I Really REALLY Want to Love Starfield

many thanks to Bethesda for providing me with a review copy of the game I really I don't get it hello my nonlinear friends I've been waiting for this for a heck of a while but it is finally time to talk about Starfield I mean it's the next Bethesda RPG and it's a new IP and it's set in space which is something I've been dreaming of for ages so let's get to it this right here is my review of Starfield first a little background on me I have played and greatly greatly enjoyed three Bethesda RPGs Oblivion Skyrim and Fallout 3 I know everyone says New Vegas is super good but I haven't gotten around to it and I haven't played Fallout 4 either so for me it was Oblivion then it was Fallout 3 then it was Skyrim and each of those games naturally I played for hundreds and hundreds of hours I absolutely fell head over heels in love with them here's the thing you young folks you youngans true nonlinear sandbox open world games they were not nearly as much of a thing back then the novelty of being able to just pick a direction and run and find interesting stuff to do like that that was it was just it was intense these were stunning Unforgettable experiences and I got to tell you here in 2023 I have been feeling way past due for another Bethesda game I mean it's been like a decade since I've played Skyrim for the first time like I was ready for a new Bethesda fix I was ready to get lost in another world oh oh but but Starfield Elder Scrolls but in space yes I don't even like post apocalypse stuff that much but I loved Fallout so you're telling me there's going to be a Sci-Fi Bethesda RPG I love sci-fi I love space exploring space in that formula I just it sounded like a dream come true however there have been a a couple of problems one Bethesda as a company has really hit some rough patches in recent years and they've done some pretty gross stuff Fallout 76 naturally comes to mind Todd Howard has completed his metamorphosis from cool down toe guy who's just a gamer like us to gross detached shareholder pleasing executive guy it had been so long since I had played one of their RPGs that I honestly did not know if Bethesda had that magic touch anymore that capability to create the kind of game that I wanted to play and then the other problem was they took so long to reveal Starfield and then when they did it just did not look that interesting or impressive to me there was never a trailer or a clip or anything that made me go like oh wow I can't wait to play this it was all just kind of eh you know but like I I had to give it a try I tried to go into it with an open mind and like I knew it was all going to come down to the execution so now I have finally played the game quite a lot in fact and I really ooh I really super a lot want to like it more than I do it's not a bad game it is not a bad game by any stretch and I can see that there are lots of people who are really loving it maybe it's just it's perfect for them it's great that's totally awesome no one is wrong for liking it but I am personally pretty disappointed but let's talk about why gameplay-wise this is a Bethesda RPG it it is Elder Scrolls in space I don't know why Todd Howard insisted that it wasn't at first because it is and that for the record is exactly what we wanted that's it's at least what I wanted it's a good thing so on that front at least the game succeeds you know it doesn't change things up so much it doesn't introduce wacky new elements to a degree that it stops feeling like a Bethesda RPG you know you got your big giant World your sandboxy gameplay you got lots of NPCs lots of dialogue lots of quests you're fighting lots of enemies you're following map markers you're you're looking for loot the game play is all about shooting with guns so naturally it's a bit more on the Fallout side of things as far as gameplay goes on that front I will say the Gunplay feels a lot better than it does in Fallout but at the same time at least Fallout had like the Vats system so that was kind of like it it took the Gunplay and added a fun little thing to it and this game doesn't really have that it doesn't really have that like extra element to make it more interesting or more RPG is or more fun um so it's definitely got that going against it it really is just kind of shooting guns which is it's fine I guess really I'd say the primary difference between this game and other Bethesda games is you know the space part the Sci-Fi part instead of one big map you travel between planets and space stations and such you got a ship and you can go up into space and kind of jump around from there and this was the part I was the most excited about space exploration again I just love space and you marry just like the humongous vastness of space to the cool RPG fun story elements of a Bethesda game it's a match made in heaven but man that space exploration ended up being such a mix bag on the plus side flying the ship is it's kind of fun it's decently fun it's got this thing where you can redirect power to your ship's different systems you know your your lasers and your ballista or your grav drive to make a quick Escape or just your engines in general to go faster and that's just a really cool idea you know makes you feel like you're actually piloting a a ship at of Star Trek the ability to divert power to the shields or