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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Gotta love how anyone who has a good time with a game is either a shill or has stockholm.
I pirated the game and won't have the funds to buy it any time remotely soon. I 100% agree with the commenter you responded to. It's a fun game, there's a lot to do and I've often been feeling like this game has the guts that 2077 was missing (and I had a mostly bug-free 100% playthrough before a lot of major patches. For me, patches have just been mod-breakers lol). I only bring up 2077 because of just how often over the last few days I've thought "they're accidentally delivering the promises 2077's marketing made". I remember when Night City was promised to have fully scheduled NPC routines (which doesn't really exist) but it's actually somewhat present and there's a quest that introduces it as a "necessary" mechanic.
I've been very pleasantly surprised with the faction and trait interactions. I classed as a space scoundrel who is wanted and I have parents - my parents show up in random pleasant places like the zoo, my space scoundrel or wanted trait I believe got me captured and now I'm undercover working to infiltrate and take down a space pirate faction. In my own time I became a space ranger who started working for a corp in Neon doing espionage. Oh and like the previous commenter said, I'd followed a secret moon base and became a notorious pirate hunter which I've decided to take up the mantle of, so I'm technically double undercover lol.
Last little thing on interactions, it's been cool that the news has minor reportings on the important things you do. After I found said legend and lived up to it I've been hearing about attacks on space pirates that I've done. Smaller questlines have meaningful NPC changes.
I have some counter-points to yours, but I do have gripes of my own with the game I'll list after.
What you're trying to say is there's no sub-orbit flight. You only fly your ship in orbit or in deep space. As a byproduct there is no way to manually fly your ship 800m. What you can do for 90% of quests is go to the planet map, click a new landing zone and land closer, skipping any exploration the game is trying to encourage. (The 10% of quests I've encountered are gas-detection on colonies. Rescue quests I can fast travel, unsure about flight). They didn't really market that you could, and frankly while the idea of flying my ship above colonist settlements and open firing on them sounds awesome I see why it's not possible. They took Elite Dangerous and dropped the interactive transitions for docking and landing. We've been aware of this since it was announced so I don't really see the issue here.
Also there may be a lore reason they came up with, as there have been mentions of ships larger than certain sizes straight up just can't land on planets at all.
I'm going to say no, subjectively. You can fly quite a bit if you want to, it's just faster to plot courses and for less populated galaxies there's not much reason to stick around. For actual gameplay, ships to make a difference though. The default ship is a good start and moderately upgradeable, but it's nothing compared to fighting in a dogfighting ship. Dogfighting ships are quite useless for cargo transport though, so if you are trying to ship people you'd be hard pressed doing it with the default ship. In a galaxy you can travel to any waypoint you see, bypassing the map menu. There is a lot of menu-diving, and I'll list some issues I have with that in a bit.
I've seen a lot of complaints about the intro. To be honest, I don't agree. So you're a miner that finds a mystical space rock that makes you feel things, then some people happen to show up looking for a large dozen of them to unlock the secrets of the universe. Cheesy? I guess. I appreciated that it was much faster getting started and out into the open world than their other games (still a little on rails slow). If anything, I'd argue that it gives much more player freedom for imagination. In Fallout you're searching for a person and you have a dedicated goal. In Skyrim it's the same as the chosen one.
In Starfield you're vision from the magic rock could be entirely meaningless if you wanted it to be and never deal with it again. The fact that you were just a space miner with no background fits perfectly with the RPG genre and solves the issue that people have been complaining about for Bethesda for years (that they're not "true" RPG's). Meanwhile we get an actual blank slate with a decent story premise and it gets called lazy and boring. Fuck that man, the concept was fine and you can be whatever you want to be for once.
Seems kinda odd complaining about graphics? Unless I'm tweaking for gains I don't FPS meter, just visual smoothness as a reference. 5800x3D and a 10gb 3080 on ultra save motion blur with RT, on medium. No DLSS mod or FSR. I haven't felt the need, as performance has been solid and stable - at least it's consistently the same in the same areas. It's a pretty game, but I wouldn't say crisp. Better than RDR2's TAA but worse than 2077's current state. Some spots have some fuzzing/film grain of some kind, might be an atmosphere effect since it doesn't seem present on all planets. Some areas are definitely lower FPS but on a variable refresh rate monitor it's not been noticeable in any negative extents. Low FPS has only ever been on planets/settlements, space and dogfights have been pristine. Performance hasn't ever gotten worse than 2077, which for me was ~25fps prepatches (sub the x3D back then). Neon and New Atlantis are generally lower fps than an indoor smaller map but no poor frametimes, no chugging or stuttering. It's just the difference between 165hz and 60hz. The only actual "lag" I have seen is NPC scripts, which sometimes after longer play sessions hang and can get a few seconds of desync. For one line, then it's fine again.
