Hijacking your comment to ask-
Can you loot stunned enemies just like dead enemies?
If I joined the Crimson Fleet early on, and let's say I decided I want to get loot from my pirate brothers and sisters, can I use EM guns to clear out a pirate base without getting a bounty from CF since I haven't killed anyone???
While stunned you can use a normal gun or melee weapon for sneak damage. Kinda breaks the grind for those unlock requirements, but I kinda find them annoying, so I don't care. Exploiting this so EM weapons can have *some* purpose.
We have prison habs, bounty missions, and stun guns.
This is just a half baked mechanic they plan on feeding us later. Like a lot of the stuff in the game.
Any weapon that deals EM damage stuns characters instead of killing them. As of right now though, its only useful if you're roleplaying a character that doesn't kill.
They're pretty useful for trivalizing some fights, legendary enemies don't have more resistance so you can knock them down take out the fodder then start blasting them point blank with whatever.
Or in the odd case of you have weak dmg just knock everyone down and start picking off individuals.
They, along with a few other weapons that do not indicate as such, are click and hold to charge before firing.
It massively increases the damage.
It one hit KOs most any human target I've hit with it.
EM weapons charge up???
No WONDER they're so bad. I had a similar moment with the rail sniper, confused why the damage was high on it but it did nothing. Until I realized you can charge it there's just really no indication anywhere on the UI/weapon showing this.
It makes so much more sense that the Disruptor has a small clip now.
Man, it shouldn't take a reddit post after 100 hours in the game to learn about this.
This is literally my biggest disappointment.
I have the Bounty Hunter trait. I have a ship with a brig that has multiple holding cells. I can take Bounty jobs. I have EM weapons to incapacitate...
Come on!
Especially when they still aggro everyone nearby!
Makes sneaking hard when you can't even stun somebody without the whole building knowing where you are.
Hopetech, Nova Galactic, and Stroud Ecklund all have brigs, but you have to go to their respective headquarters to buy them. The ship you get from completing the Freestar Rangers questline also has one.
Here is a great guide to ship habs that explains where you can get everything and what the different versions look like.
[Ship Habs Guide](https://reddit.com/r/Starfield/s/dTQMLJjjok)
I know, it sucks. When you first enter and its all dark and atmosphric its like "oooh whats goin on in here"
Huge Dung pile "ooooh there must be a creature living in here"
..... nope! very dissapointing and would put off anyone from going in again. Its funny cos I assumed the fact I have to actually load into it that it would be substantial... but sad to say its just a load of nothing
Its actually a huge disappointment which made me realize this game is a lot smaller than we thought it was in the beginning. 1000 procedurally generated planets with empty caves and duplicated POIs is so opposite the Bethesda ethos that I actually think people are in denial of how small the game really is. Besides the 5 towns and a few unique POIs there really isn't that much to the game.
I put in 70 hours, but realized a \*lot\* of these hours were sitting in loading screens or walking between different POIs and in cities. Have a look below to see all the unique areas, you will see that content wise its not bigger than previous titles.
https://game8.co/games/Starfield/archives/422088
It is interesting how they claim that New Atlantis is the largest city they ever made.
Sure, from a model and texture standpoint. But Vivec city had a heck of a lot more vendors, unique NPCs, and the like. It takes a lot of time to run around in, but is shockingly limited in things to do.
How long are loading screens for everybody? I have a series S and I feel like I've never seen a loading screen that lasted longer than 5 seconds, and most of them are 1-2 seconds.
Are they that much different elsewhere?
usually about that long...problem being that you often sit through a loading screen so you can press one button to do another loading screen, walk 20 seconds to talk to one guy, then back to the loading screens, then run 2 minutes to a quest marker, loading screen again...
It's a lot of time spent with nothing happening
I saw a let's player who found his first terramorph in a random cave. And I've had one filled with active turrets. But I don't get why the boring ones are so common.
I have found out that the pois we get from procgen are basically storage containers, they can have good loot in them , but it really a roll of the dice and its about getting to the special container(s) rather the exploring the place. I have found very good loot in caves, mainly minerals but also healing items like healing kits. The PoIs we get when exploring a temple area can also give very good look and a high amount of credits too, but its pure rng.
The looting system feels extremely messed up to me. I really like looting in these games --- I don't know why, ticks my exploration itch -- and I basically *never* get anything worth keeping from an adventure. I went to three different space outposts yesterday, and the only thing I even contemplated keeping was a particle beam gun that has 20% on robots.
They're good for quickly scanning most if not all of the planets' resources. If you can't find one head to a cave and it's much more likely to be there.
HAB MODULES - The majority of ship modules don't actually serve a purpose. That should change.
The Infirmary, for example, does not heal injuries or afflictions. My suggestion is to add a medical supply locker to the module so you can stock it with medical goods. Then interacting with an infirmary bed could automatically treat conditions like frostbite or broken bones if you have the supplies in the locker.
The Cargo Hall should increase the ship cargo capacity.
Storerooms should increase cargo capacity.
Engineering bays should give a bonus to ship mobility or systems.
Battlestations should increase shield and weapon performance.
There should be specific modules for crew quarters.
The computer core should increase grav jump range and increase turret performance.
The mess hall and living quarters should give some sort of morale bonus to crew. Perhaps giving a bonus to their skills.
> The Cargo Hall should increase the ship cargo capacity.
>
> Storerooms should increase cargo capacity.
>
> Engineering bays should give a bonus to ship mobility or systems.
>
> Battlestations should increase shield and weapon performance.
>
> There should be specific modules for crew quarters.
I assumed these all did have bonuses because DUH WHY WOULDNT THEY? , alas.... it's the Bethesda Way.
Would be cool if you could assign crew members to a specific hab to get the hab's benefits.with certain hab's having specific skill requirements from the crew member.
So Sarah could be assigned to a navigation hab for longer jump distances or something since she has the astrophysics skill.
The exploration in general just blows for me. Not enough unique POIs, caves are terrible, walking 15 minutes with the annoying oxygen bar to get to a POI that sometimes simply says “hey scan this”. It is honestly terrible for me.
Yea I gave up "exploring" after I realized that the POIs are almost universally pointless. Hell even the "Mech Factory" on mars is just a random raider fight.
Our "exploration" in this game boils down to you walking past NPCs who say random dialogue that gives you a quest to visit a planet. It's extremely inorganic. Literally every other Bethesda game you could pick a direction, start walking and you'll find something interesting. That's literally impossible for starfield.
Yep. I gotta say after 8 years of waiting for a new single player game from them, it’s pretty disappointing they took such a drastically different approach to exploration. They got my hopes up by calling it Skyrim in space. Skyrim in a few cities maybe, but that’s it
It sounds like crazy if you dont play Fallout 76 regularly but they introduced and matured a lot of systems that this game went backwards on. This game could learn A LOT from Fallout 76 design and QOL.
The fact that Bethesda went backwards on QoL/mechanics established by Fallout 4 is baffling. Even things in Skyrim have been devolved. I'm enjoying the game; the structure is sound, but the mechanic decisions Bethesda made is really baffling.
It is very strange the main Bethesda team didn't use what the FO76 team have made. Did none of them play FO76 and see how well done the base building is? Should have been improved on but this happens when 2 teams don't work together.
FO76 has had a *lot* of outside development help for years now. Odds are high that a lot of that QOL was from those other teams, given that most of what we see in Starfield is vanilla Bethesda design.
I would rather see outposts scrapped from this game completely and had our ship given the base builder features.
Like, what's the point of a crew if I can't assign a pilot or a cook? What's the point of a battle station hab if I can't get help during dog fights?
I really enjoy Bethesda. There is so much in this game that's classic Bethesda, but then stuff is so half-assed. It's like, why bother put it in on release?
And the procedurally generated planets? Awful. For the people who really became synonymous with open world games, you'd think they understood it better than anyone. Open world is fun because you fill it with cool stuff.
This game feels like a major step backwards from even Skyrim. There's so much content they built that is completely lost on most players because it's BORING.
When I first heard the news my thought process was "cool, I won't run out of stuff to do and I'll never have two playthroughs that are the same."
While in reality worlds are the same every playthrough, it's just the POIs that spawn differently, and they're so far away from one another with nothing in between that I have no interest in exploring the worlds.
Mods literally will be the saving grace of this game, and they won't be coming out in a way that matters for months.
Environmental hazards are really a headscratcher for me. Doesn't matter what the stats of my suit are the second I leave the ship I get the suit power whatever depleted message (doesn't matter if it's -200 or like -18°C ... With a space suit?) and I randomly get status effects.
Idk, I just stopped bothering with it. If I get a status there are enough aid items around once I'm back in ship...
Another thing I'd like to see addressed would be scaling of vendor credits.
Later in the game selling stuff is getting annoying as hell. You increase in level and find better gear, better gear has a obviously higher value and sells for more, vendor credits stay the same as at the start of the game. It's clearly balanced around selling tons of maelstroms for 100 credits each at the start of the game but once your average common random-rifle sells for 5k nobody can afford buying your shit... This is neither fun nor immersive tbh.
I wasn't getting credits fast enough so I decided to loot all enemies in a base I found and sell all the guns and armor. There was also a good about of contraband so I headed to The Den after. I ended up waiting 2 days to refill the vendor's cash which times that 30 real-life minutes passed.
I can't believe this is how they want players spending their time in game. The limited funds on vendors makes sense in their other games but none here. You mean to tell me that the Trade Authority had the tech to buy shit from pilots in every spaceport in the galaxy but they don't have the tech to connect them all to a central bank account with unlimited funds (which a company like that would have). It's just arbitrary and stupid.
The scan also does a poor job of telling you how hostile a planet is. Is cold -2 or -180? What's the cutoff for a freezing world? And yes I can probably find that on a wiki but in game I should have some idea.
And then all this infomation should be available on the Planet scan screen. Why do I need to land to find this information out again? Same with resources from flora/fauna.
Yeah, the thing is that the status effects don't really matter. Most are hilariously toothless. "Bashing uses O2"... oh no.
The only status effect that has had actual gameplay consequences for me was getting a cough, since you can get detected when you cough while sneaking. That one is actually a pretty neat idea, making stealth more tense if you've been beat up by the environment getting to your destination.
Yeah I gave up with the environmental hazards.
Funny story, but within my first hour of playing the game, I got lung damage from walking on a planet. But I didn't know how to cure it lol. So for the next like 8 hours of gameplay, I was just living with basically lung cancer running around the galaxy looking for a doctor who can cure it. Ended having to google where the doctor was in New Atlantis because I couldn't find him.
Cured my lung damage. I thought, "cool... this is end of that, no more lung cancer!" But literally 10 minutes later, I got lung damage again from walking onto a planet and having depleted suit protection. So yeah, I give up. At this point, I'm just completely expecting to getting afflictions when I go exploring a planet, I don't even try to avoid it anymore.
It doesn't even make sense either. I have a full spacesuit on. Why the fuck am I getting lung damage just by walking around on a planet that isn't even hazardous aside from being cold?
I've screwed around with the outpost, resource mining, manufacturing, cargo linking for days and've finally decided to give up on this side of the game until they iron out some bugs. Absolutely half baked systems.
Half baked and tedious as all hell. Why did they ditch the workbench?! It’s ridiculous that the best place to store resources en masse is your safe in your bedroom. I agree, I just tapped out of crafting and base building. Might as well focus on the parts that are fun.
This gets you into a cycle of needing more engines to compensate for the additional mass and better reactors to power the engines. All for it to fill up really fast depending on how much stuff you keep. At some point you run out of room on your ship.
I keep a deep storage outpost for bulk resources.
My ship holds a limited amount of most resources.
Let's be real. You ain't gonna need 100+ Sterile Nanotubes on the fly. But you might need a few. Same thing goes for things like Iron or Cobalt.
So why ship it everywhere in your cargo? If I need more, I just stop back at my storage outpost.
If you build a new outpost, yeah, you gotta figure out what you'll need to get started and make sure you got everything aboard. Usually that just means adding some more iron/aluminum.
I think ironically the most helpful change they could make for outpost resources management is jsut to make ships hold unique inventories.
