(PREVIEW) Starfield Was a Mistake | An Analytical Review (2023)

I miss so much darling I knew where it was top shelf of the pantry but it's not there anymore Silence of the sand how do you expect me to know where anything is you keep moving them all the time you make one I've got lifetimes worth of books and videos to occupy me so don't worry about [Music] me so I'm just going to come right out and say it I think Starfield was a mistake down to its very concept on paper the idea of Starfield sounds like the perfect Bethesda game that go anywhere and do anything concept of their is taken to its most extreme logical conclusion it sounds like a match made in heaven as that concept has been the ultimate goal for many other space games of this class over the decades your star citizens Elite dangerous Evon lines and many others from here on out I'm just going to call this vaguely defined genre of large open-ended space adventure games the big space game technically many of them are classic ified as space sims however Starfield Defenders have been using the fact that Starfield isn't technically a space Sim as a means of deflecting criticism and comparisons to other space Sim games despite Starfield borrowing heavily from the genre and Todd himself citing many of them as Inspirations for Starfield so let's sidestep the definition issue by using a different label altogether I don't think the big space game genre has been saturated or really has even had its true Touchstone game yet I also think there's a place for a big space game that's less simulation and more action adventure RPG I just don't think Bethesda was up to the task they'd underestimated as Starfield reflects a lack of understanding of genre and an inability to think beyond the type of game they've been making for two decades this is a hard game to make and that's mostly due to the combination of scale and genre here space is big and science fiction tends to include a lot of Technology that's meant to make the impossible possible one of the many challenges in game design is to fake scale and to satis satisfactorily explain why limitations exist Beyond just we don't have the tech and manpower to make a game that big when you're dealing with something that's in terms of human scale nearly infinite and in terms of modern sensibilities pure magic you got a recipe for a lot of headaches as a developer this is where the scope of a project really comes into play scope needs to be defined by the vision for the project what is this game supposed to be and what sort of experience is the player supposed to have ultimately I think Bethesda failed to adequately answer either of these questions for themselves when making Starfield and that's because the answers were either antithetical to the genre and type of game they wanted to make or weren't in line with what they were used to doing or they simply lacked the creativity and skill needed to pull them off the fact that we got tons of interviews in several marketing campaigns for Starfield that never really settled on a succinct pitch indicates to me that there never really was one if we go by what Pete hin said during an interview at Gamescom Todd's pitch was simply I want to do a massive outer space game and I want to called starfields while there was probably more to the pitch than that and a pitch to an exec is different than a vision statement to a team the final product sure does end up feeling like that's about as much as they were working off of for most of the time it sounds like the Hope was that starfields identity would form as more systems and content fell into place the various teams would be given a lot of freedom to interpret what a Bethesda game set in space would look like and eventually that would come together to make a cohesive experience the problem is that it doesn't sound like things are really coming together then their past projects always had the benefit of working within well-established IPS with plenty of games to reference in better defined genres Starfield on the other hand was a new IP in a genre of Science Fiction Bethesda had no experience with going after a type of game that has yet to truly be nailed while the freedom a new IP and a vague vision statement provides can help unleash a lot of creativity it can also lead to a lot of Tire spinning and a product that ultimately doesn't commit to anything evidence of the tire spinning can be seen when you got Todd admitting that the game wasn't fun until a year before its September 2023 release date and if there's one thing we can say about Starfield it's that its disjointed experience never really comes together to mean anything the problem with the Bethesda game in space idea is that there's a lot of vagueness there that if left undefined is going to result in different incompatible interpretations as well I just don't think that their type of game is compatible with the big space game so let's take it from the top then what is the Bethesda game now I'm sure some people will disagree with what I'm going to list but I'd argue Bethesda has essentially been making the same game since marwin while the priorities and quality has shifted from Project to project these features have all been constant since the early 2000s one a large handcrafted open world map designed to be fully open to exploration two a gameplay experience that focuses on player Freedom built upon exploration combat looting and character progression and three a large cast of NPCs many of them named that the player can interact with who provide lots of quests ranging from little side jobs to larger main story lines and faction tied quest lines right off the bat a large handcrafted open world design is pretty much impossible in the Big Space game even if the technology and resources existed to make a world that detailed at this scale the end product wouldn't be that much better planets in the Big Space game are not meant to be fully explored down to every square inch they are too big there's too many and it won't be a fun experience so already we're at an impass we either have to compromise on the scale of the world so that we can get that classic handcrafted Bethesda map into this game or we got to change how the exploration experience plays for Starfield well despite conflicting messages in bethesda's marketing they went with the ladder and two devastating results a gameplay experience built around player freedom is perfect for this type of game though go anywhere and do anything is pretty much the big space game to the tea and building that experience on exploration combat looting and character progression is what a lot of them end up doing but with exploration completely changing from previous Bethesda games how that core gameplay Loop is going to look is ultimately going to change too on top of that you also need to have spaceship combat because that's what a big space game needs so okay combat is going to be changing too with both of those changing naturally looting and character progressions got to change too and suddenly what seemed like a sure thing we could depend upon is full of unknowns we got to answer so then we got to ask how do we begin to design cities and PCs and quests when we don't even know what the exploration combat looting and character progression is going to look like I think I've already demonstrated in just a couple of minutes why this was if not a terrible idea at least a seriously challenging one and we haven't even gotten to defining the inspace part yet you see we only just finished explaining how translating the Bethesda formula to the big space game is almost untenable now we got to start answering genre questions about this game's World building that would be congruent with the vision we've completely lost focus on and the technical boundaries of the game itself betha's answer to these massive questions was just to start working on the game and honestly putting her head down and grinding out some demonstrations is actually a great way to work through a problem however when you take those demos and just start building off of them even if they didn't provide you with a vision you're going to end up with a messy poorly defined product and a lot of reworking of ideas this is exactly what happened in starfields case and it was exasperated due to the scale of the game and the fact that it's a kitchen syn product that's meant to say yes to any idea the devs were coming up with this is how we end up with the tonal Clash of cowboy Town discount night City and the Google Plex all existing in one game not only that with how Bethesda likes to design their games they never want to make players commit to anything don't like exploration don't do it just stick to the quests don't like combat turn down the difficulty don't like leveling pick some random stuff and turn down the difficulty don't like looting just don't pick stuff up simple while I think a lot of their previous games' shortcomings can be tied back to this fear of making players do things in their games I think Starfield suffers from this issue the worse to the point that it makes the player question why they're even playing the game once they start to see through all the smoke and mirrors this leads to an experience that feels incredibly unrewarding so a game that's meant to inspire a sense of adventure instead murders it at a fear that the players aren't going to like what Starfield has to offer Starfield is that maxim of appealing to everyone ends up appealing to No One applied to every aspect of an entire game but even if play players are willing to buy into what is being offered in Starfield it won't take long for them to realize how wobbly those elements of the game truly are because they must rely on cheap tricks and gimmicks in order to exist independently of starfields other elements ship combat is pointless because space exploration is dull space exploration is dull because traveling through space is dull traveling through space is dull because there's no mechanics to support it because Bethesda didn't want to commit to any survival mechanic such as limited ship fuel there's examples like this all across Starfield leading to a to total collapse of the game due to a lack of a core experience then you layer on a truly uninspired world with Bland writing that is constantly contradicting itself and you got a recipe for a game that's pretty much designed to bore its audience maybe Bethesda could have skated by releasing this game last year when competition in the RPG space was non-existent but being sandwiched between balers Gate 3 and cyberpunk 2077 massive overhaul and expansion yeah it's no surprise Microsoft's last ditch hope is already falling off the radar a month after its tepid release while Bethesda designed Starfield to be open to expansion with mods patches and DLC we're going to look at why that just might not be enough because at its core Starfield is a disjointed Hollow mess that in the pursuit of having 1,000 procedurally generated planets ended up abandoning some of bethesda's biggest strengths exploration has been receiving a lot of flack from starfields fans and critics alike and it's not hard to see why the consensus has mainly focused on on Barren planets lots of mandatory fast traveling and repetitive dungeons as the culprits however the issues run much deeper exploration is where every bad design choice in Starfield crashes together to drag the whole experience down to some new lows for Bethesda it truly is a collection of all the worst elements of exploration from every Bethesda game since Oblivion with a nice helping of No Man's Skies of sloppy seconds you got the dull repetitive purposeless combat Arenas of oblivion's dungeons the ugly emptiness of Fallout 3's capital Wasteland Skyrim's Vibe checking Dragon encounters the resource farming hell of Fallout 4 in no man's sky and the pointlessness of Fallout 76' exploration prior to starfields the express intent of every Bethesda game was to get players out of the cities and into the world and its dungeons hence why quests often treated those parts of the game as destinations Starfield presented a challenge though because what existed outside of those settlements was almost all prely generated Maps peppered with some handcrafted points of interest the fear at thesda was that not all players would appreciate the experience of wandering prely generated planets and the emptiness of outer space that fear was confirmed when people online were raising concerns about those very elements when they were shown off at the first Starfield gameplay reveal at the Microsoft Showcase in 2022 as a result or more likely in anticipation of those complaints Bethesda made exploration in Starfield completely optional with the abandonment of a singular handcrafted map in exchange for countless procedurally generated ones and the reduction of exploration down to just an optional checklist of pointless chores Bethesda effectively sabotaged two of the strongest pillars every one of their games since marwin has been built upon and so there was a big design kind of problem to solve in terms of what's fun about landing on a planet where there's potentially nothing and so we spent a lot of time figuring out okay let's just lean in on that can a be a lonely experience alongs with we tell the player here's what's there here are the resources that are there go find them but I equated to that moment of we said about listening to the windo and watching the sunset and I do think there's a certain Beauty to landing on a strange Planet being somewhat the only person there building an outpost and we are modeling all of the systems because that's how we like to do things so you can watch whatever that gas giant or Moon it will rotate and go and sun rise Sunset and all of those things that you would expect and it's it's all really happening I want to go do that and see that on that place as long as we tell them hey the quest leads over here here's where the handcrafted content is that you would expect and then here's more of the open procedural Planet experience see you're long answer I don't know if I answered your question that's Todd Howard struggling to explain what makes exploration fun in Starfield 7 months before the game is to release at that point he should have had a really succinct phrase he'd repeated a billion times to his team while working on the game for 8 years remember this is supposed to be bethesda's core competency World design and exploration are two things Bethesda is known to be Masters at however when made for Wanderers as the best you can come up with it's pretty clear there was no vision for what's arguably the most important element in Starfield at least Todd tried to explain some sort of appeal as opposed to Ashley Chen managing director of Starfield during an interview with the New York Times the point of the vastness of space is you should feel small it should feel overwhelming everyone's concerned that the empty planets are going to be boring but when the astronauts went to the moon there was nothing there they certainly weren't bored not every planet is supposed to be Disney World Ashley Chang is of course missing the fact that those astronauts weren't bored because they were in constant mortal danger no human had ever faced before they were also scientists there to perform experiments that would have tremendous value for validating theories going back to the days of Isaac Newton they were also acting as living icons so that their country could win huge points in a highstakes geopolitical game that was reshaping the world as everyone knew it players aren't going to be thrilled by the primordial fear of a horrific death or the honor of fulfilling the legacy of generations of scientists or the pride of representing their nation in the greatest way possible I hate to be one of those people but it really is just a game bro Tod is definitely closer to an actual appeal starfields planets could have he's right in thinking there's people out there who would enjoy sitting there watching the sunrise and set on an alien planet and taking screenshots of the pretty sky boxes there's definitely a vibe there to be sure however those players are going to be a minority and they were already Satisfied by the handcrafted maps of previous Bethesda games by servicing just one niche