STARFIELD — A Massive Waste of My Time

yes of course I hated Starfield that should come as no surprise to anyone it's not unbelievably bad it's not redfall and I'm not going to pretend it is it's just so underwhelming and mediocre that I can't help but be turned off by it and when it's as long as it is I can't avoid feeling this negative towards his mediocrity I got it for free with my new processor so why not try it out I'm aware that being someone who typically doesn't like open World Games going into a Bethesda open world RPG is likely inviting disaster but look I like trying new stuff it gives me more perspective it allows me to absorb gaming history I get to see what other people like even if I don't like it myself if I never stepped into new territory I would never come across gems like slay the Spire so I am absolutely open to being entertained by an open world RPG even if just for a few hours but the real question is after playing 21 hours of Starfield field how did I play and stomach so much of it when I couldn't stand Eldon ring which is so obviously a better game in so many ways it comes down to my tastes that are separate from game genre I am not a fan of medieval fantasy settings that's one of my main obstacles getting into the souls games I'm not into dragons Knights Sorcerers sword battles castles skeleton guys running around in fields and forests and caves it bores the hell out of me I can watch a fantasy movie just fine a few hours but dozens of hours no sir I'd much rather be dealing with robots or evil Corporation zombie outbreaks or Suburban religious cults or giant mechs or ninjas fighting gods and interdimensional travel that's just me okay and no amount of well-designed gameplay or a gorgeous art design or a well-written story is is gonna get me past the fact that I tend to find extended periods of time in medieval fantasy settings to be boring to me okay I'm not saying it's objectively boring and it's not like I've never had fun with RPGs or games with a lot of RPG elements in them games like Red Dead Redemption prey GTA they have a lot of RPG design in their DNA even if you're not gaining XP and specking into a class you're exploring the world influencing characters with your choices taking side quests maybe leveling up absorbing a story and I like Chrono Trigger I always mention that whenever I talk about RPGs but the setting greatly influences my enjoyment and the style of action too gunfights with cops and criminals in the streets while sports cars are exploding around me I'm all smiles swinging an ax and a dungeon killing giant rats not so much so Starfield despite being a genre of game I don't typically engage with had an advantage it's sci-fi and I love sci-fi exploring planets getting into gun battles with factions of human civilizations that sounds pretty cool to me that's how I'm able to play Starfield for days while other RPGs that are objectively better wear out my patients really quick and that's why you'll never ever hear me talk about Baldur's Gate 3 I have zero interest in the world of that game I don't care how well made it is everyone loves it and I'm happy for them I see myself being utterly miserable playing that game but I hated Starfield so let's get into why first of all the storytelling is incredibly dry it's a near constant stream of information being told to you by characters that don't feel like real people you know what I mean they sound like actors delivering their lines and not like actual characters you're interacting with and a lot of that is due to the format these aren't dialogue scenes from GTA with fully choreographed acting where you see your own character fully interacting with everyone they meet the characters you come across here largely don't feel like fully realized characters they come across as shallow and strange they're to serve a larger plot and not actually be interesting characters like they came right out of a Star Wars prequel film they're just people staring in your general Direction talking at you yes at you not with you they speak to you like you aren't really part of this because they just monologue at you until you get one line of dialogue log to respond Baldur's Gate 3 appears to be much better about this giving actual scene Direction during dialogue moments on top of way more convincing voice performances your options are typically very dry and simple it doesn't feel like a real conversation and when all the conversations feel like this it's pretty bad when they're happening all the time luckily with subtitles you can read what the characters are saying really fast and just fly through the dialogue and get the gist of what's going on which I eventually started doing once I realized how boring the characters and voice acting really are comparing it to GTA again I remember in GTA how often I would just naturally come across characters in the world and that makes the whole experience feel more believable here it's more like you're just collecting people telling them where to go or to stay and then they just wait for you back at the house doing nothing for days they just stay stay there standing exactly in the same spots forever they don't have lives to lead it just makes the world of Starfield feel dead I did actually like the historical aspect of the story though there's a part where you go to a museum and hear about the colonization of planets and the wars that happened it was really interesting to me I wanted to immerse myself in this world but the character interactions are so bad that I just couldn't I never cared about where I was going or what I was doing because it doesn't feel like I'm interacting with anything real I get accused constantly of not caring about stories and video games and it's just not true I love the story of Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid I dove into the story of signalus from last year I love a good