Coming fresh off BG3, the quality of the writing and the amount of character expression in dialog is like night and day. Honestly there was even one moment fairly early on when I said to myself “Fallout 4 would have let me extort this guy” and then I realized how egregious it was that I felt I had less agency in this quest than in FO4.

Upsides:

• side quests other than the radiant ones are mostly cool so far
• stealth archer isn’t so good that you can just play that way straight out, but the tree makes it looks eventually strong
• zero g combat in a derelict space station was cool. I hope there’s more of that
• base building seems fine, I’m not sure what it’s for, but it seems fine

Downsides:

• ship stuff feels bad. I don’t care about fast travel, but it’s just about the weakest ship-to-ship combat that I’ve played. Its early yet, though. Boarding a ship was cool at least.
• combat AI is not good. Enemies never seem to take any initiative, they mostly just crouch behind wherever you found them
• the setting has no… flavor? The factions feel like fallout analogues but without fun or verve. Maybe I just haven’t found the weird shit yet, but I’m not optimistic.

Just played 4 hours. Not saying whether the game is good or bad, but I’m not seeing the point of the spaceship yet.

It’s looks like merely a medium for the fast traveling mechanic. You can’t really “move” in space (as far as ive tried), and can’t use it to fly within a planet.

I expected being able to manually travel from planet A to planet B and finding cool stuff along the way. If you wanna actually move you need to fast travel.

I also expected to be able to get in my ship and go from place A to place B within the same planet (also finding cool stuff along the way). It seems that also is just done by fast traveling only.

Watched a streamer play for quite a while and my primary takeaway is that I wish Bethesda would just scrap their engine and start fresh.

It’s got the same stiffness, gliding movement, butt-ugly NPC’s, and just the general feel of 15 year old Bethesda RPGs. I expect I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for the same reason I struggled with fallout 4.

I7-11/3070/32GB and I have been having a lot of fun. I play all games on very hard and this one I was thinking maybe I should tone it down. I didn’t and I didn’t regret it.

30+ hours in and after reading this thread I feel like some people just got unlucky or were expecting something like SC or SpaceBourne 2. This isn’t those games and weren’t promised to be. I play both of those games and SC is a mess 12 years and $600k later and SB2 is awesome and only made by one guy! But this game is way polished and ready by comparison. By far imo.

I was maybe 4 hours in and got sidetracked in a solar system surveying everything. I forgot about the original quest to scan a moon and just traveled to every planet and not only had a great time scanning and scouting across different moons and planets but was also helping randoms with distress calls and 3 on 1 battles against Spacers in spaceships. By the time I was done with that solar system I was 18 hours in.

I would scan a planet, find a spot to land and drop in. Scout every place that popped up and then set another course on the same planet and repeat. Never did I feel bored or that I was going to see the same assets. Every spot felt unique and well designed. One planet felt like the American Southwest, it was so beautiful.

I highjacked a landed vessel during my surveying mission and upgraded and redesigned it for more maneuverability and storage and I have to say that the ship editor is so well done. I have 1000+ hours in FO76 and the camp building in that was really great and Bethesda has made the industry standard camp building format in SC. It is really an improvement from FO4 to current. I cannot wait until the mods really open this masterpiece up.

I haven’t even touched the base building yet btw.

The space combat is solid. From what I gather people don’t really know how to do space combat. Especially when in bulk freight ships or similar. You have to boost right at them guns blazing and then hard turn when you pass them so you can get behind them. Watch your throttle as you will only turn fast when it’s at halfway (within the white lines). I can take on 3 Spacer attackers on very hard difficulty with this method. If you can track the enemy (perk i think?) do it and just kill their shields and weapons. If you just kill their engines they love to just tumble in space and shoot at you. I usually kill two and then disable the third and board. It’s hard af and fun af.

