First of all, I do really enjoy the game for all of its flaws. Just want to get that out of the way first.
It is, from toe to tip, a Bethesda game. For better or worse. It definitely has a very Fallout-esque flavor. As a big fan of Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds, I can’t help but compare the two and they are similar in a lot of ways. We are definitely having cowboy times in space doodoo do doo. That’s not a bad thing though. I think it’s easy to see influences from all sorts of sci-fi sources throughout the game. We’ve got space miners on asteroids, rag-tag space pirates, slick corpos, uptight military leaders, and the aforementioned independent minded space cowboys. Pick a trope from a popular title and it’s in there. We’ve even got space drugs made from fish!
Technical downsides? Menu upon menus within loadscreens within menus. It’s fairly quick, but it just takes you out of the action. So you wanna fly to another planet? Sit in the pilot’s seat. Tiny unskippable scene of you sitting down. Menu to take off pops up. Cinematic cut scene of you taking off plays. Now you’re in orbit. You might have a random encounter in orbit, peaceful or hostile. (Some really fun ones.) Open your main menu. Go to the star map. Find the star system you want to travel to and select it. Click Jump. Cutscene of your ship doing a FTL jump to that system. Load screen. Now you’re in orbit in the new system. Open that menu back up to scan the planet and find a landing site. Etc etc.
ORRRRR you can pick a planet you’ve already been to, or from your quest log, and just fast travel there from the main menu and never fly in space at all. ??? Aside from kinda defeating the point, you have skill points to level up how much cargo your ship can carry that requires you to make FTL jumps. And BY GOD will you need cargo space.
The game does not explain things well. I guess Todd was tired of hearing about how Skyrim was too “hand holdy” because this game doesn’t tell you shit. Once I played for a while I figured things out or I just looked them up online. I also watched a couple of Gameranx videos before I started playing. (I 💜Jake Baldino and Falcon.) That helped tremendously.
Speaking of not telling you things… there are NO city maps. The cities are huge with lots of buildings and shops you can explore and people you can interact with. Good luck memorizing them, bitch. (You’ll get used to them eventually, honestly. But I’d kill for a map.) Planets have a surface map but it will only show you a very condensed local area with specific landmarks highlighted on a blank blue background.
There’s a lot of really funny stuff in the game that has made me LOL and I want to shout out the writers. Just kooky jokes and silly encounters. Had a pilot hail me to make a Uranus joke. Dead. Had another ship invite on board to party. Very fun.
I personally have not encountered any major bugs to speak of. I thought I did on my first mission but I was in the wrong place bc the game didn’t tell me where to go bc fuck maps. I did lose some weapons bc of bugged weapon racks on a ship I got but they weren’t anything special. I haven’t seen any floating mammoths or anything.
The leveling system is not my favorite. There are a ton of things to potentially put points into from pistol damage to carry weight to how well your ship steers. When you put a point into a trait it unlocks a “challenge”. For example, I put a point in security, so until I unlock 5 locks I don’t get the bonus from that point. Then once you complete the challenge, the bonus is activated and the next level of that perk is available to unlock. The problem is for some of the combat perks, you’re going to be making pistol kills (or whatever) that aren’t counting towards your perk bc you don’t have a point to unlock the next level. Or maybe you forgot to go into that menu 30 minutes ago, or didn’t realize that perk was done. Bethesda said they were trying to keep players from getting too OP and having too many perk points but damn. It sucks bc base building is also limited by perks.
Base building! Ok so this is a mash-up of Fallout 4 and No Man’s Sky sort of… kind of. Apparently your main objective is to place bases on planets to harvest valuable resources like Helium-3. Considering that I already have more companions than I do places to put them, I was looking for a place to assign these folks so they’d stop pestering me on my dang ship. You can build bases right from the get go, but certain things are blocked off until you have a couple of perks unlocked. I always need more perk points. Ugh.
There are 4 companions you can romance. I immediately started flirting with the cowboy single dad. He looked boring before the game came out, but I’m 100% a sucker. He has a southern accent and a raspy voice and calls his daughter “gumdrop”. He’s like a 15% himbo. One of his voice lines after I looted a corpse was, “To the victor go the spoils… Did I say that right?” Shut your mouth and kiss me. AND! His baby mama is NOT dead. I won’t spoil it, but it is refreshing as fuck!!
