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boatswainscall · 1 year ago

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I tried out Starfield through Gamepass and I am deeply Whelmed by it. Brutally honest thoughts below, though I will admit I did not get very far into the game and as such won't comment on the quality of the story and gameplay beyond that point.

Character Creator

The character creator is honestly really good. Options are not locked behind gender markers and I found it relatively easy to make an androgynous looking character, which is at least my standard for RPG character creators. The game uses sliders like past Bethesda character creators, and features a wide variety of scars, facial markings, tattoos, piercings and makeup to apply.

You can also select your pronouns in a deviously hidden sub menu upon naming your character, which I honestly hope becomes the industry standard across all triple-A titles. You can pick between She/Her, He/Him and They/Them. Which is limited but it's still good. You can also customize your character's physique and walking cycle, which are not locked to masculine/feminine bodies at all.

The one complaint I have is that the textured hairstyles, while better than past Bethesda games, there aren't as many as compared to like, Baldur's Gate 3, which honestly set the new standard that should be upheld across the games industry for its variety and quality of textured hair options.

The perk and character background system also impressed me, if by Bethesda standards. The perks have direct influence on character dialogue and some even have direct and pretty interesting downsides to them.

Opening Story Hook

It's not a surprise to me that they haven't learned their lesson from what, how many RPGs they've made now with insufferably foot-dragging opening sequences that force you to stare into the bottomless dead eyes of the plot that you can't skip in any way every time you start a new character. That everyone has at some point complained about each time, and critics have criticized.

And yet here we are in Starfield, and the opener and plot hook are not only aggressively mid but also incredibly fucking slow paced and overwhelmingly dour in tone. For as much as the game reminded me of the Outer Worlds in several ways, Starfield by comparison is at least in its opening taking itself way too seriously. Which honestly contributed towards me losing patience with it pretty early on.

I wasn't exactly asking for the game to be on the Outer Worlds' level of tongue in cheek right off the bat and god forbid I wasn't asking it to be on a Marvel movie's farcical level of goofiness, but I honestly think it would have benefited from being a little more lighthearted. VASCO, your helper robot and first companion, does have a few lines that made me smile but the rest of the characters didn't really play off him in a fun way to amplify it enough for me.

I will not comment on the quality of the story past you meeting Constellation in New Atlantis, but the inciting incident and main plot hook were both incredibly dull and formulaic and didn't do much to compel me to stick with it. So I ultimately didn't.

Aesthetic and Art Direction

I heard from a friend that some of their acquaintances in a Discord server described Starfield as "Fallout 3-like in the best and worst way possible", and I can't help but agree. But Starfield might honestly have the most dull premise out of all of their games, made even more so by its strong but very... Indistinct aesthetic.

Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 have equally lame plot hooks but they at least have the Fallout aesthetic to prop them up, which is incredibly strong and at least comparatively unique and fun to engage with. Meanwhile Skyrim and Oblivion are just iconic for their own sake due to their presence in a lot of millennial childhoods and teenage years which led to them sinking themselves permanently into the Internet's cultural weave. And their own specific fantasy aesthetics are similarly strong and kind of the general standard for the average gamer for "fantasy video game" at this point, for good and for ill.

And while Starfield similarly has an admittedly wonderful aesthetic and art direction - it's weapons, armour, environmental details and architecture are reminiscent to me of 80's Sci Fi/Futurism with its chunky and clunky design elements. I adore that kind of tech - movies like the original Alien and honestly Fallout 3 were what endeared me to it in the first place as a young teenager - it has the problem where while strong it's art direction is a little... Derivative.

There's not really much I encountered at least within the game's opening hours that truly stand out as something new or as a unique twist on an existing style of sci-fi. That paired with the early game's intensely drab and desaturated colours in its early planets and even the first hub city contribute to how uninspired it felt. There was even a point as I was sneaking through the first dungeon clearing it of Pirates where I briefly felt like I was in a cleaner, less wasteland-ified Fallout 4 one instead. So while it honestly might work for some - I wasn't endeared to its aesthetic as much as I would have liked to.

