{ "success": 1, "query_summary": { "num_reviews": 100, "review_score": 5, "review_score_desc": "Mixed", "total_positive": 42457, "total_negative": 23150, "total_reviews": 65607 }, "reviews": [ { "recommendationid": "152483294", "author": { "steamid": "76561197978166658", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 3, "playtime_forever": 8034, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 8034, "last_played": 1698476755 }, "language": "english", "review": "I wasn't going to write this at first because I was so 50/50 on recommending it or not but after Bethesda started replying to negative reviews about why the reviews they've written are wrong I feel compelled to write something.\n\nI would not recommend this game for $70. I would recommend waiting until the game is fully released with all of its DLCs *on* *sale* to buy it. To me there was just not enough there to justify the price. It feels like a game that's only had a few years of development rather than seven and it's just kind of under cooked.\n\nThe game itself is just boring and uninspired. It's sterile and safe, built to appeal to the widest possible audience and not offend anybody. The characters sometimes have their shining moments but for the most part are bland and your companions are the worst of these offenders because they all have the same opinion on everything, they're all the same. The characters also don't look great, they have this dead eyed uncanny valley effect to them made worse by the skyrim style zoom in whenever they talk. \n\nThe quests themselves with the exception of a few, are so uninspired and boring and offer no moral dilemmas or require any serious thought. Compare the Ryujin quest line to the thieves guild quest line in Oblivion. With the thieves guild quest like there is a gradual progression which teaches the player not only how to be a thief but what to expect as far as how challenging a given assignment will be. Ryujin gives you three childishly easy quests that are so easy that they neither teach you how to be a thief nor give you an idea of what's to come then the difficulty meter suddenly jumps with the next quest to really quite difficult. Thankfully I happened to have enough levels saved up to dump some points into stealth otherwise I would have had to fail or just leave the quest, level up, and come back. This quest comparison also highlights another issue because Ryujin takes place in one of the saddest areas in the game, Neon.\n\nLocations. What is Bethesdas engine really good at? It makes it relatively easy to hand craft huge worlds. So what does Starfield do? They hand crafted a few locations and left the rest up to procedural generation of course!... Oh, well... the few hand crafted locations are great right? No? Oh okay then. New Atlantis is kinda cool but it's so small, it's close to having some literal and figurative depth to it with the well but that's barely explored. New Akila looks cool but again is far too small. The Key is not a city. And Neon... Oh Jesus Christ Neon...\n\nNeon is \"we have Nightcity from CP2077 at home.\" It's suppose to be this cyberpunk, blade runner-esque city rampant with crime and drug use. You basically get the DisneyLand (not even DisneyWorld) version of that. There is no crime to witness. There are no daily schedules like Oblivion npcs had. Just the same blank faces staring at you like your cock is out but you don't know it like all the other cities. They hype up a drug that can only be bought in a particular very talked up club in Neon and the club is one of the saddest things i've ever seen in a game. It's one relatively tiny room with flashing neon lights and out of shape spandex wearing conehead cosplayers gyrating uncomfortably. Keep in mind this is one of the few hand crafted locations, pretty much everything else is procedurally generated. You also can't even smuggle the drug out for any profit, it's worth the same no matter what planet you bring it to which doesn't make any sense. So locations are not great which brings me to exploration...\n\nExploration in Starfield is not great. In a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls game you can stumble upon countless interesting hand crafted locations and encounters in the game to the point that getting lost is a good thing. In Starfield you won't stumble upon anything because you fast travel from planet to planet, system to system. So to explore that has to be your express goal. Okay, fine. Except everything is procedurally generated so after you've done it once you're just going to see it copy and pasted on different looking planets. You're not going to find anything new in that cave because it's the same cave. You're not going to find anything interesting on that planet because it's going to have the same stuff as the last one, just with different plants around it and the grounds a different color. Just go system to system looking for content until you get bored with that. They made some decent random encounters that you can have while out in space but not enough of them, I've run into Grandma half a dozen times by now.\n\nAnd as far as things to do... the ending: Spoilers ahead obviously. It's another multiverse story. I understand 7 years ago when the game began development this concept wasn't quite as tired and cliche as it has become but good God am I sick of multiverses. The whole point of the game is to just replay it again, that's how it ends. I wish I was joking. It's message is basically it's not about the destination, it's about the journey, which is fine but the journey is not good... Unfortunately the game has, to me, no replayability until new content in the form of DLC drops. Which I may not even buy until it goes on sale because I just don't care. The story is that uninteresting. \n\nThis is not to say that everything about Starfield is bad. The gun play is actually pretty great though not worth it alone to buy the game. The ship building is actually really fun despite it being janky, probably some of the most fun i've had in the game. Some of the quests are fun like the UC quest line and other shorter, one off quests. They all have the same problems though: if they do offer any interesting ideas they do not fully explore them, they acknowledge them and that's about it. Things like the Well, tensions between the UC and Rangers, and the UC being a fascist state are all explored in only the most superficial terms. Bethesda has always had the problem of being wide as a lake but deep as a puddle and Starfield is unfortunately a prime example of how this problem has only gotten worse with every subsequent Bethesda release since Morrowind. \n\nI did enjoy parts of this game but I cannot recommend it for $70. It is so frustrating to see Bethesda finally get a crack at creating a unique IP that isn't another Elder Scrolls or Fallout game and they make this boring, uninspired whimper of a game. This game is all of Bethesdas bad habits, everything they're bad at and nothing they're good at, finely distilled. \n\nOne of the most frustrating things to me is that this game is mediocre, it's not bad like No Mans Sky and it didn't ruin Bethesdas reputation like CP2077 did on release so it's not going to get the attention it needs to be made into great game like those studios did. Chances are post launch will be handled very much like FO4 where we'll get a couple of bug fixes but not nearly enough and a couple of nickle and dime DLCS then one or two really solid ones. They have ES6 to get to work on after all. This means the game will probably not have a miracle come back like those games did and will probably always be mediocre, which I think is a shame because it does have good bones there's just no meat on them.", "timestamp_created": 1701219032, "timestamp_updated": 1701221899, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 8770, "votes_funny": 105, "weighted_vote_score": "0.965826630592346191", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "150756759", "author": { "steamid": "76561197968397832", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 8, "playtime_forever": 4504, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4504, "last_played": 1696786186 }, "language": "english", "review": "I played for 75 hours because I needed the dopamine fix. Looking back its a boring story, in a boring world.\n\nAlso I CANNOT get over the one mission I thought would be awesome. Finding a ship launched from earth 200 years earlier with the offspring of the original crew finally finding humanity... and they have the same computers with the same operating system on their ship as the rest of the universe. WHY WHY WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY\n\n*little update*\n\nYes I too find it funny that Bethesda AI bot thinks that after 75 hours I wouldnt know about smuggling, outposts, starship customization... yes i've done those absolutely dull and mostly pointless activities. Just cause there are a thousand boring planets to visit, doesnt mean I want to visit them.", "timestamp_created": 1700611077, "timestamp_updated": 1702091530, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 5596, "votes_funny": 275, "weighted_vote_score": "0.961670458316802979", "comment_count": 496, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1701179868, "developer_response": "Hi,\nWe appreciate you taking the time to provide your review and sorry to hear that you did not enjoy your time in Starfield.\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there! \nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "149696250", "author": { "steamid": "76561198061699977", "num_games_owned": 407, "num_reviews": 30, "playtime_forever": 1790, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1739, "last_played": 1699562208 }, "language": "english", "review": "A game about space in which your ship is nothing more than set-dressing for storage containers and an optional, extremely simplistic, arcade style mini-game where fly your ship in a line while holding the trigger long enough for every AI to blow themselves up by flying directly into your path. \n\nA game about exploration that delivers the thrill of opening your menu, selecting the fast travel option, clicking to fast travel to a star system, loading, then opening your menu, clicking to fast travel to a planet, loading, then answering the same NPC dialogue at every planet before you're treated to another loading screen to finally land on planet.\n\nAn immersive RPG in which every door in every colony is a loading screen and firing an infinite stream of bullets around citizens heads in the middle of the city is apparently just another Tuesday in America for the New Atlantians as they, completely unbothered by the frag grenades going off all around them, continue to partake in every colonists favorite activity -- walking aimlessly into walls.\n\nA game which offers swashbuckling adventures in which successfully stealing a ship is as easy as killing 5 brainless NPCs. The payoff is possibly the most accurate Gamestop trade-in simulator ever made. It costs 20k to \"register\" the ship, the ship only sells for 22k and once you've collected your pittance, you'll see the exact same ship on the market with an asking price of 500k from the guy that gave you 2k for it.\n\nA game bursting with content in which each outpost and mission are functionally the same as the first 10 you play and you'll be asked to do them all 100+ times with almost zero variation. Honestly, after the first 20 hours, Starfield practically begs you to save yourself 120GBs of storage space and forget it exists.\n\nA gripping story-line in which every character is as exciting as the bread isle in the grocery store and none of your choices matter. Seriously, exactly which brand of white bread you take home with you from the grocery store has more serious consequences than literally any decision Starfield asks the player to make. \"White or Wheat?\" is a more thrilling dilemma than anything in Starfield's narrative.\n\nA ground-breaking new IP that tries its hardest to be exactly like its sister IPs while utterly failing to deliver a fraction of their charm or greatness. This is easily the most disappointing Bethesda title ever made, including \"Elder Scrolls Blades,\" because at least no one cared about, wanted, or had any expectations for a mobile title. It genuinely feels like, at some point in development, the list of \"Good Ideas for Starfield,\" and \"Bad Ideas for Starfield,\" got swapped and they made the worst possible version of Starfield that could be made.\n\nThe absolute best that can be said of this title is that it really is one of the games of all time.", "timestamp_created": 1699350400, "timestamp_updated": 1699577871, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 6157, "votes_funny": 547, "weighted_vote_score": "0.942322969436645508", "comment_count": 586, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1699540262, "developer_response": "Hi there,\n\nThank you for taking the time to provide your review and we are sorry to hear that you were disappointed with encountering many loading screens while playing.\n\nWhile there may be loading screens in between fast travelling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created.\n\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nYou can send further feedback to development here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E\n\nNever stop exploring!\n\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "148947312", "author": { "steamid": "76561198089168523", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 5, "playtime_forever": 5964, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 5964, "last_played": 1696643479 }, "language": "english", "review": "I never in my life thought that I would write a negative review for a BGS game. The magic of BGS games is it makes you feel big in a big world. This game makes you feel small in a small world that is pretending to be big. That magic feeling of go anywhere, be anyone, do whatever you want, choose any side you desire is...gone. We love BGS games because the world, the freedom, and the lore makes up for whatever the main story lacks, nobody buys BGS games for the awesome story, we buy them for the awesome world, freedom, and lore. We get the games to make the worlds \"our\" worlds and that's the Bethesda magic this game doesn't have. This game just doesn't have any of that. It does in theory but not in practice. The story-line is very linear and forced. Your actions don't really matter at all. You can't help any faction win over any other in any kind of meaningful way, You cannot shape the game world. \n\nThe game world is small, pretending to be big. See big space, load screen into small area, but there are a lot of small areas, and load screens. The game somehow feels smaller than Fallout 4. In previous titles the story was an accessory to the game world. In this game the game world is an accessory to the story. \n\nIt's almost like they cared too much about trying to prove that they could write a better story and in the process lost sight of what people love about their games and lost the magic. This game is good for one, maybe two playthroughs and that's it. All of your companions are good guys, you're heavily forced into this constellation group, you're going to play the exact same story over and over, and over again with goody companions scolding you. The roleplay value of this game compared to Fallout or Skyrim is abysmal, like terrible bad. It feels like you're playing a poor man's version of Cyberpunk or mass effect. Is the main story better than fallout or Skyrim? Yes, a little in quality, but nobody gives a ---- about that in your games, you lose the freedom of shaping the game world to make it \"your\" world. It's a decent linear game set in a kinda open world with the illusion of choice and very little consequence. \n\nBethesda, you missed the mark and lost the magic big time. Give us back the open world setting full of conflict and warring factions where we have the freedom to be who we want and shape the outcome of the game to \"our\" liking, \"our\" way, making it \"our\" game. Nobody cares about your \"artistic vision\" of a mediocre, linear, repetitive story filled with cookie cutter nice person companions and no real consequences or world shaping. \"I buy BGS games for the main story\" said NOBODY EVER....and that, that never changes.\n\nIf this is the future formula for BGS titles then it's over everyone. RIP Bethesda magic.", "timestamp_created": 1698367653, "timestamp_updated": 1698367653, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 4510, "votes_funny": 80, "weighted_vote_score": "0.929651498794555664", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698931667, "developer_response": "Greetings,\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nWe are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty.\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nWe are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time yet to come. If you would like to provide feedback straight to development, you can do so here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E\n\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\n\nBest Regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146138594", "author": { "steamid": "76561197990951542", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 14, "playtime_forever": 10175, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4659, "last_played": 1696820474 }, "language": "english", "review": "77hrs in: \"finished\" starfield.\n\nNow, it has a NG+ mode which is intriguing, so I'm actually still playing it ... but the story actively encourages you to finish it multiple times .. and restart over and over and over, which is ... curious. So I'm onboard.\n\nI'm still on the fence about the title as a whole.\n\nEnjoying it? Yes, very much.\n\nBut it's hard to compare to previous titles (such as Fallout4) because I ended up playing those in a heavily modded state, which skews my memory of the raw, unmodded game.\n\nStarfield is currently raw and unmodded. It is an RPG. It's a story. It's not about exploration, space flight, or space trucking. It's an adventure. It has a story and you are a participant.\n\nThe Bethesda feel is here in spades, and that includes a clunky interface with awful/useless filters and options (gadamn Bethesda, will you grow up and modernize this already? jesus)\n\nThere are some bugs. Even after a year of testing, I have encountered a couple of showstoppers. There are some annoying quirks I am surprised did not get addressed in the 1 year of polish they went through.\n\nI think Bethesda has also backed themselves into a corner with their Creation Engine 2. It's essentially the same architecture as CE #1, with all the same limitations. The concept of 'cells' for building transitions, or area transitions is ... old. So to completely rebuild their engine, but to do so in a way that has a old, outdated architecture was a weird decision that I think will box them in for the decade to come. All of their future games may be \"better\", but they will all \"feel old\".\n\nMove into a building? loading screen.\nmove out? loading screen.\nboard ship? loading screen.\nTake off form the planet? loading screen.\nFly to another system? loading screen.\nFly to another planet? loading screen\nLand? loading screen.\nEnter the mining facility? loading screen.\nRoom inside the facility? loading screen.\n\nIt ends up feeling very much like a series of interconnected 'cells' where you get to do things before you transition to the next cell.\n\nAnd in a world where games have demonstrated the ability to transition more smoothly - even invisibly - I question why Bethesda has hung their hat on such an archaic way of doing things.\n\nIt makes their largest game yet feel \"small\". \n\nBlasting across the universe across multiple planetary systems is ... a loading screen. And I'm not talking about the ability to fast travel and skip everything, but simply going from A->B is ... a loading screen. Every time. \n\nThere is no planetary exploration and anyone who says otherwise is misguided. Planets are procedurally generated. You land in a cell. That cell has boundaries. That cell will be populated with a very limited set of re-used POIs (One day I got the same POI 3 times).\n\nThe novelty of the first exploration morphs into routine as you realize that basically you have landed in a medium sized procedurally generated terrain cell with half a dozen random things throw in it for you to walk to and explore. It feels like a sandbox a dev might make up as a proof of concept. \n\nWant to move a little further 'east' to explore more? take off (loading) click a new area, land (loading) and you get a new cell with a sprinkle of POIs in it. Enjoy.\n\nAnd far, far, far too much of the 'quest structure' are fetch quests, and I will fight anyone who disagrees with me on that. Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too many fetch-style quests. Heck, the main effing story is a fetch quest. Exploring a planet is a fetch quest, where you don't know where anything is and you might spend 2 hrs trying to figure out where that last \"1 fauna of 9\" is located ... while effing walking everywhere. Te - di - ous.\n\nI have always felt that Bethesda creates great experiences, and even better foundations for modders to go nuts with, and it's the modded experience that really makes it for me.\n\nHere Starfield absolutely and firmly falls into that camp. It is a great foundation for what is to come.\nDon't get me wrong, I have been enjoying the experience and I will continue to do so, but I am looking forward to mods buffing out the Bethesda quirks and menu annoyances, and hopefully some reason to build an outpost (because right now there isn't one).\n\nCurrently ... I think I will give this a 6.5 or 7 out of 10. Tops.", "timestamp_created": 1694468892, "timestamp_updated": 1694468892, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 3412, "votes_funny": 85, "weighted_vote_score": "0.928446412086486816", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145736237", "author": { "steamid": "76561198019226251", "num_games_owned": 503, "num_reviews": 29, "playtime_forever": 5002, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3320, "last_played": 1696736483 }, "language": "english", "review": "[h1]Space is the backdrop, not the playground[/h1]\nWith a title like that, you're probably expecting me to say Starfield was disappointing. This could not be further from my true feelings about the game.\n\nTo put it bluntly, Starfield's space travel is inferior to No Man's Sky or Elite:Dangerous. If you are looking for a game where you can live in your ship and chill with your crew as you drift towards your next destination, Starfield will not fulfill your dreams. Space is simply used as the backdrop for something much bigger than Bethesda has ever done before. That's not to say space travel isn't important. It is very important! But most of the time, space is used as a means of getting from one planet to another via fast travel/warping.\n\n[b]Space is just a loading screen... or is it?[/b]\nYou might ask \"Does anything happen in space, since it's just a loading screen?\" The answer is actually yes! Very often! During warps, the game will run a check of your route to see if you would run into any random events. If so, you will be sent out of the loading screen and back into space. You can interact with the random event, or simply begin fast travel again. In my opinion, this simply cuts out all the slow moments of space travel and highlights the fun parts. Although, there is a catch. To trigger the route check, you will have to already be in space. Make sure to take off in your ship whenever you want to fast travel. In the case you forget to do so, random events can still happen but only at the destination of your warp.\n\nThe vastness of space and the insane number and variety of planets are the main attraction of Starfield. If you are familiar with Bethesda games, walking and talking is a large majority of your time. This is no different in Starfield, as you explore hundreds of unique locations (not even counting thousands of procedurally generated), and meet all kinds of friendly, not-so-friendly, lunatic, suspicious, and funny characters along your journeys.\n\n[b]RPG is back, but different[/b]\nStarfield is a game that arguably outshines previous Bethesda titles. The scale is larger, with no sacrifices to the mechanics they've had in the past. In Fallout 4, Bethesda simplified decision-making and the RPG elements in favor of improving the gunplay which leaves the game feeling more like an adventure-shooter than an RPG. Even Skyrim could be argued, with the removal of leveling stats, reduced how much you could create your perfect character to roleplay as. In Starfield, stats/attributes do not come back. But in its place is an interesting return to the RPG roots.\n\nWhile you don't have stats or attributes in Starfield (such as Strength, Intelligence, Luck, etc), it presents a different way to represent and express the kind of person you want to play as. Your background, chosen traits, leveled skills, and factions you've joined properly and consistently take control of almost every situation the game puts you in.\n\nSkills are another new alternative to stats. New dialogue options will be available based on what skills you choose to level. Sometimes you need to let someone know you're sneakier than other people, or that you have experience in cyber security. People can even recognize if you're a well-trained pilot or gunman.\n\n[b]Who you are matters[/b]\nIn the beginning, I thought this was a mere farce- an illusion. Perhaps they simply placed many opportunities early on, to show off roleplaying elements, to trick me. There's no way I would be able to use my background as a Space Scoundrel or my allegiance with the Crimson Fleet for more than just a couple dialogue options, right?\n\nAfter completing three major questlines, dozens of side quests, and the main story quest, I've invested more 50 hours into Starfield over four days- an average of 12.5 hours every day. With confidence, I can report that the choices I made at character selection as well as the choices I've made during the game: who I allied with during a side quest, the factions I've decided to pledge allegiance to, the people I've killed or the people I didn't kill. All of these things felt like they mattered in countless dialogue choices. I was never worried that the character I built did not matter- the opportunities jumped at me constantly. Many times I even had to choose between the different things that defined my character in the same interaction.\n\nOne moment that really impressed me was that factions are actually consistent in Starfield. In previous Bethesda games, joining a hostile faction did not always guarantee your safety against its members. Some used excuses such as \"We may be the same faction, but all of us follow different rules.\" It was a sad attempt at passing their programming (or lack thereof) for normally hostile NPCs recognizing the player as an ally. In Starfield, this is not the case. \n\nMinor spoilers in this paragraph. On my first playthrough, I joined the Crimson Fleet, the most notorious pirate crew among the stars. In an early mission during the main story, I had to rescue a friend from the Crimson Fleet. I entered their lair where they were holding the hostage, ready to enter a shoot-out. To my extreme but pleasant surprise, none of the pirates shot at me. I could walk up and even begin conversations with some of them. They recognized me as one of their own, and did not blink an eye at either me or my companion. I was able to reach the bottom of the lair without any conflict, and the game even properly acknowledged it. Minor spoilers end here.\n\n[b]The rest of the game? Gunplay, crafting, and more[/b]\nI started with the space exploration and RPG elements because I believe they are the most controversial and sought-after pieces of information. The rest of the game, though? Almost entirely improved over Fallout 4. The gunplay is chef's kiss (for a Bethesda game). Piloting a ship is reminiscent of No Man's Sky. Ship-building is extensive, but quite easy to start playing around with. The crafting is still simple and satisfying. Much of crafting is still locked behind skills, just like Fallout 4, but Starfield did not feel as difficult to reach as FO4 did. The handcrafted maps are arguably their most detailed and beautiful designs yet.\n\nThe balance has been very adequate for me personally. I could feel my character getting stronger, more skilled, but also enemies always provided a decent challenge. Nothing was too easy or too difficult- I never had to change difficulty from Normal mode. I've heard complaints that later on, enemies get very bullet-spongey, but I simply have never had that issue and I mainly used handguns. While there is an enormous variety of skills to pick from, leveling is fast enough where I never felt like I needed to save my skill points (as some skills have requisites to level). If I didn't meet the requirements yet, I simply leveled a different skill and waited for next level to try and improve the other skill.\n\n[b]It's not perfect[/b]\nIt does miss some things their previous games did as well. But it's a Bethesda game through and through. Beautiful environments, fantastic immersion and storytelling. Fulfilling the fantasy of living in another universe, especially in space. Starfield has become a game I'd love to play again and again. Bethesda has restored my trust in them, even after the launch state of FO76 and the reduction of RPG elements in FO4. I look forward to future updates, the DLC, and TES 6. I hope you can play Starfield, come to your own conclusions, and hopefully enjoy the same things I was able to as well.", "timestamp_created": 1693958445, "timestamp_updated": 1695876924, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 7770, "votes_funny": 175, "weighted_vote_score": "0.919781625270843506", "comment_count": 291, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "148090053", "author": { "steamid": "76561198026996683", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 5612, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 5612, "last_played": 1695585499 }, "language": "english", "review": "[h1]A Major Step Back[/h1]\n\nStarfield is not a game worth paying for. At every level of game design it falls flat. For example:\n\n[b]Gameplay[/b]\n[list]\n[*]The gameplay loop is very empty. It's almost entirely fetch quests that take you to uninteresting locations, locations that cannot be traveled to in any other way than fast travelling, which itself is tedious and functionally a loading screen.\n[*]Quests can usually only be completed in one way, there is no variation in the ways you can approach a situation.\n[*]Combat is simple and unrewarding. The gun play is passable, but that is the only viable build. Melee exists, and that's about all that can be said about it. Stealth exists for the first shot fired, and excluding a specific questline, has no other purpose; it is simply a modifier to the above gunplay.\n[*]Enemies scale to your level, there is no sense of progression. Any likewise leveled weapons only exist to keep pace with the increased health of bullet-sponge enemies. Never will you feel like you are more powerful, or that you are fighting a different fight than the last.\n[*]There are four kinds of enemies, humans, robots, fauna, and turrets. Humans are either pirates, spacers, or fanatics. Robots behave like humans, and all variants behave exactly the same way, requiring no change in methodology than run/shoot. Fauna behave like animals, and outside of one questline, never actually have to be engaged.\n[*]Combine both points above and you have one kind of fight, all of the time. There is no variation in combat whatsoever.\n[*]Space combat is passable, but all ships behave the same way. You can build something tanky or something maneuverable, but it makes little difference in the fights themselves. Ship building is mostly an aesthetic exercise.\n[*]There is no point in the crafting or outpost building mechanics. They give you no real advantages, its nothing but menu hopping, and are completely unnecessary for either survival or integrated quests. Were it not for the activity prompt telling you that it exists, you would never notice it or think you've missed something (you haven't).\n[*]Regarding main story abilities, the process for acquiring them is likewise extremely tedious, repetitive, and unrewarding.\n[/list]\n\n[b]Exploration[/b]\n[list]\n[*]The galaxy is extremely empty. Each planet, including the major \"settled\" planets, are simply procedurally generated empty spaces. You have to \"fly\" to them, which just consists of opening the map, cycling though the star-system-planet menu, and fast travel to them. There is no way to travel to them manually, and nothing to see along the way.\n[*]You will occasionally have a random encounter in the orbit of the planet as you arrive to it. This is often just ship combat with pirates, but you will occasionally meet a friendly ship with two or three lines of dialog. That's it.\n[*]There are four major cities, and an equal number of minor settlements. These are very small, and likewise devoid of life or points of interest. One city is a giant airport terminal. One city is a western themed potemkin village. One city is a hole in the ground. The only interesting city is Neon, the cyberpunk oil platform. The minor settlements are a few empty buildings that only exist as destinations for one or two fetch quests.\n[*]The outpost dungeons are repetitive, literally copy and pasted locations that have the exact same loot, enemies, and written notes. If you've visited one type, you seen all there is of it. There are maybe seven different types.\n[*]The loot is leveled and even \"unique\" weapons are visually and functionally identical to their base models. There is no point in collecting them, or displaying them other than their name.\n[*]All this works out to make exploration an entirely unrewarding experience of sitting though take off/grav jump/landing cutscenes and menu hopping in between, with nothing to show or do at the end of the time wasted doing this.\n[/list]\n\n[b]Quests, Characters, and Writing[/b]\n[list]\n[*]There are a few good questlines, with an emphasis on few. Some are interesting, but are mostly padded out by intervening fetch quests. While those few are fun at parts, their biggest effect is highlighting how boring and meaningless other \"major\" questlines are. Thoughtful storytelling and interesting plots were possible, but reserved for only a handful of questlines. The main quest is not one of them.\n[*]Side quests that aren't fetch quests or at least are well disguised fetch quests can also be interesting, but often are not. You can stumble on a few of these through exploration.\n[*]The number of quests is woefully small. It cannot be more than twenty, if you don't count each and every objective as individual quests. This compounds the feeling of emptiness. In freeform exploration, there is nothing to do. In major hubs, there is very little to do.\n[*]There is no faction lockout, no allegiance or faction system. You can do everything in one playthrough. There is nothing that would make you want to replay the game once you've done all there is to do; no trying a new build, no exploring a new faction. This is especially ironic at the end of the game.\n[*]The characters all share basically the same worldview, and there is no tension between them or the player character. There is always an objective \"right\" choice, and an objective \"wrong\" choice, and no benefit to choosing the wrong choice.\n[*]The writing for the characters is basically one dimensional. Few characters will be remembered after you've interacted with them. Once you've resolved their problem of having left their coffee mug in another star system, they stop existing as anything other than a faceless NPC. Once or twice you will be recognized as someone who did anything, for a single line of dialogue.\n[*]Each story is entirely self contained. There is no wider impact on the galaxy writ small, and when a questline is over, you will be unable to tell if you ever completed it at all. There is no sense of life, response, or consequence to your actions.\n[*]Procedurally generated quests are go here, grab that, go there, shoot that, or haul resources for me. These usually take you to one of the given set of outpost locations, which, when combined with the painful lack of variety of locations, means you will be going to the same place over and over again.\n[*]Without spoilers, the completion of the main quest will make each and every above point painfully exaggerated.\n[/list]\n\n[b]Conclusion[/b]\nStarfield is a major step back not just from the general gaming industry, the RPG genre, but Bethesda themselves. It is entirely unclear what was being done during the exaggerated development time and with all the money spent on it. There is less to do than in Fallout 4. There is less to do than in one hold of Skyrim. There is less to do than in independently developed early access games. When compared to other games that have released not just around the same time, but years prior, and from Bethesda themselves, it is insultingly disappointing. Any modder looking to \"fix\" the game would better spend their time developing a new one from scratch, there simply isn't enough to build off of to make it worthwhile.