Probably one of the most expected and hyped game of 2023. I have waited for it so badly that I changed my regional settings on my Xbox because the launch in my region was delayed. I think the final result is good but the hype around it made my expectation very high. I was thinking that this is a Fallout on steroids where you can build your ship to travel in an open Universe a la No Man Sky with Guns and Sword Fights that are close to if not better than Cyberpunk 2077 . So let’s see how far I have landed.
I am sharing below my personal opinion more from having played a lot of games rather being an expert that will be analysing development flaws or the number of fps. There is good, bad and ugly stuff. Ultimately I am still playing and enjoying the game for more than 100 hours so far. Actually this is the first game that I played for so long with the feeling I did nothing.
The Good
This is the game for a chilling day. You want to go around, explore, upgrade or move ahead with quests. No stress, you can pause and come back to it. Now if you need something rough, you can get some missions on the missions board. The Quests can be completed in various ways: kill everyone standing in your way, persuade, steal, etc…choice is yours. My favourite option remains persuasion. .
The Exploration: I believe this is the essence of the game and I think it delivers on that. I am an old school RPG player. I like to find as much stuff as possible, secret areas, items, etc…. If the goal points me towards the left I will go right or elsewhere 🙂 to look for secrets. So this is the worse case scenario for me, the game is huge, massive, gigantic, any adjective you can use but really so much stuff to do that getting lost is very easy. I have played more than 100 hours and I have done a lot of side missions, ship building (a little), outpost Building (a little) the main Quest and the UC Vanguard faction quest. No Bounty hunting, No other factions quests, nothing. I have experienced this feeling with The Witcher, Skyrim or, Fallout where it is almost impossible to go from point A to point B without bumping into another quest and ending up forgetting why I was even there in the first place. For Starfield this is at a larger scale.
My latest experience to illustrated : I was on a side mission (no spoilers) and upon completing it I saw a planet with only 2 resources. I can do a quick landing and exploration. Inside the planet I see a tower, Let’s have a look, at the exit of the tower some pirates are there. I get rid of the first batch, re-enforcement come in a ship. I eliminate everyone and I can get into the ship and now the ship is mine.
Spaceship building – So far for me one of the best realisation of the game. You can build from scratch or customise your current ship(s). You can build for space fights, for functionality such as carrying inventory, resources and even companions, make it a flying operation base where you can put all your upgrade work benches and labs.Design it in the builder and watch it live.
I made some tweaks to the initial Frontier ship The objective was just to increase the storage capacity, a stronger shield, weapons and colours chosen by my 7 years old son. This took me several hours. I reached the Max level for most the Items in Level A ship. I need to get the skills to upgrade to the next B & C class ships.
If you want to make fancy stuff like Bat Wing, Millennium Falcon or something else you can spend countless hours as this is a game by itself. There are a lot of Youtube videos on crazy ships you can build such as The Bat Wing. This is an example below….of SHIPS :D.
Space Fight – This is the only place in the game where for me so far where I encountered really tough enemies and died more than once before completing a mission. In one case it forced me to retreat and find another way to get into the planet because my ship and skills weren’t just up to the level.
The Guns– Not all weapons I insist on the guns, Their shape features and the upgrades and the gun fights on ground or in the space are kinda cool. The weapons upgrade you can if you have the patience to upgrade skills and materials to build your own version or if you explore you will come across powerful weapons or unique upgrades. A bit strange that ammo doesn’t have any weight in the inventory but I will not complain because you can carry as much as you need.
The OK Stuff
The NPCs – it is true that some are quite robotic and some of the dialogues are weird…very weird. During persuasion attempts I was trying to choose what I thought made sense and it actually didn’t work, so I ended up choosing the weird stuff that scored the max persuasion points. If you played Fallout 4, we need to admit that this is better.
The main Quest is a bit boring at the beginning and I have ended up doing more parallel stuff instead but It recently turned (no spoiler) more dramatic that I really want to press forward with it. So as some people said “give it some time”.
Bugs and glitches -I have seen a lot of comments and videos with people literally enraged about glitches and asking to fire all the development team but so far I have not experienced anything major by playing on Xbox One X. Some flying or hanging objects, some characters without costumes but nothing that has affected me from enjoying the game. I had a similar experience with Cyberpunk 2077 by the way. Worse bug I had so far.
Skills and Levelling – Not bad but not super. There are 5 groups of skills, each group has 4 levels of skills and each skill has 4 levels that you can activate only after completing the challenge of the level. In simple terms that’s a lot.. Where to start or to go depends entirely on your play style and the missions. I like persuasion it helps a lot, I also picked security to unlock difficult doors and safes and the indispensable weight lifting to carry as much as possible. I have focused most of my points on the Technical Section. I usually tend to keep one skill point always available in case I get into a mission where an upgrade can facilitate the job. Got this habit from Deux Ex and kept it since.
The Bad & Ugly
Loading Screen Space Travel – I was expecting a “No Man’s Sky” type of experience where you can just fly around. Not really. When you fly it is like the ship is not moving unless you are engaged in a space fight. You can’t fly from one side of a planet to another without using a loading screen and You can’t enter a planet’s atmosphere to land where you want. You need to pick any place in the planet and land through a …loading screen.
No Items inventory during purchase -You need a lot of items and resources for upgrades, outposts, missions, etc…When you buy an item you don’t know how many you already have in your inventories because you have many (on yourself, on your companions, your ship, outposts, etc…). You don’t know if you need to buy the resources/component and if yes, how many units. In way less elaborated RPGs it does is shows you how much you have. Why not here? Hope this can fixed in a DLC.
Limited Tutorial for Outpost – You can build outpost as part of the game for various purposes. I mainly extract resources and complete supply mission to send them from one planet to another for money. I do some storage as well of items I cannot carry on the ship or myself. Really basic stuff so far. However, it is not easy to understand how it works and more often why it is not. It took me long time to understand how to make links between outposts to transfer items It was a cycle of trial and error and enormous thank you to Youtube videos.
Melee Weapons – Maybe I am simply not good at it. Melee weapons look really nice but the experience I got so far is not very fun : Slow reaction and the impact of the hit is dull and not fluid. If you compare with Cyberpunk 2077 and there with a sword you can do amazing stuff. Anyway the other weapons are enough for me so far I will try again maybe I will change my mind.
Conclusion
The game is good for me and I enjoy it but I think the love and hate came from the hype created by the game and the expectations were so high that I if the first issue will be met with an outrage. I wanted a no man sky space experience and a cyberpunk melee weapon fight, Final Fantasy type of inventory, etc…At the end I got Starfield.
Leave a Reply