Starfield: Review After 100%

[Music] foreign what's going on everybody mortum here this time bringing you my review after 100 for Star field just a day before its release courtesy of a review copy provided by Bethesda just a little bit shy of about two weeks ago which was enough for me to put about 120 or so hours into it to bring you this review to get my usual stuff out of the way real quick I review games after 100 all the time to set me apart from other reviewers on the platform and while that does include the achievements it also includes a lot more than that there's a video explaining what I covered down in the description below and my steam profile is public as well with that in mind in the case of 100 for Starfield in particular while I have very much so touched Olive I would say the handcrafted content so to speak it is a game that is host to a lot of procedurally generated content which we'll discuss over the course of this review that spans across roughly a thousand planets however we'll get to that a little bit later before we start diving into the rest of this video though I do want to mention here at the beginning I will be trying to avoid any Major Spoilers things like the main story of course as well as certain side things like individual faction quests but because this is releasing before the Early Access period for the game has even started there might be some contextual stuff in the footage that could be considered a spoiler as what I consider one versus what someone else considers a spoiler might be a little bit different so with that in mind you may just want to listen to this review if that is a concern for you first up however we have an overview of this game as I'm sure basically everyone is aware though Starfield is the First new IP from Bethesda in 25 years and at its core it is an RPG that centers and focuses on exploration in space and while it does absolutely have a lot of Hallmarks of what make a Bethesda game a Bethesda game it also adds and refines some interesting systems along the way that I think make it incredibly unique because while we have the typical I would say gameplay Loop of faction quests combat perks skills that kind of thing that you would respect from Bethesda really at this point they also at the same time I think made an effort to try quite a few new things as well before we get into all of that I do want to make a note on the technical state of the game right here towards the beginning as many people have been curious how buggy this particular game might be as previous Bethesda releases have been known to be quite buggy so a few notes on this for starters I played this game on a very high-end PC this was not an Xbox Excursion for me as this is a PC channel so I played this on PC the steam version specifically and with that in mind as this is my job I have a very high-end PC about as good as it gets on the consumer level so I can't really speak to how this game is going to perform on more mid-range systems but in any event the game was remarkably smooth for me I ran into a couple of small bugs which we'll talk about but this is easily the least buggy Bethesda title I have ever played in fact I have Skyrim and Fallout 4 on my computer right now and I I could fire those up and encounter more bugs than I've encountered here the ones I did encounter were focused around NPC movement and the two that I encountered came up pretty I would say infrequently the most common one though was seeing NPCs either flowed off into the distance or sink into the ground and either reloading a save or just walking out of an area and then back into it would fix this so it never really hindered my gameplay in any way but another common problem that popped up was that sometimes when enemies and the like would go to use their boost pack which is like a jet pack of sorts or when they would just try to jump over something sometimes it wouldn't work and they would just kind of hang in the air and bug out a little bit and that was pretty much the extent of the bugs I ran into personally beyond that the game crashed on me one time in about 120 hours which just wasn't a big deal to me so while I did encounter some stuff none of it was Game breaking and again easily the least buggy Bethesda game I've ever played from there however let's talk about these story setup of star field again we're not going to go too deep into spoilers we're basically just going to talk about the setup for the story some vague details about it as well as my general thoughts on it nonetheless if you don't even want that information potentially skip ahead on the video it should be time stamped as for the story regardless of the character we make which we'll get to in a moment we start the game as someone who was recently hired by a mining company known as Argos extractors who happens to find an artifact of some sort and upon touching it we are granted a vision of the cosmos accompanied by some music it just so happens that Argos extractors was specifically looking for this artifact as they were mining because they were hired to find it by a group known as constellation meeting with Barrett the first member of constellation that we run into puts us on the path to joining constellation ourselves where we will then take up a quest to find other artifacts and determine their purpose for the sake of spoilers that is all I'm going to tell you and that is like maybe the first 20 30 minutes of the game beyond that however I do still have some thoughts to share for starters both the story as well as the faction side quests which we'll talk about as well does actually incorporate a little bit of choice and consequence there are a few choices to be made and there are some consequences for doing them one of which I will admit actually shocked me a little bit however those choices and their Alternatives ultimately lead up to the possibility of New Game Plus which has already been confirmed to be in the game as well but there is a new game plus option that will allow you to keep your level and progress while wiping all of your items and the state of the universe as you begin the game again this is directly tied to the main story in how it functions so I don't want to talk about it too much but the available choices combined with new game plus means that it's pretty easy to play the game extensively and see everything especially in terms of the handcrafted content even without just saves coming to see a different option so beyond just those things I will say that I enjoyed the story a great deal deal it did not really go where I was expecting it surprised me a fair bit in its execution and if only because it surprised me and some of the more consequential decisions I made as part of that story I enjoyed it a great deal when I finished this game for the first time and the credits rolled it really felt like a great experience but it is important to note that this is a game rooted primarily in science fiction while it does have some light fantasy elements don't expect anything too crazy in that regard as a bit of a criticism before we move on from the story and my thoughts on it as I mentioned there are some choices to be made for the story and the faction Quest and there's a new game plus however a lot of these choices and their consequences