of players you've effectively alienated most of the people who come to your game for its exploration this is where I have to wonder if Bethesda actually understands why people enjoyed exploration in their previous games because this is all starting to sound like they are simply assuming that exploration in a video game is intrinsically fun this is the same faulty assumption made by countless developers who have stuffed dull pointless open worlds into their games wandering a virtual world is not fun in of itself at least not for very long not after the novelty of what the player is seeing wears off exploration needs to be supported by some other system be that combat crafting questing character progression role playing or player-to-player interaction it's honestly pretty arrogant to assume players will just aimlessly wander your game World simply because you made it however this arrogance is not at all surprising when it's coming from a studio that has been bragging about modders fixing their games for years while touting how this game will be a modders paradise truly we are beyond the point of Bethesda expecting players to fix their games for themselves we've now entered a point where Bethesda expects players to make their games fun for themselves what's fascinating is that even though Starfield has combat crafting questing character progression and even some role playing none of those elements ever tie back into exploration in any meaningful way this is because once again Bethesda was afraid to make players engage with the empty planets portion of the game because they were afraid to make players engage with any portion of the game this is reminiscent of another game of theirs that has been very divisive Fallout 76 it wasn't the map or the dungeons that let exploration down in that game in fact I argued in my 76 video that both of those elements were perhaps some of the best work Bethesda has ever done no the fault was in the pointlessness of exploring the map and its dungeons stick with some 6 long enough and you'll come to realize the foolishness in simply exploring and clearing dungeons for its own sake quests events and daily grinds will naturally be sending you all over the map and into its various dungeons if you aren't tackling some sort of chore while doing your exploration you're just making more work for yourself and falling behind on your grinds while starfields and 76 share the pointlessness of exploration and the dishonor of being the lowest rated Bethesda games on Steam Starfield at least evades the 76 issue of saddling the player with tedious grinds by making all of its tedious grinds optional this is where we bring out subject number two no man's Sky no man's sky is a survival crafting game to its core its gameplay Loop consists of collecting resources on the surface of planets so that you can survive the elements in order to fly to another planet and do it all again it also has a codex you can fill by scanning things space building dungeons the main quest line and many other side things but that Gathering crafting Loop is the main aspect to its design it's not really my thing I always thought it felt like it was all the tedious parts of the genre with none of the benefits but it's got a strong following and at least it has a core experience it never abandoned starfields Planet exploration borrows heavily from No Man's Sky you got the resource Gathering the scanning the base building Starfield copied no man's sky so much it even copied all the parts people hated about that game such as the miserable inventory management the key thing Starfield lacks are those survival elements planets do have some Elemental hazards like high radiation extreme ambient temperatures or toxic atmospheres while while these hazards can cause some mildly annoying stat debuffs none of them will outright kill you originally they were much more punitive but it was determined during development that they should be heavily nerfed down to just being some flavor that's meant to trick the player into thinking they are more important than they actually are so the way the environmental damage works in the game on planets and on your suit and that was a pretty it's a pretty complex system actually it was very punitive so we kept trying where you get these afflictions we kept trying to tune it we get a point where we're tuning it you're having to heal those things we just make we just nerfed the hell out of it where it ends up being it matters but only a little bit it matters more in flavor like the Affliction you get is more annoying knowing you have it than the game result because if we dial it way back it becomes more flavor on the screen than it does a gameplay system ship fuel was another survival element that was diminished so much it might as well just qualify as being cut at this point it's still kind of in the game you need fuel tanks on your ship and your fuel reserves technically limit the number of jumps you can make but since your fuel is refilled when you reach your destination it's effectively pointless Bethesda assumed players would be turned off by these roadblocks inhibiting their ability to travel across the settle systems and honestly they were probably right some players would have absolutely hated it and claimed that it didn't belong in a Bethesda game my question then is why not just make it an optional mode Skyrim and Fallout 4 both got survival modes post launch while 76 launched as a genuine Survival game they know there's a demand for this sort of stuff in their games and here was a game designed from the ground up to be a survival game only for those elements to be cut in the 11th hour so why not just make it a setting in the options menu I think anybody who's made a game with a team of any size that's listening to this that change moment where you you know if you're a creative leader like yeah probably need to get rid of that we probably need to change it and you just like Dread the conversation I've never played a Bethesda game I've wanted a survival mode for more than Starfield sure it' just be copying even more from No Man's sky but hey so long as a lawyers are happy who really cares this would give outposts more of a purpose it would require me to be a lot more thoughtful with how I'm traveling between planets and star systems and would make reaching the edges of the settled systems feel accomplishing so it turns out there's really no reason to walk around the surface of planets no seriously I was going around clearing pirate dungeons trying to gather some Loot and I found the fastest way to do that was to land on a flat baren Planet get out of my ship and look around to see if there was a pirate dungeon within 500 M of my Landing site if there wasn't I just opened the surface map picked a new landing spot and in less than 10 seconds I had a new map the game weighs the POI so that there's a high chance of a dungeon being close to a landing site so I'd only need to roll the map maybe three times before I got a dungeon the game doesn't even try to impede this process either there's no going back into orbit or anything like that no it just teleports me to a new map already out of my ship and ready to go it doesn't doesn't even subject me to watching the ship Landing animation again it's so convenient that I cannot imagine this is not the intended way to explore in this game well either that or Bethesda just didn't think I'd notice walking around planets was pointless I mean considering they thought I wouldn't notice Planet hazards and afflictions are pointless I'm kind of leaning towards them assuming that I'm just an idiot who will walk off my ship and start wandering towards the first map marker that pops up on my screen there's one change here that they could make that would curtail my Landing site hopping Strat and that's to make traveling between Landing sites consume fuel on my ship of course this comes with the risk of me getting stuck on a planet if I can't scrape together enough fuel to leave the surface and as Todd said it would slow the pace of exploration down that's not necessarily a bad thing though assuming you have a method of Last Resort to unstuck a player and the player is fine with a slower survival crafting experience which like I said could just be toggled in the settings menu instead the rate in which you can knock out planets in this game really comes across as Bethesda being embarrassed by how they turned out in my honest opinion Fallout 3 man managed to make wandering a Barren Wasteland interesting sure the capital Wasteland was kind of ugly you know game from 2007 and all but there was actually a bit of Beauty in that ugliness and exploring the wastes really was a Vibe it's not something that can carry an entire game and Fallout 3 doesn't make the entire game about exploring the baron wastes but it really did a great job of helping create some peaceful moments between the more hectic Insanity the other parts the game presented the capital Wasteland and the DC ruins work well off of each other to create some interesting and meaningful contrast hell even the Metro tunnels are a more fun and immersive means of connecting locations in Starfield space portion speaking of which while bethesda's botching of Planet exploration is pretty much inexcusable as it required ignoring two decades of success at it the disaster with Starfield space portions can at least be chocked up to a lack of experience and an underestimation for how difficult it is to make space interesting from a gameplay perspective ship combat and space exploration are two elements that receive the most development in time seeing constant changes throughout the entirety of starfields 8 years of development it was one of the first systems they' built for the game and it was still seeing tweaks in total reworks a few months before the game's final release in terms of getting feedback and being willing to completely change it and that kept it moving forward and then we try things and we we'd go all the way back and then take a different route on it and their attitudes about it like they embraced it yeah like let's redo it again can we okay we're almost there a breakdown of ship combat is best safe for the dedicated combat section but as it pertains to the experience overall it's really reminiscent of how random dragon encounters were the touch of death for exploration in Skyrim you'd be walking around picking flowers and looking for the next Nordic ruined to raid when suddenly this is it then look after your doing your duty so proud of you but you better come back to me die Dragon if your build wasn't designed to account for dragons and you hadn't grinded the main quest to get dragon Ren you are probably in for a bad time with how bad these fights generally were when coupled with their unpredictability they really turned out to be a wet blanket for exploration ship combat in Starfield managed to invoke that same sense of dread if I wasn't in a ship equipped for combat or if an elite ship spawned in the Ambush or if the game just decided to reset my power management settings for no [ __ ] reason again I knew there was a good chance I was going to be reloading in a few moments Random Encounters are the name of the game in Starfield space when you jump into orbit the game does some RNG to determine what is going to happen sometimes it's a group of pirates who will just attack on site instead of trying to rob you sometimes it's a lone trading vessel or it's a funny Corky couple arguing over open comps or its grandma or more likely than anything else it's nothing at all and of course there's no system to prevent incounters from repeating themselves so have fun listening to the Valentine filling your coms with unsolicited singing while you wait for a grav jump notice how it keeps saying jump when talking about space travel this is because there's no way to seemlessly travel between planets or Star systems in this game now I wasn't one of those people expecting Starfield to allow seamless entry to a planet's atmosphere from orbit like no man's Sky Orly dangerous I also wasn't expecting planets to be one large procedurally generated map that I could endlessly wander no my wakeup call was in figuring the grav jumps we saw in the marketing was going to be reserved for traveling between Star systems and little else when it came to to traveling between the planets moons and other things within a system I figured we'd have some method of travel that lands between combat flight and grav jumping what I did not expect were loading screens and lots of menus the easiest method of travel the game heavily encourages you to use is popping open the system map navigating to the star system and Planet you wish to travel to fast traveling into orbit and then picking a landing site from the planet surface map the immersive method of space travel involves getting into your ship's cockpit launching into orbit and then using your ship's targeting system to pick a destination to fly to however this is such an awkward and inefficient method of travel the game doesn't even advertise it all it's really doing is adding more loading screens into the equation you still need to use the planet surface map to pick a landing site so it's not entirely menu free either likewise unless you have the entire settled systems memorized you'd still need to pop open the star map to figure out which systems connect to one another at which point you might as well just cut out the busy work and use it to fast travel all of this menuing fast traveling and loading screens really fragments the experience of traveling through space while I'm sure some of it was implemented for technical reasons I can't help but suspect the fragmentation of planets within a system was an intentional design choice for the sake of player convenience however this has a tremendously damaging influence on the sense of scale of the settled systems itself one of the joys of elite dangerous' interplanetary travel is watching a tiny faint dot of light off in the distance slowly materializing into a giant planet that fills your entire screen or seeing the true scale and layout of a star system thanks to the motion of the different dots of Lights it's a small detail but one with massive value as it allows the player to see the ukian relationship between these objects creating a sense of scale by offering a perspective you just can't get from maps and static orbits this is how you create that overwhelming feeling Ashley Chang was describing it's a powerful tool that Elite dangerous never forgets to use it starts with establishing the scale of a plan planet and then a star system and then a star cluster and outwards it goes until the player zooms out to see the whole galaxy and their mind basically shatters this never fails because Elite dangerous never betrays the illusion Elite dangerous never allows you to skip a system you see every jump and every Star you see every planet and manually dock at every station when in a system every meter is felt every light second is witnessed the only time it yields to convenience is jumping to a new system and that comes with a a whole bunch of other things to consider the settled systems is a big place but it's made to feel incredibly small almost stifling this is due to its inability to express its scale in terms the player can understand and the fact that you can travel across it in a matter of seconds you only have to manually graft jump to a system once once it's no longer read on the star map you can just fast travel to it or fast travel through it on your way to your next destination Elite dangerous might sound boring but it really isn't so long as you're on board with the game being about traveling there are so many mechanics tied to traveling between and through star systems fuel reserves heat management jump drive range and ship Mass just to name a few then there's incidents along the way such as pirate interdictions which are not unavoidable Random Encounters but instances that can be predicted based on the state and security of a system and avoided with careful navigation ship upgrades in just pure piloting skill starfields ship and space mechanics are so wo fully underdeveloped that none of this gameplay is possible ships in this game are much closer to what they are in Destiny visual