How Good Is Starfield 500 HOURS LATER?

hey I've got over 500 hours of play time in Starfield I've beat the main story three times I've completed all 67 handcrafted side quests and I've even explored all 1,000 planets so it's safe to say I've explored every nook and cranny of this game which I like to think makes me qualified to give an honest review so is the game good the first thing you're immediately going to notice when playing Starfield for the first time is the scale of some of the areas new Atlantis which is the games made city is not only visually stunning but it also bolsters a size that's miles ahead of anything we saw from previous Bethesda titles just the city's districts alone are as big as entire cities from Skyrim and the fact that you can go from any part of the city to another without any loading screens is a sight to behold but an absence of loading screens is the last thing you'll want to get used to in this game because outside of unique circumstances like new Atlantis you're going to be staring at a loading screen for most of your playthrough it feels feels like even the slightest movement is locked off behind a loading screen to the point where it's completely handicapped the exploration previous Bethesda games obviously also had loading screens Skyrim had pretty sparse loading screens and you could easily go for 20 minutes without seeing a single one of them Fallout 4 was a little worse thanks to its increased density but at least they were Snappy and Betha didn't try to disguise them in some areas like with elevators but Starfield on the other hand has a loading screen for pretty much any new environment you visit want to enter your ship loading screen want to enter or exit a planet's atmosphere loading screen want to jump to a different solar system you guessed it and all this waiting around completely ruins the game's immersion one thing I love the most about Skyrim is how easy it is to get immersed and fully lost in the world but with Starfield it's basically impossible to ever get close to this feeling because you get hit with a new loading screen every 5 minutes now yes the the amount of loading screens in Starfield is terrible but what's most infuriating about these loading screens isn't the number of them but just how little has gone into hiding them and when I say little I really mean zero no matter if you're jumping across the Galaxy or going into another room every loading screen cuts to the same black screen with a small logo in the corner if it's that taxing on the engine to physically travel from one planet to another or to exit solar systems then what's the excuse for not at least giving the I uson of that why not just have our ship travel through a hyperspace likee environment while the destination is loading instead of just abruptly teleporting us there hell if all that's too hard then at least let me play around with the models like in the last games anything would have been better than having to stare at my reflection and see my expression of regret every time I decide to explore someplace else exploration exploration might be the most disappointing thing about Starfield despite the game having over a, planets the majority of them are just uninteresting procedurally generated wastelands that serve no better purpose than to take up your time and when planets are this Barren and boring the only purpose this number of planets serves is mostly used during marketing the only thing you're going to find on these planets is the randomly chosen structures scattered across the map that are the exact same on every other planet there are really only two reasons you would ever be exploring a planet and that's to either scan all its resources Flor and forer or to build an outpost the former is more tedious than fun the entire mechanic entails you running up to objects that are highlighted by your scanner and well scanning them outposts on the other hand are actually pretty fun I know this Bas building mechanic hasn't been everyone's cup of tea since it was first introduced in Fallout 4 but I really liked it in that game and I like it even more now the way it works is that you place a beacon on an empty part of a planet that establishes what you can build in size from there you can start extracting resources from the ground build a botany lab a large meab base of operations or just acquire get away from the hustle and bustle you're limited only by your creativity and there are already some incredible builds made by people on YouTube that put my one-on-one Shack to shame everything about this mechanic has been improved upon since Fallout 4 you can now use an SI view during building to make the structural decisions easier to plan companions have specific skills that can be taken advantage of by assigning them to certain outposts and when an outpost is generating a lot of resources you can create cargo links between all your bases to have their resources shared but if building bases is not your style then don't worry Starfield has several apartments that you can decorate from scratch and truly make the home yours and can I just say how revealing it is to finally be able to use clean modern looking furniture out of the box instead of the dirty and dingy Furniture we had to use in Fallout 4 or the entire base building mechanic is one part of the game which I have no complaints about it's fun detailed and can easily be ignored if it doesn't interest you enemies in combat if Outpost building isn't to your liking then the majority of your gameplay is going to revolve around combat and if you've played Fallout 4 or 76 then you're going to feel right at home guns feel more or less the same as they did in bethesda's previous games there's a variety of enemy types and factions you're going to encounter there are the spaces which are basically starfields version of bandits from Skyrim the ecliptic which are a onetoone copy of the Gunners from Fallout 4 a pirate