are very well telegraphed to the point where if you make one decision or another you can pretty much guess what the outcome is going to be and while I appreciate that they give you this pretty big warning for all of these at the same time we then have this new game plus feature which means that you can't really miss anything anyway not unless you just deliberately choose not to see it so while there is some choice in con consequence here it does feel a little light in comparison to what they could have done with this new game plus New Game Plus also being tied to the story has some unique things to see so I would recommend doing the new game plus anyway even if you don't really have a concern about seeing the other options but while there is choice and consequence here I do feel like they definitely could have ran with it more and made some more substantial consequences and changes based on your actions seeing as you have this built-in feature to replay the game and see how things could have been in another way which will make more sense when people start to complete the game for themselves but to put it simply I wish they would have leaned in more on the choice and consequence because the framework and setup was there and even some of the choices are there but some of those choices don't feel as impactful as they could have in any event though I did enjoy the story I thought it was very cool and when people get around to finishing it for themselves I'm excited to hear what people have to say about it from there though let's talk a little bit about character creation there is the basic cosmetic stuff that you would expect you you can customize your body type your face there are presets as well as some contextual menus that allow you to customize things more individually so you can definitely get a pretty customized character that is to your liking however do know that despite whatever character you make here we are a silent protagonist which is absolutely my personal preference for big RPGs as attaching a voice to a character in a game like this I think really just limits your options which we saw on full display in Fallout 4. beyond the Cosmetic stuff the much more interesting part of character creation is actually the background and your traits so background is exactly that it's whatever your character was doing before they got hired on at Argos extractors whatever one you pick here will grant you three starting skills which is just a starting point for your build it's not a locked in position by any means this is literally just a starting point and we'll talk about skills in a moment however the much cooler part of the background choice is that there is some unique dialogue for every background you pick occasionally in conversations you will get dialogue options that relate to your background that can then lead to different outcomes or allow you to skip something you might have normally had to do that kind of thing so in addition to giving you a bit of a framework for role playing some starting skills there is a little bit of dialogue to be had with these as well then we have our traits traits are that classic RPG thing where they give you a positive in exchange for a negative we can take up to three of these they are all completely optional you don't have to take them at all some of them are exclusive with each other for instance you cannot be a settler of one of the colonies and a settler of another Colony as well they've got some really interesting ones my two favorites were kids stuff and hero warship or the one that gives you the adoring fan follower and the dream home one is also pretty fun but basically to give a more working example of this kids stuff makes your parents real characters that you can meet in game however you have to send them two percent of your credits every week you can get out of this by simply telling your parents you're not going to do it anymore more but this one was cool because it had so many implications Beyond just the obvious you can go talk to your parents basically whenever they can drop by constellation and give you gifts I actually ran into them in other parts of the universe so to speak on different worlds where they were on like a tourist attraction kind of thing and there was so many interactions with these two it was uh remarkable and in order to generate your parents it looks like they take your character take some of the physical traits that you gave them and then separates them out into two people who could feasibly be your parents so you'll likely see some of the exact character creation options you picked on your parents which is kind of cool hero warship gives us the attention of the adoring fan which is a throwback to the Elder Scrolls of course which gives us a very annoying follower who will occasionally gives us gifts as well as act as part of our ship crew but as I mentioned he's very annoying so you could potentially eliminate him if you get tired of him and many of the other traits as well have something like that for instance the dream home one you get a house with a mortgage right out of the gate which is normally something you have to buy into however you have a literal loan that you have to pay off and you can get out of that one by just paying off the loan of course but there's a lot of cool little stuff like that in the traits and I think a lot of them are worth checking out and while they're not exactly game defining they can add a lot to an individual's experience ultimately though I think character creation strikes a really great balance of setting up your initial character while also giving some more substantial options as well such as our background giving us specific dialogues or our traits impacting the game in various ways while also not really defining an entire playthrough if you'd like to change them later but speaking of later let's talk about progression systems there's a few here honestly but the I would say major ones are leveling up and your skills this game does use a basic experience system which is to say when we kill enemies complete quests Etc we will be earning experience which will then level us up on every level up we are granted a skill point we can then put put these points into our skills of course which then leads to the other forms of indirect progression such as modding your weapons modding your equipment researching new types of buildings to make that kind of thing skills themselves however are divided up into five sub-categories physical social combat Tech and science many of these have of course a more focused grouping if you will but chances are you'll want a little bit of each one as most everyone's gonna want a little bit of combat skill however while you can pick up new skills simply by acquiring them with your first skill point going farther than that takes a little bit more effort because as you can see each of those five subcategories is divided up into four tiers of skills the lower tiers require an increasing investment into that particular grouping of skills which is pretty straightforward basically if you want to be really great at combat you've got to put points into that tree to get down to the bottom of it and get the best stuff each individual skill is not able to be progressed simply by pumping it full