\n\n[b]As a lifelong Bethesda fanboy, It has broken my heart to write this, but I do it so you may be spared. Play anything else.[/b]", "timestamp_created": 1697133034, "timestamp_updated": 1697133198, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 4393, "votes_funny": 43, "weighted_vote_score": "0.917959630489349365", "comment_count": 438, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698760170, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are sorry to hear Starfield didn't live up to your expectations.\n\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nQuests were made to be completed in several ways. You get to decide who lives and who dies at crucial points of the story, as well as how to go about meeting any given objective.\n\nIf you are looking to feel \"OP\", we recommend looking at completing the quests that grant you special powers to go along with your heavy weaponry. If you don't feel unstoppable then, we are not sure you will feel like that in any game!\n\nWe recommend playing around with ship building and increasing the difficulty you play on if you find it underwhelming. Its a completely different experience playing a fast ship that can dodge projectiles vs a slow tank of a ship that is shooting at enemies in a shield depletion race.\n\nOutpost creation is helpful for those who want to be able to craft resources or to proceed with building an area where advanced research can be done like Alien breeding. You will always gain lots of XP for your production progress as well as the ability to continue to expand your own outpost.\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\nNever stop exploring!\nBethesda Customer Support\n\n" }, { "recommendationid": "148032339", "author": { "steamid": "76561198011352946", "num_games_owned": 268, "num_reviews": 8, "playtime_forever": 4205, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4205, "last_played": 1695216711 }, "language": "english", "review": "At first it's mind numbingly boring, then for a few hours it picks up and wow you'll never do everything this game has to offer, then a few more hours later you realize you've done everything this game has to offer and all the points of interest are copy paste. \n\nHow is everything a direct downgrade from Skyrim and Fallout 4? Very disappointing, Bethesda. Very much so not worth $70.", "timestamp_created": 1697040429, "timestamp_updated": 1697040429, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 1494, "votes_funny": 13, "weighted_vote_score": "0.911078989505767822", "comment_count": 56, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1697062305, "developer_response": "Hi,\n\nWe appreciate you taking the time to provide your review and sorry to hear that you did not enjoy your time in Starfield.\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. \n\nBuild your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nTo provide feedback for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\n\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "153324227", "author": { "steamid": "76561198027020532", "num_games_owned": 515, "num_reviews": 29, "playtime_forever": 2508, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2508, "last_played": 1702045056 }, "language": "english", "review": "Starfield is a game that has an excess of nothingness.\nAn open world RPG that is so overstuffed with meaningless content that the seams are starting to split and the empty calories are spilling out.\n\nStarfield is big, both physically requiring 125 GB to install, but also in activities.\nPlanets, cities, missions, NPCs, combat, research, space travel, space combat, space research, ship building, base building, relationship building, main story, side stories, factions, jobs, and cooking.\n\nAnd all of it beautiful, grand, silent, serine, action packed, and ultimately unfulfilling.\nA tremendous lack of focus makes each individual part of the game hollow.\n \nIn the modern Glittering Era of entertainment; Starfield is another spec of shine, so concerned with bland mass appeal that it makes any individual gameplay mechanic as empty as the space we’re flying through. \n", "timestamp_created": 1702237688, "timestamp_updated": 1702237688, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 1808, "votes_funny": 19, "weighted_vote_score": "0.910551190376281738", "comment_count": 29, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "154440607", "author": { "steamid": "76561198070854572", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 8131, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 8131, "last_played": 1697599302 }, "language": "english", "review": "We've been hearing for years that Starfield is Bethesda's passion project, a game that they've been wanting to make even before Morrowind came out.\n\nIf this game is Bethesda's passion project, then they've lost their passion.\n\nPlenty of reviewers are dragging Starfield for its technical issues. While it's true that Bethesda should not get a free pass on that stuff just because \"lol, they're Bethesda\", I was prepared to accept a certain level of jank if it meant experiencing an inspired world. What really kills this game is that the setting itself is deeply, relentlessly boring. It's a haphazard collage of space frontier tropes. And you know what? That could have been fine. Tropes can be effective when wielded in service of a strong creative vision. But here, there is no greater vision. There is nothing, and I mean *nothing*, to this setting beyond the tropes that serve as its foundation. \n\nFor our major powers, we have a vaguely Western-flavored federal government, a vaguely Texan-flavored frontier alliance, a vaguely Eastern-flavored corpocracy, some scrappy pirates, and some mysterious religious zealots. There is nothing meaningful to know about any of these societies beyond whatever pictures of them you just conjured in your head. If you have an ounce of creativity, the pictures in your head are probably more detailed and compelling than the crap that made it into the game. It almost seems like these factions have been consciously sanitized, as if someone went through the first draft and removed any cultural or aesthetic identifiers beyond the baseline of \"Hey, this frontier guy wears a cowboy hat, likes guns, and has a bit of a stubborn streak!\". You'd think that the writers would be forced to come up with some creative quirks just to explain how these people adapted to their alien environments, but even that minimal level of flavor exceeds the bounds of Bethesda's vision. \n\nThis aggressive blandness persists at every scale. We have planets that run the gamut of environmental conditions, but none of them impose meaningful gameplay changes (aside from gravity's effect on jump height, which is basically the lowest hanging fruit possible), inspire variations on the ten or so prefabricated structures that we can encounter, or even have much influence on which of the handful of flora, fauna, and feature assets can populate the game's tragically samey landscapes. One of the foundational aspects of space exploration as a genre is exploring how extreme conditions shape strategies and societies. Starfield cares so little for this relationship that it borders on immersion-breaking. I expected that Starfield would rely on repeatable assets to some extent, and that exploration would lose its shine once you've exhausted the list of things to encounter. What I didn't expect was just how short that list would be, or how sloppily curated it would be in the context of the game's environments. \n\nAnd then there's the writing. Oh goodness, the writing. The best thing I can say is that, on a micro scale, it consists of grammatically correct sentences which could plausibly be uttered by a sane human being. Beyond that, it's shot through with the same listlessness that permeates every other aspect of the game. I'll present two case studies.\n\nI came upon a sidequest where an unknown vessel was orbiting a resort planet. Investigation reveals it to be a generation ship sent from Old Earth, back before humanity developed FTL travel. They don't take it well when you explain that their new home has already been claimed by Space Epcot. The captain asks you, some random hobo who just happened across them, to negotiate with the corpos on their behalf. They send along no observers or advocates, and don't even think to request a direct line of communication. The corpos offer you three options: blow up the ship and kill the colonists, coerce them into indentured servitude, or pay out of your own pocket to install an FTL drive aboard their ship so they can find another planet. There are no other options to advocate for the colonists. At no point does either party express any sort of cultural interest, or even basic curiosity about the other. There are no potential interactions with other factions or alternate arrangements for compensation, despite it being well-established that everything to do with Old Earth (down to the meanest paperweight) is treated as an invaluable piece of vintage history. The situation has the setup for a potentially game-changing historical event, and the most interesting thing Bethesda can squeeze from it is \"Corpos bad, are you willing to pay to feel better than them?\" If a 15th century carrack made landfall on the shores of Florida carrying the long lost descendents of Ferdinand Magellan's twin brother, I don't think Disney World's first reaction would be \"Shit, they want our land, pump 'em full of lead!\"\n\nSecond case study. There's a plotline where you infiltrate the big pirate faction on behalf of the feds, right under the nose of their cunning leader and his paranoid, security-obsessed XO. So how do you stay in contact with your handlers during this delicate deep cover op? By PHYSICALLY FLYING FROM THE PIRATE BASE TO THE FEDERAL FLAGSHIP every time you complete a mission. Holy hell, are dead drops not a thing in this universe? Are the feds actively trying to give you away? During these OpSec-destroying excursions, you'll have the opportunity to turn in supplementary evidence on the pirates' many crimes. This evidence comes in the form of incriminating tapes that are just laying around in the general vicinity of the perpetrators. None of them, including the canny, wary pirate leaders, will raise objections to you stuffing said tapes into your knapsack in full view of everyone. While turning in these tapes, you'll speak to the federal XO, who repeatedly inquires as to your impressions of the pirate leader. You can either lie and say he's a nosepicking vagrant, in which case you'll be praised for your patriotism, or you can accurately inform her that he's an intelligent and charismatic figure who poses a real threat, in which case she'll chew you out for the betrayal of respecting the enemy. The questline sustains this level of cartoonishness right up to the end, where the defeated, betrayed pirate leader tells your narc ass that he's proud of you because deep down, you're the greatest pirate of all. A generous reading could paint this horrorshow as a satire of Hoover's CIA or something, but I'm not feeling very generous at the moment. \n\nThe common thread between these two cases is apathy. These scenarios have the potential to be so interesting and memorable, and the writers probably have the chops to deliver. But instead, they just... settle for mediocrity. They're writing with the expectation that they won't be held to a high standard. Situations don't have to make sense, commentary doesn't need to be thoughtful, narrative potential doesn't yearn to be realized. Dialogue is just there to point the way towards more gameplay, so write a few words and move on to the next contrivance. More and more, I feel like Bethesda views their games as theme parks; they're not writing a story, they're building a bunch of rides and doing the minimum necessary to shuffle people from one to the other.\n\nAnd now, the rides aren't even fun. Starfield uses humdrum, recycled assets to simulate a humdrum, recycled setting. None of its components do anything to support each other: not the worldbuilding, not the environments, not the gameplay, not the writing. Every part of this game talks past every other part, and if you care to listen, you'll find that they're all just rambling drunkenly about the weather. The result is a joyless, colorless mess memorable only for the lengths it goes to insult its players. Bethesda can do better than this. But they probably won't, because they don't think they have to, and apparently professional shame isn't enough of a motivator for them.", "timestamp_created": 1703585952, "timestamp_updated": 1703585952, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 555, "votes_funny": 16, "weighted_vote_score": "0.903497934341430664", "comment_count": 21, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "147081201", "author": { "steamid": "76561198044870434", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 3, "playtime_forever": 15364, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 10989, "last_played": 1698116060 }, "language": "english", "review": "I rate Starfield 5.5/10 (An ok if mediocre BGS game that has its moments, but feels like a regression in quality from previous BGS titles).\n\nStarfield as an adventure/RPG is quite poor. Starfield as an FPS is fun. After I finished the bulk of quests, I'm just turning my brain off and enjoying the FPS gunplay, combat in low gravity/zero-g.\n\nThat being said, so many features of Starfield leave you scratching your head thinking, \"really?\" No brainer QOL features from previous Bethesda titles are absent, and the gameplay features they DID use in Starfield are weak/poorly thought out/shoe-horned in/rushed for the deadline.\n\nI'm guessing it was top-down decision making mismanagement that made Starfield feel like a regression in quality instead of playing on strengths found in prior Bethesda games. \n\nThere's EM weapons, ship's brig components, contraband/ smuggling system that FEELS like they should have had greater functionality and purpose, but someone met with the dev team for those systems and said \"we gotta ship this game, send it as-is.\" And so you're left with gameplay mechanics that are TECHNICALLY there... but are functionally worthless and don't add to the game in a meaningful way.\n\nThat's just one example. I really think the lead developers/project managers made having 1000 procedurally generated planets THE CORE concept of the game, Which means that the rest of the gameplay mechanics are half-baked because they spent the majority of development on having 1000 procedurally generated, uninteresting planets, rather than focusing on exploration/worldbuilding/environmental storytelling, which were the STRONGEST parts of previous BGS titles. There's little reward for players to actually explore!\n\n\n- Starfield is a mile wide and an inch deep.\n\n-Story, quests & lore feel half-hearted, cut short for time and bland. \n\n-Bethesda created the lore for this game, and chose the most boring time to start your adventure. Colony wars are over! No mechs or armies with weaponized aliens. \n\nThe citizens, guards, etc.. from the 2 main factions complain about each other but they're at peace. You can complete all the quests for one faction, join the next and do all the quests, and join the space pirates and do all their quests and it doesn't effect the story at all! I thought BGS would have learned what game mechanics from their previous titles worked well that players enjoyed and implement them in Starfield. I had hoped we'd get something like Skyrim or F:NV where there'd be consequences to your choices (Gain positive reputation with a faction that puts you in poor standing/locks you out from faction questlines and other locations under a faction) but the game world feels Anaemic and unresponsive to Player actions and decisions.\n\n -game systems that seemed to have some purpose somewhere along development but were made completely redundant by full release\n\n (crafting, cooking/food, smuggling contraband,shipbuilding, resource collection/mining, colonies, spaceship fuel/grav jump range, stealth)\n\n- more than half the skills are unnecessary, and quite a lot of grinding is required to level up skil\n\n-Poor U.I \n\n-Powers are pointless; I only use \"personal atmosphere\" to give myself oxygen because I'm constantly over encumbered hauling only resources and loot to and from my ship\n\n-you'll spend an hour in real time trying to sell 40,000 credits worth of loot to 6 different merchants who only have 5000 credits on hand (and the trade authority vendors, who have 12,000 credits). Selling 3-4 guns will give you every credit the vendor has on hand. You'll Have to find a bench to sit on, wait 48hrs for them to restock. And unlike previous games, a maxxed out commerce skill does NOT give you the option to invest a sum of credits with a vendor to increase their buying capacity.\n\n-Say you want to use ammo as a second currency with vendors; you buy up all the ammo a vendor has, and sell loot to get your credits back. The U.I doesn't speed up the selection of the quantity of ammo/meds/resources you wish to sell like previous Bethesda games, so you can hold down the left thumbstick for half an hour to sell the amount that'll clear the vendor of their credits, or you can give them ALL of a stack of ammo/meds/resources saving you time, but giving the surplus value away to a vendor for free.\n\n-I'd like to use the Bridger grenade launcher, except only some gun shops carry 40mm ammo and between 3-25 at any time. So I spend a bunch of time sitting on a bench and waiting 48hrs for them to restock, buy out all the 40mm and wait another 48hrs. Bleh\n\n-It feels pointless to explore planets. No matter where you land, you're always 500m from the exact same abandoned robotics lab, mining outpost, frozen research station. Seriously, for a 2023 title, I know the layout of every dungeon because there's only like a dozen of them! Enemies spawn in the same places everytime, loot is found in the same places, the 3rd locker down on the left always has credsticks on its shelf.. it's pathetic. Skyrim had hundreds of unique dungeons within one province of Tamriel and STARFIELD with hundreds of empty planets and moons only has a dozen or so dungeons that are found on every planet and moon. You'll know every time where enemies spawn, where keycards spawn, where safes and contraband spawns...\n\n-research base\n-underground frozen research base\n-mining facility with vats of lava\n-the tall research base with the elevator\n-abandoned robotics facility (with notes on how the staff were using the robots to deliver coffee)\n-deeper mining facility\n\n-you'll face either spacers, crimson fleet pirates, ecliptic mercs, or var'uun heretics at any of the dozen locations. For all intents and purposes, they are completely the same (behaviour in combat)\n\nWhats the point of a big open world if there's nothing interesting inside?\n\nIt feels like I bought a tall glass of juice but the waiter drank 75% of it before watering it down and giving it to me for $90 CAD ($110 after tax)\n\nIn conclusion, this is a step down in quality from Bethesda compared to previous titles. Bethesda took the best gameplay mechanics from their previous games, removed the QOL mechanics and half assed shoe horned the others into Starfield. It feels like the game is underdeveloped, rushed to completion, overhyped, and absolutely disappointing for a 2023 title from a triple A game studio.\n\nI'd wait a year or two for the game to go on sale.. it wouldn't feel right to pay more than $30 for the game (don't spend $90+ like I did on Starfield!)\n\nThat being said, If Bethesda listens to player feedback and provides free, meaningful updates I will update my review accordingly. For the time being, I'm not interested in paying more for additional DLC when the base game at full price feels incomplete.", "timestamp_created": 1695761086, "timestamp_updated": 1697227707, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 9001, "votes_funny": 171, "weighted_vote_score": "0.895966708660125732", "comment_count": 723, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1695918311, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are sorry to hear this has been your experience. We feel Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are opposite of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game!\n\nPut points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\n\nOur support site offers many guides on different mechanics of Starfield when you are feeling overwhelmed. For example, the following may help with earning credits more quickly https://beth.games/3PAOXwb\n\nOur team always welcomes feedback https://beth.games/3Xdn3d4\n\nWe hope you give Starfield another chance as there is a lot more that cannot be experienced in just one playthrough.\n\nThe Bethesda Team" }, { "recommendationid": "149061902", "author": { "steamid": "76561198082583305", "num_games_owned": 274, "num_reviews": 4, "playtime_forever": 1740, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1740, "last_played": 1696299301 }, "language": "english", "review": "Not looking forward to TES6 anymore", "timestamp_created": 1698510268, "timestamp_updated": 1698510268, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 5382, "votes_funny": 399, "weighted_vote_score": "0.8925589919090271", "comment_count": 199, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145777756", "author": { "steamid": "76561198228817824", "num_games_owned": 416, "num_reviews": 8, "playtime_forever": 3117, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1427, "last_played": 1696733716 }, "language": "english", "review": "Starfield makes Fallout 4 look like a masterpiece.", "timestamp_created": 1693998871, "timestamp_updated": 1693998871, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 316, "votes_funny": 22, "weighted_vote_score": "0.892287194728851318", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1696359987, "developer_response": "Hello,\n\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not have a positive experience with Starfield.\nOur team is constantly working to ensure that Starfield is a fun and polished experience. To see the most recent updates, you can visit our official site: https://beth.games/3r2QGSr\n\nThere are many different ways to enjoy Starfield such as Missions, Exploration, Roleplaying, Outpost building, and Starship building.\n\nWe highly suggest visiting the Official Discord where you can find Player Guides, connect with other players, and even get technical assistance if needed. The Discord can be found at https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W.\n\nWe are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time yet to come. Please help us to best understand your issue by opening a ticket with us: https://beth.games/46e5g8E. After selecting your issue type, continue with “Next” at the bottom of the screen until you are at the ticket submission.\n\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\n\nBest Regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "150572556", "author": { "steamid": "76561197968422178", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 9, "playtime_forever": 15769, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 15769, "last_played": 1700591181 }, "language": "english", "review": "I love BGS games. I like this game. Every negative thing people say about this game is true.", "timestamp_created": 1700591215, "timestamp_updated": 1700591215, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 2895, "votes_funny": 1443, "weighted_vote_score": "0.886063456535339355", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145750793", "author": { "steamid": "76561198971997505", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 5801, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1895, "last_played": 1700209644 }, "language": "english", "review": "In just 30 hours I have:\n\n- Shot down several starships and collect their bounties\n- Boarded a ship on the ground and hijacked it mid-air\n- Blew all my money modifying said ship\n- Learned how to make drugs\n- Trafficked said drugs\n- Fought in a gang war\n- Got a white collar office job\n- Got a blue collar assembly line job\n- Used both jobs to commit crimes\n- Committed corporate espionage\n- Helped an electrician solve power outages\n- Stole the jackpot from an abandoned zero-g space casino\n- Picked sides in a marital argument\n- Sold water to a deserted starship at 300% markup \n- Built a house\n- Gained superpowers\n- Been too busy to notice the deteriorating nature of my real-world friendships and relationships, because who else is gonna deliver 200kg of copper to the Stroud Eklund Staryard?", "timestamp_created": 1693967716, "timestamp_updated": 1693967716, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 404, "votes_funny": 176, "weighted_vote_score": "0.880098342895507813", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145902650", "author": { "steamid": "76561198346947216", "num_games_owned": 96, "num_reviews": 2, "playtime_forever": 1818, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1446, "last_played": 1694981205 }, "language": "english", "review": "It's not the best thing since sliced bread, but it's a solid bethesda game with tons of content. Just don't go in looking for the next Elite Dangerous or No Man's Sky.", "timestamp_created": 1694166286, "timestamp_updated": 1694166286, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 1386, "votes_funny": 50, "weighted_vote_score": "0.866867363452911377", "comment_count": 66, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145757254", "author": { "steamid": "76561198980623081", "num_games_owned": 217, "num_reviews": 22, "playtime_forever": 6337, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3318, "last_played": 1694746358 }, "language": "english", "review": "Spreading my seed across galaxies, ensuring the survival of the bloodline of John Starfield, with a little corporate espionage on the side. Godd Howard for sure did it again, 16x the detail this time. NPCs do be staring deeply into your soul though.", "timestamp_created": 1693973856, "timestamp_updated": 1693973856, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 1576, "votes_funny": 670, "weighted_vote_score": "0.864766776561737061", "comment_count": 20, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146030330", "author": { "steamid": "76561198032088203", "num_games_owned": 829, "num_reviews": 142, "playtime_forever": 6048, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 5484, "last_played": 1697130664 }, "language": "english", "review": "The more I play Starfield the smaller it feels. Infinitely smaller than any of Bethesda's previous titles, which is ironic considering the scale of the universe they are attempting to create.\n\nFor the first time after less than 100 hours I feel like a Bethesda game has nothing new to show me. No reward for wandering off into the far corners of the map, no prospects of anything new beyond what I've experienced beyond level 30. It's a world without a soul and no interesting history within it.\n\nBethesda has always been fantastic at making their worlds feel lived in. They add history to every location, a story to be told. Whether it's an ancient dungeon, a capital city or a car factory that raiders just so happened to take up refuge in. There always seemed to be a reason for these locations to exist aside from simply being for the player to discover.\n\nUnfortunately, generated content has taken their biggest strength and stretched it so thin the other cracks in their armor become much more apparent.\n\nThe interesting, hand crafted overworlds have been turned into vast expanses of boredom, populated only by alien life that wanders aimlessly and dotted with copy and pasted locations on each planet. The reasons for each of these enemies or locations to exist are gone, instead they are placed there based on the algorithm saying this planet needs a predator, and drawing from a handful of randomized creatures to fill the role, or it needs an outpost so it takes the same bio laboratory you saw on a planet at level 5 and has it appear again at level 50 with higher level enemies.\n\nEven the main storyline in the game uses this generated content, which stands out like a sore thumb since the hand crafted locations that are still present are often the highest points of the game. They just feel drowned out in a sea of garbage.\n\nThe cities however are fantastic. It feels like most of the effort was put into making them feel like a large metropolis with loads of side quests, with many being very well written. \n\nThis is at odds with the main story that borders on the nonsensical. The entire premise of Constellation as an organization doesn't make sense. They claim to be a group that discovers the unknown to find \"what's out there\", yet they seemingly haven't discovered anything in their decades of existence. What do they actually do? They only explore within the settled systems, so they don't go anywhere new. Heck, they haven't even scanned the plants and animals on their home planet, much less anywhere else. The organization only exists for the player to discover new things, so it having existed previously makes zero sense. The entire first act of the game should have been about forming Constellation and recruiting people that WANT to go and find new stuff.\n\nThe general gameplay elements have definitely been improved on. I can't tell you how nice it is to play a Bethesda title that allows you to grab a ledge and climb up it. The shooting mechanics feel tighter, the traversal is nice and there are various quality of life improvements. But if we're being honest, these were all mechanics and improvements that have been in games for well over a decade and feels more like catch-up.\n\nThat being said, there is a ton of recycled content from both Skyrim and Fallout at play. Legendary effects being copy/pasted from Fallout items or Skyrim spells, repurposed dragon shouts as powers, etc.\n\nIt's a shame that there really isn't much gameplay when you actually explore a planet, or go hunting for artifacts and temples. There are so many locations completely devoid of life, with absolutely nothing interesting going on. Nearly every mine you explore for example is unpopulated, or at the most has a few native alien enemies. Once again, they only have a few select layouts that repeat on every planet.\n\nI like the space combat and ship utilization. It's simple, sure, but it works well enough and is a nice break from being on the ground all the time. There's nothing groundbreaking going on here.\n\nThe game shines with ship customization. I've spent hours trying to get my ship just right and make it unique. There are very much improvements to be had that I would love to see though. Being able to preview interiors and choose the locations of ladders and doors would be great. Right now the ship becomes a maze because you don't know where those will end up.\n\nOutpost building is a gigantic chore and very frustrating. I adored building settlements in Fallout 4, but the amount of different components needed to create simple items and buildings in Starfield is ludicrous, as is your storage and carry capacity. You find yourself fast travelling constantly to buy a limited amount of a resource you need, because hunting for it is stupidly time consuming. In Fallout 4, you could just run to the nearest location and grab all the junk you could haul, then store it at the infinite workshop storage. That's not the case here, so if you find resources you'll just ignore them. That is, until you need them and have to go five minutes out of your way just to find aluminium to build a small habitat.\n\nI say all this but am still enjoying chunks of the game because there are still magical bits to the world, stories and mechanics. It really just feels buried beneath a bunch of white noise and failed attempts at refining systems.\n\nOverall, despite enjoying the game at points, this feels like a huge regression in Bethesda's strengths and a highlight of their biggest flaws. The improved and refined mechanics only bring it closer to modern counterparts, which is not enough to set it apart.\n\nYou can find both my first 10 hours and 50 hours impressions here for more, if you are so inclined.\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INgrvk1NvWE&t=676s&ab_channel=IAmPattyJack\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXQU5ylbU-E&t=551s&ab_channel=IAmPattyJack\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRzDxUinaEM&ab_channel=IAmPattyJack", "timestamp_created": 1694321121, "timestamp_updated": 1695000708, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 6278, "votes_funny": 117, "weighted_vote_score": "0.859178423881530762", "comment_count": 339, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1695917639, "developer_response": "You can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!\n\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are opposite of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\n\nYou will also find our site provides many helpful articles if any aspect of Starfield feels overwhelming. For example, you can see the following for some tips and tricks on Outpost building and management https://beth.games/3rexeCq You will also find some additional tips of ship building that may help make it feel like less of a maze https://beth.games/3PyTIpS\n\nOur team always welcomes feedback https://beth.games/3Xdn3d4\n\nThe Bethesda Team" }, { "recommendationid": "145736285", "author": { "steamid": "76561198056315687", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 6, "playtime_forever": 8184, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2539, "last_played": 1695640244 }, "language": "english", "review": "Starfield has a slow start but when you get into it, its as fun as any other Bethesda RPG. I'm about 40 hours in as I write this and i had 0 crashes and minimum of bugs. Those bugs were mostly funny than annoying, and none of them were game breaking. Loading screens were a bit of a let down but I got used to them too. The thing I have to say is most annoying to me is the surface map.. I get that, you can't have detailed map on every planet, but at least the major Cities could have it. Most of the time I roam around the City for a long time before I find what I look for. I hope City maps get added, if not by Bethesda then by some modders. Overall, great game that will definetly get better in the future, with help of Community or Bethesda itself.", "timestamp_created": 1693958450, "timestamp_updated": 1693958450, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 1074, "votes_funny": 33, "weighted_vote_score": "0.855045795440673828", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "147316681", "author": { "steamid": "76561199160092295", "num_games_owned": 72, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 8050, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 8006, "last_played": 1696301482 }, "language": "english", "review": "\"modders will fix it\" is enabling this behavior of releasing half made games", "timestamp_created": 1696031639, "timestamp_updated": 1696031639, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 2272, "votes_funny": 48, "weighted_vote_score": "0.852509498596191406", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698441019, "developer_response": "Hello,\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not have a positive experience with Starfield.\nOur team is constantly working to ensure that Starfield is a fun and polished experience. To see the most recent updates, you can visit our official site: https://beth.games/3r2QGSr\n\nWe highly suggest visiting the Official Discord where you can find Player Guides, connect with other players, and even get technical assistance if needed. The Discord can be found at https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W.\n\nWe are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time to come. Please help us to best understand what would make Starfield meet your expectations via feedback. To provide feedback straight to development, you can do so here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\nBest Regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146074584", "author": { "steamid": "76561198060714818", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 14, "playtime_forever": 7346, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 7346, "last_played": 1694370642 }, "language": "english", "review": "122.4 hours, I did all the major quests and most side quests in the major cities. I played through twice and all in all its good.