(bright jingle) - [Jake] Hello, we're back with another episode of Before You Buy. That show where we give you
some straight up gameplay and our first impressions of
the latest games releasing. It's me, Jake Baldino, and
today we're talking "Starfield." This is a big one to tackle. It's a game that's been in
the works for many many years from a game development
studio many people love and some people have been
turned off by in recent years. It's a completely new thing from them. It's not an "Elder Scrolls"
or a "Fallout" sequel. It's an ambitious space exploration game with its own new worlds and lore. So after playing a review copy and spending many hours with this game personal opinion upfront
here, I like "Starfield." I don't know if I love it. It has a lot of flaws and in some places doesn't quite hit the heights
I was hoping it would, but real simply put I've enjoyed
my time in this game world. If you were hoping Bethesda
would make an epic game that would feel nothing like
what they've done in the past and be completely glitch
free and change the world, well then you might be a bit disappointed. But if you're the type of player that was just looking
for the next "Skyrim," the next "Fallout" and just like embracing the Bethesda gameplay and
vibe like a warm blanket, then I think you'll be satisfied. "Starfield" is a complicated
one to talk about and I do think everyone's
gonna argue about it, it's gonna be a divisive one. On the surface, it doesn't look very nice, it has weird NPCs, it does have bugs and the space exploration isn't as endless and as cool as some we're hoping. Like I said, it's flawed, but it's an entertaining
Bethesda-style game with some charm, some great factions, beautiful music, deep side quests, weird stuff to discover
and some cool lore. It took a while, but for me
the good outweighed the bad, for you, I don't know, that's
the point of this video. We're gonna try and work
on that, let me explain why and break down all the stuff
you could expect in the game. And just so you know,
this video you see here is as spoiler free as
we could possibly do. You know in the a hundred hours or more you could spend it in this game we tried to keep most of
the footage on screen here to within the first few hours just because like there
is a lot of good surprises and I think stuff worth seeing
yourself for the first time. And this footage is captured
on both Xbox Series X and PC. You'll be able to tell by the frame rate. We'll talk about that all later. So in the game you start out,
you create your character, you pick some defining backstory
and traits and get going. You're a miner on some
remote mining planet and you stumble upon something that quickly gets you whisked away conscripted into a group
called Constellation, they're like a group of space explorers. Where in this world, the
humans are all over the galaxy and all over planets and
just kind of doing the things humans do in the future. Constellation is a small group, still just focused on exploration and the vast mysteries of space. And there's a good main quest here with some good characters. Sure they look a little awkward but there's some good voice acting from some of the main companions and dealing with their personality quirks and life differences is fun. Some of them, especially
early on like Sam Coe have some good charm to them. Spend some time with them. While characters may look
generic on the surface some of them might surprise you, but the actual main quest
itself is interesting. Like I said, while your
character is not voiced you still seem to have some agency and choice in how things go down and there's a good mystery to unravel that, again, I won't spoil. For me personally, I actually
just wasn't into the game for the first few hours, though it takes a while to
get its hooks into you. The opening mission is a bit bland, you don't really get that wow moment. And the first city you visit, while being really big and grand, felt a bit boring and weirdly dull. But as you work your way
through the main quest line, which I suggest trying to focus on a bit at least up until you
get to the city of Neon that's when the game really unfolds, and you're more powerful. You've got a good ship,
you're with a faction or so and learn more about these worlds and you're just kind of going nuts. And one of the main things of the game, like there's a lot of combat. As much as you are an explorer and you can talk your
way out of some things you're still gonna end
up killing a lot of dudes and thankfully the
shooting feels pretty good. Depending on your stats, sometimes enemies will
be a little bullet spongy but not as bad as you'd think. Guns are loud and punchy and aggressive. And the feedback when
bullets or lasers hit enemies gives you a nice proper like thwack. Melee is meh, but you
can embrace some stealth, it gets a bit stronger as you level it up and I never found myself completely 100% stealthing a location. Things would always tend
to fall apart for me, but it does seem to be
a semi viable play style as long as you're adaptable. It's not overly RPG from numbers and stats
and points and magic, more from the gameplay
approaches, which I'll get to. But skill tree wise, it's
kept fairly simple as well with you spending points
in one of a few categories to access some benefits and each of those have their
own multiple tiers or levels that you can dump more points
into to get more out of it. So to unlock the next tier, it's not about just
dumping a point though, you need to complete
like little objectives or like a checkbox challenge first. So like instead of
"Morrowind" and "Oblivion" just jumping a ton of times
to get better stamina. Now you actually have like a checklist, like say shoot 20 bad guys
to get better at pistols, or carry 75% of your carrying
weight for X amount of miles to get an available upgrade
