I rolled credits on my first playthrough of Starfield last night after about 120 hours. I did not touch base building at all, never tried to build a ship from scratch (though I did upgrade the ships I had), and did not do any of the radiant-style quests. I also did almost no exploring on planets or in space - I basically just went were the quests led me.
Clearly there are hundreds of more hours available in the game if I pursued any of those activities.
There are many, many things I love about the game and a few that I think need improvement.
So far, I really prefer the exploration in all other Bethesda games to this. Running a kilometer or so between all POI on a planet gets old really fast - especially on the barren planets. If there are lots of flora/fauna to scan itās borderline fun, but still not great. I really hope they figure out some way to improve this in the future.
Companion variety is not great. I like Sarah/Barret/Andreja well enough (I barely used Vosco), but none of them let you stray very far from a āgoodā playstyle. I know there are limited companions available as well, but that seems like a half measure. I am 100% confident modders will eventually provide any type of companion we want, but that takes time. It took years for the best modded companions to show up in Skyrim.
One minor gripe. I was disappointed that I didnāt find more zero-g missions. As best I can remember I only had two. This is such a cool mechanic (and those two missions were so great) I wish they had used this more often. Note that I did not engage with piracy/ship boarding at all. Maybe I would have had a lot more zero-g if I did that.
Iām also a little miffed that you canāt change background/traits in new game+. I know that doesnāt make a lot of sense given the story, but I really want to see how the game plays out with a different setup without starting from scratch. Hopefully mods will fix this at some point.
Other than the points above, I pretty much loved everything else about this game. Iām sure I will be playing it off and on for years. I canāt wait to see what Bethesda has in mind for the expansions.
I think it was a bit of a missed opportunity to not have more contrast in morality among the Constellation crew. Like even if it wouldnāt fit for any of them to be outright criminalsā¦ Have Sam be a hardass who likes it when you threaten people, or Sarah hates anything that benefits the Freestar Collective instead of the UC, or whatever. Give them stronger preferences about anything besides liking being nice and disliking being mean. With Sarah, Sam, and Barrett in particular thereās barely any difference between them.
I donāt think they need to change the Constellations members, however what I do find weird is they didnāt have additional full companions from other means outside of Constellation, like maybe at least 1 from each of the major factions that could be more diverse in personality.
Yeah for sure, thatās why Iām delaying that stuff for another playthrough, maybe wait for mods even to make them more qol. Those sides of the game can almost be their own games, Iām seeing some people play a āscientistā build with focus on scanning planets and alien life like a Pokemon game lol, some others play a builder build around all things outposts, some are focusing on the shipbuilding and combat and optimizing for that. Itās incredible how flexible the game can be.
Yeahā¦ give me a mount damnit. A small tracked vehicle you can roll out from your ship or something, it doesnāt have to be rocket fast, but just a little bit faster than running and no oxygen to struggle with. Landing at a site and doing 4-5 POIās is a pain in the ass.
Itās also quite immersion breaking that there are no land vehicles, itās outright weird.
Agreed.
There are too few and too samey.
Yep, itās pretty awesome. Itās an excellent game. Iām nowhere near done yet but so far this is my GotG.
I sort of expect this is the route theyāll go with DLC, like each expansion has a āfeaturedā new companion like Serana in Dawnguard, which then you can carry back into the main game. I want to see them go out on a limb, anything but yet another Lawful Good person.
A Crimson Fleet asshole writes itself one would have thought. Or an Ecliptic merc whose life you save in some sort of scenario and they follow you after that.
An easy fix for that should be just add a boost to the pack, maybe even just limit to surface and disabled in interiors, thereās a mod for that and it works awesome and makes traversal very fast.
After 3 days of exploration I feel that I just need to advance a bit more in the story. I have been visiting different planets till the space of Porrima system (about 38 ly from Sol), gathering resources, scanning and doing small missions. What you guys think about the variety of dungeons avaliable in the planets/moon? I started to feel a little fatigue on exploring the same Robotic lab, research tower, abandoned mine, etc in different places. Maybe is time to progress in the story.
Yeah i try not to do too many at once, mixing things up as much as I can. My head canon is that most of the deep space equipment are prefab outpost things, so itās bound to be very similar. Kinda makes sense.
So Mass Effect kind of cleverly built it into the lore that aboveground buildings are totally prefabbed and just dropped onto the planet so of course every base has the same layout. The problem in Starfield is that most bases are excavated and have underground sections so that readymade explanation doesnāt work as well.
Good, haha. Never took advantage of it, as I donāt do immersion breaking things on purpose. I prefer not to stumble upon them either so itās nice they patch it away.
At least I was able to find some different logs about the factions that brings up a bit more about the invasion process, but it doesnāt help much that enemies also appears almost in the same position across the layouts. I think it is one downside of random generated places. It is what it is, still love the game and probably spent 4hs yesterday exploring gagarin. Well made planet with a rare aquatic species that took me ages to find.