That said, I shouldn't have to need high end hardware to have a good experience with the game. I feel like that's a separate issue, though. The game has been stable, completely crash free, and performance is consistent across how it performs - small maps are consistently smooth and heavier areas are noticeably lower FPS but not in a bad way. I did mention this is a pirated copy, right? I'd expect to have an abysmal experience with performance and yet...
One barista started levitating up to the ceiling when I was ordering a coffee, stopped at the ceiling. Once or twice an NPC has been facing a different direction during conversation. Once in a while an NPC will be walking into a wall, when I've wanted to steal I've "pushed" NPC's and they just repath themselves and its fixed - though rescue missions do suffer from this a bit. With some 30+ hours of playtime (on save at least), I've not seen any ship clipping or hitting stations. I've been to some heavy fleet areas like UCS and pirate bases and they are all just normal?
Like overall, I have some issues in similar ways but I have been enjoying my time with the game a lot. Pleasantly surprised compared to what I had been reading online.
Comment to long, responding to myself below
My current issues with the game:
Menu diving is definitely a pain, mostly the map. There's ways to mitigate it, but it's a small convergence of minor issues that make it feel like one larger one. So, the scope of the game is so large and missions are not categorized by planet. Transitioning between missions to check the map is long and the alternative is menu diving. Sometimes you go to a planet just to land, talk to someone, and leave. Now, that is on me if I choose not to stick around but I'm also so full of quests that I'm worried adding any more will leave me with more planets with objectives I can't find. (I do like the abundance of quests, I really wish they had given a planet or at least galaxy category for missions).
Also regarding menus, I just wish the hotkeys were consistent. Have the scanner out? No hotkeys will work. Hotkeyed into a menu? Have to press tab to back out and select a different one, can't press a different hotkey. Minor timewaste but it adds up and gets annoying.
Quest streamlining - only ran into it once but in short, I was captured at a low level and followed its questline and got stuck in an auto-save encounter where I had a -10 advantage in the dogfight. I tried about 30 times, gave up went back a save before that grav-jump and went on elsewhere. It would have been nice to have been given some more information along the way, say the rough estimate of the level I should be for the quest. However, that has actually only happened one time and every other quest has been fine in this regard, so I think I may have just been low level in a high level unavoidable encounter. Ah, this quest also put me into an NPC bug "The people of New Homestead need these supplies!" for a little while. Resolved upon completion, though. || Quickly while on the topic of quests, the colonists "place gas sensors" quest is semi-bugged as no waypoint appears. Lots of gas spews, no interactions (unless maybe I'm missing a perk point for it!) People did say that if you find the right gas spot an icon will appear, so MMV for this one.
A minor gripe, it's not really so much an issue as it seems to be an oversight. As I've mentioned, there's multiple ways to travel. You can fly, select a waypoint and travel to it. Small cutscene and you're there, no map. You can go into your map, select a plant and set a course - you will be orbiting the planet. Or you can select the planet and view it and select a settlement to land at - you will be outside your ship. However, you cannot fly to the planet, select the planet, then land. Selecting the planet has you bring up the planetary map, where you then select a settlement... This is the course of action that results in your first bullet-point of no sub-orbit flight. Because we cannot select a planet to land on directly, we must use the map to travel. Also because of that streamer we saw that you also can't fly to pluto to land on it because we can't do that with any planet.
I personally don't have an issue with that aspect of it, my gripe comes down to the flow of gameplay. Like the menu diving, inconsistent hotkeys, I'm just not sure why they added some time buffers and menu-reliant methods when they also have existing ways to do the same thing. It's one of those things where it seems like by trying to accommodate doing something any possible way they ended up nerfing each way of doing it? That said, my friend made a good point - would you rather spend time at the destination or getting there? Currently, the game is maybe 30% (quest dependent) getting there and 70% being there. Sometimes you go to a location via grav jump, hail and dock, do a couple things and leave. Sometimes you grav jump talk to someone and leave. No matter what, you are going somewhere, doing something, and then leaving. So are you going to be happier spending your time doing frivolous things to get there, or would you showing up and spending your time in the area?
So far, my complaints have all been related to the flow of the game. Most of my time is really spent engaging in the world, talking, collecting, it's genuinely fun. Then I get a quest and it asks me to go to some far away planet... well, do I have anything else left to do here? Do I leave and come back? If I leave I'm going to find something else and then I won't come back for some time. Then I start trying to reference the missions and the map and that is where
So far honestly my biggest actual bothers me issue has been the egregiously long animations for getting into and leaving the cockpit. Hold E during a dogfight? You're fucked. Accidentally forget to add something to cargo? Go make some tea, it'll be a while. I'm being a little facetious but seriously, a 5-7 second long stand/sit animation is just too much for something I'm doing constantly, especially if it's prone to happening on accident.
