Fuck preordering

Coming fresh off BG3, the quality of the writing and the amount of character expression in dialog is like night and day. Honestly there was even one moment fairly early on when I said to myself “Fallout 4 would have let me extort this guy” and then I realized how egregious it was that I felt I had less agency in this quest than in FO4.

I only played a few hours on my Steam Deck (because it would freeze on my PC), but what I saw was slightly disappointing. The game looks great, even on the Steam Deck with FSR blurring everything, the gun mechanics are fun, the character animations are the best I’ve ever seen from this studio. The performance is also very good on the Deck, with stable 60FPS in indoor scenes and playable sub-60 in large outdoor areas.

…but the exploration. Man, Bethesda is known for their exploration, yet the spaceship is a gimmick at best. To be fair, I haven’t played enough to get familiar with everything yet, but I don’t expect that part to get much better. The game feels like Fallout, except instead of having a giant seamless open world to explore, you have a giant open world with tedious transitions between different areas. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but it’s not at all what I was expecting.

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Just played 4 hours. Not saying whether the game is good or bad, but I’m not seeing the point of the spaceship yet.

It’s looks like merely a medium for the fast traveling mechanic. You can’t really “move” in space (as far as ive tried), and can’t use it to fly within a planet.

I expected being able to manually travel from planet A to planet B and finding cool stuff along the way. If you wanna actually move you need to fast travel.

I also expected to be able to get in my ship and go from place A to place B within the same planet (also finding cool stuff along the way). It seems that also is just done by fast traveling only.

Upsides:

• side quests other than the radiant ones are mostly cool so far
• stealth archer isn’t so good that you can just play that way straight out, but the tree makes it looks eventually strong
• zero g combat in a derelict space station was cool. I hope there’s more of that
• base building seems fine, I’m not sure what it’s for, but it seems fine

Downsides:

• ship stuff feels bad. I don’t care about fast travel, but it’s just about the weakest ship-to-ship combat that I’ve played. Its early yet, though. Boarding a ship was cool at least.
• combat AI is not good. Enemies never seem to take any initiative, they mostly just crouch behind wherever you found them
• the setting has no… flavor? The factions feel like fallout analogues but without fun or verve. Maybe I just haven’t found the weird shit yet, but I’m not optimistic.

I feel like I’ve burned myself out a little bit on story heavy games after Baldurs Gate 3, so I cannot concentrate on the story lol

But otherwise…
Fps jumps between 30 and 90 and I feel the slowdowns (rtx3080, Ryzen 3900x here).
The graphics and animations are kind of shit. Standard Bethesda.
The menus are super fiddly.
The aesthetic is cool. I love the retro futuristic bulky style.
Music is great!
Voice acting thus far, is good.
Starship is cool but basically unnecessary. You just fast travel anyway.
Combat is pretty cool but stiff.

I haven’t played super far yet so im hoping it gets a bit better soon.

Unfortunately it isn’t what I wanted out of this game.

Loading screen to land on a planet, loading screen to leave my spaceship, no seamless entry into caves or buildings. Planets and space having boundaries. Can’t use my spaceship to traverse.

Glad people enjoy it, but I was looking for something more akin to NMS or Star Citizen.

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I’ve been having a ton of fun with it. I’ve only played 4 hours so far, but it’s definitely the smoothest Bethesda game in terms of performance and animations, also in my experience not many bugs. Playing on a 1440p monitor with a 7900XT and I get pretty consistent 100fps (my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can’t tell how high it’ll go).

In terms of gameplay, space combat is reasonably entertaining and flying the ship is fairly well thought out. Whilst you can’t fly directly between planets like in Elite Dangerous, the primary purpose of ship control is combat and it does fairly well. On my computer, loading screens are pretty much instant, so travelling between planets isn’t a problem. Combat is fairly fun, and the AI behaviour has been much improved from previous Bethesda games. Still not always perfect but they do behave more naturally. Environmental storytelling also has a much larger presence again, with a lot of interactions and things to read. Also, this really fulfils my fantasy of being just a citizen in a sci-fi world. Walking around my ship, seeing the little bathroom and crew chambers, it’s really cool, it feels very lived in and really makes it feel like you’re an explorer on the fringes of space, living out of a ship.

There are a lot of comparisons with No Man’s Sky, but honestly I feel they’re completely different games, by design. Starfield is more Bethesda’s take on a Mass Effect style game.

Anyway, people have a lot of mixed opinions, but I’ve been loving it!

Watched a streamer play for quite a while and my primary takeaway is that I wish Bethesda would just scrap their engine and start fresh.

It’s got the same stiffness, gliding movement, butt-ugly NPC’s, and just the general feel of 15 year old Bethesda RPGs. I expect I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for the same reason I struggled with fallout 4.

Y’all I thought we agreed as a society to not preorder anymore?

Random stream of consciousness:

I played about 5 hours last night. I’m playing it on a 4K monitor with a 3080TI and 5900x. I’m getting 60FPS on ultra usually, but it drops to 30 sometimes. I think I’m going to try to tweak the settings a bit, because I want higher and more stable FPS.

Edit: Apparently there is no way to lower the resolution??? So I dropped the settings from “ultra” to “high” (one setting lower), and now I’m getting 60FPS where I was getting 30 and 90FPS where I was getting 60. This feels a lot better to me.

I really am enjoying the game, but I understand why reviewers say it starts slow. Actually going on missions is really fun, but there is a lot of time between going on missions because I’m exploring so much, talking to NPCs, and managing my inventory.

The gunplay is good, not spectacular. Leaps and bounds better than Fallout 4’s gunplay.

The inventory system isn’t good, but the more I use it, the faster I get at it. I just learned that I could favorite weapons, so that should help keep me from pausing constantly to change weapons when one runs out of ammo.

The world feels good to move in. I like the booster packs.

The start of the story feels a little forced (“COME WITH ME.” “🤷 okay”), but that doesn’t really bother me too much.

I like the NPCs I have met so far.

The character creation seemed simpler than previous Bethesda games, and I mean that as a compliment. I never wanted to make a human that looked like a fish, and having the option to do that would always turn me off from the character creator, as I felt like anything I tried made my character fall into uncanny valley. So I would just choose a preset and maybe change basic stuff like eye color, hair color, etc. In this one, it was really easy to make a character look how you wanted and still look like a human.

The default keybinds for keyboard/mouse are idiotic, especially in the menus. Sometimes the game will tell me to press the wrong button for an action (the looting in space explanation was completely wrong).

I haven’t got to the point where I am able to customize my ship yet, but I really want to add storage to it for all my materials, because my carry weight is way too low.

Spent a few hours trying to fix the broken ultrawide support. Eventually, the good old hex edit fix for aspect ratios on the EXE did the trick. After that, the FOV was messed up, but the game doesn’t have an FOV slider (or HDR, or DLSS)… so eventually I managed to fix that with a custom ini.

The next few hours was spent shooting pirates like I was playing Far Cry in Space, and struggling with the game’s horrifically designed UI, menus, and inventory. So far, I am feeling very angry about the game. Like we were flat-out lied to about what the game was. There is no exploration. There’s barely even “space”. You just teleport from map to map shooting pirates… with a little scanning creatures and mining rocks mixed in. I don’t understand how anyone is okay with this.