A (Completely) Negative Starfield Review

I like Bethesda RPGs the first one I tried was Oblivion and after Oblivion I tried Morrowind which continues to be till this day one of my favorite games of all time I think it's the best one that Bethesda has made in that style and I have continued to enjoy Bethesda RPGs since that point I like Fallout 3 unlike Fallout New Vegas and I even like Skyrim even though in all of those games I had complaints like a lot of complaints they're still fun they're strangely hypnotic even Fallout 4 which I didn't like still drew me in for a long period of time before I realized I hate this game the Bethesda RPG formula is so powerful that it took dozens of hours of playing Fallout 4 before you realized oh I don't like this this is bad that's why people that are Defenders of Bethesda games whenever you criticize it and you say well I played for 10 hours or 20 hours and I didn't like it didn't draw me in didn't like this didn't like that they'll be like oh 10 hours 20 hours that's nothing the game just started you can't judge on a Bethesda RPG game with only 10 hours of gameplay under your belt no that's ridiculous it sounds silly to say but they have a point so to quiet some of those critics let me inform you that my game time is about 100 hours now in that play time I finished the main story and all the major faction quests and started the game over several times picking different skills to focus on each time and my conclusion after doing that is that it's much of what I expected from a Bethesda RPG and I think it's a lot better than Fallout 4 which is the only one of these games I didn't really like at all so I had a lot of fun with it you don't play a game for 100 hours and not enjoy yourself but I have a lot of complaints I have a lot of complaints and that's what this video is going to focus on if you're looking for a comprehensive review that's weighing positive and negatives you should go look elsewhere because I like to stick to doing the things I do well and that's complaining I'm very good at complaining in all Bethesda RPGs the worst version of the game is the version you buy at release Starfield seems to have a bunch of planned DLC already and they've announced that there are going to be major patches to the game as it goes forward and so complaining is a good thing because it helps inform them on what needs attention and universally agreed upon problems could be rectified in one of those patches or as a part of one of the major DLCs problem one with Starfield is the build and weapon variety for anything other than a ballistics playthrough the weapon variety for laser weapons suck the weapon variety for particle weapons also sucks and the melee weapons have it worse than anybody now I talked about the laser weapons in my last video but the problem was a lot worse than I realized since that to recap the complaint in that video there are only three laser weapons in the entire game the solstice the equinox and the Orion now you could bump that up to five if you include the cutter and the arc welder now I'm not sure you should include them but whatever let's include them for the sake of argument that's five total at most with the overwhelming majority that you're going to see at any given time is the first three now out of those five the arc welder the Orion and the Equinox all use the same type of ammo they're all competing for the same resource the solstice on the other hand uses a different type of ammo and it's the only gun in the game that uses that ammo type which is something that doesn't happen to any other weapon in the game it doesn't make any sense the laser weapons are obviously neglected when you look at the scope and variety of the ballistic weapon category and compare it to any other weapon category you see how big the disparity is I suspect that there's a good reason for this I think that Bethesda is going to retroactively add a bunch of mid to low tier laser weapons in one of their DLC updates I'm betting in the first one that they release shattered space that that will be about house Varun it'll add more mid low and high tier laser weapons maybe even some particle weapons and then they'll do something similar to melee weapons in a subsequent update we will talk about the melee weapons as well because thank God it even worse but first let me respond to some of the rebuttals I got to my last video discussing this issue one of the common comments that I got was something like oh that just happened to you you know you just didn't play for long enough I got tons of cool laser weapons so many different laser weapons and many different varieties and so I'll respond to that criticism here you did not find a bunch of laser weapons you didn't nobody did what you found was different varieties of the same three laser weapons you found equinoxes solstices and orions with different weapon mods or perks on the weapons you found legendary versions of those weapons and that's all you found because that's all that's in the game I also got comments saying nah man I found better weapons down the line you know those Varun weapons and those are not laser weapons those are particle weapons but just to emphasize the point I'm trying to make let's count them let's include all of them because after all there's there's some logic to saying that that's the case the laser weapon perk that you can get does affect the laser part of the damage of the particle weapons so let's let's include them all together there are two particle weapon pistols one particle weapon shotgun and one particle weapon rifle so that's four if you put the laser weapon and the particle weapon category together even if you include the cutter and the arc welder that's still only nine weapons total nine for ballistic weapons there's around 30. three times as many there's a trend here the ballistic weapon type has a lot of weapons with a lot of ammo types there's a lot of options in it and every other category is neglected especially the melee category the melee building in Starfield is just awful like it's much worse than even what they've done before in their previous games the weapon variety is again poor with there being less than 10 melee weapons in the game there's no two-handed weapons that you can use they're all stuck to three hit combos three hit combo pods three hit combo Paws the power attacks tied to these weapons suck and not just compared to games like Skyrim that have a big emphasis on melee they also suck even in comparison to Fallout which also has guns there was more strategy involved in Fallout melee one of the reasons is because the power attacks had a kind of lunging effect you could cross distances and take advantage of an opening and that's another problem there's not as many openings in this game because in Fallout you were constantly fighting animals you were constantly fighting things that would engage you in melee combat and that was the case even for the human enemies many of them use melee weapons as well so there were a lot more opportunities for you to get good at engaging in melee combat figuring