I'm glad for their success. However, even though this is their most popular game, it certainly isn't their best. It's lacking one of the best aspects of their games, the exploration gameloop typical of Bethesda's RPGs. Without that it just feels like a shallow experience. As if there's really nothing worthwhile to do other than the questlines.

I'm 20 hours in and having a really difficult time staying interested. Nothing about the world, story, or gameplay is very interesting to me. The spaceship and space travel seem pointless. I don't know if there is any point to the outposts either. I hope it is a very long time before we see a sequel to this game. Hopefully by that time their game engine can handle a proper space exploration game.

A well-deserved success, but AMD GPU exclusivity caused NVIDIA issues. On Starfield, I had to set to Off/Low/Medium on my 2080 Ti and 4090 to prevent Windows crashes due to high GPU temps.

The lack of exploration has caused my friends group online to all switch to playing No Man's Sky lol. They are new, I've played it off and on for years and very much enjoying the new content.

For now Starfield remains uninstalled. I'll reinstall when the 'special edition' comes out next year, and there's a great community patch, a compellation mod that makes the UI not suck, and a bunch of content mods that make the game what it should have been from the start.

I really enjoyed my first playthrough, but I'm not sure when I'll get back to the game. It felt like pretty much everything in Starfield was either done well or poorly without much inbetween.

The combat felt like it didn't scale really well, but otherwise it was actually really good (both space and on foot). There were several side quests that are really fantastic. I like what they were doing with the main quest the most, but I don't think they quite stuck the landing.

I really wish they'd figured out how to do planetary transitions like NMS and also allowed flight on planet. Gear disappearing from certain ship storage (100% reproducible thus never should have been an issue) and the apartment randomly wiping are pretty huge bugs. Though maybe they were trying to force people into using the outpost system (which doesn't have snapping) in a twisted fashion.

It'll be interesting to see what sort of changes they make along the way as they get to expansion time.

Riding on Bethesda fame and GamePass low price.

Felt underwhelming to me and uninstalled (didn't get far, true), no biggie, back in a year or two.
Steam general score is going down, at 76% now.

All other Bethesda games, historic and last 30 days scores, are from near to well over 90%

My interest in the game is cooling. I only play it for maybe an hour or so a night. I had hoped for Skyrim in spaaaaaace. Instead I got Fallout in low earth orbit and I didn't particularly like Fallout 4.

I'll put my growing list of complaints with it in a spoiler tag so as not to spoil some plot beats for those who have not played it yet.

Begin spoilers:
*The magic space powers are stupid and don't really add a whole lot to the gameplay loop. It's like shouts were lifted from TES5 and shoe-horned in to the game.
*The whole Starborn/String Theory multiple universes was an incredibly lame, shallow, and pointless affair. You're in the massive vastness of space, with a grav drive that can take you anywhere, and Bethesda decided "Hey, you know what would be cool? We'll just keep you locked in the same tiny percentage of the Local Cluster and have you repeat everything!" Have the Artifacts link humanity to another race or another section of the Local Cluster. Anything other than that. It was lazy writing and, worse, a total waste of time invested in to getting there.
*Once you build a ship that suits your playstyle, there's never a need to visit a shipyard ever again.
*Likewise, for all the modules available to you, there's just no point in being a space trucker, a pirate, a smuggler, or anything else. The mission payouts are way too low and the in-game economy can't handle it.
*Romance options are...limited and uneven. You can romance Sarah, Sam, or Barret quickly but there is really no point in doing so. Andreja takes a long ass time to romance and there's no real extra payoff for investing that time.
*Base/outpost building is rather useless. Cool, I can build an outpost that farms mats for me and does some limited crafting but it is expensive to do so. I can't get a Trade Authority station in there nor GalBank so outside of crafting and mats, it is a giant resource sink with no real payoff.
*Why was House Va'ruun content cut to be held back as DLC? They're, allegedly, a major faction in the base game.yet you can't visit any of their worlds, because they do not exist, and they're only a smattering of the events you stumble upon.
*All the elements of a great game are there but they just don't gel and mesh together well. Everything feels bolted on like I am going from room to room instead of experiencing a whole house.
End spoilers

I'm still having tons of fun with this game. Good quests, dialogue, combat, world design, soundtrack, overall feeling of immersion and freedom.

I went in with medium expectations though. Yeah there's some mediocre stuff but overall it's way better than I was expecting. The only parts of the UI that really bothered me (startup videos + inventory) were easily fixed with day 1 mods, as was DLSS support.

Looking forward to seeing how the game improves over time.

