I Quite Like Starfield

so if you're watching this video I have no doubt at this point you've waded through many reviews regarding Starfield you know the ones where people say some good things about the game some not so good things and then at the end slap an arbitrary number on it whilst refusing to elaborate on the criteria they use to come to that conclusion so first and foremost this video is not a review I've played a decent number of hours of the game but I feel as if I am nowhere near the end of the line however if the rest of the game is like the game has been so far then I have few doubts that my opinions that I'm about to share today will remain largely the same so what is it that I think of Starfield well I really like Starfield I think it's a good game it's all the rich goodness you'd expect from a Bethesda game studios role-playing game along with some of the scuff too so it's not a perfect game by any means but then again what really is I shan't use that statement to excuse those flaws they absolutely do need to be discussed and I will certainly have to highlight them in this video and that's because though they aren't things that bother me massively maybe somebody watching this video might be bothered by these things and I'd like to give as balanced a perspective as humanly possible it won't be unbiased that's impossible you can never quite get rid of a bias did you enjoy something or did you not that's an important thing that will definitely alter how you deliver the information that to an extent is unavoidable and it's also not necessarily important however what is important is that the information is shared so with that in mind I'm going to share my findings about what makes this game tick and give my opinions on top because otherwise this video would have no value whatsoever not that it necessarily automatically does because I am giving my opinions with the introduction handled here are my thoughts on Staffing the first thing to talk about is apparently a few weeks back there was a load of controversy regarding starfield's main menu yeah you're gonna spend a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of your time looking at it I can only imagine that it was a slow week on Twitter the first thing I want to talk about is how the game addresses a concern that I had going in and that was the very genre of space-faring Science Fiction see I find that tackling the subject of humans venturing across the Stars can be quite a difficult one to immerse myself in when it's really good and actually interesting I love it and dumb hooked but there are so many franchises in this genre and it probably translates to others as well but it's the one where it's the most obvious that fall into this category of just being generic in every conceivable way to the point where some of the Heavy Hitters the ones that used to be good in my opinion have started doing the same thing new franchises perhaps especially when it comes to RPGs need to do an awful lot of legwork on World building generating atmosphere and simply selling you on the believability of the world that you're expected to immerse yourself in and when that particular game is set in space there's a lot less familiarity around to Anchor yourself too so if a game set on Earth or a Fantasy Realm that's inspired by a particular point and say human history you have ideas of what to expect and where it might be going that allow you to subconsciously fill in potential blanks before the blanks have been filled when it comes to space operas especially the blanks are either filled or they're not there's no telling where you're coming from much less where you're going and at first even where you are therefore the World building the delivery of law and the generation of atmosphere need to be delivered at a satisfying rate fortunately Starfield does get going relatively quickly when everything is alien to you besides from say humans being present it's imperative to quickly gain your bearings otherwise you're going to lose your interest or at least that's how I look at it I feel in staff field I got my bearings quick enough to actually start enjoying the game actual writing quality regarding where main narratives are concerned is never a trait that I have credited but there's the game studios with and I can't say that Starfield is an exception to that rule but what star field does have in abundance is World building and atmosphere it provides that density of law that is required for believability there are memorable locations that exist with a purpose and therefore are believable the same can be said with a lot of characters maybe not this one but a lot of them and then like any space adventure should it's all contrasted by vast open emptiness after all not everywhere is going to be densely populated it's important to me that a game that is about space exploration has that balance some places have been explored and settled and as a result that's where you find your cities and your settlements and then of course you have other places that are less explored where you can do the exploration and feel like you're the first person to to really take a hard look at this place whether it be a rich environment comprised of life or just a dead world because the truth is not only do you need Variety in what you can discover whilst roaming through space but you also need to feel as if you are indeed pushing the Horizon these Barren worlds and worlds that haven't been settled by people are an important aspect to be felt when pondering the vastness of the universe which is a feeling that a space exploration game like this especially in an RPG simply cannot get away from so simply put you need the duality of the universe feeling full of life but in equal measure completely deserted and I think Starfield does this mostly well but it's no Mass Effect 1. it's a flawed comparison between two games that are only similar on a surface level but allow me to explain myself before we get mad Mass Effect 1 2 and even three are much more linear experiences than say Starfield and that works to its advantage in selling the universe like Starfield it's rich in law and has that duality of places that are clearly full of life and places that just aren't but because it's much more linear it allows your imagination to fill in the blanks when it comes to the sense of scale that you get so you can visit certain parts of the Citadel for the sake of there's plot relevant things going on there but you can see just how much bigger than the area you're allowed to explore the Citadel actually is and that makes you realize that Galactic Society is utterly humongous and yet despite that there's also a ridiculous amount of open empty spaces that you can land on say planets in the middle of nowhere where you can just Ponder The Horizon and feel that sense that the Universe despite this is still empty Starfield handles the latter incredibly well because all you need is a ridiculous amount of planets with not an awful lot going on that you can land on to get that feeling of