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Huh. After more planets, I'm now less convinced its Fahrenheit and not just a random number.

The current planet I'm on (Newton III) is a nice temperate planet with trees, grass and desert hills that's a frigid 9 degrees. Much colder than the entirely ice moon I was on before (which was 25 degrees).

Edit: Yep. Snowy polar regions of a new planet (Copernicus II) and the 'Frozen Plains' terrain at the poll is 28 degrees. So either Fahrenheit or nonsense numbers.

I encountered my favorite bit of quest design so far. Just a meaningless side quest, so no spoilers necessary. Basically a criminal investigation where you pick up two pieces of evidence so the officer in charge can arrest the right guy. You talk to him, tell him to arrest the guy, and are told you'd better have evidence to back up the allegation. Then you get a speech test. Handing over the pieces of evidence presumably gives you two automatic successes, but not enough to pass the speech check. So I did that and predictably failed on the final persuasion attempt. Dude is like, that's not enough. Get me some real evidence if you want the arrest to happen. And since I already have the real evidence, I can now talk to him, hand over the exact same evidence that wasn't enough earlier as a normal conversation option and get my arrest. Classy!

But at least that was good for a laugh. I gave outposts my first serious try, and boy is getting a functional base set up infuriating. I put the mechanics to the test by selecting a mountain valley location, because I like the view. But also because Bethesda struggles with slopes. It was a good way to put to the test how robust outpost design is. It so isn't. Like, at all. On the bright side, many building options have foundations so you don't get as many floating items as in Fallout 4/76. On the not so bright side, the mesh the buildings are put on does not conform with the textured mesh you stand on when you climb some rocks. At many, I'm inclined to say most locations bordering my little valley, I kept getting "foundation is too tall" conflicts. No graphic errors of floating foundations, because they were visibly not too tall. But constantly the inability to place things with that reason attached.

Another wonderful discovery I made is that I can't have a cargo pad that connects to more than a single other cargo pad. Since my outpost is connected to three resource-producing outposts just to get the necessary basic building materials produced, that means I had to find three spots for huge landing pads, plus a forth one to park my own ship. Combined with the aforementioned inability to place things, especially large items, that was a seriously frustrating experience.

I'll keep at it, I'm sure, but the first impression is that Bethesda did their best to make the building system worse than in previous games. They're trying to do resource (chain) management in backwards ways with missing features that city builders had already perfected twenty years ago. I don't know who designed this, but I'm not getting the impression that Bethesda hired the right guys for the job. I don't think any thought was given to user experience at all.

What’s people’s opinion now that the hype has died down a bit?

 Nerak wrote:
What’s people’s opinion now that the hype has died down a bit?

A fairly standard Bethesda affair, who are well past their zenith. Starfield is exactly what one would expect: good, but not anywhere close to great.

It's average at best (many parts fall below average) in pretty much every respect, in my opinion.

As soon as you try and get a bit under the surface of any mechanic or system you realise there's not really anything more to see. Bethesda really demonstrate that they are stagnating in their design ethos.

The "scale" of the game only serves to spread the small amount of actually handcrafted content so thinly across the inflated world they made, filling in the resulting gaps with bland procedural generation and recycled points of interest that the game points you to in a myriad of the most bland of fetch quests and "go here and kill a person" quests. They also shoot the sense of awe that such a scale could impart by having all travel just be quick travel and loading screens. There's no real sense of actual movement, or a journey, except on the surface of planets where you are instead running hundreds of metres from your ship to a point of interest which turns out to be the same abandoned cryo facility you've already found on 3 other planets, with the same pirates in the same places, and the same dead bodies and notes and logs.

The writing is bad all around, with robotic animations and bland and forgettable vocal performances, which are further hamstrung by they way that dialogue is framed in the same way as oblivion, with the focus placed entirely on the faces and upper torso as they talk directly down the camera to you. Said faces are, as said, not animated enough to carry this burden, and the framing cuts off any real ability to use body language to its best to portray feeling, or to use the camera to frame a particular scene in a way to help convey meaning. So the dialogue just ends up feeling like a boring chore, and I skim read the subtitles and skip forwards through it.

