Starfield | Is It Good?

foreign share of my septemberian leisure time to Starfield so did I think it was good we'll strap in and prepare to jump to light speed for this doozy of a video in order to find out let's ask then answer the question star field is it good before we begin it might be prudent for me to share with you my Bethesda backstory and my Bethesda bug Bears the former shall provide critical context which those of you who saw my elderly video know is kind of a big deal to me as well as an overview of the various problems I have historically leveraged against bethesda's various games so please settle in for my Bethesda backstory at the exact moment in which I am typing these words into a Google doc I have played three Bethesda games Fallout 3 Skyrim and Fallout 4 Fallout 3 came out in 2008 in 2008 I was a 14 year old boy who had spent the majority of his pre-teen Years playing a Final Fantasy VII Final Fantasy 8 Final Fantasy 10 and corono Trigger then in 2008 I was hanging out with my friend John who had rented a little game at called Fallout 3. I recall friend John in the courtyard of the Galaxy news radio building sporting a red baseball cap blaring 40s music over an in-game radio and launching a tiny nuclear device at a big raging monster this was all the information I needed to know that this was the game for me fast forward to 2011 and I'm a high school senior when Skyrim comes out like many of you I lost many an hour gallivanting around the world map doing quests I don't remember and knocking objects off of tables fast forward again to 2015 and I'm a college boy who just spent eight months saving up money to buy his first ever PC upon which I will spend 140 hours of a 168-hour week playing Fallout 4. my opinions on each of these three games are very similar though it would take me two whole video essays to explain the minutia for the purposes of this video presentation which I promise you is still about Starfield I shall present the following pithy opinion morsel these games are master classes in open world design the amount of hours of my life that I have put into just walking around in these games is staggering I could have used that time to learn how to play the cello or get a girl to fall in love with me I know they all have fast travel but I never use it though I will admit to employing the carts and utilizing the helicopter feature in Skyrim and Fallout 4 respectively so strong is the world designed in these games that it is enough to support the entire experience for me seriously no other game Studio makes worlds that I want to wander as well as Bethesda and it's a good thing too because in terms of like narrative design and gameplay Fallout 3 Skyrim and Fallout 4 are mediocre at best and buckets of trash at worst so where in this trend fits Starfield is it a bold step towards a new golden era a middling crawl through mediocrity or a big crunch disappointment I shall answer this question dear viewer with the following topical list one buckthesda in anticipation for this game as well as hoping to redeem myself for my 30 frames per second Elden ring video I purchased an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card as recommended by The Game's steam store Page three days into my playing experience the game murdered my CPU so I purchased an Intel i5 10 600k Central processor as recommended by The Game's store Page and wow I know Bethesda games are notorious for their bugginess especially at launch but does this game chug like an insecure freshman at baby's first fraternity party aside from the usual stock of stutters animation glitches and the game quietly crashing behind loading screens when it didn't just flat out crash my favorite recurring glitch weirdest ugly head whenever I endeavored to talk to an NPC upon initiating the conversation the game would usually throw up in its mouth before the Avatar would stare at me blankly as words echoed from the heavens the NPC then would silently mouth those words before the conversation could continue you feel it a bit can't you ever since I found the second one being around them is just comforting so hey I'm still not a hundred percent and this was happening with with literally every NPC I spoke to and with the game's recommended Hardware on the bright side I can now run Elden ring and Death stranding at a silky smooth 60 frames per second and I can get the Final Fantasy VII remake to 90. which is great because those are all games I'd rather be playing seriously this game is a buggy Nightmare and desperately needs a carpet bomb of patches to make it stable this has been a consistent problem with Bethesda games at launch and it only seems to be getting worse at least I can run Fallout 4 to constant frame right now even with all my mods so perhaps star field shall sustain such stability 10 years hence number two spaceship much as I suspect many of you from the primordial emergence of Consciousness I have yearned for my own spaceship more specifically I've wished for a spaceship that was also my house from the Millennium Falcon to building spiritual successors to millium Falcon out of Legos to the Eben Hawk to the Normandy to the other Normandy to FTL to the unreliable I have dreamed of possessing a spaceship flying that spaceship around in space Courier missions and inviting a variety of buds