flare to look at as you menu to your next destination we can debate over what features Starfield should and shouldn't have since it's not a space Sim like Elite dangerous however there still needed to be a decision on what the space portion of Starfield needed to be is it just a place for ship combat is it a place to explore space stations and der vessels is traveling supposed to be meaningful in all of these categories Starfield fails to deliver because it's clear it was never decided on what it should be whereas Elite dangerous knew exactly what the different stages of its space exploration gameplay was meant to do Frontier then honed mechanics and systems meant to sell that experience I'd be remiss in not mentioning the mod someone made for Starfield that allows for a more cohesive seamless flight experience between planets it achieves this mainly by just making your ship move super fast and then adding a hot key to load the cell the destination planet is contained within while this mod does better helps out that sense of scale I was talking about it doesn't add any extra gameplay to the experience essentially just making it an even longer loading screen the author admits this is about as good as this mod is going to be until modding tools are available so maybe down the line they or some other ambitious modders will be able to get interplanetary gameplay to exist it all comes back to Bethesda not wanting to force players to engage with the mechanic if you don't like the space stuff just menu through it with fast traveling and if you do get into a fight spin up the grav drive and jump to the next location they were so uncommitted to making Starfield about anything that they made space in a space game optional if that's not a clear indication that Starfield was a mistake I don't know what is but uh yeah Fallout 3 I think its exploration hits the way Todd and Company were hoping starfields Barren planets would hit when I was on the moon wandering around ancient facilities that helped Humanity Escape Earth I was really getting a whiff of some of those Fallout 3 Vibes it was kind of cool it's only a whiff however as these similarities are barely surface level it really does just come down to Aesthetics wandering a Barren landscape peppered with some old industrial sits is about all the two share oh and the ugliness let's talk Graphics out of the box Starfield is a pretty ugly game it has moments but for the most part it's surprisingly draag a lot of that comes down to just one thing a lack of a brightness or gamma slider no seriously millions of dollars of art design is being held back by [ __ ] slider the game's default brightness seems to be set to cell phone screen in daylight mode resulting in everything looking really washed out Fallout 4 had this issue a little bit and 76 got it even worse somehow but Starfield hit a level I found so insufferable I had to get a mod to correct it a day after release I imagine The Brighter Image is meant to help people who have screens with poor black levels as for the blue gray filter they slapped over the entire image that's meant to evoke some sort of aesthetic of old science fiction films and TV or something all I know is that it was giving me a headache after only a few hours of playing the issue was most prevalent in dungeons when I'd be looting and I was genuinely struggling to spot objects because they were blending in with the environment in this soupy gray Haze so yeah I committed the analysis video for Paw and modded my game it was either that or keep a bottle of Tylenol next to me whenever I was recording the reshade preset I used still wasn't a perfect solution because Lighting in this game is pretty wonky this resulted in me fiddling with the Reshad settings and the game's graphic settings a lot during my playthrough so if my footage looks very inconsistent yeah that's pretty much why on top of the intense gray blue filter you got your usual suspects of bad lighting and shadows overuse of post-processing effects inexplicable ambient lighting and too much fog all robbing the image of some much needed depth wouldn't it be a Bethesda game if we didn't need mods to add Darkness to a game with flashlight the game does have a pretty striking color palette and exterior lighting can do a decent job at times especially on the empty planets but for every Pleasant screenshot worthy Vista you got half a dozen really unpleasant ones with Muddy low-resolution textures seams in the terrains and biomes or just Bland unfinished geometry at the edge of the map where the fog fails to conceal where the landscape renderer stopped Starfield also doesn't get scale right at all when it comes to geographic features mountains straight up don't exist probably because climbing them with our weak boost packs wouldn't work likewise Canyons don't exist you can sometimes find a crater those look kind of cool but once again the scale is usually wrong and even on planets with crater biomes there's just too few of them no volcanoes geysers fault lines scarps I'm not saying that they need to have implemented the entire Wikipedia glossery of landforms but there's honest to God more terrain variation in Minecraft than here in Starfield while it is an unfair comparison to make because the game was designed from the ground up to be as realistic as possible Elite dangerous did manage to Leverage its realistic scale to make some interesting gameplay you can spend hours roaming through a crater in a buggy or speed through Canyons tens of kilometers deep in your ship it's actually a lot of fun and once again achieves that thing Ashley Chang was talking about with being made to feel small by the scale of space but oh right we can't fly ships when on a planet and we don't have exocrafts like a buggy because we got the Boost pack I actually have a sneaking suspition land Vehicles were planned to be in this game something always struck me as odd with the landing Bays for the ships in this game they all have ramps it was actually the Strauss Eckland Landing Bay that clued me in when I noticed it had stairs as well as a ramp why not just the stairs why require Landing bays at all why can't I exit from a hatch from the top of my ship they finally added ladders to this engine and NPCs can even use them these bays are just acting as doors anyways unless they were meant to house a little buggy or something like that okay maybe I'm just reading too much into an art asset but I think everyone is on the same page with how much better traffic Ling across planets would be if we had some kind of vehicle the most likely reason for their exclusion is technical if Bethesda was struggling to get horses to work in Skyrim due to them letting players run faster than the renderer could handle I can only imagine the issues a buggy would present or maybe it was a physics thing the carriage ride in Skyrim's intro famously caused Bethesda all kinds of issues which is likely why we got Verte birds in Fallout 4 instead of a vehicle with wheels at any rate the Boost pack simply doesn't cut it it's too weak and unless you have your Boost pack train skill maxed you're going to spend a lot of your time just waiting for it to recharge so it turns out there's two types of jumps you can get out of your Boost pack normally the Boost pack just acts like a double jump tap the space bar once and you do a single jump tap it twice and you get a boosted jump if you bind a secondary key for jump and use that instead of the space bar you'll actually perform a different sort of boost jump that provides a bit more horizontal thrust if you use a balanced or skip rated pack you'll get even more of a horizontal boost this actually makes a noticeable difference when walking around and once I discovered it I was using it all the time I honestly cannot tell you why this is not an advertised feature when boost packs were expected to be our primary means of traversing Planet surfaces oh yeah did I mention boost packs are gated behind a perk anyways graphic Tech is only part of what contributes to starfields Blind visuals its art style is another sore spot now I wouldn't be as hard on the fact that the art style in this game is so inconsistent but when you make a big deal over your style to the point of giving it some pretentious name like NASA punk I'm kind of left assuming consistency is to be expected it looks as though some designers were on board with the style While others were not and none of the managers put their foot down to get everyone on the same page like I said this sort of disparity is how you got three main cities that don't look like they belong in the same universe together let alone one that's supposed to be vaguely function over form some of the space suits Rock the NASA Punk look hard such as the constellation suit While others like the freest star Collective gear or the Crimson Fleet stuff looks like in Practical Cowboy lar costumes and knockoff Warhammer Space Marine armor respectively the Mantis armor looks like something out of Star Wars then there's the starborn armor I wore for most of my playthrough which looks like it's ripped right out of Destiny on the ship end I think the NASA Punk theme fares a little better but like the suits it varies between the different manufacturers Nova Galactic and damos both stick to the look while some of the other manufacturers go for sleeker profiles with ample cowlings and rounded modules I'm more fond of the ships than the suit but that's because the aesthetic looks best when it's leaning into the industrial look I guess that's the NASA part I'm still not sure what part is meant to be Punk guns were another hit or miss category the old Earth weapons were neat because it's kind of hard to mess up in AK or 1911 even some of the Tactical future guns like the breacher grindle and baywolf I kind of dig then you got the lawgiver and some of the other Cowboy crap that just get a hard pass I understand Firefly had the cowboy look but there was an in universe reason for that it wasn't just because they liked the aesthetic obviously art style is just that style but I really do love when a game's art style supports its World building starfields NASA Punk fails in that front however I think the biggest example of that failure is when exploring the ancient ruins on Earth and the moon and seeing everything looking exactly the same as the rest of the settled systems it's actually kind of funny in a sad sort of way the character who invented the graph Drive Justified his actions by saying he saw glimpses of human art and Society in the future and was so moved by it he felt compelled to design the drives even though he knew it would destroy Earth cultural artistic expression reflects philosophical Evolution interest in growth perspective observation interpretation suspect you won't see any art in collector base culturally dead tools for Reapers worse than the GU no art no culture closer to husks than slaves tools for Reapers from an aesthetic standpoint my favorite parts of the game are the industrial sites and the re search facilities the industrial stuff looks like some super polished Fallout assets free of the ugly played out 50s postmodern stick while the sciencey tech stuff seems like a second attempt at The Institute style from Fallout 4 executed much better gagaran and sedoni are two examples of places I think land well with their aesthetic while staying true to their World building but bringing it back to planets and exploration where the NASA Punk aesthetic is completely absent is with the alien flora and fauna if the design ethos of the human stuff is mildly function over form the alien stuff is all style over substance plants are these overdesigned exaggerated things several times larger than the player in all sorts of colors that do not correspond to any natural adaptation for their host Planet animals are even worse however these are straight up creatures ripped out of no man's sky or Spore almost every creature is some kind of giant insect sometimes you might find a giant bird or something resembling a dinosaur but you'll never find something like a small Woodland mammal here on Earth in fact I don't think I ever found a creature with fur once again none of these creatures look like they'd have been the result of any sort of evolutionary process that would give them a Competitive Edge in their natural environments they look like they were designed in the concept art stage and they were just never called for consistency so we got ugly Barren planets that often times look like Tech demos to show off methods for procedurally generating terrain and even uglier Lively planets crammed full of garish and Visually clashing assets that looked like they'd been whipped up by undergrads for their 3D art class neither of these make exploring planets for the visual spectacle at all appealing surprisingly even starfields music is uninspired it's a very uninspired mashup of generic orchestral pieces and what sounds like leftover bits of Fallout music which makes sense this soundtrack is the work of an nzour whose work on the Fallout soundtracks usually Nails it in fact his previous Bethesda soundtrack with Fallout 76 is a genuine treat it it not only meshes flawlessly with its Associated game it also works as excellent cruising music when you're driving through the mountains of West Virginia I'm starting to think Bethesda was taking it for granted that Jeremy Solen and anzur were absolute professionals and masters of their craft who could repeatedly pull incredible work at of thin air Bethesda got used to being able to have a banger soundtrack guide them on how to make a game that fits the music I don't think the fault lies with the composer here Zur can deliver the goods I just don't think he was given any sort of direct ction for what Starfield was aesthetically speaking music is one of the first things Bethesda likes to have done but when you're dealing with a new IP that ultimately came out as an uninspired generic mess of clashing Styles scoring a good soundtrack to that is going to be a serious challenge the only thing you can do is play it safe and that's the best way I can describe Starfield soundtrack safe and uninspiring it might make for some good background music when you're studying but for backing up the action of combat you areer take your [Music] best uh I don't think so I even did a test where I threw on some music from another game I thought could work with starfields combat and the results were night and day come on some out no you can even see how much more aggressive I got when I was jamming out to the oo soundtrack The exploration tracks are a little more On Target when wandering Barren planets mostly because there's not much music at all during those sections however what passed in this game as dungeon tracks is a bit strange a lot of them sound like Town Music which comes across as entirely inappropriate when looting an abandoned facility full of dead bodies it was made even more inappropriate when the combat music wouldn't play so I'd have this town music going as I was adding some fresh corpses to the dungeon damn it [Music] all right let's talk content points of interest or pois refers to all the locations the planet content manager or PCM populates a Landing site with everything the PCM will spawn from Dungeons and outposts to caves and other natural formations is handcrafted this means the amount of proc Shen content in Starfield is actually quite minimal limited only to the terrain itself for the landing sites and the radiant missions and random events if you want to be a pent what surprised me and many others is just how repetitive these pois truly are we aren't talking Oblivion repetitive where you got 90 caves that all look very similar because they share the same tile set but have different layouts and enemy spawns I mean if you've seen one POI cryolab you've literally seen them all because the game only has the one cryolab it's going to keep spawning same layout same enemies same terminal same key card same clutter same dead bodies and the same dumpsters that ra Morgan will always stop to comment over the only variation in these places will be the levels of the enemies the gear they got and whatever spawns in the dungeons containers everything else is identical now this wouldn't be a big deal if there was a large