I’ve Given Up On Starfield After 25 Hours

bigger does not necessarily mean better and quantity is no substitute for Quality if you ever needed proof of the veracity of those two statements you need look no further than Bethesda game Studio's latest release Starfield for context I have been a fan of the studio for a long old time the love affair started donkeys ago with Morrowind back in 2002 which by the by I even suffered through a second time on the original Xbox a year or two after release still not sure why and I absolutely adored Oblivion and Fallout 3. I liked Skyrim Fallout 4 was fine and I completely skipped Fallout 76 and even though I have enjoyed bethesda's more recent titles to varying degrees it's been my view for a good while that their standards have slowly been slipping Starfield has only served to solidify that idea in my mind because after 25 hours or so longer than I spend playing most games I have decided it to take a break perhaps never to return because Starfield is a bit Naf before we get cracking proper I also just want to immediately knit this idea in the bud I've seen online that 25 hours or somewhere around that play time is barely enough time to scratch the surface and that you need to play the game for 30 50 or 100 hours to truly understand its Majesty I don't even spend 25 hours over the course of a week or two doing things I actually enjoy so to say I've not given it a fair Shake is Bonkers and let me tell you right now I would rather eat my own hands than spend another 25 hours playing Starfield let's talk about why well for starters starfield's performance is absolutely horrendous I am fortunate enough to have a very capable PC which can handle most titles at 4K with a good frame rate using close to highest settings not accounting for Ray tracing and yet this particular slice of space based nonsense brings my computer computer to its knees thankfully I do have an Nvidia 40 series graphics card so I have at least been able to mod in dlss and frame generation which has improved things significantly the performance issues would all be at least somewhat forgivable too if Starfield looked the business but most of the time it comes nowhere close to that a lot of the time it looks atrocious every so often when the lighting works properly during indoor sections when you visit a ship with an interesting interior or when you land on a particularly striking Planet you might be tricked into thinking it's a good looking game that impression will remain only until you encounter one of the many NPCs dotted throughout the world all of them dead-eyed plasticine-faced monsters whose faces are able to display the same range of emotions as my Kettle there are many aspects of starfield's visuals which look like they've been taken straight from a game released in 2010 but the NPCs are by far and away the most egregious considering this is a game during which a lot of your time is spent chatting to people the idea that Bethesda was happy with the bd-eyed little nightmares they've strewn across their game world is mind-blowing to me they also still spend the majority of their time stood or sat completely still while talking to you and although that again may have been acceptable a decade ago now that games like The Witcher have shown us how good dialogue can be while retaining a level of dynamism to character movement the gulping statues in Starfield simply do not cut the mustard even if its Graphics were polished across the board it wouldn't matter a whole lot either as Starfield is desperately unimaginative those NPCs with these serial killer stairs aren't going to endear themselves any more to you once they open their mouths as the voice acting is average at best and most of the time they don't have much exciting to say either I know Mass Effect is a different style of RPG from Starfield but look they're both RPGs and they're both set in space so throw me a freaking bone here but when I first entered the Citadel after playing through the opening of Mass Effect and began talking to important characters and random NPCs I straight away learned a ton about its World whether I was being given information regarding the machinations of certain big players in its universe or learning about the cultures and conflicts of different alien races didn't matter I was hooked from the off and desperate to learn as much as possible from minute one Starfield for me has a tendency to somehow only cover most topics at surface level despite most characters being quite verbose and a phrase you might hear me use again during this video although I'll try not to is vast but not deep there are a lot of people to talk to and there is a lot of dialogue to get through however I've never once felt myself getting anywhere near as invested as I have previously with games like Mass Effect or indeed bethesda's earlier titles this lack of inspiration when it comes to World building extends to starfield's General aesthetic as well which is also plain and interesting and about as by the numbers as it could possibly be its world is mostly filled with just about the most generic space stuff you could possibly think of I consider myself to be a terribly unimaginative person in general and Starfield and its world is exactly the kind of thing I'd think up if someone put a gun to my head and told me to come up with something similar for the record that's pretty bad for some people not having dragons flying around kids trapped in fridges for an absurd amount of time or any wackiness whatsoever will be a plus point but for me it feels about us no effort and down the middle as you could possibly go starfield's world can't hold a candle to Fallout or Elder Scrolls and the wonderful amount of imagination oozing from every corner of their worlds the biggest disappointment for me is that Bethesda has for whatever stupid reason taken what I consider to be their unique selling point and taking a big steaming you know what all over it bethesda's classic gameplay Loop has always been their Old Reliable the feature one can always look forward to irrespective of preferences surrounding setting or story you head out into vast open worlds sometimes on the way to complete a quest sometimes with no goal in mind before you then get distracted by a building in the distance or the appearance of a strange MPC before you know it what should have been a 15-minute jaunt has turned into three hours of traveling fighting and looting with the quest you originally set out to complete yet to be ticked off your list this combination of exploration Discovery and rewards has always been like a drug to me once I get into the rhythm of wandering around one of bethesda's Worlds I find it nigh on impossible to stop what will be to some starfield's greatest asset its setting or settings has thrown something of a spanner in the works a really big spanner covered in Rusty Nails which gives you