Tom wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 16:27:
Good quests, dialogue, combat, world design, soundtrack, overall feeling of immersion and freedom.

Baldur's Gate 3 completely killed Starfield for me in every way.

beigemore wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 16:31:

Tom wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 16:27:
Good quests, dialogue, combat, world design, soundtrack, overall feeling of immersion and freedom.

Baldur's Gate 3 completely killed Starfield for me in every way.

Having played both I can verify you are not crazy (about this anyway).

Starfield feels like they stripped out almost all the content from Fallout 4, spread what remained over an entire galaxy, and then slapped on a comedically bad plot.

It honestly feels like the shell of a game. I'm sure modders will liven it up eventually but I think this is the weakest Bethesda title ever in terms of an unmodded experience. What little hand-crafted content there is, is spread way too thin. The main story is a predictable bore. The "feel" of exploration is ruined by so much fast traveling and when you aren't fast traveling, its mostly just empty procedurally generated landscape.

Even looking at vanilla Skyrim or FO4, if you saw a structure or point of interest, it would either be unique in itself, or it would be a copy-paste job but with something unique to find inside, even if it was just something small like a funny note or a unique weapon. In Starfield, it's just going to be more plates, forks, and succulents.

It has plenty of gameplay mechanics, but they all feel like stubs meant to be fleshed out by modders for free.

Sheik Rattle Enroll wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 16:44:

Starfield feels like they stripped out almost all the content from Fallout 4, spread what remained over an entire galaxy, and then slapped on a comedically bad plot.

Yes. Amusing that they mention a number of "players" as opposed to the number of copies actually sold (the usual metric)--I sense some evasion going on here...;) I have nothing at all against Bethesda, no reason to criticize them for anything, really. Heck, with ~90 non-Bethesda-made mods installed, and an upgraded version of the game engine for 64-bit support, Skyrim was a treat....;) But I agree with your comment, completely. Looks like cut and paste segments lifted from past games, yes, and it neatly explains why Bethesda hasn't developed a much newer game engine! They want to make sure that modders will carry this game, too. Here's a game Bethesda says was in development for ten years, but when it released behind schedule in 2023, the game has no HDR support--let alone RT support of any kind! Indeed, after not supporting HDR, Bethesda has not even offered a date when HDR will be supported! HDR support is fairly mundane today--nothing that should break the bank or require prodigious development efforts. (BG3, according to Larian, was in development for six years, and went into EA a whole three years ago! Yet HDR was supported in the EA from day one--and it was pretty good, too, IIRC.) This looks like a somewhat puzzling minimal/maximal development goal schedule. My opinion is that the development was cratered around past and future non-Bethesda mod enhancement expectations...

Hardline Mike wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 17:16:
It honestly feels like the shell of a game. I'm sure modders will liven it up eventually but I think this is the weakest Bethesda title ever in terms of an unmodded experience. What little hand-crafted content there is, is spread way too thin. The main story is a predictable bore. The "feel" of exploration is ruined by so much fast traveling and when you aren't fast traveling, its mostly just empty procedurally generated landscape.

All these years and people still expect a good main story from a Bethesda game? I'm just glad we finally got NG+ and that there's an integrated option to skip the main quest (or even companion storylines) on subsequent playthroughs. There's a decent amount of easter-egg-like post-game modification throughout, as well.

As for the amount of content, yes it's spread thin across 1000 fucking planets, but you cannot honestly say there's little of it... That's just factually incorrect, especially in comparison to their past games. Each faction quest line is practically another main quest in itself (with some branching choices that leave lasting impressions on the rest of the game), then you have several meaty side quest lines, dozens of one-off side quests, and a ridiculous variety of endlessly repeatable tasks. Nevermind all the checklist-ticking surveying/exploration and creative outlets of modular ship-building and outpost management... Most people will easily spend 100 hours in the game and still not have done everything. Since when is that not enough?

I do look forward to seeing more added to this galaxy, by Bethesda and modders alike -- but of all the complaints people have with the game, not finding enough to do has to be the most flimsy.

Kxmode wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 13:31:
A well-deserved success, but AMD GPU exclusivity caused NVIDIA issues. On Starfield, I had to set to Off/Low/Medium on my 2080 Ti and 4090 to prevent Windows crashes due to high GPU temps.

Do you have an ITX case or something? I have the MSI RTX 4090 Suprim X and while I have shat on AMD/Bethesda generously for omitting DLSS and for the game having no ray-tracing etc., I can not generally complain about the performance or stability. My setup is: 4K res maxed out, no mods, 144fps limit because of G-Sync but at 4K maxed out I'm typically only getting around 80-ish/90-ish fps anyway so the cap is a moot point except for the menus.