Yes, I did unlock the Adoring Fan from Oblivion and add him to my crew. How could I not?? He’s everything you could possibly imagine and more. 11/10
Heller 💜
I’m a ways into the main story but these are my take aways without any real spoilers. It’s fun. It really is. I’m a loot gremlin and Beth outdid themselves with the lootables on this one. So yeah. I like it. It’s pretty much what I expected.
Who said Skyrim was too “hand holdy”?
Skyrim, i think, was a great example of JUST enough tutorial to help you get the basics. And then you just play. And the controls were fairly simple anyway (click this to attack, press this button to pickup stuff, Y to jump).
Starfield is like “press the joystick to walk….ok now, here’s a space battle, good luck”.
Oh not me! That was the old complaint from die hard Morrowind players who apparently loved the olden days of not having so much as a quest marker to guide you. Morrowind’s idea of quest instructions was “there’s a guy to the east you should go talk to and also he’s not essential so he might get killed by a cliff racer before you can find him”. By “to the east” they meant within a vague hundred square mile area. And according to these whiny dudebros, the introduction of the quest marker and salient instructions dumbed down the Elder Scrolls games and made them “too accessible” thus ruining the franchise. 🙄🙄🙄
I am a Skyrim fan girl through and through. Wonkiness and all. Starfield is complicated, there’s a thousand things to do, you get told how to do like 4 of them, and the rest you have to figure out. Sometimes I feel like if somebody stuck Farkas in a spaceship. “Skjor says I have the strength of Ysgramor, and my brother has his smarts.” Well which one has the space dogfighting skills because I need that please. Fuuuuuu…
I feel about TES same way as Mass Effect: the later sequels are absolutely better and the old diehards cant convince me otherwise.
I started with Oblivion, it was janky, sometimes a whole quest would be broken cuz the enemies would spawn and wonder off into the woods? But it was fun and you could basically figure it out after an hour.
Skyrim improved on basically all of that.
ME1 is a complicated mess with a great story and characters. Its gameplay leaves MUCH to be desired. ME2 improved on that by simplifying it lol
Starfield—to me—is like the jank of Oblivion plus the vibe of Outer Worlds. I would hate if a game as expansive as Starfield was as confusing as Morrowind or ME1.
First of all, I do really enjoy the game for all of its flaws. Just want to get that out of the way first.
It is, from toe to tip, a Bethesda game. For better or worse. It definitely has a very Fallout-esque flavor. As a big fan of Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds, I can’t help but compare the two and they are similar in a lot of ways. We are definitely having cowboy times in space doodoo do doo. That’s not a bad thing though. I think it’s easy to see influences from all sorts of sci-fi sources throughout the game. We’ve got space miners on asteroids, rag-tag space pirates, slick corpos, uptight military leaders, and the aforementioned independent minded space cowboys. Pick a trope from a popular title and it’s in there. We’ve even got space drugs made from fish!
Technical downsides? Menu upon menus within loadscreens within menus. It’s fairly quick, but it just takes you out of the action. So you wanna fly to another planet? Sit in the pilot’s seat. Tiny unskippable scene of you sitting down. Menu to take off pops up. Cinematic cut scene of you taking off plays. Now you’re in orbit. You might have a random encounter in orbit, peaceful or hostile. (Some really fun ones.) Open your main menu. Go to the star map. Find the star system you want to travel to and select it. Click Jump. Cutscene of your ship doing a FTL jump to that system. Load screen. Now you’re in orbit in the new system. Open that menu back up to scan the planet and find a landing site. Etc etc.
ORRRRR you can pick a planet you’ve already been to, or from your quest log, and just fast travel there from the main menu and never fly in space at all. ??? Aside from kinda defeating the point, you have skill points to level up how much cargo your ship can carry that requires you to make FTL jumps. And BY GOD will you need cargo space.
The game does not explain things well. I guess Todd was tired of hearing about how Skyrim was too “hand holdy” because this game doesn’t tell you shit. Once I played for a while I figured things out or I just looked them up online. I also watched a couple of Gameranx videos before I started playing. (I 💜Jake Baldino and Falcon.) That helped tremendously.
Speaking of not telling you things… there are NO city maps. The cities are huge with lots of buildings and shops you can explore and people you can interact with. Good luck memorizing them, bitch. (You’ll get used to them eventually, honestly. But I’d kill for a map.) Planets have a surface map but it will only show you a very condensed local area with specific landmarks highlighted on a blank blue background.
