The Disappointment of Starfield

the fallouts and Elder Scrolls franchises have always been a huge part of my life so I was extremely excited to get my hands on Starfield Bethesda promised some big things with this game and while I do find some charming things about Starfield after almost 200 hours played I do feel disappointed in more ways than one so I welcome you to join me as we dissect bethesda's latest epic space fairing RPG [Music] Starfield part one exploration being a Bethesda game one might say that the most important ingredient is designing and promoting immersive player-driven exploration being pulled into many directions is something often set about Bethesda games seeing a landmark and deciding to go was how it engaged you but finding a million things to do along the way was where it hooked you Skyrim wasn't perfect but it did this pretty well you could walk in any direction it seemed and find at least something interesting could have been a dungeon a champion a boss a dragon dri shrines something there placed for you to find by an actual human being I remember stumbling onto so many quests and things far beyond what occup the spaces in between Skyrim crosis on top of that Frosty Mountain Mur as Beacon a lighthouse and the last Expedition are just a few to come to mind the world was large but it was also dense with logic to it things were put in places that actually made sense and they were where they should be wood Mills placed along rivers mines placed in mountains and Bandit camps where you would likely to see them which would be outside of town in the thicket again it wasn't perfect but the world was all things considered pretty compelling and exciting to explore I would argue that Starfield does not have that satisfying World design nor immersive exploration and for a game built in the sandbox style it is a noteworthy misstep that I will be going into in detail to illustrate my points I'm going to just show you exactly what I saw the moments I landed down on Newton 3 the following footage was taken 75 hours into my first save file this is Newton 3 beautiful it's rainy and it's hazy dotted with neon glow caps nestled the top bulbous rocks looks pretty cool right it's a perfect backdrop for a game designer and you can imagine the hundreds of potential stories and characters and pieces of content you could place inside of it yet Starfield does not take advantage of this opportunity just for some context leading up to this moment I had been struggling to enjoy starfields exploration I just found it very boring of Planet hopping into these procedurally generated worlds because they didn't seem to provide enough immersive exploration the way Skyrim did and its problems extend far beyond its scale the basic gameplay Loop of Starfield revolves around points of interest which are the 3D map icons that pop up when you open your scanner they range from caves to military bases to simple ponds or even Rock structures when you land on a planet in Starfield the first thing you do is open your scanner and check out where the points of interest are then you turn to them and you run you run you run you run and you run exploring worlds with map icons is something we're all very used to it's perfectly fine it helps guide players to meaningful content while reducing the frustrations of understanding what he or she should be doing after all without icons a large portion of players would feel overwhelmed and be unsure of actually where to even go so they can be a good thing Skyrim had plenty of map icons but the problem with Starfield is that it's to a fault almost exclusively relies on these map icons and the worlds are otherwise very Barren after landing on over 100 planets I can confidently say that there is next to no reason why why you shouldn't be running to these map icons because if you go off the beaten path and walk around in pretty much any direction you will almost always find absolutely nothing the truth is the spaces connecting map icons and Starfield are empty not kind of sort of empty empty unless you want to shoot random Wildlife on only a fifth of the planets more successful games retain the map marker system while sprinkling in content between them this system rewards the player that wants to step off the beaten path it can be something very complex like finding a politically charged mini narrative that takes you 5 hours found in The Witcher or you can stumble onto a town or it could be as simple as stashing an iconic item away in a dumpster in cyberpunk like you know Skippy other times it's those moments of environmental storytelling that we all know and love something to show you that this place has been lived in there's a depthness or uniqueness to it drawing the player in Sometimes the best thing you can add into a game is something the player feels not finds and in all my time with Starfield I can say that I never found anything like this outside of some very basic things an outpost with a man who threaten to kill me if I didn't leave his little cabin or a ship with a small conversation with an AI computer nothing very complicated and nothing very uh expansive and when you step back and look at Starfield in this capacity the spaces in between only exist to connect the points of interest together and they are very very big empty spaces so the general gameplay Loop is just to land scan for POI and just walk to it or if there's Jack shits then you pack up get back in your ship and land in another spot and try again which means set of annoying loading screens the problem with Starfield is that when you're on a planet you can pretty much ignore everything around you while you run to these pois that is because Starfield is a huge landscape of procedurally generated nothingness Barren Landscapes of dirt and Frozen emptiness and after a while you realize there's actually not very much to find and in the process it even misses the most important elements of immersive player exploration having the player select an icon to run to but get distracted while running to it this is why people like playing Skyrim sure eventually you might find a river or a lake but even if you did it wouldn't matter because you can't really swim and most bodies of water are toxic and kill you yeah you can stand next to it and take a photo but I don't count photo mode as a replacement for game mechanics or exploration it's just a feature you will find different colored terrain rocks to mine from spacers to kill a building but nothing more and nothing less no distractions no unique gameplay no real characters to find and no World building for the most part when the best part about your game are the views then yeah Houston we have a problem here the players of Starfield are then Tethered to a string of pois like puppets and what results is a lack of any immersive exploration and in turn player freedom and after a while it gets really old but it wouldn't matter even if you found something unique Because unless you build an outpost you can't even catalog the planets you visit you have to somehow someway figure out that the white glow dots on your starm map are systems you've already been to and then flick through a bunch of menus just so you could check out each individual Planet manually there should have been a catalog of places the player has visited I mean I think that's a no-brainer the points of interest are also copy pasted among the star system which is another ugly side effect of the procedurally generated system that was used to create the planets basically starfields POI layouts are exactly the same no matter what planet you visit and honestly I can't even believe this is a thing I mean how did a AAA game get away with doing this you could be halfway across the Galaxy and find the exact same cave or Outpost with the same guards and even the same items placed in the same places I for one recall many times fighting inside this exact back layouts on a dozen different planets but it doesn't take 12 times to break immersion even the second time I saw this facility it shattered it instantly this might be one of the laziest things I've ever seen and a direct reason why the game should never have been designed strictly with procedural generation so you can imagine my surprise when I landed on Newton 3 and I did find something very interesting invisible crabs well not just invisible crabs invisible mean crabs hunting invisible fat crabs again leading up to this point I found very little if any natural world building in Starfield and World building provides the reason to explore again this is what Skyrim did so well so predators and prey cloaking this is exciting it piqued my interest I began to walk around the planets and saw several more fat creatures die to the mean ones I wondered what other strange things I would discover on Newton 3 so I spent 2 hours running around this planets hunting for more unexpected treats and treasures and I would ultimately find absolutely nothing no other beings no other biomes and nothing to do just a planet full of copy pasted pois that I had already seen and a handful of invisible crabs there had to be more the invisible crabs of Newton 3 had to be part of something greater this is a Bethesda game so exploration couldn't be this unsatisfying it couldn't just be an endless loop of cycling through menus and menus and menus sitting through a cacophony of irritating loading screens need to land on a mystery planet skin spin around and find so few reasons to actually explore [Music] it Starfield could not be this shallow determined Vasco and I packed up and we headed for