My GPU runs fairly cool at always a little under or a little over 70°C/40% fan (the Suprim X cooler is a beast) and I have had exactly zero crashes in just under 50 hours. The game is rock stable for me.

I think you also reported issues with the 537.13 drivers before, didn't you? If you already cleared your shader cache and let the shaders rebuild themselves then it might be time to do a serious checkup of your system. Overheating from playing Starfield definitely does not sound normal. I have played part of the game on the 537.13 drivers and installed the 537.34 drivers the day they were released. As I said, zero issues and everything is running smooth and (literally) cool here.

jacobvandy wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 17:38:
As for the amount of content, yes it's spread thin across 1000 fucking planets, but you cannot honestly say there's little of it... That's just factually incorrect, especially in comparison to their past games. Each faction quest line is practically another main quest in itself (with some branching choices that leave lasting impressions on the rest of the game), then you have several meaty side quest lines, dozens of one-off side quests, and a ridiculous variety of endlessly repeatable tasks. Nevermind all the checklist-ticking surveying/exploration and creative outlets of modular ship-building and outpost management... Most people will easily spend 100 hours in the game and still not have done everything. Since when is that not enough?

I agree. And some of the content is really well done. I've said it before and I will say it again: The UCSysDef vs. Crimson Fleet quest line is exceptionally well done. Your task is to infiltrate the Crimson Fleet by joining them and it is a long ass quest line with tons and tons of choices & consequences.

I also found it to be pretty well written. There are a lot of really funny and witty dialogue options and since you kind of have to roleplay a pirate (or actually become one by turning your back on the UC... your choice), you can make plenty use of them. The pirates actually enjoy being insulted and yelled at a little .

Like any huge RPG, Starfield has poor quests or quest lines and really memorable, exceptionally well done quests or quest lines. One should not judge too soon but actually play through most of those quest lines before declaring the game to be shit.

In this way, Starfield reminds me a bit of Oblivion. Oblivion had some rather bleak quest lines like the fighters and mages guild but then also really awesome stuff like the Dark Brotherhood, the Thieves Guild and some of the individual quests (painting, dream world, schizo elf etc.). You have to head out there and find the good stuff though. Or, if you are too lazy for that, refund the game if it's not too late.

jacobvandy wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 17:38:

Hardline Mike wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 17:16:
It honestly feels like the shell of a game. I'm sure modders will liven it up eventually but I think this is the weakest Bethesda title ever in terms of an unmodded experience. What little hand-crafted content there is, is spread way too thin. The main story is a predictable bore. The "feel" of exploration is ruined by so much fast traveling and when you aren't fast traveling, its mostly just empty procedurally generated landscape.

All these years and people still expect a good main story from a Bethesda game? I'm just glad we finally got NG+ and that there's an integrated option to skip the main quest (or even companion storylines) on subsequent playthroughs. There's a decent amount of easter-egg-like post-game modification throughout, as well.

As for the amount of content, yes it's spread thin across 1000 fucking planets, but you cannot honestly say there's little of it... That's just factually incorrect, especially in comparison to their past games. Each faction quest line is practically another main quest in itself (with some branching choices that leave lasting impressions on the rest of the game), then you have several meaty side quest lines, dozens of one-off side quests, and a ridiculous variety of endlessly repeatable tasks. Nevermind all the checklist-ticking surveying/exploration and creative outlets of modular ship-building and outpost management... Most people will easily spend 100 hours in the game and still not have done everything. Since when is that not enough?

I do look forward to seeing more added to this galaxy, by Bethesda and modders alike -- but of all the complaints people have with the game, not finding enough to do has to be the most flimsy.

Dunno what to tell you bud, I got bored a lot faster than I did with Skyrim or FO4. Just sharing my experience.

jacobvandy wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 17:38:

Hardline Mike wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 17:16:
It honestly feels like the shell of a game. I'm sure modders will liven it up eventually but I think this is the weakest Bethesda title ever in terms of an unmodded experience. What little hand-crafted content there is, is spread way too thin. The main story is a predictable bore. The "feel" of exploration is ruined by so much fast traveling and when you aren't fast traveling, its mostly just empty procedurally generated landscape.

All these years and people still expect a good main story from a Bethesda game? I'm just glad we finally got NG+ and that there's an integrated option to skip the main quest (or even companion storylines) on subsequent playthroughs. There's a decent amount of easter-egg-like post-game modification throughout, as well.