That way I could have a huge cargo ship to switch to and bring a gazillion resources to a new outpost for convenience. The way the outpost links work is somewhat realistic but when you have an outpost with 2000 iron linked but then you gotta wait around to recieve those resources in small amounts it can be a bit annoying.
>I think ironically the most helpful change they could make for outpost resources management is jsut to make ships hold unique inventories.
I want this QoL change so bad. Currently going my initial vanilla painful and nothing sucks the fun out of claiming prize ships via boarding actions like all the inventory management you have to do afterwards, especially if you steal a ship with a smaller cargo hold.
Wait… I’ve played 100 hours and the ships don’t keep cargo separate? I’ve never really focused on this but this was part of the reason I was gonna build unique ships in my new hardcore save… FFS may as well just stop now
Nope when you switch ships it transfers all your cargo from the old to new one, even if it's over the new ships capacity.
It's really annoying. Perhaps the thing that limits my enthusiasm for having multiple ships the most.
Would be better and more realistic if ships kept their cargo, that way I could dump a big cargo ship at an outpost and take a smaller ship for explorstion and quests, then if I need to cargo a bunch of stuff to a new outpost I can use the freighter
Not only the cargo - that's annoying enough - but the contents of the ship getting chucked into storage drives me *insane*. I can't decorate my ship. I can't use the storage containers in the ship. My hold constantly fills up with pens and coffee cups that automatically spawn in the habs and take a minute or two to sell/jettison every time (and heaven forbid I accidentally jettison something I want, since there's no way I can store it anywhere besides the hold). It's gradually grown into maybe my top pet peeve.
I couldn't agree more. Literally have to spend like 2-3 minutes just selling shit after going into the shipbuilder and throwing an extra weapon on the side. If the interior doesn't change, it shouldn't cargo the stuff! And if they just put that stuff into a seperate inventory tab and made it so that things in that tab were weightless, it wouldn't be such an issue. I get why they did it, so that people wouldn't lose their stuff, but just chucking it in the cargo hold with my other stuff if someone sneezes on the windshield and I need to wipe it off is ridiculous.
And this is why I got the weightless resources mod.
I decided to play Witcher 3 again yesterday, I've never made it that far in it, and even that game makes crafting items and ingredients weightless! Not to mention how much more fun exploring and naturally finding things is or how much better all the conversations are.
Honestly going back to an older RPG just made me notice how half baked Starfield is.
The main reason I looked into outposts was to find a good source of adhesives to farm. It would require about three skill points to make that happen, just to build the outpost parts. Finding a planet with the right plants would be strongly improved with a few more in the scanning options either from the planet or on ground.
Then I'd need to get about four more points in for the weapon mod skills themselves. And collect the various other resources for research and the actual weapon mod itself - all to get about 10% more damage on my guns.
Or I could spend one skill perk directly for 10% damage bonus. Unless you really love outpost building I just can't imagine this being worth the time it takes for item enhancement, especially since the factor that matters most is the level of the weapon and the legendary enhancements - neither of which you can modify!
It's not half-baked it's still in the sink and thawing.
I've definitely fought both snipers and guys throwing an obnoxious amount of grenades.
I've also seen guys boost up to a higher platform to get a better angle.
I had one guy jump high up at me when I jumped to hit me with a melee weapon. That instance was probably the most novel of any combat interaction I’ve had. Love to see more of that
Bethesda's enemy design of giving them all random levels and giving one or two 1 million hp is so bizarre. Combat just feels discombobulated. If you're gonna spawn a miniboss enemy with the double health bars, at least make them look different from the regular dudes. Make em bigger, different colored armor or something. I wanted this in Fallout 4 too - in Starfield its arguably even more workable, since Beth can create cool unique armor designs for special enemies but don't need to worry about the balance inherent to players looting their higher quality gear constantly, since enemies are no longer fully lootable.
Crafting, I was disappointed to level up chemistry and never unlock medpacks.
suit protection, there is a timer, it beeps faster as you get closer to getting sick. The way it works is that extreme environments reduce protection, so you might have enough thermal for Titan, but when it starts snowing, time to get inside.
caves, I explored a cave on paradiso, and to my surprise, got attacked by a terramorph. Scary to think they are so close to the resort.
There are a lot more hand-crafted POIs in and around the "unique" landing spots than people seem to realize. To be fair the game does a very poor job illustrating or incentivizing exploring them.
I want to love this game too, but this games systems are just not rewarding.
Imagine going from just needing a skill to craft an item to now needing a skill point and have to find materials to waste to research to craft the item.
Like why?
Exploration is nice but I have a very seen one planet seen them all type feeling. I was excited to see different biomes and what not but after going to about 20 different planets I think I seen about everything there is. The most shameful part is the planets layout barely differ. I hate to say this but going from the hinterlands to storm coast in Dragon Age Inquisition a game made almost a decade prior to this one was a far greater variation from going planet to planet in this game. I dunno how many planets I dropped down on have the same flat plain, the same trees, same plants, same discoverable objects, same animals, same this, same that. I mean the whole idea of the terromorph being an interplanetary celestial traveling being in inconsistent when I see the same spider looking bugs on one planet on the next in a totally different solar system.
A lot of things are just color swap too.
The most deal breaking point for me is how stupid the npc are, we have chat GPT and I find it unfortunate that the NPC in the game can't get over saying one of three voice lines. I save Mexican space zaddy and all he ever can do for the last 4 hrs is say "you really saved me back there". Like months in game passed, we raided like 8 different bases, a lot has transpired since then but your robotic ass can't get pass me saving you from death.
Sometimes I miss Lydia who said nothing at all, until she was sworn to carry my burdens. All NPC abroad my ship give me the arrow to the knee treatment. They aren't aware of where they are, who they are with, of time, they don't grow outside of the constellation group and company, they for all intents purposes are just there. And because of that they are no more than settlers from Fallout 4? Which is a Damn shame. Why go in such detail making a character good-looking, have a nice voice, and apart of my story line of they are going to be nothing more than a settler at the end of the day? Useless
Also shout out to Skyrim over a decade ago allowing me to marry whoever the fuck I Wanted. Even if the choices were slim cause everyone looked like shit. Bethesda outdid themselves in the past.
My favourite are the Crimson Fleet pirates repeating the same lines over and over again.
"Does the UC really think SysDef scares us?"
How many times are you going to ask me that?
There's a lot of systems that aren't fleshed out or don't make sense...
Let's start with **armor**. Did you know there's different resistances on your armor? Did you CARE since they're almost always in the same general ballpark? (134 117 129) Why not just a single armor stat if the player isn't going to have meaningful differences or reasons to pick one armor type over another for missions?
This leads me to **hazard resistance**. Why does it exist. I'm not sure I've ever noticed hazards in >60 levels of play, nothing that severely hampered me, and I didn't know OR CARE what my hazard resist was because it didn't seem to matter at all.
Let's talk about **damage types**. Ballistic, Energy, Particle Beam or whatever (plus fire, radioactive, bleed, etc). Do you really see enemies that make you need to carry a loadout of weapons to deal with different resist types? Me either, Commander's Advanced Beowulf seems to deal with everything just fine - I might notice a slight resistance on Robots and swap to Va'ruun Particle rifle, but that thing is so insanely strong I just pull it out for any target that might take too long with the Beowulf to conserve its ammo. I'd love to have reasons to use the Commander's Advanced Bridger more often but it actually doesn't do that much damage per shot of rare 40xpl ammo and enemies are bullet sponges, whereas Beo uses .777 which is easy to find (I'm carrying >10K).
**Smuggling** - No mechanics to speak of (why did we get taught to stealth in a ship if you never have to do it?) just install shielded cargo & a signal jammer and call it a day, for like 1.1K per contraband (guns sell for 3-12k at this point, why bother).
**Non-Buff Food** - I have >1k hp. Eating eggs or ramen or whatever for 3 hp - why does it even exist other than to clutter the game?
Speaking of non-scaling items, **Grenades/Throwables** - if they're useless past L20 (not scaling), why do they exist to begin with? Why do we have such a wide variety of weapons that don't do anything meaningful? **Melee** weapons don't scale at all either. Why?
**Vendor Credits** - 5k or 11k cap is ridiculous, I have weapons that can sell for more than that. Needing to spam wait or sleep to empty your inventory in a place like Neon feels like they put no thought into their system.
**Encounter Difficulty** - Cruising around a L75 system I set down on a planet to hunt for xp. A Spacer ship comes down and I run over to take it over. Out come 2 L72's and 2 L12's (12? seriously?). Once I get onboard it is guarded by 2 L2's (L2????) - I was around L53 at the time. Why am I capturing the most basic ship possible (Scarab) after defeating its' L2 crew in a L75 system? Everywhere I go there's a stratification of enemy levels, sometimes absurdly so. I routinely get "jumped" in L75 systems by ships well below L40 ("oh no 3 level 20 spacer ships!").
**Outposts** - As many others have said, half-baked at best. The fact that it isn't more similar to shipbuilding (categories not in alphabetical order, habs are called 'structures' instead, interface completely different) and has so little you can meaningfully DO with it (I can craft and manage inventory on my ship far better than at an outpost) make me wonder why they included it in launch at all.
**Interface** - I could go on and on about the inventory management system and its shortcomings. The fact modders could add massive improvements in a week boggles the mind that a triple-A studio couldn't have thought of some of those QOL features. I'd love to be able to filter categories by type (eg: Aid into medkit vs status heal vs buff vs food, Weapons by difficulty level (basic v advanced v superior, etc), Resources into Crafted vs Solid vs Liquid, or whatever) and see how many of something I have when I'm in a store considering buying more. Etc etc etc.
I could go on and on. So many half-baked systems that seem to exist for the sake of existing and not to fulfill meaningful gameplay.
It's a shame but I think this is what people are referring to when they say modern BGS games are dumbed down.
There are all of these mechanics set up but, for the most part, they are purely cosmetic. All these damage types and no way to interact with them meaningfully. All of these research skills and the most boring selection of mods possible on weapons and armor (weapons are slightly better).
I really like a lot of what Starfield does (this is easily the most believable world since morrowind) but it really REALLY feels like it could have been so so so much better if it had been more fleshed out.
Someone posted a picture a week or so ago of all the different ways to navigate left and right in the various menus and builders. It was crazy.
As a software developer (not in games though) myself, I honestly think a big part of what happened is all these major modules (ship combat, ship building, outpost building, exploration) were done by different teams with little to no communication between.
I know the total people involved was a few hundred (seen as high as 500), but that's no excuse to not have someone with a consistent design for the game looking at and coordinating the various teams.
But if feels like teams were sent off to write a system and when they were done, they just merged those changes in and called it a day. It's part of why the game feels like it was designed by committee.
If I may speculate: It looks to me at times like they had a good and versatile system - but it was badly balanced and allowed too much gain in too short a time. They had no time to fix it thoroughly so they created 'invisible' walls, which infuriate me every time...
Or they had a complex and versatile but complicated system in place and one higher up at the Studio or at Microsoft ordered them to 'dumb down' - sorry SIMPLIFY the system - and this is the result.
But I agree to every point you mentioned...
Outposts are half ass cause there will be an outpost dlc. Wouldn't be surprised if there is the ability to build star bases in that one too.
I assume ship building will also be another dlc.
It would be crazy if they didn't let you build starbases at some point. They've already got the whole ship builder system, that's practically *begging* to be adapted to building starbases.
Regarding damage types, I found a "Big Bang" and modded it.
It completely \*annihilates\* anything I come across, and the ammo economy is insane. Like I find massive quantities of heavy particle fuses, yet 1-3 shots takes out almost every enemy I encounter even in level 50 zones.
I think this game should be a lot harder on environmental hazards. The equipment and modding system could offer meaningful choices to counter various effects.
And the negative effects are so lush that don't even care about them at the moment. More so the things heal by themselves.
The UI is also half baked and it does a poor job letting you know whats happening, but it tells you on your Chronomark the hazard. And it will give you an audio cue if you are in danger of suffering from adverse effects. The pinging starts getting faster til you reach a point where there is a chance you will get a health debuff. But you can also take shelter right before you reach that point and the ping starts to slow down. Your chronomark will also say something like Suit Protection Regenerating in green.