of skill points every time you unlock a skill in order to unlock the next rank of which there are four maximum you have to complete a challenge for each tier that typically relates to the skill in some way as you might imagine so leveling up in skill progression is an interesting blend of Simply gaining more experience and putting skill points into things but also leveling by doing as you have to engage with those skills to get the best versions of them now on the skills specifically many of them can just be percent increases to things like damage however the fourth rank of a skill almost always grants something special on top of the normal effect for instance if you pump up your laser weapon skill the fourth rank gives you a chance to set things on fire if you hit them with laser weapons if you max out the Boost pack skill you have the chance to knock enemies down and set them on fire when you boost in combat next to them so in addition to the regular percentage increases they did add some fun things to the individual skills if you put enough of an investment into them which I think helps specialize your character because between all the skills you can see on screen the ranks that you can put into them in order to become a truly jack of all trades character you've got to start hitting like above level 100 which means throughout most of the game you're going to have to specialize in something which I think helps people find their way naturally into individual play Styles like say a melee build or someone who's trying to talk their way through enemies someone who wants to use the Boost pack or be really good at spaceship combat as part of the science tree for instance so I think they did a really good job with the skills however it is worth mentioning that some of the initial skills I think are almost mandatory pickups because you cannot use a boost pack at all until you take a point in the Boost pack skill and being able to Traverse planets with a boost pack in the absence of vehicles is really important you have to take the lock picking skill known as security for the digital locks in the game as part of the tech Tree in order to be able to lock pick anything above a novice lock so it's important to understand what you can do without a skill and what you need the skill to do such as in the case of stealth or sneaking around you don't need the stealth skill to sneak however you do need the stealth skill to Aid to it better of course but also in order to see enemies detection range so if you want to know whether or not you're hidden or enemies have detected you how close they are to detecting you that is something getting the actual skill can help you out with but you don't need it to sneak whereas if I want to pickpocket someone I do need that if I want to bribe a guard when I got caught stealing something I need the skill to do that so the game can be a little inconsistent in what requires a skill period and what having the skill just makes you better at which I think is really the only point of contention I had with it because otherwise I enjoyed it quite a bit that said as I mentioned skills lead to other things as getting points into skills is going to give you access to your sort of more indirect forms of progression such as crafting and getting better upgrades there is a research station on your ship as well as throughout the game that you can find where you can spend the various materials that you're finding and Gathering throughout the game so you research very various things that you can then craft such as new ways to cook things new ways to modify your weapons Etc so when you get the appropriate skill for something you'll usually then have to research that thing before you can actually start crafting for it and that's how you do things like make modding weapons better and easier or in some cases it just gives you access to buying better upgrades for instance if you want to build the best spaceships possible you need to grab the skill that is going to allow you access to the best of the best spaceship modules that you can then buy from the spaceship vendor at Major settlements which we'll get into but it doesn't even stop there of course because skills also grant us access to special dialogues relating to that skill though this never seemed locked off by rank just one rank and any skill seem to give you the dialogue option for it and these can help out in a variety of situations one that I found particularly useful was the medicine skill as sometimes if I was dealing with a quest that required me to talk to a doctor who didn't want to help me with something I could then use medicine to be like well actually I'm also a doctor and then suddenly they would be much more helpful that kind of thing so some of the skills can provide alternatives to quests even just through dialogue last but not least on progression systems though we have the skill magazines they made a return throughout the world you can find skill magazines that will grant you useful benefits if you find them such as increasing damage with specific weapon types reducing fall damage increasing carry capacity just things like that but moving on from there let's talk a little bit about the game world and the mini systems it has going for it so let's kick it off with the settled systems as it were where Humanity has settled and made various cities and is generally just trying to survive out there in the universe early on into the game once you reach the city of New Atlantis there is a quest that will give you access to a history museum of sorts that will explain the recent history of the game honestly I love that museum because I think it does a fantastic job of quickly summing up a lot of the most important aspects of the World building as you get to grips with the rest of the world but the long and short of it is almost 200 years ago from the time the game starts I think like 180 if you want to get specific we as a species realized that Earth's atmosphere was deteriorating and the planet would soon become uninhabitable and we poured all our Research into solving that problem before humans left Earth before it became a Barren Wasteland and settled out in the Stars which then became known as the settled systems this gave rise to a few different factions which we will talk about each with their own major Hub I would say there are three primary large cities alongside a handful of minor settlements and things like that just scattered throughout all the systems we can explore so the first city you're almost certainly going to go to is new Atlantis because this is where the home of constellation is and it is the settlement of the United Colonies they sort of led the charge in humans departure from Earth and became the de facto leadership afterwards however not everyone liked the United Colonies and as humans can tend to do generally split off and started doing their own thing which is how we saw the rise of the Freestar Collective which is a group of people living on the frontier of space farming and getting by the best they can while promoting a lifestyle that is a bit more free than the rather restrictive bureaucracy of the United Colonies then of course we have slightly more criminal elements let's say sanctioned criminality so to speak gave rise