As for the amount of content, yes it's spread thin across 1000 fucking planets, but you cannot honestly say there's little of it... That's just factually incorrect, especially in comparison to their past games. Each faction quest line is practically another main quest in itself (with some branching choices that leave lasting impressions on the rest of the game), then you have several meaty side quest lines, dozens of one-off side quests, and a ridiculous variety of endlessly repeatable tasks. Nevermind all the checklist-ticking surveying/exploration and creative outlets of modular ship-building and outpost management... Most people will easily spend 100 hours in the game and still not have done everything. Since when is that not enough?

I do look forward to seeing more added to this galaxy, by Bethesda and modders alike -- but of all the complaints people have with the game, not finding enough to do has to be the most flimsy.

I've played games that lasted 10 hours and every hour felt better than a Bethesda game.
I've played games that lasted 100 hours and every hour felt better than a Bethesda game.

The problem isn't the number of hours, it's the amount of padding they do.

I'm 80 hours in, probably only 1/3 of the way through the faction quests and haven't touched the main quests after unlocking the dragon shouts. If you think there isn't a substantial amount of content, you aren't looking. Was hoping for more NMS style game play, but Starfield has become my favorite Fallout game. Haven't experienced many bugs(4 in 80h), and all but one were fixed by exiting/re-entering the area. The other bug was a quest completing too early. My tour of Constellation was just talking to one person then nothing. Loaded a quicksave and it worked the second time. Glad they took an extra year to polish the game, but how does anyone release a game without FOV sliders. Did they omit it so they would have something to add in an early patch to silence upset players? It's the same game engine they've used since Morrowind, you'd think they would have found time to add a FOV slider sometime during the last two decades. Tod insists on reusing the same old game engine, and the game engine still sucks. This time I get Cyberpunk levels of performance with slightly better than Fallout 4 graphics. Same horrible character animation since Morrowind and other oddities. It was time to ditch the engine long ago. zero-g combat was fun at first, then I found you can't look 100% down, and shooting people below you in an elevator shaft is impossible.
Overall I'm enjoying the game more than I thought I would. Did find secret locations from reading random books sitting on peoples shelves like I was hoping the game would have, but otherwise haven't bothered exploring much. Will have to play the latest NMS update after finishing Starfield. I appreciate the typical Bethesda quests, and the laid back atmosphere in the game. It's what I'm in the mood for right now.

Still trying to wrap my head around not being able to invite my parents to my wedding...

If you think there isn't a substantial amount of content, you aren't looking.

I ran out of content at ~lvl 45. Half the star systems are lvl40+ and you fly there and there are no cities, no quests, nothing. Just random horse shit.

PHJF wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 21:29:

If you think there isn't a substantial amount of content, you aren't looking.

I ran out of content at ~lvl 45. Half the star systems are lvl40+ and you fly there and there are no cities, no quests, nothing. Just random horse shit.

you gotta be looking in all the wrong places then, cuz i'm 50 hrs in and i've barely touched the main quest, haven't done any faction or companion quests at all. haven't even gotten to the powers everyone's talking about. i keep getting sidetracked by phenomenal side quests that takes multiple hours on their own. this game is not lacking for content, and it's really good.

seems to me a lot of you guys went in looking for reasons to dismiss it and did just that without really giving it a chance. honestly top ten game of all time for me.

1badmf wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 21:45:

PHJF wrote on Sep 20, 2023, 21:29:

If you think there isn't a substantial amount of content, you aren't looking.

I ran out of content at ~lvl 45. Half the star systems are lvl40+ and you fly there and there are no cities, no quests, nothing. Just random horse shit.

you gotta be looking in all the wrong places then, cuz i'm 50 hrs in and i've barely touched the main quest, haven't done any faction or companion quests at all. haven't even gotten to the powers everyone's talking about. i keep getting sidetracked by phenomenal side quests that takes multiple hours on their own. this game is not lacking for content, and it's really good.

seems to me a lot of you guys went in looking for reasons to dismiss it and did just that without really giving it a chance. honestly top ten game of all time for me.

I'll play anything that's fun for me, not sure why I wouldn't want to.
I've tried every Bethesda game since Daggerfall.
Every time one comes out everyone says it's the best game ever.
I play them and I feel like I'm slogging through the worst writing dealing with the most 1d characters in a land of neverending repetition.

25% of all players haven't even left the tutorial world yet.
Reviews all point out how dull and empty the game is while praising the graphics and the fact that it's in space.

I've disliked earlier games by other developers or earlier games in a series before and turned around and loved a later entry.
I've loved a game series and then hated later games in it.

People also really like lots of stuff that I think is awful.
Usually they haven't been exposed to better stuff.