pool of pois the game could could pull from but there isn't I'm going to list the numbers of what I'd consider to be dungeons in previous Bethesda games and I'd like you to try to guess how many we've been able to confirm exist in Starfield a game made for Wanderers that hosts over 1,000 different planets and moons Oblivion around 250 Fallout 3 around 140 Skyrim around 200 Fallout 4 around 250 and Fallout 76 around 300 now these aren't exactly Apples to Apples as this is going off of map markers Fallout 3 sounds pretty Tiny But it actually has a lot going on in the DC ruins where each neighborhood could be considered several dungeons tied to one or two map markers Starfield has around 40 unique pois that are not just natural features that are only used for completing Planet surveys and that 40 is being inflated some by civilian outposts ship Landing sites temples and gravitational anomalies which aren't dungeons at all I'd also argue crashed ships and many of the one structure ruins don't make the cut either so for just comparing your usual Bethesda dungeons we're in the neighborhood of around 20 I uh maybe the thought was that the planets themselves should count as dungeons or even the individual Landing sites yeah we'll go with that I made a prediction on X formerly known as Twitter stating that the landing SES wouldn't be much bigger than something like black reach and Skyrim while that turned out to be incorrect Landing sites are actually about the size of Skyrim and Fallout 4 in terms of surface area in terms of content it's pretty damn close forget about immersion this is just awful in terms of fun I would try to play devil's advocate here and posit that the generic POI dungeons are super limited but the game has a ton of handcrafted dungeons that the quests send you to but that's not the case either as the place I saw most of these generic POI dungeons was in the main [ __ ] Quest the Crimson Fleet quest line had maybe five unique dungeons if we really stretch the definition there's a few side quests that send you to some unique dungeons but not many my point is there aren't two to 300 dungeons hidden somewhere in this game game this is wasn't this game in development for 8 years I'm sure the first year or two was mostly engine and concept work and we had 2020 happen but still Skyrim was in full development for 3 years by a team a fraction the size of the one that worked on Starfield and that game blows Starfield out of the water in terms of quantity of dungeons alone that's to say nothing about the work that went into the spaces connecting those dungeons together I figured seeing as we weren't going to be getting a singular handcrafted Starfield was going to be absolutely loaded with pois I figured it would take hundreds of hours to really see everything that could possibly spawn on a planet I was bracing myself for years of 10 places you've never seen in Starfield videos instead you really can cover all of it on a single planet in about 10 Landing sites where did all that development time go because I got news for you the quests and the handcrafted content is also surprisingly scarce Bethesda kept throwing around the phrase irresponsibly large but I'm sitting here left wondering where 2/3 of this game is now I'm not a quantity over quality guy I'll take a few dungeons in favor of them being really welld designed and open to all kinds of play Styles but not only are there fewer dungeons in Starfield overall than there are alien ruins in Oblivion these dungeons really aren't anything special I have a lot of thoughts on Fallout 4 and 76 most of them negative but one thing I will give them unconditional praise for is dungeon design Bethesda really did nail making those spaces feel lived in and grounded in particular factories and Military sites were some of my favorites not just because they were usually good places for loot but also because they were visually distinct and usually had intricate layouts that I could get lost in they made me curious as to the purpose in their world and that would get me to poke into some terminals or even just take things a little slow and let my imagination fill in some of the gaps while the realism bound nature of the design often made them less flexible in terms of play style they were still overall the most fun parts of their games all things considered but it wasn't just their interior design that impressed me the amount of work that went into their exterior design was equally as impressive Bethesda would rarely just drop a dungeon out in the middle of an empty field and call it a day they would spend a lot of time blending it into the environment designing different approaches to the places and often times linking them together with nearby locations so that I was naturally LED through these different zones that often would get me to explore several dungeons back to back while seeing as POI dungeons are just remote facilities on remote planets that whole second aspect of design is pretty much impossible these dungeons really are just boxes dropped out into the world sometimes the area around them might be developed you might have some dudes guarding a loading dock or a landing pad maybe a couple of smaller support buildings but it's not like these places are attached to other dungeons to create an industrial complex or a remote mining Village so already the dungeon design has taken a few steps back from what even Fallout 3 had going on leading us to our final comparison Oblivion Oblivion esque is about how I describe starfields dungeons overall while you have your usual Bethesda environmental storytelling with some Terminals and journals lying around the place they are like I said earlier exactly the same from the first abandoned UC listening post to the 10th I honestly don't know why they'd even bother with the terminals and stuff then but whatever so with these places being robbed of any sort of in Universe purpose we are back to dungeons just being places we go to fight and loot no pretense for anything else just go in clear the place out and move on just like Oblivion some of the dungeons try to cater to different play styles with ventilation systems you can use to sneak around and shortcuts and Alternate passageways being blocked off by a pickable lock but this is not something you can count on as a stealth player more often than not there are no fence there might not even be an entrance outside of the front one some places might have security systems you can reprogram most don't so even in terms of variety and flexibility these dungeons fail they're also just not very elaborate perhaps some of the smallest dungeons overall I've seen in a Bethesda game let me tell you Fallout 76 had some mind-bending dungeons that you will get lost in which made the removal of the local map a really questionable Choice a design choice that actually carried over to Starfield but at least they threw us a bone by building Skyrim's Clairvoyance into the scanner however the quickest way out of a dungeon is just to fast travel out of it another feature carried over from Fallout 76 according to Todd they moved away from maps for dungeons because they felt if a player had to ref to a map to navigate one of their dungeons then they failed as level designers okay but why don't we have maps for cities is that to keep the online map and guide writers employed I find it rather telling that Bethesda is willing to inconvenience and frustrate the player simply out of Pride Todd recently stated how Starfield was designed from the ground up to be a game open to having more content added to it that the launch game was just a platform for delivering more content in the future is that why dungeons are so lacking are they going to to sell us pois as DLC do they believe modders will fill the system or did they figure the exploration of barren planets was never going to match up to the experience of their previous games and so they shouldn't even try we we have this phrase you know put it in the spotlight there are things you can put in the spotlight you can make it more important just with game symptoms or you can make it less important so sometimes a way to fix things is like we make that less important in the game yeah um we do that with you know horses and Skyrim they're just not that important exploration in Starfield it's sad because that didn't really need to be the case even if it was just wandering procgen planets populated with a bunch of handcrafted Dungeons and whatnot that could still have been a decent experience if there was a breadth of content I've seen a lot of players bouncing off the exploration part of this game hard this usually then leads to them eventually dropping Starfield altogether because that has always been the core of Bethesda games it's not like the other aspects of Starfield are a huge step up compared to their previous offerings if anything the other aspects are made weak weaker by the collapse of the players desire to engage with starfields world when Todd said exploration in Starfield was going to be different I really didn't think he meant removed starfields complete failure to make exploration engaging has revived a debate that I've seen pop up whenever a new Bethesda game comes around it's this idea that what made Bethesda games good back in the day just isn't cutting it anymore competition has gotten too stiff and Bethesda needs to start taking notes from The Witcher or Zelda or Dark Souls while I agree in terms of writing design and mechanics Bethesda can absolutely learn some valuable lessons from those games in terms of exploration and World design uh I don't really buy it first I want to shoot that argument down that the Bethesda formula is dead no it isn't what we've seen in Fallout 476 and Starfield is Bethesda short changing the strong exploration elements of marwin Bolivian and even Skyrim to do other things what you're seeing isn't the failure of the formula it's the failure of Bethesda to execute on that formula if the formula was dead people wouldn't still be playing marwin to bivion and Skyrim to this day begging Bethesda to just make another Elder Scrolls a game like Ard andall wouldn't be able to grab people's attention by just looking like a spiritual successor to marind the Bethesda formula is something wholly unique the reason no one has tried to emulate it is because even Bethesda doesn't actually understand what that formula is people just really don't get Bethesda games because there's so many layers and overlapping systems you got to pull apart to get to the heart of what makes those old GES great also not for nothing they are a hard thing to make up until Starfield I still thought Bethesda was ahead of everyone else when it came to designing big open worlds their unique focus on systems really did lend their worlds a certain tangibility no other developer seems capable of replicating if there's one game I think Bethesda could take notes from it's Red Dead Redemption especially rdr2 it's not even the world design itself which granted RDR 2's map is stunning in size detail and just raw Beauty but rather it's how they the game uses its map rdr2 heavily focuses on the minute-to-minute traveling through its world it's a game that has a fast travel option I rarely want to use because traveling on Horseback and getting sidetracked to check something out along the way is the Beating Heart of that game's experience that's an aspect of their game Bethesda has never perfectly nailed a Bethesda game that really focuses on the world its scale and the means of traversing that world I think would be the Bethesda formula perfected however looking at how awful traveling in Starfield is I seriously doubt Bethesda will ever commit to something so bold so yeah maybe the Bethesda game is dead because Bethesda will never make it again but the idea of a detailed world you can genuinely lose yourself in certainly is not combat is the part of the game that received the most attention during development and it shows as it's the only part I'd say manages to rise to the lofty Heights of mid to kind of decent the ground combat anyways the ship combat we'll get to that in just a second we are in some dire need of a little positivity right now ground combat feels pretty decent refined Fallout 4 with Space Magic that actually ties in pretty well with the rest of the combat there is melee and hand hand combat in this game hand hand even has some perks tied to it however I stuck to ranged firearms for my playthrough so I can't really speak to how good or bad those parts of sandbox are I will say the weapon selection for melee is very limited and I really can't imagine rushing a level 90 equipped with a modded mag storm with nothing but my fists it looks like the two play Styles require a lot of planning metagaming and just pure luck to be made viable definitely not recommended for first timers as well while stealth is in this game I once again didn't engage with it outside of some incidental sneak attacks while sniping it's another play style that requires some perks and planning it's also not as crazy powerful as it has been in previous Bethesda games so they may have finally tamed the stealth Archer Meme here ranged combat is without a doubt the star of the show there's a huge array of firearms all organized into different types with skills and perks associated with them a decent number of mods you can slap on of them and if all of that wasn't enough there's also the legendary effect system from Fallout 476 which can really start to get your head spinning while some of the weapons can start to feel syy due to the sheer volume of them in the game and some of them are outright trash While others are Godly I was actually surprised how distinct most of them felt with legendary effects doing things like dealing more damage with consecutive hits random Elemental damage or staggering enemies that distinction is felt even more your guns tend to shape your play style which I actually really enjoyed and felt worked well with how looting and Starfield goes just like in Fallout 76 weapon enchantments make no sense in universe but I honestly don't care as they really do add a lot of depth to combat and character progression in Starfield weapons and armor are tiered based on the number of effects an item has common which has no effects rare which has one effect epic with two effects and legendary with three effects as well weapons have quality levels associated with them that determines how much damage they deal basic calibrated refined and advanced armor has its own quality level naming Convention as well as its own set of legendary effects but the same principles apply armor has been slimmed down as the only armored slots we now get are SPAC suits helmets and packs there's an underlying apparel slot that can offer some very modest bonuses but mostly it's just Aesthetics just make sure to toggle the setting to hide your armor in breathable environments in the space suit menu over the years Bethesda has been flip-flopping with how they do armor you had Oblivion slimming down the number of equipment slots for marwin then Fallout 3 brought it down to just armor and a helmet Skyrim expanded that a bit by giving us boots and gloves back along with a ring and necklace Fallout 4 tried to bring armor pieces back but its implementation was really Jank cuz only some underlying apparel slots even allowed you to equip armor pieces with them 76 addressed this issue by by letting you equip armor pieces with any apparel it would just make the armor invisible if it wasn't going to play nice visually with the underlying outfit finally we got Starfield walking it all the way back to Fallout 3 but giving us backpacks as a consolation prize I'm not a fan of losing control over my equipment and my looks especially when the name of the game these days is offering players as much control as possible over their appearance with things like vanity equipment slots and such likewise I'm not a fan of losing potential slots for more equipment effects however I will admit not having to sift through tons of armor pieces and trying to get a full set I'm pleased with is an improvement over the hell that became in Fallout 76 armor also has different damage type and environmental hazard resistances but like I said earlier the ladder is almost entirely