to the city of neon which can sell you the drug Aurora which is pretty much the only place it's legal but neon is almost the cyberpunk imagining of this world it is a very bright and colorful place as you might imagine from the name and it feels much more futuristic than I would say pretty much anything else does and these settlements alongside your reputation with their factions and everything that is to say how much work you did for them can eventually give you access to things like player housing the ability to decorate said houses and just your general standing with that group of people overall so how how you interact with these people can give you access to various perks things like that so for instance if you want to buy a house this might be important to you but I tell you all that to tell you a little bit about the main joinable factions of the game I do want to start this section by mentioning however that this is not all of the factions of the game these are just the ones you can join there are a couple of others that relate to story and things like that that I don't really want to mention here as I think they are best discovered for yourselves but in terms of joinable factions we have the United Colonies Vanguard the Freestar Rangers the Crimson Fleet and ryujin industries each of these will expose you to a different way of thinking out here in the settled system kind of introduce you to a lot of the World building but each of these factions also represents a choice that will then potentially go on to have lasting effects on the world or Universe outside of just that faction for spoilers sake we won't go like full deep dive into these but I did want to talk about them a little bit the United Colonies Vanguard is really cool as it is a military branch so to speak of the United Colonies where they allow citizens with their own ships to defend the United Colonies in a bid for citizenship that then leads to benefits within the United Colonies such as the ability to buy a house or discounted prices on Goods this one gives you a ton of background as to the state of the game in terms of the world and everything but it also deals with a lot of recent events as a byproduct of that and a more pressing threat to all of the human settlements period that I thought was really really cool well I don't think this is the best faction in terms of its content it was my personal favorite then we had the Freestar Rangers this one felt a little I would say stereotypical to be honest with you the Freestar collective in general kind of occupies the space of the space cowboy so to speak when people think the frontier of space it kind of turns into like this wild west Vibe at least here in the US and that's pretty much what the Freestar Collective is it's very much so like Space Cowboys and the Rangers are no different you effectively play a sheriff who needs to deal with some local problems that spin into bigger things overall I enjoyed it it wasn't bad by any means but it felt the most stereotypical I would say which isn't always a bad thing then we have the Crimson Fleet these are space pirates you can join them though this Quest I will say the least about because the Crimson Fleet I think was probably the best faction overall in terms of the narrative the quest and the content I will say however that this one does involve a lot of spaceship combat so if you're not specced out for that I would be careful but very very cool faction Quest and then we have ryujin Industries this is the most cyberpunk I would say of all the factions it's very much so corporate Espionage and sneaking around things like that I also enjoyed this one a great deal it leads to some really cool moments but it's a little less action-packed than the rest of them now each of these factions promotes a certain approach to problems while you certainly don't don't have to go in with a certain approach in mind there are some skills or things that would help out with it as I mentioned ryugen Industries it helps if you know how to sneak lock pick talk your way out of problems that kind of thing it's almost got like a social engineering aspect to it to a degree but then you have something like the Crimson Fleet where a combat-oriented character and a spaceship pilot are really going to shine so while those approaches aren't necessary each of those factions does sort of represent a certain play style that makes it easier if you're leaning into it but in any event I enjoyed pretty much all of these there were some really great quests in here that were worth your time and they really flesh out the universe as a result but speaking of the universe or I guess more specifically the Galaxy let's talk a little bit about exploration exploration takes a few different forms in this game pretty much space exploration or exploring a particular planet or local map so just on the map level we have the local map that is to say the area we are actually in whether that be a Starship a section of a planet Etc and then we have the system map this is the solar system that we are currently in there's like a hundred of these which means there are a lot and they wanted these to be grounded in reality somewhat and as a result of that we see all different types of stars some of them only have like one planet some of them have tons of planets we see moons things like that and basically just all the types of planets you would actually expect because again this game leans more heavily on science fiction than it does fantasy so while we'll get to the ship stuff here in a moment at this point I want to mention that you shouldn't be expecting to say land or walk on a gas giant planet because that's not something you can actually do even if we had the technology to do so because it's not a solid surface for you to land on and then up from the system map a layer we have the Galaxy map this shows us all the stars we could potentially go to however going to them typically requires a ship that is capable of doing so and while you'll get a spaceship pretty early on what I mean in this regard is the ability to grab jump as based on the capabilities of your ship you can go a certain distance to other stars other systems and increasing your ability to do that is going to make it easier to get to other places however each of those individual systems has a suggested level associated with it which gives you a rough idea of the level you should probably be before you try to mess around there because that is the level that the encounters you may run into will be or Spawn from though I will say after like level 30 or 40 and you get a solid build and Equipment under you you don't really have to worry about that too much anymore now on the system map that is to say you're when you're looking at planets you can scan them from your ship to get an idea of the resources and things they have but also to highlight various Landing areas because now I want to talk about the separation of space exploration and Planet exploration so space is sort of its own self-contained thing you have a ship you can fly it around you can engage in space combat even which we'll talk more about shortly but in order to explore a planet you have to sort of load into that planet which requires landing on it again each planet may or may not have