It’s not just you.

In the past Bethesda was innovent. With Starfield they are just stuck in the past.

The game is so close to a loading screen simulator that it kills emmersion.

I have a rule about bethesda games - I don’t buy them until well after the first few patches, or the GOTY edition. I am starfield curious but also, hesitant because of No Man’s Sky. Allow me to elaborate:

NMS shipped and was garbage. But over the ensuing year, damned near everything players expected or wanted from it came to be with game altering updates that improved it’s content range enormously. It’s still not my favorite game, but every time I fire it up there’s new shit for me to do and most of it’s pretty well implemented.

I have absolutely zero expectations in this way for Starfield. They’re not going to rework space-to-ground flight or rng generated ground plots you can’t explore past; they may improve perf and qol over time, but I fundamentally doubt anything like No Man’s Sky updates are in the future.

So yeah, that makes me pause, and remember to be patient.

The game is a mess. It’s totally lost trying to figure out it’s identity. I’ve got the answer everyone can’t quite put their finger on. Had this game came out 2 or 3 years after New Vegas it would have been heralded as the next generation in rpgs. The problem is we are well past that. Bethesda should have made this game instead of fallout 76. It would have totally fit the time frame and been forgivable.

The problem is we have multiple games that do this better in whatever aspect you prefer. Like realism space sim, that’s star citizen or elite dangerous. Want planetary exploration with life form scanning and base building? That’s no man sky.

I still find myself playing because I’m so hard gay for that Bethesda fallout choose your own adventure foundation that’s present here. But damn is it overall shit. Just embarrassing

I find the start kinda weird. Touchy tabloid, pass out. Wake up and akwardy get forced in to ship and spooky drone watching you. Got to the new atlantis and was bored already.

Even skyrim did this better.

Explored the first planet to see whats the deal. Terrorform was uglyass mf, but standing on 1meter rock glitches it completely, and then just empty all ammo on it.

It is very whelming, yes. It’s exactly what I expected, and yet… I want more. At least for the things it does to be done better. Give me a reason for base building. Make the AI not just stand there like dopes and be bullet sponges when you want them to be hard (seriously, “legendaries” have 3 fucking HP bars and it’s dumb). Actually have dialogue choices that are a bit more meaningful and change things.

I’m tired of it just working. I want it to work fantastically.

No sir, you are not alone. The horrendously weak opening combined with bullet sponge gunplay, so many loading screens, a horrendous UI, boring worlds with little to nothing to do on them…I managed to make myself play for 12 hours before I gave up for good. It simply didn’t catch me at all, despite multiple attempts. Maybe in 2 years with mods, but for now it’s just time to move on for me.

It definitely feels “meh”.

The characters are flat and tropey, the story itself isn’t very compelling, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of narrative freedom in the quests and the quests themselves are fairly cookie cutter. I was told the “First Contact” quest was really cool and well done. Nonsense! I’d like to be able to go back and talk to the NPCs about the progress of the quest, take their temperature on the options available. It didn’t feel like there was much of a point in getting the opinions of the entities aboard the ship as they had zero say in the outcome.

The game feels very much like a fantasy setting wrapped in sci-fi aesthetics, especially with the way the main quest doles out powers.

I like building a ship. I wish the ship had more functionality. I like building outposts, though I have no idea what for, I can’t see much of a use for harvesting and automating the production of resources.

The gun combat feels alright, but it seems health scales up really quickly on enemies.

I dislike how so much content is gated behind perk level ups, but it does keep me playing to see if the next unlock is cool.

I’m having fun.

It’s not NMS and I don’t want it to be. NMS is great for what it does, but it’s barely an actual game (in my experience - not played it for a few months so it may have changed).

I’m familiar enough with loading screens from FO3, FO:NV, FO4, and ES:V so that doesn’t bother me much.

Also, I’m an old man, so I’m playing on easy because I want fun and to explore the story rather than have a stressful challenge. The bosses with multiple health bars are a bit shit but I’ve rarely run out of ammo.

So, yeah, I’m having fun. But my expectations going into it on Wednesday were that it would be FO4 in space. So far it’s doing slightly better than that for me.

I can’t even get to “meh” yet. I’m currently trying to get over all the steps backward from Fallout 4. Can’t order companions in battle, can’t swap out weapon mods, can’t use/equip items on pickup without going into menus, and the local maps. Holy crap, the local maps are bad. All that is on top of having to mod the game as usual. StarUI helped a lot, and I had to grab a sound effects mod because there was painful, high-pitched tones in a lot of the interface stuff, but it needs a lot more help. Beth’s games are starting to remind me of a Civilization series or Paradox Interactive situation where the base game is worse than a predecessor at release and doesn’t yield incremental improvement until a robust mod scene/DLC arrives.

I’ve already written off the space gameplay (that was always a long shot for us space sim fans), and if I’m being honest, the loading screen pacing isn’t all that different an experience from how I played Skyrim and FO4. I’m also taking the bullet-sponginess as a challenge to focus on weapon mods. I’m hoping once I get into a self-directed gameplay flow and get used to the quirks of the UI and zone arrangement it’ll get better.

I gotta say though, even though it had its own share of bugs, Baldur’s Gate 3 coming out a month ahead of Starfield does not invite favorable comparisons. The dialogues and quest design in BG3 run circles around what I’m seeing in Starfield so far. The “Back to Vectera” quest in particular was shockingly bad. Having multiple moments where there’s no indication of what to do next until opening the mission log to find a stealth quest update is seriously rough. I’m guessing it was unfinished? I knew there were going to have to be sacrifices made at the procedural generation altar, but seeing even the bespoke elements on the main questline be this bad does not portend well for the overall quality of the game.

I genuinely haven’t had any of these issues, menu/loading screen aside which there’s small ways to mitigate (travel in space via select vs. map menu travel).

I quite liked the gunplay, at first. Then I got strong weapons, overlevelled for the order of quests, and now I feel like I’m one hitting them with a peashooter. So I actually have the opposite problem than you on this front, as I haven’t been actually challenged in the game since the early levels. However, I prefer this for the ship combat since it’s just a little more fun.

Ammo I’ve not once been low on. Granted, I collect everything but misc. In a few days I’ve amassed 400k credits, only buying upgrades for my ship. At a certain point I began buying ammo just to give vendors money to get rid of my junk. So, maybe if you have extra credits try buying some ammo? How many guns are you carrying? Realistically your base weight is about 50-65, given the head, armor, apparel, and then I have 2 weapons with a total mass of 5 (pistol and rifle). Between some health aids and other stuff I’ve found I’m usually sitting at 75 mass, which leaves quite of bit of space for selling weapons/armors.

The stealth isn’t great in this game though. It’s just not really a major focus outside of the areas they put thought into it for - frankly you don’t need it at all for the games story from what I’ve been through so far. Obviously, there’s 3 levels with green being detected in a safe area, orange needing caution before red aggro detection. But the transition from orange to red is egregious.

In addition to that you need stealth bonuses to be able to effectively be stealthy. This game does covert quests really well though, I highly recommend following the Ryujin questline in Neon and the UC/Crimson Fleet questline. Amazing quests, IMO. I have 1 point in stealth and primarily have done persuasion stealth and it’s been great, but the most recent mission I completed I needed frostwolfs for (-50% movement noise). Which, that right there is your issue. You are loud as hell without stealth investments.

On top of that 50% reduction I also needed an apparel item that had 25% harder to detect. So I think it’s just scaled a bit awkwardly.

So, with that in mind I would say it’s a weird line between me agreeing that AI know where I am far too easily in stealth while simultaneously being able to cheese the AI by utilizing the additives the game gives you. Think about it… everyone has scanners. There’s also a lot of security cameras that are fairly well hidden in various areas.You can’t really just walk behind someone and expect to not be noticed, not unless your hopped up on combat meds and wearing chameleon or other stealth specifical items. Chameleon is a game changer, but it’s a style of its own and not totally helpful for what we’re after.

It’s funny, 2077 I really enjoyed on launch but I can’t help but see shortcomings in it as I’ve played through Starfield. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have shortcomings of its own, it definitely does what with the, for me, map menu navigation. It took a few days to get used to and still the core issue for me comes down to Missions not being categorized by Planet. It’s so painfully obvious and to be lacking it is honestly a major fault. Other than that, hotkeys not being consistent.