There’s a lot of really funny stuff in the game that has made me LOL and I want to shout out the writers. Just kooky jokes and silly encounters. Had a pilot hail me to make a Uranus joke. Dead. Had another ship invite on board to party. Very fun.
I personally have not encountered any major bugs to speak of. I thought I did on my first mission but I was in the wrong place bc the game didn’t tell me where to go bc fuck maps. I did lose some weapons bc of bugged weapon racks on a ship I got but they weren’t anything special. I haven’t seen any floating mammoths or anything.
The leveling system is not my favorite. There are a ton of things to potentially put points into from pistol damage to carry weight to how well your ship steers. When you put a point into a trait it unlocks a “challenge”. For example, I put a point in security, so until I unlock 5 locks I don’t get the bonus from that point. Then once you complete the challenge, the bonus is activated and the next level of that perk is available to unlock. The problem is for some of the combat perks, you’re going to be making pistol kills (or whatever) that aren’t counting towards your perk bc you don’t have a point to unlock the next level. Or maybe you forgot to go into that menu 30 minutes ago, or didn’t realize that perk was done. Bethesda said they were trying to keep players from getting too OP and having too many perk points but damn. It sucks bc base building is also limited by perks.
Base building! Ok so this is a mash-up of Fallout 4 and No Man’s Sky sort of… kind of. Apparently your main objective is to place bases on planets to harvest valuable resources like Helium-3. Considering that I already have more companions than I do places to put them, I was looking for a place to assign these folks so they’d stop pestering me on my dang ship. You can build bases right from the get go, but certain things are blocked off until you have a couple of perks unlocked. I always need more perk points. Ugh.
There are 4 companions you can romance. I immediately started flirting with the cowboy single dad. He looked boring before the game came out, but I’m 100% a sucker. He has a southern accent and a raspy voice and calls his daughter “gumdrop”. He’s like a 15% himbo. One of his voice lines after I looted a corpse was, “To the victor go the spoils… Did I say that right?” Shut your mouth and kiss me. AND! His baby mama is NOT dead. I won’t spoil it, but it is refreshing as fuck!!
Yes, I did unlock the Adoring Fan from Oblivion and add him to my crew. How could I not?? He’s everything you could possibly imagine and more. 11/10
Heller 💜
I’m a ways into the main story but these are my take aways without any real spoilers. It’s fun. It really is. I’m a loot gremlin and Beth outdid themselves with the lootables on this one. So yeah. I like it. It’s pretty much what I expected.
Who said Skyrim was too “hand holdy”?
Skyrim, i think, was a great example of JUST enough tutorial to help you get the basics. And then you just play. And the controls were fairly simple anyway (click this to attack, press this button to pickup stuff, Y to jump).
Starfield is like “press the joystick to walk….ok now, here’s a space battle, good luck”.
Playing starfield and had this interaction where this guy goes we’ve been trying to contact you about your ship’s extended warranty so I’m losing it rn
my girlfriend wanted more than the amount of children you can adopt in skyrim so she taught herself how to mod it so that you could adopt them all, and uploaded it to a skyrim modding community so other likeminded player could utilize her code.
months later, an update was added to skyrim that was basically her code, verbatim, lifted directly from the mod, without credit or even permission. this made her so angry that she, at age seventeen, booked a flight to maryland, went to bethesda headquarters and demanded to see todd himself to yell at him.
of course, she was immediately denied this request and escorted out of the building because she was a scary six foot seventeen year old canadian lesbian who had flown all the way to yell at a man who probably had no idea her code was stolen, but she is still legitimately, 100% furious with him to this day
i fucking love her.
FACE YOUR CRIMES, HOWARD
i’ve long since retired from collecting fake internet stories but this stands out in my mind as one that’s just so bold faced and iconic because at no point in skyrim was there an update that allowed you to adopt more than 2 children. i love this post
I was about to say loll….played that game constantly for the last 12 years and in vanilla, you only get TWO crumbsnatchers. That’s it!
Now there is a mod that allows you to adopt 6 kids—which is enough to get all the street urchins and 2 from Honorhall—but its hella glitchy, relies on scripting (so you can’t install mid-save), and is wonky with certain houses.
Either way, don’t believe everything on the interwebz lol