\n\nthey could have done with 1 planet what they have done with 1000.", "timestamp_created": 1694371759, "timestamp_updated": 1694371759, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 753, "votes_funny": 68, "weighted_vote_score": "0.850511610507965088", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "147217220", "author": { "steamid": "76561198045817646", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 2, "playtime_forever": 15557, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 15557, "last_played": 1695469959 }, "language": "english", "review": "It doesn't just work!\n\n- Introduction -\n\nI'm a huge RPG fan, been playing them for over 20 years and they're by far my favorite gaming genre. \nI've put thousands of hours into Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, New Vegas and even FO:4, despite its obvious flaws.\nUnfortunately I witnessed a constant decline of quality, RPG elements and choice & consequence with Bethesda RPGs since Oblivion, with the exception of New Vegas, which ironically wasn't even made by Bethesda.\nThus my excitement and expectations for Starfield were pretty low, but I was willing to give it at least a try, to build my own opinion and to experience what BGS can create with such a big budget and long development time.\nI've completed the main quest line, all factions quests, many side quests and started multiple characters to see how I can role play my character and what choices I can make.\nSo without further ado, let's get to the good, the bad and the ugly of Starfield!\n\n\n- The Good -\n\nBackgrounds and Traits\n\nThe addition of backgrounds and traits is easily one of the best parts of Starfield.\nIt gives you more options create the character you want and even occasionally provides you with unique dialogue options.\nIts implementation is unfortunately kinda lackluster and the dialogue options provided barely have any effect on the outcome of the quests. \nIt's mostly there to help you keep the illusion of role playing your character in your head.\n\nShip Building\n\nHaving the option to build your own ships and letting your creativity flow, is one of my favorite aspects of the game .\nThe ship builder itself could use a little work, like better controls, better UI, options to choose where to put doors and ladders, to build a new ship from scratch and to change the interior of the ships.\nProblem is, that ships are basically just glorified player homes and fast traveling tools.\n\nBoarding/Stealing ships\n\nThe ability to board enemy ships and steal them for yourself is one of the most fun parts of Starfield. \nMakes you feel like a real space pirate.\nEven non pirate characters can benefit from this ability. During space battles you can target a ships engines and once disabled you can board it, to fight the enemy crew on board their ship.\n\nLock picking\n\nStarfields lock picking minigame is in my opinion the best Bethesda has ever done. \nIts more challenging than previous versions while also being more fun.\n\nZero G Combat\n\nLow gravity and zero gravity environments were a fun addition in this game and kinda expected in a space game.\nSome of my most fun encounters were in a zero-g casino in space and a damaged transporter floating in space that constantly was switching between normal g and zero g, due to a defect generator.\n\nSoundtrack\n\nInon Zur is an incredibly talented composer. He created masterpieces of soundtracks for games like DA: Origins, Fallout 3, 4 & NV.\nTracks feel like a mix of Fallout, Star Trek and Star Wars.\n\n\n- The Bad -\n\nCombat\n\nCombat is an integral part of the game and probably one of the worst. It feels clunky, one dimensional and outdated.\nIt's a slightly smoother version of Fallout 4's combat, but without VATS, gore, dismemberment and killing animations.\nBut hey we have Jetpacks now...yeah just like Fallout 4 had!\nIt also lacks weapon and enemy variety .\nOnly 3 laser weapons, only 1 melee weapon, because all use the same attack animation and attack speed.\nNo two handed melee, no energy based melee and no high tech shields.\n80% of the enemies are the same reskinned humans and the AI is outdated and bad.\nYou just fight braindead bulletsponges the whole game.\n\nStealth\n\nI love playing stealth characters, but not in this game. \nStarfield still uses the same outdated stealth system as Skyrim, just heavily nerfed to a point where's its either broken or not viable at all.\nZero improvements have been made since Skyrim, in fact it has been downgraded instead. \nNo stealth kill animations anymore.\n\nPerk tree\n\nStarfields perk & progression system is easily the worst Bethesda has ever done. \nIt's incredibly restrictive, unbalanced and grindy.\nEverything is locked behind grindy perk walls that require you to waste points into skills you don't want or need just to unlock the perks that you actually want.\nIt prevents you from creating the build you want and limits your role playing.\nAlso gaining exp and leveling up feels incredibly slow.\nThis whole system feels like it was designed for new game plus.\n\nStory\n\nThe main story of Starfield is the most boring, bland and tedious story of any Bethesda game.\nThe intro is so boring and slow it almost puts you to sleep and the writing is just bad and uninspired.\nEmil Pagliarulo, Bethesdas Lead narrative designer since Fallout 3, is well known for bad writing and has been criticized for it for ages.\nBut Starfields writing is just so boring, bland and bad even by his standards.\nHe follows the philosophy of \"keep it simple & stupid\" his own words, and Starfield is the pinnacle of that.\n\n\nDialogue\n\nTo be fair Starfields Dialogue is the best BGS has ever done.\nProblem is that it's still bad and leagues behind the competition.\nNone of your choices truly matter and lead almost always to the same outcome.\nBackgrounds and Traits don't do much, beside adding a little bit of flavor to it.\nVA is decent for the most part, but sometimes bad as well.\n\nQuest Design\n\nQuests in Starfield show how creatively bankrupt BGS is.\n90% are fetch quests and 50% of them are radiant.\nSome of the faction quests are decent, but they are too short and rare.\nThere's no choice & consequence and barely any alternative way to handle the situation.\nEvery named NPC is marked essential, preventing you from killing them.\n\nUser Interface\n\nUI is clunky and navigating through them is tedious.\nIt was clearly designed for consoles, but even then it's bad.\nAlso no Local/City Maps.\n\nArt direction\n\nDon't like the Nasa Punk aesthetics and there's not enough sci-fi in this sci-fi game.\n\n\n- The Ugly -\n\nBugs\n\nI've encountered numerous bugs in this game.\nSome immersion breaking glitches and several game breaking ones.\nSo much for “least buggy BGS game”\n\nNo Exploration & No Immersion\n\nExploration is a core part of any BGS RPG, world building and environmental storytelling is their bread and butter. That sense of mystery & discovery, when you explore the world.\nStarfield has none of that and it's not even open world.\nIt's a fast travel and loading screen simulator.\nYou run across procedurally generated empty planets with copy pasted points of interest.\nAnd those POS all look and feel the same, with exactly the same enemy placements.\n\n\n- Conclusion -\n\nAt first I was positively surprised by some of the elements Bethesda has put into their newest adventure, but the more I played, the more the negative aspects became obvious.\nMy expectations for Starfield were extremely low, yet somehow Bethesda still managed to disappoint me.\nDon't misinterpret my long playtime as a sign that I enjoyed the game, in fact I sometimes had to force myself to even boot the game up, that's how bored I was.\n40% of my playtime is me navigating through clunky menus or watching loading screens and I lost 60h of playtime due to several game breaking bugs.\nThis game is just so fundamentally flawed on so many levels.\nIt's plagued with bad game design decisions, half baked systems, bland and uninspired writing and outdated quest design.\nStarfield tries to be good at everything, but accomplishes to be the worst at everything\nAs wide as an ocean, as shallow as a puddle - is probably the best way to describe it.\nStarfield is not \"Skyrim in Space\", like Todd advertised it, nor is it Fallout 4 in space, like some others have described it.\nIt's a downgraded, mediocre and soulless mixture of Skyrim and Fallout 4, without the free world exploration and the charm of either!\n\n\n Score \n\n5/10 (if I'm being generous and only, because I like Bethesda styled RPGs)\n\nIf you're looking for a good RPG experience look elsewhere!", "timestamp_created": 1695916228, "timestamp_updated": 1695916228, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 2220, "votes_funny": 37, "weighted_vote_score": "0.85046762228012085", "comment_count": 145, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698442390, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not have a positive experience with Starfield.\n\nThe combat in Starfield is some of the most advanced in a Bethesda title to this day. Its one of our players' favorite aspects of the game, particularly for those who don't want to bother with a story and want to fulfill their space scoundrel itch. You have numerous weapons at your disposal, all that can be customized to your liking. Enemies also hit hard, particularly at higher difficulties.\n\nTo experience some of Starfield's better Stealth scenarios, we recommend you embark on the Ryujin faction quests. You will think you are playing a totally different game with the missions you undertake, especially since your payout is based on how quietly you complete your mission.\n\nThe best way to go about leveling your character is to focus on one page of the perk tree for your current run. That way you will be able to see all the benefits that come from sticking to a theme on each particular run and the pros/cons of each skill you unlock. You can also always farm points during spaceship combat and just killing creatures of random planets for some easy XP.\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nWe can understand your frustration with how the UI functions within the game.\nStarfield’s art direction and overall UI aesthetic is meant to be cohesive and have a “NASA Punk” look. Menus are clean, bold, and neatly organized with the focal point on the player’s character. The skill menu is colorful and iconic while the inventory shows off items, weapons, and armor in a visually striking way. These UI design choices increase your immersion into the Starfield universe.\n\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nWe are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time to come. The best way to have issues like bugs and glitches addressed, is to submit them via feedback as it will go directly to our development team https://beth.games/46e5g8E\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\n\nBest Regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146022502", "author": { "steamid": "76561197960561094", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 26, "playtime_forever": 3404, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3183, "last_played": 1694372453 }, "language": "english", "review": "This game is so hit or miss I’m not sure what to think of it. Part of the time I enjoy it and in other parts I find myself bored and uninterested. The graphics are okay, but the gameplay feels old and I find myself skipping through conversations. The exploration portion of the game is lacking. It’s a space game where I don’t seem to travel in space. I use the map menu to jump light-years away in a single loading screen. I don’t take off and land, I just appear and disappear.\n\nThe in-game economy seems out of wack. To buy a new ship you need a lot of credits but if you have a ship to sell, forget it. It's not even worth taking it and flying it back to sell it. After registering it you make very little. I mean it’s a spacecraft, yet it still has very little value. I often make more money by killing pirates and taking their space suits and weapons.\n\nThat brings me to my next point and I don’t mean this as an insult towards the consoles but the control appears to be based on that. Total lack of accuracy, want something placed exactly where you want it, good luck. Want some angled at an exact point, good luck. Tap a button for this and hold a button for that is telling me that someone has a lack of buttons. Made for PC, I don’t think so.\n\nI definitely see how some people could enjoy this game but I can’t recommend it. I should be traveling in space more, Grav jumping more, landing and taking off more. Entire galaxies are bypassed via loading screens and much of the game-play feels at least a decade old. They have the right parts of a space game they’re just put together in the wrong order.\n", "timestamp_created": 1694310120, "timestamp_updated": 1694310120, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 4626, "votes_funny": 76, "weighted_vote_score": "0.845225393772125244", "comment_count": 180, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698442777, "developer_response": "Greetings,\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nGiven the immense size of Starfield, we felt it made more sense to be able to use your Grav Drive to jump to other solar systems. The option to fly freely among planets is still there, and you can travel from one planet to another and land without needing to open your map if you use your scanner. However, for an expedition like solar system traversal, jumping is necessary. Remember that fast travel also has its perks as you can do so quickly when trying to complete quests and will always be given visual of your ship launching and landing, thus being able to appreciate all the little details that make your customized ship look unique.\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nIn terms of the game economy, remember that the higher the difficulty you are playing on, the better items you will receive as a drop. Enemies will be dropping more rare weapons and gear. You will also be given the option to board and steal more expensive and valuable ships!\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146681086", "author": { "steamid": "76561197975464456", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 143, "playtime_forever": 7170, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 7086, "last_played": 1695497482 }, "language": "english", "review": "I'm torn.\n\nThis game is right up my alley. I love space. I love sci-fi. I love the traditional Bethesda nonsense. I love the potential of procedural generation. I should absolutely love this game.\n\nAnd I do love a lot of things about it. I love the style. NASA-punk is a perfect description and man it works. The sound design is fantastic. The gun-play is solid. It's not mil-sim level, which I think would have been a vast improvement over the bullet-sponge RPG hybrid shooter we've got now, but it is functional.\n\nI love the realistic planets and moons. I love how realistically barren they are. I love that the game tells me the temperature and atmospheric pressure and gravity and I love that it all makes sense. Small moon with very low gravity and no magnetosphere? No atmosphere for you. No atmosphere, no life. Some might call that excessively dry and slavish adherence to science, but I super dig that. \n\nI love that the game uses real elements as resources, rather than made up nonsense. I like that it combines them in fairly reasonable ways for crafting.\n\nI love crafting, while we're on the subject. I think the ability to personalize a weapon do to exactly the job you want adds a lot to the game.\n\nBut It stumbles in a few perplexing ways.\n\n1. People have complained in the past about a world that levels with you and it seems like Bethesda has taken that feedback to heart. As a result, you will quickly level out of large portions of the game. Enemies will be no challenge and the loot they drop of no interest. I cannot imagine that the fleeting satisfaction of stomping low-level enemies is worth losing significant portions of the game world as viable content, but that seems to be the deal that was made here.\n\n2. It is a bit of a fast-travel simulator. I didn't really have any expectations for how this game would handle space and travel, so it wouldn't be fair to say that I'm disappointed. More that I see it as a missed opportunity. I have no doubt that the current system is the result of technical limitations, but that doesn't make it good. And it isn't good. The complaints you see about the travel system are legit. It's pretty bad and it negatively impacts the entire experience.\n\n3. It's not as realistic as it seems like it wants to be. It's realistic enough to be irritating. You have significant limits on what you can carry, for example. It's not realistic enough to be immersive, though. When you wear a space suit, you never [i]feel[/i] like you're wearing a space suit. You don't get a helmet overlay that fogs up and casts reflections. You can't hear the sound of your own breathing. You move around completely unencumbered. Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but that pulls me right out of it.\n\n4. The story and characters are not interesting. The writing is puerile. The characters are one-note and completely lack depth. The world itself is immensely violent, but in the most PG way. Set next to something like the Witcher games or Cyberpunk, it's kind of startling how bad Starfield is in this department.\n\n_________________________________________________________________\n\nAt one point, I am serving as a member of law enforcement. It arises that I must apprehend a person of interest in an investigation. The game has already provided to me a weapon that incapacitate enemies. I equip such a weapon since I am law enforcement and attempt to apprehend this person of interest.\n\nIt turns out that the game didn't account for the idea that someone serving as law enforcement would want to apprehend a suspected criminal. After incapacitating the individual in question and their retinue of bodyguards, I literally could not proceed with the quest until I walked around and put a bullet in each of their brains.\n\nMaybe it just didn't occur to the developers that police arrest people. Maybe the technical implementation of arresting people and hauling them back to your ship was seen as too much work for no real payoff. But that sequence really tipped me from \"Yeah, this is alright\" to \"Jesus what am I even playing\"\n\nThis is not really a recommendation for Starfield. I'm enjoying it enough to keep playing and I suspect mods will address all (or most) of these concerns. But that will be a year or more down the line. As it stands now, I can't really recommend it without some serious caveats.\n\nAlso it runs like absolute dog shit. I'm on a 3090 and regularly get ~45 FPS in cities.\n\nChrist this is a long review. Sorry.", "timestamp_created": 1695260041, "timestamp_updated": 1697730956, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 281, "votes_funny": 16, "weighted_vote_score": "0.841287612915039063", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145820187", "author": { "steamid": "76561198110660224", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 15, "playtime_forever": 7801, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2847, "last_played": 1698898782 }, "language": "english", "review": "I'll sum it up for you guys. \n1. Do you like Oblivion or Skyrim? Yes? - Buy it. \n2. Do you like Fallout? Yes? - Buy it.\n3. Are you expecting No Man's Sky or Star Citizen? Double think on buying it.\n\nDon't expect a super engaging \"No Man's Sky\" or Star Citizen killer, the space exploration aspect of the game is meh. But if you play it and treat it like just another Bethesda game, the game is an absolute banger and an upgrade from its predecessors.", "timestamp_created": 1694042851, "timestamp_updated": 1694042851, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 590, "votes_funny": 20, "weighted_vote_score": "0.840553760528564453", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146030428", "author": { "steamid": "76561197999487140", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 72, "playtime_forever": 5791, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2489, "last_played": 1694969771 }, "language": "english", "review": "I debated getting this. But ultimately, I decided I wanted to write my own mods for it. That's where most of my fun will be derived for this game.\n\nThis is a Bethesda game. If you liked Fallout 3 or Skyrim, you will get more of the same here. There is truly nothing new at play here. Arguably, it's worse than either of those games because every planet is well and wholly disconencted from each other; at least those other worlds have a contiguous coherency to them. In this game, you're on a wild west planet, then a cyberpunk planet, then you find a bunch of desolate moons: rinse and repeat.\n\nBut more importantly than that...the writing is just off for me. I don't even bother to pay attention to what characters are even saying. It's like I'm being taken advantage of. There's no reason to be helping person X or Y or Z but they all assume that I want to for some reason. The game's opening sequence really fails to create any motivation for why you must join an explorer's guild. You're basically conscripted to do it. And while you can ignore the game's mainilne story, I somehow have to rate it the worst of all of Bethesda's mainline stories thus far. Which is saying something. Give me another Oblivion gate.\n\nWhile the game's crafting/base building is better than Skyrim's, it's not saying much. You need to sink a ridiculous amount of time and effort into it, too. Inventory management is just annoying. So many stupid (and heavy) bits and bobs to collect just to make a dumb thing. Much like NPCs don't respect my time, Bethesda doesn't either.\n\nSo yeah, if you desperately need a new Skyrim to play, this is sort of it. But the gunplay is so basic (and primitive) as to make me wonder why VATS isn't implemented to try to save it. There are melee weapons, but you still can't do very much with them. The AI wasn't good in 2011. It's 2023 now. Nobody has learned any new tricks.\n\nThat said, no crash to desktops yet.\n\nIf you're on a budget, BG3 is a way better investment of your currency.\n\nAlso -- lots of mind boggling design decisions (Bethesda is great at these). The universe has 1,000 planets and tons of ways to quick travel, but if you say to yourself, \"I want to see NPC 123 again to see if they have an item in stock\" -- good luck remembering where they are. And if you stash some items on a planet somewhere, good luck. Better go take some notes while you play, the game gives you no manner of tracking NPCs in the wider world or for just taking simple notes. QoL that is simple to imlpement like this just makes me scratch my head. Surely the in-game database knows where every NPC is.\n\n**The worst thing** about this game, by far, is that by hour 8, you've seen every single mining facility already two or three times. I am confused how a game by such a big budget studio can be bothered to put together a planet generation system, but can't be bothered to dynamically generate little \"dunegons\" to put into them. It's like I'm in Dragon Age 2 again, where the same stock dungeon assets are copy pasted all over the place. It is truly awe-inspirnig how Bethesda can justify not investing into a new game engine THIS hard and yet at the same time refuse to implement something so essential as a basic dungeon generator? It honestly not that hard to pull off and it is REALLY a killer for exploration in this game.\n\n_Oblivion_ had more dungeon variation.", "timestamp_created": 1694321247, "timestamp_updated": 1694321883, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 444, "votes_funny": 6, "weighted_vote_score": "0.839555144309997559", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698443274, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not have a positive experience with Starfield.\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nIf you are interested in outpost building, we suggest investing points to upgrade the skill. It will make creation and production of resources more meaningful and will grant you a huge XP boost as well as in game currency for everything you develop.\n\nWe are sorry that you had a negative experience due to NPC interactions and behavior.\nTo keep Starfield as dynamic as possible, NPCs are not fully scripted so weirdness can ensue sometimes. The goal is to make believable characters on the screen with realistic reactions to your character. NPC AI has been improved with the move to Creation Engine 2 that has radiant AI enhancements that allows for dynamic interactions within the game’s various environments.\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "145982789", "author": { "steamid": "76561197989132341", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 59, "playtime_forever": 3352, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1977, "last_played": 1697055546 }, "language": "english", "review": "If you are looking for an incredible story or some sort of Space Trucker sim this game isn't it. It's a more advanced Fallout 4 in space where the kinda cool but not super well done ideas from that game actually go somewhere. If you enjoy rooting through random places and carrying too much junk and care more about the side quests than the main plot like basically every other Bethesda game then this is good, great even. It's the most Oblivion esque game quest density wise they have made, there is so much stuff to do in every city and even some of the minor settlements had more than I expected. The Space stuff is fun but it's ultimately part of the game and not the focus and the story like Fallout 3 is serviceable but nothing special. I wouldn't really say the writing is a mixed bag as nothing has made me really roll my eyes or cringe but there has been plenty that didn't do a whole lot with the scenario / concept, It ranges from middling to fairly entertaining. For reference a game like The Outer Worlds made me cringe like crazy and I hated every single character.\n\nI have played roughly 30 hours now and honestly don't feel like I am even close to done with the game and there is multiple of the major factions I haven't done a single quest for. The RPG elements are definitely better than Skyrim / Fallout 4 (My background as a big game hunter has surprisingly mattered quite a few times) and they finally refreshed their lock picking mini game after 15 years. The combat is refined to be an actual passable shooter now, it's not Doom Eternal or anything but you can be pretty fluid. I will also praise the perk trees. Almost everything in them is interesting and I have a hard time deciding what I want to spec into, and they made the smart move of adding challenges to get the next level so there is no more getting 100 Gun Skill by lvl 4 Like in Fallout 3 and doing Mega damage but it's not so bland and unrewarding as something like Skyrim.\n\nI have encountered some bugs most of them were benign minor things like weird physics, NPC's acting strangely, I had my gun fail to swap once so my guy was holding air but it went away after swapping to something else. The only genuinely frustrating one I have had is there is a softlock you can get if something interrupts your conversation. One Time a giant crab murdered the person I was talking to and I couldn't do anything and had to restart, the other time it was when talking to a vendor and a quest NPC interrupted. It doesn't happen every time but its a legitimate and frustrating bug. The performance on my system has been adequate but I won't pretend this game isn't a bit of a hog.\n\nI will say the loading screen complaint I have seen as a talking point is completely asinine. Like beyond ridiculous. You get 1-3 second loading screens when going between planets and some interiors. Specifically between planets you might get two or three quickly back to back if you are being efficient in how you go about landing and taking off then jumping to the next place but everyone bitching its breaking their immersion is just attaching themselves to the current regurgitated whining. You would think they were playing Morrowind on the original xbox or something with the multiple minute loading screens.\n\nI don't want to get too much into the meta commentary here but it feels like most of complaints I read about Starfield are that it's a Bethesda game that is structured and plays like a Bethesda game and they don't like that or were expecting something else. Which is funny because that has basically been a huge amount of the criticism around all their releases since Skyrim really.", "timestamp_created": 1694266834, "timestamp_updated": 1694266834, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 675, "votes_funny": 32, "weighted_vote_score": "0.836645007133483887", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146070357", "author": { "steamid": "76561198002184254", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 4, "playtime_forever": 9054, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 5595, "last_played": 1695159469 }, "language": "english", "review": "*Spoiler Free*\nCurrent playtime: 90+ hours.\n//\nStarting info:\nFor anyone interested in playing, treat this game like a fallout in space.\nIt is not a space flying sim that allows free flying between planets and systems.\nSpace travel consists of selecting a \"landing spot - planet - system\" with a short cut scene in between zones of play.\n//\nLoad times:\n3-5 seconds average (*modern nvme*)\n//\nGraphics:\nLooks great for its scale, modern pbr materials with highly detailed models wherever you look *very dense*.\nvolumetric fog & atmosphere really make it look amazing. side note \"very time of day dependent\" as it does in real life.\n//\nGameplay:\nfirst-third person.\nAll bethesda style things one might expect: quests, encounters, guns-melee, speech, sneaking, lockpicking etc (*classics*)\nSpaceship: Ship combat, Docking, ship-to-ship hailing/trading, smuggling, fully walkable/customizable ships & interiors.\nOutposts: Buildable outposts, bases, storage, resource extraction, factory's, multi system outpost connection, decorations.\nCustomization: Ships, Spacesuits, Helmets, Boostpacks, Weapons, Outposts. almost everything.\n//\nHardware & Performance:\nThis is a heavy game! 5600x & 3080 using 75% fsr upscaling at 4K gives me an average of 40-60 fps depending.\nAmd graphics cards seem to have better optimization currently compared to nvidia. Also no nvidia driver at time of writing.\nPlenty of graphics options to tweak if you need better performance, most options from medium-up look great without a significant loss of quality.\n//\nTutorials:\nVery lacking. Many systems are introduced and barely given any information on how they operate.\nWould benefit from tooltips & side panels giving more explanation and direction.\nAs some systems and unlocks are hidden behind skills!\nexamples:\nEver wondered why you cant use a ship part? Or don't see buildings for farming and animals in your outpost?\nOr what about scanning a planet for more advanced resources? Check your skill tree!\n//\nScale:\nIts actually immense! 90+ hours in and i only finished one side-faction questline!! There is just so much to do!! it is actually amazing the amount of voiced characters that are in this, just finding some random character in the middle of nowhere might lead to a multiple hour quest. random encounters vary from basic to interesting.\n10% of planets are the highlights with a city or some main location on them or have a staryard up above the planet.\nThe main cities are massive, multiple times i thought i had seen it all only to find there was an elevator leading to a whole different part of it with its own area's and quests. And if you are not as interested in base building or resource gathering then you can easily see what planets have useful locations on them so you can skip most of the generated/placed locations if that's your preference.\n90% of planets largely have resources & randomly placed locations and encounters on them.\nBut even then, some encounters can give you some pretty awesome moments & simply checking a planet for resources you need to quickly placing an outpost with some extractors on them so it can be auto-transported to your main base is useful.\n//\nMusic & Audio:\nGreat! Atmospheric & immersive.\n//\nNew-Game+:\nI am told that this is its own game separate from the base sandbox & has its own systems in place and can give people new experiences even after multiple new game+'s.\nPersonally unverified, but interesting to see once i am done with my first playthrough.\n//\nIssues:\nFov slider, no dlss.\nBugs: npc's walking into stuff, strange eyes, nothing game breaking for me personally.\nYour typical bethesda flavour. Makes for some funny moments so i like it like that.\n//\nFuture:\nExpansions & Modding potential of starfield is beyond anything we have seen before!\n//\n[edited]\nScore: Currently i'd give it an 8.5/10!\nAfter some further optimization & small feature request adds i would settle on 9/10", "timestamp_created": 1694368006, "timestamp_updated": 1696330453, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 487, "votes_funny": 26, "weighted_vote_score": "0.827508687973022461", "comment_count": 7, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145851585", "author": { "steamid": "76561198009935148", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 5, "playtime_forever": 4110, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 984, "last_played": 1700281974 }, "language": "english", "review": "The best parts of Skyrim and Fallout4 but in space. If you like Bethesda RPGs and space odysseys then you'll like Starfield.\nDisclaimer: this is not No Mans Sky 2, it's not trying to be NMS2, don't expect NMS2.", "timestamp_created": 1694094173, "timestamp_updated": 1694094173, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 758, "votes_funny": 39, "weighted_vote_score": "0.826135635375976563", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145834054", "author": { "steamid": "76561198061356965", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 12, "playtime_forever": 4286, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 961, "last_played": 1696708146 }, "language": "english", "review": "In a sea of reviews from others, I am sure that only my Steam friends will see this. The more you play this game, the better it gets. Try not to be pay attention to haters that are eager to see the next big thing fail. This game is a passion project and it shows. It is also a Bethesda game. Give it time to come into its own. If you are looking for a spacefaring Bethesda game, get it. If you want to wait, wait for a sale. But in my opinion, this game has been worth the price at launch. Cheers!", "timestamp_created": 1694065401, "timestamp_updated": 1694065401, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 1647, "votes_funny": 57, "weighted_vote_score": "0.8245697021484375", "comment_count": 81, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "149748825", "author": { "steamid": "76561197988695089", "num_games_owned": 191, "num_reviews": 15, "playtime_forever": 20001, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 16631, "last_played": 1702536199 }, "language": "english", "review": "I've honestly enjoyed playing Starfield. It is overall fun to play, and I can confidently say that I'll continue to dive in. However, it's important for me to say straight out the batch that this game have issues some can be really...REALLY big issues. While I'm a fan, I must caution any potential buyers that there are legitimate reasons for frustration. I would recommend the game if it is on sale or on gamepass, otherwise it is way too expensive.\n\nThe ground combat is overall enjoyable, but let's be honest, it's basic and bring nothing new to the table, there are plenty of comparison videos showcasing the difference between Starfield combat and Cyberpunk 2077, in addition, the NPC AI some mechanic clumsiness are questionable. However, it still offers fast-paced action, weapon and armor customisation was enough to keep me engaged. There's definitively room for improvement in terms of NPC AI, and game mechanics that really need to be updated to modern standards, as well as weapon and outfit diversity. While there's a respectable array of guns and outfits to choose from, I'd appreciate more detailed distinctions between them. For example have a different skin to differentiate between a basic white weapon and a rare gold legendary one, and the same goes for outfits.\n\nOne aspect of Starfield that seem to put everyone on the same page is its ship building system. It's well-crafted and offers players the creative freedom to design really good vessels, and Youtube offers so many amazing designs that we can follow and try to replicate. However, there's some drawbacks that's worth mentioning.You can't precisely control where ladders will be placed on your ship, and you can't buy blueprints parts, you have to manually fly to a specific vendor all around the settled systems, and those loading screens will get boring fast.