story if I can connect to it but it's how it's delivered it has to be delivered in a way where I can enjoy it and running from planet to planet doing busy work just to have people blabber at me not non-stop while choosing from largely meaningless dialogue options is not the way to get me to care okay the main quests are full of busy work go here talk to this person take this thing over there I mean just look at this list of sequential mission objectives for one of the main quest lines it's busy work so much time is spent just going to talk to someone and then getting a thing and coming back hop in your ship and warp to another solar system to board a ship and just listen to a guy talk and then go back I failed to see the point several times I did something that felt like you should have some real consequences just to see that no it doesn't matter One mission had me being sent in by a sheriff to disarm or kill some bank robbers I shot them all I went downstairs and found some food and I took it the owner one of the hostages I had just saved saw me take it he got upset that I took his [ __ ] potato chips or whatever and he reported me and the Town Security Forces came in and tried to arrest me for it right after saving the hostages so I said [ __ ] that and I killed all the security forces exiting the bank the sheriff congratulated me on a job well done and offered to recruit me what the hell all I just murdered several of your officers during the mission this means nothing to you and then you're not going to believe this hours later I came back to this planet for another mission that had me go back into the bank it's open now the employees are back to working behind the desk everything's fine but the bodies of the cops are still on the floor man how do you take this world seriously I mean is this part of the charm I've never played a Bethesda game before are they all like this sometimes the objective is to go talk to someone but pressing talk on that person says they're busy you can't interrupt them you gotta just stand there and wait for them to finish whatever they're doing it's really boring Walter Walter my man I'm trying to talk to you please stop talking to this chick I want to talk to you and move on Walter Walter come on fine maybe you'll talk to me if she's dead alright now Walter come talk to me man come talk Walter come back Walter Walter I'm just trying to talk to you it's what the mission objective says Walter please just talk to me ah fine I'll just reload and stand here then just stand here and wait for you to finish following side quests doesn't make things much better I tried running around this cool neon City doing what other people wanted and there just wasn't anything fun about it you'll get into fire fights sure I joined a gang and took part in some criminal activity but unfortunately the combat is quite poor that's because the AI is horrendous I'm not gonna get into bugs yeah there are bugs the physics are [ __ ] and things get really weird sometimes that's the least of the problems it's a way bigger problem to see how dumb and uninteresting the enemies are yes I'm playing on the hard difficulty the smartest thing in me will ever do is try to run away from you and hide the rest of the time they're standing out in the open like idiots or just staring at you while you approach to politely murder them one over here [Music] the combat sucks the best thing about it is finding a high-powered weapon that can just quickly eliminate them and you can use credits to buy more ammo so you'll never have to worry about not being able to get rid of them the faster the better because they're awfully boring to fight and those are really the biggest reasons why this game ended up being a big waste of time despite me liking the Sci-Fi setting the characters are boring the conversations are uninteresting the mission design is dated and filled with tedious errand running and the AI is stupid both allies and enemies what else is there to the game than that you pick stuff up you can pretty much pick up anything there's a lot of junk around I didn't understand why I was picking up everything because seeing a bunch of junk around makes me think I'm playing prey and oh man do I wish I was playing prey you know how in prey you can use food items for small amounts of healing and there's a button in the weapon wheel menu that automatically consumes a random piece of food instead of having to go to each individual piece of food in the menu and select consume remember how convenient that was remember how convenient it was to be able to instantly consume a piece of food you came across instead of having to put it into your inventory first and then open the inventory to go find it in a long list of Health items and then consume it pray pray pray pray pray pray is so good I could probably think of I don't know 13 Reasons Why prey is better than Starfield you can sell stuff at stores but so much of what you find is very low in value eventually I started ignoring most items and only grabbing things that were actually worth something and of course if you carry more than your allowed amount you're severely punished for it now I'm not gonna rant about this you can manage it while there is loot defined this isn't a looter shooter where you can just just carry everything you find as you run you expend oxygen and then generate CO2 and if you're carrying too much you become encumbered and you won't be able to regen oxygen while moving anymore or use fast travel it sucks so you need to make sure you're not mashing pickup item on every corpse you loot you've got to be selective about what you pick up and later you can upgrade your capacity honestly I don't have any issue with this if I engaged more in the crafting system I may I kept extra stuff in my ship and on my person I kept four or five weapons a suit a helmet Health items and I was generally able to