Newton's other planets hoping to find at least one more planet that felt immersive in the way that I wanted but I guess I shouldn't have had the Hope Newton 2 was a snowy World eerily similar to the the coold places I had visited in the system next door a star ship landed on its Moon and I killed the starborn I had done this on many planets by now these enemies without a doubt give you the best fights in this game but this is the only capacity that you will see them outside of temples or ship fighting I think starborn and Starfield are very underutilized at least for gameplay furthermore Starfield has a clear lack of enemies you either fight spacers robots or four-legged creatures which have virtually no distinction between them gameplay-wise you can find teram morphs if you're doing the UC quest line which also again don't have any unique AI to them though all the game playay in Starfield is very homogeneous spacers shoot you until they're critically injured and then run for the hills every single time and the creatures run straight at you and try to hit you with her claws and if they connect you get stunned and pushed back it is not a very fun gameplay mechanic in the slightest so after Newton 2 we moved on to its first moon and despite it looking nice there was nothing to see or do outside of yet again another Starship ship fight Newton 2's second moon was the exact same design with just a hint of yellow on its surface and the same ship landed conveniently after I arrived I saw a cave on Newton 6 but I know for a fact I've already been in this cave like seven times before some purple Landscaping gas clouds on 5B pretty cool but it didn't change anything about the gamep playay in fact the environmental hazard system in Starfield is not fleshed out in any way why have a resistant stat for armor when it doesn't even matter anyway all of the Survivor elements are extremely underbaked another ship with starborn on 5C and a mining Outpost too the one that I had seen many many times before after visiting Newton's entire system I counted up a total of 50 loading screens 5 30second fights and a handful of uneventful map icons amidst the many miles of walking Barren Planet surfaces nobody can tell me that Newton as a system has anything unique going on and therefore is worth visiting at all Starfield remains stretched too thin for my liking you could have added up all the encounters I had within this system and place them on a single planet and I would have had more organic exploration it might not have been that more immersive because really Starfield is a game of repetition and nothing is handcrafted but at least it would have been more engaging however the solution is not to cram Starfield full of more stuff it's to make the game more immersive Ive and in a word make it more dense if we were to Simply add 50 pois to every planets it wouldn't make the game any more dense it would simply transform Starfield into Far Cry being bloated comes with some terrible side effects and it might be almost as bad as being empty The Witcher 3's map is a terrible mess of icons but people love it because the world is built with a lot of care outstanding Side Stories and content can be found everywhere in the design of the continents were absolutely packed with detail which made the game feel compelling another great example of of a world worth exploring every inch is dog town in Phantom Liberty dog town is a very small space but is also very dense and remember density is not dependent on scale dog town is crammed with activities random events people places amazing visuals unique architecture crazy amounts of World building lots of visual flare attitude crime and cool things to find but most importantly every pocket of dog town has a unique vibe to it the thing Starfield does not understand is that quantity does not make a game good quality does and that kind of quality can never be attained using procedural generation tools I mean if I asked you to tell me what this planet is Could you actually do it could you tell me where I am right now could you tell me where this base is when one of my map markers is a small pond with five spiders and the next one is a big rock with four spiders to kill I wonder what I'm doing trekking around this planet so I hit M navigate a half dozen menus and loading screens yet again forever in search of that something special and the truth is I found some cool looking trees in Starfield and some nice Sky boxes but I never found that place I consider Starfield a pretty decent game but it's not the Masterpiece I was hoping for I have a lot of issues with this game and my main one is that Starfield is not fun to explore and it's just too damn big for its own good when I first pulled up the star map and I saw that I could visit a thousand planets I knew instantly that it was going to do more harm than good it seems like the video game industry is still in a rat race to make the biggest game possible but I think we're beginning to realize that at a certain point scale becomes detrimental because there's no way to fill it with unique content it's like no man's Sky didn't happen or something and companies still don't get it because to get that kind of scale you must rely on procedural generation that will get you scale but you'll never get density after all when everything is unique nothing is unique ultimately starfields World feels artificial Universal exhausting void of soul and far more empty than it should be and for someone who is deeply looking forward to this game it was a huge blow to my excitement what's really shocking about the random number system is that that little if any effort it seems was made post-launch randomization why wasn't the first priority of this game design team to manually go in to each map after it's been generated by the computer and then do their magic you know tweak the layouts add unique characters and activities fill the empty spaces up and generally make each planet its own special place this is one of the weak points of Starfield and yet it wasn't even possible to begin with due to the decision of having so many planets because no team on Earth has the manpower to make 1,000 planets unique if I gave you the option to make one game with 1,000 random Planet stats let's say 2% of players would visit or a game that has 10 unique planets that let's say 85% of their player base would visit which would you choose sure if you said 10 you'd give up some exploration but would you if I took 10 planets and I made them all unique versus a thousand where they're not unique which game would have more immersive exploration the point isn't to add 5050 unique pois every planet to make up the difference the point is to create unique dense worlds that Foster immersive gameplay and scale is not the Catalyst for exploration content is thus the game should not have only been more dense but it also should have been shrunk as a whole and the random number system should have only been used to set the initial parameters before the game designer built upon it secondly because the game is so large Starfield is forced to provide lucrative fast travel options for the player to travel such inconceivable distances and quantities of systems this in turn causes many issues such as the overabundance of loading screens and menu based system traveling but even more so all the menu flicking and interruptions create breaks and immersion so it's hard to get sucked into it when you're pulled out of whatever you're doing every 10 seconds Starfield is not a game about wandering the cosmos it has no flow to it it's a segmented disjointed mess of teleportation and one of the biggest frustrations playing Starfield is this feeling that you're in menus all the time and watching loading screen scre for so much more of your time than you actually want to be combined with the egregious loading screens a dry conversation system and a real lack of any actual handcrafted cutcenes starfi can be a very tedious and irritating experience when you have a thousand planets made using RNG you also forego some really cool features like Planet Side flying flying between planets or out into space or the ability to take off land on a planet or enter orbit manually one of the things I remember the most is my first flat inst star field I was amazed yet disheartened at the same time seeing this big beautiful planet directly in front of me yet no way to fly to it or anywhere around it thirdly all survivor elements were instantly doomed because the game isn't handcrafted if you take a look at starfields map you'll realize that most if not all the game's major cities in fact all the cities they're located on the planets bordering the left side as you work your way left to right less and less cities become available and Planet levels rise dramatically at the furthest Eastern Edge you will find the highest level systems at around level 75 in order to get around the universe the player uses what is called grab Drive fuel however fuel doesn't act like fuel in Starfield you don't actually spend fuel fuel isn't a resource it's been dumbed down for the sake of scale if you have enough range on your grab drive you can simply jump and nothing is consumed for example if I jump across Universe from the Haagen system to let's say ARA A1 it's a simple matter of clicking jump with my mouse I see some loading screens and I orbits at an imaginary cost of 162.5 fuel if I want to go back to Haagen 3 I simply scroll to the right and teleport by clicking yet again another button another 162.5 of fuel yet no fuel is actually consumed in the