to upgrade your encumbrance, which holy crap, the game is
pretty ruthless with that, or maybe I'm just a hoarder. But these little objectives do get a little bit more complicated once you get further down the tree. I don't know if it was
like necessarily needed, but that to me is a minor nitpick, otherwise it works and I like it. Back to combat though, what sold it for me
was the weapon variety. There's a good amount. All with their own use
cases and manufacturers, from kind of standard to super futuristic and even some surprises. There's a lot of good satisfying choices. Then they also bring over the
weapon mod crafting system from "Fallout 4" with some tweaks, which I thought was a great system there and also very cool here. It makes very pretty
staggering amount of options and things to hunt for
and craft and work towards and you're getting weapons, spacesuits, out of space clothing, and lots of resources for your journey. And yeah, you can like sneak
into someone's apartment or a shop and steal stuff just
like any other Bethesda game, but you're usually getting
the best stuff by exploring. And exploring is complicated. Unfortunately, it's a bit
too weird for my liking, too many hangups. There are a lot of cool planets and big cities and some towns, but there are also a bunch of
randomly generated planets. Now Bethesda was upfront about this. They set expectations about how they were randomly
generated and how it works, but I still just, it
doesn't feel quite right. So exploration itself is a lot
of loading screens and menus. You can look at a big
map, warp to a new sector and float around and look at a planet, maybe talk to another pedestrian
ship, do a few things, then you look at the
planet with your scanner, and then you can see
everywhere you can really land or really what the planet has to offer. Then you click on that
and then a loading screen and then you're landed. Then you have to click leave
ship, when you're landed and then it loads you out there briefly. You don't just hop off. So you see there's like a lot of barriers. The presentation, the boringness
of just clicking around on a map or a scanner all
really hurts the experience. It's not as smart as
it comes off initially. You know, presenting you
with fuel consumption and a bunch of numbers to seem sciencey. You're really just clicking
on stuff and it's a bummer. Same goes for actually scanning
stuff on the planet surface. Not the greatest thing
from a fun standpoint, but yeah speaking of planet surfaces from that whole planet to
landing sequence I mentioned, once you're out there, if you're on a randomly generated planet you roam around what is a
typically a pretty ugly biome slowly sprinting and
running outta stamina, jet boosting around and
checking out abandoned factories or caves that typically
have a door to click on and load in to what is like
a typical Bethesda dungeon. And from there you can
usually blast your way through and get some decent loot. It doesn't always amount to too much and it doesn't usually
have anything complex, but it does mean it feels like you can kind of endlessly space dungeon run. It may not be of the highest quality and you may see some stuff repeat. Every so often, I found
myself landing on a planet and seeing something cool
and walking towards it and finding something totally weird, but most of the time to
me it felt a little dull and I preferred focusing on like the towns and the quests and activities, because the more you get into
those the better it gets, and holy shit they give you a lot. Like from expeditions where
you're just looking for stuff to getting into some messes
with the faction quests and their own individual
activities within, to random long running quests you'll get from like a shop or some
guy, to job postings. There's a staggering amount
of stuff to do in this game. Oh and even piracy, which does remind me I should mention the ship stuff. So when you're in orbit you
can engage with other ships, like chat with them or get into combat. Combat is fairly simple but pretty good. It gets the job done. You can actually kind of
do V.A.T.S. from "Fallout." Like get a good lock on the ship and it zooms into them in slow motion, and then you can choose to target, say their shield generator first and then go for their engines
with a different weapon, something like that. How capable your ship actually is though depends on how you build it and then you can cycle power
to engines to speed up, maybe disperse a bit of power to weapons to have more power behind them or put it all towards your Grav Drive so that you can like light speed warp jump out of there quicker. The flying around isn't
super complicated again, like you're just in kind
of a big space arena separated by loading screens, which sucks, but hey it's fun to blow up other ships. Still for me, I gotta emphasize the bigger thrills were on the ground. I had a lot of fun tackling
missions and quests in different ways and stumbling through and making dumb choices
and seeing the game react. Like sometimes I felt
really slick and smooth, other times the complete opposite of what I expected to happen happened, and sometimes I just went
rash and went in guns blazing. And all of it was entertaining and sometimes surprisingly hilarious. Now speaking of hilarious I guess it's worth mentioning
the buggy nature of the game. No "Starfield" is not immune
from the typical Bethesda stuff you've seen in their other games. I mean it feels like a Bethesda
game you've seen before, from gameplay to just like
the feel, the vibe of it all. But that also boils down
to weird silly buggy things that'll happen in the game. Like I'll walk into my
ship and see a crew mate hovering two feet above the ground or clipping through a kitchen table. Now during a conversation with an NPC another character will walk into frame and the camera will wig out as they clip through them