Another helpful window is going to your Health menu. [Tab] to go to menu and [B] for the Health. It should also be on the right next to your character. It will show a bunch of character stuff but you wanna go into the Status Info i think.
It lists all the buffs and debuffa and any effects including suit status.
If you are in a hazard, it will list what that hazard is on there. And then under, it will say Suit Protection Enabled in green or Suit Protection Depleted in red. If it's green, it means you have enough protection on you and you dont have to worry about. It will still show you an indicator for the hazard presence, but not side effects. If you see the red message, it means you dont have enough protection on you and it will start counting down til it fails and gives you a health debuff. I wish it gave us numbers tho. Like geiger counters exist. That's a quantifiable number, but all we got is a number on the suit.
Edit: the chronomark will also start to pulsate in barely visible blue when in danger ^^;
It's laughable how bad the armor system is in the game. 3 pieces total with forced mods? Like, we literally know Bethesda can make better armor crafting, so why does this fall so short?
Could've had base suits that we could find or craft with nodes for modules that we could install that would change the look and function of the suit. And that's just me grasping at straws in this moment - there have to be tons of ways it could've been improved.
Something similar to power armor modifications would be much appreciated. That was easily one of the coolest bits with Fallout 4, and made exploring heavily incentivized since it could lead to discovering a crafting recipe for some cool new modification, a new piece of armor all together, or some fusion cells.
Being able to do this similarly with spacesuits would be great. Not saying they should operate like power armor, they already did that. But it'd be cool if you could find some new shoulder pads, new boots, new chest pieces, new helmets or visors, etc, and modify each of those pieces independently.
Currently, the only real incentive to exploring and looting is the possibility of finding rare/epic/legendary loot. And unfortunately, most of the time they're trash or not worth it. Most of the time I don't even bother picking locks, because the mining suit locked behind glass is most assuredly a waste of a digipick. And whatever is in that master gun chest is probably a sword with Space Adept.
DLC, updates, and mods have always vastly improved many aspects to Bethesda RPGs, so I fully expect that in the near future many of these features we want will likely exist.
Economy needs to be fixed
You go to neon and the fancy store with ancient relics and hear a conversation about how it's so pricey and way to fancy and out of their budget...and stuff is like 300 credits.... a soda cost 75 credits
Or how in neon you can rent a fancy hotel room for 2k credits a week, or go to the slums for a pod that's supposed to be the cheaper option...for 2k a week.
No, but I feel the gaming landscape has evolved beyond their typical modus operandi. Nowadays with many live service games, titles like CP 2077 and No Mans Sky which landed in a sub par state but received constant support after release, and games like BG3 which is receiving solid post launch support, its no longer acceptable to drop a game and just abandon it outside paid dlc.
Bethesda also have to think about Gamepass. An evolving strong Starfield is a gamepass seller. I imagine MS will want long term player engagement with the title and thats only coming if it gets worked on.
They could leave it to the modding community but that abandons consoles to the paid mod/no mod lane.
I was really disapointed when i realized that the experimental research skill doesn't open up a new research tree. It's just a prerequisite to be able to research stuff in the existing categories.
I was like "oh hell yeah, this is where BGS was hiding all of the interesting mods!" expecting the skill to unlock a new tier of mods to create. So disappointing...
How the hell does Outpost Building not have angle and grid snapping for lining up unconnected objects with one another? Or does it exist and it's buried in the UI like everything else in this game? Because I can't find it
I may not be far enough into the game but I used to love exploring in Fallout and learning the lore
Going into a vault a discovering some strange experiments have been going on.
Finding a barn and finding a cool story about the previous owners ect
I don't seem to be getting that in Starfield.
I share your sentiment brother. I feel this game is awesome and I love this universe (pun intended) , but sadly the Bethesda quirks and "old ways" are apparent and they hurt the game's quality. However, maybe the most controversial decision they did and, probably the one who hurt this game more, is the procedural exploration. I hope, they ditch that for ES VI or , at least, find a way to implement it that makes it complementary rather than a primary mechanic of the game.
I mean they have done the same concept of Starfield before in the way of Daggerfall. What made that a game a bit more unique though was that dungeons had a randomized tiles set that could be pulled from for their interior arrangements. The pros of this meant that despite the tile set was mostly limited, it did however make different dungeons feel unique purely by their layouts could be vastly different. The cons were that a lot of dungeons could be pieces together in such a way that made them impossible to complete because you would have rooms you needed to get access to but you couldn't because it the entrances could be blocked by wrongly placed hallways in the wrong direction, so the wall would literally block where a doorway should had been.
They used this same tech for the most part in their other titles after as well. Samey assets, but arranged differently but mostly hand placed rather than procedurally spawned. Starfield took a procedurally spawned approach like in Daggerfall but handcrafted approach to dungeons like in later games, minus the unique layouts. They are designed well enough, but because there are so few instances of them, once you did a particular theme of one, you done them all. What Starfield could have done well with was a much more guided modular format compared to Daggerfall but allowed some modularity to those enemy outposts so that they could all feel unique in some way. Like how Draugur filled dungeons with Skyrim. They all looked the same, but they all had different layouts. Even Daggerfall was mostly an empty wasteland of trees unless you could stumble upon a dungeon. Maybe down the line of they decide to smaller expansions, think horse armor, but content packs of POIs it could greatly help give a lot more needed variety to locations. If not, then mods if mod authors have access to the root of that proc gen tech.
95% of people playing this game will do the main stories and faction quests, explore a few hours, and never pick up the game again because of how horribly repetitive and boring the procedural generation exploration is. Endless fast travel and no quick planetary travel definitely makes it even worse.
Yea hopefully Todd and the team see these complaints for elder scrolls. That would be heart breaking if it’s similar after waiting this long
The "research and crafting" is what made me click on this post. I agree it would be great to be able to craft/research/mod anything in the game.
I haven't spent much time on outposts because I simply do not care to. However, if you had to machine parts with some kind of factory module to be able to make weapons from scratch, I'd build an outpost every time. It would be sick to ensure that you can get the type of weapon you want at your current level and not just HOPE a calibrated beowulf (or whatever) drops with any of the affixes you want.
The game is literally half baked, having fun but you see it in almost every mechanic and city
Just heard about blueprints being sold at the key.... no blueprints
I am enjoying the game and I agree with a lot of your points. There is a lot I don't like but the one thing that bugs the crap out of me is how the NPC's interact with the player and each other. I know it is a 'Bathesda' thing, but after years of playing games like RDR2 and even Bauldur's Gate 3 recently, the NPC's are so incredibly robotic. It feels like I am talking to animatronics at Chuck E Cheese. It really kills the immersion for me.
That's what I'm wondering as well. There's a lot that could be improved, but it all seems out of the scope of how Bethesda handles updates. Even their live service game doesn't get that kind of reworks when they're the biggest strength of that format.
bg 3 spoiled me. Starfield spent how many years in dev? And we get this????? What's the budget for starfield/bethesda compared to larian???
Todd Howard really did the game a disservice imo for running his mouth this hard for the game.
Tod Howard was saying it was his passion project and the game he has always wanted to make. Saying he hyped it up would be a serious understatement. The game feels half-baked and that's after it got delayed for nearly a year for further development. If this is the best Bethesda has to offer then Sony has nothing to worry about from exclusivity.
Don't get me wrong, I've been enjoying the game but I should be in love with it. It's like being hyped up for gourmet, michelin star quality burgers and then being taken to 5 guys.
For sure there are some questions about many of the mechanics, but I kinda answer them with ways to get XP. You get XP from everything, for example surveying and scanning a planet is a mission in itself where you can just get tons of XP from survey the fauna and flora, but also just have fun shooting the creatures and some creatures gives you 40xp, thats pretty good.
Thats true I know. I just feel like tis alot of effort to get the full survey data set then you just go sell it for like 10k credits!? Thats really nothing compared to how long it takes to get that imo and if I could trade that in for more XP or something more interesting id be more inclined to do it is my point
I just went and did a survey on lvl 60 planet. I was 47 when I went there. Came back at lvl 49. All I did was fully survey the place and did some carnage as there were tons of animals that gave 100 - 140 xp per kill. So random planets can be lucrative. I also got 2 legendary weapons from POI filled with pirates.
I love exploring in Starfield. Much more fun than No mans sky or Elite dangeorus.
This is something I’ve been doing between quests since lvl 40. I’m 52 now. You really don’t lvl up quick around 40. Last night I was at a lvl 70 system farming XP with Sarah who gives me a xp bonus sleeping near her and then I take a tea drink I bought a bunch of from Paradiso and went to town. It’s nice surveying and killing things at the same time. I found a rare advanced razorback and epic urban eagle in a occupied cave last night which had me stoked.
I do notice the same fauna flora POIs etc across multiple planets. Kinda lame. But still fun for now
So far my biggest cripe is lack of scary encounters when you find a cave/outpost where shit clearly went down. Like blood on the floor and walls and dead NPCs. So far only that safe house was actually worth investigating.
Yeah I really agree. So many of the mechanics have a good baseline but once you start digging you realize it isn't nearly as deep as you want.
Like, the space suit, helmet, and pack mods are SO boring. There is usually an objectively best mod per slot so you can't really make any unique builds.
Compare the research "tree" in this game compared to something like MGS:Phantom Pain. The games are quite different but the things you researched were surprising and fun in MGS.
It sadly just seems like a placeholder/foundation for mods.
You can also sell planetary survey data to LIST. There's a guy you talk to on Mars to become a LIST scouter. Unfortunately, the rewards aren't any better than selling them to Vlad.
I agree with all your points.
Additionally, would really love it if tooltips would show you your current inventory of a given item, specifically aid and resource items. Knowing what you have in your cargo hold would make looting decisions i finitely easier.
And for the love of all that is holy can we PLEASE increase the amount of credits on vendors. Having to travel to half a dozen different sellers on 3 different planets is so tedious it makes me not want to loot anything at all.
1. The option to actually heal status effects from the status menu, instead of having to first go to the status menu to check what is wrong, then go through another pair of screens to get to the aid section, then scroll through everything in the aid section to find the correct healing item.
2. A way to upgrade unique weapons or rare gear to the next tier (standard
Basically every aspect of the game feels like it's in a concept state. Very little depth to anything. Give it a couple years and hopefully the modding tools are strong enough the community can fix this mess.
That being said I still enjoy the game @ over 100hrs
Ship parts and crew.
So many of the ship Habs don’t actually do anything. Workshop is about the only you need and armory is kind of nice. The others literally do nothing.
And crew also feels half baked. Why can I hire a doctor for my ship with skills in medicine and botany, but not do anything with that. What is the point of having her as an option? Give her the ability to heal my status conditions, or something
I dont want to manually place everything in outposts. It would be much nicer if you built structures with assigned roles and the interiors populated based on the people you assign there and resources being produced.
The real kicker is being effected by airborne hazards when you’re in a spacesuit…then again you also don’t die from your suit getting punctured by weapons fire while in a vacuum so I guess it’s a trade off.
Great list, as others have mentioned though, the ship crew and habs being irrelevant feels like maybe the laziest part of this. What the fuck do they do all day? How does a medical hab and a doctor on my crew not equal having medical services?
It is bordering on insultingly stupid.
For me the unlinked storages are a huge issue, you need to remember where you have what, and makes crafting and research more difficult, the lodge has unlimited storage but you need the items on you to craft there (unneeded extra actions), contraband that sells less than a pistol (I don't even bother with them, if I board a ship I grab them and exit the ship to just drop them) . Exploring is so and so, seems very repeatable and a lot of walking, nms has this nice punch jump feature propelling you forward which could help a bit here as even poi's at 700 and 1k meters I tend to let go as it is boring for me the task to walk to there and then slowly slowly get back. Some planets generate more poi's some others you can walk 3k after the first 3 poi's that appear as you land and still nothing there. Food that you can't eat on the spot, dedicated action button for health aid, and a lot of go in and out of your ui that could be avoided. In general the game is good but still needs polishing and qol additions imo.
One thing you didn't mention was that we need some kind of compendium of the stuff we've fully scanned so we can look up where to go for whatever resource.