predetermined Landing points however those aren't the only places you can land you can land most anywhere on a planet that is somewhere you could actually land like you know not in the middle of an ocean for instance and then at that point it will generate a surrounding landscape for you to explore if you just chose a random place and this is how you can do things like build certain outposts set up your own settlements Etc or even set up those outposts to farm that particular place for a specific resource this individual sort of local map will also generate areas of interest for you to explore and based on the planet you're on it will have certain Wildlife flora fauna things that it might spawn in with you this is where the sort of procedural content comes up based on where you land this area is not infinite you can't just run forever there is a boundary in the surrounding area that requires you to move your ship if you want to go far other which basically means the landing somewhere else I will say this is not personally a restriction that I care about but do know that you can't just walk from one end to a planet to the other even if you wanted to though as we'll get to there's not really much of a reason to do that anyway because as I mentioned there are a few predetermined Landing spots on some planets and while these are of course our more set locations like our major cities and their surrounding areas major Quest hubs that kind of thing other minor settlements there's also a lot of I would say more generic places like science outposts civilian Outpost fracking station things like that and while those are sort of predetermined areas that you can find just by scanning a planet the problem with those is that if you start exploring system by System you'll notice that these places are very very similar many of them just have like the same structure with different contents so if you see a science Outpost you know pretty much what it looks like after a certain point and while it might have different enemies or different things going on you do get to a point where you're like all right I'm basically seen this so while there is an absolute ton of handcrafted content much of the procedural content like landing at different points on a planet or just finding even the more generic outposts and things like that it does come a point where there's a bit of diminishing return once you've played for so long I will say playing just through the handcrafted stuff that I never really saw any repeats or anything like that until I deliberately started going exploring on my own and even then it took a while so when it comes to actually landing on and exploring various planets while you can see some really cool stuff like some alien life forms in the form of alien animals really and you can even find some unique locations unless you want to build an outpost there or you are just deliberately looking for those Scenic views so to speak there's really not much to be had from exploring the individual planets and I don't think that's gonna be for everyone frankly the scope of it is impressive nonetheless as all of those things combined everything I just mentioned in this section really May manages to really capture the feeling of exploring space which was pretty remarkable lastly on that subject however though as you might imagine some of these planets are not exactly welcoming let's say they have hazards associated with them extreme temperatures extreme environments and your resistance to those things is important which is based on the spacesuit you have on because otherwise you could start taking on harmful effects diseases injuries all sorts of stuff that can then in some cases outright kill you or at the very least hamper your progress so to speak which is an especially important thing to keep in mind when it comes to building your outposts outposts are pretty much what you would expect you can build an outpost it's very similar to settlement building in Fallout 4 or where you effectively build a settlement from the ground up though it's worth a mention that the player housing in the actual cities also allows you to customize and decorate the housing in much the same way the settlement system works but obviously with different things for outposts we can send up all sorts of things to allow us to harvest the resources of the planet we're on and then we can use those resources to Aid our research which will allow us to build and construct more interesting things if we pick up the right skills we can even start building these outposts in more dangerous environments allowing us to survive and take advantage of the resources of planets we might not otherwise inhabit and what's crazy to me is that this system is completely optional you don't need to engage with this at all however if you want that space exploration Sim feeling you can build up this network of outposts that are all sharing resources and harvesting them and essentially settling the universe out there or you can just not do that at all and stick to the handcrafted content which I thought was remarkable they have this entire system that is basically there just to Aid exploration and isn't required to do anything beyond what you want to do with it from there however let's talk a little bit about ships more specifically spaceships this system is pretty crazy to me you can buy ships upgrade ships build them from scratch participate in spaceship combat and there's a lot going on here you'll get your first ship just as part of the main story to get you going and then from there it's pretty much dealer's Choice it's going to cost you credits of course if you want the best of the best stuff you also need to pick up the skills for getting better and better upgrades to your own pilot skills getting the most out of your ship weapons simply allowing you to have more crew on board but regardless of your own setup the ship is a pretty integral part of what you're doing in this game so for starters in terms of piloting much like the rest of the game you can do this in first person or third person and I will say that switching between the two and flying your ship in and out of space is a really cool thing to see honestly just from a experience standpoint but when it comes to Flying your ship the ship has a variety of systems that are the most important to its actual function which is the menu in the bottom left there the reactor of our ship and a little bit of our own skill will determine how much power that reactor is pumping out we can then take those units of power and assign them to the critical ship systems such as our weapons Shields the grav Drive Etc in order to make use of them at all we have to be supplying some power and then how good it gets from there is determined by how much power we're giving those things so weapons deal more damage the more power you give them the shields absorb more damage with the more power you give them Etc however it's possible to Target these systems individually on enemy ships or your own because as they take damage you will be limited to the amount of power you can assign those systems until they are completely taken offline they will repair slowly over time if you stop taking damage to them but managing all those systems is an important part of