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[Capt_North]

Hey there chummers!

Review on the newest life simulation replacement! from Todd, Starfield!

Its ok. Not bad, pretty good.

what..? You wanted more info?
Fine.

This very much feels like a later elder scrolls/fallout game, which isnt a bad thing, it feels very familear just jumping in, though there are many improvements.

Gunplay in the game is much more refined and doesnt require vats to keep a decent edge in combat and just feels smoother. Shooting someone usually has some effect if it does any decent damage, and in situations you can pop their armored airtanks or other such taking a target out quick (and loud) Feels like a great improvement to the style and a good addition. That said, guns are a bit.. Meh. i mean in style. some look awesome in a sort of "art-deco" style, curves, oblong, wood stocks and grips. very nice.



while others tend to be very... Brutalist? Square and blocky wth no frills, and when it does try adding those in it just sorts of stands out. Square shaped barrels (seriously, the barrels are square, and the holes are square to. far as i can tell its EM fired and uses sabot to fire as they are called caseless rounds) which are just extended out and muzzle attachments just kinda stuck on the end making them look a bit silly.




And some kinda functionalist (im possibly making that one up) future guns which are sort of between the two styles.



tons of others as well, some cool looking, some silly.
One issue is their attempt to balance, rapid fire guns do a small sliver of damage while spraying lots of ammo, single shot semis do heavy hits with each click. Thing is... Most the guns if you research weapon stuff, can be swapped between semi and auto. same gun, same ammo, just... Yeah. There are also other options like burst fire, or "binary trigger" (which is a double tap. pull the trigger back fires one, let the trigger go fires a second) and they all tamper with the damage the gun does.

Melee is an option with some nice hand to hand weapons, but they are pushed aside, no real options for mods that i have found. that said, having a guy run up with a monofilament knife, axe, or cutlass aiming for your face can lead to a bad day..

Space flight is.. Meh. But this could be me being snobbish from past space sim stuff. That said, it feels they did the bare minimum to bring the game space stuff despite making it a huge focus of the game. dog fights are kinda slow and tedious, shuffling around power on your ship to run things while also trying to fly (this can be helped by crew who help boost systems). there is no fly between, if you wanna get from place to place you just use the map, select your location, confirm and it auto travels. No option to fly from one planet to another on your own.

design aspects not to bad, but takes some getting used to, and the UI is a bit... Crap? things connect weird, mouse doesnt always register where it should be so it puts your new engine about 80 feet from the actual ship and off your screen so you have to searc for it. Then you get done, go into your ship and find out... The layout is freaking terrible and its missing all the stuff you want so you have to go back and do it again. Always autosave before you modify your ship.

outposts are a bit better then F4s town building, things snap a bit better, though getting everythign together and linked to work properly takes some time and practice. helps with the early game grind of collecting resources as you can lay down an outpost and automate it to collect good materials, or ones that sell for a good bit, or process them into manufactured goods to sell for a much higher profit. can even set up a "supply line" so its shipped to whatever planet you wanna sell to, or between different worlds so tungsten from X outpost is shipped to Y outpost along with nickle from Z outpost so Y can make bolts, which then can ge sold off or whatever. Needs work, and im sure modding community will really work in getting this fixed.

Game is actually pretty stable as well! Played over 20+ hours and not a single crash, bug, or glitch! Im absolutely amazed!!

Character creation is bare bones. Bethseda loves stripping out character stuff, and they have started here a bit.
You can customize the looks of your character all you want, but after that you get to choose a background. It gives you 3 skills, and thats it. some backgrounds get brought up in game play, others not so much. No option to choose your own skills (weapon skills seem pretty useless at the start. Oh boy. a +10 percent damage on ballistics. truely much more useful then having more carry weight, crafting skills, piloting, and so forth...)
to advance skills you dont just slapp a point in and continue, but get challenges with each skill level, complete them and next level up you can put another point in, and they are pretty much what the skill does. wanna boost your pistol skill?kill 20 guys with a pistol. wanna research better? Research some stuff. there you go. crafting? build shit.