process what this means is that fuel is irrelevant and this impacts pretty much everything about starfields exploration turning the game into a menu clicking loading screen simulator you can imagine Starfield at some point was envisioned for you to move across its map slowly consuming fuel in refueling at shipyards along your way in this world outposts were essential allowing you to build landing pads on remote planets and refuel without the need to stop at a major city outposts then would act as your Lifeline tethering you to a range at which you could explore those far reaches outposts have been depressingly downgraded from fallouts and are very buggy but I guess that's beside the point the point is over time you would build your guideline into the unknown with the use of these outposts and if you can afford a new grav drive that would extend your range allowing you to make it a little bit further out into space this all goes out the window however when fuel does not act like a resource truth be told if I was a director of game design and I built something new for a game I would first ask the question if it was actually fun would fuel actually make for a fun gameplay system or would it be a complete and utter nightmare you can imagine building an idea into a game that sounds good but perhaps isn't Fun during play testing maybe Starfield as is is more fun and would be worse off embracing realistic survival elements like fuel food hydration climate medical and so forth Fallout new Vegas's hardcore survival elements could have been reproduced with better planning but I guess again that's beside the point so I don't blame Starfield for instead turning into a science fiction RPG if star survival wasn't fun but why even tease us with these systems if they mean literally nothing they're Half Baked like a lot of things in Starfield Starfield feels bittersweet because the scope of the game belies its substance because at first the game does feel like it has unlimited potential yeah the introduction of the game is pretty bad but seeing a massive star system full of possibilities and being able to go anywhere you want is tantalizing stuff because you do wonder what you could find you do wonder about the possibilities and the stories and the people and the things that you would find and you could find but in the end you never really find them you might discover a system that has a planet that has a small cave with a dead body with a small note you might run into a building that has a file regaling the experience of a scientist that was here 9 years ago leading to at best the tiniest slice of actual gameplay maybe the plan planets I skipped had that Epic Quest I was looking for and that endless Adventure I was searching for but I highly doubt it Starfield has some terrific side quests the main story is underwhelming talking to an NPC to Mark a planet on your map that has an artifact on it just so you can hit a button in the menu and warp straight to it it'sing lame but it goes above and beyond with its factions the Vanguard Quest is very very good and extremely detailed sure the minutia is a bit dry like many things in Starfield talk to boring character fast travel here pick up item and fast travel back yes it's not very exciting and I don't feel very much emotion to a game that is so fragmented but the scale of those large quests and the climaxes were truly great and having been the first thing I did in Starfield I was shocked that eight hours went by and I was still playing this one Quest I guess that's starfields biggest strength the ability to kind of go out and do whatever you want but ironically it almost ruined my experience because everything thereafter was definitely worse this Quest might very well be the single best piece of content Starfield but outside factions Starfield doesn't provide you with a reason to be that Explorer every planet is very interchangeable replaceable and generic again if nothing is unique then why didn't they just make 10 planets I can only speak for myself but I have to believe most people would prefer a smaller dense World versus a larger more shallow one and I think 10 planets stuffed to the brim with stories and characters and epic quests and events and large outposts and cities with unique weather and discovery that would have been the sweet spot for me this would have made the game so much better and actually made some of the more pointless features like food and medical and hydration environmental hazards actually relevant even if they had 100 planets that would have been 10 times better allowing the procedural generation system to create the framework of those planets and then having the designers go in and build upon them again it just seems like a good idea ultimately at least in regards to immersive exploration Starfield is an ocean yet its depth is very low it has occasional glimpses of engaging places but because of the procedural generation system and the immersion breaking It ultimately feels like you're visiting a set of levels rather than exploring an open world and without it being immersive that is a massive step backwards part two gaml mechanics features ship building and ship [Music] [Music] combat [Music] Jesus out only want to talk [Music] [Music] what [Applause] [Music] ah I [Music] just [Music] what you uh lost your way [Music] the [Music] [Music] crazy like this look I understand the mechanics of cyber Punk wouldn't fit into a game like Starfield being able to bounce around and do crazy parkour isn't exactly fitting for this world Starfield slow cyberpunk fast I get it but here's the point the mechanics themselves are irrelevant it's the fact that the game provides its own Unique Mechanics mechanics that the player can use to express their own creativity in other words game mechanics are the players op options obviously though game mechanics are nothing on their own throwing in a dash into a game without making sure it chills with the rest of the movement options would certainly be bad so you could say both mechanics and their integration are of almost equal importance let's take a look at just one mechanic from cyberpunk 2077 to demonstrate this and then we'll look at how Starfield implements its much smaller amount of gameplay mechanics we could look at the dash which offers a wealth of movement options both from the ground and in the air and we could talk about how it Milds with the parkour and the sliding and the jumping tools that V has but I think it's very obvious how well crafted this Dash is just given how good it looks and feels and how you could do all sorts of crazy acrobatics with it so instead let's look at the very elusive air takedown mechanic why is the air takedown in cyberpunk a good mechanic and how does this relate to Starfield so the air takedown in cyberpunk is exactly what it sounds like V jumps on a bad guy and smashes his face into the ground it actually looks really sick the thing with the air takedown though is it can only be used from stealth and requ requires a player to be out of combat and at the correct distance above their target this is an important requirement as it means it's up to the player skill whether they able to utilize this feature but most importantly there's a natural meshing with the other movement options V has such as jumping and dodging which link directly and automatically into air takedowns for example you can jump off a building Dash jump again and then 360 no scope midair while falling down on an enemy for an air takedown or you can do everything I just said plus throw a knife hack an enemy lobber grenade or shoot a missile before the air Tak down in one seamless motion sorry to interrupt here I was we get sorry to and we get this is called player expressionism this mechanic also encourages emergent gameplay versus static gameplay for example if the player is about to get detected in combat and they want to use the air takedown they can use something like the optional camo ability to safely exit detection range giving them the chance to reposition for this mechanic this is what I'm talking about when I talk about game mechanics it's not just that the game has an air takedown it's the fact that it's integrated around other mechanics creating situational usage that's directly dependent on how the player is engaging with the game meaning if the player is smart enough and is good enough they can do some pretty crazy in this game and it's awesome this Freedom encourages creative stylized gameplay which is essentially another way of saying that a game mechanic has depth because if this air Das was let's say replaced by a button prompt rather than being initialized by player awareness it would simply be just another bad mechanic and I could go on about the near Limitless amount of options in this one game but I think you get the point mechanics must not only feel good but combine well and interact or enhance with what the rest of the game offers so does Starfield offer any game mechanics that have this built-in functionality does Starfield have any game mechanics at all well the answer is not really as the player in Starfield you can essentially shoot use grenades use mines which are useless because no human enemy is ever going to walk up to you they always run away or sit behind cover or walk up and smack someone in the head with a knife and oh my God the melee system in Starfield I mean is this 1999 here there are essentially no melee mechanics at all no takedowns no combos no special attacks and one of the worst stealth systems I've ever seen in a game next side of G not to mention