to hang out with me on my spaceship where they would sit in chairs looking like they're doing something important or they just stand around with their arms folded because they're doing that on a spaceship I am pleased to report that no game has scratched my spaceship itch quite in the way that Starfield has indeed something in me foretells that Starfield has soon become the spaceship game in which a prospective player issues traditional questing exclusively for spaceship man spaceship Expo voice much in the same way that Fallout 4 has become Fallout settlement Builder but we'll have to wait for the game to be more stable and for modders to make the mode more interesting before it can really take off three a bucket of stuff you can pick up someday soon I'm going to produce labyrinthine video essays on both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 in which I praise the exact same things in those games which I'm about to criticize in Starfield so let me curb any preemptive accusations of hypocrisy by providing the following apologia I like the Scavenging and inventory management system in Fallout though I dislike that very same inventory management system in both Skyrim and Starfield and incidentally every other game of this genre how could that be well the Fallout games take place in the post-apocalypse where neria Mason or architect has been born in 200 years people live in trash and they build their homes out of trash the most reliable food source available dollar two century-old packs of junk food you can't even walk down to the Potomac to enjoy the setting sun over the water without a band of vaguely Sapient Ruffians appearing intent on your murder you have to fight tooth and nail for every Advantage modern Fallout is at its most interesting when you're scrambling when you're frantically picking up enough trash to sell to a dispassionate Camp vendor so you can afford a stem pack when you're scrounging the bodies of the Dead Under Fire because your gun broke or ran out of ammo when you're running crippled through a Metro tunnel duck into a bathroom and desperately drink water out of the toilet because you need health now and you can deal with the radiation damage later this works doubly so for Fallout 4 where you need that trash you find to surround your settlements with walls and I sure do love building walls as well as upgrading your weapons it makes contextual sense within this world and supports the fight loot return gameplay Loop which sustains these games I find it genuinely interesting whenever I'm planning on setting out from my house in Megaton or my home base in sanctuary and I'm debating how many supplies I should bring because I'll need that inventory space to haul back that sweet sweet Loot and the world space is conducive to these activities as the Fallout World takes place in the corpse of America as you're poking around you're coming across terminal entries audio logs and environmental details which tell you about the world which caused the apocalypse a world where people worry about things that don't matter anymore drop proper nouns like China and communism which have meaning to us in the real world but are rendered meaningless in this world and our world could all too easily become this world all these systems work together to reinforce fallout's themes the world space traversal mechanics and inventory management each represent the waste that the great nuclear war represents in Fallout your forebearers destroyed the world over Petty insulated worries and now you're left to pick up the pieces it's great these systems still exist in Starfield and yet they don't work for me because they're not supporting anything wandering around star feels the same he feels and Sami mars-based planetary settlements has made me realize that so much of fallout's greatness is derived from its setting the absence of exploratory interest staggers me as without it I realize how much of the universe is dead empty space I love reading about the old world of the Fallout setting but I also must accept that those games have the benefit of having real life write much of their world lore when Bethesda must design a world without the assistance of real life they fail to capture me maybe it's because the Elder Scrolls feels like a store brand lord of the rings-esque high fantasy nestled into a less interesting Greek mythology or maybe it's because story field feels like a theme park of stock Space Age tropes but these worlds in particular don't really grab me because they aren't greater than the sum of their parts I feel the Lord of the Rings The Wheel of Time and the Norse mythology influence in Skyrim but nothing which makes it feel distinctively idiosyncratically unseparatedly Skyrim just as I feel the alien the Martian and most saliently the No Man's Sky influence bleeding all over Starfield there's nothing I can point to and say that's definitively Starfield I call it the goodbye proxy problem to demonstrate there is a random shot in the failed horror film Event Horizon where a torrent of blood spills down a spaceship hallway in a clear homage to the classical cult horror film The Shining in The Shining this shot makes contextual internal sense it exists as part of the film's mission statement it is a vision Dany is experiencing contextualized by all the other wacky stuff he's seen and now the audience is seeing and it fits with the surrealist abstract horror that the movie is going for in Event Horizon this shot exists because it was in The Shining and The Shining was good and hey if we put some stuff from The Shining into our horror movie then our horror movie will also be good goodbye proxy if you will Starfield is a game World built entirely out of this problem and while this problem does exist somewhat in Bethesda Fallout games that Series has strong enough themes and Aesthetics that it can make such moments feel like fallout Fallout feels like itself because all of its elements are united behind a narrative thematic and demonstrative purpose Starfield doesn't feel like anything because all of its elements are sealed away in different boxes which don't interact with each other in any interesting ways speaking of boxes four a toy box of nothing aside from their big meticulously designed open worlds Bethesda games tend to offer a wild variety of activities with which a prospective player May occupy themselves there's X exploration main questing side questing Inventory management resource collection unique item and ability collection NPC companions to collect manage and complete Quests for Collectibles scattered across the world and crafting of the weapons potions settlements spaceships and settlements again variety star field True to this design philosophy likewise offers its purchasers with a toy box of time sinks with which one can occupy oneself and if mere occupation of one's self is all one is after then starfield's Myriad of distractions will surely satiate but if one seeks a more meaningful holistic experience then one shall find Star fuel to be little more than a toy box of Nothing YouTube Daddy Joseph Anderson once made a video on Fallout 4 which highlights how its gameplay Loop of exploration combat and Gathering is rather functional and even Pleasant and how these systems all interact in such a way as to elevate the game experience piggybacking off this point Fallout 4 also offers a wide variety of companions factions Main questing and side questing which all feel vestigial and Hollow precisely because they lack this interconnectedness exploring fighting enemies looting the area returning to a settlement to drop off the loot then using the loot to upgrade weapons armor and settlement structures then going off to explore and find some more materials is a fun interconnectedness of systems which has compelled me to sync 1500 hours into Fallout 4 and it's made further enjoyable by the fact that it has broader thematic purposes Fallout 4 is a broken World which I'm aiming to repair vis-a-vis the game's systems it feels good to take my trashed Suburban neighborhood and revive it it feels good to meet strangers in the world and provide them with a new home and a fresh start and it's a feeling I gift to myself through the act of engaging with the game's systems Starfield systems and indeed many of the other systems within Fallout 4 lack this interconnectedness rather than flowing from one activity to another are in an organic meaningful way one instead picks up one toy be it questing exploration or spaceship building and plays with that for a while until it grates then you discard it for the next toy and then there's this weird artificiality on display when say you do the main quest for a while get bored then switch to another activity the main quest will just sit there on pause until you feel like picking it up again it saddens me because there's clearly a lot of work and Care on display in Starfield and yet it's all for naught as it doesn't support anything grander or more meaningful in Fallout New Vegas all these side questing and companion interactions provide the player with a broader context regarding the major factions all vying for Hoover Dam as well as the smaller factions which could help or hinder them in Elden ring all these Scavenging Inventory management and weapon upgrading serve to give you an edge in the game's harsh world as well as providing permanent progress reinforcing the game's Central themes of perseverance and success against over whelming odds in death stranding unlocking and producing equipment as well as utilizing resources to construct infrastructure streamlines The Courier process and allows you to better navigate the world space to deliver your Parcels in Final Fantasy VII remake leveling up finding and upgrading both your Materia and equipment and garnering rewards from smaller more insular side quests and Arenas helps you progress the story provides you with a unique opportunity to express characterization via City material loads out and allows you to explore hang out in and understand more about the fictional world all of these games systems hold up bigger ideas in Star Fields there's just like a bunch of stuff that you can do there are many different systems and activities one can engage in but they don't prop up an interesting story or provide you with unique solutions to narrative questions or even let you learn about the in-game world in any interesting way you just kind of quest until you're tired of doing that then you build ship for a while until you're tired of doing that then you fly around the Galaxy until you're tired of doing that then you chat up your robotic crewmates until you're tired of doing that there's no fluidity or sense of Greater purpose it's just a box of separate toys you can pick up and then put down again I guess that's better than nothing but why spend all of this time and do all of this work just to make something that's better than nothing in essence to be good enough as to be preferable to boredom yet not good enough to elicit any further emotionality or reflection is the very definition of mediocre 5. the Megaton problem in Fallout 3 the first Wasteland settlement the player is encouraged to visit is the town of Megaton a waldorf Community built around an undetonated atomic bomb I bring this up because there are two quests in this Zone which illustrate both the potential and the recurring problem in Bethesda Game Quest design the first of these is the quest following in his footsteps which tasks the player with searching for information regarding their vagrant father investigations into Megaton direct us to local sleazeball pub owner Colin Moriarty Moriarty possesses the information we seek but withholds it from us for the sake of profit we are then giving several Avenues with which to obtain this information we can pay Moriarty run a little errand for him hack into his computer when he's not looking for which we can either rely on our pickpocket skills or murder Moriarty for the password there are even other little touches to this Quest as you can sweet talk Moriarty's overworked staff for hints regarding the terminal and if you run Moriarty's errands to recover money from over you can murder her sweet talk her into giving you the money or speech check her into giving you more money than Moriarty asked for thus making a tidy little profit by exploiting another's desperation just like Moriarty is doing to you or you can refuse Moriarty's offer and search for your father in another way perhaps taking the hint of Galaxy news radio which the game has so generously offered you all in all this is good RPG Quest design your character is motivated to find information on their father and you're given a source of that information and then offered various means to secure that information vis-a-vis the game's mechanics and it's through these mechanics that you characterize your character what kind of person are you do you just cough up the money do you sneak behind Moriarty's back justifying the theft with the fact that he's a bad person it's your first instinct to chat up the people around you and search for additional information and additional options or do you do the dirty or do you say to hell with it and walk away these are the kinds of quests I play RPGs for I want to express character motive and characterization through game mechanics unfortunately this is the exception rather than the rule in Bethesda games most Bethesda quests are like the power of the atom in which the players offered a choice they can either disarm the atomic bomb in the town's Center or they can blow up the town and kill all of its inhabitants this scenario of course elicits several questions why do they build a town by an undesignated atomic bomb why are they trusting some teenager they've never met to mess with it why would she want to blow up this town why would the people who want you to blow up this town hire some random teenager they've never met to do it why would I a fresh-faced idiot teenager mess with an atomic bomb how would I even know what I'm doing did I learn about this in disarming atomic bomb class the situation is ridiculous it does however come to make sense when you realize that this Quest wasn't designed to further the story of the player character in the way that following in his footsteps did this Quest exists to give the player here something to do and to offer the player the in-game rewards of spectacle and a home base the fact that the majority of bethesda's quests are designed around giving the player something to do rather than offering opportunities to develop and Define the player character is the source of much of their games's shallowness and vapidity in Skyrim for example with the possible exception of whether or not you decide to murder parath or NAX and yes I do pronounce it to parthearnax because it's got two A's after the pub and before the Earth that's an elongated a it's not parthenax it's par ethernax all of the quests are centered around giving the player something to do so much so that the world space becomes little more than a theme park you run around in visiting all the attractions and uh killing people because you they you make funny rack dolls when you kill them a fatal flaw in Fallout 4 by contrast to see notable dissonance between character and player motivation the character wants to find their son but the player wants to roam around the Wasteland and build settlements so much so that many Askew the main quest exclusively for these other systems so is the Megaton problem in Starfield well let me tell you a story early in the game whilst running errands for the group of idiots who had employed me simply because I touched a rock and experienced a DMT dream sequence I opted to complete a simple delivery job both for the sake of in-game currency and for the sake of vicariously satisfying my unobtainable desire to be a space Courier who Who Lives full time in a spaceship upon beaming into the system in which