move around freely you may have noticed that I spent a lot of time running around in my underwear that it wasn't to run faster or anything like that I just got bored I needed something to keep me from falling asleep as I ran around through this empty World talking to people without personalities eventually I stopped running around nearly naked when I found a suit that boosted my reload speed and you have to use a spacesuit and helmet when in hostile environments so yeah I stuck to keeping my clothes on after a while but every now and then I don't know I walk into a club and I just gotta be free you know I guess you gotta make your own fun in these games huh isn't that the point of it all to ignore the actual missions and run around exploring kicking dirt in the desert murdering NPCs I guess I was pretty disappointed in the lack of space stuff though space combat almost never happened in the 21 hours I got through and when it does happen it's it's not very interesting I was almost never in space and you cannot use your ship to explore worlds which is just mind-boggling to me in a game about exploring the Galaxy and going to dozens of planets you can only run around on foot so the whole explore worlds aspect is really unsatisfying because the exploration process sucks there are no vehicles in Starfield no Cycles no hovercraft or small personal ships I mean don't you wish you could fly over the surface actually explore a planet I do and then you could have air-to-surface artillery get into some base battles against militarized enemies with anti-air defenses you could add a lot to this game instead literally the only way to explore is to run for Miles running out of oxygen over and over I was hardly ever in my spaceship because you have fast travel that nullifies pretty much every thing having to do with space travel and with the worlds being so tedious and boring to explore and the enemies being laughably stupid I never felt any need to engage with the base building or crafting or upgrading my weapons who cares and after investing in a few of the many available skills I was left looking at the menu thinking I don't need any of this and what's really crap about the skill tree is how they lock off additional tiers of upgrades you can upgrade your shotgun damage great but if you want to upgrade it again you gotta kill 20 enemies with a shotgun okay that's a bit of an excessive requirement but fine it did encourage weapon combos more soften them up with a machine gun run in for the shotgun kill that's cool it's fun it's a smart way to play and I like smart gameplay being encouraged but I get the 20 kills unlocked the next level and if I want to buy the next level is it a new challenge that gets me to do something different and learn from no now it's kill 50 enemies with the shotgun come on seriously and then it's a hundred what's the point of these challenges it's not a challenge anymore it's a task I've already done this oh and by the way these challenges do not count any of the previous times you've already done these things let's say I killed 20 enemies with a shotgun now I can buy the next upgrade tier but I don't I buy some other stuff first but I'm still killing enemies with the shotgun now when I go to buy the next shotgun upgrade it gives me the kill 50 enemies Challenge and it doesn't count any of the enemies I've already killed with the shotgun over the past two hours what a load of [ __ ] I really wanted to increase my oxygen capacity but the challenge is to completely run out of oxygen 20 times running around in the desert or in circles using up my oxygen over and over to unlock the next tier what am I learning from this and then I gotta run out of oxygen 50 more times to get the next upgrade how is that a challenge oh I know it's a challenge because sometimes it bugs out and doesn't register when you run out of oxygen so you gotta do it even more times it was definitely a challenge not to lose my [ __ ] mind oh God this is becoming too much and when I start getting irritated like this I start getting angry about a little inconveniences nitpicks to some of you pet peeves to me of course there's no fov slider we've only been making games for 50 years guys I guess we need a little more time to make fob sliders industry standard loot drops are randomized so if you come across some incredibly awesome gun and then die right after without quick saving you'll be running all the way back to this area to see that it's gone forever I don't think there's a single cut scene in the game it's all either static characters staring at you or free camera while characters around you talk and you stand around waiting which I find incredibly immersion breaking because instead of watching a well-directed cut scene where the camera can dramatically frame the speaking characters and guide the emotion of the moment we get a flat video game camera and a first person perspective that absolutely kills any drama the scene may have established and allows us to destroy all of the immersion because while everyone's attending one of the characters funeral I can run circles around the room and then teabag on the table and no one says a word I feel like I've made this point before oh right [Music] and I'm frequently irked by how you can't reload while sprinting you start reloading your gun and near the end of the animation you sprint and it cancels the whole thing and you gotta reload again I absolutely hate that mechanic in games unless it's a hardcore military Sim or something like that because the only defense for this crap and I'm sure plenty of you are thinking it right now is it's more realistic that way as if that were a good reason in a video game oh it's realism you want it's better if it's realistic then why am I able to heal while reloading I'm using both of my hands to reload how am I also using a healing item that's not realistic maybe we should