spaceship combat however I would say your Shields and your Hull Health are the most important Shields will block damage until it's gone of course at which point your Hull Health just becomes your regular Health meter and once that goes empty your ship gets destroyed or the enemies vice versa your ship weapons have a sort of recharge time based on how much you're using them you can typically have like three attached to a ship at any given time but that's really up to you and how you built it but you're gonna have a variety of ship weapons and customizing those is also a big part of combat but first let's talk about building and upgrading a ship so for starters let's talk about cargo space your inventory weight is limited in this game but you can store things on your ship this is determined by how much inventory weight your ship has via their cargo hold which is determined by the number of cargo modules the ship has so do keep in mind that your bigger cargo inventory space is down to how much room your ship has and what's more you can even do some illicit smuggling some items are labeled as Contraband and if you fly into a system with them you will be scanned and if that scan turns up any illicit Goods you'll be arrested like you had committed any other crime but you can get both a skill actually and some cargo modules and particular that are meant to hide these smuggled Goods so you can still bring them into places and they are typically worth a ton of money so you can even set up a sort of illicit smuggling operation if you wanted to now beyond that let's talk about upgrading and building ships so for the people who don't want to build their own custom ship it is possible to just upgrade the systems a ship already has so if you don't want to lean into that system this is for you upgrading a system merely allows you to upgrade the core systems of the ship the shields the weapons the grav Drive the reactor things like that but let's say you want to get a little more involved let's say you want to make your own ship you can do that though you do need a chip already so you can go into the ship Builder and either use the parts assembled from the ship you already have or delete all of them and start buying new parts individually and building your own ship the only real limits here are there are a few checklists you have to meet because basically the ship has to be able to fly so the game won't let you finish a ship unless you have cleared all these errors out but beyond that it's pretty pretty much do whatever you want to do with it you can maximize cargo space maximize weapons there's so many things you can do with this though there are a few rules of thumb for starters everything you add adds Mass to the ship and over a certain point that becomes a problem you need more and more engines to move it and then certain ship parts are only compatible with other types of ship parts there are classes of ships if you will but as far as the system goes it's mostly just snapping pieces together in a way that you find particularly pleasing and then each of those individual parts has a bunch of bonuses this is where your skills come in handy because there is a skill that will give you access to better and better ship parts that you can use and then at that point they become available at any vendor in order to access all this stuff you can basically go to any major settlement which will then have a ship Services technician who gives you access to these menus in any event though this was a remarkably in-depth system but believe it or not we're not even done because we have a few more things I want to talk about you can take on crew members if you will these can either be companions that you have or more generic NPCs that you can hire at the individual places you land at in the major settlements they'll usually have like a bar nearby and you can recruit people there to man your ship Each of which will have their own skills that can help you out you can also participate in piracy you can hail just passive vessels and essentially force them to hand things over based on the Firepower of your own ship versus theirs if you decide you would like to take someone ship over instead of outright destroying it if you take out their engines and there are no other enemy ships around you can actually dock that enemy ship take out the enemies individually as people and then just steal their ship basically and all the stuff it has on it and that's to say nothing of the ship combat itself now when it comes to ship combat I will say it was very stat focused enemy shifts and things have levels based on how powerful their ship is versus yours and more often than not this felt like less a matter of skill or tactics or anything and just straight up stats you either have the weapons and things to punch through their their Shields and hulls or you don't especially when you're fighting more than one enemy which can happen later on so it did kind of feel like space combat could oscillate between me either just absolutely dominating every point I came by or I just get destroyed immediately and there just wasn't a lot of in between so while the feel of space combat and everything and all of its surrounding systems are really really great it can be difficult to get by if you are not upgrading your ship especially because Random Encounters from the Bethesda world are pretty much down to space encounters when you arrive or travel to a new planet or system there's a chance when you do so it will spawn an encounter of some sort this can be friendly or you know unique you might run into an NPC that has something to say a unique situation or it might just simply be an attack and getting jumped in a ship that is just not ready for it is almost certain death however on that note this game does allow you to fast travel from basically anywhere interior locations for the most part outside of a few specific areas are not a restriction anymore like they were in previous games you don't have to be outside you can actually go to your Journal press I believe it's R by default on a mouse and keyboard which will then show you exactly where that Quest takes place in the galaxy and then ask if you want to travel there there are very few places you cannot fast travel from so while the universe is vast and gigantic it can also be traversed very quickly and very easily if you choose to do so which is yet another way that this game can be either completely focused on the handcrafted content and stories or a more free form experience based around the space exploration and all of that comes together remarkably well now however let's finally talk about regular old combat that is to say on foot combat I want to start this section off by saying that this game is an RPG before it is a first person shooter or anything like that which means your success in combat is down to your character's skill and not yours while there is a degree of skill that you can bring to the table via things like aiming well if you do not build a character that is good at combat they're not going to be good at combat and while this channel covers a lot of older isometric games where that is more readily apparent somehow in 2023 there's still some clunkiness around the transition to third or first person games where when