Lots of things that shouldnt be are skills as well.
Want to pilot your ship? Hope you bought the piloting skill!!
Wanna use those jump jets you gave you and made a fairly important sort of thing (which is actually kinda crap..) Better buy that skill as well!
Heres a major story part where you need to disable an enemy ship without destroying it! What? You didnt buy the auto targeting skill? Well! Better hope you can aim really well in a dog fight free hand loser! Should have bought it earlier despite us never warning you you need it!

again, all in al it is a good game. But its no ground breaking Game of the year experience that will turn things on its head!! And it is not really a 70 dollar game.. I splurged 100 to get the premium edition (thank you over time!) so i could play early, get the DLC when it comes out, and the extra little stuff, and honestly i love this kinda stuff but i might have been content to wait a while for it to go sale or something. 70 bucks is just way to much for what they have to offer here, something lke 40-50 would have made a good level.

If you want something ground breaking and absolutely worth its cost? Baldurs gate 3 is pretty excellent.
Nothing says fun like throwing ribcages full of a couple hundred pounds of explosives, alcohol, oil, acid, and whatever else you can find and making a mini mushroom cloud in some poor goblins face.

[Capt_North]

ok, so some things like piloting ships and a couple others you can do from the start, and others arent so vital that you should start with them. still abit annoying. game is still decent though.

I ended up ditching first game and starting a new one, chose background and used console commands to give myself the skills i wanted (3) and nuke the starter ones so basicly get to start as my own class. Wish they predicted some of the things...

And in details i forgot, you can totally jack enemy ships. target the engines, board the ship, kill the crew and if you have the piloting level it is yours! Nice way to earn some extra cash, but not much. you HAVE to register it, which costs like 80 percent of what you would get in selling it. still a decent chunk of cash, but kinda bullshit at the same time. you make about 2000-3000 on it. plus whatever was in the hold or on the guys when you nuked them. still pretty badass though.

Bit of a spoiler for the start, but not a major one.










Your sent off to meet a group of people and guy sends you on his ship locking the controls with his robot so you cant just take off and do what you want without actually starting things. Techincally, i should have gotten around this because first enemy ship i ran into i neutralized and boarded and took over. So now the ship doesnt have those protocols.. But your still stuck getting railroaded til your done dealing with the bellends.

[Ingo Monk]

I've been having a lot of fun with it as well. I concur with a lot of points presented. Here are some of my own thoughts:

• Space travel being auto-travel is really immersion breaking. I seems like they were building within the limitations of their game engine, basically a small pocket of space around each planet/moon and the only way to get to another is to fast travel. I feel like they were trying to copy Star Citizen's or Elite Dangerous' model of using a "jump/warp/grav/whatever drive" to get between points of interest. I rather like X4's system of using an "accelerator" type engine to increase speed within a system and using jump gates to get between systems. While it slows down space travel it is very immersive and autopilot is there to do it for you if you're lazy. I feel like they could have done a lot here to increase immersion for those who want it (as it would require no mechanics, just animation around the in-game ship model.. which they've already done), and then just make toggles to turn them off for those who prefer the full-fast-travel model. It's like they built their game like Skyrim/Fallout and just tacked on the space part. They should have spend a little more time understanding the appeal of space travel games and the players that enjoy that. Though I'm just a tiny voice of a player in the sea of the games development industry, maybe they had these discussions and made a conscious decision to make things this way.. who knows?
• I like the ship building aspect, and the fact that in-world and all animated cut scenes will show your ship as you've built it. That being said, the in-game info related to ship building leads a lot to be desired. At least plugging pieces together is rather intuitive, albeit wonky at times as the Capt. mentioned.
• On the topic of the animated cut scenes, I rather like the animated take-off/landing sequences (and some of the things your companions say when they occur). Though I don't like how if you fast travel from on one planet to a waypoint on another planet it will skip both scenes entirely. To ensure you get both you'd have to trigger the take off sequence, then fast travel to the planet/moon you want to go to, then trigger the landing sequence. Also, I feel like they could have added a "grav/warp tunnel" sequence to replace the loading screen, it would have been way more immersive this way. I think Star Citizen does this (iirc timing is tied to the speed of your warp engine and the distance you're traveling, and you can get up and move around your ship during it).
• Yesterday I just started an outpost and there's literally almost no info about it in-game. Had to read posts or watch Youtube vids on it to get a basic grasp on it. Even then I spent the better part of an hour running around in my given landing area trying to find just the right spot with the right available resources... only to find out that the way it's set up is really simple and you can just have tiny outposts gathering resources and having them automatically transferred to your "main base" type outpost for manufacturing and what not. At least things are not permanent, and taking things apart is easy. I haven't found a way to build like a concrete type pad to build on top of, but maybe I just haven't unlocked it yet.
• Gun play is ok, and the feedback from critical hits is decent. You can totally do the Skyrim stealth-archer if you wanted, but your companions usually mess it up. It's not as clunky as some other games I've played (which were blatant console to PC ports) but it's not as accurate as a pure FPS game. There doesn't seem to be any kind of bullet drop (which is probably a good thing, trying to adjust to fighting on different planets/moons with different pressures and different gravities would be a nightmare). It also seems like the "range" of a gun is an absolute range? I haven't spent much time trying to prove this out but I feel like any shot I make past the "range" of a gun will never hit.
• I thought that the amount of different ammunition types was kind of excessive, but it looks like they don't actually weigh anything (hello game breaking). In the beginning I found myself running out of ammo a few times since I was juggling long and short range weapons that used the same ammo. Once I found better suited guns I just need to carry around the appropriate ammo. Yes 2000 rounds of 7.7mm and 2000 rounds of 6.7mm weigh absolutely nothing. I just got a decent looking 50 cal rifle yesterday, perhaps I'll carry 2000 rounds of .50 as well? 
• I actually rather enjoy the skill progression system. One point to unlock level one of a given skill, then you have to do stuff related to that skill to get "good at it" so you can unlock another level. After some time with all the gun related skills and leveling them up, combat tends to be much easier than when I started.

I've got a ton more thoughts/opinions, but this is becoming quite long already so I'll stop here.

Let's discuss!

[Capt_North]

Im back and forth on the fast travel thing, the jumps i can get because the grav jumps are suppose to be instant, but between the planets..? Yeah. that takes some of the fun out as you have a chance of running into random enemies while drifting about. Maybe add in something where your "interupted while traveling" and kicks you to generic space map for whatever event.
End result is they were pretty low effort on the space aspect of the game.

Outposts were a big annoyance in trying to get everything all worked out, and once you do its kinda obvious.. But only if someone explains it. a proper tutorial or something would have been a good help there.


And with gun talk here comes Major issue #4? with starfield..
THERES NO FUCKING LASER GUNS!!!
Ok, there are. there are a total of about... 3 lasers.
A pistol (with a skin for more firedamage) a laser rifle, a double barrel laser rifle, the cutter which im not sure counts,

Thats it. Its one of the starting skills you can get, but your pimped out laser rifle will quickly be outclassed by even basic pistols very shortly after. There are a few particle weapons, but they dont get bonuses from the weapon skill. so if you invested in it, fuck you.
Ballistics has like, 10 pistols, and almost 15 rifles/shotguns?
2 particle weapons. And thats if fuck you.

hell, i cheated for build purpose.. And a fully modded equinox (starter laser, and only one until you get a double barrel one later) takes more skill points and work then a grendel, the low level trash SMG modded up the best it can be.

its... annoying.

[Capt_North]

bit more research turns out there are different "levels" of guns, basic, calibrated, refined, and advanced. Each level provides a significant boost to the last and allows things like those equinox rifles and other guns to be viable in late game. That said as stands you cannot upgrade your weapons in this method, but have to find or buy them from shops when they become available. So when your beloved zapgun from the start of the game just isnt cutting it any more, now you have to find a brand new gun of the same model and redo all of the mods you put on before. Which to me kinda sucks as i get attached to my good weapons and gear. Granted this means it just goes on display in my ships armory, but still.

