Starfield Review - A Brilliant but Flawed RPG

hey everyone MJ here and in this video we're going to be talking about Starfield a brilliant but flawed RPG I've wanted to make this video for a while now because I've seen so many takes and thoughts about Starfield and personally I've been waiting for this game since they announced it back in 2018 now obviously the game's been out for a few months now so people have been able to play it for a long time and digest what the game is I have over 150 hours in Starfield and I thought that with all that time I would be able to give my thoughts on the game since I've played it so much and I've seen what Bethesda has done for a space RPG something that they've wanted to do since like the Inception of them for 25 years I wanted to see how they've actually planned it out and give my thoughts on it but yes you've read the title right even though I do adore Starfield I can see that it is a very flawed game at its core and I'm hoping that Bethesda as from the community as a whole can take feedback from us and replicate this for Elder Scroll 6 because there will be these issues in Elder Scroll 6 if they don't address them here in and Starfield if you want a quick little basic review of my thoughts on the game Starfield is an ocean just super wide but as deep as Apollo that is the analogy I would use with Starfield it has so many things that you can do from spaceship combat to ground combat to the cool Powers they have to the base building to the ship customization they have so many cool things they described it as a ton of games like 10 games in one and that is amazing cuz there's so much content here for you to do but each just thing that you can do is not as in depth as in other games that they've created the Starship customization is amazing I think it's deep the armor customization now there's barely any like that's the issue with Fallout 4 they had so much armor customization weapon customization it's not as deep as in Fallout 4 again the guns look different but they just don't feel as different as they would be than in Fallout 4 in a lot of cases from Fallout 4 and then 76 to Starfield I feel like they've done a lot of moved a lot of things forward but they've also pulled a lot of things back and in this video I'm going to be talking about it so before we get started I just wanted to say that I'm going to be breaking this down into a pros and cons list now we're going to be starting with the cons first before we move on to the pros because it's just going to format the video easier instead of me talking about something bad then good then good then bad it's just going to be all bad for the first and then all good for the second so to start us off on the cons list we're going to be talking about the base building and outpost Management in Starfield to start us off sadly I don't even know how but has to this up the base building is not as deep as in Fallout 4 or as even in Fallout 76 there is lack of items that you can use to build and the good items are locked behind so many perks when in Fallout 4 you had access to usually a lot of the base building items that you could use with some obviously locked behind perks but Starfield has them so locked behind perks and levels it's really hard to base build now I know Bethesda meant for this to be an endgame thing to do but in every other game that they have created with Base building it is not an endgame thing and I understand like the resource Gathering as well to get into this it is it takes forever to get resources like and you have to just go buy it and then you have to get the money to buy it which is fine I know it's an endgame thing that you can do but even then as an endgame item unless you put hundreds of hours like I've seen people on Twitter make these awesome cool bases but you can't just it's not as in-depth and as cool as in Fallout 4 where it's as easy to use people felt this way for Fallout 4 as well they felt that it was rushed the base building was rushed and in starfields it 100% was I feel like when using the Outpost system it's used as an afterthought there's no real bonus to using it for yourself other than just having to use it you do not need to base build in Starfield and you don't need to do it in Fallout 4 or Fallout 76 as well more in Fallout 4 but in Fallout 4 there's a real reason to as a supply Camp you can get food you can get water it you can use it for quests you can just grow the civilization you're rebuilding society and in Starfield there's that way of yeah you're building places you're adding life to planets where they may or may not be life and it's awesome but it's just not as deep as Starfield and it could have been worked on more The Outpost management as well is not is not nearly as in-depth as Fallout 4 and Fallout 4 there were so many things that you would be able to assign your settlers to do like farming or defenses or even Manning uh artillery which was amazing there were so many cool things that you could do a especially in the DLC you could get them to exercise you could get them on the little bikes to power areas it was cool you could put them in pillar which would be like little prisons there were so many unique unique things that you could do with the settlers but in Starfield it's really just working and then the robots which are pretty cool honestly once get enough perks you can get robots that will increase your farming and resource Gathering which is pretty cool cuz then you going robots walk around but it's just not as in-depth as Fallout 4 when it comes to the base building and outpost management next we're going to be discussing the space travel now that this is not to be confused with the space combat as we're going to be talking that later in the pros list just to start I I honestly don't know how Beth has the this so badly it's a space game now I understand now a lot of people expected it to be Ln man Sky I was not one of them but I expected the space game to be able to travel in Space the majority of the space exploration is fast travel is there uh grab jumping which is cool the animation for it is awesome but it's not space travel we're not flying planet to planet which realistically we should be and I get that there's a thousand planets and they're all hugely generated and technically you can fly to other planets I know that it just takes seven hours apparently but still like we should be able to have some secondary boost like in no man's sky for example to be able to go planet to planet without having to fast travel it's really sad to see but it's sad to say as well that Starfield space travel is really just fast travel from a planet to another planet fast travel from one uh solar system to another solar system it's it's really sad because they could have done something really cool with Starfield space travel and the ships are awesome and the ship's gameplay is awesome but where they messed up was the spaceship travel I still don't know why we can't go planet to planet it's understandable if we can't go galaxy to Galaxy or solar system to the solar system that and that would need the grab jump that's fair but putting us on a little cut scene of our ship just coasting by is so unnecessary when we could just actually fly to that planet now it might be a limitation of the engine which is understandable but I'm fully expecting mods to be fixing this when it launches next we're going to be talking about the space and Planetary Exploration in Starfield again it's it's really disappointing to see that Starfield was not able to even get a basic Bethesda thing right Bethesda is known for their amazing exploration in their games in Elder Scrolls Fallout we all know this this is a given right Bethesda is amazing at their exploration they know how to make a good game and how to make a good map but by making their entire game really just procedural generation it hurts the game and especially since in Fallout 4 for example every minute or two you will find something cool right you'll find a house with some loot in it you'll find a radar or two you'll find a holotape you'll find a note with some a dialogue on it you you'll find something right and it keeps you interested in going in Starfield when you land on a planet a point of interest is what five minutes of running away is two to five minutes of running away and that hurts the exploration because it doesn't give me an incentive to land on a planet and then walk around and Bethesda cannot make a game about space exploration and Planetary Exploration and make the planets boring it's just really sad to see that their thing that they should have gotten right because they've gotten it right in every single other game that they've ever created they it up here the space exploration as well again I don't know how they it it's like I said back in the Fast Travel segment of the video it's fast traveling from section to section you can't explore anything now when you do find something like say an abandoned space station it's awesome right you land on it and it's like holy there's cool cool people on here and don't get me wrong that part of the exploration is amazing I absolutely love that when you find a space station you find like a herd of ships or when you if you have The Wanted perk like I did and then you find bounty hunters chasing you and like when you fast travel into a new spot and then Bounty Defenders come in and help you out usually I also blow them up for the extra parts but those moments in the game are what make the game so awesome it's just when it happens repeatedly is the issue with Starfield as well is the repetition of it it happens like every fifth time you fast travel somewhere and then it's just a Choy that you have to fight these bounty hunters or other enemies now we're going to be talking about starfields RPG mechanics and choices and consequences and everything that would revolve around Starfield being an RPG starfields RPG mechanics are honestly just like they're good at best the I don't know what it is with Bethesda but since Skyrim they have not been able to replicate their success with the RPGs they're trying to move to a more casual experience which with Fallout 4 Fallout 4 was heavily casualized compared to it now that's the but that's the game I started with and I loved it but of course again it was for casuals so that's a game I would love but even stuff like the skill trees Starfield has better skill trees in my opinion than Fallout 4 but they're still not as good as say Fallout 3 or Skyrim where they're really in depth with it in Starfield you unlock a perk and then you do that perk to then enough so say that you get 20 kills shotguns and then you can use another perk level to unlock it which is a cool system like they did in Skyrim but then you have to spend another perk point to unlock it instead of just doing the activity and then leveling it up you have to kill 20 enemies and then you can level up further to do