Starfield - A Skeptical Review

Starfield aims to be the most ambitious and complex Adventure Bethesda game studios has ever created with over a thousand planets to explore dozens and dozens of star systems and theoretically Limitless areas to explore thanks to their new procedural Tech Starfield is no doubt a massive game but does it actually shake the concerns that many of us Skeptics had leading up to its launch namely is it polished and bug-free does the procedural Tech avoid the pitfalls of repetitive and reused locations can the creation engine actually provide the ambitious game a strong foundation and does the lack of vehicles and in-atmosphere flight harm the exploration on the planet's surfaces well as always the answer is kind of complicated after finishing the main story completing the faction quest lines customizing the crap out of my ships building multiple bases buying Apartments experimenting in New Game Plus and exploring random planets at length I'm left conflicted I think it is the best game that Bethesda game Studios has ever made in a lot of ways but in other ways it feels painfully outdated and it also feels like they've bitten off a lot more than they could be reasonably expected to chew but before we get into details it's crucial to understand what Starfield is and what it isn't because I've seen online huge misrepresentations and overhyped expectations with this game again this is why skepticism for any game is important because it protects you from hype which can lead to false expectations and people thinking that starfield's going to be one thing when it's actually something very very different while it's perhaps no surprise to some that Starfield fails to compete with its contemporary space sims like no man's Sky Star Citizen and Elite dangerous among others for some I think this will come as a shock whether that's because of vague statements by Todd Howard and other developers or vague marketing materials or simple over hyped expectations it's crucial to understand that Starfield is nothing like no man's sky or Star Citizen other than being set in space and them giving you a spaceship can walk around in between fast traveling to different locations rather it plays like a much bigger version of the outer worlds from obsidian even down to little details like the change from The Cinematic camera we had with Fallout 4 to the straight on camera that we have in Starfield something which I personally find to be a major downgrade Starfield is not about exploring space freely as a space pirate or mercenary it's about fast traveling to locations and having conversations with people that's not necessarily a bad thing but it's important to understand what this game actually is once you go into the game with leveled expectations I think you can have a really good time after about 15 hours I was convinced that this was the best game that bgs has ever made better than any Elder Scrolls or Fallout game and I mean that the gun play is significantly improved over what we saw in the trailers the game also seems to be fairly well optimized on PC as long as you're running with fsr2 enabled something you have to put up with since the frames are pretty low without it and sense there's no dlss support for some nonsensical reason the ship customization is super cool as well and is probably my favorite part of the entire game stealing enemy ships is a great way to start this process and since reselling them turns such a tiny profit effectively prohibiting the practice of stealing ships just for resale I often just stole a ship and then customized the crap out of them to turn them into a massive cargo ship or a small and agile fighter or a gigantic Battleship and again this is probably my favorite part of the game it's really intuitive and I can only imagine how crazy the mods are going to get with this the base building and settlement system is pretty cool too though it should be noted you can only really get into it after 50 to 60 hours since it requires an insane number of resources and most of those resources have to be collected on Barren planets where you're simply running around with your scanner pulled up looking for small basketball sized Rock deposits to extract with your mining beam if you are excited for the base building I just need you to understand that it is a very very late game system and it requires you to really grind to get the materials necessary to actually engage with it the voice acting in writing is really really well done on the conversational level though I do have some strong feelings about the main story and some of the broader themes but we'll get into that later and perhaps the most obvious point to bring up is the sheer scale of Starfield it is massive and you really have to admire bethesda's commitment to ambitious game design I know Todd gets a lot of flack because he tends to over promise with his games and whether that over promising is born out of intentional deception aiming to sell you on a game that he knows is not what he's promising or if it's just excitement and vague language I'm not really sure that's the point right now the point is that these games are gigantic and I have no doubt that some people are going to be playing Star field for hundreds upon hundreds of hours and will likely still have planets and systems left unexplored after all that time the game really is that big however with all of these solid elements you have to wonder if Bethesda bit off a bit more than they could chew were they too ambitious well unfortunately I feel they were the more I played Starfield the more I saw behind the curtain and realized that much of the scope and scale of this game is nothing more than an illusion it's less and less magical the more you engage with it since there are many problems that grow tiring the more you play all of this is compounded with bugs and broken quests that are mostly concentrated in the late hours of the game it's clear that they focused their polish on the first 20 hours or so which makes sense because that's where most