whatever like that's just fun it's a cute idea in practice however it really doesn't accomplish as much as I want because it's kind of hard to do on the fly like I'm fumbling with the d-pad trying to do this while I'm being shot at like if you're in a situation where you're fighting and you really don't have time to mess with stuff like that you're not going to at least I'm not it just leads to a lot more fumbling than I would like so it's like I can kind of appreciate the idea but it's also kind of just uh fighting other ships that does feel good it's fun it's the the game playay it's a good feedback it's very crunchy locking on to other ships and dog fighting and smacking them with a missile at just the right time like that does feel pretty good though that can also be kind of frustrating cuz it's like you know it's not like a regular firefight down on the ground where you can take cover it's just kind of like nah if your stats aren't good enough they're just shooting you from all angles and there isn't really much that you can do so it feels like most battles I end up exploding in seconds or completely dominating all of them and killing them all with like barely a scratch I don't know doesn't really seem to be a good balance there I think it's very cool that you can disable ships and then board them you know like Assassin's Creed Black Flag style always thought that was really neat or you can destroy ships and pick up their stuff get some free stuff uh I really do like how it feels to just kind of fly around whenever you have like space stations or other ships to fly around it just kind of you know it's a very feely kind of thing where like you hail the space station and they're like oh yep you're you're clear to board and then you once you get close enough that's when you can board I don't know it feels nice makes you makes you feel like a ship guy you know that makes sense but I'm pretty disappointed by how little there actually is to do in the ship how little you actually need to spend time flying around in it for the most part you're just fast traveling everywhere so there's really just not a lot to do like when you're sitting in the cockpit there's not much and and I think fast traveling that is part of the issue I thought space exploration it should be very freeing it should feel very open and amazing oh I can't wait to explore but instead the end result is I mean it's the exact opposite it's the exact opposite of that fun feeling of exploration it feels like exploration quote unquote as a concept is barely a thing in other Bethesda games you have to physically get to a place before you can fast travel to it that's normal that's how it goes but here you're traveling these vast distances across space so there's no way to actually fly to a place just on your own you just you you can't do that you have to jump around so they just made it so that you can only jump to a system that's close to other systems that you have already jumped to and what that amounts to is you're like oh I want to go over here for the first time oh okay so I'll just I'll jump here and then there and then there great what that that did not accomplish anything and I also just do not feel like I actually traveled to this area I kind of just warped here even though I've never been here before and I get why they did this I can see that this was kind of a solution if you're not able to freely fly around I kind of get it but like it's it's just a very awkward way to handle it the game being split up into so many tiny pieces just so many pieces that you have to fast travel between them and that's the only way to get between them there's no sense of place there's no sense that this is a consistent world I barely even feel like I'm a guy on a spaceship exploring the Galaxy it doesn't feel like that at all it feels more like I'm picking levels on a Mario World Map you know it's just a revolving door of areas that just appear before me whenever I want them to I mean my gosh forget the ship I can be standing on one planet and go into the map and instantly fast travel to a different planet without even glancing at my ship and I I get why it would be way too tedious to have to always go back to your ship and always fly around manually like I definitely get it we needed the ability to move around quickly or else the whole thing would get way too stale and I understand that this is a space game Star systems are many many light years apart you know it's naturally going to be fragmented it's all different stars and different planets Todd Howard mentioned in an interview that they considered giving us the ability to seamlessly fly from space down to the planet surface and back up again you know kind of No Man's Sky style you know they thought about it but then they realized that it would be way too much work way too much effort considering how like it's really not that important of a thing at the end of the day it's not actually that important to the player and I get where he's coming from absolutely that probably is a very complicated thing to mechanically accomplish but honestly I think that him and the team they they didn't consider what feel can do for a game what like how much it improves the experience to actually feel like you are actually piloting a spaceship and exploring the Galaxy they really lost touch with that