flavor meant to trick you into thinking it's something you should really be concerned with really all you need to pay attention to is the damage resistances random enchantments and Aesthetics the problem with the random loot system in Starfield is that it's random while I do enjoy the fact that I got to build my character around my Arsenal which makes for an interesting early and mid game it ends up having a seriously destructive influence on the long-term progression of characters the randomness coupled with new game plus encourages a player to avoid investing into pretty much any weapon specific skills and well there's quite a few of them and those are arguably the most effective and interesting skills the randomness also means you can just continuously lose to RNG and keep pulling up weapons you don't really want because the odds of getting exactly what you want are astronomically low as well you can keep pulling up weapons that have effects like spacer which is without a doubt a bad effect as its Buff when in space combat will hardly ever be active since space combat hardly exists meanwhile its substantial damage Nerf in surface combat will almost always be felt I can't tell you how many guns I instantly ignor just because of this effect I feel like changing it to react to interior and exterior combat would have been a much better effect we still have no way of being able to level up armor or weapons which was a huge issue I had with Fallout 76 so if you find a really awesome shotgun in terms of effects but it's the lowest tier quality level there's really nothing you can do with it except deal with its low base stats or vendor it I still don't see any reason why we can't improve the quality rating of guns and armor seeing as we have workbenches for this stuff weapon mods pack a lot of potential and like in Fallout 76 there's some surprising Synergy you can stubble across with things like white hot mods adding fire damage and perks that would then buff that fire damage there's a good amount of variety to really make weapons feel more distinct and they even improved the modding menu a bit to be a little more upfront with what stats the mods effect overall I just don't have a whole lot to say about the system as it's almost entirely the same as it was in Fallout 4 and 76 armor mods are a little more debatable and that's mostly due to the utility of armor being a little more dubious thanks to the nerfing of environmental hazards while damage reduction is nice I really didn't feel it a whole lot between my best armor set and some mid-tier trash really what ends up making and breaking armor are the effects that are on it armor mods seem to just be a replacement for some perks with some damage reduction effects thrown in it's very anemic which is strange because there's no visual component to armor mods as there are with weapon mods you would think then it would be no real challenge for the designers to just stack armor with all kinds of stat altering mods so let's talk about ground and space combat space combat is not ship combat rather it's engagements that happen on ships and space stations despite what the marketing had me believing space combat is actually pretty rare being restricted to only a few space stations and large ships you'll mostly see during certain quests and boarding actions if you decide to disable a ship in space and dock with it while the ladder is pretty underwhelming due to most ships being too small to make boarding them interesting the former tended to be some good stuff especially when the designers threw zero gravity into the mix zerog works surprisingly well it takes what you know about combat and turns it on its head in a really good way suddenly all those heavy-hitting shotguns in Your Arsenal become a liability as The Recoil is going to send you flying across the room cover completely changes encouraging you to start thinking more creatively with navigating in a 3D environment even things like how you Peak from cover and Russian enemy has made so much riskier that is when the AI is able to cope with the switch up sad Zerg is just not used very often I suspect it came down to dungeon design and uncertainty whether it was going to even be in the game still if Bethesda is actually committed to making Starfield a Content platform more zg stuff is a no-brainer in my opinion I did find out recently that there's a chance for some Zerg combat when performing a boarding action I just never saw it because I rarely performed boarding actions as the reward for doing them was rarely worth the effort surface combat is the bulk of the onf foot action and like I said earlier it's pretty solid what ends up holding it back is balancing Ai and level design level design and AI kind of goes hand in hand here I would routinely see AI give up strategically Superior positions just to rush out in the open and die even though they had rifles or I'd see them struggle to pathfind on some catwalks or through tight corridors or I'd see them get themselves stuck in air locks and doorways sometimes they'd hide behind what barely even qualified as cover a lot of it would boil down to a lack of situational Awareness on their part AI just isn't capable of understanding their surroundings and using that to their advantage and this ends up encouraging the player to just sit and wait in no time at all the AI will most likely put themselves into a compromising position this is unfortunate because we have a few Mobility options such as the Boost pack clambering and even a combat slide that all seems to encourage an aggressive play style however combat isn't really designed for constant aggression that is to say it doesn't necessitate you use those options and get good with them while it can sometimes outright punish you for being aggressive thanks to busted enemy level scaling it doesn't really discourage aggression a lot of the time it's more like the game just doesn't care and so you can either play it safe and be bored or play aggressively have more fun but occasionally trip over the unpredictable roadblock up ahead for the most part the AI has access to these Mobility options as well but they hardly ever utilize them and even if they do it's often to their detriment this ends up turning a lot of combat Arenas into a playground for the player and a prison for the ai ai tends to have the biggest Advantage when the player is assaulting the exterior of a facility and the AI has defensive positions cover turrets and traps at their disposal this is where ground combat feels the most dynamic I'm forced to get a little more creative with what I'm using and how I'm approaching the enemy it also gives the mobility options more room to shine this really changes though once we get into a building and suddenly it seems the enemies are there just to act as Cannon fod as I clear through rooms like a oneman army the only Wild Card the AI seems to be able to pull is to retreat further into the dungeon and group up with their allies they won't alert those allies and get them to come back to my position to reinforce the Allies whom I'm busy slaughtering so I guess we're still stuck in Skyrim in terms of enemy AI intelligence what can put a stop to the whole show though is when you run up against a random legendary enemy or an enemy equipped with one of the brokenly op weapons legendary enemies make a return from Fallout 4 and 76 actually they don't really have a fixed term here in Starfield so I've seen some people even calling them epics there's a chance you'll sometimes run into an enemy many levels higher than their allies who will have multiple health bars and are often times capable of dealing out some serious damage these are meant to act as boss encounters however since they are random they often end up acting like a bucket of ice water during combat instead you'll be rolling through and suddenly you hit an enemy that's eating your bullets for breakfast and potentially melting your health bar simultaneously some dungeons have encounters where they are weighted heavier to spawn but often times it just feels like total Randomness this completely breaks the flow of combat and not in a good way that encourages adapting and experimenting usually the solution is just to fall back on whatever boring cheese Strat you've discovered because getting creative when facing these sorts of enemies is usually met with instant death when all else fails you can usually just sit back and Whittle them down with some Hot Shots the random weapon check is even worse however because this game is a visual mess in the art style Department reading enemies from a distance is basically impossible however even if you can properly identify the weapon an enemy is equipped with you have no idea if that weapon is stacked with enchantments or is high-leveled or is equipped with some powerful mod so you might end up an encounter where the level 70 legendary enemy is being upstaged by the random level 50 dude with a kitted out mag storm that shreds you before you even saw a health bar speaking of health bars I've seen a lot of people claiming enemies in this game are bullet sponges for the most part I have to disagree while RNG can saddle you with weapons that are woly inadequate and softly discourages you from investing into two weapon specific perks when you are properly equipped most enemies and encounters end up feeling too easy especially on the normal difficulty setting admittedly though level scaling in this game is a mess levels Scale based off of the star system you are in the starting systems are the lowest level systems hovering around levels 5 and 10 the furthest systems cap out at 75 however you can still see some level 60s and 70s in the lower level systems and vice versa with low levels and high-leveled systems this ends up making a systems level feel more like a suggestion than a rule particularly when you land in the level 40s and 50s those systems can feel almost random with its scaling level scaling also affects the quality of equipment enemies will spawn with I wasn't able to work out how this system works exactly but it seems like your character level determines what loot spawn and containers while the system level determines the equipment that spawns on enemies this means the best way to get highlevel gear and make money is to fight enemies in high-leveled systems exclusively this ends up having a negative influence on exploration as you're encouraged to stick to the higher leveled systems if your goal is to get good loot this also Cuts another way because an overwhelming majority of the game's Quest content takes place in the low-leveled systems if you're running through that stuff as a high-leveled player you're going to be bored out of your mind as you stomp your way through each quest's combat Encounters this becomes even more obvious during New Game Plus and I think the solution would have been to allow those lower leveled systems to slowly creep up it's fine to keep the starting systems below the player's level but I don't think I should be at level 70 going up against level five during major quest lines now you might say I should just increase the difficulty setting if I want those low-leveled systems to challenge me again first off even maxing the setting out a level five system is not going to challenge my level 70 character second ship combat scales with a difficulty setting to and uh oh boy let's talk about ship combat it's pretty awful I think it comes down to tuning lack of tactical options bad AI how the encounters themselves are set up pretty much the whole system from top to bottom every ship enemy and player alike feels like it's made out of paper either Shields and Hull Integrity is too low across the board or weapon damage is too high this is coupled with the fact that weapons have some pretty insane range and travel speed meaning damage is almost always unavoidable even if you have a ship built for Speed and Agility then you have the combat encounters themselves almost every encounter I was outnumbered 3 to one in ground encounters being outnumbered is not necessarily a bad thing because the player has numerous advantages tons of Med packs and chems a giant Arsenal they can bring around with them Companions and when all else fails better situational awareness and a greater ability to use geography to their advantage ship combat is the devoid of all of those advantages what your ship is equipped with is all you got outside of ship parts which just repairs Hull damage there's no consumables you can use in the heat of a battle while companions can buff some ship systems we can't form a squadron with Ally ships and with most encounters occurring in empty space there's not much you can do in terms of Maneuvers to gain the upper hand unless you got better engines and shields than your enemies and even then if it's a three onone odds are someone is going to be outmaneuvering you with so few tactical options at the players's disposal Space Battles really boil down to a game of numbers and RNG Todd said they were having a lot of trouble getting ship combat to feel right fights were either too difficult or they were turning into endless jousting matches as the player and their targets continuously did flybys in one another rather than expanding the combat sandbox to give the player more tactical options they just programmed the AI to be really dumb let's look at how Elite dangerous that ship combat because it looks like that's the sort of ship combat Starfield was going for for starters in Elite dangerous you got way more tactical options Silent Running and shaft launchers to break Target locks Shield cells to temporarily boost Shield strength and Deployable fighters to harass and distract your enemy just to name a few ships are faster more agile and harder than anything in Starfield there's also a heat management mechanic in Elite dangerous that creates more of a potential skill Gap that the player can then get good at to exploit in their enemies however Elite dangerous also knows how to set up engagements rarely if ever is the player just ambushed by three enemies and is immediately Under Fire unless the star system is in a state of war and you wandered into an active battle NPCs aren't going to freely fire on whoever happens by pirates for instance will just demand some cargo and run off once appeased Elite dangerous never spawns players within weapon range there's always several seconds to give them and NPCs an opportunity to size up the potential fight and either prepare or attempt an escape often times a fight can be avoided with without even dropping out of light speed if the player is paying attention to what's around them via the different scanners enemies also have options to give Chase which means the FTL Drive isn't a guaranteed combat pass however the player also has access to those tools too so if they want they can be the aggressor and instigate fights on their own terms this results in some intense games of cat and mouse that are straight up impossible in starfields because not only does it lack the tools to make this possible it also lacks a seamless method of space travel and finally Elite dangerous make sure when the player is grossly outnumbered there's Allied ships somewhere nearby sometimes this is ships that are currently engaged with the Enemy other times it's nearby security ships on patrol all of this adds up to create many layers to Elite dangerous as combat I never got killed and thought I'd been cheated it was either poor piloting skills poor planning or committing to an engagement I should have run from I really don't think Starfield has enough depth to its ship combat to ever really be good but it can be at least at least made tolerable more ship Health faster ship speeds more balanced encounters fewer random ambushes with shoot on site targets and smarter enemy ship AI can go a long way however I do think there's a lot of negative opinions on Starfield ship combat owed to the starting ship just being absolute trash the frontier is like many other things in Starfield a newbie trap you really want to drop that thing ASAP if most ships in Starfield are made out of printer paper then the frontier is made out of toilet paper the problem is that the game doesn't introduce shipboard mechanics soon enough being tied to the second mission in