Combat and Related Mechanics

Okay, now to talk more positively, at least comparatively so. The combat in Starfield right off the bat feels really good. Animations for reloading and firing/swinging weapons are very polished and detailed, and enemy AI while still suffering from Bethesda-isms in some respects does feel at least on par or improved upon Fallout 4's. Guns also sound and handle in a very satisfying manner.

When you are inside of a building you don't have to worry about it, but when on the surface of a planet with a hostile atmosphere you have to be mindful of your Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide levels while in combat. Autorun and Sprint drain your O2 and fill your CO2 really fast while you're in a fight, so you can't just run and gun the way you could in their other games and get away with it. It forces you to be more methodical and slower with taking things down, which I at least enjoyed. When you're out of combat though you only have to watch your O2/CO2 levels when you're sprinting, so don't worry about having to manage it while out exploring unless some wildlife aggros on you.

The perk system is also off the bat the best one they've made, at least by Bethesda standards. When you level up you get perk points, but you can't just automatically spend them on whatever you want. You first have to complete mini challenges tied to those specific perks in order to level them up. Unlocking perks at their base level I don't believe require said challenges, but if you want to improve them in any way you have to work for it. Which compared to past games is a welcome change and definitely makes the game feel more like a RPG.

Other Mechanics

The lockpicking minigame is the best Bethesda has ever made. Which is a low bar to clear but they sure did clear it. It's a lot more cerebral than their previous one where it was just a guessing/patience game. Now it's an actual puzzle to solve, and while it might grow repetitive to some over time I really enjoyed sitting down to figure it out the first time I encountered a locked box.

Ship combat/flight though is something I want to take a second to warn people about. If you have wrist/joint issues, either due to injury or medical reasons and you want to play Starfield on a keyboard, I strongly suggest you rebind the controls for Ship System management to be something that will be more comfortable and safe for you. Because as it exists now while I don't normally have issues with my hands it was causing me pretty severe hand cramps due to the Crab Claw positioning I had to take to manage it effectively, so I can only imagine it would be excruciating by default for someone who has joint issues. It's a major accessibility issue, and again I strongly suggest you rebind the keys to prevent injuring yourself if you have these issues.

Also if you similarly have problems with motion sickness I'd avoid playing Starfield because ship combat and navigation is intensely disorientating and made me nauseous after only two sequenced dogfights with pirates.

Beyond that ship management is... Fine? It's mechanics are interesting in theory but in practice its intensely clunky and frustrating to deal with. I saw someone else post about it but frankly ship combat at least while you're flying solo with nobody else to assist with things is very aggravating to manage and honestly kind of bad.

Performance

I'm not running with a rig that meets all the minimum system requirements, so the game defaulted me to low settings with automatic dynamic resolution scaling (DRS) enabled to prioritize performance over prettiness. But despite that, I found the game actually ran rather well even after bumping things up to medium settings. I didn't encounter any graphical bugs in my time playing beyond some z-fighting textures in a small part of the environment in New Atlantis, which I think was more caused by the graphics settings than being of developer error.

I would still warn that if you don't meet system requirements and decide to play anyway with your own customized settings and DRS enabled, that when things get busy on screen the quality of your resolution will get quite blurry as the game compensates, which may cause eye strain and motion sickness from extended exposure.

Conclusion

I wasn't riding the hype train for this game so I wasn't exactly disappointed by the early game experience I got, but I was let down by how overwhelmingly "Bethesda" in the bad way it was.

If you honestly enjoy the Bethesda game experience of ignoring the main plot and spending hundreds of hours exploring and sidequesting instead, I think that Starfield will hold up just fine for you. But for me at least, I wasn't impressed, and likely won't continue to play it.

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