even if they weren't going to allow the whole like space to surface seamless travel I think at the very least they could have given us an option to actually pilot the ship when we are traveling between systems instead of a loading screen how about we get a little sequence where we're actually in the cockpit we're in the slipstream and we're kind of like aiming our ship here and there and kind of traveling around the map in very large swads you know make it take a few moments to get between systems at the very least like yeah it would take longer but it would feel so much better I want to feel like I'm piloting not just selecting from a map I'm going to bring up starlink battle for Atlas which is funny because most people will not tell you that that's a good game I thought it was a cool game and I felt like it handled this stuff way better you know it had that seamless space to Planet stuff and then it functioned largely the way that I just described there is fast travel but you can also just kind of aim your ship at a planet and start warping very quickly toward it and whereas in starfields sometimes you'll jump somewhere and then there will just be Pirates there waiting for you already starlink had this cool system where you're in the slipstream and sometimes you get knocked out of the slipstream because oh no pirate Ambush now you got to fight him or like there will be sec where you have to like maneuver around asteroids and stuff it made the actual Journey between these places that are very far apart it made that part of the fun and as a result it felt way more like real space exploration it was actually fun to get around space but Starfield has none of that it is all cold and Technical and robotic and automatic the space setting ends up doing very little other than introducing more loading screens that's that's what this space sci-fi setting gave us more loading screens now it seems that a lot of the limitations you find in Starfield um are there because of the scope of the Galaxy it seems that they made a lot of sacrifices in order to deliver us a just massive humongous world over a thousand planets or whatever they took a gamble they were like okay let's just make things a little bit less interesting so that we can put more and that gamble can work you know going for a little bit more quantity over quality you can kind of game that system you can make things a little bit more by the numbers in order to push how many can be delivered to the player that can work but if you tip the scale a little bit too far now you have a whole bunch a whole bunch of stuff that is just not interesting enough to want to engage with more history I loved play Planet exploration in Mass Effect 1 again I am in the minority but here's the thing I can do boring I can do tedious I can do procedurally generated fluff content if I am locked into a game's formula it's overall core experience if it has me if it's hooked me hard enough then I'll do just about anything I mean that's that's that's Skyrim that you know I don't care that I'm going through these like probably procedurally generated dungeons doing the same thing over and over I really don't care because the whole thing is just fun it's a fun world to be in and that was Mass Effect planets they were boring the content was repetitive you're basically just going around and collecting stuff and it was really just nonsense and yet I loved it I was hoping that Starfield would be that it would be that enjoyable repetitive fluff and it's so funny cuz when Todd Howard is like yep that's right over a thousand planets that was supposed to be a selling point he thought it was a selling point but that's so many planets everyone was just like who that yeah that's that's not as appetizing as you make it out to be and early reports of the game were coming in and they were like yeah the planets are just as boring as you expected and even then though I was holding out hope that this would be a Mass Effect one situation where it's like it doesn't matter as long as I'm engaged with the game I will be happy that there are so many boring planets to explore but nah nah no it really turned out to be the worst of what I expected might happen these planets are just as boring as we feared they are these syy flat dry desolate Landscapes with almost nothing in the way of interesting topography or landmarks they're peppered with these procedurally generated dungeons you know like oh there's a base here an abandoned mine an abandoned ship all these different things and if you have seen one you have seen them all there are creatures on a lot of these planets but even those are like procedurally generated you can scan them you can scan the creatures and the native plant life I'm like oh my gosh that's great that's really cool you can get resources and stuff from it but like it's not fun and there's just there's so much that it doesn't even seem worth doing but all the stuff on these planets there's just there's there is nothing that is interesting all by itself and like and you know like I haven't played the entire game I don't know everything that you'll find on a planet for the most part you're not finding anything interesting you're not finding characters you're not finding quests or anything cool to do all that stuff comes from other places it comes from cities and space stations