Also, i got to thinking on what Ingo said on starfield... I think bethseda wasted a big thing in the space travel.. As stands, you select your destination and zoom, you just appear there after a small cutscene. What the game could have used is some random encounters in these, funny little things happen like an issue with your ship, like one of the gribblies from one of the worlds you set down on snuck on and has decided to make itself known, a stowaway is found, your attacked by pirates, or find a ship in distress, something to break the empty jump pattern as you go.

Further, and admittedly, ive shipped out with no crew at all cause im a badass lone wolf space ace, but this would have been an excellent moment for interactions with crew and companions. When your designing your ship you get tons of optional rooms of different styles to fill things out. While your drifting through the void it seems a perfect time to go talk to your peeps in a relaxed setting, have different interactions in different rooms, dont have to be major story shaking events, but chat with them about what type of guns are their favorite in the armory, talk science stuff in the lab, hang out in the living quarters, talk shop over a meal in the galley. Something that makes you feel a bit more attachment to both your ship and your companions rather then they are just set dressing in the game.

[Capt_North]

Further things i want to change in starfield..
You can build your own landing pad at your outpost that lets you modify your ship... its cool, but its only the most generic of parts.
What i want..? IS the option to save parts from ships. Like, if i catch a  ship and it has some rare powerful engines or something, i cant like, remove them and put them on another ship like my main ship which has these really cool and rare other parts on it, but shit engines.
Because of the way they "balanced" selling ships, i actually make more money selling 10 grendels then a pirate heavy ship. The engines they will charge me 80,000 credits for, they will only pay me 200 credits for. I might as well keep them and upgrade my own ship.

The more i play the more im getting negative feelings on the game. they have quite obviously leaned into waiting for modders to balance and add content, the only thing they have done right this time is make the base program solid an not as crash happy as most the stuff they pump out.

[Ingo Monk]

bit more research turns out there are different "levels" of guns, basic, calibrated, refined, and advanced. Each level provides a significant boost to the last and allows things like those equinox rifles and other guns to be viable in late game.

Yeah this I understand, but again they're missing in-game fluff to explain the differences. How is a "calibrated" gun different than a "refined" gun? You have to hit the Google machine to find a blog post about it. It would be nice if there was some text that would say "a calibrated gun is 5% more accurate than a normal model" or something along those lines.

Also, i got to thinking on what Ingo said on starfield... I think bethseda wasted a big thing in the space travel.. As stands, you select your destination and zoom, you just appear there after a small cutscene. What the game could have used is some random encounters in these, funny little things happen like an issue with your ship, like one of the gribblies from one of the worlds you set down on snuck on and has decided to make itself known, a stowaway is found, your attacked by pirates, or find a ship in distress, something to break the empty jump pattern as you go.

This is a great idea. I would totally support if this is a standard mechanic and you could have the option to fast travel if you've been to a place before (main story aside). They could have easily added quests to get a "map" or "star coordinates" to various stars and that's how you expand your galaxy map.

Further, and admittedly, ive shipped out with no crew at all cause im a badass lone wolf space ace, but this would have been an excellent moment for interactions with crew and companions. When your designing your ship you get tons of optional rooms of different styles to fill things out. While your drifting through the void it seems a perfect time to go talk to your peeps in a relaxed setting, have different interactions in different rooms, dont have to be major story shaking events, but chat with them about what type of guns are their favorite in the armory, talk science stuff in the lab, hang out in the living quarters, talk shop over a meal in the galley. Something that makes you feel a bit more attachment to both your ship and your companions rather then they are just set dressing in the game.

I think they would have to have spend much more time writing character interactions and recording voice overs and what not, but not too far fetched. I could see why they wouldn't do something like this mainly due to the costs involved but how awesome it would be!

