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Starfield | Review Thread

What scores do you think StarfieId will get?

  • 40-45%

    Votes: 3 0.5%
  • 45-50%

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 50-55%

    Votes: 1 0.2%
  • 55-60%

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 60-65%

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 65-70%

    Votes: 2 0.3%
  • 70-75%

    Votes: 5 0.8%
  • 75-80%

    Votes: 15 2.3%
  • 80-85%

    Votes: 81 12.5%
  • 85-90%

    Votes: 241 37.3%
  • 90-95%

    Votes: 243 37.6%
  • 95-100%

    Votes: 55 8.5%

  • Total voters
    646
  • Poll closed .

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
There's nuance to all this, all I will say is seeing the facial animations just made it look...normal to me. It didn't look amazing or like the 2nd coming. Especially factoring in everything else about the game.

I say this because that made Zero Dawn underwhelming to me, and elevated Forbidden West for me. Presentation is also a thing that IMO hurts Forspoken alot. There are some lil things that add up to make you go wtf where they thinking with Forspoken. I enjoy the combat, but it falls short in other areas.

Starfield.... environments look really good tho. But as more details come out about the game....its just whelming to me right now. Not underwhelming but just...eh. I too will see how I like it when I play it. I also like the Crackdown series, enjoy Recore and State of Decay so my opinion is probably shit, lol.
Emotion Reaction GIF

Season 3 Ron GIF by Parks and Recreation
Forspoken plays better than most games this year. Only ac6 controls better.. and re4 ok. maybe
 

Sleepwalker

Member
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:

 
Last edited:

TheMan

Member
It has no obligation to be realistic; it’s a game. Games have mechanics designed to serve their gameplay design.

Reality has hard rules. Not games.

This also clearly isn’t a sim.
Have to agree, I think realistic physics would be a pain for most people
 

Montauk

Member
So the rules of space don’t apply to Bethesda’s space based game, because it’s not real. Thanks for clearing that up :messenger_tears_of_joy:

That’s right, they literally don’t apply because the game is a game and not reality.

They’ll be quite a long list of other things that also aren’t realistic.
 

jroc74

Phone reception is more important to me than human rights


Gives an idea of what space exploration is like. Much more limited than I thought…


This 3-minute video by NXG perfectly summarizes my feelings and disappointments with Starfield.



To me, Starfield is a story of wasted potential. This game could have been super special, a 95+ must-play.

As more info comes out....yeah.....
 

Hugare

Member
I fail to see hows that a problem.
When you just want to go to your objective but there's no goddamn map and you're in the middle of a city

Or when you want to go to a vendor, but you have to memorize where he is, 'cause there's no map
 

Shifty1897

Member
87 is a good score.... But do you remember how people on this very forum talked about how Bethesda, who haven't made a game worthy of GOTY discussion in 12 years, was going to annihilate BG3 and TOTK and take GOTY? 😂😂😂🥴 If I ever have the free time I'll dig through those threads and start calling some of y'all out, the internet needs more accountability.
 

ABnormal

Member
Problem is they cant even create their own unique content anymore. Evert here of The Initiative? Neither have I (jokes aside) this was supposed to be their grass roots studio built from the ground up. Money poured into it, working on the new perfect dark and what happens? They bring in Crystal Dynamics a third party player to come in, take over, and take charge of the project which I assume and been restarted or vastly changed
I completely agree. Budget destination outside, it's probably not easy to build and grow efficient and skilled development houses, and MS failed to do so for ten years. Now they have acquired many studios, and if they will find a good way to grow them, they will succeed, eventually. But from the past trends, I'm not very confident that they will.
 

Topher

Gold Member
Overhype isn’t a personal thing, not in this context. The game exists outside your mind, and that’s what’s being discussed when people say the game was overhyped.

Menu based exploration. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

What's with the snark my man?
 

damidu

Member
hmm lower than i guessed, considering their review-copy tactics, guess itll balance to low 80s after all the reviews pour in
still hyped though, scfi rpg is my cup of rpg
 
Last edited:

killatopak

Gold Member
It has no obligation to be realistic; it’s a game. Games have mechanics designed to serve their gameplay design.

Reality has hard rules. Not games.