literally zero interesting weapons to use and a game that is set in the future like nothing not even a distraction system no mechanics at all sure you can use the game's various powers to spice things up but none of them interact in any way once again no mechanics at all partially because Powers have no direct interactions and also because you don't have the Mana to use two powers in a row that could have interacted anyway for example gravity well and sunless space in theory you could imagine a very simple interactive combo using these two Powers the player uses gravity well to pull in two to three enemies then they swap to sunless Bas and freeze them sunless Bas has a splash radius to it so it's the perfect complement to gravity well which sucks enemies into the center of it this is a very basic interactive combination that is not possible in Starfield once you cast gravity well you don't have enough mana and when you regen enough Mana to use sunless space the gravity well has expired now take for example another Power which does not synergize with starfields supporting mechanics and that power is grab Dash grab Dash is starfields dash for lack of a better word I guess it would be prudent of me to mention that you don't actually get to use this ability until you've unlocked it through story progress which could be anywhere from 5 to 80 hours depending on if you actually do the story immediately or fck around for 3 weeks this gting mechanism in my opinion is ridiculous as is locking the ability to SL hi or hover while firing behind skill tree progression the ladder of which could take you an eternity because it's in the final tier of the tech tree regardless that's really not the point here the point is that grab Dash is not implemented well as a video game mechanic for two reasons one it's Jank it feels awful and this goes back to the integration that I previously mentioned grab Dash is not only clunky but it has these weird slow startup frames making it feel really bad to use there's like this little delay that's really annoying it also feels weightless and floaty just just because grab Dash is an alien power doesn't mean we don't have to add things like screen displacements body movement and kinetics to make it feel physical it's just lazy but more importantly and secondly using grab Dash destroys your character's momentum especially if you're Airborne in games like cyberpunk dashes are linked directly at least as best they can without making it feel too slippery with a player's movement this means you can be running or jumping hit Dash and then when the dash ends your character moves at about the same rate as you were prior to the initial Dash this is typically best practice because nobody wants to use Dash and feel like they're being slowed down this is particularly bad in Starfield because all of the games exploration requires large amounts of on foot traveling amidst the Sea of rather empty Barren planets because the game doesn't have any land Vehicles which is also lame it would have been very nice if grab Dash was animated smoothly into the player's movement so that momentum could be kept close your eyes and you can instantly imagine chaining grab dashes with your hover pack while moving around the planets to cut down on travel time if even for a little bits but you can't while on the ground grab Dash is also not implemented well as when you use it you're automatically placed into the walking animation afterwards even if you're running when you input grab Dash this is one of those subtle indications that the developers of Starfield lacked foresight in order to keep sprinting after you grab Dash in Starfield the player must hit the Sprint Key a second time and if the timing isn't perfect your character will not begin to run and it's actually really hard to get the timing right this is precisely how it's set up with a slide key as well causing the player to briefly stumble while trying to get back into the Running Animation after the slide cyberpunk 2077 again solved this 3 years ago in this game if the player slides when sprinting V stays crouched when the slide is finished this in some cases is exactly what the player wants espe especially if he or she is playing sneaky after all you can imagine wanting to do something as simple as sliding into cover to avoid detection but unlike Starfield cyberpunk knows that in aggressive scenarios or when just running around the city the player is going to want to dash while sprinting and continue sprinting afterwards without the need for another input or without the game hitching the character's movement because that's always annoying and that's exactly what you can do this setup is the best of both worlds to any player a tool for stealth and a tool to keep sprinting momentum with the animation either way linking perfectly into each state but that's not even the best part V can actually do partial slides depending on how much pressure is put on that input and in this scenario V will do a partial slide stand up and continue running automatically in one seamless motion and this happens without any additional inputs from the player and such is the case for the also often misunderstood bounce mechanic which allows V to dash in mid there and then hit jump the moment she hits any surface for a long jump also known as a bounce this freedom of movements is so precisely engineered that no hitching happens providing total control absolute readability and seamless transitions on the other hand starfields parallel systems provide sluggish movements with unnecessary gessing games [Music] again the dash doesn't have to be stylish but it should be snappier and link up properly with the players animations and movement options like sliding which is also completely godamn useless these two movement options do not link up in anyway speaking of the slide it's horrendous you can only slide two feet and you can't shoot or do anything while you're actually in the motion such as the common slide into reload option that many games have it has quite literally zero utility in any way and as it stands I have absolutely no idea why anyone would ever use this ability especially in combat furthermore there's next to zero weapon mechanics at all in cyberpunk you've got all these interesting mechanics like smart weapons Ricochet power weapons vulnerability points for extra damage and and some subtle features built into the skill trees like partial charges on Tech weapons that give various special effects not to mention the very basic mechanics of bullet drop when shooting at long range there's also various melee systems like throw weapons executions silent or lethal melee takedowns body throwing and even projectile parries with the use of Swords again I'm not saying that Starfield needs any of these mechanics it needs its own but they essentially do not exist and that's the point unless by some miracle I miss something the only true G gameplay mechanic in Starfield is the slow motion option when you use your jet pack if you jump and aim down sights you get this Nifty slow-mo feature which is pretty useful for mowing down spacers and it looks pretty cool 15 hours in when you make it to the bottom of the tech tree again thank God the game has powers which don't dramatically change up the game play but at least there's something even if most of them are completely situational to the point where you wouldn't even bother using them anyway now acquiring these Powers is something I can rail Starfield on until the end of time but I won't bother you because everyone knows it's one of the most pathetic features in any game ever made the truth is I tried very hard to find anything cool about the gameplay in Starfield this clip you're watching right now is about the most creative combat I've been able to come up with in Starfield and honestly it's pretty boring I don't care if P Bethesda games had lackluster mechanics don't tell me that's fine because it's a Bethesda game Starfield is a modern AAA game that feels at best a marginal upgrade in gameplay from its last title the shooting is at best a modest improvement from Fallout 76 but that is not the standard for AAA gameplay other AAA games that do it best are the standard which is why I'm pulling so many examples from cyberpunk as they're both at the heart firstperson shooting games and Starfield is Flatout dull in every way in comparison far beyond mechanics that is because Starfield also just doesn't have any style to it at the core it feels uninspired gam playay presentation personality or character it just feels generic in every way possible cyber Punk drips with style you could taste it there's an energy to everything it's immersive and intimate the characters have grit they're intimidating they're oppressive and not cookie cutter or safe at all cut scenes are absolutely gorgeous showcasing such rawness to the oppressive and dark side of the people in the story and the gameplay is stylish and can be as fast slow or crazy as you want it to be no matter what though all the animations link up so buttery smooth and just the basics like dashing creates screen displacement and visual feedback that's just so pleasing to the eyes we get affected by the movements with a subtle blur and change of angle to the weapons depending on which direction you dash you can see your character's arms when you perform any movements you can even look down and see the animation of your lower body you can change slides into parkour you can air Dash in any direction including backwards and then link those dashes into melee combos hacking sliding air takedowns