That aside, every menu is tab once to go back to main menu except for map which is 3.

Another is a bit regarding scale. 2077 I really enjoyed just walking around taking in the view of Night City. Walking 400m doesn’t really feel like a chore. For some reason 400m in starfield is a couple minutes, with sprint? It just feels a little too big in some spots and too small in others. Like you said, sometimes you’ll go through 3 loading screens just to talk to a person and leave the area and go through another couple loading screens. Other times you get these amazingly long quests that feel just right, and other times you get landed 1000m away.

Most of the time, not always but a lot of it, I’m just trying to get there to do the next thing. In 2077 I was enjoying the journey being in awe and happening to reach the destination. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy New Atlantis and Neons visuals, I also think the world building and liveliness is an improvement (simple things like having more named characters, somewhat varied patterns with citizens, hireables, and named characters.)

I enjoy both for what they are. 2077 does the imposed story line well enough and it gives you enough freedom in the variety of playstyles that the lack of variance in story doesn’t matter much. On the other hand, Starfield has very little imposed story (you were a miner, now you are a constellation member) giving you actual RPG freedoms. I haven’t explored differences in traits, but if starting as a Var’uun Zealot is any different than the others then it’s a big point over 2077.

And both have thoughtful quests. Neither is objectively better than the other, they both just play to various strengths and weaknesses.

As it stands, Starfield is a Bethesda game with inspirations from Elite Dangerous and futurism. 2077 is a game about a corpo-dystopian future. They have many similar and overlapping themes, and Starfield clearly has quests that are a response to 2077. Neither are perfect, but both are lots of fun once you get them rolling.

My main complaint is the writing and worldbuilding. So far I’ve been exploring new Atlantis and picked up exclusively fetch quests from NPCs so generic and uninteresting I don’t really feel like continuing to talk to them. And the uncreative worldbuilding of authoritarian capitalists Vs libertarian capitalksts vs religious crazies. Can Bethesda not even imagine an alternative to capitalism?

I hardly run out of ammo, but I’m also the kind of person who levels up carrying capacity first and becomes a loot goblin.

And yes, ammo has 0 weight but more weight cap means more time for me to search every corner of every room

There’s worse out there trying to reach a similar audience (fucking Star Citizen is a staggering grift), and at least Starfield is an actual working game with a standard box price, but I personally find it boring, even at an aesthetic level. The story is a whole lot of capitalist realist nothing where even the wonders of FTL travel did nothing to remove the bleak corporate drudgery from the setting, as if today’s late stage capitalism would go into space with basically no changes.

This game is exactly what I expected. Its unapologetically a bethesda fps rpg.

The menus are unwieldy, the economy is annoying, the politics half thought out, gun play is eh, etcetcetc.

But that’s not why I play these games, I play them because I love the weird quest rabbit holes you find yourself going down. I love how I can just go somewhere and knock all the shit off the shelves.

I’ve been playing on normal difficulty except for 5 on 1 space battles, I set that shit down to very easy. The gun play has felt fine for me, focus on headshots and you end up with more ammo you can use, particularly caseless shotgun ammo, .50 cal, and whatever the grendel shoots. I almost always go into areas underleveled in early game so I tend to have long range extended gun fights or just barrel stuff with the old earth shotgun.

Last time I played New Vegas I walked directly to the strip at level 2, avoided all the cazadors and death claws, then started the Dead Money DLC at level 5, and finished it at level 9.

I’m ranting right now but basically what I’m trying to say is these games are games where you need to find your fun and set your goals. You have main quest lines that literally end the game, so go out and find something weird, set off in a direction and find a long winded side quest. Make your character a drunk and drink every single alcoholic drink you find. Make your character a clepto and steal relentlessly. Get addicted to every drug and refuse to wear armor and specialize in the utility knife.

if you really dont care about combat, just roll the difficulty all the way down and have fun.

I truly dont understand the “everything is a bullet sponge” argument.

I havent skilled any combat related skills and I am doing just fine in combat. Also I dont expect enemies in an RPG to get down in a single shot. Especially when they are armored like tanks or some weird giant alien creature. People have weird expectations tbh.