and it leads you to the planets to do these kind of quests but as far as just exploring a planet goes like really there is nothing fun to do and it could be fun that's what's so frustrating because there is on paper so much to do all of these dungeons to explore resources and creatures and plants to scan oh my gosh any place any Planet you can just build a base you can pick your favorite planet and build all of these different machines to build an entire base for yourself and and it'll collect resources basically build your own little town oh my gosh that's awesome that's amazing but no because it's just too much and none of it individually is interesting enough here's the thing give me a few dozen planets to explore even if it's kind of tedious I will probably do it if I'm enjoying the game I'll feel good I'll feel like I completed something you know but give me over 1,000 planets and I'm just like okay well clearly none of these planets is actually worth exploring it doesn't feel worth fully scanning any one place discovering all these creatures all these plants or anything because why would I there's 999 other planets I could do that with just like no I'd rather just do none of it and that's what's so frustrating here seeing these planets exploring them it wasn't necessary it doesn't do anything for the game giving us the over a thousand planets or whatever it's it's not yeah it's not a selling point they could have gotten away with giving us so much less a fraction of what they gave us and they could have taken the effort to make each of those planets a little bit more interesting a little bit more interesting animals and plants to discover more interesting topography and landmarks and stuff more interesting dungeons to explore and quests to stumble upon it could have been so much more purposefully crafted and interesting but no as it is it's just a giant Galaxy full of as it is exploring planets is not really worth doing unless you have a quest that has brought you to a planet otherwise it's no fun to just land and start going start looking for stuff no it's really not worth doing and I will remind you again I can do TDM I can enjoy fluff I love collecting resources like on paper this game is a dream come true all these things to collect and scan it's a Bethesda RPG but there's like infinite stuff to explore and collect and you can even build stuff and build bases and you can research all this different stuff and upgrade and craft and everything as far as like stuff to do in crafting goes this is so much deeper than any other Bethesda game that I have played and yet it's just not interesting and I will now talk about the other reason that this doesn't really work you know having just too much having it too dilute that is a big problem but for me there's a very very humongous problem with this game it's that the world itself the universe that they have created is just not interesting let's go back to Elder Scrolls and Fallout these worlds they're full of tedium they're full of FL but the worlds are also consistently fun to be in they're consistently creative and interesting and that hooks you into the formula you know like it's it's fascinating exploring the world of Skyrim and and reading books and just kind of learning how this world works it's a very weird Fantastical fantasy world and then Fallout is very Bleak and desolate but like it's still interesting it's got these Frozen in Time 1950s elements and yet for some reason when we got to the 50s we were like technology was way further ahead than it actually was in the ' 50s so it's kind of futuristic sci-fi and everybody's trying to live in this world and it's full of mutants and everyone's trying to rebuild it's just interesting Starfield has none of that visually it's super duper Bland and this is I guess this is why the game never really looked that appealing to me in the initial trailers and stuff they call it NASA Punk because it it takes a very uh realistic take on sci-fi like you could actually yeah you know hundreds of years from now if we go into space and we've all got our own ships I could see it looking like this it's it's got a very gritty kind of realistic feel and I can definitely appreciate that in its own way but it's just not fun it's not interesting to look at visually it's just so boring there is very little in the way of any kinds of visuals or locations or anything in this game that is captivating a couple of the Cities look all right but like that's it it's mostly just endless space station ship abandoned mine military base hallways it's just corridors as you spend most of your time in boring corridors worse though much much worse conceptually it's just Bland it's bland that's the only word I can think to use it is one of the most by the books unimaginative takes on a space fairing future Humanity possible there's no like weird or fun interesting technology that these people have access to that makes you go oh wow the future's really cool I have not found very much in the way of Fun World building it's your standard like oh at a certain point Earth was uninhabitable so we went into space and now you've got the United Federation military corporate machine and you've got the rebellious Pirates and like that's it that's the world like that that's it it's same old same old there aren't even aliens that to me