the game is truly an RPG and based around your character's skill level a lot of people seem to disconnect with that and the answer to that is of course the appropriate skills skills that are going to make you effective at combat simply by dealing more damage with certain weapon types granting you access to certain things like a slide in combat the Boost pack skill which you can use in combat and slow down time at Max rank just to name a few so do keep in mind combat is down to your character's skill and abilities more so than yours but starting with the basics each enemy has a level assigned to them which determines their stance some of which are upgraded more difficult variants of enemies with multiple health bars these enemies can drop unique gear here gear is the other big part of combat outside of the obvious thing like our weapons we also have our space suit and clothes so while this system isn't as in depth as Fallout 4's was which had like this whole layered armor system Starfield basically has clothes and your space suit your space suit is divided up into your helmet your actual suit and then your Boost pack each of these will have various stats in terms of what it reduces damage wise and then resistance to various elements that will come into play when you're on a dangerous planet in terms of its environment and how well your spacesuit can protect you from that environmental effect and then there's all sorts of weapons be they melee all types of guns modifiers to those Guns Etc all of those things can come in one of a few different Rarity tiers which are effectively the legendary weapons from Fallout 4 but a little more complicated because each color-coded Rarity tier adds an extra effect as a bass line so blue purple and then orange orange for instance will have three unique effects to that equipment in addition to its regular stats which includes the modifiers that you can add via weapon or spacesuit mods so it's possible to say find an incredibly great weapon that is a legendary with these three effects and then mod that to make it even better which is the same for the space suit stuff so the gear plus your skills is going to equal what you can do in combat and the nice thing about this weapon system just like in Fallout 4 is that you can occasionally find a weapon that just changes the way you play entirely you're never really quite sure that you are locked into a weapon anymore because you could potentially find one that is just incredible like I did with this weapon on screen known as unmitigated violence this was effectively a sniper rifle that rolled a legendary perk if you will I guess I could call it that means enemies at full health take double damage from a weapon that already did obscene damage so if I wanted to play a stealth sniper it doesn't get much better than this and I was just destroying enemies with this thing and while I had already committed to using laser weapons I wasn't using sniper rifles in particular so finding this laser weapon version of a sniper rifle was really cool I also found a dead eye pistol that just did insane damage as well at the level I found it in which is a great way to just delete low level enemies as I focused on the bigger ones with bigger weapons but ultimately I think the combat felt really smooth and I enjoyed it a lot there's not really a system in combat for things like that's more of a spaceship thing here and this game just gets a lot of comparisons to Fallout so I wanted to mention that specifically but combat was again very smooth I had a lot of fun with it it just comes down to what skills you as a player have picked up for your character because that's how you're going to be able to do things like use a boost pack in the middle of combat which can then get its own damaging effects and abilities how accurate you are with a weapon depends on certain skills can you ignore armor can you use laser weapons effectively can you use throwing grenades do you want to do an unarmed build Etc there's so many different approaches which is pretty standard for a Bethesda game but ultimately it depends on the character you build though last for this section I did want to mention a couple of things for starters we see a return of the favorite slot system that is to say you can favorite weapons and things to switch to them automatically at the Press of a hotkey very very useful and last but not least there is one system I have been deliberately not talking about that adds both a little something to exploration and combat and is a little more fantasy oriented however it is directly tied to the main story so I'm just not going to mention it here because it would just be a huge spoiler there is a little more to combat or there can be but I simply can't say what it is without spoiling the story so enjoy that mystery I guess that does finally however bring us to our companions as this simply wouldn't be a big huge Bethesda RPG without companions now there is a difference between Companions and crew crew are there to man your outposts your spaceship potentially Etc some of them will even have generic names like defense specialist that kind of thing most of our big companions however are going to come directly from constellation people like Sarah Morgan Barrett just to name the two big ones I will say Sarah Morgan and Barrett I really enjoyed they had really cool stories with you know side quests and everything and the other companions there was a few of them but I found them a little less interesting we have Sam Coe who was basically just a space cowboy he has a daughter though which is an interesting Dynamic for a companion in a game like this and then there was andreja I believe her name is I'm not sure how to pronounce it I might be butchering that but she's intended to be a bit of a mystery but by the time I got around to having her around I was just like not really interested in what that mystery was to be honest nonetheless though these companions do have personalities quest lines Etc things they want you to do some of them actually relate to the main story like as you meet them because they're part of constellation which is part of the main story some of them have extra things for you to do that relate back to that and a select few of them even have potential romances which can be as in-depth or inconsequential as you choose to make them which was certainly a nice touch but if I'm being honest the only two companions in this game I really cared for were the first two Barrett and Sarah Morgan the rest of them honestly just weren't doing it for me but that is finally where we're gonna start to wrap this up a little bit now I normally cover steam deck compatibility but I will say that the one pager of info that Bethesda sent over with the review copy specifically mentioned that handheld devices were a bit underpowered for this game so they didn't recommend people play on those and I of course then went on to test this myself and I would have to say they were right it was incredibly choppy and then when I tried to record just to even show that the game would crash immediately so while I would never say never as people tend to be resourceful I personally couldn't get this to run on Steam deck in anywhere approaching what would be an acceptable frame rate Etc so that's