group known as the Crimson Fleet and the Varun zots a devoted branch of the aoic religion known as House of Varon other than humans you'll also encounter defense robots and hostile alien life forms which all share the same common goal of killing you unfortunately this variety is mostly superficial regardless of which faction you're going to be fighting all the the humans you're going to be fighting are going to have the same tactic of either charging you with a melee weapon or hiding behind cover and trying to pick you off from a distance and aside from their armor and voice lines there's nothing special about fighting a spacer compared to an ecliptic or a Varon zots or vice versa being a mercenary group the ecliptic could have been more organized compared to the disorderly spaces the Crimson Fleet could have acted more aggressively whereas the vun zalon could have used stealth capabilities the sky was the limit so it's disappointing that the enemies you're going to face will all behave in the exact same way in fact the most variety you're going to encounter is with the alien life forms which can be hostile territorial or harmless but such a variety is never seen in quest and the concept is left being only a fraction as good as it could have been but when it comes to the actual running and gunning things do get better although it's nothing new the Gunplay feels satisfying and responsive enemies will regularly react to getting shot by staggering and falling to the ground you can shoot enemies oxygen tanks to make them go flying and their screams of pain have never sounded more satisfying although strangely all the amazing dismemberment and Gore mechanics of Fallout 4 are completely absent the melee system is also aggressively Bare Bones and makes me feel a little worried for Elder Scroll 6 the Firearms thankfully play a lot better there have been some clear improvements made to the smoothness and responsiveness from Fallout 4 and with the added features of low gravity manling and boost packs mowing down hordes of enemies has never been so much fun levels are also designed with freedom of movement in Minds with wide open Arenas mixed in with tight bottlenecks that keep things fresh guns range from precise pistols and snipers to grenade launchers and light machine guns that rip enemies to shreds and everything in between all the weapons feel unique and have a beautiful grounded design to them seriously bethesda's weapons have never looked better and the variety Bethesda is given allows you to become become a nightmare for spacers and pirates in any way you please stealth on the other hand is not the greatest although Bethesda added many features for stealth builds such as vents in hostile areas stealth specific skills and invisibility mods for suits most of the levels are simply not fit for stealth most hostile areas have long and wide sections infested with enemies that make getting spotted very easy couple this with the plethora of locked doors that you'll have to open with your Digi piics and the painfully slow Crouch speed and you've got a recipe for an underwhelming stealth experience that's tedious at best and near impossible at worst spaceships when you're done terrorizing the citizens on the ground you're going to be blowing up ships in space these are the first fully controllable Vehicles Bethesda is placed into a game and they work quite well there are dozens of different ships to choose from each with its own set of pros and cons some are spacious and of great defense but are heavy and awkward to control others are small and Nimble but but are weak and not very spacious so players have a lot to consider when they're deciding on what ship to buy but if nothing suits your fancy then you can also try your hand at building your own ship completely from scratch this feature didn't have to be included in the game but I'm all the more happy that it was and just a quick glance of Starfield forums can show you all sorts of designs that players were able to create with this mechanic space combat however leaves much to be desired though there's nothing particularly bad about the way sh combat works it's very shallow it amounts to nothing more than pointing your reticle at a ship and then shooting it until it explodes many sort of advanced maneuvering is mostly unnecessary and the victor of these battles is usually determined by Whoever has the better Firepower ultimately these fights ends up being pretty damn boring dialogue however no other mechanic comes close to the level of boredom that the game's dialogue brings I finally understand what Phil Spencer meant when he said Starfield is more like Oblivion than Skyrim when you talk with an NPC for the first time and the face abruptly takes up 90% of your screen while they make awkward facial expressions it all makes sense I feel like Bethesda didn't even try to make the facial animations better and instead try to make them worse for comedy purposes which would have worked well if the rest of the game was actually fun but it's not if I was going to use one word to describe facial animations it would be stiff things only go downhill when these characters open their mouths my guess succinctness has been completely forgotten in the future because every character will happily talk about their entire lives without sparing any detail even with skipping past all the questions and secondary dialogue options you're still going to find yourself in these dialogues for a large sum of your playtime and the experience is far from fun it's a shame too since the overarching stories in this game can be pretty interesting but for some reason the dialogue writer felt the need to have every character say way more than they had to but with the boring writing aside the dialogue mechanics are exactly what people wanted after Fallout 4 taking notes from Fallout New Vegas Starfield allows you to utilize your skills traits and even your companions to