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Starfield thread.
Mediocre writing, animations, gameplay, many loading screens. And yet I can’t deny I played until 7am today, and I started very tired and wanting to go to sleep at 10. There’s a certain charm to this game that’s hard to describe, a sense of adventure that was in Skyrim but not - in my opinion - in Fallout 4 (although that might just be because I find post apocalyptic settings very boring). I slept for three hours, now I can’t stop thinking about playing some more. You overhear something, then the next thing you know you’re off a grand adventure around the galaxy; time vanishes.
Would I recommend it? I’m not sure, all the criticisms are valid. But I’m having more fun with it than with Baldur’s Gate 3 so far.
A copy magically appeared on my machine, but I'm yawning my way through, so far.
Mechanically uninteresting, enemies are bullet sponges, making guns full-auto somehow cuts their damage output down to a third, hogs too many system resources for too little to look at, and oh boy yes please I can't get enough of inventory management. All the RPG pacing where you're just a random miner who still happens to be able to wipe the floor with dozens of pirates at once, and everyone you meet takes one look at you and gives you a job (often their job!) to do, still weirds me out. And the lack of a mini-map is just insulting.
Edit: I normally put all my gripes into steam reviews, but since that's not an option, I'll put them here instead.
The quests, at least at this stage of the game, are asinine. Talk to person A, talk to person B, retrieve object from clearly marked point that's five loading screens away, return to person A to receive uniformly paltry reward. No challenge whatsoever, pure busywork.
The need to forego the use of my perfectly atmospheric-flight-capable spaceship and its giant guns in favor of trudging around entire planets on foot and shooting entire brigades of pirates or mercenaries with those underpowered bb rifles they use in this future is baffling. Not that it's difficult - it isn't - but how time-consuming it all is, where it could be so much faster! If you could at least pack a jeep into the cargo hold, but no, no.
Surveying planets requires scanning resources and plants. Well, I thought I was doing so by pointing my scanner at them, but somehow my survey percentage didn't go up. Turns out you not only need to point your scanner at them, but also press a key to actually make it scan. This takes no time and consumes no resources and requires no skill of any sort - the keypress is perfectly superfluous.
The game is very frequently interrupted by loading screens, but don't you dare alt-tab and do something else, because they won't load in the background.
The space combat and by extension the shipbuilding are so basic and linear that I don't think anyone would miss them if they were gone.
Edit: Played some more, and it's not worth reviewing at length. Hot trash.
This always gave me an aneurysm in Fallout. At least modded weapons aren't as susceptible to this bullshit.
I also hate the fact that bulletspongy enemies have become a staple of the "RPG" genre, for all that it has nothing intrinsically in common with trying to role play anything but a mass shooting at an airsoft convention..
There was a brief golden moment, in the original Deus Ex, where it looked like we might have been able to move to a more serious timeline. I remember being flabbergasted at my first death, in the first level: "He just shot me once! With just a pistol! How did I get killed by a single pistol shot to the head!?! ... Wait a minute. What kinds of games have I been playing, to make me believe I should be able to shrug off a bullet to the head?" That might have been on hard mode, but even so the principle surprised me. Of course, what's good for the PC is good for the NPCs, so only the armored enemies were bullet sponges.
But shortly into the game, even Deus Ex gave you some options for handwavy "use nanotech to make your skin more bulletproof" magic armor. Naturally, because in a long game "bullets all miss" would be even more implausible, "you can't let yourself get shot at ever" would be too hard, and "every now and then you die instantly" would be too frustrating. It's easy to sympathize with game designers who just skip the "too hard" and "too frustrating" options entirely; I just wish it wasn't so many of them.
Well, I play a lot of Tarkov, Squad and Arma, and in those games people usually die when you shoot them even once in the head.
(Sometimes characters might seem even tankier in Tarkov than many RPGs, but only because you're using piddling rounds against really good armor, and you'd have much the same result IRL. Good bullets can kill in 2 or 3 torso hits.)
I don't understand why this became such an RPG staple, and I hate every time it shows up. At least in some games, like Fallout 4 or Stalker you can mod the damage and end up with a much more enjoyable experience!
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