You can build your own landing pad at your outpost that lets you modify your ship... its cool, but its only the most generic of parts.
What i want..? IS the option to save parts from ships. Like, if i catch a  ship and it has some rare powerful engines or something, i cant like, remove them and put them on another ship like my main ship which has these really cool and rare other parts on it, but shit engines.
Because of the way they "balanced" selling ships, i actually make more money selling 10 grendels then a pirate heavy ship. The engines they will charge me 80,000 credits for, they will only pay me 200 credits for. I might as well keep them and upgrade my own ship.

I feel like the ship building thing is designed as a mini-game and a credit sink rather than part of the game world. There's no effort to modifying ships at a ship yard or city dock, just bring credits. As it stands right now outside of leveling up your skills to access the more specialist parts, you need to go to specific ship builder star yards to access some of those specialized parts. I think this is fine, it forces you to hunt down where these places are to get the parts, but is super annoying.

Building at your outpost makes no sense to me. You can modify your ships and it seems it's just limited to your skills. Seems like you can access most things if you max your skills? I'm not 100% here since I haven't maxed my ship building related skills. But at the same time it makes no sense here. How would you get the random parts for your ship to this random outpost on this random planetoid in this random star system? Doing it at a ship yard makes sense, there's infrastructure and warehouses there, but at a random outpost it makes no sense. They could have totally gamified it, giving you access to all those parts at your outpost but you'd actually have to build the parts by supplying the various resources. Higher tier parts require higher tier resources, etc.

In addition to the above, I feel like they missed out on an opportunity for ship manufacturer faction standings. Like, cities don't have maybe rank B or rank C parts, you have to go to the builder to get them. And even then you can't build with them unless you have a level of faction standing with them. You build standing by running missions from their job board, and further they could have had a side quest line with each vendor that once completed grants you access to rank B parts. Then you run jobs for them to access rank C parts. Then beyond this they could sell you a "license" to access these advanced parts at your outpost landing pad (if you supply the appropriate resources to the pad). X4 does exactly this, and I think it's a totally immersive and can be story driven. You can build your own space station and build your own ship manufacturing hub, but you can't build anything without first getting licenses from the various factions. You can run quests or just have your automated traders supply them for small faction gains, then eventually you'll have enough for them to sell them to you (assuming you have the credits)

Doing those kind of things would make the whole Outpost thing worthwhile. I feel like there's so many opportunities missed that I'm sure someone there brought up these ideas. I have a suspicion that having the game on a console restricted a lot of what they could do, either based on available hardware resources or knowing the target demographic. Console games don't tend to have this kind of depth to them, and fast travel is totally console driven as the average console player doesn't sit and game as long as a PC gamer would (at least I remember reading statistics relating as such in the past)

[Capt_North]

Yeah. Considering they show some rough 3d printing tech it could have been explained as the quality pf files used to print, your basic gun being something cheap that pirates programmed up jist measuring an old rifle, calibrated use proper files though pirated and degraded, refined are the factory direct files  with no loss, advanced are the specs for those special custom jobs someone ordered, and the superior guns are done with prototype parts and stuff.

Boom, there we have an explain for the diff styles of the same gun, and gives an exuse for why players can crqft guns out of the resources we have wasted so much time collecting. Hell, add in a credit cost as part of liscense fee. Company charges us each time we print so cant jist make 30 guns from scratch and sell them for bank.

And the little random event thing was in the original fallout games! Youd be redlining along the map and something happens, boom, sometimes yiur attacked, or find a caravan, or so forth. But nah. Ship takes off, ship lands. I wouldnt have minded a small travel thing, blip moving through subspace corridors as a lpading screen, looping image of ship speeding through weird space as it gives SOME feeling of being in space and the time it takes.

And yeah, im finding how limited the crew npcs are, a few named ones and spot fillers that are literally "energy weapon specialist". But the name ones they could have put a little more into. Cause honestly... constelation? They can go off amd twist for all i care.

