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 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.
Like hell it isn’t fair!