loneliness and exploration that makes sense but in my opinion Union Starfield actually struggles a bit more on the frontier of civilization it's more than agreeable and feels lived in but I can't help but feel as if it's incredibly small because the idea behind the world design is if it's there you can go there however when applied to absolutely everything indiscriminately that can crop up a few limitations so new Atlantis on the planet of jemisin is the city I'm going to use as an example this is supposedly the heart of human civilization in the 24th century it's comprised of three small districts and if you venture too much further you'll find yourself just out in the sticks and the rest of the planet hasn't been settled very much at all besides from a generic Outpost here and there I guess what I'm trying to say is you'd have thought the heart of human civilization would have had more to boast I feel as if if there were a handful of cities of this size on this planet it probably wouldn't have stuck out to me anywhere near as much and how much content there actually is in these locations isn't actually the issue but what I noticed it doesn't feel as if it's any bigger than us just running around three small districts so The Duality is a bit skewed so the result is you don't feel like you're in the heart of anywhere to balance the moments where you're in the heart of literally nowhere the World building lore and atmosphere of Staff field are still pretty damn good but there is an imbalance in the sense of scale and that's because there's a point where naturally your imagination does have to take over and I do appreciate that but there's no material provided what I mean by this is the world space that comprises new Atlantis is adequate for what we need it for however instead of having this non-visitable area around it full of buildings and things like that as far as you can see to really embed that you're in this supermassive City there's this empty World Space full of trees and things that you can visit and it makes the city aspect feel smaller when it should perhaps feel huge and since this is clearly an already explored Planet we're not actually gaining anything from exploring it besides from perhaps the self-destruction of Gravitas if any of that sounds like a nitpick that's because it absolutely is I had to reach for that but it is a point I wanted to raise and that is that the notion of being able to explore entire planets indiscriminately does leave it without that bit of focus that would allow you to embed yourself in the immersive qualities of the world the absence of streamlining is the thing that both bloats and Shrink Starfield unfortunately so in making the playable World space is technically bigger they've made their Universe feel smaller and another example of how that's accomplished is just how heavily Reliant the game is on fast travel so for example the spaces where you can fly around in your ship you're not actually going anywhere you're just in some little area where you can shoot some ships and if there's nothing to do all there is is open the world map and land on a planet or fly off somewhere else sometimes you can do this without opening the star map as the game calls it but only really if you have an active mission in another star system does that option become available otherwise you need to open the map and then select a point to land at or from there you can fast travel so whatever way they dress it up fast travels kind of mandatory and unless you're actually moving around after landing on a planet you're not actually traveling anywhere because the vast majority of things you can see whilst in space is little more than a Skybox don't get me wrong the exploration aspect to Starfield has its charms but it is quite heavily stunted which compounds with my previous talking point of touch I thought the idea of Limitless exploration was intended to make the world feel massive but because it relies on fast travel it feels small so when you're in these smaller City areas that are supposedly the heart of human civilization they feel small just so you can go off and explore the empty space that takes up the rest of the planet this means that star field has an incredible amount of negative space which is good for space but not necessarily to this extent fortunately for Bethesda game studios their games have a massive following from the modern communities which means a lot of modders will lick their lips at an opportunity to transform these spaces and I do look forward to modding this game to death however I do think it's a fair point that Bethesda game studios perhaps shouldn't rely on the replay value afforded to their games via modding as much as they seem to these days but that does actually naturally bring me on to a positive from my experience with this game thus far and that is that I haven't experienced very many bugs at all okay there's the occasional one here and there that's just classic Bethesda but for the most part in my experience they have been relatively few and far between on top of that I've only had the game unexplainably crashed to desktop once it wasn't ideal when it happened but considering the track record of these games I was honestly expecting it to happen a bit more regularly than that so on the technical front it's been somewhat easy going I do wonder how long it will take for the game to itself when I inevitably mod the game to death but we'll see besides that it's pretty bog standard creation engine stuff I mean the faces range from looking all right to borderline dilapidated and you're guaranteed to encounter a loading screen every five minutes and though that's not always ideal those loading screens aren't too bad for me at least they didn't take too long to load in I imagine that will be a wild variable though I'm playing on PC and I had my PC built to be utterly mental but it is a few years old now and I haven't seen the need to upgrade it since and then on top of that to make the loading screens a touch cooler they actually cycle some of the images you took in photo mode and I suppose that is one way to encourage people to take better screenshots I like games having photo modes it makes Gathering thumbnails for videos at least a little bit easier and on top of that it's another medium through which you can enjoy the scenery a game provides anyway moving on to more important things let's talk a bit about how the game actually plays gunplay-wise it's smooth and you shoot things and they'll eventually die but how quickly they die depends on how much health they have you also get to see their level on their health bar for some reason I don't actually know what value that has because the numbers can be wildly inconsistent on top of that it is just useless information cluttering the screen you can also bash things and use melee weapons it's smooth I quite enjoy it it's not something I could talk at length about because I honestly wouldn't know what to say it just works but what I do want to talk about is flying the ship which is