This also clearly isn’t a sim.
They made it a point that they overhauled their physics system in their presentations though. What we got is still ragdolls in the end. I wouldn't have had any problem if they didn't mention it.
 


Detailed review. Says it's very good, he like the main plot, feels like a real RPG, many different systems to play with or ignore completely, captures the feeling of exploring outer space. Downside is that some of the major story elements choices and consequences are a little too telegraphed, he only cared about a couple of the companions, and that outside of the hand crafted content, exploration on random planets can get boring after a while.
 
Last edited:

DragoonKain

Neighbours from Hell
The biggest letdown of all imo. I would have easily traded a little less combat prowess for better exploration.

That's pretty much the consensus throughout the reviews and it takes away from one of the most hyped aspects. Most reviewers have barely started playing the bigger sweep of the game and are already tossing exploration aside. That's really bad.

I never expected to be 1000 detailed, interesting worlds, but we know now it's a total gimmick combined with the restrictions of where you can actually go.
I think in future space games like this need to ditch the idea of having tons of planets to explore and instead focus on a handful of super large detailed planets. Until technology gets better to where a dev team can make hundreds of planets interesting and packed with content without being bland and boring.

Everyone is trying to outdo each other with bigger games and more places to explore and sometimes it comes at the expensive of these areas actually being interesting.
 

ChoosableOne

ChoosableAll
After reading and watching reviews, I thought it could be even more boring than Fallout 4. It seems like a new cyberpunk disaster. I'll install it to test my computer, but I don't think I'll be spending my hours on this game. I'm waiting for Baldur's Gate 3 to be polished thoroughly. In the meantime, I'll finish ToTK and Hollow Knight. Instead of calling their games Bethesda RPGs, it might be more accurate to divide them as Bethesda medieval fantasy RPGs and Bethesda FPS, because while I enjoy the former, I don't really like the latter.
 

Montauk

Member
I think in future space games like this need to ditch the idea of having tons of planets to explore and instead focus on a handful of super large detailed planets. Until technology gets better to where a dev team can make hundreds of planets interesting and packed with content without being bland and boring.

Everyone is trying to outdo each other with bigger games and more places to explore and sometimes it comes at the expensive of these areas actually being interesting.

Like many others when they said there would be 1000 planets I knew there was huge disappointment ahead for the lunatic hype crowd.

Same as with the revelation that they were still using Creation Engine.
 

Heisenberg007

Gold Journalism
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 is 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 they were hoping for.

"Starfield is a solid game that was shooting for the stars but never left the orbit".


YT Link:


This is the best review, by the way. 💯

It really shows he played the game in its entirety and actually inspected the game to find the good and the bad.

10/10 review! 🔥
 

Arsic

Loves his juicy stink trail scent
Can’t wait to play! Sounds like it’ll be a blast. Skyrim in space is exactly what I wanted.

Sure it won’t beat Zelda or BG3 for GOTY but it seems like it’ll be worth your time and $, plus it could be your personal GOTY.

Congrats to Hodd Toward.
 

killatopak

Gold Member
Basically zero relevance to what we’re talking about.
It does though. You can't just say in your trailers how your new physics system are realistic with even zero gravity covered and shrug it off with it's just a game bro. That's simply stupid. You're really playing down physics in a fucking sci-fi game that has little to no fantasy elements? Sorry but I have standards and don't like being lied to in my face.
 

Romulus

Member
After reading and watching reviews, I thought it could be even more boring than Fallout 4. It seems like a new cyberpunk disaster. I'll install it to test my computer, but I don't think I'll be spending my hours on this game. I'm waiting for Baldur's Gate 3 to be polished thoroughly. In the meantime, I'll finish ToTK and Hollow Knight. Instead of calling their games Bethesda RPGs, it might be more accurate to divide them as Bethesda medieval fantasy RPGs and Bethesda FPS, because while I enjoy the former, I don't really like the latter.

Nowhere near as bad as Cyberpunk but definitely falls in line of Fallout 4 in terms of being "fine." Just sucks the studio doesn't have the magic anymore.
 
I wonder what state the game was in last year before it’s last delay.

I’m looking forward to playing it, I can’t help feeling tho Xbox still lacks that wow game , particularly from a technical perspective, for all their posturing over Series X it’s lacking that real step up game from last generation imo. Forza Horizon 5 came close perhaps.
 
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