I would like to be able to spacewalk but also see why it’s not included in Starfield. It’s fun but as I have experienced it in SC all of that extra functionality doesn’t really add to the game. It’s a pain to get out of your ship and fly over to the enemy ship and then try to gain access. I like the way Bethesda did it. Super easy.

Also the space travel is super easy. Fast traveling is great and keeps the game going without having problems finding where you want to go. SC has this problem. Their map of one solar system is terrible and doesn’t work half of the time. It’s only 1 solar system and barely works. Not to mention the navigation in SC and SB2 typically bug out and don’t work which calls for a reboot. Bethesda said fuck that and did better. Sure it’s not as immersive but immersion really has potential to take away from the game and progress.

The overall look and feel is what I was hoping in FO76. Vast improvement. The gunplay is on par with what I want and expect. Fighting on moon bases is fucking awesome. On very hard the enemies are harder, their tactics are okay, not great, but challenging enough to keep you guessing. Abandoned bases are always fun to attack. Loot is everywhere.

Some NPCs are bugged. It’s annoying but infrequent enough to not be a game breaker. The NPCs just talking to you randomly is weird, especially when you are walking through a city and your companion is already talking to you. Needs work.

I caught Shrouds stream and it looks like this game just gets better. I can’t wait to jump back in.

Spent a few hours trying to fix the broken ultrawide support. Eventually, the good old hex edit fix for aspect ratios on the EXE did the trick. After that, the FOV was messed up, but the game doesn’t have an FOV slider (or HDR, or DLSS)… so eventually I managed to fix that with a custom ini.

The next few hours was spent shooting pirates like I was playing Far Cry in Space, and struggling with the game’s horrifically designed UI, menus, and inventory. So far, I am feeling very angry about the game. Like we were flat-out lied to about what the game was. There is no exploration. There’s barely even “space”. You just teleport from map to map shooting pirates… with a little scanning creatures and mining rocks mixed in. I don’t understand how anyone is okay with this.

Unfortunately it isn’t what I wanted out of this game.

Loading screen to land on a planet, loading screen to leave my spaceship, no seamless entry into caves or buildings. Planets and space having boundaries. Can’t use my spaceship to traverse.

Glad people enjoy it, but I was looking for something more akin to NMS or Star Citizen.

I feel like I’ve burned myself out a little bit on story heavy games after Baldurs Gate 3, so I cannot concentrate on the story lol

But otherwise…
Fps jumps between 30 and 90 and I feel the slowdowns (rtx3080, Ryzen 3900x here).
The graphics and animations are kind of shit. Standard Bethesda.
The menus are super fiddly.
The aesthetic is cool. I love the retro futuristic bulky style.
Music is great!
Voice acting thus far, is good.
Starship is cool but basically unnecessary. You just fast travel anyway.
Combat is pretty cool but stiff.

I haven’t played super far yet so im hoping it gets a bit better soon.

I did not bite and will avoid it until 75% off GOTY edition all DLC in etc. Patient gamer through and through, burnt way too many times. So far what I read about it, it not optimized, it’s shallow, lacks polish, etc etc. Basically, a standard AAA fare, something we sadly grew to expect from major studios. Will be watching it for a while to see what I’m missing.

Fuck preordering

I’ve been having a ton of fun with it. I’ve only played 4 hours so far, but it’s definitely the smoothest Bethesda game in terms of performance and animations, also in my experience not many bugs. Playing on a 1440p monitor with a 7900XT and I get pretty consistent 100fps (my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can’t tell how high it’ll go).

In terms of gameplay, space combat is reasonably entertaining and flying the ship is fairly well thought out. Whilst you can’t fly directly between planets like in Elite Dangerous, the primary purpose of ship control is combat and it does fairly well. On my computer, loading screens are pretty much instant, so travelling between planets isn’t a problem. Combat is fairly fun, and the AI behaviour has been much improved from previous Bethesda games. Still not always perfect but they do behave more naturally. Environmental storytelling also has a much larger presence again, with a lot of interactions and things to read. Also, this really fulfils my fantasy of being just a citizen in a sci-fi world. Walking around my ship, seeing the little bathroom and crew chambers, it’s really cool, it feels very lived in and really makes it feel like you’re an explorer on the fringes of space, living out of a ship.