\n\nYou can build outposts, they introduce some interesting ideas to the game world. The default building mechanic is a little restricting, but the console command allows you to have more freedom and bypass most of the restrictions, I appreciate that it is in the base game and not forcing you to go trough a 3rd party website in order to get that feature, you do need to know it tho, but Steam guides will teach you how to open and use it. However, outposts currently lack a substantial purpose and they feel really basic and clunky at times. It's tedious to build and grind the skill trees to build them, you can't accurately pin what resources you specifically need to build a base part, and there is no way to navigate trough which outpost you want to travel to, you have to remember where you have placed them and manually find them on the galactic map, then on the planet itself.\n\nWhat's even more frustrating is that the game appears to intentionally waste your time for so many things, and fast travels and unskipeable cutscenes for pretty much anything you do are redundant. This deliberate time-wasting design has led to a wave of negative reviews from players who've spent over 100 hours and I cannot blame them. Idk who started to spread the \"it gets better after 10 hours\" but that was a genius move, since Steam policy offers a refund if the playtime is below 2 hours. \n\nIn terms of graphics, Starfield offers visuals that are quite nice but are really not a next-generation title like the trailers and \"influencers\" are trying to sell you. For example, the design of the NPCs that populate the world have become the subject of all the mockeries and have pretty much been memed to oblivion by the internet, they are clunky, the writing for them is average to below average and to be honest, they are one of the ugliest 3D assets I have seen in a triple A game.\n\nIt's hard to ignore the fact that the game feels very overpriced for what it currently offers. The experience, in many ways, still feels like an unfinished product. There's an overwhelming number of bugs even for a Bethesda game, plenty of issues that plague the gameplay, ranging from a clunky user interface, insane amount of loading screen and fast travels to poor graphical optimization. There are just too many to count them all and possibly enumerate in one single review page, and I have pretty much wrote a book of a review so far.\n\nAnd don't get me started on those so called \"game-specialist\" and Influencers who gave that game all the praises and showered it with 10 out of 10 reviews, before Starfield, people were mad at game journalists being biased into giving a game all the praises, now we have websites specialised in men's fashion and cocktails giving game reviews, one of these guys are even owned by Microsoft, the parent company of Bethesda, I am not a layer but I think this is kind of suspicious.\n\nI really wish there was a score system instead of recommended or not recommended because I would give this game a 6.5 out of 10. This game is a pass, a very hard and painful pass because it resides on a precarious balance between bad and good but it is still above average. It's not a terrible game by any means, and there are certainly enjoyable aspects. However, the game's high price, multitude of bugs, unpolished graphics, and questionable design choices cast a massive shadow over its potential. Proceed with caution and consider your preferences before buying this game.", "timestamp_created": 1699433891, "timestamp_updated": 1703226593, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 482, "votes_funny": 36, "weighted_vote_score": "0.80746769905090332", "comment_count": 15, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146429711", "author": { "steamid": "76561198032403012", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 7, "playtime_forever": 4618, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4618, "last_played": 1694898268 }, "language": "english", "review": "***THIS WILL HAVE SPOILERS, THEY ARE NECESSARY FOR THE REVIEW***\n\nThis game has no soul at all. It is sterile. Corporate. Bland. \n\nDo not take my playtime as an endorsement of this game. I wanted to finish all the questlines and spend some time in the ship creator before I wrote my review.\n\nThis game IS Fallout 4 in space. It is both graphically and in gameplay terms functionally identical. I've heard that Starfield spent a long time in development. I have to wonder what on earth they were spending the time on? \n\nWhat I liked:\n\n- SOME quests were OK. The writing and quest design is very inconsistent. There are a few good ones. UC Vanguard started strong but then fell off. Some Crimson Fleet quests were reminiscent of Oblivion thieves guild in their execution. That's really about it.\n\n- Ship designer. While the UI could use some improvements, building ships is actually fun. Its a little difficult to find who has the parts you want. I ultimately settled on Deimos and made a pretty large ship. It's just a shame that there is really no reason to do this, other than maybe the crafting benches. New Game+ invalidates this.\n\n-No voiced protagonist - glad they learned from that mistake.\n\nWhat I disliked (where do we even begin?):\n- NewGame+ makes everything pointless. The way they executed it makes every core game play loop feel awful. Why would I spend hours designing my ship if I'm going to lose it? Why would I collect any resources? Build an outpost? A player can newgame+ OR participate in these aspects of the game but not both. Also, there is really no reason to do any of the quests again because...\n\n- Quests... They are awful. I came into this game with LOW expectations and NO hype. I thought the quests in Skyrim were lackluster in many ways. Fallout 4, very much the same. Here is an actual quest in one of the main factions. You are tasked with sabotaging a rival competitor's newest ship in the factory. Now you MIGHT be inclined to think this would involve breaking into a building and sneaking around or persuading your way in while avoiding security robots. But no. It is quite literally, walk into the factory onto the unsecured factory floor, waltz right into this ship in construction, and then press the button. That's it. The most challenging part was not being bored during fast travel. Here is another one. You are tasked with stealing a trophy. This trophy is made out of very precious materials. You can ONLY get this trophy if you get the keycard to the vault it is locked in. You can QUITE LITERALLY just ask the person responsible to give you their keycard via persuasion. That would be like Todd Howard persuading me to give him my wallet and social security number. This brings me to...\n\n- The writing. Oh my lord. I am not expecting anyone's magnum opus, but these quests and dialogue were 100% written by recent college grads or something. At no point did anyone while writing quests ask themselves what they would do in the situation. Example analogy. This is exactly what happens in the game. Imagine you are a new FBI agent. Just started yesterday. You lead an investigation where you find out the President of United States is doing some heinous crime leading to people dying. You have A PIECE of evidence. What would you do? If your answer was confront the President and his security detail directly and try to arrest him, and then kill all of them, then congratulations, you are a Bethesda writer. No option to go tell your superiors or anyone else. And when you show up and say HEY GUYS I JUST KILLED THE PRESIDENT they take a look at one piece of evidence you have and say YEAH SOUNDS GOOD HAVE A PROMOTION. Then the questline is done. WHO WROTE THIS? THIS IS JUST DUMB. I have many other examples but I won't belabor the point. The writing is awful.\n\n- The characters - completely forgettable. There is nothing endearing about your \"friends\" as the game refers to them as. Everyone is a caricature of an actual person. It's absurd.\n\n- The \"exploration\" - let's start with space travel. Space travel is quite literally just fast travel with more clicks and menus involved. It is also redundant in many cases, because you can just fast travel directly and skip the actual flying through space. But let's take a new location. Travelling to a new location is the following all in menus. Select star. Select planet. Select landing point. Press button. Take out the fancy UI and you could literally do it with cascading context menus. How is this acceptable in 2023 with lord knows how many years of development when other games have already conquered the space travel issue. Beyond that, the destinations themselves are bland, auto generated garbage. It's like Todd saw radiant quests and said HOW ABOUT RADIANT MAPS? And then he did it! It's not as if there is a lot of content the game has to pull from. Expect to see the same locations over and over. Also as an aside, expect to see the auto generated locations integrated into your main quest, because Bethesda couldn't be bothered to make those up by hand when every quest is a fetch quest for the exact same object over and over and over.\n\n- \"Progression\" - Perks are either necessary or useless. They took out core features and locked them behind perks because who knows. No attributes. Forget about the R in RPG. This is a theme park ride just shut up and keep your hands inside at all times. \n\nIf I had to sum it up, the game is just sterile. There isn't anything interesting to do, the quests aren't enjoyable, the combat is just a grind against spongy enemies, inventory management is awful.\n\nIt is a shame that with their time, money, and resources that this is the best they can do. They need to ditch the creation engine. It works OK for a game like Skyrim that has a large open world to traverse but it cannot do what they tried to get it to do here. It is hopelessly dated. \n\nI do not feel like this game was worth my money or my time. I didn't really enjoy the time I had with it, but rather saw it through to the end so that I could give it a proper evaluation and see what it had to offer. As it turns out, not much. If you've seen it once, you've seen it all. If you've landed on 2 or 3 planets, you've landed on all of them.\n\n3/10 - Some fun to be had in certain parts, but slogging through the rest of it to find these just isn't worth it. I personally believe this game is the 2nd worst game Bethesda has made, other than Fallout 76. This is not a labor of love. It is a labor of money and only money and it feels like it.", "timestamp_created": 1694900541, "timestamp_updated": 1694900541, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 3585, "votes_funny": 98, "weighted_vote_score": "0.805917203426361084", "comment_count": 13, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698443860, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not have a positive experience with Starfield.\n\nGoing through New Game Plus will grant you very powerful items every time you restart for the first 10 levels that cannot be gained any other way. You will also be able to continue gaining points for playing missions you enjoyed again, and even having the liberty of taking a different route/approach each playthrough.\n\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nThe best way to go about leveling your character is to focus on one page of the perk tree for your current run. That way you will be able to see all the benefits that come from sticking to a theme on each particular run and the pros/cons of each skill you unlock. You can also always farm points during spaceship combat and just killing creatures of random planets for some easy XP.\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\n\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support\n\n" }, { "recommendationid": "145837802", "author": { "steamid": "76561198271636233", "num_games_owned": 15, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 5408, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3205, "last_played": 1694768859 }, "language": "english", "review": "A game that keeps you thinking \"oh one more thing\" for several hours, is an awesome in depth game. It's that simple.", "timestamp_created": 1694072769, "timestamp_updated": 1694072769, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 508, "votes_funny": 21, "weighted_vote_score": "0.805787920951843262", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145855053", "author": { "steamid": "76561198113516506", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 3865, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 575, "last_played": 1695088134 }, "language": "english", "review": "No Man's Skyrim", "timestamp_created": 1694097871, "timestamp_updated": 1694097871, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 666, "votes_funny": 392, "weighted_vote_score": "0.790025413036346436", "comment_count": 11, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146012342", "author": { "steamid": "76561198018183000", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 4, "playtime_forever": 8082, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2263, "last_played": 1696465912 }, "language": "english", "review": "Edit #7 (probably the last one):\n\nFINAL THOUGHTS:\nI had extremely high hopes for the game and though I will be playing it for years, like Skyrim, but tiny locations (New Atlantis is big but is 99% empty space) connected by fast travel killed it for me. I finished it once and might install it again when DLC comes, but otherwise, I see no fix to this fundamental flaw unless modders will add big explorable locations like in \"The Outer Worlds.\"\n\nTLDR: Imagine Skyrim or Fallout 4, where the map is divided into hundreds of locations, and the only way to move between them is to fast-travel.\n> Instead of an epic climb to the High Hrothgar you fast-travel there!\n> Imagine getting words of power by teleporting to an empty field, running for a few minutes, done! \n> Skyrim starter location - fast travel - Riverwood - fast travel - Whiterun - fast travel - Kill dragon - fast travel - Whiterun - fast travel - High Hrothgar... \n> Instead of walking through Boston ruins towards Diamon City while exploring buildings, fighting ghouls and bandits you skip it all and fast travel!\n> As if every town, cave, vault, village, and every part of the map is a separate small location and you MUST fast travel between them. No random wandering and surprise discoveries, no interesting random encounters, only fast travel!\n\nORIGINAL THOUGHTS:\nKeep in mind the following, though. You WILL spend your time like this:\n40% - RUNNING around between quests' points of interest and watching loading screens.\n40% - WALKING (because of STAMINA!) around between quests' points of interest and watching loading screens. It will get better when you dump 8 points into stamina and booster pack skills, but it won't make running around empty planets any more fun.\n5% - talking to NPCs and trading.\n5% - shooting stuff.\n3% - flying and fighting in space, building and upgrading your ship. Building ships is actually fun, but there are very few space battles and its mechanics are as simple as they can be. You had one space battle? Congrats, you've seen them all! Put the strongest guns and biggest cargo containers, done.\n2% - base building? I tried it. Not fun but you can farm XP!\n\nTLDR2: Similar to The Outer Worlds but worse almost in every way* which I liked a lot, but with extra running and EXTRA loading screens. They even copied spacers from it! It's not the best choice, it's Spacer's choice!\n* Forget the graphics, the styles are different, and looks are subjective.\n\nBugs? Yes!!!\n> Quest blockers where the quest NPC is behind a closed door, and there is no way to open it, or the NPC is teleported off the map and can't be reached. No solutions!\n> The ship is teleported underground, and if you teleport to it, you will be underground as well. No solution!\n> All ship technicians are teleported underground - no more ship upgrades for you! No solution! The only workaround is to go to the Red Mile, a space station that sells ship parts or build a base.\n> Can't shoot! Yes, can't shoot and key bindings have nothing to do with it. Changing appearance through an Enhance Clinic NPC solves the bug.\n> Can't finish one fraction quest line as one quest NPC is out of reach (map). No solution.\n> Broken dialogs where you have to load a save.\n> Graphical and physical glitches, like falling through floors.\n\n* Performance? Definitely not optimized for PCs. The graphics absolutely not the next-gen, especially when exploring planets and comparing how other games with huge open worlds look and run.\n\nYou will probably buy it anyway. I know I would, but I warned you.", "timestamp_created": 1694296407, "timestamp_updated": 1696541042, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 1793, "votes_funny": 53, "weighted_vote_score": "0.789433956146240234", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698444016, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not have a positive experience with Starfield.\n\nWe can understand your frustration with fast travel making the universe feel much smaller.\n\nGiven the immense size of Starfield, we felt it made more sense to be able to use your Grav Drive to jump to other solar systems. The option to fly freely among planets is still there, and you can travel from one planet to another and land without needing to open your map if you use your scanner. However, for an expedition like solar system traversal, jumping is necessary. Remember that fast travel also has its perks as you can do so quickly when trying to complete quests and will always be given visual of your ship launching and landing, thus being able to appreciate all the little details that make your customized ship look unique.\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nNever stop exploring!\n\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "148766531", "author": { "steamid": "76561197994055976", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 17, "playtime_forever": 10434, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 10434, "last_played": 1698113603 }, "language": "english", "review": "Ok this is tough. You know how chocolate chip cookies taste good even when under-baked? This game is like that. I think I looked so forward to playing it I have been looking at it with affection like I would a little brother with developmental delays. It's heart is solid, and I have a lot of love for the ideas in it, but the gameplay and mechanics are barely conceived. It's like the game creators at Bethesda are living in a vacuum and have not played any games for the past ten years. They are struggling to keep up in the race while I shout for them to run, run! RUN! I so wanted them to get a prize. This hope brought me almost 200 hours in.\n\nWhy isn't there a sweet buggy to survey planets with? Why do I have to tediously on foot survey planet surfaces for resources when a special binoculars from a mountain top would reveal what I need for an outpost? This is the future! I am out here like the Louis and Clark expedition. Why are outposts so clunky and janky? The QOL here is nonexistent. It is like having a game where you do your taxes or something.\n\nWhy is the narrative so simplified? Why are characters like card-board cutouts? They say the same insipid things over and over. [spoiler] And why are the Starborn fighting each other when they could gather the artifacts, all get on one ship with an armillary on it and go through Unity together? Surely some ancient Starborn character could get the young NG3 upstarts in line. [/spoiler] Why do the cities that are 200 years old feel like set pieces at Six Flags? Why is the game world lifeless and broken and barely passable at what it is portraying? NPCS staring lifelessly at walls... There are countless questions in my mind as to why, how, wtf? So much just isn't well thought through, underdeveloped, barely passable, lacking evolution, adaptation or innovation. I could go on but everyone has heard the critiques.\n\nAgain, QOL is not even on the game's radar. An awkward, ultimately sad, outdated game, empty and ponderous, upheld by the hopes of its fans (me), played out of obligation and a kind of nostalgic hope. Mods will improve it as many have said, but it takes a real hero to slog through this game ten times (NG+, I made it to NG2 before throwing in the towel). Sadly, I am not that hero.\n\nI realized tonight I played this much in the hope it would somehow fulfill the desire I truly have for a game that will set the bar higher (even if just in Bethesda Land), instead of receiving another special needs bus. I can no longer make the excuses to myself I have been making. I will reinstall in a couple years and see what the modders have created to re-imagine and refine. I love my brother, but there's a whole world of well-formed games out there to discover. Perhaps that is what the Bethesda creators could have contemplated when developing a game about exploration and the limitless possibility of the human experience in an infinite multiverse.", "timestamp_created": 1698116886, "timestamp_updated": 1698117460, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 154, "votes_funny": 29, "weighted_vote_score": "0.78919529914855957", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "152170086", "author": { "steamid": "76561198250713354", "num_games_owned": 36, "num_reviews": 17, "playtime_forever": 4592, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4592, "last_played": 1697936607 }, "language": "english", "review": "the story is as generic as it gets and the gameplay gets boring. i wish there was a reason to even bother exploring planets and building outposts. everything is fun until you do it once, then it's all a repeating, soulless chore.", "timestamp_created": 1701054439, "timestamp_updated": 1701054439, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 168, "votes_funny": 0, "weighted_vote_score": "0.786905050277709961", "comment_count": 32, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1701101161, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\n\nYou can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. \n\nThere are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\n\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nNever stop exploring!\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146998653", "author": { "steamid": "76561199115781380", "num_games_owned": 159, "num_reviews": 6, "playtime_forever": 11649, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 11649, "last_played": 1695216457 }, "language": "english", "review": "After finishing the main story and doing all the faction quests and reaching level 100 it's safe to say Starfield isn't worth the hype.\n\n1. The main story felt really short and average. Not going to spoil anything from the main story or even faction quests but they are all meh, except the crimson fleet.\n\n2. The companions are boring and uninteresting and stupid at the same time, they will dislike your decisions even if it's good.\n\n3. Exploration is really terrible and not worth it. It's just walking to empty places and it gets repetitive for every planet you have been for the 500th time, and the same outposts and structures are exact same but generated to other planets.\n\n4. The weapons are trash and there are a few of them, like you will find 20 different variants from the same weapon and nothing special to it, (melee weapons are even WORSE).\n\n5. Space combat is a JOKE. There is no depth to it, no skill, brain dead AI.\n\nI mean we are in 2023 and a big game like Starfield doesn't have the basic settings to adjust the game as you like is really absurd.\n-No FOV slider.\n-No brightness slider.\n-No gamma slider.\nAnd on top of all that no DLSS at least to compensate the trash performance of this game.\n\nOverall this the weakest game Bethesda has ever released, I tried to like the game but i couldn't. \n6/10\n\n\n", "timestamp_created": 1695646075, "timestamp_updated": 1695646075, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 1013, "votes_funny": 32, "weighted_vote_score": "0.786008596420288086", "comment_count": 107, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1695652635, "developer_response": "Hello,\n\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not enjoy some aspects of Starfield.\nOur team is constantly working to ensure that Starfield is a fun and polished experience.\n\nTo see the most recent updates, you can visit our official site: https://beth.games/3r2QGSr\n\nWe are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time yet to come. Please tell us more about any issues you have by opening a ticket with us: https://beth.games/46e5g8E. After selecting your issue type, continue with “Next” at the bottom of the screen until you are at the ticket submission.\n\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\n\nBest Regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146062950", "author": { "steamid": "76561197987202463", "num_games_owned": 244, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 2029, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 501, "last_played": 1695701513 }, "language": "english", "review": "If you love loading screens, fetch quest, navigating layers of map UI, and uncomfortable levels of eye contact from NPCs, then this game is for you.\nBe prepared for every story to revolve around people you just met, who don't even know your name, giving you important errands. \nHere's an actual interaction:\nYou walk into a coffee shop and start a conversation with a stranger.\nStranger: \"I lost something important. Please take this valuable thing and trade it with someone you've never met 30 meters away. I will wait here in the coffee shop for eternity hoping you return.\"\nPlayer:\"Sure\"", "timestamp_created": 1694360480, "timestamp_updated": 1694360480, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 357, "votes_funny": 51, "weighted_vote_score": "0.78573310375213623", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698444918, "developer_response": "Hi there,\n\nThank you for taking the time to provide your review and we are sorry to hear that you were disappointed with encountering many loading screens while playing.\nWhile there may be loading screens in between fast travelling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created.\n\nWe can understand your frustration with how the UI functions within the game.\nStarfield’s art direction and overall UI aesthetic is meant to be cohesive and have a “NASA Punk” look. Menus are clean, bold, and neatly organized with the focal point on the player’s character. The skill menu is colorful and iconic while the inventory shows off items, weapons, and armor in a visually striking way. These UI design choices increase your immersion into the Starfield universe.\n\nYou can send further feedback to development here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E\n\nNever stop exploring!\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146575835", "author": { "steamid": "76561197961167439", "num_games_owned": 1570, "num_reviews": 714, "playtime_forever": 6776, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 6776, "last_played": 1695080125 }, "language": "english", "review": "Starfield is a good game, not a great game, certainly not Bethesda's best product. It's pretty much Fallout in space. There are a few game design features that make it look like No Man's Sky, but it really plays nothing like NMS and honestly makes me appreciate NMS that much more since a huge organization like Bethesda couldn't just copycat what Hello Games has accomplished.\n\nStarfield is all about quest lines and NPC interactions. There are a few different quest lines and they are all well done with great voice acting as can be expected from Bethesda. Beyond that, nothing else really stands out as being amazing.\n\nThere are many downsides:\n\n1) The minimum system requirements are insane. I was able to run it at mostly 30 fps on my dinosaur computer from 2012 by downloading a mod to reduce the texture size. I really don't feel like this game needed 2K textures which effectively requires players to have a serious gaming rig to play this without mods. ~$2,000 for their recommended rig.\n2) The menu system is not user friendly. To be frank, it's downright horrible. It took me 25ish hours to finally learn how to maneuver in an out of the menu efficiently. I almost just stopped playing at around the 15 hour mark because the menus were so painfully un intuitive.\n3) Too much fast travel. There is actually very little need to use your starship in this game. And even if you do want to fly your ship, it's not even possible in the normal sense of flying from point A to point B.\n4) Too many loading screens due to the previous 'too much fast travel' issue. Now granted I have a dinosaur computer and the loading times get exaggerated as a result so this is certainly less painful the better system you play on.\n5) No option for exclusive fullscreen. Really Bethesda?\n6) Too many useless character skills/traits. A lot of the skills are useless due to the next bullet point.\n7) Crafting is unnecessary, shipbuilding is unnecessary, outposts are unnecessary. Hell I can even make an argument that the majority of player powers are useless. There was obviously a lot of energy and effort put into these game features that genuinely serve no useful utility in playing the main meat of the game (quest lines).\n8) Stealth is laughable. No improvements have been made to stealth gameplay from any of their previous titles.\n\nDid I have fun with the game? Yes. Would I recommend it? If you enjoy the Fallout titles, yes. Overall though, I feel like it was a step backward for the franchise.", "timestamp_created": 1695106901, "timestamp_updated": 1695106901, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 238, "votes_funny": 21, "weighted_vote_score": "0.776629149913787842", "comment_count": 6, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "149585165", "author": { "steamid": "76561198026145600", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 8, "playtime_forever": 3279, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3279, "last_played": 1695159914 }, "language": "english", "review": "A derivative echo-chamber of a game that exemplifies Bethesda's fall from grace. The RPG elements are dumbed down to a thin gruel, the characters are as emotive and convincing as cardboard cutouts, the quests are mere shells of narrative, the long-decrepit engine is an embarrassment compared to modern genre competitors, POIs are reused and recycled to a truly ludicrous degree and even the main story beats are hollow and derivative - you get 'space dragon shouts' for heaven's sake.\n\nGone are the open worlds and interesting en-route encounters that made prior games so beloved, replaced with disconnected islands of shallow, recycled content, punctuated by loading screen after loading screen. Every ounce of soul has been sacrificed to the altar of convenience and accessibility; every atom of creativity fused to molecules of mediocre until all that remains is a shambling, empty echo of the past.", "timestamp_created": 1699189074, "timestamp_updated": 1699194071, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 221, "votes_funny": 0, "weighted_vote_score": "0.776570558547973633", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1699540527, "developer_response": "Hi,\n\nWe appreciate you taking the time to provide your review and sorry to hear that you did not enjoy your time in Starfield.\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nThe intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nWhile there may be loading screens in between fast travelling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created.\n\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\n\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "145745108", "author": { "steamid": "76561198141270398", "num_games_owned": 897, "num_reviews": 27, "playtime_forever": 5794, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 26, "playtime_at_review": 2320, "last_played": 1703086716 }, "language": "english", "review": "\"For every star, there is a field.\"\n-John Starfield", "timestamp_created": 1693963426, "timestamp_updated": 1693963426, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 644, "votes_funny": 468, "weighted_vote_score": "0.773353874683380127", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145799038", "author": { "steamid": "76561198253132472", "num_games_owned": 382, "num_reviews": 55, "playtime_forever": 3411, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2538, "last_played": 1694908084 }, "language": "english", "review": "10/10 would buy again for Sarah Morgan", "timestamp_created": 1694019110, "timestamp_updated": 1694457447, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 38, "votes_funny": 4, "weighted_vote_score": "0.76814645528793335", "comment_count": 3, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "150248875", "author": { "steamid": "76561197963272141", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 7, "playtime_forever": 8836, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 8506, "last_played": 1700354666 }, "language": "english", "review": "It's like a warm drink of water when you're really thirsty. You really want a cold glass of ice water, but you're not NOT gonna drink it y'know? Personally I think beth could have done better. I hope they expand on starfield and inject a bit of that Bethesda charm, because as much as it pains me to say it, if it weren't plastered at the start of the game, I almost wouldn't even know it was a bgs game. Where's the love? Where's the heart Bethesda? Where's the excellent, beautiful, amazing, thought provoking writing? Where's the delicious charm? I miss it bethy, I miss it a lot.", "timestamp_created": 1700177208, "timestamp_updated": 1700177208, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 708, "votes_funny": 150, "weighted_vote_score": "0.764991581439971924", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "153842073", "author": { "steamid": "76561197961270473", "num_games_owned": 406, "num_reviews": 15, "playtime_forever": 454, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 454, "last_played": 1701998382 }, "language": "english", "review": "After dedicating countless hours to creating mods for Skyrim and Fallout 4, amassing over 5 million downloads, it pains me to announce to my modding community: I won't be modding for Starfield. I'm at a loss to comprehend Bethesda's direction. In an era graced by masterpieces like Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption II, Elden Ring, and Baldur's Gate, Bethesda has somehow managed to release a game that feels archaic, lackluster, and painfully underwhelming. The game's script is lackadaisical, the gameplay lethargic, and the overall experience is profoundly uninspiring. It's a far cry from the innovative standards set in 2023/24.\n\nThis weekend, as I pen this review, the player counts speak volumes:\n\nStarfield: 20,027 players\nFallout 4: 20,089 players\nSkyrim SE: 23,723 players\n\nThese figures paint a grim picture for Bethesda. It took them eight years to produce a game that not only fails to surpass but barely matches the engagement of their older titles. A \"Fallout 4 - Space Edition\" or a substantial DLC would have likely been a more successful venture.\n\nI played Starfield for a mere 8 hours, enough to confirm the myriad issues highlighted in other reviews. I refuse to waste more time on a game that has left me, a long-time Bethesda admirer, deeply disappointed, frustrated, and saddened. There's no incentive for me to invest my creativity in playing or modding Starfield.\n\nBethesda, this is a farewell from a disheartened fan. Peace.", "timestamp_created": 1702882380, "timestamp_updated": 1702882961, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 141, "votes_funny": 6, "weighted_vote_score": "0.763770759105682373", "comment_count": 18, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "154572794", "author": { "steamid": "76561197991936394", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 26, "playtime_forever": 1558, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1558, "last_played": 1693795735 }, "language": "english", "review": "[h1][b] Welcome to the new normal, where AAA Titles are rubbish, perform terribly, and the devs blame you when you speak up [/b][/h1]\n\nI haven't really played around with this since Early Access and launch. I wasn't going to bother with a review. Prior to Bethesda's immature behaviour, this was just another in a long line of poorly developed AAA games that left a bad taste in my mouth and has become the norm on PC, and arguably in the Gaming community in general. Sadly, this review has to be done since Bethesda loves to blame US for THEIR mistakes. I guess they didn't learn from ReSpawn and EA Games when those studios also tried to blame players for Jedi: Survivor's rubbish code and optimisation.