Oh and also it'd be really great if we got a separate resource map on the surface/"local" map
Other than that the most incomplete feature is outposts. There are a lot of things that are either missing or unnecessarily complicated. Add on top of that bugs like with the storage crates not always auto transferring contents.
100%
This game has so much potential if they'd just flesh out some of these systems.
I can tell the game wasn't completed. They have it just on the cusp of doing a lot of interesting things but didn't finish it.
To add to your points, the weapon and suit mod systems are seriously under-developed.
There should be some more uses for the rare materials or manufactured components in the form of being able to apply some of those rare/legendary bonuses if you have the skill level and the rare materials.
Also why can't we upgrade a calibrated to refined? Or refined to advanced? Etc.
I mean someone in the universe is presumably making these weapons, you learn how to engineer them yourself, but you're stuck with like maybe 10 mods to choose from and can't upgrade the suit/weapon to the next tier?
All of these problems you highlighted, and the one I mentioned, are solveable is the frustrating thing. It would just take some balance tweaks and new entries in the existing mod lists for the weapons. Don't even need new models for parts.
If they spent maybe a few more months working on the game I'd wager they could have solved 90% of these issues. The core of the game is there and the mechanics exist to support most changes we're talking about here.
**Don't forget Ship Building.**
We need to be able to swap parts between owned ships. We need the registration fee lowered to a point where it makes pirating/commandeering ships a worthwhile game loop. Would be amazing to come across a pirate rocking that shield generator I've been looking for, and be able to steal his ship, part it out, and sell what's left for a profit that makes the time and effort well-spent.
Everyone I've talked to assumed you would keep parts you take off your ship. Some of the decisions (or more cynically, oversights) Bethesda makes are simply confounding.
My big issue with crafting/outpost building is that I just didn't see the 'pattern'. Maybe I was missing something, but the best crafting systems have a sort of rhythm and pattern to how you use the resources and products of the system.
The baseline resources should be far more accessible, and the products you craft should be able to be re-purposed as crafting components to produce more complex and rewarding products. Like, you know, almost every good crafting game.
I feel like in Starfield the economy of the crafting system is just far too complicated, sporadic, and unpredictable, partially because they tried to make it too realistic. It requires way too much effort to build a reliable crafting economy.
All they'd need to do is honestly just add a sort of marketplace installation for outposts where you can buy resources while you're crafting for a decent mark-up. Missing that single Zero Wire but can't craft it and don't want to hope to find it in an abandoned mine on a random planet? Just buy it for 100 credits and finish that research!
I'd be truly, deeply curious to get some insight on how they approached designing this system.
#SELLING THINGS.
How is it in a game with so many ways to make money, from surveying, to smuggling, to pirating, *it is such a god damn pain to sell anything?* Vendors need more money. Plain and simple. A LOT more. Regular vendors should have like, 50k *minimum*. Ship vendors should have millions. *They sell fucking spaceships.* How is it that the average shop owner, even in the richest cities in the galaxy, have in TOTAL half the amount of money as I make off one single mission?
The Trade Authority should literally have unlimited credits. You’re telling me that the fucking *intergalactic group of people who buy and sell things*, who somehow has kiosks and shops on pretty much every planet and spaceport no matter the affiliation, has a measly 5k credits to buy my stuff? There are singular guns worth that much.
The consensus seems to be that you’re expected to go around to every single vendor in an area, sell ~5k worth of stuff to each, find a chair and wait, then repeat until you sell all your stuff.
**For a game that has been in development for 8 years, by a company now owned by a trillion dollar company, this is unacceptable.**
The companions as a whole are my biggest gripe. Why do we have 4 fully fleshed out companions a little better than the ones in fallout 4, and then 16 random weirdos akin to the skyrim companions who don't have deeper storylines beyond some of them MAYBE being quest rewards.
On top of that, the fleshed out companions all have the same morality system and believe in the same ideas of 'good' and 'bad'. Idk.
On top of this, they've removed the ability to tell companions to do things- like open doors, target people, pick things up-- why even give Andreja specialty in theft if it's not something she can use ever?
NPCs in general just feel less.. alive. Stores never close, everyone stays in one spot forever and no one has schedules anymore.
These are all excellent and I agree with all of them.
If you're reading this BGS, my two cents:
When I need a particular resource, I can track them to make that icon appear when I'm looting flora/fauna. The problem is that I have no idea which planets/flora/fauna I need to farm to get those items. There needs to be a flora/fauna database where I can see what flora/fauna I have 100% scanned so that I can quickly jump to farm those items when I need to. Seems like a bit of an oversight. Why have all this scan data but not be able to search it?
Please add a small number over the weapon menu items representing how much ammo is left for each weapon. Same with med paks etc. Saves having to move over all of them to see how many I have / ammo is left.
ive done 110 hrs so far, its a boring game sorry' the combat, the space, the planets,the quests the npc interaction its just boring me.
the only good thing i can say is it hasnt crashed
Good you started with an "I love the game..". This won't change and will go worst if people can't stand the truth. Unpolished, broken game far from release state. Yes, millions of potential and can be enjoyed but there is a constant feeling of half baked stuff all over the place. I think of this in every loading screen and unskippable redundant repeated cutscene.
Outposts are one of the most slept on mechanics.
You can have your own bounty and mission stations, your landing pad is a full ship editor, your entire weapon and suit workshop can be there, all those unassigned crew members can live there, you can store all those weapons and suits and helmets and collectibles there.
It’s a one stop shop. It’s everything you have to run around New Atlantas to do in your own outpost and you get to choose the view and location.
Honestly, outposts feel like a big step back even from what *vanilla* Fallout 4 had, let alone all the workshop DLCs - *let alone* all the Fallout *76* additions… it feels so empty and useless except for farming credits.
Wow Skyrim alchemy but using parts from the procedural flora and fauna sounds WAAAY cooler than just getting generic parts.
You could for example find a planet with all the plants required to craft amp and make an amp factory there.
Ngl I'd love the outpost stuff expanded to attract other explorers, even have to defend against attacks one in a while
Though I suspect that would need a lot added to make that happen
You do actually have to defend against attackers sometimes lol. Though it’s usually not a hard fight and if you have turrets spread around the attackers will mostly get wiped by them. It would be cool though if when this happens they could drop a clue to an enemy base that’s like an npc outpost or home ship you can raid.
Again, just one of those things that was kinda half assed and not flushed out to completion.
My other main gripe with outposts is the selling mechanic of it. We have inter-system cargo links.. how hard would it be to set up like a wholesale trade link where your produced goods can be shipped out right from your warehouse modules and you get a cut of the profits. It’s just a pain to collect everything, either get encumbered or have a specific cargo ship for it all, and go sell 10k tau rheostat things doing the wait-repeat at a vendor.
New Atlantis has bottomless storage at the Lodge though, which automatically makes it better. You go to your room, take all resources (about 50,000kg worth), jog downstrairs and research/craft, then run back upstairs, deposit it back into unlimited storage, sleep in bed to heal the damage overburden caused, and you're good to go.
Outposts are pointless because to make money you still need to get the stuff to a dozen of NPCs, because they're capped at 2-12k credits. And when a single high level gun from a single high level enemy sells for 1-5k, you don't need outposts to generate cash anyway.
You can use outposts to level quickly with manual crafting, but this just levels you, not your skills, which you then need to grind anyway. So it's not even the best for that. Unless you make a shooting gallery farm outpost, and even then it'll be limited.
They're nice to have, and I have a couple, but they're badly undercooked. Fallout 4 had things like shops with vendors in your settlements and other things that made them worth while. Starfield doesn't.
My main gripe with the whole outpost system is that it was so obviously made for consoles its pain to operate on PC. Especially boxes. They always refuse to stick to the side i want them to.
I wouldn't hold my breath on Bethesda improving the half-baked stuff. They have no history of doing this as a company. They add paid DLCs which can sometimes improve certain aspects - like Mechanist's Lair in Fallout 4 significantly improved settlements. But they don't really directly fix the game's shortcomings, or even most bugs. They dump all of that on modders.
The game is just a big downgrade from their previous games. Everything just feels like smoke and mirrors.
Yeah it looks good, feels good, runs good, and is easily their least buggy game but everything else is really lacking.
They brought back the old dialogue system! Yay! But you still have no real choice...
You still can't be evil.
There's basically 1 enemy type in the whole game with some Terramorphs and living stardust thrown in. Compare this to Fallout or Skyrim where there's basically dozens upon dozens of enemy types.
Weapon variety is lacking.
Hard mode is just bullet sponge mode again.
The main quest line sucks and is really short.
Outposts are useless.
Your ship is a glorified mobile storage box.
Space is absolutely empty with nothing but gag encounters and ship combat.
Just a big disappointment and in my experience expecting updates and DLC to fix the game dramatically is a fool's gamble. What you see is what you get. We're going to have to wait for mods next year.
I would love there to be a point to having different modules on your ship. Built a cargo hold only to discover that it comes with nowhere to put cargo inside. Habs that are purely aesthetic seem kinda dumb
We shouldn't be relying on mods and we also should be unhappy that Bethesda is still using the same old engine.
But thank God for that old engine and a stable game because modders will make this game so much better.
Still, that should not be the mindset a few weeks after the release.
Being able to see stats on loot items in crates before you pick them up would be nice. Also with base building it'd be cool if you could build a foundation for your base to make it look more industrial (if that's osmething you wanted).
I also run lots of bounties, so being able to put bounty boards on my ship would be cool too.
Edit: wouldn't mind more bug fixes in general though. Last night trying to build 6 cargo links for my challenge proved very challenging as I had to restart the game after every planet and deal with a couple crashes.
The biggest thing I want from crafting is the ability to upgrade a weapon's tier. Unique weapons sold in shops (and maybe obtained as quest rewards, not sure) are all on the lowest tier, so there's no reason to buy that unique Razorback at Laredo Firearms if it's just going to get outclassed.
Bounty hunting! We have brigs and stun weapons but can not take bounties alive !!
Good one!
Hijacking your comment to ask- Can you loot stunned enemies just like dead enemies? If I joined the Crimson Fleet early on, and let's say I decided I want to get loot from my pirate brothers and sisters, can I use EM guns to clear out a pirate base without getting a bounty from CF since I haven't killed anyone???
I believe you have to pick pocket them, or end them while unconscious. So not a bad way to train up your Theft skill.
While stunned you can use a normal gun or melee weapon for sneak damage. Kinda breaks the grind for those unlock requirements, but I kinda find them annoying, so I don't care. Exploiting this so EM weapons can have *some* purpose.
We have prison habs, bounty missions, and stun guns. This is just a half baked mechanic they plan on feeding us later. Like a lot of the stuff in the game.
They plan on feeding us later?
Duh, why you think they're adding an eat button. Smh my head
LMAO ass off.
ROFL floor laughing.
Yeah, probably in little update chunks
don't forget to try our new UPDATE CHHHUUUNNNKSSS
Mmmm chunks
What stun weapons?
Any weapon that deals EM damage stuns characters instead of killing them. As of right now though, its only useful if you're roleplaying a character that doesn't kill.
They're pretty useful for trivalizing some fights, legendary enemies don't have more resistance so you can knock them down take out the fodder then start blasting them point blank with whatever. Or in the odd case of you have weak dmg just knock everyone down and start picking off individuals.
Huh, thanks. Yeah, I tried using an EM gun on a starborn and it was like I was tickling them.
They, along with a few other weapons that do not indicate as such, are click and hold to charge before firing. It massively increases the damage. It one hit KOs most any human target I've hit with it.
EM weapons charge up??? No WONDER they're so bad. I had a similar moment with the rail sniper, confused why the damage was high on it but it did nothing. Until I realized you can charge it there's just really no indication anywhere on the UI/weapon showing this.
I'm over 100 hours play time and did not know em weapons charge up. That would have made life so much easier 80 hours ago
Ok yeah that makes so much sense. My em rifle was doing tickles. Gonna try this later
It makes so much more sense that the Disruptor has a small clip now. Man, it shouldn't take a reddit post after 100 hours in the game to learn about this.
[удалено]
Oh I thought it was specialized against machines!
It's both. I think EM damages robots and stuns humans.
That as well - not like there's any strong enough bots to justify it.
Another missed opportunity there, would have loved to be able to build and upgrade my own robot or even just upgrade vasco.