is unforgivable weird aliens and like exploring their cultures and their personalities and even just looking at them they look different that is so much of the fun of sci-fi that's why sci-fi is a thing and I I don't doubt that there are aliens somewhere in the game but like you know built into the cannon of this place if there are aliens out there they've never met them they've never seen alien ever it's all just a bunch of boring humans it's just so nothing there is just nothing about this world to Captivate me there's nothing about it that stands out from any other sci-fi it's it's paint by numbers sci-fi and it's also just like unnecessarily Bleak like everybody is in horrible poverty even though there seems to be just like a vast Galaxy full of resources just for the taking but for some reason everyone is miserable and like nobody helps anyone else if you ever help someone you give them money or even if you just help them fight off Pirates they're like a a person helping another person just to do it that's never happened that's never happened because we all live in such a miserable World we're all so horrible to each other that that is simply unheard of it's just it's just Bleak it's not fun why why I I mean I it's kind of a sore spot for me in general with games how it's like I'm trying to have a fun game do you have to push the whole humanity is bad thing is that really where the story always has to go is just like let's explore all the ways that people are bad and people take advantage of each other do you know what I mean it's just it gets old and what's so frustrating about this whole issue is that it's it is not an issue born of any kind of limitation in in design or or Inc capabilities of the hardware or anything like that this is a purely purely creative issue when they were planning and writing the game in the early stages they were you know they were building this world this is simply the world that they decided to build they decided to build a Sci-Fi world with nothing really interesting about it and no aliens nothing weird nothing like Fantastical the main quest line does get into like a little bit more mystical oh there's a weird artifact and you see visions and then you get powers or whatever like yeah there's a little bit of that but it also kind of just comes off as so generic and so like oneandone that it doesn't really have much of an impact and outside of that there's just very little in the way of that fun mysticism that that mystery it's just like it wouldn't have been harder for them to write something else they just didn't want to and like I can respect their integrity this was the Sci-Fi World they wanted to make and that was their decision and I'm just disappointed that it does not mesh with me personally and it's especially unfortunate because I can see the effort they put into this game I can see the care there is a wealth of story in this game we're talking novels upon novels of quests and little stories and and just dialogue so much dialogue I mean it's unprecedented you know Bethesda they've always been the best at this and they have really pushed the boundaries you know like this is this is probably five times more dialogue and story and stuff than like the next game down it's unprecedented it's incredibly incredibly impressive what they have done and I can see that in there there are some interesting stories to be found I've I've had a couple a couple little quests that I thought were kind of cool a couple characters that are kind of fun and I'm sure if I kept playing there would be more I would find more there's got to be more good stuff in there but there's not enough there's just not enough that feels worth engaging with there's so much to do and so many NPCs to talk to and yet this is the first Bethesda game where I have found myself kind of skipping dialogue you know like they you know you have a conversation with an NPC and there's all these different things to ask about or you could just get to the heart of the matter and ask about the one thing to progress ress the conversation I find myself just progressing I'm just like yeah I could oh how long have you been on the station what's it like around here I don't care I don't care because this character isn't interesting enough this space station is interesting enough I don't care what anyone does around here it's too bland and because I can't connect with the world and the characters and the story and all that stuff everything else stops working the entire formula starts to break down now instead of like fun fluff quests are just kind of I'm just following the quest markers just fast traveling to here to there kill the Pirates here kill the Pirates there fast travel from point A to point B to point C you're just following map markers I certainly don't feel engaged enough to want to go and explore planets and collect resources and upgrade all my stuff and get a better ship and all that stuff and then that's what's so frustrating is that whole thing slowly getting stronger Gathering the resources and upgrading like it could be amazing I there's the potential to get so lost in it and to feel so cool after playing for 200 hours and having such a cool ship and being rich and having this Empire I bet that could be amazing incremental progress is awesome when you're really locked in because it gives you