I could complete my delivery I was contacted via the space phone to visit some security Chief my investigations led me to a nearby spacecraft where upon boarding I was rope into playing Diplomat for a stranded band of prospective colonists who entrusted me a man they've never met and indeed the first human they've ever seen who had not been born on their ship to be their Diplomat after stacking around their ship which various Idol dialogue informed me was both outdated and outclassed despite the fact that it didn't look any different from any of the other locales I had visited a quick glance at the Mission Log revealed to me that the security officer was not aboard this ship but was rather down on the planet so I popped down to the planet to chat with him after threatening me several times he revealed to me that he likewise planned to recruit me as a diplomat for zero compensation and upon discovering that I had already visited the ship in question directed me to speak with his Australian boss he then exited the conversation with without telling me where his boss was or anything about him evidently he knew that I was a player character and that my quest log would be all the direction I needed once I staggered my way into the corporate headquarters I sat in on a meeting with three Resort Executives Who provided me with three options one I could inform the colonists that they could settle the world if they agreed to be these three people's footstools two I could from my own finances purchase a warp drive for the colonists so that they might fly elsewhere though why would I do that I don't know any of these people and a warp drive sounds really expensive or three I could just find a way to murder The Colony ship seeing as none of this was really my problem and I'm not the sort of guy to just murder an entire ship of what purport to be living breathing citizens just to satisfy some corpo's bottom line so I instead flew back to the colonist ship hoping for some kind of option where I could say hey these guys they're just a bunch of greedy suits just attack them and take over but instead the captain of The Vessel readily agrees to enslave herself and everyone on on board her ship then with the corporals requesting some kind of materials with which to further build their infrastructure as to accommodate their New Slaves the acquisition of these materials somehow became my responsibility so I sweep talked to the captain into giving me what materials they could spare then I jumped into my ship and I flew away never to return I assess that this Venture is adequate to illustrate the fundamental problem I have with Bethesda Quest design especially how it exists in Starfield on paper this Quest is intriguing and endemic to the setting what would a planetary settlement do if a spaceship of colonists showed up hoping to settle their world it's an interesting situation let down by the vapidness of how it's handled with this Quest Bethesda isn't trying to develop their setting or Express a theme or even allow us the chance to express something about our character it is instead there to give us the player something to do we the player are tasked with playing Diplomat because of someone at Bethesda heard that players like doing things like that we're giving three choices on how to resolve the conflict because Bethesda heard that players like making choices and games and the more choices we get to make the better the game and finally it's on us to accumulate the funds or materials needed to complete the quest because this is a game and players like to accumulate money and or materials and then spend those materials in the game Space so yes the magazine problem is Alive and Well in Starfield but maybe this isn't a problem for you maybe all you want is the theme park where you run around building a ship and doing busy work for NPCs killing people collecting and spending money collecting and spending resources and acquiring levels then I ask you why do they even have NPCs at all why build a world why try and make a story why not just strip away the veneer of an RPG and be more like Destiny well they did once before they made Fallout 76 which they marketed as a theme park which excuse all the trappings of a story based RPG in favor of a purely mechanical experience wherein you run around a Fallout World Shooting ghouls looting resources and discovering locations except nobody liked that game granted that game had Myriad of technical problems but they did feel the need to shove NPCs in the semblance of a story back into it later not to mention you'd be hard-pressed to find a Fallout fan who doesn't regard Fallout New Vegas as Superior to both fallouts three and four and Fallout New Vegas is a game all about developing your player character it's a shame that Starfield is not number six a universe of menus as I stated earlier bethesda's unparalleled skill at designing traversable explorable worlds is the main appeal of their games for me and they are so unparalleledly skilled at such things that I am willing to stomach their games's Myriad of other recurring problems Starfield however takes place in space and space is a difficult place to render into a traversable world so instead in Starfield you navigate the world with menus to travel safe from the lodge to Mars you have to stagger through