more damage what they should have done is say every time you kill 100 enemies your damage goes up by 1% and then it caps out at like 100% or something right something where if you actually do that activity instead of having to waste perk points to put into it where you'd be able to do more RPGs activities now they do have some perks with it where say um people were complaining about Starfield forcing you to put a perk into stealth before you could even do it which is understandable because like yeah you can't just start doing stealth like in Fallout 4 and three and my understanding I'm pretty sure Skyrim you could always do stealth but in Starfield you need to do a perk to do that and you also need to have a perk to even lockpick which is also confusing but it those are more in tune with RPG mechanics but they went too far with some stuff like being able to have to put in a perk point to get pickpocketing and to get stealth but then like the the the perks to upgrade your damage and to upgrade your weapon um customization it's super annoying to have to upgrade your perk to upgrade weapon and armor customization and ship customization and then having to build 10 things to then unlock it again just to get the better gear instead of just being able to do it all or just having a certain level cap like in Fallout 4 if you are Level 20 you'll get one level of that perk and then when you're level 30 you can unlock the next one instead of having to upgrade 10 guns with those shitty perks another issue with bethesda's mechanics is their just dialogue options with the extra traits when you're being a beast hunter or a someone who's wanted or any of those other ones like the child one it offers very little dialogue options that are useful now for some cases like in my in my case with the Crimson Fleck quest line at the end it involves The Wanted perk that I have had gave me a dialog option that stopped me from having to kill two major characters and they could they would just surrender which I thought was like holy this perk is actually useful but then another perk I have is just useless or other perks I've seen like how is Chef going to go into it now obviously for Chef some of it might be useful but most of the time it's just going to be an extra little dialogue option that won't mean much where you could just persuade someone and you get the same outcome and just to know I cannot get over how dog starfields persuasion is I don't know where they were going with it but I would rather have Fallout fours just Charisma being level 10 you instantly get it than whatever they decided to do here in Starfield they give you a bunch of different options for persuasion and they give you green yellow and red for the level of difficulty it is to persuade but then they also give you the little like quick um just little dialogues they'll give you so like it'll be completely random like someone will be able to take over the power of the universe and you can just talk them down by saying like oh you know you you don't want to do this and it's like what like and then that if you say that they'll be like okay I won't do it you can have it and it's like what like where did Bethesda think that this was good writing I don't think the persuasion system is awful but in some situations it can be useful if you have certain perks again or if you've done certain things in the game you could have the easiest difficulty which is like a light blue where it's instant success but you obviously won't get it now they obviously do have critical successes as well which I thought was cool like 20 hours in I persuaded someone and I got a critical success thank God because I was trying to persuade them but Bethesda just did not do well with their persuasion system the dialogue system though was great we'll get into that later now these are all the main issues that I've had with Starfield all of the cons of Starfield that I feel like are worth noting for the game now we're going to be getting onto the pros but I wanted to quickly mention one more time that Bethesda has allowed this game to be held back by their engine now their engine's amazing I'm not going to get it wrong but mods will be the savior of this game they want this game to be another Skyrim mods will be the ones to save it Starfield and Bethesda will be okay in the future obviously under Xbox no matter how this game turns out they've have over 12 million players it's a massive success it's a top seller of the Year even while being on Game Pass and it's amazing I love Starfield but holy did they ever up with a lot of their things that they're good at like I don't know how they messed up at exploration like that is the thing Bethesda is known for is for their worlds and maps and they it Fallout 76 is map I would argue is their best map that they've ever made and Starfield is somehow worse now after all the cons that I've talked about and all the issues with the game now we're going to finally be moving on to the pros and why I think it's a brilliant RPG to start off with the pros list we're going to be starting off with starfields Gunplay and Powers starfields combat Gunplay powers are just some of the best that they've ever created in a Bethesda game like holy the Gunplay is phenomenal I cannot tell you otherwise it is amazing amazing it puts every it makes every other Bethesda the game looked 20 years behind I'm being honest now it's Gunplay obviously isn't as good as like say Doom or Halo but for a