[MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!
For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you've already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!
Discuss all things Starfield below!
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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.
This is one of the more biting criticisms I've heard of the game. It results in a lack of feeling of scale and scope. The universe just feels like connected places, instead of worlds within a galaxy. No Mans Sky got this right, and it's surprising that Bethesda would fumble such a core mechanic. It looks like they tried to cover up this wart by... removing city maps.
Elite dangerous did it better. A mix of both maybe.
So the space exploration is more like Mass Effect Andromeda instead of No Man's Sky?
To me Mass Effect 1-3 felt more cohesive in space, because it was always clear how much you could do, whereas in SF it looks exactly like you're in NMS, but you can't do NMS things.
It's not game breaking or ruining though. Just know going in that it isn't No Mans Sky.
I haven't played it, but that seems to be the general consensus I've seen.
Yes, it's much more like Andromeda than NMS. You can also land at other points on planets and get a procedurally generated area instead of just the pre-made ones like in andromeda though.
Sounds disappointing. I’m definitely unnaturally excited with the idea of “Large vehicles” - being able to walk inside with your character, take casual actions like crafting/talking while it transports, then stepping out. It’s why I enjoyed Sea of Thieves and Subnautica, and it’s what I mainly want out of trains in games.
Reducing them to interaction prompts and cutscenes sort of undersells them to me.
I did read that landing on planets is just a cutscene rather than a seamless transition, but I thought for sure you can actually fly it in space - isn't there even combat with other spaceships or random locations to check for resources?
Is there anything else to do on the spaceship, does it feel like a home base where you keep your gear, crafting benches, companions to talk to, etc? I really want that cozy starbound/kotor ebon hawk vibes if possible 🥺
So you can fly in space, and fight space battles there, but you can't really fly fast enough to fly from one planet to another in real time. To move to a different point of interest in the system, you need to fast travel to it. So the meaningfully interactable part of space is just the immediate area around each fast travel point.
I'm not far enough yet to know if the interior gets more interesting after you add more modules to the ship; the starter ship is basically an RV: bed, galley, cockpit.
Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games. I get it might be harder between solar systems the way E:D does it but kinda sad it's not real travel within one. Maybe they patch it in one day in the future? Who knows
Ehhhh.
I dunno about No Man's Sky.
But in X3 (and X2, for that matter), you don't really seamlessly enter stations. In X4, you do, but it felt like a gimmick to me -- there's not much interesting gameplay on a station.
And there are loading screens between sectors in those games. Short ones, but they're there. Freelancer too.
Well I never said "enter" stations, I said travel between them. In X3 you used SETA to travel between stations and in X:R and X:4 you had (super)highways. Freelancer also had those rings that speed you up and you could leave them at any point - in fact, the way piracy worked was you destroy one of the rings which would interrupt the travel and drop any ships out of the hightway lane so you could attack them.
Basically, all of these games didn't just have a loading screen when going from one station to another, there was an actual feeling of distance and travel. From what I've heard starfield doesn't have it at all.
Your ship is basically a TARDIS. You pick a destination from your star map and then your ship magically disappears from one place and appears at another. There is "space" but it feels completely fake, like they tacked it on at the end. Really, so many of the games mechanics feel fake and the effort it takes to suspend disbelief is really high.
There is spaceship battles, not sure about random locations, but I'm guessing you'd also need to fast travel to those.
Also the spaceship is VERY customizable, so much in fact that I found it overwhelming lmao. Not saying that's bad thing, but you'd definitely need to come up with a lot of credits /loot first.
Again I only have 4 hours in game, so I don't really know much yet.
Damn, I guess we've been spoiled by No Man's Sky. I was expecting it to be a completely open, manual traversal universe.
Why were people expecting this? I agree it would be awesome, but I thought they were pretty clear this wasn't going to be like no man's sky
Well. Fuck.
I had this complaint early on. It was very disheartening.
20 hours in, I love that I can fast travel from one planet to another in an entirely different solar system, to the building I need to get to.
Tbh I have had a lot of fun with this game (35h in). It's an RPG first and space explorer second, nothing necessarily wrong with that.
I also learned that if you're tracking a quest you can use the grav drive right from the ship's HUD by selecting the locstion marker. It does help immersion a tiny bit more.
Overall it's what they promised, modders can anyways "fix" the shortcomings.
This is the exact thing that I expected them to implement, and the dealbreaker for me.