as I've said before offering so many options to install your own style into this game and it's the small things too like having actual healing animations when you pop your stem the year is 2023 and Starfield does not bother with providing a healing animation and don't say it's because you have a space suit on oh really my character heals by telepathically communicating with herself I didn't know my Starfield character had artificial communication implanted into her neurons blocky animations boring conversations stale writing and lots of Jank again it's not that Starfield needs character because cyberp Punk has character it's that Starfield needs character 2 Starfield does have a couple cool features like audio and haptics that change based on your environment but ultimately it just doesn't have any mechanics big or small no takedowns no Gore the AI is pretty trash favoring bullet sponginess only any weapon handling quirks are essentially gone and the lack of virtually any bullet drop makes the gun play extremely one-dimensional even though there's also a tremendous amount of Randomness with spread which is a bizarre combination the thing that sticks out even more than the flat mechanics however is how the gameplay doesn't truly evolve much and this was the deal breaker for me people talk a lot about gameplay progression this feeling that a game evolves over the course of a playthrough many games adopt this philosophy but Starfield does not and the easiest way to see this is to trace the gameplay back to the very beginning and when you do you might discover as I did that playing Starfield at the 50h hour mark actually doesn't feel that much different from the introductory shootout if you examine the first combat scenarios of both Starfield and cyberpunk 2077 they're actually pretty similar small area just a few enemies and the player pretty much has a pistol in cyberp punk you could do some additional stealth but even still for most players the encounters will likely pan out the same but over the course over the next 50 hours with cyberpunk you'll become a night City God all the tools and all the mechanics you're given will dramatically and fundamentally change your play style in so many ways and the gameplay will fundamentally evolve to something that is barely recognizable to the first gig with Jackie in contrast Starfield feels no different from the start of the game to the end you might pick up some new weapons you might press the power button on your controller or hover with your jetpack but that is essentially it the reason Vats was installed into Fallout was because Fallout also didn't have that many interesting mechanics but at least it had Vats to bring it some character and style and without Vats or any interesting mechanics gameplay in Starfield is run ine maill and not at all special part of me enjoys space combat more than the Gunplay it's actually pretty fun even though it's very basic and I do appreciate having thrusters and the speed wheel for optimal turning on the left side of the HUD these are two solid features and if used correctly Allah being a mechanic you can go from being a floating box of junk with a big Target on your back to a zippy and Nimble Starship capable of running down enemy aircraft depending on how you build your ship the power allocation controls however were really poorly implemented and desperately need to prompt a slow motion effect when you begin to mess with it time dilation would be a perfect fit for both PC players and console players or if it was a design issue how about one hotkey per power slots because it's really hard to manage all three of these mechanics at the same time on very hard difficulty when you're on the verge of death at every moment not to mention having to reach across the keyboard for the default healing hotkey makes it even more frustrating furthermore it also sucks that you can't fly out into space in any way as you're essentially confined into this small window of a playing field with a giant planet in front of you that gets no bigger or no smaller no matter what you do it really is a shame how the entire Starship experience is limited to this square box of a space when you can imagine so many possibilities more stations more ships more unique encounters black holes really anything to break up the endless Sami space gameplay however the entire ship building aspect of Starfield is pretty good there's a lot of stuff to mess around with and if you're a Lego whiz you can make some pretty awesome stuff but the process of building can be pretty annoying not being able to save partial builds is extremely annoying and I had many frustrating nights where I had to restart my ship building process also building High tier ships with parts for multiple shipyards is absolutely stupid I just don't have any other words for it many ship parts are tied to manufacturer shipyards and it's not uncommon to need access to several systems when building your ship so in this case the player has two options one start on an outpost landing pad and access the shipyard console this will give you access to lots of ship parts from many different providers however of course not all of them the second option is for the player to start their ship build from a shipyard manufacturer which then only gives them access to that manufacturer's Parts though even if you've never played Starfield you can already see what the problem is here and that is that the player never has access to all the ship parts at a single location so this presents a quandry which is forcing the player to start building a ship with the limited parts they have before traveling to each manufacturer star system in order to buy the remainder of the parts that they need need but in Starfield you cannot save partial ship builds so what the player then has to do is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen and that is that the player will have to build an entire ship using parts that they will eventually have to replace with parts that they will buy in the future and this creates multiple problems such as the hassle to the player wasting the player's time and having to spend more money than you would by having to replace those parts logistically speaking when building your ship you will have to magically determine the exact specifications for each part as as well making sure to place the temporary Parts into the ship build with the right slot connections as if they would have had the slightest idea of how those future Parts would connect to their current ship build anyway Habs have different configurations Wings have different configurations engines have different configurations every ship is unique and requires planning on how things are connected so I say again how the hell is anyone supposed to know how to do this what Bethesda is asking you to do if you want access to all the ship parts is to learn how to see into the future I mean Imagine This scenario you start building your ship and you're scrolling through the list of engines you want you realize at that moment that the game has five additional unique Shipyard vendors that have custom engines that you might want to use you haven't been to these shipyards yet but you know they're out there but you were like me too annoy to sit through another 45 loading screens to travel out to these systems and back so you're sitting there thinking this sucks but then you realize even more so engines have different connection blocks to them and not all of those engines you might want to fit in your current ship build is actually going to fit so you can either strip down your entire ship and reconfigure basically everything about it or you can guess that the engine you will eventually need in theing future is going to fit into your ship build knowing this you could at this point travel to each Shipyard and inspect every single engine and write down the configurations one by one but that would be Beyond knowing or you could cross your fingers and hope for the best if this seems bad enough the shiest part is if you somehow guessed right for this one part then you will have to do this entire process all over again for the next Future Part that you will or will not need what if you plan to make a ship that has parts from four different vendors I mean can you imagine the headache again you have no clue because you can't see unique vendor parts that may or may not be better than what you currently have so what are we supposed to do here Todd make a bunch of ship shells that will then later Salvage and waste money on and just pray everything we need from each vendor magically fits is anyone else flabbergasted at the way this was set up why not be able to purchase those parts from the vendor and then store them in your ship you know take them back to your Landing pad unload the cargo and make your new ship right then and there how is this not a feature or let us buy the blueprints for a high price and make them accessible from our landing pad or just have a quest in each major city that grants you access to Shipyard uniques from your Outpost if you finish it like this is really really terrible game design supporting an otherwise very well-made feature no matter what though it does really suck that the balance of ship combat is really really bad unless you rush to a top tier ship and spend all of your skill points and Starship upgrades very hard difficulty is virtually impossible in Starfield if we're being honest Bethesda has always been quite horrible at adding different difficulty levels to their games and at this points I'm surprised they