get your way if that fails you can also try the persuasion miname which is governed by a dice roll that has its favorable odds increase with each rank up to the skill but to be honest dice rolls are just not my thing and I feel like it would have been better to simp lock specific persuasion options based on your persuasion skill skills skills have had some big changes every skill can now be leveled four times with each purchase of a skill going towards unlocking more advanced skills in their respective category but these skills were not made equal in more ways than one some skills such as weightlifting are incredibly useful for every play style others like astronomy are pretty much useless and serve no purpose other than novelty the changes and skill upgrades are also strange some challenges make sense like getting a certain amount of kills with a specific weapon type or picking X amounts of locks others have challenges that are comically easy and can have you ready for your next rank within minutes of unlocking them when it comes to the skills themselves some of them can actually be quite interesting and add new abilities to Your Arsenal however most of flat percentage upgrades that do nothing to spice up the blank gameplay although it is an issue seen in most RPGs it's a shame that be hasn't done anything to improve upon this issue especially considering all the interesting and quirky skills that we saw in Fallout 4 overall these skills feel like a step down from that of Fallout 4 with the only saving grace being the addition of the challenges and the cool unique art that we get for each skill main story finally we get to the meat and potatoes of these games the stories to sum it up you start as a minor for Argos extractors who comes across a mysterious artifact on the Moon of vect Tera thanks to you having the special ability to hear the artifacts you're instantly recruited into constellation one of the Galaxy's last group of explorers to find the rest of them and find out what they all mean and so you're going to be spending the rest of the 20 hours or so of the main story finding and collecting these artifacts and it's hard to give a verdict on the main story as a whole since its quality is so inconsistent sometimes the quest of some of bethesda's best work while others have less going for them than some of Skyrim's miscellaneous objectives and it feels like a pretty even split between these two states some quests like entangled and high pric depay are captivating and show us scenarios and mechanics which we've never seen in previous games other quests amount to nothing more than going to a procedurally generated part of a planet entering a procedurally generated mine to finally mining another artifact it's yet again another example of the biggest problem with this game bethesda's prioritization of quantity over quality there's nothing fun about going to these empty planets and exploring empty Minds it all feels like nothing more than busy work made to artificially lengthen the main story this is a shame too since the majority of the main story quests do have unique and interesting scenarios during one Mission you're dealing with an artifact deal gone bad and in another you're shifting between dimensions in an attempt to save both so it boggles my mind as to why beer thought it was a good idea to sprinkle in these 10 minutes of tedium between the quest they're actually proud of then there's the ending and how the story ties into New Game Plus but if you ask me the reveal of who the starborn were was very predictable and disappointing when I saw the starborn ship orbiting neon for the first time I was pulled back into the story who could they be sentient aliens Time Travelers or maybe interdimensional beings incapable of being understood well it turns out there were none of those things and are instead glorified Marvel superheroes that have a pension to be evil for no reason and you can forget about what Unity is who created it or why it speaks to you H the whole plot point of you and Barrett being the only people that the artifact spoke to is completely forgotten about the only saving grace the main story has is the way the new game plus mechanic ties into the story but if I'm being honest it's really not that cool because aside from a few new dialogue choices New Game Plus adds nothing to the table sure you do get the choice to the main story entirely and playing as your original character through multiple runs is cool but these few additions are simply not worth losing the countless hours you spent Base building developing relationships and becoming beloved or feared by the world what I did like was the secret timelines you could come across on a new game plus run these secret timelines would drastically change constellation and by extension the story in many interesting ways one of them had my beloved Andreia turn on Constellation in the name of house of vun and I was forced to kill her another turn Sarah Morgan into a plant because why not and my favorite the one where constellation is run by a group of children if Bethesda went further with these alternative timelines and had more drastic changes to the World At Large the new game plus would have easily been worth your time but as it stands I can't see any reason why I would want to redo all the work I put in my safe file for the sake of extra skill points companions my companions to be one of the most disappointing features of this game only second to the exploration this is because whereas most other aspects of this game are an improvement from Fallout 4 companions are a straightup downgrade despite there being dozens of companions that you can recruit only four of them allow you to develop a friendship and romance these are Baron Sarah Morgan Andreia and Sam Co all members of constellation this makes having crew members outside of constellation follow you around kind of useless since they have no more depth than