this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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I was on Windows at the time and had GamePass, so I pleasantly had access included with what I was already paying for. I ended up pirating it so I could mod it (that is prevented on GamePass), because it needed mods.
No, it's not negative because it's MS owned. It's a very bad game. I love older Bethesda games and I love sci-fi. This should have been an easy win for me. Wow, it was disappointing. The actual combat gameplay is fine, but everything between combat sucks. Too many loading screens taking you out of the gameplay.
The writing sucks. They make use of established sci-fi tropes, but then they don't understand how to make them work in a story. They give you very few choices, often not including the most obvious ones.
Despite this being the "exploration" game, exploration is essentially non-existent. Every planet pretty much has the same stuff. There's like five bases that spawn everywhere identically, and a handful of "natural" points-of-interest, which appear all over the planet identically, as well as being the same as every other planet with the same ones. You might see some benefit to explore if you're building bases, but that system is incredibly clunky and frustrating to make operational. Even once you have things running, it'll still require managing storages from overflowing and blocking incoming supplies. It's really bad.
The universe is incredibly unreactive too. If you thought this was true for their previous games, it's worse in Starfield. There's no ships bringing supplies to colonies. No colonies being built that weren't there at the start. No fighting between factions, besides pirates randomly and it's the same random event that happens when you warp into a place, not something that happened because pirates are raiding a supply line or something. It just doesn't change ever.
Basically, no. Starfield actually sucks. I really wanted to like it, but there's nothing to like in my opinion. I've seen some people say they like it, but I honestly don't get it. Every aspect seems like a downgrade from FO4, which had its own issues but had reasons to like it too.
Thanks for the review. Disappointing to be sure. I was hoping to play it at some point and that it wouldn’t suck as much as people say it does. Or that they would turn it around in time.
Still give a try, it’s not for everyone and it’s not to the same quality as their previous games but it’s honestly not a bad game. At worst I’d say it’s aggressively average. But I still have a great time with ship combat and exploration, the loading doesn’t bother me as much and people act like the quests and writing are BAD, They are not, it’s just not to the level of their previous games. But there are still a few quests I absolutely love.
I would say most of the writing is bad. There are a handful of interesting quests, but most aren't. Then there's things like the generation ship, which they don't do anything interesting with, it uses the same technology as the modern ships, and also the quest path to end it is stupid. There's also so many things that just don't make sense in the universe it's set in, and it's overall just boring.
I agree overall the game is just aggressively average though. It plays fine enough, but it gives no reason to want to play it. It's not actively painful to play, but it gives no feedback to make anything feel worth doing.
I really enjoyed the Ryujin quest line, the quest where the world was shifting, and there’s tons of great smaller quests and interactions, but I agree the generation ship was a big miss, the main quest flounders and flops hard about half way through and overall they didn’t do enough with universe building.
I was holding out hope that the modding scene would help support the game, because traditionally speaking Bethesda modders have done some incredibly amazing work on other titles. But no, alas, Starfield is such a fuckin' trash fire that not even the modders are willing to put in the work to unfuck this heap of shit. Somebody might release a killer overhaul for it after they've had a couple more years to basically rewrite the entire engine, but frankly I don't see anyone caring that much about this game to make it happen. I know of at least one guy who rather than getting involved in the mod scene, instead got on Steam and said fuck you, I'll make my own fuckin' Starfield, and started whipping up Spacebourne 2, and even this half-baked early access alpha jank has clear signs of being the seed of a better game than Starfield was. I'm sure that others have had similar ideas.
I feel like starfield is an experiment in user driven content (mods) to sell a game. The issue with Skyrim is that there is really only one map, and before any map extension mod came out, there were so many mods out there that competed for space on the map. Even today, large world overhaul mods are constantly stepping on the toes of other mods. City redesigns are also a problem unless you're really good at load orders and merging.
Starfield feels like each world is an open map, ready for people to start designing content: either a colony, a cave, or anything really. The story seems loose and open ended so that it won't interfere with large collaborative content. It's not a game they are selling, but a modding storefront. It's like Skyrim Creations, but putting the horse (armor sold separately) before the cart.