Luke Stephens summary:
- Best game BGS has ever made in some ways but inferior to past games in others.
- It's not No Man's Sky, it's more of a bigger Outer worlds.
- Not about exploring space freely, its about fast travelling to locations and talking to NPCs.
- Gunplay significantly improved.
- Ship customization is great, favorite part of the game for him.
- Base building is only really available after 50 to 60 hours due to insane resource requirements that require A LOT of mining on planets. Very late game system and VERY grindy.
- Voice acting and writing is very well done on conversational level.
- The game is very big but he thinks Bethesda were too ambitious and bit off more than they could chew.
- Much of the scope is an illusion, the more you engage with it the more this illusion fades.
- Late hours of the game are full of bugs and broken quests.
- MSQ can be beaten in 18 hours if you skip side content, over 50% of the MSQs are fetch quests for NPC characters. MSQ pretty lacklustre.
- Side content quests are superior to MSQ but have numerous bugs, one major faction quest line got so broken in his first save that it cannot be completed at all.
- Many broken and bugged quests, first 20-30 hours are VERY polished, the further into the game you get the more bugs you see and the more severe they become.
- NPCs float into the sky during conversations and sometimes clip outside into diferent zones (lmao) this breaks the quest as the characters can clip out of ships and disappear into space. This broke a big quest as an NPC floated out of the space station to never be seen again, he reloaded a previous save 1 hour back and the NPC floated out of the station again when he got to that point. He never came back. Only solution was to make a new save.
- Ship physics are prone to breaking, as are character and object animations.
-AI is broken at times, cites an issue where security guards NPC stop pursuing you after you cross a treshold in the city.
- Many funny "classic" BGS glitches.
- You can see "null objects" visible on the screen. These should not be visible to the players
- Guards randomly drop dead when you approach them sometimes
- Shadow glitches
- Game sometimes thinks you're in combat and won't allow you to fast travel despite not being in combat.
- No DLSS support
- Good performance and framerate in his high end rig.
- Constant loading screens, like A LOT, "if you're wondering wether there's a loading screen for a particular action, the answer is most likely yes"
- Feels like a game built on technology of the past, in the same vein of Fallout 3 and New vegas.
- Game design feels dated in a lot of ways.
- Exploration is very limited, you get to a visible wall that tells you you've reached the end of the area and get prompted to fast travel away.
- The planets are not fully explorable, just small generated maps based on your landing location and points of interests. It's an illusion of scale and freedom.
- These generated tiles are not continuous, if you see a big mountain in the distance that you want to explore but is out of reach, if you try to land as close as possible in the direction of that mountain it won't matter because there will be a whole new terrain generated and the mountain will have disappeared.
- These are not planets to explore, just individual microbiomes, compares it to a tiny minecraft map being generated once you land.
- Procedural generation engine is broken, in the first 20 hours of the game he saw multiple recycled locations, up to 8 times per location. Some of these recycled locations are also recycled for the MSQ. Many points of interest are straight up copy pasted onto different planets without any variation (same enemies, same enemy placement, same structures, same environments and objects in the same placements) This caused him to think he was going insane while playing until he was able to pinpoint the issue.
- Many planets are gas giants you can't land on, sometimes they will have barren moons you can land on, these are apparently counted as planets.
Conclusion:
- Starfield is a really fun game and there is a lot to grind and have a good time, people will be playing for years and still be discovering new things
- The encounters you can get randomly in planets are fantastic, NPCs will remember previous encounters and initiate random dynamic encounters.
- There is lots to do with all the systems in place and there's something for most people in here.
- Solid game, very fun, not a masterpiece.
- Loved the combat.
- As a gamepass title, playing this game is a no brainer.
- Perhaps not the masterpiece Bethesda and Microsoft were hoping for but still good.
"Starfield is a solid game that was shooting for the stars but never left the orbit".
YT Link: