Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hater. I actually was really excited for the game. But so far I am just not having fun.
For a little bit of reference, I just finished playing thru Cyberpunk 2077 and then jumped right into Starfield. Maybe that was a mistake because I kinda just want to go back to Cyberpunk (and I will in a few weeks when the DLC comes out).
But I’m noticing two really big issues with Starfield: first, the gunplay/combat is… let’s call it underwhelming. I realize it’s quite probably a skill issue and I need to just git gud, but holy crap, everything is a bullet sponge and I don’t have that many bullets! Stealth seems to be pretty worthless at early levels as I don’t have any high-alpha guns that can take advantage of it and, most of the time, I’m detected before I even see the bad guys. I’m just not enjoying this aspect of the game at all.
The second big issue for me is that there’s a loading screen every five seconds! Again, probably a me thing, but OMG, it’s driving me nuts. Get into ship, loading screen. Launch from planet, loading screen. Fly to next planet, loading screen. Land on planet, loading screen. Leave ship, loading screen. I just want to go shoot things! Let me shoot things!
Okay, found some spacers, time to… oh shit, out of ammo. Let me swap to a worse gun that still has ammo. Sigh. Okay, they’re dead. Let me just heal up… oh shit, out of med packs. Sigh.
Oh and wrestling with the UI is exhausting.
Anyways, I realize that this probably isn’t the place to find a lot of like-minded people. But I really do want to like this game. Any tips on maybe at least ways to make the combat less of a chore?
I agree about the loading screens. It didn’t drive me crazy but would have been better if there were fewer.
In regards to combat, I like it. Even many of the reviewers felt combat was one of the good things.
I’m still pretty early game, but I also like it. The sponginess means I can’t just fire a few shots at a guy’s head and call it a day, I might need to cycle through weapons, be pretty careful about taking breaks for cover, watch my health. It means my ammo gets used up a lot more, and same with health items.
Actually, Ive noticed a bit of a trend in Starfield where it seems like Bethesda is trying to push back a bit against having a massive overage of ammunition and money (without bringing the scavenging skill into it).
Having spongey enemies and a ton of different kinds of ammo means no one weapon has an absurd amount of ammo, and not having a ton of easily burgled apartments or houses means I cant just have a huge city stealing spree and come out the other end richer than I know what to do with only ten hours in.
I initially hated that there weren’t huge apartment blocks ripe for stealing, but I can sort of understand why that’s the case now and I can appreciate having a larger wind up time to becoming stupidly rich, especially with there being much higher money sinks compared to older Bethesda games between ship and outpost building. It really seems like, to me, Bethesda is purposefully trying to have a functioning economy compared with their older games where making money a non-issue was basically a part of the early game.
I haven’t checked out a ton of reviews, just two or three from trusted reviewers. The very first one I watched said they didn’t like the combat but still really enjoyed the game overall. I’m hoping I can push through to the point where I’m enjoying the rest of the game…
I think part of this is what it’s being compared to. The combat is significantly better in starfield than past Bethesda (BGS) games. People who are saying it’s great are generally comparing it to their past games.
I don’t have experience with Cyberpunks combat yet (waiting for the update to finally play it) but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s better.
Shouldn’t you be comparing to other current games in the genre, rather than past games of the company? Because if the game is better than their past games, but nothing close to current games in the genre, then that just means it’s a bad game and their past games were worse.
BGS game is a genre unto itself really. With a few exceptions for games made by another developer there really aren’t any other games that play or work the same. That said the most recent game in the genre I can think of would be Fallout 4 and the gunplay is definitely better.
My main complaint is the writing and worldbuilding. So far I’ve been exploring new Atlantis and picked up exclusively fetch quests from NPCs so generic and uninteresting I don’t really feel like continuing to talk to them. And the uncreative worldbuilding of authoritarian capitalists Vs libertarian capitalksts vs religious crazies. Can Bethesda not even imagine an alternative to capitalism?
Name me one sci-fi that has had an alternative to capitalism without access to something god-tech level like Treks replicators, which would break the setting entirely.
Not saying there should be fully automated luxury gay space communism, but that every faction is different flavours of capitalism is very disappointing. Sci-fi is usually a medium that criticizes the current society.
It took like a 30 seconds of web search to find the dispossessed by Ursula le guin.
Your argument is actively supporting the other commenters point about boring world building in sci fi.
Capitalism works great with RPGs leveling system.
But I’d love to have seen a cashless society where the only way to get stuff was to trade other goods.
Or some sort of social credit system, where the nicer you are and the more quests you complete, the higher your status and the more free items you unlock.
Or some authoritative system that binds you into a contract whenever you make a trade it forces you to work off your debt in all matters of ways.
Capitalism is the best system you can really have when you have multiple factions who’s economies work together though. What you describe is great if the whole world trades in that manner, but when you have multiple factions you needs someway for commerce to work between them for world building. To be fair, it’s not like the factions in stafridls are just boring capitalists. The more I’ve learned about the UC, my assumption that they were just democratic socialist types has been undermined totally.
No sir, you are not alone. The horrendously weak opening combined with bullet sponge gunplay, so many loading screens, a horrendous UI, boring worlds with little to nothing to do on them…I managed to make myself play for 12 hours before I gave up for good. It simply didn’t catch me at all, despite multiple attempts. Maybe in 2 years with mods, but for now it’s just time to move on for me.
What I think plagues this genre of game is that the sense of discovery is not there, like it is on a “2D” plane. What I mean by that is this:
In a game like Skyrim where you have essentially a 2D plane of area to explore, you can see in front of you all the things that are possible even without using a map. You can play the entire game without a map by following roads, seeing things that pique your interest, and just walking there.
However, in a game like Starfield, you can’t go anywhere without entering a menu and going through 4 or 5 loading screens. And you HAVE to use the menu to go places instead of just walking to something you see in the distance. It’s a huge barrier to organic discovery. And on top of that, purposely, there’s nothing to do on the vast majority of planets AND THEN, even the things that are on planets are so unimportant, they may as well not be there. An anomaly I found on a planet was 1000m away, I walked to it, and all I could do was scan it for half a second. It was just a waste of time. Buildings don’t actually seem to have anything to do in them. Caves are all empty.
It’s fun to think you can explore the galaxy, but making it too real makes it much too boring and much too difficult to feel that you’re actually discovering anything.
Edit: Another thought is that in Skyrim, you know there are things to discover, you just have to find them. In Starfield, Bethesda purposely made many of the planets devoid of anything of interest, so when you go to a new area, you’re not even sure it’s worth your time.
After about 20hrs, I couldn’t take it anymore. I popped open the console, increased my carry weight, added a bil creds, set my level to 666, and finally, tgm. Let chaos reign, baby.
I had already added a couple UI mods (because Bethesda still ships UI components at 30fps for whatever reason) and patched the achievement disablement function, so now I feel like I can actually kinda enjoy the game (when I’m not in a loading screen).
I’ve put another 20hrs in playing like this, and have zero regrets. It makes my time in the game feel arcade-like, in a good, nostalgic way. I went from being stressed out and annoyed, to relaxed and able to laugh at the endless jank that we’ve all come to expect from Bethesda. It’s like GTA back in the day… if you weren’t using cheat codes, you were straight up missing out on the fun.
All that said, overall the game does feel like Bethesda threw Fallout, Skyrim, and No Man’s Sky in a blender and then ran it all through a sieve to ensure that only the worst parts made it into the final release. I’m actually shocked by how much they seem to have outright copied elements from NMS (from UI, to gameplay mechanics, to storyline elements). I’ve got hundreds of hours in NMS spread across the last 5ish yrs, and I can’t help but feel kinda greasy when I play Starfield because of how much appears to be straught up lifted from NMS.
Ultimately, Starfield is a new(ish) experience and fun to fuck around in, but if I want to explore space, I’ll go boot up NMS.
I’ve already said “screw it” and started looking up the “get OP early” guides on Youtube, which I generally avoid. If it helps me have more fun then whatever… it’s a game, not a chore.
It is very whelming, yes. It’s exactly what I expected, and yet… I want more. At least for the things it does to be done better. Give me a reason for base building. Make the AI not just stand there like dopes and be bullet sponges when you want them to be hard (seriously, “legendaries” have 3 fucking HP bars and it’s dumb). Actually have dialogue choices that are a bit more meaningful and change things.
I’m tired of it just working. I want it to work fantastically.
The game is a mess. It’s totally lost trying to figure out it’s identity. I’ve got the answer everyone can’t quite put their finger on. Had this game came out 2 or 3 years after New Vegas it would have been heralded as the next generation in rpgs. The problem is we are well past that. Bethesda should have made this game instead of fallout 76. It would have totally fit the time frame and been forgivable.
The problem is we have multiple games that do this better in whatever aspect you prefer. Like realism space sim, that’s star citizen or elite dangerous. Want planetary exploration with life form scanning and base building? That’s no man sky.
I still find myself playing because I’m so hard gay for that Bethesda fallout choose your own adventure foundation that’s present here. But damn is it overall shit. Just embarrassing
I’m so hard gay for…
Really?? Good post up to this point… /smh
Lol no one cares.
Most low level enemies drop weapons that only deal between 3 - 11 damage, which are basically useless against anything higher than level 5. I found some higher level weapons in a shop that dealt 30 - 40 damage and found they made combat much more fun.
As I progressed however, I noticed that enemy levels in a location were distributed:
- 4-5 low level
- 10-15 med level
- 1-5 high level
So there is still a problem with bullet sponges. I keep an overpowered shotgun (med damage, high rate of fire, explosions on crit) with me and just bum rush the high level enemies with that. Otherwise you’d be shooting them all day with your 40 damage rifle.
As you go on, those high level enemies drop weapons that do more damage, so there is progression…. But you also just encounter higher level enemies with more health so the problem continues.
I see that there are already combat rebalance mods on nexus, the kind I’ve used on Fallout games in the past, and I’ll probably install one of those when I decide to start a new play through. (Which, I definitely will. I’m enjoying the game a lot overall despite there being some tedious aspects)
Thanks, I’ll pay closer attention to the weapon damage. Maybe I’m not upgrading enough.
I red it takes like 12 hours for the game to get good. That’s like two weeks for me. Some people have to work and limited time.
There’s a 2 hour refund window. Bethesda misses it a tiny bit
I genuinely haven’t had any of these issues, menu/loading screen aside which there’s small ways to mitigate (travel in space via select vs. map menu travel).
I quite liked the gunplay, at first. Then I got strong weapons, overlevelled for the order of quests, and now I feel like I’m one hitting them with a peashooter. So I actually have the opposite problem than you on this front, as I haven’t been actually challenged in the game since the early levels. However, I prefer this for the ship combat since it’s just a little more fun.
Ammo I’ve not once been low on. Granted, I collect everything but misc. In a few days I’ve amassed 400k credits, only buying upgrades for my ship. At a certain point I began buying ammo just to give vendors money to get rid of my junk. So, maybe if you have extra credits try buying some ammo? How many guns are you carrying? Realistically your base weight is about 50-65, given the head, armor, apparel, and then I have 2 weapons with a total mass of 5 (pistol and rifle). Between some health aids and other stuff I’ve found I’m usually sitting at 75 mass, which leaves quite of bit of space for selling weapons/armors.
The stealth isn’t great in this game though. It’s just not really a major focus outside of the areas they put thought into it for - frankly you don’t need it at all for the games story from what I’ve been through so far. Obviously, there’s 3 levels with green being detected in a safe area, orange needing caution before red aggro detection. But the transition from orange to red is egregious.
In addition to that you need stealth bonuses to be able to effectively be stealthy. This game does covert quests really well though, I highly recommend following the Ryujin questline in Neon and the UC/Crimson Fleet questline. Amazing quests, IMO. I have 1 point in stealth and primarily have done persuasion stealth and it’s been great, but the most recent mission I completed I needed frostwolfs for (-50% movement noise). Which, that right there is your issue. You are loud as hell without stealth investments.
On top of that 50% reduction I also needed an apparel item that had 25% harder to detect. So I think it’s just scaled a bit awkwardly.
So, with that in mind I would say it’s a weird line between me agreeing that AI know where I am far too easily in stealth while simultaneously being able to cheese the AI by utilizing the additives the game gives you. Think about it… everyone has scanners. There’s also a lot of security cameras that are fairly well hidden in various areas.You can’t really just walk behind someone and expect to not be noticed, not unless your hopped up on combat meds and wearing chameleon or other stealth specifical items. Chameleon is a game changer, but it’s a style of its own and not totally helpful for what we’re after.
It’s funny, 2077 I really enjoyed on launch but I can’t help but see shortcomings in it as I’ve played through Starfield. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have shortcomings of its own, it definitely does what with the, for me, map menu navigation. It took a few days to get used to and still the core issue for me comes down to Missions not being categorized by Planet. It’s so painfully obvious and to be lacking it is honestly a major fault. Other than that, hotkeys not being consistent.
That aside, every menu is tab once to go back to main menu except for map which is 3.
Another is a bit regarding scale. 2077 I really enjoyed just walking around taking in the view of Night City. Walking 400m doesn’t really feel like a chore. For some reason 400m in starfield is a couple minutes, with sprint? It just feels a little too big in some spots and too small in others. Like you said, sometimes you’ll go through 3 loading screens just to talk to a person and leave the area and go through another couple loading screens. Other times you get these amazingly long quests that feel just right, and other times you get landed 1000m away.
Most of the time, not always but a lot of it, I’m just trying to get there to do the next thing. In 2077 I was enjoying the journey being in awe and happening to reach the destination. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy New Atlantis and Neons visuals, I also think the world building and liveliness is an improvement (simple things like having more named characters, somewhat varied patterns with citizens, hireables, and named characters.)
I enjoy both for what they are. 2077 does the imposed story line well enough and it gives you enough freedom in the variety of playstyles that the lack of variance in story doesn’t matter much. On the other hand, Starfield has very little imposed story (you were a miner, now you are a constellation member) giving you actual RPG freedoms. I haven’t explored differences in traits, but if starting as a Var’uun Zealot is any different than the others then it’s a big point over 2077.
And both have thoughtful quests. Neither is objectively better than the other, they both just play to various strengths and weaknesses.
As it stands, Starfield is a Bethesda game with inspirations from Elite Dangerous and futurism. 2077 is a game about a corpo-dystopian future. They have many similar and overlapping themes, and Starfield clearly has quests that are a response to 2077. Neither are perfect, but both are lots of fun once you get them rolling.
I’ve only watched someone play it, but it does seem like it is super superficial, like a puddle that looks deep but is only a few inches
To be fair, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten far enough into the game to be able to tell how deep it is. But compared to Cyberpunk, the both the story and the combat are a lot less engaging. The space combat seems like it has potential and base building is something I really want to get into but they are both things that require more money (aka time played).
I can’t even get to “meh” yet. I’m currently trying to get over all the steps backward from Fallout 4. Can’t order companions in battle, can’t swap out weapon mods, can’t use/equip items on pickup without going into menus, and the local maps. Holy crap, the local maps are bad. All that is on top of having to mod the game as usual. StarUI helped a lot, and I had to grab a sound effects mod because there was painful, high-pitched tones in a lot of the interface stuff, but it needs a lot more help. Beth’s games are starting to remind me of a Civilization series or Paradox Interactive situation where the base game is worse than a predecessor at release and doesn’t yield incremental improvement until a robust mod scene/DLC arrives.
I’ve already written off the space gameplay (that was always a long shot for us space sim fans), and if I’m being honest, the loading screen pacing isn’t all that different an experience from how I played Skyrim and FO4. I’m also taking the bullet-sponginess as a challenge to focus on weapon mods. I’m hoping once I get into a self-directed gameplay flow and get used to the quirks of the UI and zone arrangement it’ll get better.
I gotta say though, even though it had its own share of bugs, Baldur’s Gate 3 coming out a month ahead of Starfield does not invite favorable comparisons. The dialogues and quest design in BG3 run circles around what I’m seeing in Starfield so far. The “Back to Vectera” quest in particular was shockingly bad. Having multiple moments where there’s no indication of what to do next until opening the mission log to find a stealth quest update is seriously rough. I’m guessing it was unfinished? I knew there were going to have to be sacrifices made at the procedural generation altar, but seeing even the bespoke elements on the main questline be this bad does not portend well for the overall quality of the game.
Yeah its a little unfair to compare anything to BG3 so bad timing there. I think when Phantom Liberty comes out and a bunch of people jump to Cyberpunk, it’s not gonna help this game much either. lol
It’s really not, lol. In the first hour playing this I kept thinking how dated the facial animations felt. CP2077 has the best faces I’ve seen yet, and it’s not going to have this grey filter all over the place either.
I find the start kinda weird. Touchy tabloid, pass out. Wake up and akwardy get forced in to ship and spooky drone watching you. Got to the new atlantis and was bored already.
Even skyrim did this better.
Explored the first planet to see whats the deal. Terrorform was uglyass mf, but standing on 1meter rock glitches it completely, and then just empty all ammo on it.
I’m feeling the same way. Starfield isn’t a bad game, but it’s very meh. I enjoy the ship building aspect, but otherwise nothing really grabs me with this game.
Combat is a good example, too. There just doesn’t feel to be any impact to the weapons. Mobs just get shot but don’t really react to it. I know they will flee at times which is nice, but close range SMG fire to ones torso should illicit more of a response.
Fast travel also seems to be an detractor. Being able to fast travel anywhere you’ve been even if that place is across the galaxy really removes a lot of the exploration vibe the game would have otherwise. I know this isn’t a space sim, but a lot of the systems they have don’t really mesh well with others.
Starfield is like mediocre lite-RPG / space sim crossover that doesn’t do either very well.
Edit: I also want to point out that Bethesda did not come up with the “NASA-punk” aesthetic, either. I’ve seen articles about that. The Expanse has been doing that for years now. Even before that, I can think of at least two Matt Damon movies from 2015 and before that used it as it’s setting. Point being it’s not anything new.
Fast travel also seems to be an detractor.
Yeah it’s kind of weird but I feel like they’re too liberal with the fast travel. You really lose a lot of the sense of scale when you can just… go anywhere from anywhere.
I mean, that said, given all the loading screens, I guess more fast travel means less loading screens so it’s definitely a double-edged sword.
Starfield is like mediocre lite-RPG / space sim crossover that doesn’t do either very well.
The RPG aspects seem really shallow after Cyberpunk. The space sim aspects are what I’m hoping keep me interested once I get deeper into it. Fingers crossed.
To make matters worse, the space around each planet is it’s own load zone. Star systems are just collections of these zones. I don’t think they can patch zone loading as it’s done so much by design. It’s like they took what they had in FO4 and just slapped a sticker on it that said “space sim”.
Yeah, I was excited to go exploring space as soon as I got my ship, but it’s such a slog with all the loading! Even flying from a planet to its moon while already in space requires a loading screen. Like, I just want to play the game but I feel like I’m mostly loading or wrestling the UI…
I hardly run out of ammo, but I’m also the kind of person who levels up carrying capacity first and becomes a loot goblin.
And yes, ammo has 0 weight but more weight cap means more time for me to search every corner of every room
In 20 hours, I’ve amassed 2k bullets for my main weapon type. Ammo is hardly scarce in this game.
I have a beowulf that has increased damage for each consecutive shot and it deals 72 damage (large for my level). I have around 3.5k rounds waiting to be used and I’ve been really overusing it lol.
I have a rule about bethesda games - I don’t buy them until well after the first few patches, or the GOTY edition. I am starfield curious but also, hesitant because of No Man’s Sky. Allow me to elaborate:
NMS shipped and was garbage. But over the ensuing year, damned near everything players expected or wanted from it came to be with game altering updates that improved it’s content range enormously. It’s still not my favorite game, but every time I fire it up there’s new shit for me to do and most of it’s pretty well implemented.
I have absolutely zero expectations in this way for Starfield. They’re not going to rework space-to-ground flight or rng generated ground plots you can’t explore past; they may improve perf and qol over time, but I fundamentally doubt anything like No Man’s Sky updates are in the future.
So yeah, that makes me pause, and remember to be patient.