the main story after the player has been cut loose from the mandatory tutorial introduction actually it's even worse because the mechanic is arbitrarily locked behind a perk so if the player doesn't have the perk unlocked they literally cannot perform system targeting during the mechanics tutorial like seriously couldn't even give Sarah Morgan the skill so that we'd have a guaranteed way to do it here hey did you know you could actually board the pirate ships that Ambush you during the ship Combat tutorial you can even Commander them and set them as your home ship this requires you picked a background that gives you the systems targeting skill however systems targeting as a mechanic I was actually surprised to see make it in a Starfield this is one of the few things I think might be what saves ship combat as a whole if someone is able to make the tweaks that I listed systems targeting is basically starfields fats time slows down and the player is able to pick a part of the ship's Target they wish to incapacitate weapons engines Shield or grav Drive the grav Drive I find funny because I've never seen an AI jump out of a fight to save their lives probably because it's nearly impossible even for the player but also because the AI is programmed to lose you'll sometimes hear overom saying that they are jumping out and your companions will mention how the enemy can't jump away so I'm guessing enemies jumping out of a fight was a mechanic at some point that just got cut disabling a grab Drive might be what gets you Zerg when boarding though so I guess there's that anyways the only system really worth targeting are engines this will stall an enemy ship and open it up for boarding once the player kills everyone on the ship they are free to hop into the pilot seat and Commander it for themselves they got to get it registered with a ship Master if they want to modify or sell the ship but this is actually a pretty decent way to NAB a good ship if the player is able to identify one they wish to steal the identification part is needlessly complicated because it's difficult to see these stats of a ship Park gated once again and there's no way to see what modules are on the ship outside of taking it to a ship master and modifying it however if the player decides they want to steal a ship it does add a fun risk reward twist to ship combat where the system targeting mechanic utterly fails though is in being at all useful in actual combat I hate to keep invoking Elite dangerous here but in that game system targeting was a seriously powerful tactic that could level the playing field a lot for a weaker ship hit a ship's Shield system and your target just lost a huge advantage or hit their engines to slow them down so you can make some distance to recover or attempt an escape hit the FTL drive to keep them from escaping or pursuing you Starfield system targetting mechanic fails here because of the aformentioned low ship Health by the time you've even damaged a ship's engines that ship is likely almost close to death in fact if you don't commit to disabling a system early in a fight you're likely just going to kill the shrip before you disable a single system good luck getting two systems down that's pretty much a guaranteed death sentence for the Target outside of boarding Ships In Space the player can also hijack ships that are landed on these surface of remote planets the challenge with this method is that most ships will only stay on a planet's surface for a minute or two so unless the ship lands in front of you you're likely not getting aborted before it's back in orbit as well it's RNG so the likelihood of getting a ship you actually want to keep isn't all that great the shest method of ship acquisition is just purchasing one while I have some genuinely positive things to say about that and ship building mechanics we'll get into later as in early game method of getting a ship it's pretty much untenable basically I don't blame players for sticking with the frontier and making the ship portion of Starfield magnitudes worse for themselves because they're so used to not being directed by the game to do something anyways for all the issues I just listed cranking the difficulty setting and making enemies do more damage to the player while the player deals reduced damage is a [ __ ] terrible idea when it comes to ship combat we really do need two difficulty settings in this game one for ground combat and one for ship combat before we get into character progression we really should discuss one more element to starfields combat abilities I've been calling them all kinds of things during my playthrough Space Magic space shouts space th you see these abilities are much closer to shouts from Skyrim than they are spells from Skyrim we get something like a Mana bar when we unlock them but considering most of the abilities tap out the bar in a single shot it really acts like a cool down meter just like how shouts and Skyrim worked a few of the abilities can be cast in quick succession and there is a resource that acts like a Mana potion but both of these elements come with some pretty big ashis and there's no perks or skills associated with the abilities so space Zoom it is they're even tied to the main quest are unlocked with something similar to Skyrim's word walls there's a group called The starborn no seriously space Zoom works on many levels there's 24 abilities in total and if you're familiar with shouts and spells from Skyrim most of them will be quite familiar you got fire breath frost breath unrelenting Force Slow Time whirlwind sprint animal Allegiance but then you got some new ones like Singularity for Mass Effect spawning a clone of yourself anti-gravity Fields turning yourself into a rock I actually enjoyed the space them a lot more than I was expecting I didn't even mind the long cooldown a lot of them have because many of them can be total showstoppers during a fight being able to just Spam these all the time would pretty much undermine everything combat has going for it they're a lot of fun and while I did find myself gravitating towards a select few that more had to do with me just finding ones that worked well with my weapon selection and play style and less that it had to do with them being op some of them are kind of worthless but most have a distinct purpose and so long as you remember to whip them out they can do a lot to mix up combat it's just a shame that most combat encounters are too easy in this game to Warrant leaning on abilities very often okay I've talked around the subject long enough character progression let's just start with the basics Starfield uses an XP system same as Fallout earn enough XP gain a character to level up and one skill point take that skill point invest it into a skill to unlock a new perk you cannot just pick whatever you want from one of the five categories as skills are tiered in their respective category you need to invest a certain number of skill points into a category to unlock the next tier as well skills have ranks to them and in order to be allowed to invest skill points into ranks beyond the first rank you need to complete challenges on paper this doesn't sound like a terrible skill system a bit basic but it should get the job done however a lot of questionable design choices and a maddening lack of information makes it perhaps the worst leveling system I've seen from Bethesda to date let's knock challenges out of the way because it's the most straightforward and how it's poorly done I imagine the thought behind adding challenges to progression was to prevent players from rushing all four ranks of a skill and basically making the middle two ranks less meaningful as well it does share a very surface level spirit with Elder Scrolls a system of leveling as you use a skill which addresses that issue of a character that has done nothing but Gunn down all their opponents suddenly being a master in speech I don't have much against the idea of challenges being tied to progression however three issues bogg the system down in Starfield for one most of the challenges are extremely arbitrary it's clear coming up with challenges was a real challenge for the designers many skills particularly ship skills fall back on just requiring the player to kill X number of enemies which completely defeats the point of the level as you use at ethos but then there's challenges that can be completed with 10 minutes of grinding or 5 hours of natural play time the graph jump scill is a great example I just sat there jumping between random systems for a little while so I could quickly polish the skill off seeing as fast traveling wasn't even counting towards the challenge the crafting skills are some of the most arbitrary however you just got to craft X number of whatever to knock those out so those challenges just act as a tax as you spend resources crafting random mods and trash gear or building outposts just to spam buildings the second issue is a lot more punitive for no real benefit and that's the fact that you cannot earn progress towards a challenge unless you have the challenge unlocked for that rank of the skill so say you don't have any points in security any locks you pick will not count towards its challenge progression or say you do have the skill but you don't have the next rank unlocked and you just finish the previous ranks challenge same issue presents itself the obvious solution here is to make all challenges track their progress whether you have a challenge unlocked or not and lastly you have a complete failure on the UI side of things is there's no way to see what a skill's challenges are until you've unlocked the first rank of a skill While most challenges aren't really anything crazy some of them started to get to be so tedious that they disincentivized me from continuing with the skills progression withholding information is the perfect segue from challenges back to skills in general while Bethesda has gotten better with giving us actual numbers in their perk descriptions there's still skills like rank four Fitness that just says sprinting in power tax now use significantly less oxygen or how about the cellular regeneration skill whose first three ranks simply read slightly increased chance to recover from injuries naturally moderately increased chance to recover from injuries naturally noticeably increased chance to recover from injuries naturally is someone EP Bethesda just screwing with us or were the numbers for the skill getting tweaked so often that the person writing the description just gave up and started using synonymous adjectives instead of numbers the ranking system also adds a new new level of confusion let's look at ballistics as an example rank one ballistic weapons do 10% more damage rank two then does 20% more damage now do these stack and that means I'll actually have a 30% increase to damage no rank two just overrides rank one now I wasn't blindsided by this because I just assumed it was overriding but I really cannot blame anyone who thought they would be stacking due to how the UI lists the rankings vertically but where the lack of information reaches its worst is when at skills Companions and crew members have thetha made a pretty big deal about Companions and crew members being able to share their skills with the player allowing them to do things like buff a ship's weapon systems the game will list the same skills the player can see and acquire in the skills menu however those skills work differently when being shared by crew members this wouldn't be a big deal if the game told us how these skills worked for them but of course it doesn't take Sam CO's piloting skill as an example at Max rank which he is the the player is supposed to be allowed to Pilot the best class of ships however piloting better ships is not the bonus Sam's piloting skill offers the player instead it simply boosts the ship's engines I'd be remiss not mentioning there's another skill Engine Systems in the same category as piloting that also affects ship engines there's some skills crew share that people online still have yet to figure out exactly what they do like those ship weapon skills and outpost engineering so the people trying to test this stuff are left one wondering if their testing methodology is faulty or if the skills are simply bugged and it's not like we don't have a good place to list this information we have a crew page we can access at any time that lists our crew where they are assigned what skills they have and even what skills are being shared when I heard about this skill sharing system I foolishly assumed that it meant I could hire crew members who could just act as researchers on my ship rather than me dumping points into weapon engineering or spacit design I could just burn a couple of crew member slots in my ship and have it covered I went so far as to do a social build so that I could have more crew members aboard my ship turns out no crew members have any research skills despite having 82 skills in the game with four ranks in each not even half of those are available on crew and even then many of them likely don't do anything except act as flavor to explain why they keep giving you sandwiches and rocks without the forn knowledge of that I kept avoiding certain skills for half my playthrough hoping it would pop up on someone who I could bring onto my ship eventually I realized I got played by the Starfield direct and started moving away from the social skills build entirely so with the benefit of crew perks being taken off the table a new dilemma presents itself with 328 possible Investments and the game being designed for most players to end up in the70s there's nowhere near enough skill points to get everything in any other RPG this is of course a positive thing as it encourages specializing your character and starting new ones if you want to try a different play style Starfield really drops the ball there because as it turns out a lot of its skills are either not that great or just outright worthless this coupled with the perk gating of a lot of mechanics and a poorly balanced weapon sandbox heavily pushes players who are paying attention and are not trying to do a themed build like I was towards a very specific character build let's just go through the categories themselves physical can be quite literally ignored entirely if you are not doing a melee hand to hand or stealth build weightlifting to increase your carry weight can be useful I guess though personally I just had a follower to act as backup storage and then I just dump all my loot into my ship's cargo hold physical also has all the perks tied to environmental hazards but with the survival mechanics being gutted from the game all of those skills are now worthless Wellness as health increases can be useful if you're dying a lot however healing items are plentiful enough in Starfield that I never felt compelled to grab the skill as someone who did a social build I can safely say most of the skills are worthless so you can ignore most of this category too persuasion is probably the best skill in the category however I I'd still say you only need about two ranks to pass most of the persuasion mini games leadership is decent if you like having followers or isolation if you're going it alone the skills that increase ship and outpost crew size is very debatable however considering how worthless most crew Parks end up being diplomacy instigation and intimidation are the calm frenzy and fear spells from Skyrim rendered into two skills they're an interesting idea I'm not opposed to however the way you use the skills is so [ __ ] awful it made me quit using them after only a few dungeons they require you to pull out your scanner holstering your weapon in the process get into shooting range of the target activate them and then scroll to which skill you want to use these often fail until you get a few points into the skill as well so you're basically taking a ton of damage for an effect that kind of disrupts encounters a little bit it's that classic Bethesda problem of why bother using spells to alter the aggression of your enemies when the easiest quickest and often times most interesting thing to do is just kill them them there is a nice side bonus with these skills in that they add new options you can use in Persuasion that at least according to