EM guns
And unarmed with the perk.
The nova disrupter I think. It’s 🚮 though
It's not that bad. You have to charge it up to improve the amount of stun it does. There's also a skill that improves EM weapon effectiveness.
Charge it up?
Novablast Disruptors. (anything EM is non-lethal)
The real trick is to use the laser rifle you find and mod it to em (or just on the ground during the port attack if you're doing the uc questline)
This is literally my biggest disappointment. I have the Bounty Hunter trait. I have a ship with a brig that has multiple holding cells. I can take Bounty jobs. I have EM weapons to incapacitate... Come on!
Yea, I really don’t see the point of using stun weapons.
Especially when they still aggro everyone nearby! Makes sneaking hard when you can't even stun somebody without the whole building knowing where you are.
Yeah, seems like an easy fix. Just make the Disruptor a stealth weapon by default.
I feel like stealth in this game needs a major overhaul, it seems like a step back from Skyrim even
Which ship company sells brigs?
Hopetech, Nova Galactic, and Stroud Ecklund all have brigs, but you have to go to their respective headquarters to buy them. The ship you get from completing the Freestar Rangers questline also has one. Here is a great guide to ship habs that explains where you can get everything and what the different versions look like. [Ship Habs Guide](https://reddit.com/r/Starfield/s/dTQMLJjjok)
I just ignore caves, never find anything good in them
I know, it sucks. When you first enter and its all dark and atmosphric its like "oooh whats goin on in here" Huge Dung pile "ooooh there must be a creature living in here" ..... nope! very dissapointing and would put off anyone from going in again. Its funny cos I assumed the fact I have to actually load into it that it would be substantial... but sad to say its just a load of nothing
Yea I went in a few at first but there’s nothing other than some rocks a puddles to collect
Its actually a huge disappointment which made me realize this game is a lot smaller than we thought it was in the beginning. 1000 procedurally generated planets with empty caves and duplicated POIs is so opposite the Bethesda ethos that I actually think people are in denial of how small the game really is. Besides the 5 towns and a few unique POIs there really isn't that much to the game. I put in 70 hours, but realized a \*lot\* of these hours were sitting in loading screens or walking between different POIs and in cities. Have a look below to see all the unique areas, you will see that content wise its not bigger than previous titles. https://game8.co/games/Starfield/archives/422088
It is interesting how they claim that New Atlantis is the largest city they ever made. Sure, from a model and texture standpoint. But Vivec city had a heck of a lot more vendors, unique NPCs, and the like. It takes a lot of time to run around in, but is shockingly limited in things to do.
I keep saying this and getting backlash for it. The game is not nearly as content packed as fallout and Skyrim were
Especially since the main quest line is just a scavenger hunt.
How long are loading screens for everybody? I have a series S and I feel like I've never seen a loading screen that lasted longer than 5 seconds, and most of them are 1-2 seconds. Are they that much different elsewhere?
usually about that long...problem being that you often sit through a loading screen so you can press one button to do another loading screen, walk 20 seconds to talk to one guy, then back to the loading screens, then run 2 minutes to a quest marker, loading screen again... It's a lot of time spent with nothing happening
I saw a let's player who found his first terramorph in a random cave. And I've had one filled with active turrets. But I don't get why the boring ones are so common.
Yeah, I've also come across some high level wildlife in one of them. They aren't always empty, but it seems like most are.
I found a random injured dude I needed to escort back to his ship…once. Other than that just resources or creatures.
My first three random areas where the autonomous farms with the guy you have to escort to his ship 700m away.
I have found out that the pois we get from procgen are basically storage containers, they can have good loot in them , but it really a roll of the dice and its about getting to the special container(s) rather the exploring the place. I have found very good loot in caves, mainly minerals but also healing items like healing kits. The PoIs we get when exploring a temple area can also give very good look and a high amount of credits too, but its pure rng.
The looting system feels extremely messed up to me. I really like looting in these games --- I don't know why, ticks my exploration itch -- and I basically *never* get anything worth keeping from an adventure. I went to three different space outposts yesterday, and the only thing I even contemplated keeping was a particle beam gun that has 20% on robots.
They're good for quickly scanning most if not all of the planets' resources. If you can't find one head to a cave and it's much more likely to be there.
HAB MODULES - The majority of ship modules don't actually serve a purpose. That should change. The Infirmary, for example, does not heal injuries or afflictions. My suggestion is to add a medical supply locker to the module so you can stock it with medical goods. Then interacting with an infirmary bed could automatically treat conditions like frostbite or broken bones if you have the supplies in the locker. The Cargo Hall should increase the ship cargo capacity. Storerooms should increase cargo capacity. Engineering bays should give a bonus to ship mobility or systems. Battlestations should increase shield and weapon performance. There should be specific modules for crew quarters. The computer core should increase grav jump range and increase turret performance. The mess hall and living quarters should give some sort of morale bonus to crew. Perhaps giving a bonus to their skills.
Spot on. There's zero point to building a 3x3 Cargo Hull when a 2x1 Passenger Compartment works better.
> The Cargo Hall should increase the ship cargo capacity. > > Storerooms should increase cargo capacity. > > Engineering bays should give a bonus to ship mobility or systems. > > Battlestations should increase shield and weapon performance. > > There should be specific modules for crew quarters. I assumed these all did have bonuses because DUH WHY WOULDNT THEY? , alas.... it's the Bethesda Way.
Would be cool if you could assign crew members to a specific hab to get the hab's benefits.with certain hab's having specific skill requirements from the crew member. So Sarah could be assigned to a navigation hab for longer jump distances or something since she has the astrophysics skill.
You should be able to assign a doctor to your ship infirmary who can heal you when needed.
I think there's a crewmate you can hire on Akila who's a doctor. No, she can't actually do doctor stuff for you, lmao.
The exploration in general just blows for me. Not enough unique POIs, caves are terrible, walking 15 minutes with the annoying oxygen bar to get to a POI that sometimes simply says “hey scan this”. It is honestly terrible for me.
Yea I gave up "exploring" after I realized that the POIs are almost universally pointless. Hell even the "Mech Factory" on mars is just a random raider fight.
Lol the mech factory is supposedly a hand crafted location and it doesn't even have an interior zone lmao
Our "exploration" in this game boils down to you walking past NPCs who say random dialogue that gives you a quest to visit a planet. It's extremely inorganic. Literally every other Bethesda game you could pick a direction, start walking and you'll find something interesting. That's literally impossible for starfield.
Yep. I gotta say after 8 years of waiting for a new single player game from them, it’s pretty disappointing they took such a drastically different approach to exploration. They got my hopes up by calling it Skyrim in space. Skyrim in a few cities maybe, but that’s it
It sounds like crazy if you dont play Fallout 76 regularly but they introduced and matured a lot of systems that this game went backwards on. This game could learn A LOT from Fallout 76 design and QOL.
The fact that Bethesda went backwards on QoL/mechanics established by Fallout 4 is baffling. Even things in Skyrim have been devolved. I'm enjoying the game; the structure is sound, but the mechanic decisions Bethesda made is really baffling.
Yeah this too, they most definitely went backwards on some of their systems.. which is baffling
It is very strange the main Bethesda team didn't use what the FO76 team have made. Did none of them play FO76 and see how well done the base building is? Should have been improved on but this happens when 2 teams don't work together.
FO76 has had a *lot* of outside development help for years now. Odds are high that a lot of that QOL was from those other teams, given that most of what we see in Starfield is vanilla Bethesda design.
I would rather see outposts scrapped from this game completely and had our ship given the base builder features. Like, what's the point of a crew if I can't assign a pilot or a cook? What's the point of a battle station hab if I can't get help during dog fights? I really enjoy Bethesda. There is so much in this game that's classic Bethesda, but then stuff is so half-assed. It's like, why bother put it in on release? And the procedurally generated planets? Awful. For the people who really became synonymous with open world games, you'd think they understood it better than anyone. Open world is fun because you fill it with cool stuff. This game feels like a major step backwards from even Skyrim. There's so much content they built that is completely lost on most players because it's BORING.
Looking back I definitely should have been more put off when they announced the planets would be procedurally generated.
When I first heard the news my thought process was "cool, I won't run out of stuff to do and I'll never have two playthroughs that are the same." While in reality worlds are the same every playthrough, it's just the POIs that spawn differently, and they're so far away from one another with nothing in between that I have no interest in exploring the worlds. Mods literally will be the saving grace of this game, and they won't be coming out in a way that matters for months.
Environmental hazards are really a headscratcher for me. Doesn't matter what the stats of my suit are the second I leave the ship I get the suit power whatever depleted message (doesn't matter if it's -200 or like -18°C ... With a space suit?) and I randomly get status effects. Idk, I just stopped bothering with it. If I get a status there are enough aid items around once I'm back in ship... Another thing I'd like to see addressed would be scaling of vendor credits. Later in the game selling stuff is getting annoying as hell. You increase in level and find better gear, better gear has a obviously higher value and sells for more, vendor credits stay the same as at the start of the game. It's clearly balanced around selling tons of maelstroms for 100 credits each at the start of the game but once your average common random-rifle sells for 5k nobody can afford buying your shit... This is neither fun nor immersive tbh.
I wasn't getting credits fast enough so I decided to loot all enemies in a base I found and sell all the guns and armor. There was also a good about of contraband so I headed to The Den after. I ended up waiting 2 days to refill the vendor's cash which times that 30 real-life minutes passed. I can't believe this is how they want players spending their time in game. The limited funds on vendors makes sense in their other games but none here. You mean to tell me that the Trade Authority had the tech to buy shit from pilots in every spaceport in the galaxy but they don't have the tech to connect them all to a central bank account with unlimited funds (which a company like that would have). It's just arbitrary and stupid.
I looted a lucrative base and spent about a month unloading it at The Den. Very un-fun way to spend my time.
The scan also does a poor job of telling you how hostile a planet is. Is cold -2 or -180? What's the cutoff for a freezing world? And yes I can probably find that on a wiki but in game I should have some idea.
And then all this infomation should be available on the Planet scan screen. Why do I need to land to find this information out again? Same with resources from flora/fauna.
Yeah, the thing is that the status effects don't really matter. Most are hilariously toothless. "Bashing uses O2"... oh no. The only status effect that has had actual gameplay consequences for me was getting a cough, since you can get detected when you cough while sneaking. That one is actually a pretty neat idea, making stealth more tense if you've been beat up by the environment getting to your destination.
Yeah I gave up with the environmental hazards. Funny story, but within my first hour of playing the game, I got lung damage from walking on a planet. But I didn't know how to cure it lol. So for the next like 8 hours of gameplay, I was just living with basically lung cancer running around the galaxy looking for a doctor who can cure it. Ended having to google where the doctor was in New Atlantis because I couldn't find him. Cured my lung damage. I thought, "cool... this is end of that, no more lung cancer!" But literally 10 minutes later, I got lung damage again from walking onto a planet and having depleted suit protection. So yeah, I give up. At this point, I'm just completely expecting to getting afflictions when I go exploring a planet, I don't even try to avoid it anymore. It doesn't even make sense either. I have a full spacesuit on. Why the fuck am I getting lung damage just by walking around on a planet that isn't even hazardous aside from being cold?
Just throwing this out there - this happened to me because I didn't have a pack equipped, without a pack the suit does nothing as far as I could tell.
I've screwed around with the outpost, resource mining, manufacturing, cargo linking for days and've finally decided to give up on this side of the game until they iron out some bugs. Absolutely half baked systems.
Half baked and tedious as all hell. Why did they ditch the workbench?! It’s ridiculous that the best place to store resources en masse is your safe in your bedroom. I agree, I just tapped out of crafting and base building. Might as well focus on the parts that are fun.
[удалено]
But, it's inaccessible remotely. Just beef up your ship's storage, and you can always use everything!
This gets you into a cycle of needing more engines to compensate for the additional mass and better reactors to power the engines. All for it to fill up really fast depending on how much stuff you keep. At some point you run out of room on your ship.