\n\n[b][u] Mediocre gameplay and storytelling: [/u][/b]\n\nStarfield was in development for 8 years (while most of us have been waiting for Elder Scrolls 6 I might add). For a game to be this \"paint by numbers\" after an 8-year development cycle, and not taking risks or breaking moulds for what is supposedly their passion project, is insane. This is like if Wish.Com had made Mass Effect. BioWare already did this genre far better than Bethesda could ever hope to. The NPCs and side characters are uninspired, generic, safe. The quests, save for a few, were as simplistic as remembering the alphabet. The promises made by the head of the studio were never delivered upon. To make no mention of the fact that Bethesda, in a reminiscent display of Project CD RED's Cyberpunk, overhyped their game and then bought in to their own hype train. Is it a bad game (problems with optimisation and coding excluded)? No. But the expectation that this would be a GotY contender this year, or that it was worth 70 quid, is asinine at best, and downright clinically delusional at worst.\n\n[b][u] Immersion Breaking Glitches, Bugs, and Poor Performance: [/u][/b]\n\nThe memes of how Bethesda lets you test their software AFTER release and making you pay for it instead of doing Early Access like some other GotY winning studios are insanely accurate.\n\nThe release was bugged, the performance was awful, and the response to criticism was appalling. Moving beyond the dead-eye stares of NPCs that have given rise to the STAREFIELD memes, optimisation was just simply not a thing. Levelling up bugs, companions chilling on top of your ship while travelling through space, and other immersion breaking glitches are all over the place. One should not be getting 40ish FPS with a mid-tier RTX 30 Series card in this game when the recommended hardware is a mid-tier RTX 20 Series Card. That's not even mentioning how people with high-end 40 Series Cards were experiencing the same problems. Also, can we acknowledge that relying on upscaling is not optimisation of your software? Far too many AAA developers are pumping out titles to meet their shareholder's money hungry gluttony by relying on this tool. I shouldn't have to upscale to eke out 10-20 more frames a second, and in Starfield's case it didn't even work that great, to put me over the standard 60 FPS. Come on people, we live in a post DOOM: Eternal world, where the standard of true optimisation of a video game has been set for almost 4 years.\n\n[b][u] Developers Throwing Temper Tantrums: [/u][/b]\n\nBut perhaps the biggest offence, the most appalling behaviour of all that actually led me to writing a review for this steaming hot cup of mediocrity? Beyond releasing an official statement gaslighting players by blaming their hardware (very reminiscent of ReSpawn's official statement in April regarding the average player's reaction to Jedi: Survivor), Bethesda sent their devs in to the Steam reviews to negatively respond to our criticism. To gaslight us, Devsplain to us why WE were wrong, and not THEM. That's not a good look. Consumers set the tone, your game performed horribly. Eat the shit sandwich and do better next time. But this is the world we are coming to. Corporations producing products for people they disdain, and then getting mad when their product performs poorly. Blizzard started it, it's so obvious that Blizzard hates their players, and now we have seen it with ReSpawn/EA Games and Bethesda. Welcome to the new normal, where AAA Titles are rubbish, perform terribly, and the devs blame you when you speak up.\n\nI give this game a hard line 2/10, and my recommendation is wait till it's marked down 90%.", "timestamp_created": 1703711854, "timestamp_updated": 1703712281, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 77, "votes_funny": 2, "weighted_vote_score": "0.763490557670593262", "comment_count": 1, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145736043", "author": { "steamid": "76561198029894415", "num_games_owned": 248, "num_reviews": 78, "playtime_forever": 2573, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2321, "last_played": 1694137125 }, "language": "english", "review": "I grinded out this game's main story during the few days of early access for Premium Edition pre-orders. For all the marketing of this game being \"vast, highly replayable, and has over 1000 planets to explore\", this universe feels very... small, and mostly empty. A few bright spots stand out, don't get me wrong, but by and large there's a lot of filler here, and not always a lot in the way of solid sustenance. I tried out a little bit of everything, from trading, exploration, space battles and ground combat, and can definitively say that a LOT of this game's spouted activities are miserable without heavy skill investment. With the first half of the game being slow & rather uninteresting, looting being your only real way to make money, many characters uninteresting & bugs abound, right now my recommendation is a soft pass. For now.\n\nMy general impression of the game is that the early game needs a lot of work. Very little is explained to you, and the bits that are get locked behind quests that you can miss. I went in with the mentality of wanting to be a trade-focused build, as I've done in other games like Elite: Dangerous and Starsector, but ended ditching that idea after realizing that space combat was broken, practical trade ships require way more capital than you can possibly generate early on, and don't pay anywhere near as well as other activities (IE. looting). There are also no tutorials in the way of shipbuilding, general trading, or anything regarding smuggling.\n\nI then tried my hand at exploration, and spent the next 4-8 hours trying to survey ONE planet. It was here I learned that, without massive investment into survey and mobility skills, planet surveying is miserable, time-consuming work that again doesn't pay anywhere near as well as looting. Plants and animals take WAY too many scan requirements to be fun, especially the solo predators who appear infrequently. You spend an ungodly amount of time running around, hoping to get lucky with spawns, and it doesn't help that there's no biome information for animals found in the waters of coastal areas, which is something I ended up having to look up online.\n\nYou also have an extremely limited inventory space to collect and store items in, making the draw of harvesting planet/animal parts even less appealing. This problem is in fact so bad, that inventory management will be an issue for virtually every stage of the game, or at the very least until you can get a high-capacity ship to store everything in. Outposts don't help much, because the starting storage areas you're given are pitifully tiny, and you're again forced to spend a huge amount of skill points investing into the relevant skills to get better ones, not to mention that outpost management is locked far into it's respective skill tree.\n\nThis lead me to try a combat approach. Space combat was out because I couldn't afford a proper combat ship for most of my playthough, and my first experience with an actual, non-simulated fight had me get instantly blown away by three level 13 enemies in a level 5 zone. Conversely, it's also trivially easy to escape combat if your engines aren't disabled, and ambushes tend to be rare, so I ignored this mechanic almost entirely. This lead me to ground combat & looting, which ended up being my primary money maker for the rest of the game. Once I found out how much weapons and armour sold for, every other activity fell by the wayside. The combat in this game is actually rather fun, albeit with few ACTUAL options in the way of builds or tactics. Ballistic rifles & shotguns dominate everything, both in terms of efficiency, perks, and ammo availability.\n\nRegarding characters: I found most of the main cast either dislikable or forgettable, only the gray ones with shady pasts I thought were memorable. There really isn't a good selection of \"gray\" conversation options either, most are geared towards being a boyscout or edgelord. The general response to your character saying \"I'm mostly just here for the money\" is people thinking you're an unstable psychopath, which is ridiculous. Most of the main cast follow the \"boyscout\" path and will incessantly complain about you not being Paragon enough, which is made even worse by the long sections of being forced to travel with them during plot missions.\n\nAs for the main story, I again blitzed through it in a few days so my experience is limited. In general I didn't get super sucked into the worldbuilding, the first half of the game I found incredibly boring and thought things didn't ramp up quickly enough. The latter half was significantly more interesting, with some actually interesting missions and setpieces. The space cowboys ripped from RDR I didn't much care for, but the ME Omega-spinoff aquatic criminals I did, and hell any mission that has me enjoy an espionage & stealth section gets a pass in my books. The later themes of \"cosmic enlightenment\" and \"Science vs Faith\" really stuck though, and oddly enough, I'm actually enjoying the twist and added character depth of NG+ more than my first playthrough.\n\nQuickfire round to ends things off:\n\n-Need more earlygame tutorials to help the player out, shipbuilding, trade and smuggling especially. The latter I didn't/couldn't touch during my entire playthrough\n-The menus can be pretty unintuitive. \"Respond to hails\" is the same button as \"get out of seat\", which can lead to deaths from your character lethargically getting up while the ship gets blasted\n-Really need more movement options besides running and jetpacking, vehicles especially would help. Also, why are jump-packs not unlocked immediately from game start, considering their critical importance?\n-Too many gamebreaking bugs: some ship encounters softlock the game, and the final quest broke for me entirely, forcing me to do it blind and afterward having all my autosaves immediately softlock with an unskippable recruitment screen. Enemies can get locked behind doors, get yeeted upon death, and long rifles can poke out of locked containers and just grabbed through the wall\n-Really need to ease out of the \"all or nothing\" aspect of item/armour engineering skills\n-Make exploration more worthwhile and less grindy... 8 hours to survey one planet is completely unacceptable when the main storyline is like 15hrs long\n-Storage management needs an overhaul: give us more options to put things away in, and don't force us to have only 1 ship available at a time\n-Art direction is on point, but graphics are completely borked. I can reliably play every game I own on high/ultra, this game I had to set to medium-low, even with an SSD\n-Some NPCs spawn without weapons or armour. I've seen naked guards roaming the streets\n-Companions are completely lobotomized, most of the time they're without weapons or proper spacesuits, and frequently run into the player's LOS, especially in zero-G sections\n-Deadly gasses can seep into the ship while landed, which is especially a problem if there's one on your bed, and kills you instantly if you try to rest\n-Ship segments can straight up disappear while landed, and some landing pads have you spawn directly underneath with little way to escape\n-Solar system levelling seems to be completely arbitrary: fauna in low-level areas are still unreasonably tanky, triple level 14 ships can spawn in level 5 zones, and level 75 zones were easily taken down by my character who was only in their mid 30s\n-Fuel seems to be completely arbitrary\n-[spoiler]NG+ ship needs a bed & crafting area[/spoiler]\n\nOverall, early game is too slow, forced Paragon characters are annoying, lots of bugs... some gamebreaking. Some redeeming moments in the latter half of the game & NG+, but for now it's a soft pass until the jank is stamped out, and vehicles are added in.\n\nCome back in a few months to a year, I'd say.", "timestamp_created": 1693958433, "timestamp_updated": 1694129500, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 3956, "votes_funny": 159, "weighted_vote_score": "0.759352803230285645", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1696430839, "developer_response": "Hi,\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nWe appreciate you taking the time to provide your review and sorry to hear that you did not enjoy your time in Starfield. Below we have addressed some of your concerns and issues regarding the lacking tutorials, the emptiness, surveying, inventory, combat, and the story.\n\nLacking Tutorials:\nStarfield can seem overwhelming for new players at first, with a multitude of systems to learn and many different planets to explore. When starting out, make sure to read the various tooltips that explain the different systems as you encounter them through the initial tutorial. As you progress further into the game, you can get further help by looking through our 'Getting Started' guide here: https://beth.games/46AJah3\n\nEmptiness:\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nSurveying:\nSurveying involves scanning three specific planet features to gather information. These three features are fauna and flora, inorganic resources, and landmarks. You may not receive data every time you scan something which can slow down the process. Scanning can be improved by upgrading the skills Surveying skill which is under the Science Skills. You can also upgrade your scanner to be able to find increasingly rarer inorganic resources. Please see the following FAQ for more details on the surveying system: https://beth.games/3ZEIJjo\n\nInventory Space:\nYou start the game with the ability to carry 135kg on your person. The best way to increase your inventory size in Starfield is to purchase the weightlifting skill. Doing this will increase your carry weight. Some foods give you stat increases that temporarily increase your carry capacity. You can unload some of your inventory to a nearby companion to make more room on your character. Finally, you can offload into your ship's cargo hold. Cockpit Modules can be used to add increased cargo space on your starship.\n\nCharacter Combat:\nYou will face many dangers during your exploration on foot. You can increase your chances of survival by approaching these encounters with different combat styles. These different styles range from ranged, melee, or stealth combat. You can also learn different combat skills that will enhance your combat style. Investing skill points into the Combat skill tree is going to increase the deadliness of your character by expanding the understanding of different types of combat, from Unarmed to Ballistics.\nFor further information on combat styles you can see our guide here: https://beth.games/3PBumI8\nFor further information on combat skills you can see our guide here: https://beth.games/3tbM4Kx\n\nStory:\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nTo provide feedback for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146148671", "author": { "steamid": "76561197996840801", "num_games_owned": 486, "num_reviews": 13, "playtime_forever": 6392, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 6073, "last_played": 1695135556 }, "language": "english", "review": "A little back-story first: Morrowind was one of the first games I had ever installed on my first ever PC…my first RPG, my first open-world game and my first all-nighter…with so many firsts of my gaming life, it was also love at first sight. So I can confidently say that Bethesda games hold a special place in my heart and to be honest, with such high affection also comes high expectations\n\nCompared to previous Bethesda titles, general stability of the game is much better. No game-breaking bugs, almost no crashes (I had 3 crashes in 100 hours which is fair enough), mostly NPC/Companion related camera angle bugs which are part of the experience at this point to be honest BUT let’s be real; this level of polish was only made possible with the resources of Microsoft not Bethesda. If not for the acquisition (which was the best possible scenario for Bethesda in my opinion), this game would be riddled with catastrophic bugs. So when it comes to polish, Microsoft definitely saved the day.\n\nMy biggest gripe with this game and in general with Bethesda is the Creation Engine. Yes, the game uses Creation Engine 2 but still, it’s the same base code since Morrowind and it shows…it definitely shows. Having an SSD is a must if you want to play this game, it’s not optional. Technically you can play it on an HDD but you WILL lose your mind. Loading screens are everywhere…I can understand different instances with fairly large interiors but small shops, houses etc. all are instanced with load screens. During one of the quests, I entered a room which was probably 2 meters by 3 meters, I spent 20 seconds in there and it was loading screen entering and loading screen exiting…why Bethesda…why?\n\nCreation Engine definitely doesn’t meet the requirements of a modern open world game. It feels extremely bloated and it shows. Performance is all around the place; with ultra-settings I had 60 fps in taxing locations yes but I have a 4080…This is not a card that you settle with 60 fps…and if it’s like this in the high end, I don’t want to know what it’s like in the lower end. Btw, Elder Scrolls VI is also being developed with Creation Engine 2 so I have a lot of reservations about it at this point…Creation Engine needs to go Bethesda, enough is enough.\n\nI started talking about the shortcomings of the game on purpose because almost all the negative parts of the game can be linked to the inadequacy of the game engine; facial expressions of characters for example, much better compared to previous games yes but just a month before a [i]tiny, little[/i] game called [b]Baldur’s Gate 3[/b] came into our lives and comparing the two [i](yes, I know…two games are fundamentally different but still…both are RPGs and both are AAA games, so a comparison is warranted)[/i], BG3 stands head and shoulders above Starfield. The disappointment on Wyll’s face when I refused his romantic advancements, the emotions of Minsc when he’s talking about Boo…these have stayed with me long after...In Starfield, I can recall no such memory…I romanced Sarah in my initial play-through and it was….meh…not bad but...not memorable either. BG3 gave that emotion with every single character...The [i]“feeling”[/i] Larian Studios managed to give me…I want THAT Bethesda…and it’s not happening with the Creation Engine…Again…Enough is enough…Creation Engine needs to go!\n\nAlright…Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about why this game deserves every single penny you spend…Yes, I know…after all I’ve said about the awful game engine, how this game can be worth any money…\n\nLove it or hate it…they made it work…It’s still a Bethesda RPG through and through.\n\nDon’t get me wrong; liking this game requires a specific mindset so it’s definitely not for everybody…But if you do have that specific mindset...You will have fun with this game for the foreseeable future.\n\nFirst of all, main campaign was really good. It asks really fundamental questions about existence...and for answers…Let’s just say, you have to make your own deductions…nothing more, nothing less…\n\nSide quests are also satisfactory. Faction quests were very memorable experiences and other smaller side quests definitely didn’t feel forced. I truly believe they were all hand crafted. Randomly generated quests are a plenty but the point you get them is fair and obvious so you don’t feel cheated.\n\nGraphics are good….yes the engine is old and outdated, performance is wanting but damn you can take some seriously cool screenshots in this game.\n\nShip and outpost building: This is Lego…no question about it…During any part of your childhood, if you have come across Lego and fallen in love with it, this game is ‘digital Lego’. Since Fallout 4, it’s probably the best gameplay mechanic Bethesda have come up with. I don’t care about the bugs, I don’t care about anything else…I can build my own dream starship and planetary outpost…I can build a commercial empire throughout the settled systems…It might take years but I can…\n\nFor a game…any game…Replayability/gameplay loop is king and it is here, which brings me to another main point: MODS.\n\nModding has always been a major part of Bethesda games. I’m going a step further…modding is THE reason Bethesda is Bethesda today…Without the modding community, this company would not have become the titan it is today, so let’s give the credit where it’s due: Silent protagonists of the Bethesda story – Modders…\n\nThe main game has its flaws, yes…but even if it didn’t, modders will be modders and do their own thing…This game will be officially and unofficially updated for the foreseeable future…Until Elder Scrolls VI comes, this is it…It’s your digital Lego for the next decade.\n\nAbove, I said Starfield requires a specific mindset and this is what I meant…To love this game, you need to be a bit old school…try to fix things manually, try to change things manually…accept that things are not given with updates but taken through research.\n\nThinking about it…All my gripes with the game engine etc. …maybe it’s intentional…maybe…just maybe it’s part of the design…to push us brave through the starfield…to be born among the stars…one more time…\n", "timestamp_created": 1694486420, "timestamp_updated": 1694486420, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 193, "votes_funny": 7, "weighted_vote_score": "0.757469236850738525", "comment_count": 7, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145739271", "author": { "steamid": "76561198024186349", "num_games_owned": 353, "num_reviews": 12, "playtime_forever": 6978, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3041, "last_played": 1702167215 }, "language": "english", "review": "So, I really tried to embrace the game and really tried to keep my expectations in check but boy, the game dropped the ball. To spare you folks a wall of text, I'll summarize it in points:\n\n- the game is basically a mix of Skyrim and Fallout in space but worse. They took Skyrim's shout system and idea of making you some super powerful being, mixed it with Fallout's gunplay, pulled a space skin over it and you got yourself Starfield.\n\n- the story is average and unoriginal. Not going to spoiler anything here but the main story and the faction stories are all just meh. Surface level writing.\n\n- the pacing is all over the place, making the early game painful and exhausting but the endgame endurable. By the time you feel comfortable with the game it's already over.\n\n- factions are unoriginal as they have always been in previous games and are among the few things you can actually do before running out of meaningful quests.\n\n- choices don't really matter and have barely any impact (you can just lie to other factions and they believe you right away and pretend you didn't blow up a navy's fleet a couple days before)\n\n- visuals are partially great and partially last gen. The lighting makes the game look great but the assets like foliage and human models are certainly not living up to the modern standard\n\n- space flight / fight is terrible and generic at best. Unless you're really into travelling from one dead rock to another to destroy random ships, this feature is completely obsolete.\n\n- ship building lacks preview features to see what the ship looks on the inside while constructing\n\n- exploration is boring after visiting dead planets for the 100th time. Calling this intentional is a bad excuse because procedually generated content always sucks when nothing hand-crafted adds flavor to it.\n\n- building is a major downgrade compared to previous games. Buildings are no longer made up from single pieces but instead you gotta puzzle together premade building parts that adapt to whatever you are snapping to it.\n\n- the PC performance is a bad joke even when being beyond the recommended specs (Ryzen 5 5600x and a RTX 4070ti are not enough for stable 1440p 60fps, no matter what settings you're on, LOL)\n\n- no DLSS support which could have been a savior for RTX 4000 card users with DLSS 3. Instead people have to use a paid mod to get frame generation which would have made the experience endurable. I blame the AMD deal for it.\n\n- most of the solar systems are empty and rely on procedually generated maps and events. These locations are just generic dungeons and locations which hold no notable loot. The only important places are all tied to quests.\n\n- no black hole. I've been to every single solar system to figure that out. So the most exciting and terrifying entity of our galaxy is NOT in this game. The hell?\n\n- the perk system is feature-locking the gameplay and enforcing to play the game in certain ways one may not like. You even have to unlock the ability to pick pocket and sneak which have been default abilities in previous games.\n\n- inventory management in this game is a nightmare and requires you to filter out stuff while outside or keep adding storage containers to your outpost to store a fraction of it\n\n- the gore is lame. I had at least expected stuff like cracking open a helmet and see a frozen/bloated face inside but nope, nothing. No blood. The only fun thing you can do is blowing up folks jetpacks\n\n- one of the major factions (House Va'ruun) that has been involved in the game's lore is not available at all and only a couple random renegades can be found and fought.\n\n- the weapon upgrade system is one big chore as you have to research new parts at the research terminal which is just another grinding chore.\n\n- surprisingly few bugs compared to their previous games\n\n- the way they introduced NG+ is fun, allowing you to skip the main story part right to the finale to do the final and only interesting part of the story over and over again.\n\n---\nOverall, this game launched in a poorly optimized state and I'm pretty sure the long delay was only to cut all the unfinished stuff because there is no way they thought it would be a great idea to ship a game with 4/5 dead landscape and call it a great experience. This is a game, not a simulation ffs.\n\n--------------\nUPDATE: 01.12.2023\n--------------\n\nSo since Bethesda's marketing team has tried to tell me that I'm playing the game wrong and that there is so much fun to be discovered in doing the same thing again and again and again, I think after another 50 hours spent in this game should be enough to say that the guy obviously doesn't play his own game. Contraband smuggling is worthless and the peanuts you get from selling them isn't worth the trouble. Side quests are meaningless and offer nothing exciting to discover. Hell, destroying and looting every ship at Deimos' shipyard is more profitable and entertaining than doing anything else the game has to offer.\n\nThe game is bland and empty. If you wanna tell me that's because of realism: Gaben Newell made a pretty strong statement regarding this in a recently released documentary -->\nI don't play games because of realism. If I want realism, I go buy stuff at the grocery store. I play games because I want to have fun, not to experience realism. Meaning you should have never relied on real space as a reference in the first place and you should have started coming up with a game-worthy interpretation of space instead.", "timestamp_created": 1693959727, "timestamp_updated": 1701444766, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 1271, "votes_funny": 26, "weighted_vote_score": "0.757173359394073486", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698760968, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are sorry to hear Starfield didn't live up to your expectations.\n\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nQuests were made to be completed in several ways. You get to decide who lives and who dies at crucial points of the story, as well as how to go about meeting any given objective.\n\nOutpost creation is helpful for those who want to be able to craft resources or to proceed with building an area where advanced research can be done like Alien breeding. You will always gain lots of XP for your production progress as well as the ability to continue to expand your own outpost.\n\nYou start the game with the ability to carry 135kg on your person. The best way to increase your inventory size in Starfield is to purchase the weightlifting skill. Doing this will increase your carry weight. Some foods give you stat increases that temporarily increase your carry capacity. You can unload some of your inventory to a nearby companion to make more room on your character. Finally, you can offload into your ship's cargo hold. Cockpit Modules can be used to add increased cargo space on your starship.\n\nWeapons are the most efficient way to deal with lifeforms and robots, hostile or otherwise. There are many different types of weapons in the Settled Systems to utilize and modify. Each weapon, excluding melee weapons and throwables, also has a damage type. These damage types are the following: Ballistic, Laser, EM, and Particle Beam. Throughout your travels you will find resources you can use to modify and upgrade weapons. These are found in the Resources section of your inventory. To modify and upgrade weapons, you need to locate and access a Weapons Workbench. For more details on weapon workbenches please see our FAQ here: https://beth.games/3PGlO2y\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nNever stop exploring!\n\nBethesda Customer Support\n" }, { "recommendationid": "154564629", "author": { "steamid": "76561198052282026", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 10065, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 10065, "last_played": 1700688565 }, "language": "english", "review": "....took them 8 years to make this ? A lifeless, empty, repetitive, poorly written waste of potential. Enjoy the same bugs and engine quirks we've seen since Oblivion in 2006", "timestamp_created": 1703705178, "timestamp_updated": 1703705178, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 103, "votes_funny": 4, "weighted_vote_score": "0.752153873443603516", "comment_count": 14, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146160295", "author": { "steamid": "76561198056260607", "num_games_owned": 372, "num_reviews": 66, "playtime_forever": 9802, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 9738, "last_played": 1694552187 }, "language": "english", "review": "“As vast as an ocean, as deep as a puddle.”\n\nNON-SPOILER REVIEW\n\nQuick TL;DR? Pretty mid game, not the greatest Bethesda game but it isn’t horrible, yet it certainly isn’t GOTY. 5 or 6 / 10. Wait for it to go on sale/DLC to come out/Modders to add additional content. Honestly The Outer Worlds blows this game out of the water in my opinion.\n\nActual Review Below:\n\nA rather disappointing game. I’d personally say 5/10. It wasn’t horrible by any means but looking back on Bethesda “main-line” titles I’d certainly say this was the weakest. I’d argue any other Bethesda main-line titles are better than this one. From the writing, exploration, combat and mechanics. So let’s get into the details so I don’t sound like I’m needlessly shitting on this game without reason. As a frame of reference I’m writing this with over 162 hours of gameplay and I’m on NG+ run 3.\n\nStory: Fucking fetch quest galore. Some may argue that such a thing may be a common theme in Bethesda games and they may be right but the ENTIRE GAME? Nearly every single quest in the game aside from minor ones is a fetch quest. From the main story to the faction quest. So let’s go over them without spoilers.\n\nMain Story: “You think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he’s created?” You have an acid trip when you touch a special jigsaw piece so now you’re on the hunt for all of the other pieces to complete the puzzle. 90% of the MSQ is finding these pieces with some minor drama in between but nothing worth caring about. This happens until a laughable quest takes place where you must “solve a riddle” concerning the three main religions/beliefs within the galaxy that dissolve down to some movie fluff plot of “Well these must be coordinates and this must be the planet it’s on!”. In the finale of the game they rush some hasty question of universal power/god that asks you “What is Unity?”. Resulting in the player’s choice to enter a new game plus which results, personally, in the feeling that all you accomplished in the playthrough was for nothing with how the NG+ system works.\n\nUC Story: “I’m doing my part!”. The UC story is nearly comical. If you like Starship Troopers then I can promise you that you’ll love this faction questline. Join the Navy! Get sent out on a basic mission where the “basic” mission was a lot more than your recruiter expected. End up in a plot to cover-up state secrets or expose them and put an end to the “bug” threat! Pretty alright and you earn your “citizenship because of your service”. \n\nFSC Story: “In the eyes of a ranger, had better know the truth from wrong and right”. Holy shit, someone just came at the thought of cowboys/southerns in space and made an ENTIRE faction about it. You get recruited into this faction by stopping a wild west bank robbery and get deputized to stop the “outlaws of the blackest ocean”. Which all basically ends with “It was the corrupt mayor’s fault!” which you saw from a mile away if you have the most mild of storytelling abilities.\n\nUC Sysdef/Crimson Fleet Story: “THERE ONCE WAS A MAN NAMED GOLD ROGER WHO WAS KING OF THE PIRATES!”. Pirate fantasy or undercover cop dream, take your pick. Either you’re recruited to spy on this pirate faction or help them. Either way results in an “adventure” to find a hidden treasure hunted by the most famous pirate captain. It’s practically One Piece without the powers and in space. The entire questline is to basically find the One Piece where you get a final choice either to give it to one faction or that other and then kill the one you don’t give it to. \n\nRyujin Story: “Tetsuke RAISE! TETSUKE RAISE!” Wake the fuck up samurai, we’re serving the corporations! You ever wanted to work for off-brand Walmart cyberpunk Arasaka? Congrats. Here’s your chance. Welcome to corporate espionage and the most “here’s the thieve’s guild” faction I’ve ever seen next to Skyrim. An entire basic thieves guild storyline that culminates into a cyberpunk plot of “This cyber brain chip is dangerous and could cause the end of civil society! What do you think?! HMMMMM?!”. No Keanu Reeves though. This questline ends with a fucking board meeting and then they basically tell you to fuck off. Wonderful.\n\nPlot holes: “Miku won. You know what that means? All my friends are gonna die and you are too.” Where to begin? First off, House Va’Ruun. Despite being a clear rip-off from a Dune faction. We’re told NEXT TO NOTHING about this cult-like government full of people that hold a major amount of power such as: Holding access codes to a vault of forbidden tech governed by the space UN. Yet there’s nothing in this game of a home planet, centered fleet or actual power. Yet they have an embassy and diplomatic relations with the UC? I hope they get expanded on in the DLC. Next to the cult faction is “The House of Enlightenment” which I thought was going to be an interesting faction till it felt like an abundance of their story/play within the story was cut almost? They’re almost portrayed as sorta the Yin to Va’Ruun’s Yang yet are never expanded on aside from a small MSQ element before being discarded for minor side fetch quests. And the “beings” ah yes what feels like a ham-fisted last moment attempt to get the players interested, we’ve got to bring in “other worldly beings” and multiverse theory. Jesus Christ.\n\nExploration: “Over a thousand planets to explore!” was a common quote I heard pertaining to this game both in its marketing and other people talking about it. But I’m not here to complain about the gas giants. Those are fine. My issue is with the ACTUAL planets. The only planets that are worth visiting are maybe four or five? Out of the thousand? The rest are barren as fuck aside from the standard copy and pasted pirate hideouts or “abandoned cryo-facility”. All of which are copy and pasted to each planet with no variation other than when the MSQ forces you to clear out one and adds a small single room to the layout to which lays a jigsaw piece. “Well Zombie you can put outpost on those planets and survey them” to which I ask “Fucking why?” The outposting system serves no purpose. Literally zero purpose. Not even like in Fallout 4 where you kinda had to build one depending on which faction you picked in the story. As of this very moment there is no reason to build an outpost.\n\nCombat/Mechanics: It’s just Fallout 4’s gunplay. That’s it for combat. Some of the weapons are interesting but for the most part you’re just gonna hard skill into one type of weapon and end up one or two tapping enemies then looting their corpses. Flying? HA! How do you feel about extended fast traveling? Because that’s what you’re getting. Do not get this game expending NMS levels of flying into the atmosphere and flying to another planet to which you may land on it. Everything is covered by a loading screen. Which would have been fine if they actually filled the planets with a bunch of shit to do on them rather than only five planets with actual shit to do and 995 being basically barren deserts with the occasional pirate outpost. For a moment let’s reflect back on Skyrim. I know I know we’ve seen and heard enough about Skyrim for over a decade but trust me on this. Skyrim was jam-packed full of content even before any DLC dropped. Countless cities with minor and major storylines/faction quests. Even on your mundane travels you could find a burned down fishing hut and discover what happened to the small little family who burned alive inside of it. This has next to nothing other than fetch quest, the major fetch quest MSQ and rather small faction quest. The leveling system requires multiple playthroughs to actually build your character. I’m on NG+ run 3 and I’m only level 59. That’s with purposefully going to over level areas to grind out higher XP enemies. The level cap is 100. Does this game want me to play it over 9 or 10 times to reach the level cap?