My second biggest issue that I think most people have been talking about is rooted in that quests don't have a view all on map/make all active/most sensibly, categorize quests by planet (or galaxy). Goddamn, I have spent a lot of time in Neon trying to figure out which quests if any are still available there, or searching for another quest that is somewhat nearby another. I'm trying to follow sensible trade routes and plan accordingly, but there's just so many to sift through and cross referencing them is a pain. That said, it seems like they have combated this by trying to push that that does not matter. If you are in the Sol system and need to go to Neon or further right, just plot a course or go directly to the planet and land on the waypoint. If you have no contraband, you land in the settlement outside your ship/in the city. There's no need to stay within Sol/near Alpha Centauri because as long as you're ship is within range, grav-jumping is as instantaneous as a loading screen.
That's about it, honestly. Carrying capacity has been generous, 140kg per follower and 2 being pushed on you right away. Ships with 1,000kg can be had easily. Storage is pretty freely given, 300kg at the lodge (which has all the crafting right there), default ship has ~600kg (450 cargo + 150 captain + ~150 random storage?). I've been trying to take it easy and not grab all the junk to exist but only from looting bodies and actual usable materials. I've got 4 ships and 100k credits and still more to sell. The game is genuinely lots of fun, very detailed with lots of interactions, it really does feel alive especially compared to 2077 which I enjoyed but saw it's shortcoming for.
That's how I feel for Starfield. I see some shortcomings (frankly, that will be fixed with mods probably. I forsee a lot of animation skip mods.) being an otherwise extensively large, and so far well crafted game with meaningful decisions for your character. Actions I've made have actually made a difference and affected me later. And while bugs are gonna vary for everyone, my experience so far has had very few bugs that actually matter. To be honest, even if every 2nd body was flopping around after death I wouldn't care? It literally does not matter? I really don't care that once in a while an NPC is facing a different direction while they talk to me. Intended? Probably not. People in the real world also don't always face you or even look at you while they talk, so I don't see the issue.
So, there you go. Now either I'm a shill whose been paid by Bethesda (I could really use it right about now), or a pirate whose been blinded by the shiny new so I must be missing all the terrible qualities of the game.
Or, could it just be that it happens to be a slightly more fleshed out Bethesda game. It has some fairly minor shortcomings, performance aside, but it's also a fun light RPG. (I really have to stress, I see lots of complaints about performance online but ultra+RT medium on my hardware has been stable and fine, and I love high refresh rates. I have 165hz for a reason.)
Anyway, sorry not sorry for the length. I'm just tired of seeing people enjoy things and getting called a shill for it. It's disingenuous considering there are actual issues with the game to complain about.
Could it be that, like myself, these streamers have found that in their playtime these bugs are pretty minor compared to the rest of the game that's been fun and engaging? Two things can be true, you know. I can enjoy the game and say that it's strong and well developed while simultaneously saying that it has shortcomings regarding how they relied on the map for travel. But just because they relied on the map for galactic travel doesn't mean that my excursions on planets are any less fun, it just means that it's a little less fun to get there than it is to be there.
This didn't work for me. If you do this, a new instance is loaded and my mission does not show up.
For which quests? Colonist quests I believe you can't leave for, everything else is a permanent quest until completiom
It's kind of difficult to explain this without telling you the whole thing.
Here goes...
Build outpost randomly.
Meet Bounty Hunter in close-by container.
Bounty Hunter asks for help with bandits, and to meet 1km east.
I get a marker on my map and on HUD.
I think "fuck, im not running 1km."
I go back to my ship and open map.
I put my landing marker close to mission marker.
Click to fast travel.
Loading Screen.
Ship lands.
Get out of ship.
Look around. It's a whole different map.
No marker on HUD.
Think "wtf".
Fast travel back to my outpost.
My mission is there again.
Ah I see, I understand! Yeah that's essentially a version of the colonist bug I encountered. It seems certain parts of the game want you to play through it. Mine "works" a little more than yours though, since I was rescuing someone fast traveling would defeat the point. But showing up somewhere is definitely something you'd expect to work for a bounty.
For what it's worth I often find myself feeling like I don't want to run 1km, but it's only 5 minutes and I get there before I know it. The distances of the POI's feel so far, but most are around 400m and it seems to go by in about 2 minutes. For moons it's full cause you can complete the surveys quickly, but for planets it's a good opportunity to finish them up without feeling like I'm wasting time I could be spending on quests.
Anyway, sorry you had to question your sanity and thank you for indulging my curiosity!