I'm probably going to wait until it goes on sale in the future before I buy it. It definitely feels like Bethesda bite off way more than they can chew. From what I've seen, the game isn't bad but it just feels woefully inadequate for its pricetag, especially when many of its features are compared to other games. The whole major point is that it tries to do a lot of different things that other games have done but it doesn't hit the mark, so it doesn't even feel like a "Jack of All Trades" but more of a "Barely Competent At Everything". The "Skyrim/Fallout in Space" is very applicable, if you were expecting that but with less freedom in exploration, you'll be fine. Quite a few streamers I've watched weren't really enjoying it but after like 5+ hours, something clicks and they enjoy it but they can't say why. It's that classic Bethesda feeling of "Why the fuck am I enjoying this shit? There should be no reason why I have 80+ hours into this game but I do." It's like the game is the definition of a guilty pleasure, where they know how much of the game is not up to par but
it just works and they're hooked and having fun.
For the past two days, I've constantly had a stream of someone playing it in the background, so I've seen like 15+ people play it (both IRL and vtubers) and what I've gathered is this:
- Exploration: Majority of the bad reviews are coming from the fact that there is no real exploration, as you fast travel from place to place. They don't even do the Jedi Survivor trick of making the ship's screen enter hyperspace while you can do whatever, it's just straight into a short cutscene. It's why this game listed SSD as a mandatory requirement under its specs. You go to a city/station, get a quest, you fast travel your ship to orbit around where you were, you fast travel to the orbit of where you need to go, and then you fast travel when landing. The whole concept of "seamless open world" is nonexistent. The whole Bethesda RPG feeling of going off into a random direction and finding some cool shit is dead in this game because when you land on a planet, they draw a big boundary of ~30min of walking and the only thing that really matters is what they set out for you in that specific direction. Instead of letting you run around a giant sandbox, you're now in a fishtank and you just get asked to move to different fishtanks in a room when you're done doing your tasks in that fishtank.
- Environment: The whole "1000 planets" thing ended up just like everyone expected and the procedural generation isn't that unique. I've seen streamers run into the same location/facility that has the same layout and NPC placement on different planets. People have always complained about this with other procedurally generated space games like No Man's Sky but the problem for Starfield is that environmental storytelling has always been the one thing everyone praises Bethesda for despite their retardation in all other aspects of game development. What I mean by this, is that you could visit a cave or house in their games and the environmental storytelling is what grips you as you figure out what happened here. There was a sense of care players could feel from this stuff. Procedural generation of locations kills this as you'll see something and think "woah, that's cool" and then you see it like 6 more times. These first two points I listed are the two points everyone has always praised Bethesda for but for Starfield, they abandoned their two greatest strengths for mediocre replacements.
- Gunplay: They weren't joking that the gunplay is the best in the series because from everything I've seen, it definitely is. It is a huge step forward compared to previous Fallout games. However in this case, having the "best gunplay ever in a Bethesda game" is like being the smartest kid on the short bus. If you don't play other FPS games, it will be fine. If you have played any other FPS that has come out in the past 10 years, you'll realize that they're still lightyears behind. This is just like how when Skyrim came out with its horribly outdated combat system. People casually accepted Skyrim's combat because the general Western audience doesn't play a lot of RPGs with better combat. The problem with Starfield is that shooters are one of the most prominent genres in Western gaming so the general Western audience has most likely played a game that has better combat to compare to.
- Ships and Space Combat: One of the few positives I've seen is that people enjoy the customization of ship creation. However the major problem is that the ship custom builds only really serve a purpose of giving you stats like "bigger inventory slots" and while they buff you in space combat, space combat is routinely noted as being shitty. Space combat's only saving grace is the "Fallout VATS" system where you can target specific sections of a ship, like shooting out their engines so they're easier to board. However these features are limited and do not solely make the space combat fun. It feels like you're on a camera dolly while enemy ships move around you instead of you being able to maneuver around in space.
- Storytelling: I've heard some claim that the main story is phenomenal but I've watched about a dozen people struggle to stay awake for this stuff and it is mandatory to progress through it a certain extend to access certain gameplay systems. This is one of the few cases where a recent game actually makes this worse because Baldur's Gate 3 had significantly better dialogue, NPC facial expressions, and NPC movements when you were chatting. None of that is here, it just feels monotone and the characters came straight from the uncanny valley. Again, I've heard some people enjoy certain story quests but those people I've talked to have no-life'd the game until they're way further into the game. So either the first dozen hours is filled with the worst quests and stories in the game while it gets better later on or the people I've talked to suffer from a massive sunken cost fallacy mindset. I've been told the game really picks up and becomes super interesting by the time you get to the city of Neon but that's like 5-10+ hours in from what I've heard.
- AI: Yup, it's Bethesda AI and it has never progressed, it has actually gotten worse. Enemies will constantly look at you and wait several seconds before shooting a few shots, they hardly react to damage or any threats, they don't use the environment as you pop in and out of cover to take shots, and the AI will often just break. One of the best examples I saw was a streamer fighting a melee enemy on a low gravity planet, so he could jump super high. He'd shoot at the enemy but once he jumped into the air, the AI broke because it no longer had a path to hit the player and it just stood still while the player slowly floated back to the ground. Once the player touched the ground again, the AI then resumed combat but the player immediately jumped again and the AI stopped. They didn't implement the bare necessity of allowing AI to anticipate player positioning/trajectory in the pathfinding. The AI wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so effortlessly easy to break it. Every single stream I've watched, the AI completely breaks itself and the streamer stops to take note of the completely retarded AI.
- Bugs: Everyone was anticipating that there would be bugs because it's a Bethesda game but I heard that this game was surprisingly better. I will say I've seen far less bugs than I expected but some of the bugs that I have seen are far worse. I saw a quest NPC casually float through the wall and disappear into space as a space station was maintaining orbit because the game broke and stopped factoring that in with the NPC's placement. That quest is now bricked as you can't talk to that NPC as it is chilling in the cold vacuum of space. The classic Bethesda bugs break immersion but at least they're amusing and don't break the game, so everyone is fine with that. So even though Starfield's bugs are far less prevalent than any other Bethesda game at launch, there's quite a few bugs in Starfield that straight up break the game entirely, which makes this worse.
So if you take a step back and look at all the components of the game, it really shouldn't work. It doesn't excel in any one thing and it is subpar in many components. This game should by all means be trash but for some reason,
IT JUST FUCKING WORKS. I have yet to see a streamer put 5+ hours into this and then say they never want to play it again. They have all been eager to complain about all the things wrong with the game and then they'll keep streaming it for another 5+ hours because they're having fun and they don't know why. There's some evil Bethesda dark magic going on here where the game claims your soul and you start to have fun. You know you shouldn't be having fun, you will complain about all these systems and components that are inadequate, you'll be eager to tell your friends about all these shit things going on, but some some reason, you are now having fun whether you like it or not.
