apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy, personally.
And moreover, did they not play their own game?
I feel like the core complaint that every person has regardless of liking the game or not is that the travel system is just absurd and inconsistent. It is so weird how I go to my ship, pull up to orbit a planet, can see the planet from my ship but I cannot select it. Sometimes, you can! But most of the time, you cannot. This means the player then has to pull up the map and land on the planet from there, even though a simple interact to land would be much more seamless and immersive.
The map issue goes deeper, literally. Opening the map on a planet brings you to the ground-view of it, so you have to pull up one or two sub-menu levels to go from ground-view to planet view to solar system to galaxy. Literally, consistently navigating through menus - heaven forbid you pull up one menu too far because you’ll have to start over.
It shouldn’t feel quite so bad, but each interaction of these takes like 5-7 seconds. Doing that over, and over, and over again? That’s a symptom of the game as well, have you ever been in a space fight and held down E? Then you have experienced the pain of leaving the cockpit for that insanely long animation, only to have immediately sit through the insanely long sit back down animation while your ship is being shot up.
The game is full of little hold ups like this that compound into something that just feels awful to navigate.
Don’t get me wrong; I liked my first playthrough of Starfield. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, despite these issues. But I was working through these issues. And then NG+ came around and stole everything from me (understandably with the lore). I just couldn’t bring myself to do it again. Philosophy wise, the game has some great decisions that are impactful and raise. Gameplay wise these are pretty terrible decisions.
I did everything my first playthrough, I checked out every planet every quest every follower (not the dialogue for those quests, obviously). For the most part I liked my time but the base building and the homestead quests since those seem mostly broken (gas vents were never discoverable for me). A number of hours in on NG+ for the main quests having to recollect everything… What was the point?
No, I didn’t get lucky with a crazy NG+. I shouldn’t have to replay a game 12 times to “get to the fun stuff”
I haven’t finished my first run through the game yet, but I do keep hearing about NG+. There are all of these factions to check out, some of which should be opposed to happening in the same playthrough as certain other factions, and they built a game around NG+, so why not have you commit to one faction in the course of a shorter game, and then build the opportunity to play through the other factions into NG+?
I’m not hating my time with Starfield so far, but hardly a few minutes go by while I’m playing before its obvious shortcomings annoy me. Most of them I think (and hope) I can easily attribute to their ancient tech that they probably ought to throw straight in the garbage.