\n\nTL;DR: Comically horrible writing. Basic combat. Poorly made systems/exploration. Wait a bit.", "timestamp_created": 1694511665, "timestamp_updated": 1694511665, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 660, "votes_funny": 22, "weighted_vote_score": "0.748727679252624512", "comment_count": 50, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698763077, "developer_response": "\nGreetings,\n\nYou can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!\n\n\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nThe combat in Starfield is some of our player's favorite aspect of the game. It is closer to a Doom Eternal pace than that of Fallout but still honoring many aspects of what made the combat in Fallout so great. You will face many dangers during your exploration on foot. You can increase your chances of survival by approaching these encounters with different combat styles. These different styles range from ranged, melee, or stealth combat. You can also learn different combat skills that will enhance your combat style. Investing skill points into the Combat skill tree is going to increase the deadliness of your character by expanding the understanding of different types of combat, from Unarmed to Ballistics.\nFor further information on combat styles you can see our guide here: https://beth.games/3PBumI8\nFor further information on combat skills you can see our guide here: https://beth.games/3tbM4Kx\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nNever stop exploring!\n\nBethesda Customer Support\n" }, { "recommendationid": "145913655", "author": { "steamid": "76561197960511970", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 5, "playtime_forever": 2613, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 842, "last_played": 1694705767 }, "language": "english", "review": "It is not a bad game. If you want Fallout in Space with dogfights, it absolutely delivers that. But the problems are that it feels very dated. The voice-acting and writing are embarrassingly bad, especially after coming off Baldurs Gate 3 where I found myself caring deeply about the characters and their stories. Starfield makes me want to skip dialog as fast as possible because it is so cringey. \n\nThe main plot is about as cliched and uninspired as you can imagine. You are a no-name miner, but suddenly you are the crux of the whole plot and everyone just decides to make you the \"chosen one\" to do all the important stuff in a pre-existing group for no reason at all. It makes absolutely no sense when they had someone in their organization who had already experienced the mcguffin. \n\nThe more I play it, the less I like it from the plot perspective. If people aren't playing for the plot, their experience will likely be better, but I still find the game feeling dated... Looks like I've played too much to refund it, which is disappointing, but the same issues still remain. The writing and voice-acting are reminiscent of a game from 1995 and really hold this game back.\n\nEdit: lol at the AI generated response from developer. Seems like they are spamming everyone that didn't enjoy the game. As for my experience since writing, I played through all of the story lines and while some of the other ones were slightly better than the main one, this game is horribly dated and I will likely never revisit it again. A real pity and a missed opportunity to really up the bar on space-exploration. Kinda says something that I went back to No Mans Sky to scratch the itch for space-exploration...", "timestamp_created": 1694181004, "timestamp_updated": 1701184526, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 1425, "votes_funny": 28, "weighted_vote_score": "0.744234204292297363", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698763267, "developer_response": "Greetings,\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nYou can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\nNever stop exploring!\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "149622136", "author": { "steamid": "76561197993637427", "num_games_owned": 350, "num_reviews": 62, "playtime_forever": 3271, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3271, "last_played": 1696123834 }, "language": "english", "review": "Boring and overrated. There is a wide universe to explore, filled mostly with empty planets. I understand. They have to do that to sell you on the idea that this is a whole universe, but that doesn't make the game more fun. You can land on any planet and explore the copy/pasted locations. You will see the exact same locations from one end of the universe to the other and everywhere in between. A hodgepodge of messy, slapped together mechanics. Bloated skill trees, \"exploring\", crafting, base building, an RPG, an FPS, a space opera. Starfield doesn't know what it wants to be. As wide as the ocean and as deep as a puddle. You can explore everywhere but why would you want to?", "timestamp_created": 1699229300, "timestamp_updated": 1699229300, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 56, "votes_funny": 3, "weighted_vote_score": "0.742002665996551514", "comment_count": 12, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1699293458, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\n\nWe are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty.\n\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nNever stop exploring!\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146469505", "author": { "steamid": "76561198086914029", "num_games_owned": 286, "num_reviews": 30, "playtime_forever": 5836, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2792, "last_played": 1696633160 }, "language": "english", "review": "Pros:\n-Ship building\n-Good voice actors\n-Most of the weapons feel good to use\n-Some good side quests\n-Looks gorgeous at times\n\nCons:\n-The ship building is limited and instead of an elevator or stairs there are the slowest ladders in the existence that are auto generated all over the place\n-Bullet sponge humans and animals\n-No vehicles for planets and moons (not even horses with horse armor)\n-Hard crashed my GPU twice and frozen in a loading screen once\n-Loading screen simulator 2023\n-Unplayable on a HDD\n-Installed on a M.2 SSD and there is still texture popin\n-Facial animations are 20 years behind\n-The mission npcs take their sweet ass time to go somewhere while you have to follow them\n-Main story that has been so far a giant fetch quest of fetching scrap metal that auto plays an ad of orchestral boot up screen video\n-Barely getting a good 60 fps performance on 4 years old pc without the max settings\n-Lack of choices / Unkillable essential npcs\n-A good old map would have been nice in the cities\n\nOverall its a really mediocre experience that feels like it was designed to waste players time as much as possible.\n6/10 Fallout 4 but in space.\n(Maybe get it when its 50% off.)", "timestamp_created": 1694954801, "timestamp_updated": 1694954801, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 219, "votes_funny": 14, "weighted_vote_score": "0.739687740802764893", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698763732, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are sorry to hear Starfield didn't live up to your expectations and that you experienced some performance issues. We would like to make this right by assisting in any way we can.\nStarfield is a PC and next gen exclusive title due to the technology required for all it has to offer. If you are experiencing any graphic issues on PC, make sure that you are meeting the system requirements for running Starfield optimally https://beth.games/3OF9wXB Hiccups in performance can also be an indication that your storage space is full or nearing capacity on your system. You can refer to the following for additional help https://beth.games/3sEbssc Our team is dedicated to continue optimization of all systems moving forward through updates and so if you experience a bug or glitch in game, please submit it to us via feedback https://beth.games/3Xdn3d4\n\nYou can design your spaceship to avoid having many ladders. It also comes to the design and how compact you want to keep your ship. You also have the ability to chose the type of landing bay you want, some giving you access by climbing up a ladder and some by walking straight in. The only limitation is that it needs to lead directly to the cockpit.\n\nWe can understand your frustration with how some enemies feeling like bullet sponges.\nThe harder the difficulty, the harder enemies will be to kill. Each level sees an increase in enemy health, damage, and quality of items. However, the higher the difficulty you are playing on, the better items you will receive as a drop. Since enemies will have better equipment, they will be dropping better equipment.\n\nWhile there may be loading screens in between fast travelling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created.\n\nWe are sorry that you did not like how the graphics look within the game.\nThe Starfield developers took care to make sure its ideas had roots in the real world. Visually, Starfield draws from the nostalgia and imagination of 20th century space travel. The game is a kind of period piece, despite it taking place in the future. It's a fusion of future and past, a style the team calls \"NASA punk.\" The idea is that everything in Starfield's future world feels tactile and real. Buttons on spaceships are not mysterious; there are labels detailing what they do. Spacesuits look like they were dreamt up in the 1970s.\n\nQuests were made to be completed in several ways. You get to decide who lives and who dies at crucial points of the story, as well as how to go about meeting any given objective.\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nNever stop exploring!\n\nBethesda Customer Support\n" }, { "recommendationid": "150813242", "author": { "steamid": "76561197973241025", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 13, "playtime_forever": 19859, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 795, "playtime_at_review": 15783, "last_played": 1703973144 }, "language": "english", "review": "Half cooked game that spent too much time trying to be far reaching than creating a good cohesive universe with in depth stories. The development team failed to learn what worked in Fallout 4/New Vegas/Skyrim and decided to half ass a new universe.", "timestamp_created": 1700622129, "timestamp_updated": 1700622129, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 114, "votes_funny": 2, "weighted_vote_score": "0.738866448402404785", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1700692140, "developer_response": "Hello,\n\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not enjoy your time in Starfield.\nOur team is constantly working to ensure that Starfield is a fun and polished experience.\n\nYou can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. You can also break the law by smuggling and selling contraband, Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment, Exploration and Roleplaying. There are many things to do and and explore. You can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nThere are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\n\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nWe are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time yet to come. \n\nIf you would like to provide feedback straight to development, you can do so here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E\n\nTo see the most recent updates, you can visit our official site: https://beth.games/3r2QGSr\n\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\n\nBest Regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "145737022", "author": { "steamid": "76561197970355321", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 5, "playtime_forever": 5507, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2977, "last_played": 1694730491 }, "language": "english", "review": "Bethesda Game Studios is a company that broke ground on some truly revolutionary games like The Elders Scrolls: Arena, and its sequel Daggerfall. However a long line of commercial failures afterwards pushed the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Its next game had to be a success to save the company, and the result was TES: Morrowind, a truly fantastic game of incredible creativity, set in a world unlike any seen before. It captured my attention like few other games have when it released in 2002.\n\nThen they released the next game, TES: Oblivion. And they played it safe. Utterly safe. Gone was the fantastic creativity of Morrowind, replaced instead by the most bog standard fantasy world you could possibly create. All elements that could offend anyone were removed or heavily toned down. But it still worked, the joy of freely exploring such a vast fantasy world still held up even if the world was comparatively shallow. And with their next series of games, Fallout 3, TES: Skyrim, and Fallout 4, the formula held up. Successful, but increasingly safe, shallow games plagued by weak writing and increasingly inconsistent lore, held up primarily by the freedom of their open world and the endless modders supporting the games for decades after release.\n\nThat brings us to Starfield, the latest game from Bethesda, their first new IP in ages, and the final destination of their increasingly lazy, uninspired and utterly \"safe\" game design. Though I fail to understand why they were so hell bent on creating a \"new\" IP when they did absolutely nothing original with it. Starfield does absolutely nothing new, it's just a long series of sci-fi tropes done better by others without adding anything, or putting an interesting new spin on anything. With the recent Elder Scrolls and Fallout games they had the luxury of copying the homework of the great talents that created those franchises, but with Starfield they had to learn to walk on their own, and they faceplant right out of the gate.\n\nThe main story is the most tedious, derivative and repetitive slog I've ever experienced in a Bethesda game. Most quests are simple fetch quests, the EXACT SAME fetch quest, repeated for hours on end. The story takes forever to build any kind of momentum, and it barely reaches the pace of a gentle jog before it reaches its final unsatisfying end. It opens to a far inferior version of Mass Effect's inciting event, before going into some pseudo-religious claptrap and ultimately devolving into the most overdone sci-fi trope that has been plaguing popular culture in recent years. You'll know it when to get there, trust me. I can barely describe how much I hated the main story, and it certainly didn't help that I predicted most of the big story reveals along the way.\n\nBut what about the open world? It's always carried Bethesda games before. 1000 planets of adventure must be something, right? No. Bethesda dropped the ball here monumentally. The open world is basically a lie, an illusion of content. In truth the worlds you visit are little more than vast empty expanses of open terrain with the occasional copy/pasted structure dotted around. And it's extremely obvious how lazy it is, every \"random\" structure is identical down to the placement of every last item, enemy, and decoration. Worse yet is the fact that you can't fly directly to the structures, nor are there any kinds of mounts or vehicles available so you'll spend vast amounts of time walking to things. At least you can fast travel back, and good god you have to fast travel a lot in this game. Enjoy the loading screens.\n\nThe worldbuilding is some of the worst I've ever seen. There's no depth to anything. In playing it safe, every faction is just a generic stock entity, \"space law enforcement\", \"space bank\", \"space bandits\", \"space pirates\". Every character is a basic cardboard cutout, with terrible facial animations and wooden acting to boot. All animal and plant life across the galaxy is basically the same models, just with different names. It's all so bland and repetitive I can barely remember the names of any of the characters I encountered. There's nothing to distinguish one person or place from any other. Every area is equally diverse, with no distinguishing features to set them apart from any other. The worst example of this I experienced is when I found a 200 year old generation ship, launched at sublight speed from Earth to colonize another planet, and I discovered the people born and raised on said ship all spoke with clearly distinct Earth accents like Russian, African, English etc. Are you joking? Did the Africans isolate themselves in a ghetto in Cargo Bay 3 for two centuries? Did the Russians conquer and establish a fiefdom on deck 9? Bethesda's writers have clearly never experienced a truly multicultural society, because it doesn't work like this. After growing up together in a community sealed inside a spaceship they should speak the same English accent, and probably a strange form of English that distinctly diverged from what everyone else speaks after two centuries in isolation. But that idea was just too clever for Bethesda.\n\nThen there are the bugs, of which there are many. This is pretty much part and parcel of any Bethesda game, but needs to be addressed. I've personally experienced a plethora of minor irritants such as t-posing corpses, wild physics and poorly scripted quests and triggers. This on top of many, many crashes and freezes. Save often is my advice. Hard saves, so that you can revert if necessary.\n\nBeyond bugs there are also endless little irritating quirks that makes the game a pain to play. There are no local or interior maps, so finding your way around cities or buildings becomes irritating. Particularly in cities which have been built around long detours to get to anything, most likely to hide how small they really are.\nThe \"skill challenges\" you have to complete to progress character skills. It's just another system meant to slow the game down, to pad out the time it takes to get anything done. And the challenges are never anything interesting like, breaking into the secure vault of a band of religious zealots, or hunt a lethal predator loose on a space station that's falling into a black hole. No, it's just a grind. Do X thing Y number of times. I particularly hated having to grind space combat to pump up my Piloting skill so that I could use a ship with longer jump range.\nThen there are escort quests, thankfully I haven't found many, but trying to keep a character with the survival skills of a clinically depressed lemming alive is never fun, especially with the sheer number of bloodthirsty aliens the game throws at you. \n\nUltimately a lot of the game's issues beside the stale writing and uninspired worldbuilding, boil down to engine limitations. The game is built on the back of the aging Creation Engine, which itself is an evolution of the Gamebryo Engine Bethesda has been using since Morrowind, over 20 years ago. Please Bethesda, let it rest. It can go no further.\n\nTo conclude, Starfield is all the bad connotations of the word \"Bethesda\" distilled into one game. This is the final destination for all of the lazy choices, overhyped features, stale writing, and \"vast but shallow\" design philosophy that Bethesda is known for. What else can I say but this? Bethesda. This isn't good enough any more! Your lazy, half-assed efforts aren't good enough. You had the unmitigated gall to ask 100$ for early access to this uninspired piece of shit, the worst product you have ever cobbled together. If we are to have any hope of a decent Fallout or Elder Scrolls game in the future, there has to be a serious shakeup at Bethesda. And I doubt Todd Howard is the only problem as some have suggested. For a game to so utterly fail in so many aspects takes a considerable team effort. I can only hope that this game's failure is a wake up call and that the future will see some positive changes.\n\nFinal score: Bethesda / 10", "timestamp_created": 1693958641, "timestamp_updated": 1693958641, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 6999, "votes_funny": 462, "weighted_vote_score": "0.738392889499664307", "comment_count": 703, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698768053, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are sorry to hear Starfield didn't live up to your expectations.\n\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nOutpost creation is helpful for those who want to be able to craft resources or to proceed with building an area where advanced research can be done like Alien breeding. You will always gain lots of XP for your production progress as well as the ability to continue to expand your own outpost.\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nThere are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nOur team is dedicated to continue optimization of all systems moving forward through updates and so if you experience a bug or glitch in game, please submit it to us via feedback https://beth.games/3Xdn3d4\n\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\n\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support\n" }, { "recommendationid": "153427803", "author": { "steamid": "76561198199218642", "num_games_owned": 142, "num_reviews": 2, "playtime_forever": 5289, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 5289, "last_played": 1700649368 }, "language": "english", "review": "i was coping.\n\ni paid 100 dollars to play this slop before anyone else due to my consoomer mental illness and even told myself and others i was enjoying it, up until the point where i played another game again, then i realized exactly how unfun, unpolished, and unacceptable starfield is. we do not have to settle for games like this any longer. (there are good things in this game spread thin and far between that kept me going but i'm telling you right now as a whole package it is so disappointing.)\n\nleather jacket moment.\n\n\n\nedit: what i enjoyed about the game was dogfights and most things surrounding the ships. the problem is i am sad the only place you ever get to fly is in orbit and everything you do with them, including getting in and out, is a loading screen. it's much like being stuck on a roller coaster ride and it's very restrictive. but hey the backdrop always looks cool and bethesda only asks that you BELIEVE in order to make this all work. so if you're ok with loading screens being the way in which you navigate this world, which most of the content does not make up for, then it might Just Work. \n\ni also really liked the photo mode in this game and taking pictures of my ship and sarah's big butt (it looks great when she leans over on the counter).\n\nloading screen moment", "timestamp_created": 1702366239, "timestamp_updated": 1702524894, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 105, "votes_funny": 4, "weighted_vote_score": "0.736579835414886475", "comment_count": 10, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146322984", "author": { "steamid": "76561198064323421", "num_games_owned": 220, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 5447, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4376, "last_played": 1695478998 }, "language": "english", "review": "Content wide as an Ocean but deep as a puddle.\n\nA regression from Fallout 4 in many ways, Starfield has been a personal disappointment.\nI went in expecting the general Bethesda fanfare of a casualized RPG experience and was still let down.\n\nSome \"highlights\"\n>Features locked behind perks, like stealth, carrying anything more than your armor and weapon, ship targeting, using ship thrusters etc.\n\n>Horrible Starship combat that necessitates the lock on perk progression and heavy investment into your ship - in part because enemy ships have perfect accuracy and you usually have to fight 1v3.\n\n>Worse and less companions than Fallout 4, which had 13 companions in its base game, with Quests and wildly different opinions on the things that happened in the game in comparison to the 4! companions in Starfield with are all slightly different shades of good explorer guy.\nThere is no one as memorable as Nick Valentine, Hancock or Piper in this game.\nThe crewmates are a joke as well were you can knock out all conversation with them in less than 5 minutes.\n\n>Factions and Questlines are a joke, more akin but worse than Skyrim. Unlike the somewhat exclusive factions of Fallout 4 you can be essentially an enlisted member of all factions in Starfield (with one exception), making NG+, a feature Starfield really likes, ultimately less interesting. After finishing one of the already short and linear questlines there is little to no further interactability with the faction outside of Bethesdas beloved radiant quest and you being able to mention your affiliation in some conversations, with usually no result other than a slightly different answer - no branching quests, no additional content, nothing.\n\n>Shipbuilding is a mess too, with no option to spin parts by 90 degrees and a horrible unintuitive UI\n\n\n\nSPOILERS AND CONCLUSION BELOW\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Gameplay loop of NG+, which the game heavily encourages through its story and ending makes it so you lose all your equipment, items, built bases and starships, knowing this why would you be invested in building and looting if you are gonna lose all that progress anyways?\n\nStarfield seems to be confused about what it wants to be and ends up coming short in most categories. Calling this Fallout 4 in space is honestly a disservice to Fallout 4.\n\nBethesda can and has done better in the past. I suggest you pass on this game until major changes or major discounts come along.", "timestamp_created": 1694767217, "timestamp_updated": 1695553339, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 141, "votes_funny": 5, "weighted_vote_score": "0.735948801040649414", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698764115, "developer_response": "Greetings,\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nYou can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are opposite of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there! New Game + like many other games, will reset your progress in exchanges for exclusive items gained as you go through each new game +.\n\nNever stop exploring!\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "148821410", "author": { "steamid": "76561198003387718", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 20, "playtime_forever": 11485, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 436, "playtime_at_review": 4999, "last_played": 1703154250 }, "language": "english", "review": "I can recommend this game because it's fun for what it is, a space game mixed with a loading screen simulator.\n\nDon't get me wrong, I know that this game has lots of hate and negative reviews, but this game is basically a bunch of other games in a single one, x4 has better space economy simulation, NMS has better planet exploration and base building, Elite Dangerous has better better combat and space trading, in some parts the combat even feels like it came straight from Everspace 2. There is a big chance that if you like those games you may like doing things in this game as well, it's not the best game but like every bethesda game it's probably going to be saved by modders.\n\nCan I recommend it full price? If you can afford it and don't have anything else to play, yeah, but if you have other games in mind I would just wait for a sales.\n\nDo I regret buying it? No, but I'm not playing it as much as I thought I would. \n\nLeaving the positive review because I still think that while not a perfect game it's still a solid game that can be enjoyed for what it is.", "timestamp_created": 1698194259, "timestamp_updated": 1698194259, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 338, "votes_funny": 66, "weighted_vote_score": "0.735783100128173828", "comment_count": 4, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145819140", "author": { "steamid": "76561198216014836", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 5, "playtime_forever": 2396, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2396, "last_played": 1693848613 }, "language": "english", "review": "EDIT: Hey Bethesda Customer Support, if you're just gonna reply with a copy-paste response that's entirely irrelevant to the points I brought up, don't even bother next time.\n\nI have complex feelings about this game. It took about 12 hours before I started enjoying it, and up until that point there were points where I was regretting not refunding it. I still regret paying the price for premium. Side quests were the highlight for me, the main quest is quite boring until you get about halfway through. I very much enjoy the ending of the main quest and the \"new game+\" though. Combat has a solid basis but gets pretty samey when you come across bullet sponge enemies (my favourite questline in the game, one of the ones you get for the UC Vanguard, involves an enemy which essentially just sucks up bullets while presenting very little threat despite what the characters will tell you), social encounters can be fun too. \n\nThe biggest reason I don't recommend it is that a lot of it feels like downgrades from Bethesda's other games, particularly the... less than stellar UI and UX. Which is impressive, considering that the UI in Bethesda games has never been good. Mods will help with that, some already have. Menus are a massive part of this game and they are way too clunky considering how much you have to use them. Inventory management is hellish; and sure, you can use companions as pack mules, but that still requires you to get out of your flow and interact with the poorly designed UI.\n\nThe exploration aspect is... alright. Shipbuilding was the most infuriating thing I experienced with this game, which is a shame because it was one of the things I was most looking forward to. Buildcrafting is somewhat underwhelming, I usually like trying diverse builds in RPGs, but in this game I can't conceive of getting an enjoyable experience without using persuasion, security, boost pack training, and a lot of combat skills. \n\nThe character creator, while it has a lot of sliders, the options within those sliders are often underwhelming; but maybe that's just because the character preview doesn't really represent how your character will look anywhere in the game so it's tough to get what you want. But even then, I'll just give an example. While I love dyed hair, why are the options so limited when it comes to natural hair colors? All the blondes look unnatural, there's a light brown option and then two natural black options, and an unnatural black. Also, at some point in the creation process my character got freckles and was unable to remove them, even after going through every single option. I think it was somehow a locked-in choice from the template I chose to start from.\n\nPerformance-wise, it's underwhelming. Before the game came out, I thought I understood why it was a fairly resource-intensive game, but after playing it I'm not so sure. I was expecting \"wow, this is a living universe, a lot has to be loaded at once and there's many systems that have to be calculated, probably very CPU intensive\", but really the cities feel more dead than launch-day Cyberpunk and everything is cordoned off into load zones, so I don't see what justifies the performance. I think it's just not optimized well for PC. \n\nI really wanted this game to blow me away. I wouldn't have spent $130 CAD on it ($150 when tax and such is factored in) for the premium edition to get early access if I didn't. The best parts were pretty alright, the worst parts made me want to uninstall (not due to difficulty. I found the game quite easy all around in fact, but it would always throw some frustrating mechanic whenever I got into my groove).\n\nAll in all, a lot of the things I dislike will be fixed with mods. It will be a pretty good game by then. But the real question is: is this game worth the price when Bethesda is once again going to rely on modders to smooth things out? I really don't think it is. I currently have 39.9 hours on record and I'm not currently motivated to play more, and I don't think I will be for a while.\n\nIf this game came out five or six years ago I'd give it a 9/10 or a 10/10. Compared to the absolute banger games we've had this year, I'm not very impressed. If you hypothetically only have enough money to buy one game this year, it should not be this one. If you hypothetically have enough money to buy three games this year, I still don't think it should be this one. \n\nIt sucks to write this as a person whose childhood dream was to be an astronaut and whose teenage dream was to be an engineer for a space agency, but this game has not captured my passion.\n\n\n-------\n\nEDIT:\nThinking about it for a day, I noticed a few things I didn't mention in this review which I will now mention. \n\nI definitely have quite a few critiques of the narrative and writing in general. The worldbuilding is... alright, I guess, but if you're a sci-fi fan like me there's nothing you haven't seen before. It's very shallow when it comes to ideas and just presents a bunch of classic sci-fi tropes without making much effort to be original. Any plot element in Starfield has probably been done better somewhere else.\n\nTrying to avoid being political as much as possible, I'm quite surprised that the pronoun selection turned a certain cohort of people off this game considering they've been complaining about games getting political. This game, in the worldbuilding and story, is probably the least politically deep game I've seen in recent memory. It's quite uncritical in its approach and everything is fairly surface-level. Fallout 4 and even Skyrim had more to say politically. It puts you in situations which have the guise of involving politics, social ideals, and morals, but they're not crafted to be thought provoking at all. Both of the main factions are basically different flavors of space cop, and aside from a couple situations which have the depth of a stereotypical supervillain saying \"we're not so different, you and I\", there's not much complexity to them. The average group of bad guys you will find are pretty much unambiguously evil murderous assholes who barely even have loyalty to eachother while trying to speak about honor, so it really removes the impact of questioning which side is the good side. \n\nWhen it comes to the in-game religions, I kind of have to laugh, particularly compared to the religions in other Bethesda games. In general it's pretty easy to tell that whoever wrote the themes and ideas of the religions was somebody who has never experienced anything beyond Christianity but was told \"don't make a stand-in for real religions.\"\nThe religions can be described as \"caricature of totally-not-Christianity\", \"caricature of an atheist\", and \"evil gang\".\nAt some point you learn about a character who had some unique ideas, a sort of Buddha-like or Jesus-like figure from the past, who can be boiled down to \"ummm why are we arguing about science or religion? why not both?\"\nThe ideas presented when you learn about this figure aren't very groundbreaking at all, you can experience much more thought provoking ideas in many other games.\n\nCharacter development among companions is lackluster. While things change in their stories, they're pretty much the same character you started with. The most that happens is some window-dressing changes. Compared to something like Baldur's Gate 3, it's not even in the same league.\n\nAll in all, the game tries to do a lot of things. You're getting shooter, RPG, exploration game, space combat, building game, etc. all in one package. Which is admittedly pretty cool. The problem is that all of these things are done better individually somewhere else. To get parts of this experience in a sci-fi setting, there's games like the Mass Effect series, Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky, etc.\nWhile they don't offer everything Starfield does, they're far better in their niche.", "timestamp_created": 1694041244, "timestamp_updated": 1701267838, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 261, "votes_funny": 4, "weighted_vote_score": "0.735520362854003906", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698762513, "developer_response": "Hi,\nWe appreciate you taking the time to provide your review and sorry to hear that you did not enjoy your time in Starfield.