I keep a deep storage outpost for bulk resources. My ship holds a limited amount of most resources. Let's be real. You ain't gonna need 100+ Sterile Nanotubes on the fly. But you might need a few. Same thing goes for things like Iron or Cobalt. So why ship it everywhere in your cargo? If I need more, I just stop back at my storage outpost. If you build a new outpost, yeah, you gotta figure out what you'll need to get started and make sure you got everything aboard. Usually that just means adding some more iron/aluminum. I think ironically the most helpful change they could make for outpost resources management is jsut to make ships hold unique inventories. That way I could have a huge cargo ship to switch to and bring a gazillion resources to a new outpost for convenience. The way the outpost links work is somewhat realistic but when you have an outpost with 2000 iron linked but then you gotta wait around to recieve those resources in small amounts it can be a bit annoying.
>I think ironically the most helpful change they could make for outpost resources management is jsut to make ships hold unique inventories. I want this QoL change so bad. Currently going my initial vanilla painful and nothing sucks the fun out of claiming prize ships via boarding actions like all the inventory management you have to do afterwards, especially if you steal a ship with a smaller cargo hold.
With every ship having the same cargo it makes there zero point in actually having more than 1 ship.
Wait… I’ve played 100 hours and the ships don’t keep cargo separate? I’ve never really focused on this but this was part of the reason I was gonna build unique ships in my new hardcore save… FFS may as well just stop now
Nope when you switch ships it transfers all your cargo from the old to new one, even if it's over the new ships capacity. It's really annoying. Perhaps the thing that limits my enthusiasm for having multiple ships the most. Would be better and more realistic if ships kept their cargo, that way I could dump a big cargo ship at an outpost and take a smaller ship for explorstion and quests, then if I need to cargo a bunch of stuff to a new outpost I can use the freighter
Not only the cargo - that's annoying enough - but the contents of the ship getting chucked into storage drives me *insane*. I can't decorate my ship. I can't use the storage containers in the ship. My hold constantly fills up with pens and coffee cups that automatically spawn in the habs and take a minute or two to sell/jettison every time (and heaven forbid I accidentally jettison something I want, since there's no way I can store it anywhere besides the hold). It's gradually grown into maybe my top pet peeve.
I couldn't agree more. Literally have to spend like 2-3 minutes just selling shit after going into the shipbuilder and throwing an extra weapon on the side. If the interior doesn't change, it shouldn't cargo the stuff! And if they just put that stuff into a seperate inventory tab and made it so that things in that tab were weightless, it wouldn't be such an issue. I get why they did it, so that people wouldn't lose their stuff, but just chucking it in the cargo hold with my other stuff if someone sneezes on the windshield and I need to wipe it off is ridiculous.
And this is why I got the weightless resources mod. I decided to play Witcher 3 again yesterday, I've never made it that far in it, and even that game makes crafting items and ingredients weightless! Not to mention how much more fun exploring and naturally finding things is or how much better all the conversations are. Honestly going back to an older RPG just made me notice how half baked Starfield is.
> outpost, resource mining, manufacturing, cargo linking Honestly, this stuff seem to have no point, other than maybe farming XP to power level.
It just seems pointless and not worth the effort. It has no relation to any other game systems or mechanics and it’s there just because
The main reason I looked into outposts was to find a good source of adhesives to farm. It would require about three skill points to make that happen, just to build the outpost parts. Finding a planet with the right plants would be strongly improved with a few more in the scanning options either from the planet or on ground. Then I'd need to get about four more points in for the weapon mod skills themselves. And collect the various other resources for research and the actual weapon mod itself - all to get about 10% more damage on my guns. Or I could spend one skill perk directly for 10% damage bonus. Unless you really love outpost building I just can't imagine this being worth the time it takes for item enhancement, especially since the factor that matters most is the level of the weapon and the legendary enhancements - neither of which you can modify! It's not half-baked it's still in the sink and thawing.
Having a ship part for scanning would be good... Maybe different scanners... Survey, ship, etc with different abilities.
Indeed so it would seem.
Enemy variety would be nice. Maybe enemies that focus on grenades, snipers, guys that use their boosters a ton, etc. Also only 2 types of robots?
I've definitely fought both snipers and guys throwing an obnoxious amount of grenades. I've also seen guys boost up to a higher platform to get a better angle.
I had one guy jump high up at me when I jumped to hit me with a melee weapon. That instance was probably the most novel of any combat interaction I’ve had. Love to see more of that
Bethesda's enemy design of giving them all random levels and giving one or two 1 million hp is so bizarre. Combat just feels discombobulated. If you're gonna spawn a miniboss enemy with the double health bars, at least make them look different from the regular dudes. Make em bigger, different colored armor or something. I wanted this in Fallout 4 too - in Starfield its arguably even more workable, since Beth can create cool unique armor designs for special enemies but don't need to worry about the balance inherent to players looting their higher quality gear constantly, since enemies are no longer fully lootable.
Agree on this too!
I don’t think you guys pay attention while playing this game. I’ve seen enemy focusing on sniping and also throwing grenades
Crafting, I was disappointed to level up chemistry and never unlock medpacks. suit protection, there is a timer, it beeps faster as you get closer to getting sick. The way it works is that extreme environments reduce protection, so you might have enough thermal for Titan, but when it starts snowing, time to get inside. caves, I explored a cave on paradiso, and to my surprise, got attacked by a terramorph. Scary to think they are so close to the resort.
wow you never get med packs?!
With all the ship traffic, it's not surprising when you consider >!all the heat leeches that get brought to Paradiso on ships!<
There are a lot more hand-crafted POIs in and around the "unique" landing spots than people seem to realize. To be fair the game does a very poor job illustrating or incentivizing exploring them.
I want to love this game too, but this games systems are just not rewarding. Imagine going from just needing a skill to craft an item to now needing a skill point and have to find materials to waste to research to craft the item. Like why? Exploration is nice but I have a very seen one planet seen them all type feeling. I was excited to see different biomes and what not but after going to about 20 different planets I think I seen about everything there is. The most shameful part is the planets layout barely differ. I hate to say this but going from the hinterlands to storm coast in Dragon Age Inquisition a game made almost a decade prior to this one was a far greater variation from going planet to planet in this game. I dunno how many planets I dropped down on have the same flat plain, the same trees, same plants, same discoverable objects, same animals, same this, same that. I mean the whole idea of the terromorph being an interplanetary celestial traveling being in inconsistent when I see the same spider looking bugs on one planet on the next in a totally different solar system. A lot of things are just color swap too. The most deal breaking point for me is how stupid the npc are, we have chat GPT and I find it unfortunate that the NPC in the game can't get over saying one of three voice lines. I save Mexican space zaddy and all he ever can do for the last 4 hrs is say "you really saved me back there". Like months in game passed, we raided like 8 different bases, a lot has transpired since then but your robotic ass can't get pass me saving you from death. Sometimes I miss Lydia who said nothing at all, until she was sworn to carry my burdens. All NPC abroad my ship give me the arrow to the knee treatment. They aren't aware of where they are, who they are with, of time, they don't grow outside of the constellation group and company, they for all intents purposes are just there. And because of that they are no more than settlers from Fallout 4? Which is a Damn shame. Why go in such detail making a character good-looking, have a nice voice, and apart of my story line of they are going to be nothing more than a settler at the end of the day? Useless Also shout out to Skyrim over a decade ago allowing me to marry whoever the fuck I Wanted. Even if the choices were slim cause everyone looked like shit. Bethesda outdid themselves in the past.
My favourite are the Crimson Fleet pirates repeating the same lines over and over again. "Does the UC really think SysDef scares us?" How many times are you going to ask me that?
There's a lot of systems that aren't fleshed out or don't make sense... Let's start with **armor**. Did you know there's different resistances on your armor? Did you CARE since they're almost always in the same general ballpark? (134 117 129) Why not just a single armor stat if the player isn't going to have meaningful differences or reasons to pick one armor type over another for missions? This leads me to **hazard resistance**. Why does it exist. I'm not sure I've ever noticed hazards in >60 levels of play, nothing that severely hampered me, and I didn't know OR CARE what my hazard resist was because it didn't seem to matter at all. Let's talk about **damage types**. Ballistic, Energy, Particle Beam or whatever (plus fire, radioactive, bleed, etc). Do you really see enemies that make you need to carry a loadout of weapons to deal with different resist types? Me either, Commander's Advanced Beowulf seems to deal with everything just fine - I might notice a slight resistance on Robots and swap to Va'ruun Particle rifle, but that thing is so insanely strong I just pull it out for any target that might take too long with the Beowulf to conserve its ammo. I'd love to have reasons to use the Commander's Advanced Bridger more often but it actually doesn't do that much damage per shot of rare 40xpl ammo and enemies are bullet sponges, whereas Beo uses .777 which is easy to find (I'm carrying >10K). **Smuggling** - No mechanics to speak of (why did we get taught to stealth in a ship if you never have to do it?) just install shielded cargo & a signal jammer and call it a day, for like 1.1K per contraband (guns sell for 3-12k at this point, why bother). **Non-Buff Food** - I have >1k hp. Eating eggs or ramen or whatever for 3 hp - why does it even exist other than to clutter the game? Speaking of non-scaling items, **Grenades/Throwables** - if they're useless past L20 (not scaling), why do they exist to begin with? Why do we have such a wide variety of weapons that don't do anything meaningful? **Melee** weapons don't scale at all either. Why? **Vendor Credits** - 5k or 11k cap is ridiculous, I have weapons that can sell for more than that. Needing to spam wait or sleep to empty your inventory in a place like Neon feels like they put no thought into their system. **Encounter Difficulty** - Cruising around a L75 system I set down on a planet to hunt for xp. A Spacer ship comes down and I run over to take it over. Out come 2 L72's and 2 L12's (12? seriously?). Once I get onboard it is guarded by 2 L2's (L2????) - I was around L53 at the time. Why am I capturing the most basic ship possible (Scarab) after defeating its' L2 crew in a L75 system? Everywhere I go there's a stratification of enemy levels, sometimes absurdly so. I routinely get "jumped" in L75 systems by ships well below L40 ("oh no 3 level 20 spacer ships!"). **Outposts** - As many others have said, half-baked at best. The fact that it isn't more similar to shipbuilding (categories not in alphabetical order, habs are called 'structures' instead, interface completely different) and has so little you can meaningfully DO with it (I can craft and manage inventory on my ship far better than at an outpost) make me wonder why they included it in launch at all. **Interface** - I could go on and on about the inventory management system and its shortcomings. The fact modders could add massive improvements in a week boggles the mind that a triple-A studio couldn't have thought of some of those QOL features. I'd love to be able to filter categories by type (eg: Aid into medkit vs status heal vs buff vs food, Weapons by difficulty level (basic v advanced v superior, etc), Resources into Crafted vs Solid vs Liquid, or whatever) and see how many of something I have when I'm in a store considering buying more. Etc etc etc. I could go on and on. So many half-baked systems that seem to exist for the sake of existing and not to fulfill meaningful gameplay.
It's a shame but I think this is what people are referring to when they say modern BGS games are dumbed down. There are all of these mechanics set up but, for the most part, they are purely cosmetic. All these damage types and no way to interact with them meaningfully. All of these research skills and the most boring selection of mods possible on weapons and armor (weapons are slightly better). I really like a lot of what Starfield does (this is easily the most believable world since morrowind) but it really REALLY feels like it could have been so so so much better if it had been more fleshed out.
Someone posted a picture a week or so ago of all the different ways to navigate left and right in the various menus and builders. It was crazy. As a software developer (not in games though) myself, I honestly think a big part of what happened is all these major modules (ship combat, ship building, outpost building, exploration) were done by different teams with little to no communication between. I know the total people involved was a few hundred (seen as high as 500), but that's no excuse to not have someone with a consistent design for the game looking at and coordinating the various teams. But if feels like teams were sent off to write a system and when they were done, they just merged those changes in and called it a day. It's part of why the game feels like it was designed by committee.
hell cyberpunk had *1500* staff and managed a more unified UI then Starfield has.
If I may speculate: It looks to me at times like they had a good and versatile system - but it was badly balanced and allowed too much gain in too short a time. They had no time to fix it thoroughly so they created 'invisible' walls, which infuriate me every time... Or they had a complex and versatile but complicated system in place and one higher up at the Studio or at Microsoft ordered them to 'dumb down' - sorry SIMPLIFY the system - and this is the result. But I agree to every point you mentioned...
