Bethesda's New Magnum Opus, or Todd Howard Is Lying to You Again (In Space): Starfield thread

[Deathhappens]

And so, with launch a month and change away (for the Glorious PC Master Race^tm at least) and more news leaking and "leaking" out every day, a thread is made. Discuss what planets you want to see first, what kind of spaceships you'll build, and what aliens you're going to disappoint your parents by having virtual intercourse with^*.

In the meantime, here's the 40+ minute video containing most of what we know about the game before YouTubers bloated it to 4000 by making funny reaction faces:




*Disclaimer: Alien sex not actually confirmed, at least not until the first mods hit. So maybe a week, tops.

[ItsaRandomUsername]

I'll only buy it when it goes on sale for a fraction of a price.

I've learned from the past, Todd.

[Deathhappens]

I'm probably going to buy on launch or shortly afterwards, depending on how burnt out I am from BG3.

[Toranth]

I'll only buy it when it goes on sale for a fraction of a price.
I've learned from the past, Todd.

This. Even if it sounds awesome in first reviews, I'm going to give it a few years for bugs and balancing (and DLC) to be released and produce a final, fully playable product.

[Deathhappens]

Oh, there's no question it's going to be buggy. I expect missing quests, broken NPC behavior, people finding ways to make their starships break physics in half, pirates teleporting eveywhere, and at least one variety of alien that can punt you in orbit, possibly several. But on the flipside it's an experiment in being the next benchmark for space sims and procedurally generated content, at least as it applies to planetary biomes. As evidenced by my Freelancer, E: D, NMS, etc playtime... I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. Plus, this might actually manage to be a Fallout 3 rather than a Skyrim in terms of writing. I have hope.

[Deathhappens]

So hey, game is out or something. For those who have access to a PC at any rate. You should check it out and report back so I know if I'm going to buy it or not.

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Getting so hyped by AC6 I ended up instabuying it was almost assuredly a mistake. Not making a thread for it may also be a mistake, but I'm waiting until I can put up my own emblem at least (which entails being able to, you know, play).

[Kamera]

It's flaming garbage, even for Bethesda game standard. Blandest space exploration lore and worldbuilding I've seen in a while.

[Deathhappens]

Mostly I'm hearing some performance issues in busy cities (to be expected), the usual array of Bethesda bugs, and exploration just being a bunch of menus to go through. The latter is the one I find more concerning since it's not something that can be fixed sooner or later. How's it work exactly? You go into spaceship, launch into space, then what, can you explore stuff in-system or is it just more menu action until you land? Space combat is in so I assume it has to fit in somewhere.

[Kamera]

The game is divided into the usual walking sandbox for planet exploration and spaceship piloting for space exploration; and there's no in between. You can't use any type of ship to manually take off and fly above the surface of the planet and land where you want, like in No Man's Sky.

It's a decent Bethesda game gameplay wise, even aside that. My actual biggest gripe with Starfield is just how uninspired the setting is. With the Elder Scrolls you have one of the most imaginative fantasy worldbuilding in video games, and with Fallout you have the genre-defining post-apocalypse setting in the media. But in Starfield you got nothing original going on. They aimed for a cowardly "realistic" and "grounded" approach, which in turn just makes it the most dull and vanilla science fiction setting I've seen in a while.

[Five_X]

I'm really enjoying it; it's basically Daggerfall: In Space. There are tons of quests, tons of people to talk to, and the role-playing aspects are the best of any Bethesda game in a long time. I like what they tried with the persuasion mechanic, even if it's kind of janky. It is definitely a slow-burn kind of game. The combat gameplay feels dynamic and less monotonous than the Bethesda norm, especially when you get to do stuff like fight in zero gravity. There's plenty I haven't even touched yet, like outpost building. And maybe I'm isolated with this, but so far there have been few bugs and zero performance issues. I have it running on an NVME with an RTX 2070 and even on ultra it's fine. The one bug I did run into was pretty nasty though: my ship's cargo hold and all the loose objects I'd stored in it were deleted out of nowhere somehow, for some reason.

There are some issues with it though:
-Human enemy variety so far (I'm level 13) is pretty minimal: there are ranged baddies and melee baddies. They boost sometimes, but not a whole lot.
-There seems to be some balance around damage types and armour/shields/health, but it's not communicated well. Contrast something like Mass Effect 3, where it's made very clear on enemy health bars.
-A number of gameplay mechanics are unlocked, but the game doesn't do a good job of explaining this to you, e.g. when you get a boost pack, you're not told that you have to unlock boosting with the skill.
-Walking takes so, so long. I love the planetary exploration and it keenly reminds me of the original Mass Effect, but in that you had a vehicle. Here you've gotta hoof it, and God help you if you're on a heavy gravity planet.
-This is the most generous gacha game in the galaxy. I've lost count of how many times Random Mook #75 had an EPIC helmet or a LEGENDARY gun. That's not very legendary now is it!!
-If the game is going to drip-feed lore and world info with the glacial pace it has, there really ought to be a codex. There's literally Space Tim Hortons in this game. I wish to know more!
-There's no setting to auto-unequip spacesuits in town or even on your own ship. This kinda makes sense since you can get into combat in towns, but it'd be nice. Playing Fashionfield is hard.

You do have to go through a bunch of menus in order to move between planets and star systems in spaceship mode, which is pretty unintuitive. Even if you couldn't directly fly to a planet's surface, it'd be nice if you could jump around a solar system without entering a menu by pointing your ship in the right direction and pumping up the grav drive.

Most of all, I look forward to what mods come up with once the tools are out. It'll be a good while yet, but there's a lot of potential. TES games have always been more heavily modded and had more active modding communities than Bethesda's Fallout games, so it's up in the air what will come out of it.

Oh, and DH, to answer your question:

From what I heard there's a number of unique effects for weapons (stuff like making healing packs pop out of people you kill or doing more damage the more health a target has), but I don't know if they're only on unique weapons or modifiers any weapon could theoretically get.

These modifiers can be on any weapon drop from a chest or enemy. They're relatively common but random. There are also weapon mods which can be freely applied or removed that mainly change weapon stats around.

[Deathhappens]

I'm really enjoying it; it's basically Daggerfall: In Space. There are tons of quests, tons of people to talk to, and the role-playing aspects are the best of any Bethesda game in a long time. I like what they tried with the persuasion mechanic, even if it's kind of janky. It is definitely a slow-burn kind of game. The combat gameplay feels dynamic and less monotonous than the Bethesda norm, especially when you get to do stuff like fight in zero gravity. There's plenty I haven't even touched yet, like outpost building. And maybe I'm isolated with this, but so far there have been few bugs and zero performance issues. I have it running on an NVME with an RTX 2070 and even on ultra it's fine. The one bug I did run into was pretty nasty though: my ship's cargo hold and all the loose objects I'd stored in it were deleted out of nowhere somehow, for some reason.

There are some issues with it though:
-Human enemy variety so far (I'm level 13) is pretty minimal: there are ranged baddies and melee baddies. They boost sometimes, but not a whole lot.
-There seems to be some balance around damage types and armour/shields/health, but it's not communicated well. Contrast something like Mass Effect 3, where it's made very clear on enemy health bars.
-A number of gameplay mechanics are unlocked, but the game doesn't do a good job of explaining this to you, e.g. when you get a boost pack, you're not told that you have to unlock boosting with the skill.
-Walking takes so, so long. I love the planetary exploration and it keenly reminds me of the original Mass Effect, but in that you had a vehicle. Here you've gotta hoof it, and God help you if you're on a heavy gravity planet.
-This is the most generous gacha game in the galaxy. I've lost count of how many times Random Mook #75 had an EPIC helmet or a LEGENDARY gun. That's not very legendary now is it!!
-If the game is going to drip-feed lore and world info with the glacial pace it has, there really ought to be a codex. There's literally Space Tim Hortons in this game. I wish to know more!
-There's no setting to auto-unequip spacesuits in town or even on your own ship. This kinda makes sense since you can get into combat in towns, but it'd be nice. Playing Fashionfield is hard.

You do have to go through a bunch of menus in order to move between planets and star systems in spaceship mode, which is pretty unintuitive. Even if you couldn't directly fly to a planet's surface, it'd be nice if you could jump around a solar system without entering a menu by pointing your ship in the right direction and pumping up the grav drive.

Most of all, I look forward to what mods come up with once the tools are out. It'll be a good while yet, but there's a lot of potential. TES games have always been more heavily modded and had more active modding communities than Bethesda's Fallout games, so it's up in the air what will come out of it.

Oh, and DH, to answer your question:

These modifiers can be on any weapon drop from a chest or enemy. They're relatively common but random. There are also weapon mods which can be freely applied or removed that mainly change weapon stats around.

Thanks for answering here.

So, no flying from planet to planet then, even with cutscenes in between? You need to go through a menu to land on a separate planet in the same system?

[Five_X]

Yeah, you'll be flying around one planet, then you open the menu, select another planet and press a button to set a course for it, and you fly to it. It *might* be possible to go directly from orbiting a planet to one of its moons and vice versa? It seemed to work like that when I was going from Earth to Luna.

I've heard a lot of criticism of Starfield's UI and menus and that's definitely true from my experience. It's kind of funny that there's a really cool HUD element specifically for adjusting your ship's reactor power around (to weapons/shields/engine etc) while flying but there's nothing similar for actual travel.