and do something funny. People will disappear in a blink, like if you've seen it in
a previous game of theirs you might see it here. Now you might not see it as much, like as often, but that
goofiness is still there. Does it break the game? No, haven't really had
any catastrophic issues other than getting stuck on a chair and having to reload my save. But it can break immersion a bit. It's not a disaster but you'll see some
weird stuff occasionally it's worth, some people are
more sensitive to this stuff, so it's always worth bringing up. All that stuff does however, contribute to making the
game feel a bit old in spots. Some towns are like rich with detail and have a surprisingly dense
amount of NPCs on screen. But other areas like the planet terrain or even some sections of say
New Atlantis just look flat and drab and weird, especially
at a lot of times of day. And that's on PC and Xbox
versions of the game. It's just not the cleanest
or newest looking game and it's a shame considering the massive
scope of everything. The town density, like I
said is great oftentimes and when you're in space, the planets, and the effects, and the
asteroids look pretty great. Or say if you're on a moon
looking up at like Saturn and it's casting a light,
that stuff is awesome, but the rest of it really
leaves a lot to be desired. And as you probably know, frame rate is 30 frames
per second on console and in our experience, for the most part, it was a very solid 30. On the PC side, of course
everybody's machine is different and who knows how it'll be at launch. We've already had some
patches and some updates and stuff like that, but
we haven't had many issues after messing around with
some of the settings, you know, not the biggest
amount of options there, but we've been able to
play it fine on our end. Now switching back to
another positive note I did allude to all the
stuff the game lets you do like weapon mod crafting,
but also researching to make special crafting components as well as cooking recipes, suit mods, which acts kind of
like the weapon mod system. You can also build outposts on planets, kind of like "Fallout" and set that up to generate resources, and
yeah it can all be a lot. But the best thing I found myself spending time and money
on was the ship building. To me it absolutely delivers. Building is easy to grasp and fun to slowly get more
and more crazy with it. You know, parts snap together, the game very clearly and
intelligently shows you what can and cannot work and you're doing it all in real time. There's a lot of options
too, like small ships, space trucks for hauling,
a bigger battleship, and I just loved adding onto my ship and then seeing it on the
landing pad and real time and going, "Whoa." And then going in the ship and seeing how the interior changed. Like it's all satisfying and addictive. I got hooked on this like I did building
settlements in "Fallout 4" and it just improved the whole experience. Even if I was dissatisfied with a lot of the space exploration, seeing the ship I made in
action, landing on planets, docked at a city, was cool as hell. And I found myself saving
up for a new engine or a new type of weapon to
mount on it all the time. These were the main points we
wanted to hit today, really, there's a lot of game here and despite spending
a lot of time with it, we haven't seen every inch of it. There's both stuff we couldn't spoil here and also just a lot of secrets to uncover, stuff that we haven't
even come across yet. "Starfield" is a flawed
game, with some aspects that just don't quite reach
the heights they should, but it has plenty of merits, and the more time you put into it the more it shows you
its you know, flavors. We're probably gonna be talking
about this one for a while. It is a Bethesda game,
I was expecting, really, even more so than I thought. If you like Bethesda games, even with this one's
significant shortcomings, you might like this one. Now, it didn't do
everything I wanted it to do but like I like the characters, the world, the civilizations, cool
science and guns and ships. And as much as I have my complaints I'm looking forward to continue playing it and I pretty much recommend it, obviously depending on
the type of player you are and your expectations for this game. Hopefully I laid it out enough for you so you get where I'm coming from. This is a Before You Buy, you know how this goes by now, right? I give you some pros, some cons and some personal opinion
and now I want to hear yours. What do you think about "Starfield?" Just let us know. Are you someone who's jumping
into like that early access where you pay more for the game? Are you waiting for it
to come to Game Pass? And also let us know if you're planning to play on PC or Steam. Are you gonna be making mods for the game? Are you just skipping the game? Whoever you are, let's talk "Starfield"
down in the comments. There's a lot to talk about with this one and like I said, stuff we can't spoil and stuff we haven't even found yet. So let us know in the comments, try and keep it spoiler free, but if this video helped you
out at all, informed you, maybe just seeing the gameplay was nice, anything like that, clicking
the like button helps us. Thank you. But I always
make it a point to say this with the big Before You Buy videos. Thank you for watching. If you've been sticking
with us for so long, I put out the first Before You Buy video like eight years ago at this point with "Batman: Arkham Knight,"
and we're still here today just kind of yapping
about games, so thank you. You guys know where to
find me on social media, but if you're new to Gameranx, be sure to click follow,
do all the YouTube stuff. Thank you very much for watching and we'll see you guys next time. - [Sarah] Gear looks green, ready to land. (engine whining) (ominous music) Can I help?