The game also locks core gameplay mechanics behind perk points. It gives you a jump pack when you get to the first big planet, but you need to put a point in a skill to use it. Same for targeting specific systems on an enemy ship. An early main storyline quest has the game telling you to target an enemy ships engines so you can board them, but if you didn't put points in that skill you can't and so the game just makes the ship lose engine power and become unkillable as far as I could tell. Other skills are locked behind needing to put points in previous skills before you can unlock them, and these frequently lock off useful abilities behind arbitrary barriers, especially when levelling is quite slow and you are spending the first few levels picking up core skills to get to use the mechanics the game is telling you to.

Many mechanics are recycled from previous titles, especially fallout 4, but are made worse by the changes made. You are now no longer able to take a mod off a weapon and attach it to a different weapon of the same type, for example. Have a scope on that rifle and want to remove it and to put it on a higher level of that same rifle? Nope, not allowed, that scope is gone forever when you swap it out and you have it make a brand new one. Hope you invested a lot of skill points in scanning/research to even unlock the ability to put points in the weapon mods skill, then put points in that to get to the required rank to attach a basic scope to a rifle. Outpost building is also massively stripped back from fallout 4s settlements, while at the same time made even more cumbersome when you try to link multiple outposts together in a logistics chain.

 Nerak wrote:
What’s people’s opinion now that the hype has died down a bit?

Functional but bland.
Innovation and improvement seems to be on the 'engine' side (particularly lighting) but RPG mechanics are almost a blind copy/paste that's _really_ noticeable. (Especially with things attached to the main quest, and they feel baffling and out of place).
A lot of long term problems and exploits carried over as normal, which is frankly absurd given that some of that was solved years ago by amateurs.

Companions are boring, a little obnoxious and have a very short list of recurring barks.

Setting is... bland. Aesthetics (particularly for weapons) are largely fine (with some room for subjective taste), but the setting's problems and factional conflicts are milquetoast and watered down so not to offend anyone. The most 'controversial' thing is basically a meta commentary on gaming and speedruns.
There are some good sidequests hidden here and there, but they're few and far between (and some fall apart at the end. 'Entangled' has a really good start and middle but ends as a really simple version of the Trolley Problem)

The procedurally generated points of interest large cut out the interesting 'traveling' encounters that were so interesting in Skyrim and Fallout. Duplicates abound, sometimes next to each other.

The skill grind is tedious and in places nonsensical (physical has a lot of deliberately injuring yourself in increasing amounts which gets harder to do as you gain ranks, because as you gain ranks you're taking less damage from that specific mechanic (like fall damage))

Outposts and crafting are worse versions of FO4 systems. Stuff has just been ripped out. That's one the very few areas where they made mechanical changes, and the change was just removal.

Space stuff is undercooked and really uninteresting. Your ship is a reskinned skyrim house with a bubble turret and a storage capacity. It serves no real purpose, because mostly what you want (and mostly have to) do is fast travel.



----
Its a perfectly servicable shooter, and once you're on a planet, has skyrim-light exploration (with no real emergent or environmental storytelling). Some side quests are interesting.

Its Space Skyrim without the extensive lore from the elder scrolls series. Which is what really hurts it. And the game doubles down about not giving an explanation and reinforces the theme that either you should ignore the setting problems and just settle down and play with your (metaphorical) Legos, or embrace the ludo-narrative dissonance and keep grinding the video game.

To add to the above. Leveling up is hard if you are simply going around and exploring without doing anything. Only actual quests give half-way decent xp. Scanning flora and fauna or just exploring is worth very little.

Of course this can be bypassed by simply making an outpost on a planet that generates Cobalt and Nickle, waiting a few hours, then craft a million magnets over and over again. Limited only by the storage capacity of your outpost's raw material storage. So getting the actual levels isn't hard.

What is hard is that you have to then complete "challenges" before you can continue to level up. I think this was done as a half-assed attempt to prevent power leveling as even with maximum levels you can't just spend your perk points to unlock everything. You have to actually do stuff. This problem is that the challenges are themselves spammable and towards the end just tedious. It just punishes people for trying to power level without actually preventing it, and making everyone's life harder.

The perk that increases your storage on your ships? To level it up you need to make jumps with your ship's storage over 75% full. Level up your own personal storage? Sprint while your inventory is over 75% full. But once you're at the 3rd or 4th level of the perk it is so tedious to just keep jumping from system to system in short jumps. Oh, and the dumb part is if you jump 3 systems away in one go, it only counts as one. But if you jumped one system at a time it counts as 3

I still think the game is worth it. It has some really nice quests, but the fast travel simulator is a little offputting. Especially since they've made it so much more annoying to fast travel/ Want to jump to the next star system? Better mash M followed by Tab twice, click on the star system you want to jump to, then hold X. "Oh, why isn't it doing anything? Because we depowered your grav drive every time you jump so you have to repower it each time "

I swear, Bethesda needs better play testers to weed out dumb UI choices.