take that out how are you Looting corpses while reloading oh and spaceships are just able to repair themselves from Battle damage in a matter of seconds by just pressing a button yeah take your realism and shove it you don't actually care about realism you just use it as a defense of annoying game design when it suits you I don't want to harp on bugs too much because the ones I came across were mostly superficial and just kind of funny whoa whoa what's going on calm down girl but there's some terrible terrible [ __ ] going on when you load new areas whenever you load into a new Zone including going through doors there's this long fade in from black and you cannot move or do anything until the image fully appears and if you press any button during this time or come in with a button already being held the input is dropped so the image starts fading in and you press forward in anticipation and when it's time to move your character just stands there you have to wait out the entire fade before you can press a button it blows my mind that this game could be in development for seven years and something like this exists it's the most basic [ __ ] in the world don't lock me in place after I open a door and don't drop my anticipatory inputs while you're fading in this has the potential to cause massive problems in combat I was in a fight and I went through a door by accident I had to go back and clear the fight but loading into the room didn't allow me to move but the enemies were allowed to shoot me causing me to die over and over because the game reloaded here at the door just a loop of getting shot in the face while unable to move this is [ __ ] fantastic I am amazed that I stuck with Starfield as long as I did between the main quest and the side missions I made it 21 hours but that's really a testament to my attraction to the Sci-Fi genre that I can play a much better game like dark souls and want to kill myself because I don't care about fantasy worlds and then I play crap like Starfield for 21 hours just because I'm generally amused by seeing different planets and jumping between solar systems and shooting assault rifles at idiot soldiers it's sad right yeah I know near the end of my run I was getting so bored with the main quest that I tried taking on some more side quests just to mix it up and the first one I found had me collecting a debt from a bank I flew to another planet talked to the guy convinced him to give me the money and I flew back I Got 5 000 credits that was the whole mission so I reloaded the autosave and and thought that maybe if I don't talk to him and instead fight him it'll be more interesting nope he just died immediately I can't do this anymore I tried to push on further and further and I reached a point where I just said no no I'm not doing this anymore it's been three days I don't think I've actually loved anything about this I'm done I don't care what's next I don't care if I'm five minutes away from the greatest Mission ever designed I'm ready to stop okay I hate to judge aside from the poor design choices and bugs and bad Ai and dry dialogue I know there are people who love these kinds of open world RPGs they like walking around and looking at the world they're entertained by being able to buy a living space and decorate it I understand that part of the appeal even if I don't care about it myself but there's a good way and a bad way of doing things even if the genre isn't my thing I'm still trying to look at stuff and think about whether my issues with it are a matter of personal taste or if some of this is straight up badly made and I think a lot of Starfield is horribly flawed I think it could be doing what it wants to do way better than it does I'm not trying to make Starfield into a different game I just think it's far from the game it wants to be just because it's an open world RPG it doesn't mean the AI has to suck it doesn't mean every conversation has to be so one-sided and painfully dull it doesn't mean your character has to be lacking a real personality it doesn't mean so many of the missions have to be fly across the Galaxy and pick up this one thing and bring it back it doesn't mean the cities have to have Circles of people standing around just staring at each other it doesn't mean the skill tree challenges have to be tedious and uninteresting it doesn't have to be this way and I don't think you can just dismiss all my criticisms as me just not understanding RPGs this stuff could be and should be much better I would at least be able to play the game and be entertained by the quality of the product instead I'm left trying to play a type of game I normally don't enjoy simply because I like the Sci-Fi setting and there's all these poor design decisions making the experience so much worse sure if you've fixed a lot of the stuff I have issues with it would still not be a game I'm crazy about it would still be entirely too focused on talking to NBCS and skill trees and all the features of the genre but I would at least respect it a hell of a lot more I am not an open world fan I'm not a fan of ghost of tsushima or Elden ring or The Witcher 3 but I respect those games because I think they're well made even if they don't resonate with me but Starfield no man I don't think this is any more than mediocre only impressive in its Central premise of going around the Galaxy in a spaceship if you love Starfield cool I'm glad you're enjoying it nothing against you I shouldn't have to say that but some people are babies and think that criticizing a game is somehow also insulting the people who like it well it doesn't work that way so please be cool thanks like And subscribe share the video it's almost time for Mortal Kombat [Music]

Channel: Under The Mayo

Views: 131,464

Keywords: starfield, analysis, review, critique, criticisms, bethesda

Id: Gtmsi0Kc4kI

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2023