Bethesda game holy they put it above and beyond here I cannot tell you how amazing it is and combined with the powers like how you can freeze time or how you can just give yourself unlimited oxygen or just make them make enemies float while you shoot them midair it's amazing from the shotguns to the rifles to the grenade launchers to all the kinds of weapon capabilities and even at some point now I know I said this earli about the customization that it's not that great but when you do when you can't customize it and the Legendary Weapons they brought them back from Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 when you when I got an explosive rifle on my first playthrough that shredded every enemy I found and that was awesome I kept that like it was my baby I kept it safe I fed it ammo it's just the combat was amazing just being like I played a stealth character at least I tried to with my explosive rifle and it was awesome there's so many cool builds that you can do and it's amazing sadly though the melee combat isn't as good as it should be though it feels like it was an afterthought but they do have some pretty cool weapons in Starfield like some pretty cool knives and swords and a Veron slicer or something like that it's a pretty cool like handheld weapon and the the swords actually do have some pretty cool ninja abilities especially when you're in third person you will slice and dice like a ninja the powers are also so much better than just for just shooting you can also use them to your advantage around the world when you kill creatures you can bring them back to life you can duplicate yourself and that duplicate will be using the weapon you're holding to fight off enemies you can bring dead enemies back to life it's so cool to see all the that you can do with the powers and even some Powers you can use to like rejuvenate plants or uh resources and all this other cool that you can do like launch um orbs that just suck in all the uh atmosphere around it and suck in all enemies and you could just use grenade launchers to blow them up and all these cool abilities you guys have to find for yourselves in this game I'm telling you the powers alone make Starfield worth playing now we're going to we're going to start talking about the cities and the points of interest in Starfield the cities in Starfield from neon to new Atlantis to Aila to all the other smaller cities you can find around the game are all amazing they they're all so unique and cool they all have so many quests that you can find with them so many cool characters you can talk to Companions you can find the the cities have been done so well neon looks beautiful Atlant new Atlantis looks gorgeous Aila City at when the sunset's going on obviously a desert with the sunset looks beautiful but when I left that main building in Aila City and I hit a sunset hit me holy the game looks gorgeous the points of interest as well when you're landing on planets now to take 2 to 5 minutes to get there is very annoying but once you get there they are actually interesting you can find gas station sites you can find wind turbines you can find whole ass outposts Towers full of enemies that you have to kill like 20 30 40 enemies they get to some cool end of game dungeon chest the points of interest in the cities are very well done and I commend Bethesda because it is their best cities that they have ever created in a game that they've made next we're going to be talking about starfields enemy variety and enemy design the enemy design and Variety in Starfield is really overwhelming when it comes down to it now the human design itself does not is not a lot now you have like the typical Raiders you'll have like all the factions but that's about it for humans there's no humanoid aliens now the animals itself there are so many different kinds of animals from water animals to space not space animals sorry to air animals the land animals there's like dinosaur looking animals there's The Crazy Ones like the teram morphs which remind me of the deathclaw in Fallout 4 those are like the scary animals the one you're really scared of there's animals that are related to missions that have a lot of lore and context to them it's really cool to see but the enemy variety itself of the humans is lacking but they do have a lot of different factions and weapons and each of them have their own ships which are all very the ships itself have so much variety to them you're not going to find a ship that looks the same name unless it's like a designated name ship which is usually the faction ships next we're going to have a really quick segment on the space suits and armors in Starfield each armor and different kind of space suit in Starfield all of them there's so much variety to the suits they all look beautiful from all the faction space suits to the starborn ones that you can get they all look gorgeous and Bethesda can clearly put so much time into the space suits where you can look like whoever you want to be if you want to look like a trucker which is funny if you want to look like a hauler a tra a bounty hunter if you want to look like a captain there's so many different kinds of suits for you guys to try out it's amazing to see now moving on to one of my favorite Parts about Starfield the companions starfields main four companions consist of Barrett Sarah Andreia and Sam now all of them together they are all pretty cool I do like every single Companion now obviously you can't forget about