a lot to play and a lot to work toward but because I'm not engaging that incremental progress is just like G why why bother why go on this quest to get like 3,000 credits why explore this planet and go into that mine just to pick up a couple extra bits of minerals I just don't care enough and not engaging with the world also kind of makes like the cracks in the Bethesda formula a lot more obvious like there is something to be said for the Bethesda charm you know like the games that I have played it's fun the jankiness it's part of the fun all the NPCs are so weird and awkward like there's definitely an element of that where like I have a fondness for it and I am happy to a degree that this is a Bethesda game and it plays like a Bethesda game but it's that charm it's just a lot less Charming now it's okay to use the same formula but I kind of wish that they had pushed the formula a little bit more evolved it I wish that this felt more like a modern version of the formula but it really doesn't it really feels like it's just kind of stuck in the past it's still janky you still have NPCs all around you all like talking awkwardly over each other and you just oh now I have a quest I didn't actually hear what that person said cuz there were 10 people talking but I guess I guess I have a quest now and I'll go follow the M marker wherever it leads me you talk to characters like from behind and they like take way too long to turn and look at you fast enough you know you enter a room and all the items on all the desks kind of like fall like they loaded in and now they're tumbling everywhere you know what I'm saying you know I I like I get in trouble for a really stupid reason and I can't even talk to the people to like pay a fine they just open fire on me everywhere I go everyone in the world is just shooting at me and it's like really hard to fix the problem early on in the game I get stuck on the in the first city because I don't realize I have to do one specific thing for the main quest or else I literally can't fast travel and I'm looking up FAQs everywhere why can't I fast travel because it's is a thing that I had to do that the game wouldn't tell me other stuff that just seems completely inexcusable like item management is terrible between like your own inventory and your ship's inventory and you have to like find a box somewhere in your base that has unlimited storage and you're always going back and forth between them it's super tedious the menus are atrocious the UI is super sluggish the maps are almost worthless they're so annoying to navigate even after dozens of hours it's just awkward nothing about the menus in the maps feels right this is the future why do I not have a map of the town that I'm in in the present the real life world that we are in I have a map of the town that I am in why don't I in this game and then of course straight up glitches it's not the most glitchy Bethesda game ever at launch which is like apparently the High Praise that everyone's been given it but like it still happens way too much you know I've got two conversations both loading at once here lots of freezes lots of crashes Quest markers not loading right things just in general kind of just going wrong and not working and then something that feels so much more inexcusable than anything else the loading times are way too long this whole entire generation their whole thing the only real selling point they had was solid state drives to cut down on loading times look at all these games they don't even they don't even have loading screens anymore loading screens are like a second long and yet leave it to Bethesda to have like the only current gen game that I have played with significant loading screens and a game with so much fast travel that you see so many of those loading screens and none of them are terrible none of them are probably like as bad as you know playing Oblivion back in the day or whatever but it's still so much more than it should be especially because I know I just feels like I'm nitpicking the heck out of this but it all it all makes sense in my head it doesn't even make sense that the load times are so long because on a technical level nothing about this game feels that impressive they marketed this as like oh my gosh it's the biggest game that's ever existed this is a true nextg Bethesda RPG but like it does not feel like it nothing in the game looks that good at the absolute absolute best you have fine you pretty good solid but then it only goes down from there there are some elements especially like on planets straight up bad like not exaggerating looks like an Xbox 360 game and then like I'm not a frame rate snob at all I don't actually care that it runs at 30 FPS but I find it weird that it runs at 30 FPS considering it doesn't really look that good and it's not even like the whole Space thing like nothing about it is so big that I think wow yeah this is only doable this gen like no there's no one environment that seems so Grand and amazing that I couldn't see it running on an Xbox One it doesn't do any one thing well enough to kind of justify any of it limitations you know if it doesn't look that great why does it not run that great if it doesn't run or look that great why doesn't it load faster I don't know doesn't really make sense to me I have a lot of very critical things to say