I also swear that the Settled Systems must have banned all ground vehicles when they banned mechs too.

I swear, Bethesda needs better play testers to weed out dumb UI choices.

The truly annoying thing about this? The Bethesda offices are a ~30 minute drive from the University of Maryland main campus, and the computer science department has a dedicated User Experience/Interactivity Lab. And I know for a fact they hit local software companies for internship opportunities, and faculty who churn out studies on UI.

They've got easy access to people who know better, and who would salivate over the opportunity to help.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I also swear that the Settled Systems must have banned all ground vehicles when they banned mechs too.

I don't think the game engine supports legless ground vehicles, which makes that story choice a bit unfortunate.

Maybe there will be a DLC for a robot horse. Hey, Saber Rider has a robot horse. Why should we settle for less? Wouldn't even be weird considering the game has both robots and Space Texas.

Hover vehicles?

An illegally rebuilt mech?

There are ways around that.


There is so much potential here for either DLC or mods which is another thing that has be excited and kinda disappointed that they weren't done sooner.

I'm now wondering if the developers wanted to encourage investing skill points in boost packs. I haven't yet had the points beyond the first one to enable me to use the thing in the first place, so I don't know how impactful using less fuel is. For the basic one, sprinting and boosting is a passable way of traveling on low gravity worlds, since it also circumvents excessive O2 drain. Especially when there's aggressive or territorial fauna that would otherwise slow you down. I could see them figuring the boost pack is plenty good and not worrying about normal/high gravity worlds. It's the kind of not fully thought through design Bethesda is good at.

Even considering more distance from the boost packs once at higher levels traveling is still way too dang slow. Its a combat multiplier, not a travel aid.

Maybe if you could fly your ship around the planet No Mans Sky style that could fill the gaps

Thanks for the replies everyone. I think I will hold off from buying it for a few years and wait for an inevitable sale. Maybe hopefully some added ground vehicles as well. Skyrim in space sounds like fun and I did put a lot of hours into Skyrim. Still what I’m hearing about Starfield convinces me that there’s no haste to experiencing it.

Thanks again to everyone for helping me to decide if I want to purchase Starfield now or wait.

Dipped back in last night to do the Crimson Fleet quests. Because pirates have to be fun, right...?

? ?

... well. I did the formal join up (as a 'spy' technically), got dragged to a planet to find some information (and shoot pointless things) and now I'm at a charity event.

Which involves interacting with faceless people until someone drops the info I need (at which point all of them have the same line of dialogue, reiterating the info) and additionally I need to steal something from someone.

This is, apparently, accomplished by walking up and asking her for it. I guess I could also just kill her (which has complications) or steal it, but the fact that just asking for a priceless, one-of-a-kind artifact works is mind-boggling.

And it isn't presented in a conniving or nuanced way, either. Just... 'Hey, give me that [thing]'

sigh...

Classy.

I've given up early on trying to do things in anything but the most straightforward way. When I'm sent to hack the biggest news network in the galaxy and all I have to do is walk up to a terminal in the lobby and nobody cares what I do there, and not just because there is no security whatsoever around to care, I'm told I all need to know about the game's story and quest design.

So yeah...

 Geifer wrote:
Classy.

I've given up early on trying to do things in anything but the most straightforward way. When I'm sent to hack the biggest news network in the galaxy and all I have to do is walk up to a terminal in the lobby and nobody cares what I do there, and not just because there is no security whatsoever around to care, I'm told I all need to know about the game's story and quest design.

So yeah...

That has to be a new low even for bugthesda

The game is a weird mix of copypasta mechanics (complete with long existing bugs), engine upgrades for lighting and physics and just filling in all the empty space with a sort of bland, inoffensive malaise.

It feels like a test bed, and anything they weren't testing was simply paint by numbers. Todd's even about out and about talking about how they nerfed space combat and nerfed environmental effects.