Vasco but Vasco itself Vasco is an awesome companion if you have trouble choosing which one you want to pick for a full playthrough I recommend Vasco he doesn't dislike or like anything you do and he's just funny to have especially with some crazy clips that you can take with him I've had some pretty funny moments with Vasco Sam is a you know the cowboy kind of guy Barrett is the is just like the constellation perfect person trying to find what's out there Sarah is like that too and Andreia is just trying to find a new home you know after being discarded by her own it all four companions have an amazing backstory and awesome quests with them and just so much dialogue that you can delve into especially and the system with companions as well now with Fallout 4 you had to do things they like with Starfield to my understanding you have to do the things they like and just spend time with them as they're following you you don't have to do a certain amount of things they like to just get the new companion dialogues which I think is a benefit to bethe this new game because Fallout 4 was really annoying to having to max out each companion's dialogue trees now we're going to be talking about starfields graphics and art design straight up all I have to say about starfields graphics and art design is that it is beautiful but that's the has just put so much effort into starfields just design and art they have so many different environments and just things that you can look at they're all eye candy all of the Cities look gorgeous all of even the procedurally generated stuff when you land on a planet and if you're at a sunset or even if you're not at a sunset like if you're landing on a moon and the the the star in the middle of the solar system is just placed right it looks gorgeous or when you're on a moon and you can see the close Planet up to you like the ringed planet it's just amazing Starfield is bethesda's biggest upgrade with their Graphics now obviously starfields Graphics can look like utter dog sometimes but when they look good they look good it is amazing to see that Bethesda puts so much time into their Graphics part of the engine where it looks this gorgeous last but not least we're going to be talking about starfields main quest and story now no worries there will be no Major Spoilers in this little discussion of the main quest and story as it's a review and I don't want to be spoiling it for people who some have not played this game yet starfields main quest starts you off as a minor trying to find this artifact for a client who wants to buy it now you started finding the artifact you touch it you gaze into this infinite Universe Vision you have and then you find constellation who are trying to find what's out there you go on quests with them you do you to find more artifacts you lead into some cruel group of people who I'm not going to spoil but you do find this group of people who may know something or may not know something it leads you into this big just battle between humans and past or future humans it's really cool and I recommend playing it there's so many different things that can happen in these quests too there's one where you have to make a deal like kind of like a smuggling deal there's one where you board the ship of a collector and you have to try to find an artifact there's all these cool little missions that you can do within it and then side quests that also pop up too after doing these quests if you do it correctly it's awesome because I feel like personally it's bethesda's best main quest and at the end of it it's amazing you like you go through all of that and there are some B pretty big plot toasts as well in the middle of starfields main quest that can actually you up like I cried a little bit at a certain part of this Quest and it's only for your first playthrough because you can turn it back when you do complete the main quest you can fix this at some point of your game but it made me cry the first time I played it because it was just like holy this happened I'm I can't believe that happened I did not expect that that came out of nowhere I didn't think that choice would have that effect that much and Bethesda has done something awesome here with their story and I commend them for some of the best writing that they've done in their own games after all that I said and done and all the pros and cons that I've have given you I'm going to let you guys pick if you want to play this game or not now if you've already played the game I'm happy that you've watched this video to hear my thoughts on it but if you have not played this game yet I hope that my video has helped you somehow in making a decision now it's free on Game Pass on it's not free if you to pay for it but it's on Game Pass it's 10 bucks if you want to try it for a month I recommend doing that it's $10 just try the game It's amazing at the extent now obviously if any of the cons that I've stated turn you off of the game that's completely fair I'm not going to tell you to play the game if you're not interested in it but if you have any interest in Space games and any of the pros that I've given you I highly recommend this game I want to thank you all for watching this video please like share comment subscribe if you also choose to and I'll see you all in the next video see you

Channel: MJ Plays

Views: 2,096

Keywords: Starfield

Id: wpKzNx91hHM

Length: 23min 42sec (1422 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 12 2023