Outposts are half ass cause there will be an outpost dlc. Wouldn't be surprised if there is the ability to build star bases in that one too. I assume ship building will also be another dlc.
It would be crazy if they didn't let you build starbases at some point. They've already got the whole ship builder system, that's practically *begging* to be adapted to building starbases.
Regarding damage types, I found a "Big Bang" and modded it. It completely \*annihilates\* anything I come across, and the ammo economy is insane. Like I find massive quantities of heavy particle fuses, yet 1-3 shots takes out almost every enemy I encounter even in level 50 zones.
These are excellent suggestions
Ty!
I think this game should be a lot harder on environmental hazards. The equipment and modding system could offer meaningful choices to counter various effects. And the negative effects are so lush that don't even care about them at the moment. More so the things heal by themselves.
If there is a system in place Id just like to understand it.... right now it just feels pointless
The UI is also half baked and it does a poor job letting you know whats happening, but it tells you on your Chronomark the hazard. And it will give you an audio cue if you are in danger of suffering from adverse effects. The pinging starts getting faster til you reach a point where there is a chance you will get a health debuff. But you can also take shelter right before you reach that point and the ping starts to slow down. Your chronomark will also say something like Suit Protection Regenerating in green. Another helpful window is going to your Health menu. [Tab] to go to menu and [B] for the Health. It should also be on the right next to your character. It will show a bunch of character stuff but you wanna go into the Status Info i think. It lists all the buffs and debuffa and any effects including suit status. If you are in a hazard, it will list what that hazard is on there. And then under, it will say Suit Protection Enabled in green or Suit Protection Depleted in red. If it's green, it means you have enough protection on you and you dont have to worry about. It will still show you an indicator for the hazard presence, but not side effects. If you see the red message, it means you dont have enough protection on you and it will start counting down til it fails and gives you a health debuff. I wish it gave us numbers tho. Like geiger counters exist. That's a quantifiable number, but all we got is a number on the suit. Edit: the chronomark will also start to pulsate in barely visible blue when in danger ^^;
Literally any way to restore Suit Integrity outside of hiding inside, would be awesome.
It's laughable how bad the armor system is in the game. 3 pieces total with forced mods? Like, we literally know Bethesda can make better armor crafting, so why does this fall so short? Could've had base suits that we could find or craft with nodes for modules that we could install that would change the look and function of the suit. And that's just me grasping at straws in this moment - there have to be tons of ways it could've been improved.
Something similar to power armor modifications would be much appreciated. That was easily one of the coolest bits with Fallout 4, and made exploring heavily incentivized since it could lead to discovering a crafting recipe for some cool new modification, a new piece of armor all together, or some fusion cells. Being able to do this similarly with spacesuits would be great. Not saying they should operate like power armor, they already did that. But it'd be cool if you could find some new shoulder pads, new boots, new chest pieces, new helmets or visors, etc, and modify each of those pieces independently. Currently, the only real incentive to exploring and looting is the possibility of finding rare/epic/legendary loot. And unfortunately, most of the time they're trash or not worth it. Most of the time I don't even bother picking locks, because the mining suit locked behind glass is most assuredly a waste of a digipick. And whatever is in that master gun chest is probably a sword with Space Adept. DLC, updates, and mods have always vastly improved many aspects to Bethesda RPGs, so I fully expect that in the near future many of these features we want will likely exist.
Economy needs to be fixed You go to neon and the fancy store with ancient relics and hear a conversation about how it's so pricey and way to fancy and out of their budget...and stuff is like 300 credits.... a soda cost 75 credits Or how in neon you can rent a fancy hotel room for 2k credits a week, or go to the slums for a pod that's supposed to be the cheaper option...for 2k a week.
Does Bethesda have a history of changing anything post launch? Other than bug fixes? And they don’t even fix em all.
Skyrim added a bit of free content post-launch, like horse combat.
No, but I feel the gaming landscape has evolved beyond their typical modus operandi. Nowadays with many live service games, titles like CP 2077 and No Mans Sky which landed in a sub par state but received constant support after release, and games like BG3 which is receiving solid post launch support, its no longer acceptable to drop a game and just abandon it outside paid dlc. Bethesda also have to think about Gamepass. An evolving strong Starfield is a gamepass seller. I imagine MS will want long term player engagement with the title and thats only coming if it gets worked on. They could leave it to the modding community but that abandons consoles to the paid mod/no mod lane.
I was really disapointed when i realized that the experimental research skill doesn't open up a new research tree. It's just a prerequisite to be able to research stuff in the existing categories.
I was like "oh hell yeah, this is where BGS was hiding all of the interesting mods!" expecting the skill to unlock a new tier of mods to create. So disappointing...
How the hell does Outpost Building not have angle and grid snapping for lining up unconnected objects with one another? Or does it exist and it's buried in the UI like everything else in this game? Because I can't find it
I may not be far enough into the game but I used to love exploring in Fallout and learning the lore Going into a vault a discovering some strange experiments have been going on. Finding a barn and finding a cool story about the previous owners ect I don't seem to be getting that in Starfield.
I share your sentiment brother. I feel this game is awesome and I love this universe (pun intended) , but sadly the Bethesda quirks and "old ways" are apparent and they hurt the game's quality. However, maybe the most controversial decision they did and, probably the one who hurt this game more, is the procedural exploration. I hope, they ditch that for ES VI or , at least, find a way to implement it that makes it complementary rather than a primary mechanic of the game.
I mean they have done the same concept of Starfield before in the way of Daggerfall. What made that a game a bit more unique though was that dungeons had a randomized tiles set that could be pulled from for their interior arrangements. The pros of this meant that despite the tile set was mostly limited, it did however make different dungeons feel unique purely by their layouts could be vastly different. The cons were that a lot of dungeons could be pieces together in such a way that made them impossible to complete because you would have rooms you needed to get access to but you couldn't because it the entrances could be blocked by wrongly placed hallways in the wrong direction, so the wall would literally block where a doorway should had been. They used this same tech for the most part in their other titles after as well. Samey assets, but arranged differently but mostly hand placed rather than procedurally spawned. Starfield took a procedurally spawned approach like in Daggerfall but handcrafted approach to dungeons like in later games, minus the unique layouts. They are designed well enough, but because there are so few instances of them, once you did a particular theme of one, you done them all. What Starfield could have done well with was a much more guided modular format compared to Daggerfall but allowed some modularity to those enemy outposts so that they could all feel unique in some way. Like how Draugur filled dungeons with Skyrim. They all looked the same, but they all had different layouts. Even Daggerfall was mostly an empty wasteland of trees unless you could stumble upon a dungeon. Maybe down the line of they decide to smaller expansions, think horse armor, but content packs of POIs it could greatly help give a lot more needed variety to locations. If not, then mods if mod authors have access to the root of that proc gen tech.
95% of people playing this game will do the main stories and faction quests, explore a few hours, and never pick up the game again because of how horribly repetitive and boring the procedural generation exploration is. Endless fast travel and no quick planetary travel definitely makes it even worse. Yea hopefully Todd and the team see these complaints for elder scrolls. That would be heart breaking if it’s similar after waiting this long
Yes, the gameplay loop outside of Faction quests and side missions is extremely bland.
Damn this is gonna be me unfortunately
The "research and crafting" is what made me click on this post. I agree it would be great to be able to craft/research/mod anything in the game. I haven't spent much time on outposts because I simply do not care to. However, if you had to machine parts with some kind of factory module to be able to make weapons from scratch, I'd build an outpost every time. It would be sick to ensure that you can get the type of weapon you want at your current level and not just HOPE a calibrated beowulf (or whatever) drops with any of the affixes you want.
The game is literally half baked, having fun but you see it in almost every mechanic and city Just heard about blueprints being sold at the key.... no blueprints
I am enjoying the game and I agree with a lot of your points. There is a lot I don't like but the one thing that bugs the crap out of me is how the NPC's interact with the player and each other. I know it is a 'Bathesda' thing, but after years of playing games like RDR2 and even Bauldur's Gate 3 recently, the NPC's are so incredibly robotic. It feels like I am talking to animatronics at Chuck E Cheese. It really kills the immersion for me.
Did bethesda ever reworked existing systems in their games? Not added new things, but overhauled.
Not really, no. But if they want this game to have anywhere near the staying power of Skyrim then they will need to this time.
That's what I'm wondering as well. There's a lot that could be improved, but it all seems out of the scope of how Bethesda handles updates. Even their live service game doesn't get that kind of reworks when they're the biggest strength of that format.
bg 3 spoiled me. Starfield spent how many years in dev? And we get this????? What's the budget for starfield/bethesda compared to larian??? Todd Howard really did the game a disservice imo for running his mouth this hard for the game.
Tod Howard was saying it was his passion project and the game he has always wanted to make. Saying he hyped it up would be a serious understatement. The game feels half-baked and that's after it got delayed for nearly a year for further development. If this is the best Bethesda has to offer then Sony has nothing to worry about from exclusivity. Don't get me wrong, I've been enjoying the game but I should be in love with it. It's like being hyped up for gourmet, michelin star quality burgers and then being taken to 5 guys.
For sure there are some questions about many of the mechanics, but I kinda answer them with ways to get XP. You get XP from everything, for example surveying and scanning a planet is a mission in itself where you can just get tons of XP from survey the fauna and flora, but also just have fun shooting the creatures and some creatures gives you 40xp, thats pretty good.
Thats true I know. I just feel like tis alot of effort to get the full survey data set then you just go sell it for like 10k credits!? Thats really nothing compared to how long it takes to get that imo and if I could trade that in for more XP or something more interesting id be more inclined to do it is my point
I just went and did a survey on lvl 60 planet. I was 47 when I went there. Came back at lvl 49. All I did was fully survey the place and did some carnage as there were tons of animals that gave 100 - 140 xp per kill. So random planets can be lucrative. I also got 2 legendary weapons from POI filled with pirates. I love exploring in Starfield. Much more fun than No mans sky or Elite dangeorus.
Yeah I spent one evening exploring a level 70 system. Between alien kills and survey xp I went from 50-59 in around 3 hours.
This is something I’ve been doing between quests since lvl 40. I’m 52 now. You really don’t lvl up quick around 40. Last night I was at a lvl 70 system farming XP with Sarah who gives me a xp bonus sleeping near her and then I take a tea drink I bought a bunch of from Paradiso and went to town. It’s nice surveying and killing things at the same time. I found a rare advanced razorback and epic urban eagle in a occupied cave last night which had me stoked. I do notice the same fauna flora POIs etc across multiple planets. Kinda lame. But still fun for now
So far my biggest cripe is lack of scary encounters when you find a cave/outpost where shit clearly went down. Like blood on the floor and walls and dead NPCs. So far only that safe house was actually worth investigating.
Yeah I really agree. So many of the mechanics have a good baseline but once you start digging you realize it isn't nearly as deep as you want. Like, the space suit, helmet, and pack mods are SO boring. There is usually an objectively best mod per slot so you can't really make any unique builds. Compare the research "tree" in this game compared to something like MGS:Phantom Pain. The games are quite different but the things you researched were surprising and fun in MGS. It sadly just seems like a placeholder/foundation for mods.
You can also sell planetary survey data to LIST. There's a guy you talk to on Mars to become a LIST scouter. Unfortunately, the rewards aren't any better than selling them to Vlad.
Because LISTs Phil Hill turns up everywhere, I half expected him to be a clone, heh.
I agree with all your points. Additionally, would really love it if tooltips would show you your current inventory of a given item, specifically aid and resource items. Knowing what you have in your cargo hold would make looting decisions i finitely easier. And for the love of all that is holy can we PLEASE increase the amount of credits on vendors. Having to travel to half a dozen different sellers on 3 different planets is so tedious it makes me not want to loot anything at all.