the followers from Skyrim did 12 years ago hell some of these companions don't even have a unique name so it goes to show just how much effort was put into the followers this time around but things only get worse when you're talking about the four main companions although they may look different and come from different backgrounds all of them are virtually identical in terms of morals if you are hoping for one of these characters to have morals that your quicksafe character could get behind then think again 99% of the time these four followers will have virtually identical beliefs with only slight tunings to different morals so the biggest factor of who you're going to have carry your burdens is going to be which face you like the most the companion controls are also completely absent now so good luck trying to get your followers out of the way when they inevitably block you in a hallway faction quest lines but it's not all doom and gloom aside from its main story Starfield also features faction quest lines these are a set of quests that revolve around a specific faction in the game and it's between the quality of the side quest and the main quest line at least that's how it typically was with previous bethesa games but in Starfield the faction quests match and sometimes beat the level of quality of the main story there are a total of four of these quest lines with varying levels of enjoyment the rugen industry's quest line is by far the worst of these four and this is mostly thanks to its tropy story and aforementioned shoddy stealth mechanics being being heavily incentivized to be used the frear Rangers quest line has much better gameplay ALB with an equally uninteresting story as a matter of fact the only two faction quest lines that I would say are good are the UC Vanguard and the Crimson Fleet quest line both of these quests have much more varied gameplay and higher Stakes making both of these story lines far more engaging than the former 2 the best of these is without a doubt the UC Vanguard quest line which is various twists and turns not to mention Stakes that actually matter matter I mean sure a wealthy pirate Fleet or patented mind control technology sounds pretty bad but not as bad as the extermination of the human race the Crimson Fleet quest line was also great with the promise of those sweet sweet credits what I liked about those two quest lines over the ruin and Freestar Collective ones was that they got right into the action and didn't have a bunch of boring quests like collecting coffee for the faction leader overall these quest lines are highlights of the game and I was surprised by the amount of unique set pieces that were shown throughout all of these quests it's definitely an upgrade from Skyrim's faction quests which typically amounted to clearing slightly higher budget dungeons than the ones you typically come across side quest side quests on the other hand were unfortunately a step down from previous games there are a handful of interesting quests like the one where you side with one of three clones of famous historical figures or the one where you help an Old Colony ship find a new home but for every operation star seed and first Contact there's a mountain of boring fetch quests that amount to you going from A to B and maybe picking something up or talking to someone along the way some people might argue that Bethesda might not have the time or resources to make every side quest as big and expensive as others and that may be true operation star seed uses models and textures that we don't see anywhere else in the game but that's not an excuse for the side quest being bad and it's not like Bethesda is incapable of making small but interesting side quests who knows Gambit is a side quest where you have to talk to and decide the fate of a sentient AI despite taking place almost entirely within a dialogue menu inside a single room it's one of the best side quests in the game thanks to its Superior writing and interesting topic I mean where are the quest where you jump into paintings or stop a serial killer overall Starfield currently has more than 60 side quests and I feel like the game would have been much better off if that number was halfed and the writers and Quest designers were instead given more time and resources to make 30 great side quests rather than the 60 mediocre ones we have with a few gems sprinkled in between final review overall Starfield has a lot of good things going for it many of the issues we saw in Skyrim and Fallout 4 have been resolved and things we like like the RPG elements and Base building have been expanded upon but none of these things are enough to justify the out-of-date quest design aggressively boring dialogue and mediocre main story what we're left with is a massive but empty game that takes hundreds of hours to complete but only a few of those hours are going to be a good time and if there's anything Bethesda can take away from this is that bigger does not mean better if Starfield was just a fraction of the scale it was trying to be and instead Focus those efforts on making the content that it had as fun as possible then it could have been an amazing game but as it stands starfields as vast as an ocean or a Galaxy in this case but as deep as a hudle subscribe it to fall damage you milk drinker

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Keywords: starfield, starfield gameplay, starfield review, starfield news, starfield game, starfield bethesda, starfield impressions, starfield update, starfield full game, starfield xbox, starfield ending, starfield pc, bethesda starfield, starfield tips, starfield guide, starfield leaks, starfield tips and tricks, starfield walkthrough, starfield bugs, starfield 2023, starfield mods, starfield patch, starfield trailer, starfield glitches, starfield info, starfield part 1

Id: 8ERQBGLsZ2Y

Length: 22min 3sec (1323 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 25 2023