Any starfield love?

[Barthheart]

Yikes! 

[JudgeDredd]

Indeed - if it's true

[BanzaiCat]

I've not played much. I played a bit more last night, but my total is barely over 2 hours at this point.

I did do the first mission, which was a mine. Then an outpost. I then flew to a planet and landed, then explored a bit of the city. I took a tram to a location where I need to go, to progress the first quest. All of this, thus far, has been part of the introductory quest.

The loading screens I've experienced thus far are VERY short.

Boarding the ship - it's two levels. The lower level, which you access from the ground, is like a cargo area. You click on a ladder to go into the crew space, above. The loading maybe takes two seconds. Same for exiting. I would understand if loading takes longer, exiting from the crew space to the cargo area (which is technically open to the portion of the world you just accessed), but it never took more than a couple of seconds.

There is animation for taking off and landing. It doesn't take that long and it's fun to watch (so far, anyway).

There are some 'fetchit" quests. I already had a weird one. That tram I mentioned, when I exited the station, I went to talk to a random person. You can tell in the game if someone might have useful dialog to share, because they're named, and not some generic label (e.g., "Citizen" as opposed to "Jerimiah Lawton" or something like that). I talked to this person and she said how tired she was. Strangely, one of my options was to go and fetch her a cup of coffee. This coffee shop was in the last area, where I just was; I passed by it to get to the tram station. I thought, that's a little weird, making me fetch her a cup of coffee. I had to save and exit at about that point.

I'm not sure if loading screens can be skipped; I've not gotten to the point where I want to skip them. I will let you know if it is skippable, or not, once I get some more time in the game. This sounds like someone complaining about 3 second load times for screens. I'd also posit that a LOT of games like this have the fetchit quests, so you talk to A who needs B but it's in the possession of C and you can choose violence against C to get said McGuffin, or steal it, or do something for C to get it from them peacefully. I don't know yet, I just don't have enough time in it.

But my preliminary reaction to that is, someone is whinging.

[JudgeDredd]

Yeah...he didn't mention the length. His point was the quantity.

[BanzaiCat]

I've only experienced a few transitions thus far. Not many. I mean, this isn't anything different from a lot of adventure games. Go to planet A, land in location B, access mine C, go to level D, get item. Exit back the way you came, fly to planet E, go to location F...meh. It is what it is. If it gets crazy I'll report back.

[Boyerwulf]

This is a big step backwards from Fallout 4 and Skyrim. The graphics have not improved much if at all, yet for some reason the system requirements have gone up drastically. You have repetitive enemies, and locations. AI opponents are totally braindead, and you can go to places 40 levels higher and have no problem clearing them. Up the difficulty for a little bit of a challenge, because normal provides none at all. It has none of the cool randomness as you would explore in Skyrim and Fallout.  In Skyrim you could explore and really take in the beauty and wonder of the world.  In Fallout 3-4 you could have a good time exploring while listening to the radio, and watching random stuff happen like a Brotherhood of Steel copter getting shot down by some Mutants, and almost landing on top of you. Starfield has none of that.  It's just very mediocre, and the engine is starting to show its age. It really lacks immersion. Frankly I found myself nodding off  because it just became so repetitive, and unexciting.  But if you like loading screens, and scanning berry bushes on some generic biome for XP, you will love Starfield. Thank god Cyberpunk 2.0 came out. Might have taken awhile to get it right, but it is everything Starfield isn't at this point. Immersive environment, gripping story lines, few loading screens, random stuff happening all around you. A better game in almost every aspect.

[Huw the Poo]

I've been looking forward to this because, while Bethesda certainly have many faults, there's hardly anyone else making this kind of game. They're the Paradox of RPGs.

Anyway, I didn't think I was going to play it any time soon because my PC didn't meet the minimum requirements (don't you just hate when that starts to happen?). However I happen to have just bought a shiny new PC - literally, today - so Starfield is pretty much at the top of my list.

I think I was supposed to get the game free with my GPU, so I've emailed the PC vendor to see if that's correct. If not I'll just buy it. One way or the other, I should be playing in a few days.

[Huw the Poo]

Well I'm about three hours in now and not exactly gripped. It has lots of promise, but so many issues and bizarre design decisions.

For example, there's no map when you're on foot. This is exacerbated by the fact that in order to sell a good day's loot you have to go between multiple vendors - clothiers won't buy your spare guns, for example. So at the end of an intense session you can't just "nip to the shop" to sell all your trash, you have to painstakingly make your way around all the vendors and undoubtedly forgetting where to find one of them.