about Starfield but I have to say again it's not a bad game it's really not all of this is really just coming more from a place of personal disappointment cuz it is a good game you know it is very big there is a lot to do there is a lot of story and I could could see any number of people being totally into it falling head over heels in love with it like I did with those other games so so long ago it's got a lot of good elements it's got good story you know what one thing I really want to point out is the voice acting the voice acting is really good the Bethesda games I've played it felt like there were a lot more like repeating voice actors but here there's a really really extremely wide range of actors the quality is good they all have a wide range of personalities and and voices this this world is very diverse a lot of different accents and stuff so I do want to give the game credit there and I'm sure the game deserves credit in a lot of different areas there is stuff to enjoy I just wanted to like it more and I had fun with it I did have fun with it I played it for a few dozen hours pretty okay amount of time in my book it's just that like it started really really slow like not even almost as cool as like the beginnings of Fallout or Skyrim or whatever very very slow but then it kind of started to pick up like the more I played the more I got into it I started to enjoy it more and I was like okay now we're rolling but then I reached a point where the enjoyment level just started to slow like the more I explored the more I tried to find interesting stuff to do it all started to feel kind of shy I was finding it just hard to find quests that sounded actually fun to do I was scouring every bar in the galaxy for cool Companions and finding nothing I was only finding these like boring kind of grading weirdos that was disappointing I just wanted a fun friend and I couldn't even find one and like I could feel that this was going to be one of those games where it's like I'm having fun I'm like fairly kind of hooked into the formula but once I put the game down for more than like a day or two I'm not going to want to pick it back up again and that's exactly what happened I went one too many days without picking it up and then I found myself with a little free time reaching for the controller and just being like I don't think I want to just I just don't want to anymore Starfield is huge it can be fairly exciting it's really really ambitious it is it is something so special and unique in the realm of games when it comes to just story and dialogue and stuff really really unique and really admirable but it just doesn't do any other one thing well enough to keep me engaged its interesting characters and stories are lost in a sea of paint by numbers filler its fun gameplay is spread thin across a myriad of tedious systems and activities its truly engaging quest lines are few and far apart and they're diluted by an ocean of bland repeating cont content I know a lot of people hate it when you compare games but I'm doing it I love comparing games to bring up Mass Effect again I love Mass Effect so much and you know what I I tried not to but I thought about it the whole time I was playing Starfield because just about everything that you can do in Starfield you can also do in Mass Effect in some ways they're very similar in Mass Effect these activities are so so much more limited way less Freedom less to accomplish overall less just like systems less overall content in terms of scope it's apples and oranges Mass Effect it's it's a it is a fraction of what you can do in Starfield and yet every one of those things that they both do mass effect does better way way better the writing is better the universe is more interesting it has more to say about the nature of humanity it's got aliens it's got cool fun weirdo aliens and even the tedious stuff is a bit more fun because there's a limit to it you know it ends ever and because all of that stuff at the very least feeds into your main quests and all that honestly I just think Starfield is too big I mean like obviously there is the the creative issue the just the world that they decided to build I will always have a problem with that but it could have been so much better if they just hadn't decided to make it a huge million trillion planets it in the end it just didn't pay off it was not necessary it did not do the game any favors they would have been so much better off giving us 100 planets or even like a few dozen in 50 that would have still been a lot of planets to explore a lot of places and yet they could have made each one so much more interesting they could have made exploring them all a thing that you actually wanted to do they probably still could have fit the same amount of inpcs and quests and stories and dialogue and all that stuff even if they had just shrank down the scope a little bit as it is though Starfield is a whole lot a whole bunch of lot of fine it it it is an ocean of fine a galaxy of fine as it were and I I was hoping for more but oh well can't win them all I guess better luck next time see you in 14 [Music] years

Channel: Arlo

Views: 560,831

Keywords: puppet, blue, monster, xbox, series x, microsoft, bethesda, rpg, starfield, review

Id: MdNTWmfD2PE

Length: 39min 49sec (2389 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2023