My Thoughts on Starfield

good evening Gamers tonight I bring you a gift more valuable than gold another opinion on Starfield I know there's already a million of them out there but this one's unique this one's not like the other reviews this one's quirky and zany with a real nice personality and a big pair of Honkers it's my full thoughts on Starfield so far so it is going to be a review but it's also kind of an admission of my weakness because I'm I'm just going to take the egg on my face here and say I don't think I'm finishing the game now everyone says that the game gets good after 12 hours I am just shy of that 12 hour mark and I got to be honest with you sports fans I can't Envision a world where I hit that 12-hour Mark and a switch flips on and all of a sudden it's exhilarating it blows my hair back and it's it's a masterpiece like I don't see that happening but let's just assume that we are in a fantasy Dimension where that is the case that still doesn't excuse the first 12 hours being miserably paced and excruciatingly uninteresting like that is still a bad design if you have to invest 12 hours before the game actually gets good so I don't know if that claim is just cope or if that really is true but even still it doesn't negate my feelings on how this first just under 12 hours experience has been going you shouldn't have to put that much time into a game before it makes it worth it and I want to be clear right away so there's no confusion it's not because I think the game is bad in fact quite the opposite I think everything in the game is good but it's also extraordinarily boring and underwhelming I struggle to stay awake playing it it's like the cure for insomnia for me I would rather be listening to my college professor lecture me on the kreb cycle through Vimeo videos as homework it would keep me more stimulated than playing through the main quest line in Starfield and it's not like they've done anything wrong the thing is I went into this expecting on this outrageous amount of hopium that this would truly be an ambitious Bethesda title that would finally evolve their formula and push it forward but unfortunately that's not what it is this is the standard Bethesda experience that many of you probably know and love but set in space no more no less and you'll see that sentiment echoed across pretty much every single player out up there that's like the only universally agreed upon thing when it comes to this game this is a very divisive game but you'll find one common thread that everyone agrees that if you like the standard Bethesda formula you'll probably like Starfield and I completely agree this is the standard Bethesda formula and for me personally I'm just exhausted with it not because of oversaturation it's not like they keep constantly feeding Bethesda titles to you like shoving them down your throat every year like Call of Duty or anything and that's probably why for a lot of people this game is so comfy and is so exciting to them because it finally scratches that Bethesda itch that they've had since the last title but for me that itch only gets scratched if the game is an improvement or something bigger like I wouldn't want to just keep playing the same game with a different skin I loved the Bethesda formula a decade ago and this feels like it's stuck in the past this feels like it's still playing with fidget Spinners right now it just with all of the hype and all of the claims that they were making about this Game pre-release I would have expected so much more than just being complacent with the exact same Bethesda experience that you're used to with a different coat of paint now it's a beautiful coat of paint I actually love all of the main locations that I've visited so far and it's not like there's no new mechanics or anything like the ship customization is super in- depth and really cool the ship combat I wasn't a huge fan of but it's not bad by any means like I think it's a good implementation I would have liked it to be a little more fleshed out but overall like it's still fine and super functional there's a couple other things as well but I don't know if I can mention them cuz that'd be spoilery and I'm not trying to just dump spoilers on you like a jump scare but there are new things they added but none of those new things are all that new per se they're new to the Bethesda formula but they're very familiar with many things you've seen in many other titles over the last decade that doesn't make them bad again I don't think there's actually anything bad in the game aside from the main quest story line the writing in the main quest line is lazier than my summer book reports in high school like it is kind of laughable at points they really phone that in it is some formulaic silliness I I don't want to get too deep on it but that was the only thing that I think is like actually weak everything else is fine and good in Casa in certain cases but somehow the game still manages to keep a neutral expression on my face it doesn't make me smile it doesn't make me giggle spit up and kick my feet in my chair or anything like I don't get excited by the game cuz I feel like I've already played this so many times with Bethesda like for example the engine that this runs on hasn't changed in a long long time so during the main quest line especially there's almost no facial animations for any of the NPCs so it takes all of the emotional investment and immersion right out of it because you'll be getting great voice acting from all of these characters but then you're looking at the character you're having this goddamn staring contest where they're just staring a hole through your soul and there's nothing on their face even when it's like an emotional beat there's nothing so it makes everything so [ __ ] stiff it's like all you can do is communicate with mannequins like it's I Am Legend like if you're lucky the extent of the Expressions you'll experience in the Starfield main quest line is this and you are Beyond fortunate if you even get that much because most of the time and this is even outside of the main quest line NPCs will give you the meanest stink guy this side of the G Galaxy's ever seen if you talk to them or if you walk by them they'll hit you with this like they're just constantly concerned like keeping a close eye on you like it's like they're all [ __ ] spies or something everyone's giving you the reverse kubric stare and they all look like absolute Psychopaths I don't know if that's like a bug or what but that is a very common expression that you're going to get in your play through no