And yeah, i enjoy ship building some, but needs a ton more polish. And it ties with outposts. Most resources are so minor they aremt worth gathering unless your going to swap your gear every hour anf need to refit each time. If you could splat down your own little colony, take some of those specialists and plop them in, get petitions from randos to move in and help production, then cool little evemts like theu found some cave system, or pirate attack, or jist Something interesting... but no. Its a pointless time sink aside from a place to stash your contraband tol get shielded bays and jammers. Then i just turned mine into giant sanctuary for all the plushes ive rescued in the galaxy.

Hell, the ship building platform can link in with the 3d printing stuff, as thats how your able to upgrade your ship on it. Add in some mechanical arms and such moving over the ship welding things and all. Then when you refit you are 3d printing the new gear then and there using the resources youve collected (and paying a fee to the compqny that originaly produced the part for liscensing stuff). Its cheaper than going to full station dock, and gives a reason to go out and improve your relations with the other builders.

More i think on this stuff the more disappointed i feel in ways. They could have setup this whole ecology for the world.

Say you want to play a technician type. You are sinking your points into weapons tech, ship design, armor, all of those... which leaves you a bit clumsy with a gun and all. So what do you do? You go anf hire some badass gunfighters to back you up on missions, give them orders and support them in fights with heal kits, armor repairs, or so forth. Between then you also build them new armor and guns, toss new gubbins onntheir guns to make them more effective.

Or say you want to play badass gunner? Now your out hiring technicians to run your ship, build new kit for you, and med you ehen taking heqvy fire so you can dump all your points into fighting skills.

Want to pilot a ship more then burn the points to build? Hire some techs with those skils and plunk them in your outpost to do jist that. Now you jist tell them what and where. Need to expand as want to build those c class parts? Ok, need to expand outpost so can support more people to maintain things.

Whats this? One of deimos old engineers retired but is said to still tinker with designs on his own? Hey! Lets go talk to the guy amd see if we can recruit him for cool custom parts!!

Establish trade with a farming colony for food stuffs in exchange for minerals you mine.

So much potential here, and they havent really done anything with it. Its like they just wantes to get it out the door and leqve it for modders to fill out.

[Capt_North]

Thats... annoying.
Load up starfield.
Some reason my ship has brand new generic name uc cargo hauler a.

Same ship and layout.. but, the entire stores of the ship? Gone. 5000 units of resources, armor, weapons, ammo, contraband, all of it. Just... gone. As well as my credits.

Personal inv was still there, but.. yeah.

[Capt_North]

As i think, might be a ship bug.
Have a habit of disabling ships and hopping in for quick test drive. Once you hop pilot seat you can check stats and build, if i dont like it usually leave it. Sometimes those ships show in my starport inventory to register and sell or modify, though never even jumped with them.

Might be some error with that.

[Ingo Monk]

As i think, might be a ship bug.
Have a habit of disabling ships and hopping in for quick test drive. Once you hop pilot seat you can check stats and build, if i dont like it usually leave it. Sometimes those ships show in my starport inventory to register and sell or modify, though never even jumped with them.

Might be some error with that.

When you take over a ship, whether it's in space or on a planet, that ship immediately becomes your "home ship" and all your crap gets moved there. You have to go to a planet or station (or outpost) with a ship technician or whatnot to open the ship editing interface, then select your previous ship again and click on the "home ship" button. Super annoying, but I haven't lost and gear and stuff... at least none that I've noticed.

[Capt_North]

Usually its not swapped to homeship til you land or fqst travel, jumpnor in system. But on occasion ive had a couple that even if i dont make the full move eill get added to my list.
One time had one i just dropped as trash and got a message saying it was returning to homebase and just started flying itself.

Lots of times swiping on planet ships it happens to, jist konda auto made your homr base, though your old ship is still where it originally landed.

Side note thats fun. Sometimes when you break into a landed ship, like with eclip, spacers, or pirates,  they eill sometimes takr off into space with you on the ship. If your lucky its while your in the modules, but had a couple times where i was in the lander whicj will glitch up and eject you out at top of atmosphere. Hope you time yout boost right for landing..