my experience always succeed diplomacy in particular popped up a lot and was often worth quite a few points in the miname fortunately you only need one skill point invested to unlock these dialogue options so if you're committed to just stacking speech skills to talk your way through every persuasion attempt these can justify one point each seeing as we're on the subject let's talk persuasion we got a new persuasion miname that blends a bunch of bethesda's previous speech systems into to something that's mechanically speaking surprisingly robust how it works is during conversations you might see a dialogue option that has a persuade tag in front of it picking that option launches you into a turn-based miname that has you racking up points in order to win the persuasion attempt you'll be presented a list of options with a point value associated with each and a color representing the difficulty of the option more difficult options net more points and like I said you can see things like diplomacy and checked options in here too picking an option runs a check if you pass you get the points if you don't you don't rack up enough points before you run out of turns and you'll pass the persuasion attempt there's also a chance to score a critical pass which will automatically win the persuasion attempt as well the system was designed to make persuasion feel more conversational and I'd say it mostly succeeds in that regard there is some weirdness to what your character and NPCs are saying during the miname though it can start to feel very artificial in some conversations especially if you keep losing turns or you switch from reasonable to threat dialogue options all in all though I'd say it gets the job done pretty well really the main issue isn't with the persuasion system itself but how it's used and the fact that it's not an adequate substitute for a proper disposition system persuasion is a scripted thing you cannot just whip it out on any NPC you want like you could oblivion's persuasion Pi I'll give Bethesda credit and admit it was used more often than I was expecting but it really does take the wind out of a speech character sales when they only get to use their main skill once or twice during a quest I wasn't expecting disposition to come back seeing as it's been dead for a while now with its remains being stuffed into the companion Affinity system still it seems like a missed opportunity not to have some generic version of the Min game we can play to get discounts at shops or get better rewards for completing quests I guess the bigger issue is the complete lack of interaction with NPCs outside of quest givers Companions and shops so really coming up with many uses for a proper disposition system is is kind of hard but the complete absence of the miname outside of quests made finishing challenges for the skill difficult I really cannot imagine what it would take to get this skill maxed out if you are not running through a bunch of new game plus Cycles like I was and next up we got the combat category and this one I ignored for most of my playthrough as I was way too busy stacking Social Science and Tech as my Fallout 76 overseer roleplay demanded surprisingly ignoring this category save for maxing out the ballistic skill resulted in combat that was mostly fine on medium difficulty I think you can safely ignore combat skills entirely so long as you're diligent with looting and maybe tweak the difficulty setting down a notch so if you're dedicated to some kind of RP or meme builds you don't have to worry about the combat dragging you down for the sake of this section I ended up respecing my character via console commands because of course there's no way to do that in the base game even though this is a game heavily designed to encourage A Single Character playthrough I'm honestly torn on whether I preferred no combat skills or the absolutely stacked character I resp into I went from having a decent struggle from time to time a normal difficulty and high level dungeons to absolutely annihilating everything on the highest difficulty settings I ended up switching to a very aggressive play style with my combat Loadout and because I refused to pick up any of the defensive perks from the physical category my character was an absolute glass Cannon which did help balance out the combat experience I think there's a happy medium in here that's probably something like 12 12 to 20 skill points in the combat category I also think we're going to need some sort of legendary difficulty setting because even without an optimized gear Loadout or relying much on the space Doom it was not hard to run laps around the enemies on Max difficulty I think it's important early on to decide whether you'll be going for combat perks to increase your combat Effectiveness or crafting upgrades to get the job done pick one of these paths and stick with it until you pretty much start running out of things to put points into personally I'd suggest combat skills over crafting skills because the ladder necessitates diving into Outpost building and that really seems like a late game system or you can skip crafting entirely so long as you're fine with whatever mods your looted equipment comes with the science category houses all the perks related to crafting and exploration so either it's going to be a bunch of skills that will be essential for you or a category you won't give a second glance at as someone who ended up going hard into the exploration part of the game I invested heavily into it early on when it came time to do the Respec thing I gutted it almost entirely because I realized how miserable exploration crafting and outpost building are in this game and I wanted nothing to do with any of it after I got what I needed for the video outside of crafting and outposts a lot of the remaining skills revolve around resource Gathering and scanning the resource Gathering ones are frankly not worth the investment outside of maybe one point each the scanning ones are a nice Quality of Life Investment maybe some decent dump skills if you got nothing else needing your points special mention goes to astrodynamics which increases the jump range of your ship while sarra Morgan has this maxed out her perks only reduce fuel usage so it's not going to let you make super long jumps between systems I've seen people arguing this is a great skill but I got to disagree as it's really only saving you a few seconds of having to take slightly more roundabout routes if you're doing some long-distance voyages I really can't imagine making a strong case for spending skill points to make the already thoughtless space travel even more thoughtless unless you got something against upgrading your jump drive Tech is the final category and like science if you don't care about the spaceship stuff in this game which with how that's almost universally being called the shittiest part of the game odds are you don't then you can ignore most of this category however I imagine almost every player will have some points invested into this category because it houses the most essential skill in this entire game boost pack training I mentioned it earlier but that Nifty jetpack they kept showing off during the marketing is actually gated behind a skill it's only one point for a tier one skill so if you don't pick one of the backgrounds during character creation that gives you boost pack training for free this is pretty much the first perk you should pick up no questions asked really you're going to want all four ranks of the skill to get the most out of your Boost pack given just how much traveling on foot you do in this game I really just cannot wrap my head around why you can't use boost packs at all without rank one of this perk given how much combat and traveling suffers without it I'd go so far as to say piloting is another must have skill at rank four as it's the only way you'll be able to fly the biggest and best ships in the game with how poorly balanced ship combat is and how painfully small most ships cargo capacity is you really do want access to those class c ships also it's a minor thing I know but why are the worst ships ranked a and the best are ranked C it's just it's the little things you know security is the final skill in the category I'd say is almost essential you can get away without investing into it or just throwing one or two points at it with how many locks there are in the game especially quests it's hard to pass up entirely on the skill while I didn't come across any locks that were essential for me to get through to advance a quest it really was a nice thing to whip out a lot of the time there's quite a few locks during quests that could save you a lot of time and frustration however breaking into locked storage containers was a very mixed bag for me so your mileage may vary there I guess I should talk about the mini game SC as I was actually starting to enjoy it once I was able to wrap my head around how it works presentation wise it looks a lot like the lockpicking mini game we've seen in the fesa game since Fallout 3 however there's a lot more going on with it that ends up requiring some neuron activation in order to get through it the gist is you got to match the set of notches on the right side of the screen with the slots and the concentric rings on the left side you can rotate the notches and spend picks to undo mistakes you may have made and after leveling the skill you unlock the ability to Auto Place some of the notches the key to the mini game is to plan ahead look at all the sets of notches you got and look at the patterns on the different rings and don't just throw something in the moment it fits because you're going to have multiple solutions to each ring pick a bad solution you might end up locking yourself out two rings later I like the mini game because it necessitates paying attention and thinking ahead there's no time limit you aren't going to get killed while picking the lock so there's really no excuse to rush it except impatience which is totally understandable if you don't get the game or you've been picking way too many locks however between skill Investments and just playing the mini game a lot you can get pretty damn fast at it I started recognizing some basic patterns after a while which made it a lot easier to punch through even Master tier locks it's a surprisingly engaging Min game that avoids the mindlessness of the old lockpicking system and the tedious boredom of fallouts hacking all right so with all the categories covered all that's really left to discuss is what this Universal build might look like as I said boost pack training is a must have for any character not only do you want it you want it maxed ASAP piloting will be another skill you want Max by mid game security if you want the options that opens up for quests maybe some persuasion depending upon the guns you want to use your combat skills are going to vary but at the very least you want to be investing about 12 to 24 skill points into combat unless you plan on knocking the difficulty down or taking things slow I'd argue ballistic weapons and rifles in particular are the best look to stack armor penetration critical shot chance and damage as those effects get pretty insane pretty quickly snipers are solid shotguns can also get pretty nutty most of your early game investment should be in here don't be afraid to bank skill points for later use I'd suggest looking at all the skills you want and then creating a rough map app for investing into them the challenges can throw a lot of those plans out of whack but I do suggest trying to stick to your plan even if it means sitting on a few skill points for a little while the reason being level progression in this game can be glacial not all activities are created equal surprisingly doing quests is perhaps the least XP efficient activity in the game the first 10 or so levels go by quickly but after that things really do start to fall off grinding New Game Plus can net a lot of XP due to some of the XP rewards for those particular quests I found the most consistent XP gain was just grinding bounties from the mission board there's some weird crap you can do without post to farm XP but you got to be pretty dedicated in order to stick with it long story short plan ahead and stick with that plan because you never know when you're going to hit an XP dry spell after you got all your Essentials out of the way things kind of open up it really does come down to what tedious [ __ ] parts of the game you want to ignore entirely and what tedious [ __ ] parts of the game you want to make less tedious exploration stack some of the scanning perks so social persuasion and either companion perks or isolation stealth stealth and theft carry capacity Fitness and payloads ship combat don't [ __ ] bother just get some crew slots with the social skills and stack your ship with Companions and hirelings maybe grab Astro Dynamics and the skill that increases power reactor output dump as much money as you can into upgrading your ship then you got your crafting skills I'm going to throw Starship design in with this lot as it's the only way to acquire the better ship modules I'd leave these for mid to late game as getting crafting off the ground is a real pain in the ass maybe pick the weapon modding skill early just so you can start to slap Scopes and rage modifications on some of your guns but seriously you're going to get so much more bang for your buck putting your early points into combat skills that boost the different types of guns you're using as opposed to modding them as for the space suits most of those mods act as replacements for a lot of the physical skills so it's definitely not useless but not really essential early on this advice gets less applicable the more New Game Plus Loops you do however with how looting in this game works Lo losing all that randomized gear you spent skill points to build your character around might never be replaced I honestly have no advice here except don't invest much into weapon specific perks until you know you're done Universe hopping it's hard to give any solid advice with this progression system because it's clear Bethesda never had any sort of vision for it there was no grand plan for how they expected players to navigate it they just threw a bunch of skills in perks into Starfield without any regard for how the other non-skill systems interacted with it this is why I think it's the worst character progression system they've ever done mechanically it's solid enough but there's no cohesion between it and the rest of the game there's no better example of that lack of cohesion than starfields crafting outposts and ship building I honestly don't know where to even begin with crafting that is to say I never found a comfortable introduction point for it while playing Starfield has perhaps the worst onboarding experience I've ever seen in a modern AAA game and I've played Destiny 2's recent freeto playay introduction what is this I don't even know what the [ __ ] I'm looking at this is the fre you're listen you're getting onboarded in into the schizophrenic experience is Destiny do as Todd Howard would say I'm already lost the problem with Starfield being such a disjointed mess of systems and ideas is that there's no way for the designers to create a cohesive flow between the systems Starfield barely does the player the courtesy of introducing systems to them let alone explaining how those systems work and how they are meant to intersect with each other there's no better evidence for the onboarding experience being an afterthought for Bethesda than the fact that the tutorials were bugged and kept resetting themselves during my playthrough listening to Todd talking about this though it sounds to me like he thinks this is a good thing because it gets players talking about discoveries they made about the game when you get in a specific systems what's good is like you can just show a couple screens you can show 3 seconds of footage with a menu and whereas like on a first view people don't get it you know they're going to go on Reddit and other places and tear it apart and they're just awesome at it like they somebody will spend you know a 100 hours going through and figuring out what every skill does um we still like and this is H we've noticed this with it