haven't just scraped the difficulty slider altogether because star combat is way way too hard on the highest difficulty setting if you try you're at the mercy of simple math overwhelming numbers and Aimbot just like the ground combat the difficulty is again inflated through sheer hit points not any Unique Mechanics or scenarios at all and all the enemy ships essentially function the same with the player getting bombarded by hit scan targeting and with no ability to use flares or counter missiles trying to boost or evade during those situations doesn't always work the whole process gets a little bit better when you unlock targeting but by and large the advanced difficulties in Starfield are just not balanced in any way the Vanguard training ship simulation missions truly expose how busted and unfair very hard ship combat is early on but even during story missions or normal pirate fights it's just way too unfair unless you want to cheese enemies by kiing using Superior range I can in some way tolerate the bull sponginess in ground combats because you typically have more space to move around if you have good tactics you might Prevail you could theoretically be level 15 and take on 10 plus level 25 ground enemies but the second you get ambushed by three level 17 ships in space you get washed in 10 seconds with absolutely no way to avoid it's beyond praying your grab Drive doesn't get destroyed before you can make the jump to hyperspace and this in turn encourages players to spend their precious points in ship upgrades even though you're not even sure if they're going to help you or not especially because there are no mechanics to mitigate damage or avoid taking damage unless you're able to swing behind your Target and shoot them in the back but even if you manage that you're typically being blasted from three other ships at the same time and this imbalance sucks because if you're like me and like to play on the highest difficulty you have to constantly change your difficulty levels when you get into a ship fight and then once it's over you have to go back into the menu and change it when you land on a planet this isn't fun especially in a game where you're already spending most of your play time in menus and sitting through loading screens it's just a pain in the ass not to mention it's utterly immersion breaking and tension shattering at the end of the Crimson Fleet quest line there's a section where you have to push back UC ship Invaders and within 15 seconds you get blown into a thousand pieces every time you get close to the big ship even if you have the best possible ship this section is nonon impossible on very hard difficulty and the only way I was able to finish it was to do some damage run away to a different system and then grab jump back five different times and honestly even then I was barely able to finish it it was just embarrassing ultimately Starfield ship combat was better than I expected but it quickly turned into a game of how can I cheese this fights or how many ship parts am I carrying part three story characters missions and everything else now seeing as how I wasn't particularly impressed with starfields exploration in combats I was really hoping the story and the RPG elements would blow me away Starfield story has the player following a group called constellation who are on a quest to discover the nature of shiny floating objects called artifacts it's your job to join the team venture out into space and uncover the anomaly and being a Bethesda game I was expecting a few things here an exciting introduction great characters and some compelling material to work through surprisingly Starfield has a pretty boring introduction which is really weird because historically they've mostly done a good job in this department so the game opens up from black with a player riding down a mining shaft where you meet a woman named Lynn and her team you then have the distinct pleasure of walking slowly down a cave while mining rocks until you stumble on an artifact that's essentially the beginning of the game at this point your character passes out and you awake as one of the chosen ones so yes it's another one of those games in which the player goes from an absolute nobody to the most important character in the game in about 5 minutes historically not a terrible Paradigm if not cliche but the thing about Starfield is that it's wrapped around a very slow uneventful start whereas other games set immersive stages sky had the dragon attack and Fallout had the nuke all three games essentially accomplish the same thing narratively yet only two games take the time to set the stage properly and deliver memorable set pieces starfields intro is flat out boring the player then moves on to meet barretts and kill a bunch of enemies and then is miraculously gifted an expensive Starship because again the player is now the chosen one we're then told that we have to travel to creets and murder a bunch of space pirates before we can go to new Atlantis and it's at this point that the player immediately then then becomes accepted into constellation an impressive reward for a half a day's work the whole thing is just so abrupt and has virtually no leadup making the transition from broke cave diver to Future savior of the world feel pretty damn cheap as in just a few conversations without learning anything about the character we're playing and hardly anything about the people we talk to we now get to depart on one of the most important missions humankind has ever ventured on since they left Earth not exactly the thorough story developments I was expecting from here as constellation's new hero the player can either work through the main story which isn't very long join factions or complete various side content and if you're just going to examine the main story it's safe to say it's actually not all that interesting and there are a few reasons for it at least for me one of my main problems with essentially everything narrative in Starfield is the extremely dry presentation particularly in the talking bits let it be clear Starfield has no cutcenes and I don't think this is a good thing and let me explain why part part of playing an RPG is being engaged through the mountains of dialogue and subtitles after all role playing games are based off of stories and people and typically the Playtime is impacted heavily by interactions therego we read and listen to a lot of people talk there's a lot of writing in Starfield and just for the record it's not very good and when the writing isn't great the player is required to be inherently interested in what a game is saying and in order to prevent from falling asleep when you make a game like this you typically have three choices pre-made cut scenes with a directed camera this is what the Witcher does alongside other third person Games Live scripted conversations with a directed camera this is what cyberpunk does well and a lot of other firstperson games try to do well what's really interesting about this setup is that the conversation extends far beyond the person talking to you characters in camera can move around people can come in offc screen and things can be happening in the background this by all accounts can be the most immersive yet labor intensive technique with a very high payoff again keep the player interested we're playing a game here we're not reading a book the third choice is to do what Starfield does which is static dialogue between two people with a non-moving camera video games have been doing this for a very long time and it wouldn't be a stretch to call it dated and the reason is that it's boring bethesda's choice to make the person you're talking to super big on the screen and everything else really blurry in the background with no moving action or a directed camera or no moving pieces speaks to a cost-saving mechanism and if I can be frank this really isn't a conversation this is a character staring at you speaking words conversations on the other hand exist inside worlds of motion here's an interesting engaging conversation in cyberpunk 2077 done here yours please can't help feeling I uh interrupted something when I walked up up do not worry yourself about this oh c cam V is just being [Music] cordial Missi you weren't snooping just now were you still no sign from Reed V got a sink and feeling about this place your BS please he it's my magic number so ah you got me on to you big time but in my defense you guys stand out even in a crowd like this one oh really listening to conversations of strangers can be dangerous sometimes you can hear more than you can [Music] handle listen Reeds Mia for now can't wait for him got to do both scans on your own we were discussing local politics specifically our host Mr K Hansen Big Fish selling big guns for big money yet here you have celebrities politicians even the chief of police so I was thinking perhaps Hansen would do better by being a veritable businessman no I claim he would disagrees even red guess it's not my lucky day Place her bets please who is KT Hansen really a crucial question tread carefully with that Doo the [ __ ] psycho analysis a hobby of yours and here's a conversation in Starfield they could stay here temporarily but it'll cost them quite a bit too ah maybe not what if we help them get out of here outfit their ship with a grab drive so they can find a new home we could even lend our Engineers to help and give their Captain an updated star map what do you think sounds costly we can't absorb that cost and it's unlikely they even have compatible currency let alone enough for the transaction