There are a lot of comparisons with No Man’s Sky, but honestly I feel they’re completely different games, by design. Starfield is more Bethesda’s take on a Mass Effect style game.

Anyway, people have a lot of mixed opinions, but I’ve been loving it!

Did the game pass for a month. No way I’ll spend 70. So far not impressed. I really don’t care for the start of the game

I only played a few hours on my Steam Deck (because it would freeze on my PC), but what I saw was slightly disappointing. The game looks great, even on the Steam Deck with FSR blurring everything, the gun mechanics are fun, the character animations are the best I’ve ever seen from this studio. The performance is also very good on the Deck, with stable 60FPS 30FPS (edit: when I wrote this initially I was just eyeballing it, but didn’t bother to check that Steam capped the frame rate to 30 by default lol, so it was actually 30 and not 60…my bad) in indoor scenes and playable sub-30 in large outdoor areas.

…but the exploration. Man, Bethesda is known for their exploration, yet the spaceship is a gimmick at best. To be fair, I haven’t played enough to get familiar with everything yet, but I don’t expect that part to get much better. The game feels like Fallout, except instead of having a giant seamless open world to explore, you have a giant open world with tedious transitions between different areas. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but it’s not at all what I was expecting.

EDIT: update after playing some more.

The game definitely grew on me! The exploration is still shitty, but everything else makes up for it. I’m at ~9 hours on my Steam Deck, and even with all the FSR blurring I’m enjoying it a lot. I started doing a side quest collecting on bad debts for a bank, and during one of them I found a mission terminal on Mars offering a reward to anyone who surveys a distant planet, and on my way to the planet I picked up a distress call from a settler asking for help to fight off a bunch of pirates, and stumbled upon a drama between 3 settler families, then hijacked a pirate ship and found some “sentient AI” contraband inside and then… I went to sleep because it was late.

So in short, it definitely feels like a typical Bethesda game, but in a good way. Just side quests on top of side quests, but with less bugs.

The ship combat is still bland. I found it very easy. Idk if it’s because it’s early in the game, but no enemy has even gotten close to killing me, even when it’s 3 on 1 and we’re using the exact same unmodified ship. On the one hand, that’s boring, but on the other hand I appreciate not having to spend a lot of time in ship combat. However, now that I discovered how to board and hijack a ship, the combat is slightly more interesting.

And again, I did all of this on Steam Deck, with the only performance issue being on Mars and New Atlantis, which are both big cities/hub areas. It was still playable, but a blurry FSR mess. I disabled FSR because I hate the blurring, and it dropped the FPS pretty hard. Luckily, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time in those locations.

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I’m having a great time, but I also love FO4 and No Man’s Sky. The toe-dip I’ve done into colony building shows that they put real thought into Astroneer-like automated manufacturing stuff, which is my crack, and something I missed in NMS and FO4. It’s also clear from the first city that they know how depressing FO4 is, and wanted to add more variety.

Story and characters are a cut above any other Bethesda game so far, but that’s not saying much. My wife is replaying BG3 next to me, and it makes Starfield’s writing look amateurish by comparison. It’s not the core of the game though, so eh.

Downsides so far have been that the minor planets/moons don’t have much to do, and that inventory management is annoying with how much crafting components weigh.

Ship combat is… Fine. It’s not as intricate as Elite: Dangerous or SW:Squadrons (for sim gamers, weapons are all on REALLY forgiving gimbals, which makes precision unnecessary), but not actively bad like NMS VR. I think it’s a good compromise, because not everyone wants to deal with a realistic sim in what is essentially a minigame.

It’s also complex, which is good, but adds some awkwardness to the beginning.