players will be spending their time especially considering the main quest if you just Sprint and do nothing else can be completed in around 15 to 18 hours also over half of the main story Quest objectives are literally just fetch quests where you're assigned to go collect a thing and bring it back to the lodge which is the center of operations for the constellation so we'll get into it more in a bit but word of warning if you were thinking that the main story is going to be compelling in this game you are sorely mistake taken it's probably best to actually ignore the main story and focus on the side content which some people will say no duh that's how I always play bgs games but for other players I just want to remind you the main story here is pretty lackluster but after the first 20 hours or so many of the late stages of side quests faction quests and other parts of the game have numerous bugs and one major faction quest line is so broken in my first save file I straight up can't complete the faction quest line on that save but more on that later but it's not just bugs and weird behaviors from NPCs that bring starfield's overall experience down the more you play there are near constant load screens though to be fair they are pretty short so long as you're playing the game on a platform where it's loaded onto an SSD oftentimes the game feels as though it's been built with technology that's significantly behind what contemporary peers are able to pull off the best example are these load screens requiring the player to sit through one every time they travel between buildings small zones within cities themselves similar to the Gated design of Fallout New Vegas or Fallout 3 which bear in mind are games that are over a decade old and the same structure and style of area design is the same here as it was 10 years ago there's also load screens every time you enter your ship when you take off when you travel from orbit to another star system going from that star system down to the planet's surface getting out of your ship down onto the planet's surface and then from the planet surface into a building if you're wondering whether or not there is a load screen to do something in this game the answer is probably yes they are constant again they're pretty quick on my computer they only usually lasted between two and a half to five seconds but it's still important to note that they are everywhere furthermore when you land on a planet you don't actually get to explore it freely a few points of interest are put on the map but if you run too far off course sometimes only a kilometer away from a point of Interest another times up to four kilometers away you'll be treated to an invisible wall telling you to return to your ship the game doesn't actually give you planets to explore as was promised by Todd Howard and Pete Hines in the lead-up to the game's launch it generates a small map each time you land that's built off of a seed from the given planet that you're landing on and where on that planet you've selected to land whether it's a pre-assigned landing location with a point of interest on it or a random location that you choose simply put it's an illusion of scale and freedom for everyone that thought that Todd's promise of a thousand planets to freely explore sounded too good to be true you were painfully right to be skeptical though to be fair some people won't consider this a big deal but like I said it grows all the more frustrating when you go out into the great unknown trying to explore like previous Bethesda games only to be greeted with invisible walls reminding you that you're in a glorified Fishbowl and not actually exploring a planet furthermore I think it's very important to note that these tiles that are generated to create individual little fishbowls for you to explore are not contiguous this means means that if you land on a planet see a big mountain in the distance that you want to reach but it's just outside of the playable area you can pull open the menu and try to jump to as close a tile as you possibly can within the game's map screen but it won't matter since they aren't contiguous each of these individual tiles are generated with the planets seed and then an individual seed based on where you plan on Landing whether it's next to a coast in a mountainous area or a crater area a desert or a forest these are not planets to explore they're individual microbiomes that are based on apparent seed it's like generating a tiny map in Minecraft every time you land your ship and that might not be a big deal to you but as far as I'm concerned this is a far cry from the free exploration of a planet that was promised to us however the promise of exploring a planet was done in just vague enough away that I think Bethesda will largely get away with this and I have no doubt that in the comment section you're probably going to see many people claiming that this isn't a big deal and it's just a different interpretation of what it means to explore a planet however I have to point out that other games that are contemporaries in this very same genre that Bethesda has placed themselves within have achieved contiguous Planet Exploration with very little effort involved but frankly whether or not you consider this to be a big deal and you might not you might be fully embracing the procedural generation and thinking well I never was gonna just run in a straight line and try to run to the ocean on the other side of the planet so it doesn't matter to me that's fine if that's your opinion everybody is allowed to have one it's totally totally fine if it doesn't bug you but I do think it's important to note and be very very clear about this there is simply no debate here that this is simply inferior to how other contemporary games handle this type of procedural generation even a seven year old version of No Man's sky before any fixes or patch just avoided these constant load screens and lack of free exploration on a planet again like I said at the top Starfield is not trying to be no man's sky and that's cool