[Deathhappens]

(They stole that from Elite Dangerous.)

[Five_X]

I've known Todd was a thief ever since he stole my heart, I'm not surprised.

[Formless Creature]

You know what's funny about this game? I'm seeing people compare it unfavorably to No Man's Sky. And that's perfectly reasonable. But if you went back in time to 2017 and told me "No Man's Sky is better than the Bethesda space game and I mean that 100% unironically" I would've called the police.

[Deathhappens]

Maybe Starfield will get a NMS-level glow up eventually. Starting with mods.

[Deathhappens]

I completely forgot this thread existed, huh.

Well, I had a euro to spare I decided to put it towards a Game Pass "trial" of 14 days, and the first game I downloaded was, of course, Starfield. I now have 45ish hours on it.

...Man, this game is BAD. Not just disappointing, it straight up barely improves on SKYRIM, a 2011 game, even in its core gameplay loops. I can pull a gun to the face of any NPC anywhere in the Settled Systems, 0 response. Forget RDR2 or Cyberpunk, fucking GTA San Andreas had that more than twenty years ago. The skill system is them taking every annoying "+5% to wearing underwear trait" that nobody ever gave a shit about and making an entire tree out of them, with the few cool skills that actually do something split into 2-3-4 skills increasingly deeper in so you're forced to invest into stuff like "+10% to how healy your heal items are" if you want to mod your weapons or your spaceship. They have the same annoying Diablo-esque tiered loot with pronouns system that people lambasted Cyberpunk so much for they ended up ditching, PLUS random modifiers so you can never just mod your gear to your liking. Umpteen resources needed for building or researching or modding anything and good luck securing storage space for all that when even a spaceship's cargo hold fills up in minutes. Weightlifting 4 is mandatory to get through even one POI's worth of loot (only taking guns and armor, not even accounting for expensive odds and ends, of which there are way too gooddamn many cluttering every level) and good luck finding a vendor who can afford to offload them all for you. They have what must have been an immense effort in the build a starship system which is ruined by the fact that depending on where you landed you can't access half the "legos" needed to build a ship, and we're not talking proprietary stuff like guns or shields but simple connecting pieces (which they seem almost afraid to give the player, like why the hell do I need to go to the asscrack of nowhere to get a piece that connects sideways but has a top slot? Why can't I just rotate stuff 90 degrees, for that matter?). Plus the actual space combat part is almost 1- to-1 poor man's Elite Dangerous (especially with the pip system that's just more annoying and harder to actually utilise here) with the sole exception of boarding, which is actually pretty cool but ultimately worthless since you need to jump through a dozen hoops (and pay a ton of money) to keep any prize vessels. As has already extensively been covered, you can't actually travel ANYWHERE in space, not even intra-system (not sure if it's actually impossible, but the extremely low in-sysyem speeds mean it would take hours in any case), even when chasing pirates or raiding merchantmen you just jump to point and everyone is neatly arranged in front of you. Aaand to top everything off, the game is still super buggy, both with NPC's glitching animations all the time in plain sight, stealth being basically worthless as NPC's are prescient and see you through walls, and plain old quest triggers not working properly (I've had two quests break on me already and both of them were quests you pick up in the FIRST CITY YOU VISIT IN THE GAME, New Atlantis). So many little annoyances everywhere and the parts that aren't annoying just feel low effort (the UC Vanguard storyline has you testify in a meeting with the entire presidential cabinet and not only is it a dry "walk in a previously locked door and stand at specified point", they don't even bother taking your guns away... you can literally just walk in and decapitate the entire UC leadership, hide in a corner until the guards stop looking, pay off your bounty and come back- it doesn't even fail the quest because the NPC's involved are unkillable). I'm immensely frustrated (despite still, somehow, having some fun with it) and feeling like I dodged a machinegun's worth of bullets when I picked AC6 over this. No wonder it got panned so hard launching the month after BG3, lol.

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Oh yeah I also hate how the NPC's complete lack of reactions to anything extends to the combat. Empty a mag on an NPC's face, maybe he'll flinch if you crit (I think headshots have a higher crit modifier but not guaranteed crits), maybe he'll just keep shooting you back. At the same time you're getting hit and have 0 feexback, not even screen shake, that you're losing health. Many times I thought I was slick dodging melee monsters (or well, sidestepping them since there's no dodge function) and found out I was actually half hp by the end of everything. The biggest baddest shotgun you can get has the exact same amount of impact on either you shooting it (the reticle just expands, it doesn't fucking move) or the target eating it (barely phazed if at all). FALLOUT ALREADY DID THIS BETTER TODD.