this is not a surprise for us I think it's a surprise maybe for the audience it's a very complex game and we were okay for better or worse with people discovering things in it and sharing that so they're still finding things by the time this runs they're still going to be finding things and I think that is a little bit of a bonus because it is a single player game where people are able to share these water cooler moments the next day be like did you know you could do this how you can I didn't know that why don't they explain that um there's a lot of that going on and that's you know understandable so the Dilemma goes like this I want to start putting mods on my guns and armor but in order to do that I need to First unlock the research projects by putting skill points into the weapon and armor modding skills once I got the projects unlocked I then need to complete the re research projects which requires crafting materials to get the crafting materials in any serious quantities requires either lots of money or diving into Outpost building however unless I plan on completing only a couple of research and crafting projects at a time I also need a lot of storage space be that on my ship at an outpost or lugging everything to the lodge which has an unadvertised feature of giving the player unlimited storage in its basement upgrading ships especially pre-built ships with storage modules is not a straightforward task because reasons we'll get into and it's expensive as well buying a pre-built with storage space is also expensive and likely requires a high piloting skill Outpost building is the next route then however it requires investing into the Outpost engineering skill which requires building different things at various outposts in order to complete its challenges which requires lots of different resources which requires storage space which requires a ship with a bigger cargo hold and you see the problem here this is what it looks like when a system has no on-ramp this is likely why I haven't seen any reviews going into Outpost building in any sort of depth they all looked at it saw no way to naturally get into it and just assumed it wasn't for them I don't blame them for doing what Starfield was designed to facilitate and outright ignore a whole part of the game I do take offense to all the reviews who just assumed Outpost building is a good system despite not trying it for more than a few minutes because it's not a good system in fact I'd go so far as to say it's a significant step back from what we had in Fallout 4 and even 76 how Fallout 4 created an on-ramp to its settlement building was with Sanctuary a large settlement with tons of resources in a safe part of the map introduced very early into the game complete with tutorial Quests for all of its major systems Starfield needed an optional Quest like this that would send us out to a location that had all the resources we need to get a basic Place set up there it would run us through the tutorials to explain the basics of its systems power management resource extraction storage linking defense crew assignment Outpost linking just to name a few none of this is explained in game so you either got to go online and watch tutorials which didn't exist at launch or do what I did and spend sever several hours trying to learn the system through trial and error even then gaps in your knowledge will mean you're going to be screwing something up or left wondering if something is bugged or poorly designed because how can there be no way to search your Warehouse setup outside of walking up and manually going through 20 plus storage containers looking for where the system decide to dump all your aluminum it's a [ __ ] mess out of all the things we've covered so far no system drove me crazier than Outpost building I think the worst part is just getting another Outpost setup because it requires a lot of different materials just to get a very basic extractor going far more resources than you'd ever be able to pack onto the frontier if you don't have a ship with enough storage space to transport everything you're going to be doing a lot of back and forth between that Outpost and wherever you're storing those materials and yeah it's not difficult doing the back and forth since you'll just be fast traveling but it's an extremely tedious back and forth through tons of menus as you're trying to keep track of all the materials you need in order to build a handful of solar generators to power a few minor extractors you built over an hour ago because you need to run off to Titan to Mindless Farm some more titanium once again Fallout 4 had this figured out linking workshops go to a new settlement clear it out claim the workshop go back to one of your established settlements assign a settler as a caravan to that new settlement and boom you got access to all your resources at your new workshop go back to that new settlement and build it out to your heart's content Starfield has a system to link outposts together but this will only transport some materials that are fed into the landing pads it does not give access to your entire storage system as far as I'm aware there is nothing in Starfield that replicates the functionality of Fallout 4's Caravan system while you can get a basic Outpost going without any investment into the Outpost engineering skill you'll really want to get points into that skill if you're at all committed to the system just be warned you still need to spend resources on the research projects to finally be allowed to build those bigger storage containers also be warned Outpost engineering is one of those skills we still don't know what it does when being shared by a crew member in all likelihood it's currently bugged the only people I've seen getting any sort of mileage out of the system are those using it to build XP and money Farms so I guess it's nice to see Bethesda making a system that appeals to the minmax spreadsheet players again However the fact that I haven't seen any articles or videos showcasing beautiful and Nifty outposts in Starfield leaves me to believe this system is not nearly as popular among the creative building Community as Fallout 4 and 76 is settlement system Outpost building is a very tedious process requiring hours of prep work and doing things in a very specific order just to be allowed to build some prefabs while I do kind of like the Aesthetics of outposts particularly my warehouse setup this is a very inflexible system this isn't a system where you're allowed to build structures one wall at a time all the structures are just boxes that snap together these are just giant empty rooms that don't Inspire creativity as well placing the prefabs on anything other than flat empty geography is super finicky I cannot imagine trying to build a base on the side of a hill or inside a crater issues like this inevitably drives away players who just want to build cool look looking bases especially when there's so much competition in the base building genre these days if you look at outposts as a water down version of a factory building game like satisfactory things start to click a little more however compared to those games starfields offering looks like a pre-alpha mod Outpost are too small The Mechanics for building connecting and managing machines is too clunky and the UI is not at all up to the task necessary to keep the player from getting lost in all of this and at the end of the day outposts just don't have enough on tap to make it appeal for that sort of gameplay if you don't want to bother with outposts but you don't want to rely on the Lodge's infinite storage container then living out of your Starship is your best option this is perhaps my favorite element of Starfield not ship combat [ __ ] that trash no I mean having your own ship you can build and modify and then flying it around the Galaxy having a base of operations has been a thing in Bethesda game since before even marwin where the player chooses to settle down how they use that space how they decorate it all of these things do a lot to make each romp through one of their games feel unique it really helps color a playthrough and does a lot to create a sense of adventure as that space slowly evolves to reflect what you have accomplished over those many hours Bethesda has been expanding upon this aspect of their games over the years into great success I feel Bethesda leveraged the opportunity Starfield presented to take that base and make it mobile resulting in the ship Builder this is perhaps the only truly original element of Starfield that I think is a solid contribution to the space game genre so naturally it was not the work of Bethesda Maryland but instead outsourced to their support studio in Dallas remember Jamie mallerie sandwich lady yeah this was her team's project it's a cool system but it's got some pretty serious issues for starters the controls are very clunky the system uses snap points the same way the settlement and outpost Building Systems have used the snap nodes can sometimes be too close together for the aggressive magnetism to play nicely with resulting in the module you're trying to place being snapped to all sorts of positions on the ship there's also a deck layer system you need to cycle through in order to place Parts above or below the ship which only adds to the I don't know load feeling to the system anyways without a doubt the best way to build a ship is to hover over a snap point and then open the module purchase menu this has two very useful benefits filtering out anything that will not snap to that specific snap point and automatically snapping the new module to that point removing the need to mess with the floaty controls so your ship has several things it needs in order to be valid and pass the flight check it needs a landing Bay some landing gears a cockpit a docking port thrusters a fuel tank a jump drive and a reactor weapons and a shield generator are optional though heavily encouraged there's more to it than that though the bigger your ship gets the more requirements and limitations are going to pop up ships can only be a certain length and width because they need to be able to fit onto landing pads at settlements they also need to have a certain number of landing gears to support it so if you're making a long ship be prepared to start spamming gears to clear the error message the more you throw in a ship the greater its masket requiring more thrust either in the form of more powerful thrusters or a greater number of them you'll also need a bigger graph drive this is the dance I kept getting stuck in as in trying to upgrade one of those things one or two of the others would then get thrown out of whack until I hit the brick wall that was the reactor size limit I'm not annoyed by their being limitations they seem a bit low but whatever we'll blame that on Console Hardware or the game engine what's really frustrating is trying to find a configuration that actually works I didn't think my cargo ship was that unreasonable but it took a good half hour of just messing with different engine and reactor configurations until I found one that actually worked and I only managed to break out of the circular power management Trap by capitulating and cutting down on mass of my ship what would have helped immensely is if the UI had some way to filter out the modules that weren't going to be powerful enough for my Hull Mass or if there was something that at a glance could indicate a module's mass to power ratio I found the best way to work out what the more efficient modules were was to just look at the most expensive ones and work backwards however from my experience most modules progress linearly that is their benefits and drawback scale at the same rate so you're really only paying for more power which is exactly how you end up creating these sorts of Balan Loop traps that I kept getting stuck in the worst part of all of this is that there's no way to save your build and come back to it later or save a draft you can reload if you get a few minutes into some changes and decide you want to revert there is an undo feature but it's so inconsistent it cannot really be relied upon and once again it's no replacement for an actual save feature considering doing a total ship build from scratch was taking me upwards of 2 hours not including painting the ship a lack of a save feature is a huge issue it really ends up turning into a battle with the tools as my vision smacks up against all of these limitations resulting in me making a ship that's not at all how I imagined it but instead some sort of disappointing compromise it's clear the system can be used to make some crazy stuff it's just the very rough edges of the system get in the way of player creativity fortunately I believe most of these issues can be fixed whether will be Bethesda or modders who will clean it up we shall see hopefully someone does because getting to see a ship I designed rendered into a familiar human scale was a genuinely powerful moment I've never felt so attached to a base in a Bethesda game as I did with my ugly ass voltech themed cargo ship it flew like a brick had some horrendous blind spots when piloting it the interior was amazed and performance on the ship dropped into the 50s but damn did I love that ship where customization really fails is with the interior however I really don't understand the internal logic that dictates how interior configurations are decided when you're connecting the different habitat modules because most ships feel like they were designed to be the most oppressive closed floor suburban American Colonial imaginable I'd have to take the most confounding Serpentine paths through so many ships which made it a real pain trying to locate companions who would rather hang out in the cramped Landing Bay rather than the cushy crew quarters I really wish we could go in and open up walls and seal off passageways the way we can with Outpost modules or at least see in the Builder what sort of Pathways and internal connections the game was going to create there's no way to see what the Interiors of the modules look like when in the ship Builder they don't even list what workbenches are included in the modules so I didn't know my workshop included a research computer so I ended up tossing an unnecessary science baying in one of my ships as a result I was surprised The Outpost building system wasn't accessible when on ships I figured that was a no-brainer allowing us to place in couches tables display cases and whatever else as it stands we've been bumped back to Skyrim in terms of personalizing our ships and that's perhaps the biggest missed opportunity with this system ultimately though what diminishes the system the most is what happens once you get into the pilot seat space sucks and so balancing the Finer Things like weapon loadouts weight and jump drive range is all completely knapped reducing what could have been an absolutely Stellar system down to just a way to make a Nifty mobile base for storing gear and talking to Companions ships do have one hugely positive positive influence on the game experience though and that's by way of acting as a major money sync for the economy for the most part starfields economy is pretty busted it's that usual Bethesda issue of too much to sell and not enough things to buy however ships end up balancing things out a lot because ships can cost upwards of 100,000 credits which is a significant sum for a decent part of the game and because the limitations of ships encourages you to own specialized ships for different purposes such as a combat ship and a cargo ship building out a whole Fleet can be a massive expense there's also no way to build ships or acquire Parts any other way except purchasing them with credits this means you can't just go run some dungeons or craft these things methods of acquiring gear in previous Bethesda games that always disincentivized purchasing equipment at Shops it would have been neat if we had something similar for outposts where we could just directly purchase everything as opposed to either farming resources or going around to vendors and buying components we may or may not need [Music]

Channel: Private Sessions

Views: 513,372

Keywords:

Id: zizrI9edOcI

Length: 118min 7sec (7087 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2023