but they need to understand that when you give players a ship the option to explore over a thousand planets ship customization and seemingly endless opportunities to explore on a planet's surface you have to understand that players are going to hear that and inevitably want to compare it to other games that promise the same things and frankly do it better no Starfield is not trying to be no man's sky but it will be compared to it because they're promising similar things and whether or not the way Starfield approaches it bugs you or disappoints you doesn't really matter because it is objectively the case that starfield's technology is significantly inferior to what games we're doing close to a decade ago but moving on there are also many broken and bugged quests damaged to varying degrees again mostly focused in the later portions of the game I have no doubt you'll see a lot of review was praising the Polish of this game especially if they've only put in 20 30 hours or so I ran into most of my problems at the 40 50 60 hour mark the further into the game I got and I don't know if that's because they just were not polishing as much or if the rose tinted glasses kind of fell off and I started to see these things I previously was ignoring I'm not sure but what I do know is that the more I played the more of these I saw in increasing density and with increased severity some quests just have broken objective markers that may point you towards your ship when you actually need to go into a building in the other direction this isn't a big deal because especially if you pull up your scanner little arrows appear on the floor and point you to where the true objective is I have no doubt that this will be patched out in the future and maybe it's going to be fixed with the day one patch I know Bethesda said that they are working on many many fixes though they didn't specifically note this one to me but I would not be shocked at all if this gets remedied with time other quests are glitched in a much more severe way there were multiple times when I saw NPCs I was tasked with speaking with simply float into the sky and outside of the spaceship we were inside of and this causes the NPC to clip outside into a different zone so then the game thinks that they are both out in space but also still in this room and this entirely breaks the quest you can't get to the person to engage in a conversation and the game for whatever reason doesn't see the issue with this character being a kilometer away floating around in space as the space station floats around the planet I ran into this with the Crimson Fleet faction questline one of the biggest quest lines in the game and frankly one that I think is way way better than the main story however in my first save file I just can't complete this Quest he glitched outside of the space station and I can't get him to come back inside I went back loaded to a previous save about 45 minutes earlier tried to catch up and when I reached the same point he floated out of the space station again and even after dozens of hours doing other stuff finishing the main story and completing other activities I tried to return and he was still floating out in space somewhere with me not able to talk to him it's just totally broken however when I made another game and I went and I tried that same questline I was able to complete it because he never floated out of the ship so your mileage on these types of glitches may vary I have no idea what's causing it I did send this information and the clips to bgs we will see if they fix it but as far as I'm concerned it's just totally unacceptable that anybody might run into the situation where they will miss out on what is in many ways the best quest line as far as I'm concerned in the game simply because of a bug like this now listen I know I said at the top that this game is actually really polished especially for a bgs game but that's not saying a lot I mean that's kind of the point a really polished bgs game is still broken for a lot of other companies like a polished bgs game for Rockstar would be totally unacceptable but I do want to give them some credit here it is significantly improved over what we've seen with like Fallout 4. even Skyrim had a lot more broken stuff at launch so I think they do deserve some credit for improving the player experience but it's important to note that this is far from a perfectly Polished game and there are still a lot of really weird things that happen there are characters that don't engage in conversations properly there are other guys clipping through walls during combat sequences there's characters that are supposed to be holding objects that simply aren't there are people that don't stand correctly within objects ships that spin uncontrollably and have their physics just totally break weird Shadow glitches which I think are related to volumetric lighting I have no idea what's going on here though characters that are super shaky and glitch out during conversations which actually made me motion sick at one point there were times when I got caught between the seat of my spaceship and the wall meaning I couldn't move and had to sit back down and stand back up up to be able to get out from between these two it was really weird and really stupid there's other cases where security guards will completely lose interest in you if you're in a city like neon seemingly for no reason just because you passed over some arbitrary line it's frankly really strange they can see you they can look at you but because you walked two feet forward they now disengage and aren't interested in you it's really really bizarre and kind of Tears you out of any immersion you were feeling there are soft locks where objectives just frankly break companions that freak out when you try to talk to them of course there are the funny glitches like you would expect from Bethesda game Studio such as this guy that clipped into a ceiling and it kind of looks like he's pleasuring himself this was this was just funny oh and there was this one which I