out when to block when to step to one side or the other when to use your power attack lunge to get in some damage it wasn't like great it wasn't spectacular but it's a lot more than what we have in Starfield in Starfield you're not engaging with alien monsters very often in my experience the most you're dealing with is other humans there's very few quests that will put you in front of alien monsters that will engage you in melee combat there's some but not nearly as many as you would in Fallout so most the time you're dealing with human enemies most of those human enemies are using guns and even when you are facing an enemy that's also using a melee weapon the melee combat is so simplistic that the strategy is the same regardless of what you're doing it's run up to the enemies and whack at them and hope you don't die in the attempt which can be a real pain if you're playing on the hardest difficulty you have to understand I'm not saying that the melee combat was a masterpiece in those Fallout games in previous Bethesda games but it was a lot better than this a lot of the times the enemies will run away from you in Starfield they'll just start sprinting away from you and I chase them but I often can't hit them again while they're running away and I would have been able to if I still had my lunge attack from Fallout another problem with the melee is that you can't modify it there's no crafting associated with the melee weapons it's like the whole thing is an afterthought there's no attack speed rating on the weapon to compare one to the other and I think that might be because they all have the same attack speed I'm not entirely sure but they all seem to attack in the same way and at that point why even have different types why wouldn't you have the light knife weapons attack faster but do less damage and then the heavier weapons attack more slowly but do more damage this is space why isn't there some kind of energy-based melee weapon why isn't there some that work like a stun baton and do em damage I thought the weapon variety was bad for the laser weapons but if it's true that all of the melee weapons have the same attack speed then I was wrong the melee weapons have it the worst because that means that there's not nine melee weapons there's one with different skins at that point it doesn't matter if the dagger says it's different than the Cutlass if they swing at the same speed and there's no other variables to them then they're the same weapon and one is just objectively better why don't we have two-handed melee weapons why don't we have high technology Shields to go with the one-handed weapons why does everything seem to be so underbaked and give off the impression that they intend to do something about it in future updates here's a good example why can't we have an evil companion or at least one that's not such a goody two shoes all of the major companions are the ones in constellation and those are the only ones you can Romance let's list out their qualities for a second you got Sarah who likes being honest and being nice you got Sam who likes Justice and being nice you got Barrett that likes it when you avoid confrontation and being nice and then you have andreja who likes helping people and being a nice person and that would be fine but at the moment constellation is the only place where you can get these important companions you can hire some randos from bars but that's not the same why can't I have an evil companion join me as part of the Crimson Fleet questline the game lets me join the Crimson Fleet it lets me be an evil bastard it lets me take on quests to engage in piracy but it doesn't give me a fleshed out companion to enjoy that with and this next thing this is the biggest problem I have with Starfield this is the real one that bothers me one of the biggest appeals I have with bethesda's previous RPGs is that I enjoy exploring the act of walking around and seeing things that catch your interest and walking over to those things like in Skyrim seeing the temples carved into the mountainsides I like walking around in these carefully crafted environments and letting the atmosphere wash over me and much of the enjoyment from this kind of activity comes from the actual walking from exploring from physically moving from place to place and in Starfield that's gone it's basically non-existent exploration in Starfield is done through menu navigation you pull up your star chart menu you pull up the system that you want to go to and then you just fast travel there or even worse you pull up your quest menu and then have it directly send you to wherever the quest wants you to go I have no idea what planets I visited to do the main quests or the side quests I don't know what systems those planets were on I don't know what they were close to or far away from and even if I touch down on a planet and decide to explore there's nothing to explore there isn't anything there the areas on the planets that you visit will have some points of interest that seem to be handcrafted but between them is like five minutes of procedurally generated [ __ ] there is just nothing satisfying about exploring in this way you know I saw a lot of people getting upset that you couldn't actually go across the whole planet you know that there were invisible walls at certain points and you couldn't go any further past those points and I just don't agree with that criticism because why would you want to explore the whole planet if the whole planet is like this there isn't anything there if anything I wish the planet was a lot less explorable I wish the planet's explorable area which was much smaller you couldn't just land anywhere in the planet you could land on specific areas and these areas had more tailored content like I don't want to go into a cave and find some more mineral resource nodes I don't I don't care and I want to see another research Tower and you kill all the ecliptic mercenaries in the area and you go up the tower and it gives you a little bit of information on the planet's resources I don't care no so I completely don't understand people that were upset that you couldn't explore the whole planet because that wasn't the problem the problem was that there wasn't anything on those planets that were worth exploring my impression of Starfield is that it needs a lot of work I said this in the beginning but all Bethesda RPGs are at their worst state when they first release they get much better over time after they've gotten all their patches DLCs and mod support I expect I'll enjoy it a lot more once all of these things come out but as it stands I don't think I really had a great time with it and my recommendation to people thinking about getting it is to wait and that's the end of this video please unsubscribe and unclick the bell notification hopefully you've been alienated and if you haven't I'm sure I'll get to you in a future video until then thank you very much for watching

Channel: Ratatoskr

Views: 268,210

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Id: 7mPiQzMbhP4

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2023