doubt now one thing that they are absolutely right about when it comes to the claims made about this game is the bugs being much lesser than you're used to there was a lot of hype around this being the least buggy Bethesda title and so far in my playthrough I've only experienced a handful of bugs and none of them are game-breaking like there's no big bugs that I've seen on my playthrough or even in any of the other playthroughs I've been watching so this game really is pretty light on Bethesda jankiness which is great that like that's really surprising because especially given the scope of the game I would have thought this would be by far their glitchiest one but no they really they put WD40 on those on those squeaky wheels and they lubricated it they massaged it there is not a whole lot of bugs here so Big W on that and speaking of W's there is some good writing outside of the main quest line there is a ton of different things you can do it's it's hard to talk about a lot of this without getting into spoilers but there's a lot of different like factions and a lot of different side quest lines that are pretty deep and intricate I haven't done a of them I've only done a handful of side quests but there are some that are far more interesting than the main quest line significantly more interesting and better executed though I have seen a couple of side quest lines that uh a couple of friends of mine were streaming and in one of them it felt really important like they exposed a big web of corruption and there was a prominent figure that got outed for some bad [ __ ] and once they completed the side Quest nothing changed that character is still in the exact same position so that whole side quest even though he completed it didn't really have an effect which takes all of the wind out of the sails and makes the journey feel kind of worthless if nothing actually changes in the game I don't know if that was a bug or maybe they maybe they weren't done but it seemed like they were and they seem to think that they were so I don't know if that's common place or if that was like some kind of rare exception but for the most part the side quests are significantly more interesting than the main one now let's get to some things that I think people have been misled by and by far the biggest one and the one that Starfield really put a lot of eggs in the basket of is exploration the go to any Planet explore you can explore for thousands of hours there's a thousand planets to explore and they're all [ __ ] amazing you're going to lose yourself in here you're going to jack into the Starfield Starfield world and you never want to go back to cringe old Earth the real world is you know it can't even compete with what starfields got and man that couldn't be more wrong that is so far from the truth it makes me want to spit I tried to do the exploring I really did but when you explore a planet like let's say you go to one of the main planets and instead of going to the main city you land somewhere else on the planet my thought was with everything they said you could land on that side of the planet and then run all the way to the main qu the uh main city if you wanted to and I tried to test this because I thought it was a cool idea for example I had Contraband on my ship and when you're going to one of these planets that is a central one really they will scan your ship and if you have Contraband they either arrest you or you become an outlaw and they'll try and hunt you down and all that and then you can't land at the main city so I decided to try the outlaw thing I ran away and then I landed on the planet outside of the main city where you're allowed to do that with Contraband and I thought it would be really cool if I ran from there to the main city so I could keep my Contraband keep my ship parked outside and still continue the main quest while keeping the Contraband and never going to jail so I started running and I ran for about 15 minutes and it turns out you can't run from that to the main city or anything like that on any Planet apparently there's a lot of invisible walls if you can believe that which is very disappointing to hear and during my entire Journey that spent going across this planet it was entirely [ __ ] empty just rocks flat ground and a couple of space animals and by a couple I mean one space animal type per planet from everything I've seen and they just kind of stack them occasionally in clusters so it feels like it's somewhat alive and that's it there's a couple of places you can visit outside there such as like a cave that has a little bit more to it or like a very small little mining Colony on that planet in particular where there's like five people in a robot and that's it there's nothing to explore nothing at all to explore from what I've seen unless you just really love sitting in an empty open world with nothing to do now there was a moment during this long empty Voyage here through the void where a spaceship flew in and it was like a random event some some Outlaws coming in they parked and I snuck aboard their ship and I killed all of them and the game has a cool mechanic where you can steal ships which I think is great and I decided to try and unleash a bit of a galaxy brain gamer maneuver I still had all my Contraband on the ship that I parked way back on that planet and now I just stole this completely fresh Outlaw ship so I thought maybe I can keep my ship parked over there and I take this ship to the main city because there's no Contraband here so if they scan it it'll be clean and I should be able to land there I thought this would be a really creative way of getting around the scan and the Contraband while being able to keep it without ever being arrested or anything but it turns out you can't do that so I stole the ship and what it did is it put the Contraband from my main ship onto this new stolen ship and thus the Contraband was immediately alerted to the to the space Hall monitors the police force they came and they they blew me up so it just feels like at least so far in my my limited play time with it of course since apparently 12 hours is the bare minimum before things really open up that there's not as much freedom in this game as I was led to believe there would be especially with the exploration there really isn't anything overly ambitious about this game procedurally generated soulless empty worlds to explore isn't fun like yeah there's a ton of planets you can go to and that's cool I guess until you actually go there and realize how tiresome it is and how not fun at all that component of it is which is a huge selling point of it it's just disappointing really now now another big thing is this game is kind of like a loading screen simulator since exploration is so [ __ ] awful most of the time you're just going to be fast traveling around this game anyway so you're constantly going to be going from loading screen to loading screen and on PC that's fine because it's quick but it's just constant loading screen simulator anytime you're doing anything because you don't really have any reason to explore or actually run there there's just not a lot of interesting things to do along the way so why not fast travel so there 's a lot of that and another bafflingly odd decision is there's no real map so if you go somewhere in the game land on a planet land in a city wherever if you try and bring up a map there isn't one and I I don't get why it's super easy to get lost because of that when it was so easily rectifiable just put a [ __ ] map like it's 2023 and now we took away the map like that doesn't make any sense like what what's there is bad like it's not even replacing a map it's just there is none what you can do is pull up your scanner and do like 360 degrees in circles to try and locate the interesting point you want to go to like if you want to go to the industrial district of a place you can pull up your scanner and then look around with your character and then see over there and then you can run at it but there's no actual map so it gets very confusing like pretty often actually until you really start to become super familiar with the location and another decision that's just I don't understand why they wouldn't even think to include it is there's no vehicles to explore the empty worlds like if there was vehicles or a faster way of traversing them I guess it could be a little more interesting because then at least it wouldn't be a massive time investment of doing nothing but there's no like moo or anything there's no vehicle to get you around in any kind of timely fashion so it just makes it even more monotonous at least there's not so far and I haven't seen one from any of the footage I've watched from this from any of the streamers I guess it's possible that there is later maybe I I don't really know but even still it it is a huge oversight not to at least have something to make exploring a little more interesting and a little less slow at least I feel like it's an oversight not to have something like that because all it can do is improve the game by making it a little more fun to just get from point A to point B but yeah another thing the combat is is better in this game than most Bethesda games in terms of like how fluid and smooth the shooting itself is like the gamep play is smoother for sure and the jetpack from I I'm not using the jetpack in my playthrough I'm doing a [ __ ] caveman build so mainly melee the jetpack is cool from everything I've seen and it has some nice perks that can make things very interesting so I do think Bethesda has polished off their shooting in particular here so the combat does feel a bit more fluid thanks thanks to making it a less janky game than you know what we're used to from Bethesda but that being said it's still exactly what we're used to with Bethesda when it comes to its gameplay loop it's exactly the [ __ ] same the combat here is literally just Fallout combat but without Vats and it like I said it is smoother but it's still just the same goddamn thing there's not a new crazy amount of depth there's not a new crazy amount of things that you can do in combat here that we have haven't already been doing in Bethesda games for over a decade now like it just they they've polished off what they've had for 10 years instead of building what they had for 10 years instead of adding cool [ __ ] on top of their Bethesda combat formula they're more than fine to just have the exact same combat but make it play a little bit better and again for a lot of people that's fine there's a lot of people out there that don't want any kind of like big changes to the combat in Bethesda games or new additions they're totally fine if they can just deliver the exact same combat but without the jankiness and for those people Starfield is going to feel great because like I said this is definitely the smoothest Gunplay I think Bethesda has had so far but I would just think after all of this time they'd want to do more than that like I I it's just underwhelming like I said everything in Starfield I think is good like everything is good there's nothing in here I think is like actually [ __ ] there are definitely things I think are a bit weak but nothing I would actually say is truly bad or awful it's just this whole package is just so disappointing because I I'm just tired of playing the exact same Bethesda game without anything really changing about it even bugs that were present 10 years ago are still present in Starfield of course they're not gamebreaking like they're very minor things and for a lot of lot of people the bugs add charm but come on like it's been over a decade and you still have the same bugs in this game as you did all the way back then like it's just it shows a complete lack of drive to do something different they just want to keep delivering the same Bethesda experience and again a lot of people want that I am not one of those people I wanted more and I hoped Starfield would be more so again nothing in it is bad if you like Bethesda games you are no doubt going to like this but if you wanted more than a Bethesda game if you wanted Bethesda to be a little more ambitious you might not be super satisfied so this is kind of my review of it it's not a moist meter but we are still going to have a moist meter for Starfield it just won't be done by me a lot of you might not remember but Jackson actually does the moist meters with me we usually talk to each other about how we're feeling about the things we moist me meter and I'm tapping out on Starfield I don't see myself finishing it I just I can't find the motivation to push through the boredom Jackson is loving it Jackson is someone who's more than comfortable getting the exact same Bethesda experience and nothing more so Jackson will do the moist meter so we can get my perspective entirely here and Jackson's entirely on the moist meter so that's just uh it's just kind of what I wanted to talk about tonight with Starfield that's really about it see you

Channel: penguinz0

Views: 2,806,197

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Id: Kg0jPX1d5P8

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023