An exercise in corporate blanditry.
Profoundly unsexy. Sterile, hostile UI. Bland companions with bland romances that lack any sort of passion or intrigue. They stand around in your ship making bland water cooler talk and after a while it sinks in...you are at work. This game is a job.
Every successive Bethesda game since Morrowind has been a slow descent into corporate sterilization. Now in Starfield you literally span the galaxy just to go to board meetings and lawyer offices, in between gunning down bandits at the copy/pasted planetary outposts. Mass Effect Andromeda was a better game than this. We all owe it an apology. Hell I even owe Cyberpunk 2077 an apology in comparison to this. At least the outfits and photo mode were fun.
Other terrible things:
-The loading. It will take up a huge amount of your playtime. In cities every little room is in a loading zone. Quests needlessly require you to march in and out of loading areas 6 or 7 times- it's mindless, thoughtless inconsiderate violence upon the player. If you thought Faridah's quest in Deus Ex: HR was aggravating you ain't seen nothing yet.
-The writing. Quests are worse than ever, people talk like HR zombies and you get a choice of three different libertarian responses to choose from every time. City guards say things like "Private sector is where the money is!" The game offers you about 7 different ways to be a cop. The way the npc's condescendingly praise you like a toddler after every quest is so mortifying.
The future they've imagined 300 years from now is just 2023 office culture with a reskin. People still use current lingo or have pronounced earth based accents. There is no humor or cleverness in any of it from the grand design to the smallest dialogue. The future is just one big USA corporate office park, complete with an underclass in every city who we still haven't gathered the will to do anything to help. A profoundly depressing and bleak conception.
Fallout 4 at least had a few good side quests that were full of weird shit like the old days. I've found maybe two like that out of hundreds so far. The way the game opens and just tosses you into the story is so lazy and derivative, just totally careless, cynical and joyless. Then you get further in to your 'powers' and realize it's just reskinned Skyrim except with no interesting coherent world to lose yourself in. The Starborn are dumped on you in the same unceremonious way as the intro. None of the factions differ from each other in any meaningful way. None of your quest choices mean anything at all. Even building your character is pointless, if you play long enough you can unlock everything, there's no strategy to it.
-The haze. Why does every single game have to have a thick haze over everything now? Is the future on other planets polluted too? it sucks shit and I hate it. Let me see clearly please.
-The hundreds of planets you can go to are boring and mostly identical, and you can't even fly to them or between them. Just more loading screens. Scanning them is sort of fun but almost every single one of them is already heavily colonized with copy/paste outposts, so it doesn't make any sense.
-Speaking of copy/paste, where are the dungeons? Even the Fallout games had unusual places for you to stumble on and explore. The pre-marked outposts you sometimes run into on planets amount to three or four different quests that repeat over and over. When I say they are copy-pasted I mean literally every pixel down to placement and type of loot and location of mobs/npc's. It makes exploring completely pointless. Even some of the official quests in the game send you through the same abandoned mine over and over. Shades of DA2.
-The level scaling makes no sense. You will take down a level 24 starship then get creamed a few days after by a level 4. The terrormorphs that everyone is so terrified of die easier than some spacer bosses. I gave up trying to see any logic in it, just keep shooting until things die.
I could go on. So the question is why am I still playing? The old addictive loop I guess, of filtering through loot and selling it. Hoping upon hope I find one of those fun side quests that made Fallout 4 barely worth it. I really should stop. When you find yourself sitting there running through the long list of quests in Neon yelling "This is dogshit! This is busywork!" at your screen then you really should just stop...but I've been in anticipation of this for so long I can't quite give up on it yet even after 90+ hours. It's a degrading feeling.
Maybe it will be worth a damn in a year or two when modders have made it into something fun.
Profoundly unsexy. Sterile, hostile UI. Bland companions with bland romances that lack any sort of passion or intrigue. They stand around in your ship making bland water cooler talk and after a while it sinks in...you are at work. This game is a job.
Every successive Bethesda game since Morrowind has been a slow descent into corporate sterilization. Now in Starfield you literally span the galaxy just to go to board meetings and lawyer offices, in between gunning down bandits at the copy/pasted planetary outposts. Mass Effect Andromeda was a better game than this. We all owe it an apology. Hell I even owe Cyberpunk 2077 an apology in comparison to this. At least the outfits and photo mode were fun.
Other terrible things:
-The loading. It will take up a huge amount of your playtime. In cities every little room is in a loading zone. Quests needlessly require you to march in and out of loading areas 6 or 7 times- it's mindless, thoughtless inconsiderate violence upon the player. If you thought Faridah's quest in Deus Ex: HR was aggravating you ain't seen nothing yet.
-The writing. Quests are worse than ever, people talk like HR zombies and you get a choice of three different libertarian responses to choose from every time. City guards say things like "Private sector is where the money is!" The game offers you about 7 different ways to be a cop. The way the npc's condescendingly praise you like a toddler after every quest is so mortifying.
The future they've imagined 300 years from now is just 2023 office culture with a reskin. People still use current lingo or have pronounced earth based accents. There is no humor or cleverness in any of it from the grand design to the smallest dialogue. The future is just one big USA corporate office park, complete with an underclass in every city who we still haven't gathered the will to do anything to help. A profoundly depressing and bleak conception.
Fallout 4 at least had a few good side quests that were full of weird shit like the old days. I've found maybe two like that out of hundreds so far. The way the game opens and just tosses you into the story is so lazy and derivative, just totally careless, cynical and joyless. Then you get further in to your 'powers' and realize it's just reskinned Skyrim except with no interesting coherent world to lose yourself in. The Starborn are dumped on you in the same unceremonious way as the intro. None of the factions differ from each other in any meaningful way. None of your quest choices mean anything at all. Even building your character is pointless, if you play long enough you can unlock everything, there's no strategy to it.
-The haze. Why does every single game have to have a thick haze over everything now? Is the future on other planets polluted too? it sucks shit and I hate it. Let me see clearly please.
-The hundreds of planets you can go to are boring and mostly identical, and you can't even fly to them or between them. Just more loading screens. Scanning them is sort of fun but almost every single one of them is already heavily colonized with copy/paste outposts, so it doesn't make any sense.
-Speaking of copy/paste, where are the dungeons? Even the Fallout games had unusual places for you to stumble on and explore. The pre-marked outposts you sometimes run into on planets amount to three or four different quests that repeat over and over. When I say they are copy-pasted I mean literally every pixel down to placement and type of loot and location of mobs/npc's. It makes exploring completely pointless. Even some of the official quests in the game send you through the same abandoned mine over and over. Shades of DA2.
-The level scaling makes no sense. You will take down a level 24 starship then get creamed a few days after by a level 4. The terrormorphs that everyone is so terrified of die easier than some spacer bosses. I gave up trying to see any logic in it, just keep shooting until things die.
I could go on. So the question is why am I still playing? The old addictive loop I guess, of filtering through loot and selling it. Hoping upon hope I find one of those fun side quests that made Fallout 4 barely worth it. I really should stop. When you find yourself sitting there running through the long list of quests in Neon yelling "This is dogshit! This is busywork!" at your screen then you really should just stop...but I've been in anticipation of this for so long I can't quite give up on it yet even after 90+ hours. It's a degrading feeling.
Maybe it will be worth a damn in a year or two when modders have made it into something fun.