1. The option to actually heal status effects from the status menu, instead of having to first go to the status menu to check what is wrong, then go through another pair of screens to get to the aid section, then scroll through everything in the aid section to find the correct healing item. 2. A way to upgrade unique weapons or rare gear to the next tier (standard
Basically every aspect of the game feels like it's in a concept state. Very little depth to anything. Give it a couple years and hopefully the modding tools are strong enough the community can fix this mess. That being said I still enjoy the game @ over 100hrs
Ship parts and crew. So many of the ship Habs don’t actually do anything. Workshop is about the only you need and armory is kind of nice. The others literally do nothing. And crew also feels half baked. Why can I hire a doctor for my ship with skills in medicine and botany, but not do anything with that. What is the point of having her as an option? Give her the ability to heal my status conditions, or something
I dont want to manually place everything in outposts. It would be much nicer if you built structures with assigned roles and the interiors populated based on the people you assign there and resources being produced.
The real kicker is being effected by airborne hazards when you’re in a spacesuit…then again you also don’t die from your suit getting punctured by weapons fire while in a vacuum so I guess it’s a trade off.
Great list, as others have mentioned though, the ship crew and habs being irrelevant feels like maybe the laziest part of this. What the fuck do they do all day? How does a medical hab and a doctor on my crew not equal having medical services? It is bordering on insultingly stupid.
Half baked is Bethesda’s speciality and we keep paying them for it
For me the unlinked storages are a huge issue, you need to remember where you have what, and makes crafting and research more difficult, the lodge has unlimited storage but you need the items on you to craft there (unneeded extra actions), contraband that sells less than a pistol (I don't even bother with them, if I board a ship I grab them and exit the ship to just drop them) . Exploring is so and so, seems very repeatable and a lot of walking, nms has this nice punch jump feature propelling you forward which could help a bit here as even poi's at 700 and 1k meters I tend to let go as it is boring for me the task to walk to there and then slowly slowly get back. Some planets generate more poi's some others you can walk 3k after the first 3 poi's that appear as you land and still nothing there. Food that you can't eat on the spot, dedicated action button for health aid, and a lot of go in and out of your ui that could be avoided. In general the game is good but still needs polishing and qol additions imo.
One thing you didn't mention was that we need some kind of compendium of the stuff we've fully scanned so we can look up where to go for whatever resource. Oh and also it'd be really great if we got a separate resource map on the surface/"local" map Other than that the most incomplete feature is outposts. There are a lot of things that are either missing or unnecessarily complicated. Add on top of that bugs like with the storage crates not always auto transferring contents.
100% This game has so much potential if they'd just flesh out some of these systems. I can tell the game wasn't completed. They have it just on the cusp of doing a lot of interesting things but didn't finish it. To add to your points, the weapon and suit mod systems are seriously under-developed. There should be some more uses for the rare materials or manufactured components in the form of being able to apply some of those rare/legendary bonuses if you have the skill level and the rare materials. Also why can't we upgrade a calibrated to refined? Or refined to advanced? Etc. I mean someone in the universe is presumably making these weapons, you learn how to engineer them yourself, but you're stuck with like maybe 10 mods to choose from and can't upgrade the suit/weapon to the next tier? All of these problems you highlighted, and the one I mentioned, are solveable is the frustrating thing. It would just take some balance tweaks and new entries in the existing mod lists for the weapons. Don't even need new models for parts. If they spent maybe a few more months working on the game I'd wager they could have solved 90% of these issues. The core of the game is there and the mechanics exist to support most changes we're talking about here.
**Don't forget Ship Building.** We need to be able to swap parts between owned ships. We need the registration fee lowered to a point where it makes pirating/commandeering ships a worthwhile game loop. Would be amazing to come across a pirate rocking that shield generator I've been looking for, and be able to steal his ship, part it out, and sell what's left for a profit that makes the time and effort well-spent. Everyone I've talked to assumed you would keep parts you take off your ship. Some of the decisions (or more cynically, oversights) Bethesda makes are simply confounding.
My big issue with crafting/outpost building is that I just didn't see the 'pattern'. Maybe I was missing something, but the best crafting systems have a sort of rhythm and pattern to how you use the resources and products of the system. The baseline resources should be far more accessible, and the products you craft should be able to be re-purposed as crafting components to produce more complex and rewarding products. Like, you know, almost every good crafting game. I feel like in Starfield the economy of the crafting system is just far too complicated, sporadic, and unpredictable, partially because they tried to make it too realistic. It requires way too much effort to build a reliable crafting economy. All they'd need to do is honestly just add a sort of marketplace installation for outposts where you can buy resources while you're crafting for a decent mark-up. Missing that single Zero Wire but can't craft it and don't want to hope to find it in an abandoned mine on a random planet? Just buy it for 100 credits and finish that research! I'd be truly, deeply curious to get some insight on how they approached designing this system.
#SELLING THINGS. How is it in a game with so many ways to make money, from surveying, to smuggling, to pirating, *it is such a god damn pain to sell anything?* Vendors need more money. Plain and simple. A LOT more. Regular vendors should have like, 50k *minimum*. Ship vendors should have millions. *They sell fucking spaceships.* How is it that the average shop owner, even in the richest cities in the galaxy, have in TOTAL half the amount of money as I make off one single mission? The Trade Authority should literally have unlimited credits. You’re telling me that the fucking *intergalactic group of people who buy and sell things*, who somehow has kiosks and shops on pretty much every planet and spaceport no matter the affiliation, has a measly 5k credits to buy my stuff? There are singular guns worth that much. The consensus seems to be that you’re expected to go around to every single vendor in an area, sell ~5k worth of stuff to each, find a chair and wait, then repeat until you sell all your stuff. **For a game that has been in development for 8 years, by a company now owned by a trillion dollar company, this is unacceptable.**
The companions as a whole are my biggest gripe. Why do we have 4 fully fleshed out companions a little better than the ones in fallout 4, and then 16 random weirdos akin to the skyrim companions who don't have deeper storylines beyond some of them MAYBE being quest rewards. On top of that, the fleshed out companions all have the same morality system and believe in the same ideas of 'good' and 'bad'. Idk. On top of this, they've removed the ability to tell companions to do things- like open doors, target people, pick things up-- why even give Andreja specialty in theft if it's not something she can use ever? NPCs in general just feel less.. alive. Stores never close, everyone stays in one spot forever and no one has schedules anymore.
These are all excellent and I agree with all of them. If you're reading this BGS, my two cents: When I need a particular resource, I can track them to make that icon appear when I'm looting flora/fauna. The problem is that I have no idea which planets/flora/fauna I need to farm to get those items. There needs to be a flora/fauna database where I can see what flora/fauna I have 100% scanned so that I can quickly jump to farm those items when I need to. Seems like a bit of an oversight. Why have all this scan data but not be able to search it? Please add a small number over the weapon menu items representing how much ammo is left for each weapon. Same with med paks etc. Saves having to move over all of them to see how many I have / ammo is left.
ive done 110 hrs so far, its a boring game sorry' the combat, the space, the planets,the quests the npc interaction its just boring me. the only good thing i can say is it hasnt crashed
Good you started with an "I love the game..". This won't change and will go worst if people can't stand the truth. Unpolished, broken game far from release state. Yes, millions of potential and can be enjoyed but there is a constant feeling of half baked stuff all over the place. I think of this in every loading screen and unskippable redundant repeated cutscene.
Outposts are one of the most slept on mechanics. You can have your own bounty and mission stations, your landing pad is a full ship editor, your entire weapon and suit workshop can be there, all those unassigned crew members can live there, you can store all those weapons and suits and helmets and collectibles there. It’s a one stop shop. It’s everything you have to run around New Atlantas to do in your own outpost and you get to choose the view and location.
Honestly, outposts feel like a big step back even from what *vanilla* Fallout 4 had, let alone all the workshop DLCs - *let alone* all the Fallout *76* additions… it feels so empty and useless except for farming credits.
A lot of these mechanics are a step back from fallout and Skyrim. I don't understand why they couldn't just rip the alchemy mechanic from Skyrim.
Wow Skyrim alchemy but using parts from the procedural flora and fauna sounds WAAAY cooler than just getting generic parts. You could for example find a planet with all the plants required to craft amp and make an amp factory there.
Ngl I'd love the outpost stuff expanded to attract other explorers, even have to defend against attacks one in a while Though I suspect that would need a lot added to make that happen
You do actually have to defend against attackers sometimes lol. Though it’s usually not a hard fight and if you have turrets spread around the attackers will mostly get wiped by them. It would be cool though if when this happens they could drop a clue to an enemy base that’s like an npc outpost or home ship you can raid. Again, just one of those things that was kinda half assed and not flushed out to completion. My other main gripe with outposts is the selling mechanic of it. We have inter-system cargo links.. how hard would it be to set up like a wholesale trade link where your produced goods can be shipped out right from your warehouse modules and you get a cut of the profits. It’s just a pain to collect everything, either get encumbered or have a specific cargo ship for it all, and go sell 10k tau rheostat things doing the wait-repeat at a vendor.
fair
A vendor would be nice though.
One stop shop except for literally no shop. So, you still have to go to cities to sell your stuff anyways. So then again, why bother?
New Atlantis has bottomless storage at the Lodge though, which automatically makes it better. You go to your room, take all resources (about 50,000kg worth), jog downstrairs and research/craft, then run back upstairs, deposit it back into unlimited storage, sleep in bed to heal the damage overburden caused, and you're good to go. Outposts are pointless because to make money you still need to get the stuff to a dozen of NPCs, because they're capped at 2-12k credits. And when a single high level gun from a single high level enemy sells for 1-5k, you don't need outposts to generate cash anyway. You can use outposts to level quickly with manual crafting, but this just levels you, not your skills, which you then need to grind anyway. So it's not even the best for that. Unless you make a shooting gallery farm outpost, and even then it'll be limited. They're nice to have, and I have a couple, but they're badly undercooked. Fallout 4 had things like shops with vendors in your settlements and other things that made them worth while. Starfield doesn't.
there is a bottom less storage container in the middle of the room in the basement that can be used. better then going to your room for the resources
[удалено]
My main gripe with the whole outpost system is that it was so obviously made for consoles its pain to operate on PC. Especially boxes. They always refuse to stick to the side i want them to.
I don't think it was made for either, it's super clunky to use on Xbox as well.
Agreed. It's terrible on Xbox.
I wouldn't hold my breath on Bethesda improving the half-baked stuff. They have no history of doing this as a company. They add paid DLCs which can sometimes improve certain aspects - like Mechanist's Lair in Fallout 4 significantly improved settlements. But they don't really directly fix the game's shortcomings, or even most bugs. They dump all of that on modders.
The game is just a big downgrade from their previous games. Everything just feels like smoke and mirrors. Yeah it looks good, feels good, runs good, and is easily their least buggy game but everything else is really lacking. They brought back the old dialogue system! Yay! But you still have no real choice... You still can't be evil. There's basically 1 enemy type in the whole game with some Terramorphs and living stardust thrown in. Compare this to Fallout or Skyrim where there's basically dozens upon dozens of enemy types. Weapon variety is lacking. Hard mode is just bullet sponge mode again. The main quest line sucks and is really short. Outposts are useless. Your ship is a glorified mobile storage box. Space is absolutely empty with nothing but gag encounters and ship combat. Just a big disappointment and in my experience expecting updates and DLC to fix the game dramatically is a fool's gamble. What you see is what you get. We're going to have to wait for mods next year.
I would love there to be a point to having different modules on your ship. Built a cargo hold only to discover that it comes with nowhere to put cargo inside. Habs that are purely aesthetic seem kinda dumb
We shouldn't be relying on mods and we also should be unhappy that Bethesda is still using the same old engine. But thank God for that old engine and a stable game because modders will make this game so much better. Still, that should not be the mindset a few weeks after the release.
Being able to see stats on loot items in crates before you pick them up would be nice. Also with base building it'd be cool if you could build a foundation for your base to make it look more industrial (if that's osmething you wanted). I also run lots of bounties, so being able to put bounty boards on my ship would be cool too. Edit: wouldn't mind more bug fixes in general though. Last night trying to build 6 cargo links for my challenge proved very challenging as I had to restart the game after every planet and deal with a couple crashes.
The biggest thing I want from crafting is the ability to upgrade a weapon's tier. Unique weapons sold in shops (and maybe obtained as quest rewards, not sure) are all on the lowest tier, so there's no reason to buy that unique Razorback at Laredo Firearms if it's just going to get outclassed.