I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.
While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you’d expect.
Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.
In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today’s game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don’t scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.
I just don’t understand why some key binds are random. Why am I using b to add favorites? Why not f. Or x to exit the ship. Why not q? It just seems like the binds are just chosen at random when there are available keys where my hands are already resting.
I love that 0 is to heal but O is to repair my ship. I’m constantly just mashing both because I can’t remember which is which when my shields are down and I’m trying to dodge a missile.
There is a big issue with tedious repeating animations. Like standing up from the cockpit. Or docking a station. The hand made content is still there it’s just placed into the world procedurealy.
So much of the game is simply infuriating, and I’m not all that far in yet.
The menus are attrocious. It feels like wading through mud every time you try to get to menu. Half of them are locked to what feels like 10fps. You go into the map and it’s 37 presses of the tab key to get out, or else use the awkward as fuck hold tab to exit. The inventory menus are a fucking joke. It took two weeks for modders to fix all of Bethesda’s UI garbage that they have to fix every time a new game comes out. How is there not an option to sort by value/weight yet?
There’s a lot of time wasting crap too. If you want to go to a different planet you have to walk to your ship, go up the ladder and go to the cockpit, watch an animation to sit down in the cockpit, watch a cutscene to take off, open the map, find your planet, set course, watch a cutscene as you jump to the planet, open the map again, find where you want to land, watch a cutscene as you land, get out of your ship. That’s a lot of steps. Unskippable cutscenes every time you go somewhere sucks.
I keep seeing this “Skyrim in space” moniker from the people who are lukewarm yet still positive about the game. I’d argue you can’t even say that. From what I’ve seen, the game is a regression in a lot of ways. Skyrim and other earlier BGS titles are superior products.
Yep. Saw what I would be buying and didn’t waste money. Funny how that makes me the dumb one in your eyes?
Gotta have that credit card number locked in by the E3 launch apparently.
You can’t really form an opinion of a game you’ve never played aside from surface level or opinions from others.
Most common bug for me so far is the invis cloak glitching and becoming visually permanent (but not the effect on stealth. Boo)
Honestly not even a tiny problem for a Bethesda vet.
7/10 basically space skyrim