At this point, I'm more interested in the rumor about remasters for Oblivion and Fallout 3 than I am in ES6. I'd absolutely love it if they went back to Arena and Daggerfall when they were really willing to take risks and try things, rather than rated PG for a combat stim, alcohol bottles and red paint.

Installed via GamePass because why not?

I only went as far as character creation, but I'll give them this much, they improved facial animations enough that going from BG3 to Starfield actually wasn't particularly jarring. I didn't think Bethesda could pull that off.

I know it'll get worse, but I'm actually impressed. I felt like Fallout 4 was actually a stepback from Skyrim in terms of character creation, but this Starfield is an improvement. At least they're doing some things right.

I don't know what people's general expectations of facial animations are these days, but yeah, purely from one Bethesda game to the next, Starfield looks better. I mean, it should, but it's still nice to point out improvements that were actually made.

I don't know if I'd call the editor the best Bethesda has to offer to date. I think of the difference between sliders (like Skyrim) and more free form shaping (like Fallout 4) as personal preference. I think both of them provide much the same functionality for facial creation. Skyrim was worse on body creation with just a slim/wide slider. Fallout 4 and Starfield have the more advanced slim/fat/muscled triangle. But both of them are still less sophisticated than what Elder Scrolls Online offers. Personally I had hoped for the latter to influence Starfield.

trexmeyer wrote:
Installed via GamePass because why not?

I only went as far as character creation, but I'll give them this much, they improved facial animations enough that going from BG3 to Starfield actually wasn't particularly jarring. I didn't think Bethesda could pull that off.

I know it'll get worse, but I'm actually impressed. I felt like Fallout 4 was actually a stepback from Skyrim in terms of character creation, but this Starfield is an improvement. At least they're doing some things right.

I'm also planning to download it via game pass and give it a go. I'm far more likely to forgive any bother when it is more or less free.

That’s pretty much my position. It’s fun enough to play given that i’ve kinda already bought it

Basically, it's a game that will be great years later, when the modders release actual stuff more interesting / fun to play than what Todd Howard think.

It's sad to see Bugthesda is still unable to get past their bigger success from their time. The true people behind Skyrim and Fallout's genius aren't working anymore at the company, and it shows.

Maybe they can make great games again when they get rid of useless dumb higher ups like Todd Howard and actually listen to what players want in their games (running on foot with encumberance on bare planets wasn't exactly what people expected from Starfield, I believe).

Sarouan wrote:
Basically, it's a game that will be great years later, when the modders release actual stuff more interesting / fun to play than what Todd Howard think.

It's sad to see Bugthesda is still unable to get past their bigger success from their time. The true people behind Skyrim and Fallout's genius aren't working anymore at the company, and it shows.

Maybe they can make great games again when they get rid of useless dumb higher ups like Todd Howard and actually listen to what players want in their games (running on foot with encumberance on bare planets wasn't exactly what people expected from Starfield, I believe).

The worst thing is, it isn't the bugs this time. That was the least of the game's issues.

Its... well, for me, their games are about looking into and finding weird locations and poking around, while doing side quests that get me out in there world with a reason to care about it.
Starfield does none of that. The exploration is reduced to copy/pasting a relative handful of locations on random planets of no note, with exactly the same 'loot' in exactly the same spots and no interesting surprises on the road to the next one. And sometimes the 'next one' is the very one you're standing in. Which makes the jog between them even less interesting

Even the towns feel like a downgrade from skyrim, which is sad. There's only a handful of them (which some works in the 10 year old game about the _province_ of skyrim, but not 'hundreds' of worlds), which makes the two factions of bland, safe and uninteresting cliches feel barely established. The lore and history just isn't there.

I don't think 'mods will fix it' is the answer here. I think (if they bother) 'Starfield 3' will finally have enough background and development to be interesting, with some major base-level systems reworks.

Voss wrote:

The worst thing is, it isn't the bugs this time. That was the least of the game's issues.

Indeed. The fact it was one of their games released with least "game breaking" bugs makes it look like they think that alone was enough to make it an instant hit.

Even the towns feel like a downgrade from skyrim, which is sad. There's only a handful of them (which some works in the 10 year old game about the _province_ of skyrim, but not 'hundreds' of worlds), which makes the two factions of bland, safe and uninteresting cliches feel barely established. The lore and history just isn't there.

I don't think 'mods will fix it' is the answer here. I think (if they bother) 'Starfield 3' will finally have enough background and development to be interesting, with some major base-level systems reworks.