the city of New Atlantis to your spaceship sit down at the pilot sea trigger the takeoff animation then navigate to the star map in the menu select the system you want to go to watch the traversal animation arrive at the system navigate to the menu again select the planet select the part of the planet you want to land your ship upon watch The Landing animation then select exit [ __ ] and you have to do this every time you want to go to a new planet in your space exploration game that's about going to new planets and this is the setting necessitating solution for which Bethesda sacrificed literally the only thing you can call consistently good in their games was it worth it it certainly wasn't number seven I don't care about any of these people I see over the past 15 years and across three games Bethesda has managed to make me care about three characters daddy Liam Neeson parthearnax and the voltex salesman and before you go trying to accuse me of some kind of character prude snobbery let me tell you that I will go out of my way to care about a character I'm literally the only guy in the world besides YouTube's own inhaling ashes 26 who genuinely likes mikalash and the mikalash boss fight in bloodborne the reason I like these characters is derived mainly from their role in the setting they have goals and motivations which make sense within the broader context of their respective worlds and your interactions with them develop the setting they're involved in daddy Liam Neeson is a scientist who wanted to purify the water around DC a noble goal and one endemic to the Fallout setting wherein various plots often revolve around resource management and acquisition but he abandoned this goal in order to secure a safe place to live for you his child eventually however his old dream catches up with him and he returns to the Wasteland setting off the main story Arthur next complicates the simplistic evil of the Dragons you've been munching on and even encourages an opportunity for reflection interacting with par ethernax actually develops on Skyrim's story and makes their iteration of Fantasy Dragons more interesting and unique too bad this plot doesn't really go anywhere and finally we have the vault-tec salesman who we meet at the start of Fallout 4. we then witnessed his performative chipperness melt into Stark fear transform alongside his body into despair which we can then mitigate by inviting him to live in one of our settlements should we do so he expresses genuine happiness I know what since we talked I'm feeling sweat wow that made me feel an emotion gold star Todd unfortunately most Bethesda characters don't get to make narrative choices develop the setting in central conflict or even go on little emotional Journeys like these characters most Bethesda characters are pure function the Megaton problem extends to the people who inhabit these fictional worlds they have no life or personality beyond their role as companions shopkeepers enemies or Exposition dispensers most if they have any personality at all have one note personality and even the dullest of Music appreciators know that a song needs at least two notes to be interesting I did earnestly try to engage with starfield's stiff robotic denizens in my Eternal Quest to feel emotions before I am rendered a corpse but they're Stark artificiality grated me into dirt dust eventually with my sincerest attempts exhausted and yet my mammalian instinctual drive towards companionship forever presence within the abyss of myself I opted to abandon in-game human contact exclusively in favor of the walking Mars Rover robot for at least said I this robot's roboticisms make contextual sense so if this game doesn't have good World design and it doesn't have good Quest design and it doesn't have good character design then what does it have it's got cool jackets number eight cool jackets if there's one thing I like to do in video games it's dress up by lumpy Avatar and I am not being sarcastic when I say I would definitely wear all of these jackets and all of these jumpsuits hey shout me out in the comment section if you know where I can get this hatch and where I can get this jacket preferably without killing anybody I mean I do not recognize the humanity in any of these stiff-faced NPCs but that doesn't mean I want to murder all of them besides if star Fields eventual fate is to become the space trucker game where you ignore all the story and focus on living your dream of being an itinerant space Wanderer who Pilots his house Among the Stars then I might as well look the part well that's all I got as always I have been and will continue to be Zachary Kush and you just found out what I think about Starfield do I think it's good well to recap no I don't think it's very good at all I'm sorry Todd I'm sorry only took me 20 hours to decide I didn't like the game you spent eight years of your life making better luck next time buddy and hey if you need a script doctor my fees are reasonable see you space cowboy [Music] hey save that for the bad guys I'm not gonna be part of this [Music]

Channel: Idiot's Monthly

Views: 42,513

Keywords: starfield, starboy, starman, starplace, starpalace, starcity, starnation, tarnation, space cowboy yeehaw

Id: 70u_Pf88I5c

Length: 32min 35sec (1955 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2023