someone else would have to foot the bill here's probably starfields most ambitious scene we came here in good faith now honor our previous agreement you either figure out a way to give me what I want or I walk out of here right now I'm not hearing here's the money and we would have wrapped up already if you hadn't gotten greedy uh I all right you win hand over the money this thing is all yours well done some high pressure tactics but we got what we were after time to go home shall we I have the I wish to discuss with you stop right there you're ah Slayton must have been the original owner we don't need to do this all's Fair on neon am I right hand over Mr slayton's property now there a problem here yes this armed Thug was trying to steal our belongings I'm going to need you to back away from our VIPs now fine but you can't stay in the astral Lounge forever stoud Nicholas slayton's already got your number here's a comparable negotiation scene in a game that was released 3 years ago here to see Roy we got Biz to transact Mr Roy is busy just now you will deal with me you got a bot model mt0 D12 called the Flathead and the hell you care guy I represent already paid brick for it I'm just here for the pickup I can talk direct to Roy if necessary nah you talk to me name's Tong now couch planet well [ __ ] goes for you too I'll stand this so [ __ ] hard [ __ ] ass on the [ __ ] couch make me thought you'd never ask sit your ass down for a planet bullet your skull Jack sit down this ain't going to end well but [ __ ] well all right come on got lien up take a hit better now we can talk here we go the flad model mt0 D12 need to see it suit [Music] yourself [ __ ] tricked out this thing Dynamic thermal optic cam armor full cognitive immersion with a raven controller pink out prototype actuators made of titanium vadium cavlar composite and watch this fully integrated link too so when the spider starts crawling out walls dangling from ceilings mhm could lose your lunch so what you [Music] think yep we'll take it three sure yeah let's see cred brick got it it's all paid up brick got it I don't see any [ __ ] brick around here do [Music] you come on can't expect me to pay for this thing twice and who the [ __ ] are you to say what can and can't be you'll pay twice because I say you'll pay twice all right you want what the Flathead I better see some Eddies relax got him right here just like that without batting a [ __ ] eye want it or not I got places to be you know you never did say who sent you never did say who you're working for Dexter Deshawn that's who Dexter Desa The lord ass who punching animal [ __ ] half of Pacifica no He's Alive wellhe kicking and he s his regards so you going to consider my offer now C on this hey flat hands good gear it'll do the treat for you whatever the trick is [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] can't they breaking in I want you a where's they [Music] go dropped one the scenes simply speak for themselves one game is interesting and one game is not and one game has a lot of variance in how scenes play out and one game doesn't these dialogue pieces in games like cyber Punk with their Lively backgrounds and animated motion cap with all the moving pieces are just incredible one of my favorites was this one with Johnny where in the background you can watch a perfectly choreographed game of one-on-one basketball starfields conversations on the other hand always look like this for the entire game Bethesda has never been up with the times but I thought Starfield would be the game that pushed the envelope and made things really immersive and detailed at least extending beyond their comfort food basics but that's not the case it doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing every single scene in this game looks like this and it gets old fast even when Punk does the exact same cut scene as Starfield the results are miles apart take the palm tree scene in Phantom Liberty this scene is not unlike the conversations in Starfield with a big character on the screen and a fuzzy blurry background but unlike Starfield this scene is actually great because the style isn't used that often and it's artistically relevant the personal framing here suggests a tender moment the characters are acted with a deep resonance to the story The Design is purposeful and most importantly the characters are interesting and the writing is just playing good the frequency of the dialogue is covertly destructive in Starfield and may very well be one of the biggest issues with the entire thing if you think about it Starfield actually has more dialogue per hour of gameplay assuming the player is doing missions or story content than any other game Bethesda has already made this is mostly because as I discussed before exploration has been streamlined Starfield All Things Considered is an experience watted by loading screens and fast travel not by walking not by driving and not by running you don't travel across lands you don't pass any borders you fast travel and that's about it in Skyrim you were exploring and going on adventures in Starfield you just kind of zip around from NPC to NPC after completing your objectives and when you primarily fast travel the game time after completing that mission is condensed into you guessed it talking and this is why Starfield has more talking or reading per hour of gameplay than virtually any other RPG I've ever played of course again assuming the player is doing any narrative based activity honestly the frequency and the quantity of it wouldn't be so bad if the writing was top tier but mostly it's pretty disappointing see now you starting to sound like me next thing I know you'll be trying on my clothes won't look as good in them though you can break it down in a variety of ways but at its most basic starfields writing is so utterly generic for lack of a better word it's boring the game simply doesn't stand for much characters are afraid to say bad things in fact I don't think I've heard the word [ __ ] in my entire playthrough it's almost like the game is rated for kids or something even though it's not there's nothing edgy or controversial or even barely contentious yeah not every game needs to be dark or edgy but it really should have an identity Starfield is a squeaky clean familyfriendly all you can eat buffet and its inability to commit to a sub JRE is Crystal Clear Starfield will never say anything or show anything that will offend you or piss you off and what's left is a lukewarm and rather meish game that lacks any sort of Personality Starfield doesn't need hookers on every corner or junkies shooting up crack in every Alle way but even just a modom of adult SAS or at least subject material would make the game a lot more interesting the problem is tone it's like the writers at Starfield were told to behave and tone down practically every facet of their War choices and general attitude of conversations to the point where it's practically trending on the lines of Disney territory truthfully I never met anyone who had remotely anything interesting to say at all everyone is generic inclusive and most of the Sci-Fi tropes are very derivative nobody has any grit no one is twisted or evil or maniacal yet at the same time the wit from fallouts has been removed too thus both emotional extremes seem to be missing even starfields bad guys like the Crimson Fleet feel like Angels next to some of the crazy fights in cyberpunk no character and I mean none stands out as that iconic video game character there's no Jackies there's no Nick Valentine's and there's certainly no geralt or Ellies here in fact I would go so far to say that I could barely remember anyone's name in this game without glancing down at their name plate during conversation part of me thinks it's because they aren't eye-catching or stylish the designs of the characters at all but I think it mostly comes down to the timidness of the dialogue and the absolute absence of any personality and it's really telling that a game that has so much dialogue barely manages to say anything at all not to mention a game that has such a large amount of characters that ultimately have no character whatsoever even the places that they could have easily made things more interesting they didn't and they failed to even try especially in the art Direction department for example the city of neon it does look nice but that's about it neon doesn't come anywhere close enough to capturing that cyberpunk Vibe even though written in the lore is a dark dystopian pleasure City juxtaposing the story of a hopeful future neon should be the Shady shoddy dark place that you'd be afraid to walk out on the streets at night where crime and all sorts of ugly things happen and where you see the [ __ ] up part of humankind but in Starfield there's none of that there's no sex there's no nudity at all there's no prostitutes nothing edgy no filth no Grime to the underbelly it's a PG-13 version of a city portrayed in writing as a gang-infested cesspit not a single tit or Ash cheek exists in Starfield not even in neon's nightclub which is also extremely disappointing in more ways in one get some Aurora and let lose come on Dance go [Applause] [Music] crazy take it easy get yourself a drink it's time [Music] [Laughter] to me the way I make me TR [Music] I'll take you bricks in for Royce now yeah heard what happened at all foods probably thinking brick will be grateful huh what that would disappoint you no Ed Brick's not in a position to demonstrate feelings of any [Music] kind [Applause] [Music] going from night City to Starfield