kind of all I can report on that front all of that however does finally bring us to our positives negatives and then we will wrap this thing up so on the positive side of things we have all of these systems and directions that Bethesda went with this that we're just really really refined versions of what they already did well it kind of showed me that they've at least been listening to player feedback over the last 10 years because this game actually manages to feel like an RPG there's also entire systems you don't have to engage with at all that are just there if you want to happen to mess around with them like The Outpost system on top of that every system I ran into was incredibly polished and all of that felt really great to play and mess around with and experience which is an awesome feeling in addition to all of the work that I think went into making this feel like a space exploration game there were so many moments where I was just kind of out in the vastness of it and I was like they really nailed the feeling of just exploring this immense impossibly large Galaxy because there's just so much here and while yeah some of it's absolutely procedural generated and not exactly going going to be anything new per se if you wanted to experience that stuff it's there and they capture that feeling remarkably well which has certainly helped Along by another positive which is that Bethesda World building Bethesda is incredibly great at building a world that feels genuine and it's certainly no exception here there were so many moments where I was just really enthralled by the way everything was working all the factions and their interactions with each other the writing even so I think it's safe to say they nailed the World building even though I will admit that personally I wish they had gone a little more fantasy oriented but I can see why they didn't they wanted to give this game its own unique identity and while I personally prefer more Fantastical things they did a lot of remarkable work with this more science fiction oriented universe and there were a lot of moments throughout the story in the faction Quest where I was genuinely Blown Away in spite of all that there are absolutely a few negatives like there is with every game though my personal biggest one was that I wish wish they had taken more chances so to speak with more far-reaching consequences as I mentioned much earlier in the video while there are some big choices that can lead to different outcomes they're incredibly well telegraphed the other outcome you think might have happened is usually pretty much what happened because they basically tell you so while there are big choices to be made I really wish they had leaned into that a little more and offered more and potentially even unique playthroughs through the game and story because they have this built-in New Game Plus mode that is almost custom built for unique and interesting playthroughs which will again make more sense when people beat the story and I feel like they just really could have leaned into that so much more than they did but I will say in spite of them not doing that all of the systems and everything are still a huge step in the right direction I just wish they had taken that direction a little bit farther the other negative for me was exploration outside of the handcrafted content Because unless you are farming resources on a planet there's just not a lot of reason to do it because a lot of it comes down to either radiant quests or just your own curiosity and after a while you get tired of seeing another new life form that is just going to drop the same type of materials as every other new life form and it just feels like the game lacks a compelling reason to make you explore some of these more isolated planets and while I do think some of that is intentional they stated many times that they were kind of going for realism with a lot of these planets in the sense that sometimes the planet is just an ice ball there's nothing there I think it's a little unfortunate that you see these huge planets and things and you know for a fact that there's just not gonna be anything worth finding there though to their credit you don't have to do that at all it's just a little bit of a bummer to me that there isn't something there especially when you compare it to again all the handcrafted content which I thought was for the most part really really well done all in all though that brings us to our conclusion Starfield is a massive game I think no matter how you feel about it or Bethesda you have to admit that this game is huge it has so many things on offer for so many different people so many different ways to play it and while there's all this handcrafted content you could ignore all of that and just go explore the Galaxy and farm it for resources even maybe build up your own settlements if you wanted maybe you just want to be the best spaceship Captain there is that is also a possibility and choosing to do any of those things wouldn't get in the way of the more traditional I would say Bethesda game experience that they've went on to add a ton of refined systems to that make it feel like more of an RPG than some of their more recent previous work has frankly and to me that's a huge step in the right direction so while Starfield I think as a game has some weak points here and there it is an otherwise great RPG that is very easy to recommend because you can of course get it on Game Pass for very cheap or if you pre-ordered I believe the Premium Edition you'll have Early Access starting tomorrow from the time of this video until it launches on September 6th more specifically I think the base price of the game seventy dollars is more than worth your money and thus the game gets a buy from me I think it's worth checking out especially since because regardless of whether or not you like this game it is almost certainly going to be incorporating some of its Tech into Elder Scrolls 6 so it'll be curious to see what is kept from here as they have just started development on Elder Scrolls 6. that is pretty much going to do it for this video I hope you enjoyed it this should be a pretty long review I don't know exactly how long it'll wind up being I'd be surprised if it's less than an hour though so if you made it this far and you watched the whole thing truly thank you it means the world to me that people are so interested in my opinion about games or at the very least learning about them so with that in mind don't forget to like comment subscribe let me know what you think about all this down below I'd love to hear your thoughts on it but regardless of any of that truly just thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 1,283,982

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, starfield, starfield gameplay, starfield character creation, starfield backgrounds, starfield builds, starfield skills, starfield traits, starfield adoring fan, starfield kid stuff, starfield leaks, starfield review pc, starfield leaked gameplay, starfield direct, starfield build guide, starfield boost pack, starfield skill trees, starfield review, starfield review after 100%, starfield mortismal, starfield mortismal gaming

Id: blQjbbF7HlQ

Length: 52min 7sec (3127 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023