won't go into too much detail as to the situation for sake of spoilers but you can actually see null objects visible on screen these are used to like anchor other objects in animation sets and normally these things are cold and are not visible to the player but are visible to the Developers for some reason though I can see them and I've never had this happen before in a bgs game so I have no idea what's causing it but I thought it was kind of fun it was like seeing how the sausage is made there's other cases where guards just randomly drop dead when you approach them I also have no idea what could be causing this one that I found particularly annoying was that the game would consistently think I was still in combat even when I wasn't I could run two kilometers out of the way there's nobody still in this area potentially wasn't even fighting anybody to begin with because it happened sometimes when I just took my weapon out in the middle of nowhere but the game would think that I was in combat and as a result not allow me to fast travel because you can't fast travel while engaged in combat which would effectively lock me in place until I got back to my ship climbed in and then fast traveled from my ship out into the atmosphere and with the games over Reliance on fast travel so much so that that in the scanner if you look at your ship you are greeted with a prompt to fast travel to it since they knew you would just run a kilometer or two away from your ship and then need to fast travel back since there's nothing between you and the ship to find it grew really frustrating to run into these glitches where I can't just fast travel back to my ship and instead I have to run on foot for 10 minutes to get back there so that I can Force the game to behave properly but perhaps the most damning thing with all of Starfield is that the game's procedural engine fails to provide a truly unique encounter or point of interest every time in my first 20 hours with the game I was using a spreadsheet because shout out to Bethesda they gave us review codes a full two weeks ahead of time which allowed me to do a lot more careful testing than I normally would be able to do for a review in those first 20 hours of the game I saw multiple locations such as the abandoned mining Outpost the abandoned Research Center the abandoned Shipyard the research station and many many more over six times a piece copy and pasted precisely even down to enemy placement and in some cases the loot and in this spreadsheet I actually wrote down the different locations some of which I think would classify as spoiler so I won't share them directly but the first location I saw seven times in my first 20 hours of gameplay the next one I saw three times the next one eight times next one seven the next one five and the next one four times so many of these locations and points of interest are heavily heavily recycled almost through the damn thing heavily heavily recycled over and over and over again you will see many of them the same exact way the same exact alignment in the same environment on totally different planets and sometimes they're even recycled into the main story I'm not joking early in the game I traveled to an abandoned mine and cleared it out it was a pretty cool encounter with lots of combat and the mine was very large as well which was extra cool down in the depths of the mine I found an area where they had been digging and had Unearthed some weird dinosaur alien looking skull it was just laying in the ground at the very end of one of their mining tunnels and it had seemingly been the cause of their halted excavations and I thought this was so cool and I even made a note of it to praise it as this cool environmental storytelling piece that Bethesda game studios is so well known for it's like these miners were digging in here found this skull and then had to Halt all operations because they had discovered something really important and that eventually led to the mind being abandoned and therefore the Pirates taking it over what I didn't realize was that I would see this exact same mind with the exact same Alien Dinosaur skull in the exact same place four different times before I hit that 20 hour mark everything from the placement of the skull to the enemy placement and even the loot within containers seemed to be directly copy and pasted and that's just one example there was also this science lab that I found sitting next to a swampy pool of poisonous gas and I thought it was pretty cool looking so I made a note of it to praise how cool it was that they dynamically placed this science lab studying toxic elements next to this toxic pool on this planet that just so happened to have a lot of toxic elements however just 2 hours and 15 minutes in game later I encountered the exact same thing on a different planet as part of a main story Mission the exact exact same poison bog and the exact same building with precisely the same enemy placement but this time it was part of a main story Mission instead of a dynamically placed encounter I thought I was taking crazy pills I had seen these things exactly the same and it's like this weird Deja Vu where you're like I swear I've done this already I swear but sure enough you have it's just you did it in a different place and it was copy and pasted over here and again these are just two individual specific examples I have literally dozens of these examples maybe if you get really high while playing Starfield you won't notice these or remember that you've already seen these encounters before but for me it created the feeling like I said that I was going absolutely insane all while I'm exploring these locations I'm constantly overwhelmed with this sense of deja vu that is painfully uncomfortable feeling as though I've already been here and done this because frankly I have and I don't love saying I told you so but I told you so I was trying to encourage everybody to be very skeptical of the pro promised that there would be over a thousand planets with dynamically placed points of interest and