tetanus the problem is segmentation in previous Bethesda games there have always been towns cities and other assorted hubs which are simultaneously connected to the the open world while also in a way being disconnected from it thanks to loading screens that's never been a huge deal though if you're anything like me you pop back to them once in a blue moon to finish off a few quests or pick up new ones then head back out into the world for another extended Mosey there's a loading screen when you enter and a loading screen when you leave and there might be one or two when entering buildings but it's all perfectly manageable in Starfield by comparison there is no single curated world for you to explore rather there is a selection of hubs where you stock up on quests and then a million and one planets across which many of your objectives are spread in order to start clearing your big fat to-do list you then have to spend ages taking off and landing and fast traveling all over the place with each portion of your journey broken up by A procession of loading screens there will also likely be several more once you reach your destination too I originally planned to make a joke here along the lines of Starfield more like loading screen field but I decided not to because a I'm not very funny and B it's so dissatisfying a gameplay Loop that I struggle to find any humor in it it completely destroys any sense of pacing the counter argument will of course be that the exploration side of things comes into play when visiting the vast array of planets most of which you are able to land on as you touch down on one the world and a number of points of interest will be generated around you and they are mostly absolute Trek at first they may flatter to deceive but the more you play the quicker you'll come to realize that most of it is the same content on repeat with the occasional change in Geometry building layouts or enemy variety it's all content which is very much like space itself cold impersonal vacuous so to boil down what I've just spoken about you usually end up spending a lot of your time playing Starfield doing one of two things you'll either be running around procedurally generated planets heading to the same old points of interest over and over again until you have eventually consider putting a laser gun to your head or you'll be fast traveling all over the shop working through a list of handcrafted quests while constantly being interrupted by loading screens in the game's defense what I will say is that the faction quests in particular do still invoke memories of the Bethesda of old I don't want to spoil too much but the Deep Cover Quest line for example is excellent and some tasks which seem small to begin with will still blossom into something quite marvelous like the Mantis storyline it's just so difficult to get into any kind of Rhythm however when there always seems to be so much standing between you and any continuous period of fun every time I found myself starting to get truly absorbed I'd have to do a load of fast traveling between locations or spend way too much time running around one of the hubs talking to a load of NPCs who always have a lot to say about everything Bethesda has continued to double down on more recent additions to their games procedural generation Base building and and the like and in the process have whittled away at most of what made their game special to begin with getting lost in the worlds of Fallout or Elder Scrolls in the past always felt so effortless whereas in the present Bethesda Makes You Work For Your Entertainment you really have to manage how you spend your time playing Starfield to avoid monotonies setting in and even doing so successfully may not be enough I did my very best to switch things up and keep events varied and I still ended up being bored to tears regularly the performance issues lack of imagination and the erosion of the Bethesda gameplay Loop are by far my biggest issues with Starfield but before I conclude it would be remiss of me not to also quickly touch on the Litany of other awful design choices everything to do with maps in Starfield is horrendous the star map is unintuitive to navigate and you're basically on your own once you land somewhere there may as well not even be any other maps for all the good they do you this is such basic stuff and it's genuinely staggering the that Bethesda couldn't get it right on a similar note considering how much time you're going to be spending in menus starfield's UI is a master class in exactly how not to design a user interface it is indecipherable to the point I often felt like a dog trying to read a newspaper every time I had The Misfortune of needing to use it finally the actual flying through space part of Starfield which you'd think would be vital to the experience is mostly pointless he'll do it a few times until the novelty wears off and they're not really bothered with it much after you will sometimes come across the odd random encounter but it's not enough that spaceflight feels like a must-have mechanic as a result there are a few other things I should also probably talk about such as the boring companions unexciting main quests or the Shameless lazy recycling of Skyrim's most unique mechanic but I'm at the point where I think I might give myself an aneurysm if I carry on moaning too much longer anyway I know compared to my usual fare this video has been somewhat negative so apology is for that it's just one of those rare days where I'm not feeling great and I thought ranting at people I've never met on the internet might prove therapeutic if you're playing Starfield and having a whale of a time then great I'm sure there are many of you out there who will strongly disagree with what I've said during this video ultimately for me however I can't help but feel incredibly disappointed by how the game has turned out what I expected after so much development time was at minimum a polished modern take on the Bethesda formula where in actuality a lot of Starfield either feels like it's a decade or more past Itself by day or like bethesda's Focus has been on completely the wrong things I really wanted to like Starfield I promise you I really wanted to like it but after 25 hours I pretty much decided to call it quits thanks for watching the video boys girls and cosmonauts if you thought it was out of this world do consider liking subscribing and sharing your thoughts and all's well we'll catch up again soon

Channel: Ben Plays Games

Views: 80,964

Keywords: starfield, starfield good, starfield bad, bethesda, bethesda game studios, skyrim, fallout 3, fallout 4, starfield analysis, starfield critique, starfield gameplay, starfield review, starfield pc, starfield rant, starfield gamepass, starfield xbox, starfield game pass, starfield series x, starfield series s

Id: hk4gDcx0m_4

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2023