\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nWe are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time yet to come. Please help us to best understand your issue by opening a ticket with us: https://beth.games/46e5g8E. After selecting your issue type, continue with “Next” at the bottom of the screen until you are at the ticket submission. If you would like to provide feedback straight to development, you can do so here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\n\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\n\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146357976", "author": { "steamid": "76561198031242952", "num_games_owned": 477, "num_reviews": 8, "playtime_forever": 6299, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4475, "last_played": 1695442970 }, "language": "english", "review": "If you like Bethesda games, you'll like this. If you don't like Bethesda games, you won't like this. I like Bethesda games.", "timestamp_created": 1694810399, "timestamp_updated": 1694810399, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 231, "votes_funny": 31, "weighted_vote_score": "0.733277618885040283", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "151827448", "author": { "steamid": "76561198311533496", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 3, "playtime_forever": 2591, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2591, "last_played": 1700313810 }, "language": "english", "review": "It's alright, kinda mid, don't pay full price.", "timestamp_created": 1700919964, "timestamp_updated": 1700919964, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 101, "votes_funny": 16, "weighted_vote_score": "0.731161773204803467", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146416222", "author": { "steamid": "76561197969850661", "num_games_owned": 621, "num_reviews": 14, "playtime_forever": 8935, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 6167, "last_played": 1695616179 }, "language": "english", "review": "[h1]EDIT: Bethesda. I'm not changing my review. My opinion did not change after 140+ hours of main quest, side quests, all content.[/h1]\n\nI have a love hate relationship with this game and I've loved all of Bethesda's past titles with a passion.\nWhile it's not all bad, I can't recommend this game unless you want to suffer with me.\n\nI still want to play this game.\nThere is something neat about making your own ship, trying to play different roles and going to different factions that appeals to me. There is still a lot of content I've yet to explore.\n\nBut...\n\nThere is no hook. \nIn previous Bethesda games, the beginning was often the coolest part and hooked you into the story of what's to come next. Skyrim had your potential execution and introduction to a world with functional, for the first time in games (outside of CRPGs), dragons -- and hell, a functional civil war you could choose sides with. Fallout 3 had you grow up in an underground vault -- live a childhood, a completely fresh story. Starfield presents you as a miner who digs up an artifact and then pirates come to try to kill your character to get treasure -- which sounds interesting, but none of these pieces are presented in any other way than uninspired, unimaginative, and boring -- with 0 roleplay options and a ton of boring dialog choices.\n\nNo roleplay? That's a fun killer.\nWant to try and steal the pirate's ship at the beginning of the game? You can't.\nWant to try to join the pirates at the beginning and abandon the main story? You can't.\nWant to find something truly spectacular while exploring space? There is nothing beyond \"huh, that's kinda interesting\" -- in the galaxy.\nWant to go deep into a cave and see something truly special? Not going to happen.\nWant to be a badass fleet commander and have a fleet of starships and fight big space battles? Nope.\nWant to become the leader of a faction, president, or warlord and just be the top dog? Nope.\nWhat about space magic? Just a copy of skyrim shouts.\n\nAnd that's the problem...\nAll semi-interesting quests end up disappointing you.\nDialog is nonsensically boring.\nRoleplaying choices are minimal.\n\nI still want to play this game and hope I find -- somewhere in it, a nugget of genuine heartfelt love and fun and care in this game.\n\n111 hours in, I haven't found it.\nIf you still want to buy it, wait for a big sale.", "timestamp_created": 1694886076, "timestamp_updated": 1701799932, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 147, "votes_funny": 2, "weighted_vote_score": "0.730176627635955811", "comment_count": 3, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698768513, "developer_response": "Greetings,\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nWe are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty.\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nQuests were made to be completed in several ways. You get to decide who lives and who dies at crucial points of the story, as well as how to go about meeting any given objective.\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb \n\nNever stop exploring!\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "145745839", "author": { "steamid": "76561197986524854", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 5, "playtime_forever": 366, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 366, "last_played": 1693600408 }, "language": "english", "review": "Enter ship *cutscene*, sit down *cutscene*, launch *cutscene*, jump to next area in space *cutscene*, dock at space station *cutscene* , exit space station *cutscene*, jump to next planet *cutscene*, land on planet *cutscene*, get out of chair *cutscene*, exit ship *cutscene*,\n\nyou may now proceed to walk around the planet. No there are no ground vehicles so you have to walk, have fun.\n\nGame is a glorified loading screen, you can't fly to locations in space, this is on top of the combat still being the same left click spam for melee, and the exact same shooting as fallout4, fallout3, NV etc.\n\nImagine spending 10 years making this game and calling it your biggest game ever. Good job Todd. \n\nJust let modders fix your game. Again. Oh yeah the performance is horrible, the textures are trash and there isn't even an FOV slider. Like I said, good job Todd.", "timestamp_created": 1693963942, "timestamp_updated": 1693968381, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 1849, "votes_funny": 139, "weighted_vote_score": "0.730133950710296631", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1696360137, "developer_response": "Hello,\n\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not have a positive experience with Starfield.\nOur team is constantly working to ensure that Starfield is a fun and polished experience. To see the most recent updates, you can visit our official site: https://beth.games/3r2QGSr\n\nThere are many different ways to enjoy Starfield such as Missions, Exploration, Roleplaying, Outpost building, and Starship building.\n\nWe highly suggest visiting the Official Discord where you can find Player Guides, connect with other players, and even get technical assistance if needed. The Discord can be found at https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W.\n\nWe are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time yet to come. Please help us to best understand your issue by opening a ticket with us: https://beth.games/46e5g8E. After selecting your issue type, continue with “Next” at the bottom of the screen until you are at the ticket submission.\n\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\n\nBest Regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "145936188", "author": { "steamid": "76561198144743509", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 7, "playtime_forever": 17528, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 6363, "last_played": 1696995519 }, "language": "english", "review": "For the short comings that it does have i.e. loading screens galore, poorly thought out space travel, and the bugs.... bugthesda still lives. It is a good game that I am thoroughly enjoying", "timestamp_created": 1694205672, "timestamp_updated": 1694205672, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 167, "votes_funny": 15, "weighted_vote_score": "0.727817237377166748", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "149189083", "author": { "steamid": "76561198796126267", "num_games_owned": 394, "num_reviews": 4, "playtime_forever": 8447, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 8442, "last_played": 1700573922 }, "language": "english", "review": "The main story missions and the major faction missions are really good but unfortunately after finishing them the entire universe just felt empty. There are still things to do after that but they are just not interesting enough to keep you playing. I give it 7/10", "timestamp_created": 1698668023, "timestamp_updated": 1698668023, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 405, "votes_funny": 56, "weighted_vote_score": "0.72425079345703125", "comment_count": 16, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "154514011", "author": { "steamid": "76561198031796376", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 10, "playtime_forever": 6437, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 6437, "last_played": 1695313518 }, "language": "english", "review": "I regret paying for this game (and even more so, paying for the release-day access). \n\nYes, I put 107 hours into Starfield. \nBecause I kept trying to find the old \"bethesda magic\", pushed on because \"well maybe the faction quests will be fun. Well maybe the side quests become better deeper in. Well maybe the main plot gets more interesting later.\" And, no, unfortunately, at the 100 hour mark, it still doesn't. I put in 100 hours because I was conditioned to give Bethesda games the time they (used to) deserve, and because I did not want to admit to myself that Starfield just isn't gonna be the next skyrim.\n\nStarfield is disappointing to me, because the worldbuilding, the sci-fi universe that Bethesda have created, is so joyless and uninspired. Bethesda games have never been about good characters or good \"writing\", but previously they were set in good, interesting fictional worlds. Starfield's \"world\" is a painfully obvious failure of imagination. I love SF&F. Starfield does not compare well against the backgroud of what SF&F is, in games, movies, and books.\n\nWith Starfield, Bethesda had an almost unlimited budged, full studio focus, almost no corporate oversight, no constraints from existing IP. Bethesda had free reign to do *whatever* they wanted. A true blank canvas. They whiffed their shot so hard.\n\nTechnically, Bug-wise and performance-wise, the game is OK. \n\nGameplay-wise, the game is mid to bad; mechanics are there but they don't really fit together; space dogfights are barebones and lacking and unbalanced, space flight is a joke interspersed with fast travel. Planetary exploration is... dull and repetitive. Points-of-Interest are repeated - not similar, but actually repeated over and over. Combat (gunfights) are... pretty alright, actually. The loot system feels too random to me. Progression and leveling up feels half-baked; many skills are mandatory and other skills are bugged(?) or just pointless. I don't think there is any playstyle variety though, every character plays the same. Exploration is.. just not there. Not at the space level (it's just a map of different orbit instances with random events), and not at the planetside level (maps are samey, and points-of-interest are repeatedly randomly recycled from a small pool. The POIs do not \"fit into\" the map, they are just slapped in. Planet X does not feel meaningfully different from planet Y, from planet Z - same style of plants, same style of animals, same buildings, mines, and \"non-interactable\" decoration buildings. Settlement building is not my thing, so idk if it's good or bad. Ship building is nice. All these mechanics don't really feel cohesive; the sum is lesser than the parts. \n\nWriting-wise (quests, world design, characters, lore, story), the game is threadbare junk. This used to be what carried Fallout 3/4 and especially Oblivion/Skyrim; this is by far the worst aspect of Starfield. Bethesda's writers just plain FAILED. There is NO redeeming aspect there and it pains me to admit it, because I was a fan of Elder Scrolls as a whole.\n\nElder Scrolls universe feels real; Starfield's universe feels as fake and shallow as No Man's Sky's universe (lorewise, consistencywise, immersion-wise). The writing does not hold up to any focus or thinking about it; and the world design makes exploration meaningless. For me, that above all kills the game. I play(ed) Bethesda RPGs for the rich world they were set in. I loved Oblivion and Skyrim because they let me explore Tamriel. Starfield does not allow meaningful exploration (becuase there is nothing to find, just endless regenerated samples of the same slop), and it does not have a meaningful rich worldbuilding for its universe.\n\nA true 4.8/10. A teensy bit below Mid.\n\nI am also quite upset at all the Day-0, Day-1 reviewers on Youtube who said that this game was the new best of Bethesda, etc. etc. It's really not, it's a sad trombone of a previously-great studio. But all the day-0 hype convinced me to pay extra to get to play the game on day-0 (instead of day-4). Well, guess I was the sucker. Money wasted, time wasted, lesson learned.\n\nBottom line: Starfield is a middling game (that's OK) and a colossal waste of opportunity (that's what hurts). It's fundamentally a total disappointment. \n\nThere is no hope for Elder Scrolls 6, unless Bethesda sells the Elder Scrolls IP to a different company & dev team who still remembers how to make games. Bethesda certainly is no longer capable of producing anything other than slop for the pigs.", "timestamp_created": 1703654166, "timestamp_updated": 1703654166, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 45, "votes_funny": 1, "weighted_vote_score": "0.724040865898132324", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145882523", "author": { "steamid": "76561197972021646", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 20, "playtime_forever": 1984, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1103, "last_played": 1695238331 }, "language": "english", "review": "It seems like the essentials of immersion from older Bethesda titles are reduced, and/or just missing - the AI seems a lot less refined, this was the dealbreaker for me. \n\nAI:\n\n- NPC's don't even care if you're in a restricted area, and won't react. :'(\n- NPC's, don't care if you wave a weapon about, even the police don't care that you just unloaded a hail of bullets\n in a coffee shop. :'(\n- The AI reacts a lot less to immediate player actions than older Bethesda titles. :'(\n- It doesn't feel like your actions have any consequences, outside of quest-related choices. :'(\n\nCombat:\n\n- Very \"PG\" rated combat, hardly any blood or visual feedback from gunfights. Bethesda used to be known\nfor the opposite. :'(\n- A very small roster of guns to choose from. :'(\n- Combat feels \"cheap\" and un-engaging, limited amount of enemy types, you see the same ones over and over. :'(\n- Dogfights in space are decently immersive, though, that's something. :)\n\nQuests:\n\n- This is where the game does decently well, the quests feel quite good so far. :)\n- A lot of side-quests, bounty-hunting, hauling, generally diverse things to do. Quite nice. :)\n\nGeneral:\n\n- Loading screens *EVERYWHERE* :(\n- Very, very poorly optimized. :(\n- The graphics are pleasing. :)\n- The sound design is very good, one of the few things that feels nicely polished and complete. :)\n\nThe game feels like it's not finished, I found myself enjoying it for a while, but there were too many things that felt \"off\" about the experience.\n\nIt's as if Bethesda has layed down an impressive template for a good game, but forgot to make it come alive. The game is 80% of the way there, and it seems promising, but in it's current state it's just not a complete experience. Yes, you can now explore space and its solar systems, but at what cost? What's the point of exploring a new settlement or a new solar system if the game doesn't make an effort to decently react to you, the player?\n\nAs usual, wait for the modders to finish developing the game for Bethesda - buy it on sale in a few years. I enjoyed Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Skyrim, even without mods - but this game is just missing something essential.", "timestamp_created": 1694130430, "timestamp_updated": 1694130430, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 263, "votes_funny": 3, "weighted_vote_score": "0.72360074520111084", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698930293, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nWe are sorry that you had a negative experience due to NPC interactions and behavior.\nTo keep Starfield as dynamic as possible, NPCs are not fully scripted so weirdness can ensue sometimes. The goal is to make believable characters on the screen with realistic reactions to your character. NPC AI has been improved with the move to Creation Engine 2 that has radiant AI enhancements that allows for dynamic interactions within the game’s various environments.\n\nWeapons are the most efficient way to deal with lifeforms and robots, hostile or otherwise. There are many different types of weapons in the Settled Systems to utilize and modify. Each weapon, excluding melee weapons and throwables, also has a damage type. These damage types are the following: Ballistic, Laser, EM, and Particle Beam. Throughout your travels you will find resources you can use to modify and upgrade weapons. These are found in the Resources section of your inventory. To modify and upgrade weapons, you need to locate and access a Weapons Workbench. For more details on weapon workbenches please see our FAQ here: https://beth.games/3PGlO2y\n\nWhile there may be loading screens in between fast travelling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created.\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nNever stop exploring!\n\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "145809773", "author": { "steamid": "76561197969354918", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 37, "playtime_forever": 2501, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2501, "last_played": 1694021645 }, "language": "english", "review": "The weakest single-player game Bethesda has ever released.\n\nThe usual Bethesda hallmarks are all here. Floaty combat. Plasticky faces. God-awful colour filters. Procedurally generated filler quests that are entirely forgettable. A small handful of characters repeating the same line ad nauseam, hoping one will stick enough to be a meme. Vacuuming clutter into an awful inventory screen because why design a PC UI when we can force them to use a console one and save money.\n\nThe world building is lazy. Styrofoam cups and fire extinguishers on the surface of the moon? How do you figure people use those in hard vacuum. Gravity changes from outdoor sections to indoor sections because they couldn't even be bothered keeping a jump modifier consistent. The main quest is poorly written, with everyone just immediately dumping everything on a random miner because apparently they can't do their damned job themselves. The big plot twist is... dragon shouts. It's re-branded dragon shouts. At least they stole that from themselves, because the plot is cribbing so heavily from Mass Effect 1s notes, it's a wonder EA hasn't sued them yet.\n\nThe world manages to feel both tiny and empty at the same time. You'll be fast travelling from the surface of a planet, to a city's trade distract, to a mission marker because you know there is nothing in-between worth exploring. If you do try to force exploration, you'll mostly get flat and nearly featureless plains with a few prefab buildings scattered about with no thought or purpose. Even among procedurally generated content - and we've had a fair amount of games with that these past few years - this feels lazy and underdeveloped.\n\nLoot is level-scaled and enemies are level-scaled, bounded by a static level for the star system. But there are a few quests out there you will likely run into on your own because they're offshoots of the semi-mandatory intro sequence to unlock full free roam. These reward you with high-level weapons and ships that trivialize much of the early game content.\n\nThe bugs are still here. Some crashes. A few NPCs floating off into the air. AI falling asleep in a doorway, blocking your path or shooting at nothing in particular. Or just ignoring you unloading a machine gun in a crowded city. But at least you can still steal with a bucket, so that's full Bethesda. Companion path finding is awful, as expected. Getting stuck on things, blocking your path and so on. They will also randomly warp them around when they're out of your field of vision. Sometimes warping them to a part of an area you haven't actually got to yet. Other times they'll hop through an airlock and run around outside in hard vacuum without a space suit to no apparent ill effect.\n\nI cannot in any shape or form recommend this game to anyone. There are simply much better alternatives out there. This is a soulless game that somehow managed to make space exploration boring. Hard pass.\n\nIf you're looking for a nice, recent RPG - Go play Baldur's Gate 3\nIf you want to build spaceships - Kerbal Space Program (first one) is amazing.\nIf you're looking for a game about flying around space, looking at interesting planets, getting fancy spaceships and doing procedural generated missions while gathering resources to create an outpost, No Man's Sky has Star field beat by a factor of ten or more.\nHell, I'd even pinch my nose and recommend Elite Dangerous over this, despite the absolutely awful latest expansion. At least Elite Dangerous absolutely nails the feel of spaceships and their mediocre-to-bad ground content still blows Starfield out of the water.", "timestamp_created": 1694029847, "timestamp_updated": 1694031491, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 43, "votes_funny": 0, "weighted_vote_score": "0.723438084125518799", "comment_count": 3, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698768318, "developer_response": "You can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\n\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\n\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\n\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support\n" }, { "recommendationid": "145766597", "author": { "steamid": "76561198077892212", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 4, "playtime_forever": 753, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 611, "last_played": 1694275930 }, "language": "english", "review": "It's not the best game but still a good one. However, I don't recommend this game especially for old time Bethesda fans because Bethesda once again forgot core principle which made their games great.\n\nBethesda games were always about making a journey which we can actually feel and perceive as ours. This was done by crafting an open world filled with things to do and letting us wander that world using our own skills and judgement. While Bethesda never excelled with the best quests, characters or combat, they offered all of them at once in manner of which I can explore on my own.\n\nFallout 4 was in many ways crisis in 'things to do' part. Main quests and other big factions didn't make much impact it needed. Conversations regressed seriously alongside characters of NPCs around player.\n\nIn Starfield, that problem is mostly solved. First time in a long while, Main story of a Bethesda game is mentioned in somewhat positive light. Conversations are restored to what they were and persuasion system actually makes some sense.\n\n\n\nThat being said, I've realized after 10 hours of gameplay since immediately ditching main quest, Bethesda failed to let me wander the universe they promised on my own accords.\n\nI can move in only limited fashion on planets because each planet's landing zones are connected only through a space ship I own thus my ship is as much as important as walking. Pretty bold take from Bethesda, considering how much they were evasive about moving without using 2 or 4 legs.\n\nHowever, my ship didn't have much on its own and was treated by game's system as merely fast travel posts, much like wagons in Skyrim. Process of space travel was largely just fast travel, reminding limits of universe I'm exploring with clear loading screens. Space itself wasn't empty but far from being enough to forming convincing universe while I was deprived of baisc perception of travel due to all those fast travelling.\n\nWhat's most insulting is that as long as I've visited a star system, I can open map and fast travel to anywhere in that system mostly from anywhere, anytime even when I've never visited any of those individual planets of the system. It felt like tacit confession from Bethesda. It felt like they knew their space travel is empty and hollow so they'll allow people to skip it as much as possible.\n\n\nBethesda games were never known for quality of their individual quests, characters, combat or anything else in their vast games. It was sense of freedom that we can experience all of them at once in perceivable personal journey of our own in our own choosing, thus creating image of actual world with rich life and history.\n\n\n\nWith Starfield, I can't make such journey anymore. I don't feel and perceive anything while exploring Starfield's planets because my journey is gutted out in midst of fast travelling.\n\nIn short : Bethesda made me to take half of my journey in spaceship, without telling me how am I supposed to enjoy bunch of loading screens as If It's same as walking from Helgen to Riverwood.\n\nThe game is enjoyable. Official patches, DLCs maybe able to eventually solve problem of Starfield's hollow space travel and exploration with better space travel cutscenes or even entirely seamless voyage and more diverse and subtle procedural generation. \n\nIf none of those are possible, I hope Bethesda still can do and is willing to do what they did with Fallout 4 and bring back survival mode option plus some actual fuel system. While I'm restocking my food supply and refueling my ship, I may be able to feel like actual pilot instead of button-clicking geek.\n\nI'm just sad none of those came at launch and I'm left without one half of what Bethesda games always promised since Oblivion, lost in vast but empty void between 1000 planets.", "timestamp_created": 1693985002, "timestamp_updated": 1693998895, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 332, "votes_funny": 9, "weighted_vote_score": "0.720104455947875977", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698768749, "developer_response": "Greetings,\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nWe can understand your frustration with fast travel making the universe feel much smaller.\nGiven the immense size of Starfield, we felt it made more sense to be able to use your Grav Drive to jump to other solar systems. The option to fly freely among planets is still there, and you can travel from one planet to another and land without needing to open your map if you use your scanner. However, for an expedition like solar system traversal, jumping is necessary and the distance you are able to travel in one jump is rightly determined by how upgraded and powerful your ship components are.\n\nRemember that fast travel also has its perks as you can do so quickly when trying to complete quests and will always provide you a visual of your ship launching and landing, thus being able to appreciate all the little details that make your customized ship look unique.\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\nNever stop exploring!\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "145765629", "author": { "steamid": "76561198144338839", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 8, "playtime_forever": 9893, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2496, "last_played": 1701123939 }, "language": "english", "review": "[h1] Short Version [/h1]\n[h3] TL;DR [/h3]\nIf you're looking for something like Baldur's Gate 3 where almost every decision you make has an impact on the story, or if you're looking for a space simulation like Star Citizen, this is not your game. But if you're looking for new adventures that take part in space with RPG elements or if you liked Skyrim / Fallout and you're saying [i]\"Skyrim / Fallout in space? Say no more.\",[/i] this is your game.\n\n[b] Pros: [/b]\n[list]\n [*]Todd Howard\n [*]So many adventures to be a part of\n [*]The freedom that it gives to you\n [*]Day 1 mod support\n [*]Beautiful atmosphere in space, cities, planets\n [*]Skyrim / Fallout in space, this is [b] the [/b] Bethesda game\n [*]Massive amount of content\n [*]Voice acting and OST\n [*]Very low number of repetitive side quests\n[/list]\n\n[b] Cons: [/b]\n[list]\n [*]Todd Howard\n [*]Soulless NPCs, almost no facial expression\n [*]Immersion breaking decisions such as too many loading screens, probably due to technical issues (Creation Engine)\n [*]Optimization\n [*]No mini-map in cities and difficult to understand outside city maps that's awfully drawn, probably by AI\n [*]No vehicle on planets\n [*]Enemy and companion AI\n [*]Difficulty (So easy, playing the game on hardest only adds more health to the enemies. No improvements of AI)\n [*]Some bugs that prevent some quests from progressing (As of this review date)\n[/list]\n\n[h1] Detailed Version [/h1]\n\nYou'll hear so many different things from people, some will say this game is bad, some will say it's mid, some will say it's good. Everyone's expectations for this game were different, so the experience they had also varied. Worth mentioning, this game is not something you can fully judge within the first two hours of playing. The more you give, the more it gives you back.\n\nI've spent 11 hours just in New Atlantis and I recommend not getting too caught up in one city because there is so much more to discover outside of it. Because as soon as you get out of New Atlantis, you'll find more joy in the game. Other cities in the game are also big, but New Atlantis is on another level. However, it's important to note that bigger doesn't always mean better in terms of quality. Neon, another city in the game, surpasses New Atlantis in many aspects. In my first 40 hours, I didn't come across with repetitive side quests. Almost every side quest offers a brand new story, an adventure that awaits to be completed. And the quality of some of them is really good, especially the companion/faction missions. In fact, there are some side quests that'll blow your mind!\n\nOkay, now comes the [b]BUT[/b] part. But, the gameplay is so old that if you take a break from the game, play different games and come back to Starfield, you might not want to play it anymore.\n\nBefore I continue, I just want to say just finish the main story first. The main story is tied with NG+ and that's all I can say. If you want to explore so many things in this game, I'd suggest first finishing the game. Alright, time to get into some details.\n\n[h3] Exploration [/h3]\nThe exploration isn't as good as it's advertised, and Bethesda should have considered its marketing. Because of the way they marketed it, so many people focused on this aspect and were immediately disappointed. Exploring the 1000 planets feels kinda pointless because those planets are just different maps drawn by AI, and the caves and factories are designed the same way as others you might come across. Even the loot will be the same. Additionally, not having a vehicle when you land on a planet is a huge letdown. Sometimes it feels like those aimless, depressing walks you have in the real world.\n\n[hr][/hr]\n\n[h3] Immersion [/h3]\nThis is a very big issue. For example, in No Man's Sky, you can land on a planet, take off from the planet, go to space and travel through planets without a loading screen which is very immersive. In Starfield, you'll have loading screens instead of that. And not just in planets, even going into a shop in a city, getting inside or leaving a building etc. And that's probably because of Bethesda's dinosaur era engine. Also, since this is a Bethesda game, every NPC is soulless which can be considered as an another immersion breaker.\n\n[hr][/hr]\n\n[h3] Game Engine & Bethesda Formula [/h3]\nStarfield is a very good example that Bethesda's both game engine and formula are beyond the age now. They really need a new engine because of its technical limitations. But not just that, they also need to change their thinking. The same NPC modelling and behavior for the past 25 years which includes soulless NPCs and very but very minimal face animations, same gameplay loop etc. These needs to go away. In 2023, we're following an NPC that walks slower than my dead grandpa. Wake up, Bethesda, both of your game engine and formula are outdated. If The Elder Scrolls 6 will follow the same route, I don't think the name \"The Elder Scrolls\" will be enough. Although, I'd still prefer this over any Ubisoft formula.\n\n[hr][/hr]\n\n[h3] Space [/h3]\nTake out the space from the game and you won't notice anything. You don't even have to use your ship and be in space besides some missions which their number are very, very low. The atmosphere though, is something else. If one thing Starfield does perfectly, that's the atmosphere both in cities and space. Ship combat is just... I don't know. It's fun than normal combat that's for sure though. The game kinda pushes you to upgrade your ship in order to survive in fights. Dock mechanic is fun, sometimes you see some space station, you dock there and it's either a place where you can get new missions and trade or there are enemies in there with loot. Or if you deal enough damage to an enemy ship, you can dock that ship, kill all the enemies and steal the ship. Use it for the rest of your journey or sell it. Some places have zero gravity and fights in there are good.\n\n[hr][/hr]\n\n[h3] General [/h3]\nWhile creating your character, choosing a background affects NPCs' dialogue, there's no depth in any aspect of this game. In my first 40 hours of playtime, I completed over 60 side quests and only 2 main quests. Traits and factions do affect dialogues, provide new options, but not enough. It's like 2+2=4 or 3+1=4 type of new options. Additionally, the persuasion mechanic is a good addition.\n\nThe game doesn't teach you everything, so that can be considered as a con for some. It only only teaches so little. Wants you to discover and learn everything by trying it yourself.\n\nStarfield has tons of content that might keep you playing for years if you like it. You can build your own outpost and that outpost can produce resources from that planet. You can build your own ship or you can customize the ship you just bought the way you want. You can be a space pirate, you can be a space cowboy or you can be just yourself, play along the way you want. Be the bad guy (not completely though) or be the good guy. Join a faction, stay loyal or kill the leader of the faction. Find love, get married, get your own house, be a citizen of any region you want. There are so many things to do in Starfield. Maybe you can't shape everything in every story in this game, but there are so many adventures that await to be completed, and some of them has great stories.\nThese are some parts of the Bethesda formula. But in a good way. Just like in Skyrim and Fallout series, freedom remains the same.\n\nPrevious score: 8.5/10\nCurrent score: 7/10\n\n[i] Edit: Updated after playing over 160 hours. [/i]", "timestamp_created": 1693983732, "timestamp_updated": 1701124278, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 34, "votes_funny": 3, "weighted_vote_score": "0.719886124134063721", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146027883", "author": { "steamid": "76561198014780561", "num_games_owned": 229, "num_reviews": 3, "playtime_forever": 7636, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3787, "last_played": 1697332991 }, "language": "english", "review": "8.5/10 for me. Performance isn't terrible, but definitely needs to be improved. 63+ hrs without crashing is sadly impressive for a modern game.", "timestamp_created": 1694317578, "timestamp_updated": 1694317578, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 297, "votes_funny": 30, "weighted_vote_score": "0.718381106853485107", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146022423", "author": { "steamid": "76561198115809507", "num_games_owned": 336, "num_reviews": 19, "playtime_forever": 11702, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 8543, "last_played": 1695379759 }, "language": "english", "review": "To begin with, I really like this game, but there is nothing revolutionary about it and it is certainly not the game that many players were impatiently waiting for. What I mean by nothing revolutionary is that you will not be able to travel from planet to planet without a loading time or land manually, the planets are made up of biomes which have an exploration limit that is quickly reached.