Combat is uh...serviceable. I guess it's the same as the combat from the Elder Scrolls series wherein every shot from a weapon is essentially a roll of the dice, but it just feels wrong in a sci fi setting. You can unload a laser gun in someone's face and chances are it won't be enough to put them down. There's no proper cover system; crouching is merely the 'sneak' mechanic and rarely have I found cover that's the right height for this use. Also, admittedly I probably need to level up/find better loot, but all of my guns feel like peashooters so far. With the exception of the shotgun, but even that takes a minimum of two point-blank rounds to the face to kill a basic grunt. The guns don't feel very meaty at all.

The graphics are decent and don't tax my GPU at all even at high settings so I'm satisfied in that department. Also the loading screen "issue" is overblown; there are no more here than you'd find in any other Bethesda game and they aren't even long enough to scratch your arse. NPCs are finally looking....not great but far better than any others Bethesda has made. Good lip-syncing too. It's a shame that the writing so far has been abysmal, and the voice acting - mysteriously described as brilliant by some - is not very good. It's serviceable but as is all too common you can easily picture the actors just churning out the lines from a script without the slightest idea of context - wrong inflections on the wrong words and such. Perhaps I'm particular about this but it does irritate me and will irritate others.

Anyway, it's not a bad game by any means but it's not amazing either. I've heard numerous times that "it gets a lot better" - well, I've never understood why that's supposed to be a good thing ("watch Breaking Bad, Huw, it's awesome after the first twenty episodes!"  ), but I've paid my money now so I'll carry on with it and see what happens.

[JudgeDredd]

Breaking Bad was great after the first episode! But I did prefer Better Call Saul.

As for the game - thank you. That's along the lines of what a couple of pals have told me. It's alright. Not great. Could be better. Not gripping. And I've seen people saying it gets a whole lot better   

I'll wait for a sale...and even then...

[Huw the Poo]

I'll wait for a sale...and even then...

Yeah, at the moment I'm annoyed I paid £60 for this. But pay I did, so I'll plough on and hope that it does indeed get better.

[BanzaiCat]

I've not gotten back to this since I made my initial report, so I can't say anything one way or another, now.

Other than, I'm kind of annoyed I spent full price on this and played it as much as I did...just barely over the refund limit. Oh well.

I've read several news bits on the game where players are calling for this or that or the other to be added...so maybe it will be a better, more intuitive game in the near future. Of course, I thought that with No Man's Sky too; I didn't buy NMS full price, but on sale, and it annoyed the piss out of me.

[Huw the Poo]

So I wandered off the beaten track for the first time this evening. I wanted to really explore a planet instead of just visiting the quest buildings (sorry, I mean lore-rich palaces of visual delight). The game hasn't bothered to tell me how to do this of course (a running theme) but I navigated the clumsy map and picked a spot on the planet I was orbiting. And I mean, I literally just picked a spot. As far as I could tell I had the whole planet to choose from and no reason to go to one place over any other so I randomly clicked a spot and landed. There, all I could do was run around looking for rocks to mine. But wait! My scanner picked up an artifact or something! Nearly 1km away, cool, I'll just nip in my.....oh no, I actually don't have a vehicle and I can't just fly my ship over. So I walked. And walked. And when I finally got there it was an asteroid impact point. What could I do with this? Press E to scan. That's it. Then it's just fast travel back to my ship to dejectedly take off and sigh.

Another time I was on foot and I had my scanner up, and I noticed an option at the bottom of the screen - outpost. What's all this then? I press the button and am immediately presented with an option to start building a base on the lifeless rock I was "exploring". There has not been a single peep from the game that this was even a thing. What can I do with it? Why would I want to? How does this make any sense in the context of what I'd been doing? I actually looked this up and the conventional wisdom among the playerbase is that there's no point even doing this until you're doing late-game crafting anyway.

I just can't believe this is the culmination of eight years of development and god knows how much money, from the (former) kings of first person RPGs. What have they been doing? There's no immersion, no logic, the interface is terrible, combat sucks, the ship sections suck, I could go on and on. No Man's Sky is an indie game, and Elite: Dangerous is AA at best, and both of those games are orders of magnitude better at making me feel like an actual space pilot. Immersion off the charts in both games. Starfield just feels sterile and lifeless.

[JudgeDredd]