Starfield

2023-12-10
Wow this was a divisive game. It's hard to separate how much of the hate for the game is because it's another Bethesda game that sells like absolute hotcakes despite having significant problems and how much people genuinely don't like it. For my part I learned my lesson from Fallout 4 that I shouldn't go in expecting what type of game it ought to be ("UHH MORE MORROWIND PLEASE") and just play it as it is. And what's on offer is certainly another Bethesda game. Sure the visuals are much, much better, the scale is much larger (in some ways), the voice acting is much better, and so on. But fundamentally you're doing the same core things of exploring worlds, entering instanced dungeons, killing people, picking up literally every last thing on the ground that's worth money, returning to a town, selling aforementioned Pile Of Shit you've looted, get better gear and get back to it. I'd say whether it's a good Bethesda game is a matter of breaking down whether the minutae of the mechanics that underpin this gameplay loop are engaging and secondly, maybe more importantly, whether the little stories that happen along the way, both emergent and scripted, are good. On those counts I'd say the gameplay is good and the stories are great if you know where to look.

Let's talk about the gameplay first because fundamentally that's most of what my time was spent doing in my 80+ hours of playing through the game. It's really a game about shooting people in the face. Those faces happen to be in space but really that's presentation. And the face-shooting is actually pretty damn good. Fallout 4's shooting felt solid, an improvement from 3's pretty garbage shooting (if you're not using VATS, which rules and I miss), and this is another step up which means you have something that feels surprisingly good. Which is good because I imagine a solid 40 of those 80 hours were spent shooting stuff. There's a variety of guns though not too many. I found that one I found the semi automatic rifle with good damage and a scope I never used anything else so that's a little boring. And that's despite the game having a bunch of attachments and customizations a la Fallout 4 plus randomly generated "legendary" versions of things with perks that end up being pretty underwhelming. On that front, loot is pretty boring.

The rest of the game is spent fast traveling through space. Yes, that's the thing everyone is whinging on about. "It's in space but you just fast travel, what's the point?" Which is a fair criticism. Flying in space is restricted to the planet you're outside of. Interplanetary travel is basically watching a cutscene of your ship jumping. Over. And over. And over. Which I'm fine with. I come from Morrowind being my favorite game and fundamentally if you want to point a finger at everything that breaks immersion or limits the detail of the game you're just going to have a bad time. At some level you need to just take what's given to you and use your imagination to fill in the rest of the blanks.

Space combat itself is pretty standard. It's visually cool but mechanically pretty basic. Some dials that let you shift power to different systems, attacks can disable different systems, you can make fast and slow ships with more or less guns. The customization is cool but again I found it to be one of those systems where you can do so many things but the most effective strategy is quickly identified (put a bunch of auto cannons on a ship) and then you're kind of on autopilot for the rest of these fights.

There's some special powers you start to unlock as a part of the story but those just turn out to basically be Skyrim shouts. And in the same way I don't really want to use them. They're not something specific to my build or character it's just some cheese everyone gets. They're pedestrian and boring in that way. I think I used the regular "FUS" like 3 times and was like "No thanks." Cause my character I created and I imagined wouldn't be able to do that. I don't want to be a dragonborn. I want to be someone else. It's a weird pidgeon-holing of your character. Something that never happened in Morrowind or Oblivion. Odd that they would do it again. I mean they're cool but you should have to pick and choose which ones you want. And they should be harder to get given how powerful they are. Not just shit that everyone gets.

I write all that out and it sounds pretty boring. Like cool, Stefan, that sounds like a pretty mediocre game. But that's the beautiful thing about a Bethesda game. If you analyze each of its constituent parts you think "Huh this is trash" but once you put them all together and you get the ability to create a character with specific goals and skills and just go out in the world on a journey to figure everything out and take shit over you have a blast.

One of the big reasons for that because you have Jank. I mean really there's nothing like Bethesda Jank. I was in tears because one time I'm looking up at a planet in the sky and I see my companion ZIP across the sky going easily 100+ mph just speed walking to catch up to me oblivious to the rules of gravity. Bumping into a ship, required for a quest, and having it get yeeted off into space at such a high rate of speed my ship can never catch up to it and I have to reload a save. Having a ship take off with my locked inside the ramp compartment until it goes fast enough that I clip through the back of the ship and die.

Another big reason is the scripted, tailored bits. The production values on display here are insane. The main story is fine, a reasonably, cool sci-fi tale involving multi universes which turns into a very cool NG+ where you're basically traveling through universes with slight variations on each other. (Apparently there's one where you can meet yourself which is incredibly cool. Sadly the process is tedious as hell and there's no guarantee you'll find that one. Woops.)

You also have a handful of core factions and these are where you're going to find the best bits. The Crimson Fleet in particular might be my favorite. It takes you all over the place has a colorful cast of characters and the final mission allows you to either side with the pirates or with the space cops. Siding with the pirates means you have a massive battle against the space cops who happen to have the biggest ship you'll see in this part of the universe which you fight with a ton of other ships in an amazing spectacle and then get to board the ship for a massive prolonged fight where you massacre like 100 UC troops lol.

On top of that you have other classic Bethesda mini stories like the Mantis superhero base, a ship full of colonists that traveled to the galaxy using non-FTL travel which means it's a multi-generational ship where you're meeting people essentially from the past, and others that add some fun things to find on your journey.

The tl;dr here is it's another Bethesda game. I don't think it's moving in the direction I'd like them to move which is more hand-tailored games a la Morrowind with a focus on really tight exploration. But despite moving in a different, more glitzy direction I still love their games and will continue to play whatever else they ship out in the future. Give me more slop, Todd the Godd Howard.