Ares42

Having finally finished the game, I think I actually hate this game. A lot of people have talked about how it gets good 10+ hours in, but my journey was far more complicated than that.

It took me about 40 hours of playing it before I became "comfortable" with the game. During that time I approached the game sorta the way it was handed to me. It showed me outposts, I played around with outposts. It took me to a new city, I looked around and followed whatever fell into my lap. It took me to a spaceport, I played around with the ship building. I was inching my way through every system of the game, trying to find what I enjoyed the most, and none of it stuck.

So I finally decided to just not engage with the distractions anymore and focus on exploring the cities and doing the quests. And for the next 40-ish hours or so the game was ok. My plan was to explore every city, doing all the side-quests and save the faction and main quests for the big end. The cities look amazing and exploring them was cool, but once you wrap your head around them (thanks to the terrible map) they sure are small. Most of the sidequests aren't anything to write home about, but they're fine, with a few exceptions being pretty good.

Then I started doing the faction quests, and this is where the game took a nose-dive for me. I started off with the Freestar quest-line, and it was alright to begin with, however the ending is so dumb. It was the moment where I started to actively dislike the game. Next up was UC and it was kind of redeeming my experience. This is easily the best structured narrative in the game while also being fairly compelling, and honestly I think if this was the main story of the game the game would've been FAR better. My only criticism of it is that there is a "correct" choice at the end, although that goes for all of the faction quests.

Then came Ryujin, and oh god... The first half of this chain is annoyingly boring. At one point I was thinking to myself "this is the game version of the start of Office Space". And I get it, it's supposed to recreate the corporate experience, but it still just sucks. Thankfully the second half picks up, however the second half also leans heavily into stealth gameplay, which is... not very functional. You can still complete the goals by cheesing the system (because Bethesda) but from a narrative perspective it becomes pretty ridiculous.

At this point I had planned to do most of the main quests and then go do the pirate stuff before finishing, but I was so done with the game I decided to ditch the pirate stuff and wrap things up. I had already gotten to the point of meeting the "villains", so it was basically only the final act left. However this still didn't fail to disappoint. I have never been a fan of the Space Odyssey/Interstellar "infinite and beyond" take on space sci-fi, and this game takes a confident stride into that territory. There's also a moment that's so dumb I was literally face-palming.

I dunno, maybe I'm being too harsh, but for the first 40 hours if I were to give the game a subjective review I would've given it a 2/10. The game is obviously more of a 7-8/10 from an objective/technical standpoint, and there was definitely parts of my experience where I enjoyed it more. But then the rapid decline in enjoyment I had finishing up the game really soured the whole experience.

@sethmode: sorry =(

@sethmode: Have you noticed the eyebrows yet ? =D

@lab392: Honestly, I think the reception is more about Starfield just kinda being a whiff and not so much Bethesda fatigue. The game seems very uninspired beyond the "but in space" concept, and the transition to the space setting seem to have neutralized a lot of what makes their games tick. Maybe it gets better later, I dunno, but from what I've seen so far it's just not bringing any fresh spice to the formula.

@efesell: For sure, I totally get that the game needs a big bad boss to beat at the end and that the stakes need to progressively become bigger. But going through the different encounters you have I think I could count at least eight different villains that could've carried the game all by themselves. It just becomes sorta ridiculous when you discover the third hidden cult and temple to an evil god inside the city.

It might've worked better if that's where the entirety of Act 3 went. I'm not opposed to some God of War-style "let's kill the Gods" ridiculousness. But it kept flip-flopping between that and more traditional adventurer stuff like the Gondians being enslaved or the haunted house, so it never really establishes exactly what the tone is supposed to be. I guess I enjoyed the more down to earth stuff more, which made me interpret that as the baseline (making the high fantasy stuff overbearing), but I guess it could've just as easily been interpreted the other way around.

I feel like one of the things no one seems to be talking about is the absolute whiplash the game has when it comes to scope/stakes. Act 1 is largely ok, you get this grand opening hinting at bigger things but then you're put into this goblin vs druid conflict and you have this conspiracy thread going in the background.

Then you get into Act 2 and you have this cursed area with a necromancer in a tower and you end up saving/using an angel to help you. Things are scaling up a bit, but still fairly grounded and you still feel like you're participating in the world around you. Then BAM, big floating brain conquering the world. When I hit that moment I was just flabbergasted.

But then we just move on from that and move into Act 3 with a villain taking over the city, refugees suffering, and building a rebellion. However once you get into the city proper things just start going wild. One second I'm dealing with some thieves and bandits squabbling, the next I'm fighting the champion of a death god, then I'm having a quiet story moment with Jaheira and her kids to be followed up with a ancient vampire sacrificing a towns worth of people to ascend to some superior being.

I'm not usually someone to complain about the "ticking clock problem", but this dichotomy of grounded conflicts vs other-worldly villains in the second half of the game kinda broke the experience for me. I guess it kinda speaks more to the core DnD audience, but for me the amount of "non-sense high fantasy" just makes the experience too silly. Didn't really help that I find the main plot with the mindflayers etc to be fairly uninteresting and weak in the first place, and every time the big brain is involved I can't help but think of Futurama. When I hit the moment near the end where the Emperor goes "It's not longer an elder brain, it's a netherbrain" I was just done.

@efesell: Honestly, with the way DnD works I wouldn't want to be responsible for creating combat encounters. The extreme differences depending on party composition, levels, combat preparation, items etc etc makes it damn near impossible to find a balance sweetspot. And then there's the absolute absurdity that is the DnD powercurve.

If you play the game the "correct" way there's not really gonna be any encounters that will challenge you, but that's pretty counter-intuitive to what the game is supposed to be about.

@efesell: On a similar note, I just got into the city and my performance absolutely tanked. Was already having some issues in the outskirts area, but nothing unplayable. It's also become abundantly clear that the game has memory leaks, so the only way for me to keep it playable is to regularly reboot the game at this point. Makes me wonder how the console versions are gonna turn out.

Having put 50 hours into the game now I feel like this game is the perfect example of a 8/10 game. People often judge games by taking off points for things they didn't like, which tends to come off as very archaic, but this game is the ultimate "this is good, but I know exactly how it could've been even better". It's the Witcher 2 to Witcher 3. Witcher 2 is a great game on its own, but when compared to Witcher 3 you easily see how they turned everything up to 11.

@mistersims: As far as I can tell the game very much follows the Bioware formula of having companions at base, talking to them and eventually they unlock missions. You use whoever you wanna use for your party, you can even just get hirelings if you want, doesn't really matter except for some encounter specific dialogue here and there.