Oh, it's not about "mods will fix it". The same reason why Skyrim and Fallout were so great is that it is the modders who add interesting and actual more fun mechanics in their games and why people kept playing them for so long.

Here in Starfield, if modders makes a mod removing encumberance gak mechanism or actual land vehicles and interesting planet / space content that is not just procedural but actually unique (and maybe not just murder involving material - looks like Todd Howard thinks space exploration is more about killing endless hordes of pirates / raiders / bounty hunters who are all humans - where do they come from and what can they actually raid ?! - than actually exploring and meeting other species / cultures / alien places), that will be giving players stuff to be really engaged on long time. But that will take a lot of time to happen / develop, hence the "years later".

And TBH given all the stupid commentaries from Todd recently, I really don't expect that kind of content will come from Bugthesda. They seem very focused on smelling their own farts and call it "genius", so far, and certainly not about listening to player concerns / wishes.

Starfield world is indeed empty and meaningless.There isn't that spark that makes Elder Scrolls or Fallout universes so special. It's just bland, generic - and it's made on design so that "1000 planet" feature works the best. The very problem of Starfield is that it is wide as an ocean yet deep as a pudle. It's all about appearances / padding and Todd thinking it's enough for people to keep playing on it for years. A bit like Fallout 76 : he seems to think giving a bare bone game is enough for players to "make their own content" and have fun as it.

I don’t think mods are going to be much of a factor for Starfield. Thing about Skyrim is that for all it’s flaws it was a huge hit. So many people played it for so long. That of course drew modders to the scene. Starvield just can’t compete with the success of Skyrim. So there’s way fewer modders who’ll be prepared to put their passion into Starfield.

Plus who knows how the systems of Starfield will interact with modding.

The procgen that Bethesda built for their planets could mess up with trying to add new places to existing planets for all we know.

I don't think mods are going to fix it. Skyrim is almost a one-of-a-kind when it comes to it's mod scene. The other Bethesda games have big mod scenes compared to the rest of gaming, but nothing like Skyrim. Fallout 4 came out and went and the mod scene never got close to Skyrim. Fallout 4, by all accounts, is flat out better than Starfield and at worst, it had a good baseline for modding.

The DL numbers are interesting on Nexus.
Skyrim SE has 9 mods at over 10 million downloads. Fallout 4 has 3 and the 4th one is under 7m. I could be counting incorrectly, but it looks like Skyrim SE has 19 mods with over 7 million downloads.

Skyrim SE has has 8 mods with 15k downloads in the last 30 days. Fallout 4 has 1.
Fallout 4's top 5 have about 63k total downloads. Skyrim SE's top 5 have 172k.

For total numbers
Skyrim SE - 60k mods, 3.1 billion downloads
Skyrim - 69.5k, 1.9bn
Fallout 4 - 48.1k, 1.2bn

Downloads don't tell the whole story because A LOT of Skyrim mods are reliant on others. I think the most telling thing about Skyrim is how much combat mods have evolved over the last 5 years. They're still not perfect and you'd be better of playing the games they imitate, but the man hours going into those are insane. People are literally successfully selling (and others are pirating) fething melee animation packs.

I don't see this happening with Starfield.

Well, given Todd's recent interventions to "reassure" players the studio still works on the game and DLC are coming (of course they are, give Bugthesda more money for cut content to be finally in the game I guess ), I guess he seems to be in a panic with the recent drop in ratings with the game. Players with a lot of time on it are giving their review in the end and can only aknowledge the problems that were spotted in earlier reviews, and the lack of real incentive to keep playing "new game +". That, and the fact exploring new planets is actually very boring and repetitive, and that there's not much point to fly in space with your personnalized ship.

I agree the modder community so far doesn't look very thrilled to work on Starfield and it all depends on the community that will keep playing Starfield on long term, or if as many seem to have done already they go back to older Bugthesda games that have actual content to keep playing.

Either way, if numbers of players on Steam / Xbox keep dropping and it makes Todd sweat heavily, it's a good thing in the end for the Studio. Maybe they'll change their vision for their next games, who knows ? Well, as long as Todd is in charge, I have doubts about that : guy isn't the kind to question himself.

Basically, Starfield doesn't seem to have good bones at the core to be invested for years playing the game. That's the real issue, and the main mistake of Todd here.