honestly a blast even if it does serve no traversal function whatsoever you need to allocate power to different systems depending on what you're doing with a finite Supply which is a nice touch and you can have space dogfights which are good fun on top of that you can hail ships and communicate with them or they might hail you and ask about your ship's extended warranty you can engage in piracy and trade and sometimes you can dock with other ships and board them and the same can be said for space stations there is fun to be had even if when flying your ship you're not actually going anywhere but what's missing for me is the fact that you can't actually fly it within a planet's atmosphere so what I mean is when you take off off with your ship you're going all the way to space you can't just take off and fly around probably because that would cause havoc and that's kind of why I want it more but my favorite thing is your ability to customize your vessel or simply buy an entirely new one with ship customization you can configure Your Vessel however you see fit within particular confines it can't be too heavy it needs to have a certain amount of power and everything needs to actually be attached but there is a bit of leeway there and you can create some absolute monstrosities the more I find the design the faster the ship is and also the more maneuverable it happens to be but at the same time there's wiggle room to sacrifice some of that for Aesthetics and if it's space on board you're looking for then you can sacrifice everything for a hateful flying brick and in doing that I made some ugly useless monstrosities but at least they were funny and of course considering your ships like a hub area it makes sense to want it to have at least some space and considering that double function for your ship it's good for it to be configured get how you see fit and then you can choose your crewmates and you can figure out who you want to be assigned to your ship and who you simply don't you can interact with these characters and have conversations which is very nice and you can also bring one with you at a time as a follower the more time you spend with particular characters actively involved the more you learn about that character in conversation and the more your relationship develops culminating in a loyalty Mission there are more Dimensions to your followers than Lydia had in Skyrim simply put and I guess it's up to us to figure out who's worthwhile keeping around and who simply isn't and these characters also have a small pool of ambient conversations that can be overheard when on the ship other times they just grunt as if they've taken damage I never said the game was entirely without scuff but yeah the shipbuilding aspect scratches the right itch besides that you can loot stuff find better gear and always have to micromanage your carry weight in that sense it's a standard Bethesda RPG really and I suppose that in itself brings me to a talking point The Voice protagonist nonsense from Fallout 4 has been removed it's gone now it's just we select a dialog option that's exactly what's said but we don't hear that and the character responds allowing us to insert our own voice our own character into the experience rather than just having preset voices to the player character and dialogue options that are incredibly vague in what they actually translate to when you pick them so there's wild inconsistencies between what you intend and the conversation you have without that particular Edition star field can get straight to the point give us the entire dialogue option so we know what's meant and we know what's said and we know where that conversation might lead that doesn't mean that the dialogue options at times don't only provide the strangest choices rather than what you think would be appropriate but there's no denying it's the better system for this kind of role-playing game I don't know if Bethesda were listening to criticism there or if they just couldn't be asked voicing the protagonist in this game but it's massively appreciated one thing that has been carried over from Fallout 4 though that I probably should have mentioned before I moved off the ship building thing but whatever is Outpost building which was fashioned in Fallout 4 as settlement building I'm yet to do an awful lot of that but I'm sure I'll have some fun when I get around to it truth be told it sounds like something that would feel much more in place in a game like Starfield versus a game like Fallout so whilst I can't comment on its quality at least outposts have a purpose existing Beyond being hounded 24 7 by Preston Garvey and that purpose is you're exploring space and you're a million miles from anywhere but maybe I'll give that a good old whack when I've run out of better things to do overall I find Starfield to be very enjoyable it's very Bethesda game studios in some ways and in other ways it feels a bit strange considering it's not the Elder Scrolls or Fallout but they clearly still know how to construct cohesive law on top of that there's an interesting main story with some fast fascinating twists and turns and a big mystery but the joy of truly experiencing this game comes when you go off that path and start exploring for yourself picking up quests and doing what you feel is worth your time it has a fair few mechanics that are fun to play around with and it comes together to form a fun experience but there are some elements that simply hold the game back for example this game is the exact opposite to seamless it has more loading screens than even I expected and I went in expecting a ton it also relies on fast travel in absence of getting between one place and another there are limitations on undiscovered locations as to how quickly or more accurately how many loading screens you actually have to go through to land on a planet for example but you're still not in control and you're forced to see loading screens so it is still technically fast travel and on top of that at times the exploration can feel less immersive than ideal but when Starfield shines it really shines and it makes it all worthwhile in my opinion if there's a perfect space exploration game out there in my opinion it's certainly not Starfield but it's still a highly enjoyable Bethesda RPG and there's a lot of space for modders to play around in and that's not a defensive statement of some of starfield's less than fine points but I genuinely look forward to seeing what they come up with there is a fantastic game in here but it could be greater and whether or not one way or another that gets accomplished is a question for time alone to answer but as it stands right now yeah I like Starfield thank you for putting up with my disorganized ramblings and hopefully I'll be seeing you soon goodbye [Music]

Channel: Fizhy

Views: 32,756

Keywords: Fishy Yarpster, Gaming, Gameplay, Banter, PC gaming, Fizhy, Fishy, Starfield, Bethesda, Bethesda Game Studios, Starfield thoughts, Fizhy RDR2

Id: pzy2OZq50p8

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023