everybody that was thinking critically was going how do you do that and not just have a bunch of repeated stuff isn't that going to get boring isn't that going to get tedious where you just see the same thing over and over and over again and sure enough those concerns were warranted after 65 hours in the game I have dozens upon dozens of examples of these copy and pasted encounters and points of interest if somebody is a completionist and hopes to complete all 1 000 planets they are going to be shocked at just how many times they will see the same thing over and over again and speaking of those thousand planets it's also important to note that many of those are gas giants like Jupiter or Uranus meaning that you can't actually land on them often they'll have small moons that are completely Barren and it also seems that Bethesda is counting those moons as planets in their 1000 Planet number just something to keep in mind because this certainly inflates the number but with all of this I just want to bring us back before we tie this up because I have notes literally long enough for me to do a three hour critique of this game and that's what we're gonna do but that's not what this video is supposed to be this is a review so we're trying to give you enough information to know what the game is like so that you know what you're getting into if you decide to buy it or download it I spent this video going through a lot of the things I like about Starfield and a lot of the things I really don't like and I've tried very hard to show you actual footage to back up these points so that it's clear that these are actual problems we encountered during the review process I have no idea what other people are going to score this game at or how they're going to review it but my position and stance is that I should give you all of the information you need to make an informed decision and you can come to the conclusion yourself in my opinion Starfield is a really fun game and there's a lot here to grind out and have a good time with I have no doubt people are going to be playing this game for years and years and years and still be discovering new things in different planets and biomes one of my favorite things that I haven't touched on yet that has consistently entertain me is that every once in a while when you fast travel to a planet before fast traveling down onto the planet's surface you get these Dynamic encounters with different people some of which you might have seen earlier in the story for example one point I screwed over this guide is part of a faction quest line and he was super pissed at me so he disappeared and said I'll get you back and 10 hours in game later I ran into that guy trying to jump me with a bunch of his friends as I was outside of a planet ready to go land on its surface they tried to shoot me out of the sky I thought that was super cool and that's where I think Starfield really excels is in those Dynamic encounters that are original unfortunately though there's just a lot of stuff that isn't original that's copy and pasted all over the place but other systems like the base building the ship flying and combat the side quests the faction quests the gun play the weapon customization and all of the other systems I haven't even touched on are right for the plucking there is lots to do here and a lot of fun to be had but listen bgs is not magical okay it's still a Bethesda game Studio's title it still has weird bugs and glitches the people all look like sisters and brothers it's a Bethesda game and that's okay it's just not going to be the second coming of God Howard it's a solid game it's not what I would consider a masterpiece but I think there's a lot of fun to be had with it and as far as I'm concerned as a Game Pass title day one or I guess day five depending on how you look at it I think it is a no-brainer I know a lot of the time in these reviews it's really easy to just fixate on the negative because I can say I love the combat I think the gun play is way improved over what we've seen before I think it works really well and I can say all of that but what people are going to remember is me tearing the game a new one for all of the bugs and the copy and paste content which I think is probably Fair as well so in conclusion I think Starfield is a solid game that was shooting for the stars but it never really leaves orbit it's still an amazing accomplishment and something that they should be very very proud of but it's not the accomplishment that they were hoping to achieve but nonetheless there's a ton of fun to be had here and I have no doubt that this game is worth enjoying and playing especially if you can get a non-game pass for a deal or for no added cost if you're already a subscriber to it again shout out to Bethesda for providing me a review code a full two weeks early also shout out to Todd for chilling with me through the whole review that was awesome very patient isn't he like I'm kind of tearing his game a new one in a couple of respects and he's just chilling he's just there what a guy thank you for watching make sure to like the video If you enjoyed it share with a friend who might have gotten too hyped for Starfield and as always subscribe if you want to be notified when the big critique of Starfield goes up in a couple of weeks no joke my script for this review was initially about two and a half hours long I just ended up trimming all of that stuff out and I'm going to be delving into all of it in the main critique where we get into all the nitty-gritty details with spoilers and with all sorts of crap so we're gonna get into that it's gonna be a good time so subscribe all that said I love you guys very very much hugs and kisses stay safe I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 798,982

Keywords: luke stephens, starfield, luke stephens starfield, starfield review, starfield tiles, starfield bugs, starfield glitches, starfield gameplay, starfield early access

Id: 3uuI-6fwwtY

Length: 27min 49sec (1669 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023