touch it. Really fun aspect of that game.