was one of the most jarring experiences I've ever had in basically every departments and role playing characters and Story part four wrapping things up if I'm being entirely honest I had plans to talk about a lot more things in Starfield such as the companions the questing the story and the RPG elements but as I continued to play more of the game I realized there just wasn't too much to say about any of it ironically I played a lot of Skyrim and a lot of cyberpunk in the off time creating this video cyberpunk offers some of the best gameplay with an intoxicating mature world to take in and some great characters to boot Skyrim offers the best of exploring and the ability to embrace the role-playing aspect of a video game these were the elements I was hoping to see in Starfield and I only found them in my spare time playing these two games that are far better in practically every way I'll be the first to admit that I did enjoy myself to some degree while playing Starfield there's something about Bethesda RPGs the ability to just do whatever you want and create your own kind of experience I am in some way at least for a while drawn to that freedom but that feeling didn't last the same way that it did with Skyrim a game that I can still return to to this day and enjoy myself greatly with and to think I have no design desire whatsoever to return to Starfield after one playthrough actually makes me kind of sad I guess the more I think about it I just couldn't get absorbed into Starfield beyond that initial feeling of it being something new the main quest just isn't captivating at all and dragged down by some of the most boring Mission designs seen in the Bethesda game one thing Starfield does do well is not making the same mistake as other RPGs Starfield makes the narrative seem important yet not overly critical you are essentially just trying to figure out what these strange floating artifacts represent that is for all intents and purposes your main goal in Starfield the world's not ending you don't have to save your son you just have to figure out what things mean and that might take some time perfect this provides a great backdrop for you to do all the things you want to without feeling like you're conflicting with the main story and you can like I did ignore the story for 50 hours and come back to it later on without feeling like you should have been there but ultimately the story is disappointing the entire artifact angle is so atrociously done I can't even bring myself to write more about it the content conflicts so heavily with the mystery of it what is out there to think that this Infamous question is broken down into a fast traveling to Vladimir's ship where he asks you to fast travel to artifact temples that sit no more than 200 M from randomly generated encampments in pois yet no one has even seen or discovered them is so unbelievably Soul crushing to think some of the team working on this game made the characters and backstories of the Elder Scrolls made a completely unlikable character cast is obs ABD I could write a book on how generic the characters are from Sarah who acts like your mom if you steal a pen to Sam Cole who's one of the most boring characters I've ever seen in a video game this is a guy who quite literally has nothing interesting to say at all then there's a church kid and Vladimir and the rest so unbelievably boring and void of anything that could make a character interesting ironically the most interesting characters in Starfield are actually the robots Vasco and Kaiser have the most engaging dialogue and they're actually pretty funny too better yet they don't pesture you when you want to you know roleplay or don't want to play babysitter to think Starfield has the framework of endless Choice yet none of the choices really matter is depressing too Starfield allows you to join every single faction with basically zero consequence and not a single NPC seems to care about any of the conflict unless of course you have a bounty on your head in fact despite centuries of War everyone in Starfield seems oblivious and optimistic of the future and has no problem with each other and the game shows little if any signs that any of it actually mattered or happened in fact you can't even really be evil in Starfield the game is hellbent on never developing any villainous characters and barely offers the appropriate options for companions in the Crimson Fleet as we all know the ability to influence the wider narrative and story is nion irrelevant so no point hammering on that but just playing evil freely is also a bunch of hassle for one the entire bounty system is completely anain if you the player blow up a friendly ship on the edge of space apparently everyone in the Galaxy instantly knows about it despite the fact that apparently it's impossible to communicate Beyond individual star systems after all there's no communication Network in Starfield there's no phone there's no comms line even though it's centuries into the future if the game wants to write that into the history of the game then it also shouldn't know that you did this unless there was a witness that escaped and Hyper jumped into UC controlled territory you should like many past games be able to see that iconic last witness killed Bounty removed message upon clearing the area because if this isn't the case if the player does anything remotely bad they have to fast travel back to a system that isn't controlled by UC to clear the Bounty and if it is you're instantly attacked on site and while you're getting attacked you cannot land and you get an incredibly High Bounty for fighting back forcing you to sit through even more loading screens to return to an outpost and purchase a bounty station to clear the status you can trace this perplexity down to the most minute level I dare you steal a pencil when no one is watching and watch NPC's three rooms over who didn't see you scream for help I I guarantee you 5 seconds later you'll see 10 red blips on the radar and be shot immediately but it really doesn't matter anyway no matter the crime Mass genocide or a pencil you can always clear it with a bounty system and go about your Merry way the game never holds you responsible to the choices you make and in fact actively goes out of the way to ignore them Starfield is a game that shattered my sense of disbelief on a regular basis because of this and on the same token if you want you can also marry multiple people in fact every single person in constell at the same time if you want to so long as you commit to Andrea first for example if you marry Sarah and then you marry Sam none of them will ever acknowledge anything I guess the future is free love but doesn't really make sense for an RPG and also if you want to you can murder all of new Atlantis and then proceed to fly to your Outpost and buy the Bounty [Music] off all right we're done you're cleared to land in new Atlantis come back and no one ever says anything evening ma'am the game doesn't acknowledge you no content ever gets locked off a St contrast versus Boulders Gate 3 where in the First Act you could set off a chain reaction of things without even knowing it and never be able to change any of it and an RPG that's called accountability and is a major impetus for repeat playthroughs Starfield is a game about the future But the irony is that much of it feels out of date in today's time bethesda's game template was dated before Starfield and Starfield decided not to add any fresh air to it Starfield simply doesn't innovate enough in the gameplay departments in the mechanics too and a good story and a memorable cast of characters to support it is also absent at the end of the day Starfield is a safe game tepid and even perhaps unconcerned with standing on its own two feet I had looked forward to Starfield for years patiently waiting for the engaging epic space RPG adventure of the generation what I found was a very boring Video Game Void of any char character style or substance that other recent games brandish so confidently it may be a step up in scale from the previous games but it's a big step backwards in overall game design in the areas that matter if the game had a great story and a great cast it would have helped a lot if there was freedom to role play and the game held you accountable for your choices it would also have helped but perhaps not enough starfields exploration isn't compelling and the feeling of traveling a great world into the late hours of the night while getting lost and surprised is virtually non-existent the game would honestly have to overhaul so many elements to make it great and I fear that won't happen for a long long time perhaps I'm being picky but I don't really think so a game this big doesn't come around very often and to see it provides so very little of what could have made it special is very disappointing in the end Starfield said very appropriately in the endless Bleak vacuum of space isn't a game I'll be coming back to anytime soon

Channel: Downward Thrust

Views: 668,611

Keywords: starfield, starfield review, starfield sucks, starfield is disappointing, the disappointment of starfield, starfield news, starfield updates, starfield patch, downward thrust, starfield game, starfield bethesda, bethesda games, starfield vs elder scrolls, elder scrolls, game of year awards, goty awards, game of the year, baulders gate 3 vs starfield, cyberpunk 2077 phantom liberty, phantom liberty, starfield choices, starfield dlc, starfield patches

Id: 80R73vFPFG8

Length: 82min 48sec (4968 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2023