\n\nSome optimization issues in a few places but nothing that stopped me from playing, don't forget that there are bugs everywhere and with some characters too.\n\nThe story was fun for me but nothing extraordinary, the things that made me love this game are quite simply, the space universe and being able to conquer space in the Bethesda style made me love this game.\n\nFinally, it's a pleasant game for me and meets my expectations, it will be up to you to see if this game meets your expectations as well.", "timestamp_created": 1694309988, "timestamp_updated": 1700609427, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 39, "votes_funny": 3, "weighted_vote_score": "0.717448413372039795", "comment_count": 8, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145740492", "author": { "steamid": "76561198040706244", "num_games_owned": 422, "num_reviews": 92, "playtime_forever": 5900, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 134, "playtime_at_review": 2674, "last_played": 1703910649 }, "language": "english", "review": "This is a Bethesda game SET in space, NOT a space exploration game by Bethesda, and that, to me, is exactly what I wanted. The game isn't perfect, but for a new IP, the lore, the story, the characters, the soundtrack (nut) and the atmosphere are all wonderful. \n\nIf you like BGS games, you'll probably like Starfield.", "timestamp_created": 1693960414, "timestamp_updated": 1693960414, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 40, "votes_funny": 1, "weighted_vote_score": "0.714635312557220459", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146202978", "author": { "steamid": "76561198361943830", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 19, "playtime_forever": 4528, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4184, "last_played": 1700875843 }, "language": "english", "review": "Woke up to Sarah Morgan telling me we should try having sex in zero gravity next time. Turned around to Vasco watching us. 20/10 game.", "timestamp_created": 1694576281, "timestamp_updated": 1694576281, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 82, "votes_funny": 49, "weighted_vote_score": "0.713521480560302734", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146405085", "author": { "steamid": "76561198035846757", "num_games_owned": 246, "num_reviews": 22, "playtime_forever": 7970, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4443, "last_played": 1696575005 }, "language": "english", "review": "I find myself really enjoying the RPG story and potential of this game, despite this game having immersion interruption with constant fast travel load screens, the lack of space exploration other than jumping system to system and scanning planets. The ship builder and customization is probably the single best thing about this game that No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous don't come close. The amount of questing to keep you busy if you like being assigned quests also gives it an edge over NMS in making the game feel more alive with characters to meet, talk to and perform quests for. Ship combat is arcade like, nothing too fancy but the ability to disable enemy ships and board them and kill all the occupants is incredible.\n\nThere is so much happening and randomly, like you could be on a random planet and colonists land just taking a photograph for the scenery, or a pirate ship land to invade a mine and you can kill them, take their ship...etc. \n\nThat being said the Biomes, aliens and plants end up being far more repetitive than No Man's Skies ability to generate random biomes and aliens.\n\nOverall if you liked Fallout 4 and The Outer Worlds, I think this is a great game despite some of it's faults. I think it can only get better with mods and future enhancements/releases.\n", "timestamp_created": 1694875336, "timestamp_updated": 1694875336, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 67, "votes_funny": 3, "weighted_vote_score": "0.711977481842041016", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "150560309", "author": { "steamid": "76561197968317338", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 16, "playtime_forever": 6167, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 6167, "last_played": 1696535965 }, "language": "english", "review": "Tried so hard to enjoy it. \n\nKept waiting for it to be good.\n\nIts the most \"meh\" game i've played in a while. It doesn't outright suck. Its just incredibly mediocre in regards to everything. Writing, voice acting, quest design, exploration, space flight etc, etc. Its surprisingly stale. \n\nMaybe buy on sale. But most likely, you'll just waste time. Get something else instead.", "timestamp_created": 1700589696, "timestamp_updated": 1700589696, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 102, "votes_funny": 0, "weighted_vote_score": "0.710401833057403564", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1701180717, "developer_response": "Hello,\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not have a positive experience with Starfield.\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "149384856", "author": { "steamid": "76561199101127695", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 22768, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 22560, "last_played": 1699164103 }, "language": "english", "review": "While there are a few enjoyable gameplay loops, like capturing and building starships, the game is replete with bugs, glaringly missing content, and plot/character development inconsistencies that make Starfield not worth the investment at release pricing. At the moment, the game feels like a hasty last-last-gen Fallout 4 reskin.\n\nPros:\n+ Build your own ships (buggy)\n+ Decently beautiful scenery\n+ Andreja OwO\n+ Ryujin quest-line is engaging and well-written (but there could've been more follow-up on the mind control elements and Benjamin Bayou's crime syndicate.)\n\nCons:\n- Companions can feel like nitpicking sociopaths who were mostly written without an understanding of nuance or pragmatism and may react to you as if you're a puppy-murdering monster if you don't conform perfectly to their world view. There should've been many more opportunities to persuade companions to see things your way. All this leads to little character development.\n- Companions can kill NPCs then blame and be angry at you\n- \"Guards\" can automatically assume you killed an NPC when you didn't\n- Sarah... goes on about acceptance but then spends the rest of the game micromanaging your morals and making confusing personality flips like berating you for NOT killing a guy for basically having a parking fine. Constantly belittling the working class and really hates being out in nature (weird for an explorer). She talks up exploring the great unknown and serving in the UC military but constantly whines about the dirt and situations where she might chip a nail. Better off left at the Lodge with her sugar daddy Walter.\n- Too much call back to Skyrim and Fallout. This was supposed to be a new IP but you're flying around collecting \"shouts\" in a boring, repetitive loop at procedurally generated copy-paste \"temple\" locations.\n- Out-of-place mix of modern and retro that don't make story or in-game sense, e.g., cloned RobCo computers and interfaces, people basically pining for Earth's baseball and white picket fences when that era was long gone by the time of Earth's evacuation in our far future.\n- In the future, robots use 1950s voice synthesis. Bethesda really missed out on the opportunity to extrapolate present-day machine learning generative technology.\n- Faction feel too small. They have been space-faring for a couple centuries, have massive space ships, and widespread automation and yet are limited to a few relatively backwater settlements. Something more along the lines of the X-universe in terms of industrial and social development would have been achievable and made more sense.", "timestamp_created": 1698944243, "timestamp_updated": 1698944733, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 139, "votes_funny": 1, "weighted_vote_score": "0.709162116050720215", "comment_count": 19, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1699540918, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are glad you enjoyed some of what Starfield has to offer.\n\nWe are sorry that you had a negative experience due to NPC interactions and behavior.\nTo keep Starfield as dynamic as possible, NPCs are not fully scripted so weirdness can ensue sometimes. The goal is to make believable characters on the screen with realistic reactions to your character. NPC AI has been improved with the move to Creation Engine 2 that has radiant AI enhancements that allows for dynamic interactions within the game’s various environments.\n\nWe are sorry to hear you experienced some game bugs/glitches related to companions killing other character's and your character being targeted in return. We encourage submitting bugs like these via feedback on this page: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nMost faction quests will vary based on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are opposite of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter.\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\n\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146748410", "author": { "steamid": "76561198063209795", "num_games_owned": 346, "num_reviews": 39, "playtime_forever": 3219, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3219, "last_played": 1694972285 }, "language": "english", "review": "It's honestly amazing to me that the same people who gave me characters I liked and who are known way beyond the scope of their games made this game and filled it with the absolute most bland characters I've ever seen in a game of this scale. \n\nNot a single member of Constellation is interesting. I never once cared about anything they do or are involved in, and I honestly hope at some point Sam is violently depressurized out of an airlock. And that's just the companions, nevermind the actual characters in the quests. The people who the game wants you to believe are these cut-throat executives or evil space pirates are barely capable of hurting anyone it seems.\n\n***Spoilers from here but you shouldn't care***\n\nIf you operate strictly on how it's written, the Crimson Fleet is a group of slightly antagonistic friends who would be more likely to go out shoplifting than raiding and murdering people for their ships. They don't talk or act like a group of notorious pirates should. Hell, through the actions of the player, you can expose some weasel who wants to kill the Fleet's boss, and instead of executing him he just lets him go. You can help them fight SysDef, this supposedly elite police force that behaves more like a group of well-armed mallcops, but it hardly matters. I did the Crimson Fleet questline almost right form the start and I've only seen one group of them in the wild that weren't milling about in abandoned factories or science outposts. I can't tell you about the Rangers or the UC questlines because I got so bored being an inoffensive pirate I just stopped playing. \n\nUntil the modders can make the game entertaining or something drastic happens to make the story good, I'd avoid this one.\n\nEDIT: The modders have abandoned this project and are refocusing on games they don't find boring. No worse of a condemnation can be made for a game so dull and lifeless that even the modders can't be bothered to work on it.", "timestamp_created": 1695343357, "timestamp_updated": 1703536221, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 1172, "votes_funny": 44, "weighted_vote_score": "0.709091007709503174", "comment_count": 36, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698931420, "developer_response": "Hello,\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nWe are sorry that you feel the companions you’ve run into are lacking and under geared.\nCompanions can be valuable allies and assets, if you choose to invest in them. Just like Crew members, Companions can lend a hand in the field. Your companions can provide extra storage, extra firepower, various bonuses, and much more. They can also be customized with different weapons, outfits, spacesuits and helmets if you did not like what they started with. The following guide has more information on the different companions you can encounter in Starfield: https://beth.games/3EV38at\n\nWe appreciate you taking the time to provide your review and sorry to hear that you did not enjoy your time in Starfield.\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\n\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "152901454", "author": { "steamid": "76561197961039656", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 9, "playtime_forever": 36344, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 256, "playtime_at_review": 33607, "last_played": 1702904877 }, "language": "english", "review": "Many reviews have already pointed out that the new content Starfield offers isn't very good.\n\nI want to offer another perspective by pointing out the many ways in which Bethesda seems to have intentionally made Starfield *worse* than their previous titles. So many gameplay elements/mechanics have been removed:\n\nCan't craft armor/weapons/ammo. You can't modify melee weapons. Weapon mods are no longer items that can be transferred from one weapon to another.\n\nCombat is the bare minimum. There are no \"special\" weapons. They had a golden opportunity to create new weapons designed for fighting aboard spaceships (which you really don't want to damage while you're inside one...) and in zero-g, and they squandered it.\n\nNPCs no longer have their equipped armor/clothing in their inventory, and it can't be removed from them.\nThere are no traps (tripwires, tension triggers, pressure plates, noisemakers, etc.)\n\nNPCs are less interactive than what GTA 4 accomplished more than a decade ago. In Skyrim, when you used your special powers, npcs would be amazed or frightened, and guards would scold you for disturbing the peace. In Starfield, no one even seems to notice unless you hurt someone with it.\n\nCompanions can no longer be given orders to move to specific places, or interact with things, or loot containers, or attack specific enemies. You can tell them to wait and carry items, that's it.\n\nNo gore/dismemberment.\n\nNo limb crippling.\n\nNo reverse pickpocketing.\n\nThis is all stuff that players should be able to take for granted from a Bethesda game like this, because they've already done it before!", "timestamp_created": 1701741958, "timestamp_updated": 1701741958, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 110, "votes_funny": 0, "weighted_vote_score": "0.708639025688171387", "comment_count": 11, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146111717", "author": { "steamid": "76561198014109764", "num_games_owned": 161, "num_reviews": 42, "playtime_forever": 10579, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 7354, "last_played": 1695093616 }, "language": "english", "review": "[h1] All I wanted to be was a man trying to make his way through the galaxy but instead I am once again made to be the chosen one with special powers.[/h1]\n\nFor me, immersion matters almost above all else. Being able to forget you're playing a game and to spend hundreds of hours feeling like you are taking your character on a real journey is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of gaming. When games can make us feel real human emotion, that is when they become art. Starfield does not do that, but it is fun.\n\n[h1]You cannot walk as fast as NPC's[/h1]\n This may seem like a small gripe but really think about it. At some point a developer at Bethesda must have tried walking along with an NPC in one of their many playtests, right? Why do the developers not think \"oh this feels bad lets fix it?\" It's almost like they think \"well this works so lets leave it.\"\n\n I was prompted to write this review because of a dialogue option I saw. It read: \"Vlad. I have powers. Powers!.\" It just hit me like a brick. It reads like something a kid would say and there are many other instances similar to this too. Instances where the only way to accept a quest is to say something like \"I'd love to help!\" or \"I'm at your service!\" Well, what if my character isn't a happy go lucky good Samaritan? What if I only care about the credits? There should be dialogue options for every play type. What is the point of choosing a background for your character if you're going to be made to pick dialogue options that doesn't support it? Oblivion felt so good because you're just a guy helping out until it opens up and turns into a grand epic. Skyrim was so cool because, even though you're the chosen one, the game let you experience almost all of it before YOU choose to have your character find that out. In New Vegas you're just a courier pushed into a greater conflict where your morals are exactly what you make them. The world in those games was it's own character. The world of Starfield is not it's own character, it's more of theme park with an unoriginal story slapped on it. The opening tutorial of Starfield throws you into being the chosen one and it's all on rails from there. The main quest makes Constellation out to be this super secretive group that are the only people who still care about exploration, but personally I find the idea that humanity will ever LOSE their interest in exploration to be laughable. Discovery is part of human nature. Every member of Constellation is either annoying, boring, or both. I cared more about the people of Goodsprings in 1 hour of New Vegas than I did for any member of Constellation in 80 hours of Starfield. Why is that? What is stopping Bethesda from reaching the bar that Obsidian set all those years ago? \n\nMaybe it's unfair to hold every game up to the standard that those older Fallout and Elder Scrolls games set in terms of story writing and creativity, but I really don't think so. Those games aren't unicorns. They just took time. Time that Bethesda clearly won't spend on any of their newer titles. \n\nThat being said the ship builder is very fun, it brought me back to being a kid playing with Legos and making my own ships from the spare parts of other sets. I enjoyed the atmosphere in many of the locations. Neon is a particularly cool and well-designed city and whoever worked on it should feel proud. However, New Atlantis is full of dead space and looks like an open air hospital. I would have liked to see better use of the space in Bethesda's \"biggest city yet\" \n\nPretty good score from Inon Zur, but would be better if it wasn't so similar to Fallout. I particularly enjoyed the space battle themes. \n\nI was so excited for this game. They said it was going to be a deep RPG like Oblivion, but no skill points. Fully explorable universe, just don't go too far too fast. They considered land vehicles, but not hard enough", "timestamp_created": 1694434208, "timestamp_updated": 1694444664, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 899, "votes_funny": 30, "weighted_vote_score": "0.708146274089813232", "comment_count": 83, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1701180455, "developer_response": "Greetings,\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nYou can fly, you can shoot, you can mine, you can loot!\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\nWe are sorry that you feel the companions you’ve run into are lacking and undergeared.\nCompanions can be valuable allies and assets, if you choose to invest in them. Just like Crew members, Companions can lend a hand in the field. Your companions can provide extra storage, extra firepower, various bonuses, and much more. They can also be customized with different weapons, outfits, spacesuits and helmets if you did not like what they started with. The following guide has more information on the different companions you can encounter in Starfield: https://beth.games/3EV38at\nWe are sorry you were disappointed with the lack of vehicle options when on a planet.\nGround vehicles were considered, but the dev team wanted players to take their time and explore planets on foot. On the planet surface you do have a jetpack which you can upgraded. The different levels of gravity on planets will also affect how you travel by foot or jetpack.\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\nNever stop exploring!\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "145923742", "author": { "steamid": "76561197986862576", "num_games_owned": 644, "num_reviews": 152, "playtime_forever": 22985, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 5874, "last_played": 1702675555 }, "language": "english", "review": "I would give the game a 7/10 in my opinion. Some things could have been done better and I don't agree with all design choices but this is a good game.\n\nThe drama in the forums during launch has also been fun. Everybody is a snowflake about something nowadays.", "timestamp_created": 1694191449, "timestamp_updated": 1694192244, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 231, "votes_funny": 21, "weighted_vote_score": "0.706255197525024414", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "147500895", "author": { "steamid": "76561198207134816", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 5, "playtime_forever": 36021, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 2111, "playtime_at_review": 11696, "last_played": 1704009058 }, "language": "english", "review": "After 100% the game, I can say that this game did not deserve the hype it got,\nIt needed more time to cook tbh. \n \nSure it is an amazing game at first and there are amazing and beautiful moments in the game.\nThen you start to progress further into the game and begin to realize how monotonous it really is.\n\nThe game does a phenomenal job of incorporating space elements and sci-fi\ninto the story but at the same time you have this feeling of something's missing.\n\nThe characters have story but lacking emotion, \nthe over all story plot seems rushed and quickly put together.\nalthough the storyline is not bad, its quite good, but there is no substance in it.\n\nand of course It's Bethesda. \nThere are glitches, bugs and sometimes crashes.\n\nWith all this said, the reason I give this a positive review,\nit did meet my expectations, I do enjoy the game with mods ofcourse.\nand because of the mod support Bethesda games have.", "timestamp_created": 1696250826, "timestamp_updated": 1696250826, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 262, "votes_funny": 27, "weighted_vote_score": "0.70518261194229126", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146969299", "author": { "steamid": "76561197970672461", "num_games_owned": 2213, "num_reviews": 193, "playtime_forever": 5059, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4495, "last_played": 1700678971 }, "language": "english", "review": "Starfield has been a surprisingly contentious game. A lot of people have bought the game apparently not understanding that Bethesda Game Studios only makes one type of game, and thinking it would be similar to No Man's Sky or Star Citizen, when Skyrim/Fallout in space is the only thing it was ever going to be. That's not to say the game doesn't far short in certain areas, because it certainly does.\n\nStarfield is also an enormous game, featuring well over 1000 stellar bodies you can land on and explore (more on that later) and a script longer than Skyrim and Fallout 4 put together. The scope of the game can seem a bit overwhelming but it does a good job of balancing that with making the wide range of content easily accessible. Within this giant scope, BGS has built a very interesting and and carefully crafted universe about a future human civilization that had been forced to abandon Earth 200 years prior. It's a bit of a breath of fresh air having a new setting in a BGS game, and the writing quality continues to improve as well.\n\nFrom a game design perspective, Starfield is a typical BGS affair with its detailed and highly interactive world design and an enormous amount of content. Anyone who's played a BGS game before will know if they enjoy that or not. For anyone who hasn't, it's a unique design that heavily prioritizes player freedom and world interactivity within a huge sandbox RPG world. No one game system is going to be the best compared to other games, but the way they're all combined is more than the sum of its parts. However while many things have remained the same, gunplay has improved significantly and has finally reached the point where I don't think anyone's going to miss VATS. Plus you can build space ships now!\n\nThere is one significant deficiency in Starfield however, compared to BGS's prior games. In Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, you could always just start walking in any direction, and sooner than later you'd run across a new location, a random event, or some interesting unmarked content on the map. Because Starfield's content is spread across hundreds of planets with procedural generation filling in all the gaps rather than being contained in a single hand-crafted map, this key element is pretty much entirely missing and it really hurts the enjoyment of exploration.\n\nTying into the previous point about exploration is the worst news - the game doesn't actually have real planetary exploration. When you land, the game creates a sizable chunk of procedurally generated terrain around your ship matching the particular biome you landed in. If you hit the edge, you get a horribly immersion breaking popup message telling you you can't proceed any further. Now while it's unlikely that the vast majority of players will encounter this, it's one of those things that just knowing about negatively impacts your enjoyment of the game. This is also the first time where I've truly felt that BGS has lied about one of their games in saying you can fully explore planets. There also does not seem to be any consistency between the geography of the planet as seen from orbit to what you find on the ground, suggesting that picking the exact same landing location across different saves will provide completely different results. So the end result is that it doesn't feel like you're really exploring anything (and the procedurally generated content is so sparse and thin that there's not much point to it anyway.) It's become abundantly clear that this is the real reason why there are no ground vehicles in the game, and also why there are no seamless planetary landings since there isn't actually a planet to land on.\n\nFrom a technical perspective it's an oddly mixed bag. The game's graphics are mostly good, with lots of detail crammed into the game's environments and characters. NPC's are weirdly inconsistent in quality though, even setting aside the noticeably lower quality non-named NPCs that just act to flesh out settlements. The game also features a brand new real-time global illumination system, something that's rather necessary to handle the lighting on 1000+ stellar bodies with fully simulated orbital mechanics and weather. It really is impressive seeing it all work, however the GI system appears to be extremely rudimentary and leans heavily on static color filters to provide a certain look to different areas, which often results in lighting not matching the scene. It really is too bad because a more robust GI implementation would do wonders for the game.\n\nNow the bad technical news - quite frankly the game runs like crap. It's heavier on an nVidia GPU than Cyberpunk 2077 on RT Psycho settings, yet doesn't look nearly as good. It runs far better on AMD GPUs, seemingly due to their development partnership, yet still not as well as it seems like it should given the game's modest graphical quality.\n\nTo get the rest of the bad news out of the way: This is the buggiest game Bethesda Game Studios has released in a very long time, at least since Oblivion. I have no clue what game all the reviewers played, because it certainly wasn't this one (though it's possible they were just overlooking the bugs because this is the first time a Bethesda game has actually had a stable framerate on consoles.) Bugs and glitches (not the amusing ones that people actually enjoy) are a constant presence in the game and game-breaking issues can pop up seemingly at random. Given that the game was primarily delayed from its original release a year ago for polish and that it released as version 1.7, I can't even imagine how bad it was back then.\n\nSo I suppose that's about it. I realize this review may seem negative, but it really is one of those games that's more than the sum of its parts and I'm still greatly enjoying the experience despite all the problems I listed. Well, back to space.", "timestamp_created": 1695596204, "timestamp_updated": 1695596204, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 233, "votes_funny": 21, "weighted_vote_score": "0.703504443168640137", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146978534", "author": { "steamid": "76561198009740749", "num_games_owned": 660, "num_reviews": 145, "playtime_forever": 2434, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2434, "last_played": 1695608384 }, "language": "english", "review": "With each new Bethesda game the quality and quantity gets lower, it's quite a phenomenon.\nSure the visual quality goes up, but it always looks outdated for the year it comes out.\n\nIt's very hit or miss in each sitting, which has been my experience with Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Except VERY VERY much more in this game.\n\n\nI really hope this is a fluke, but the Elder Scroll games typically have more quality put in them in general, so not super worried.\n---------------------------------\n---------------------------------\nSPOILERS AHEAD\n---------------------------------\n---------------------------------\nRandom Thoughts\n\n- it feels like I have seen 6 enemies (On Foot) within 40 hours of playing (Not literal, just feels this way, humans are what you fight 90% of the time, which comes to my next point)\n- This is not a Scifi game, this is near future imagining with LITE scifi elements -- No Sentient Alien lifeforms (I still haven't beat the main quest yet, so maybe thats where you see some? or maybe some random side quest, either way a single species feels odd in a Bethesda game, and frankly is boring)\n- Factions & Questlines: It very much feels like theres the main quest then side quest, they outline a few factions, but man...\n - Pirates aren't pirates? They are treasure hunters or thieves? wtf? Like just give us a Pirate questline \n\nYou know what I think that actually summarizes my experience and expectations across the game. \n\" - Pirates aren't pirates? They are treasure hunters or thieves? wtf? Like just give us a Pirate questline\"\nThe questline for Pirates is about finding a long lost legend/treasure from the original pirate leader. It's contextually lame. Would have been much cooler with a different Narrative wrapped or as a side quest for the Pirates. This is how everything in this game has been so far.\n\n\nOther quick summaries\n- outpost seems more useless in FO4? The only good thing that was added? Big disappointment here, half my time was wasted on this pointless feature\n- Companion/Crew is pointless, no outpost use, no apparent crew questlines so far, or relations, just gimmicky dialogue to make you think they have relationships\n- Shipbuilder, is cool but annoying, clunky controls, no information to the player, surprisingly limited? Hard to find ship parts you want\n- Skills, the skills are actually cool, but since you don't have anything by default it feels like you need to be level 40 by default just do anything. And since all skills are restricted by level, and can't be naturally earned, this is a huge roadblock in a lot of cases.\n- Ship: Wow, Disappointed.\n- Ship Combat: No part aiming = lame, more arcadey than galaga \n- Controls: for building outpost and shipbuilding are limited and clunky\n- Information: The game has no accessible information from anything, that you should be able to see: Example: Shipbuildings have length limits, no indicator to shop height or length limits. Same with building outpost with buildings being too tall.\n- Tutorial: Worse Bethesda Tutorial yet. And shortest one, unrelated to the whole game, and its just an engine to get you to find the most boringest alien artifact that you will spend the next dozen quest doing and seeing the same boring thing. You are a miner, so all those story/traits/background thigns you chose at the start dont matter and at the end of the day your backstory is \"Miner\" Which was actually cool with me, till I realized Miners were an occupation you could roleplay as in the game, no faction or questline to be a miner lol\n- its hard to discern what is procedural content and curated content, I think i know, but its hard to tell. This feels bad too\n\nGoing back to the Scifi game, this is why its boring in a lot of cases. You never stumble into a blackhole, or even investigate something like this. Its always \"Go to abandon research place\" Oh!!!! RESEARCH I bet its something cool like making mutants or something, nope... and even if it is you wont see it lol.\n\nEither way, the game is big so its possible i just have missed all the cool stuff, but im pretty skeptical, i plan on beating the main quest doing a few other side quest, but this may be one of those, come back when all the DLCs are done and out, but ive never done that with fallout, and this is definitely a step down from fallout.\n", "timestamp_created": 1695609804, "timestamp_updated": 1695609804, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 84, "votes_funny": 2, "weighted_vote_score": "0.70271754264831543", "comment_count": 10, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698932449, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nWe are sorry to hear Starfield did not meet your expectations. We encourage you delve deeper into more of the side quests if you are looking for the more SCI FI type action. Without going into spoilers, we encourage you embark on the Terrormorph quest as well as the Mantis quest.\n\nGiven that Starfield is a space game, the Crimson fleet are pirates in the sense that they share many of the same principles/ personality of pirates that we are familiar with, however with a space twist to it.\n\nOutpost development can help you farm for materials and gain XP much more quickly. You can also create a landing bay with ship builder connected to it, so that you will have the majority of ship parts all in one place when you feel like upgrading your ships.\n\nYou should look at completing each companions quest and talking to them whenever they say they need to talk to you. Once you build affinity you can actually turn that companionship into marriage!\n\nFor ship combat, we encourage you put at least one point into Targetting Systems under the tech skill tree. This will grant you the equivalent of VATS from Fallout 4 for your ship when in battle.\n\nYou have the option to remap any keybinding/ control option in the game menu. This will allow you the freedom to create the control scheme you feel most comfortable with.\n\nIf you would like to provide feedback straight to development, you can do so here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E\n\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\n\nBest Regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "145744244", "author": { "steamid": "76561198258408602", "num_games_owned": 147, "num_reviews": 18, "playtime_forever": 3557, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3348, "last_played": 1694002252 }, "language": "english", "review": "Gives you a 1000 planets to explore.\nDoes not give you any vehicles to explore them.", "timestamp_created": 1693962812, "timestamp_updated": 1693962812, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 33, "votes_funny": 17, "weighted_vote_score": "0.700509369373321533", "comment_count": 21, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146017649", "author": { "steamid": "76561198254966328", "num_games_owned": 116, "num_reviews": 15, "playtime_forever": 5407, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1634, "last_played": 1695421787 }, "language": "english", "review": "To put it short - it's a Bethesda RPG.\nMeaning that most mechanics are very shallow, and while there's a lot to do, most of it isn't really worth doing.\n\nBut like any other Bethesda RPG... it's simply fun. If you enjoy Bethesda's TES or Fallout games, you'll enjoy Starfield.", "timestamp_created": 1694303326, "timestamp_updated": 1694303326, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 189, "votes_funny": 11, "weighted_vote_score": "0.698795914649963379", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146074484", "author": { "steamid": "76561198076429795", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 2, "playtime_forever": 5268, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3728, "last_played": 1696116563 }, "language": "english", "review": "When Starfield reviews started to drop, I was really disappointed. When I saw IGN's 7 - that probably disappointed me the most, because while they're not a perfect reviewer, I feel like they're directionally correct in assessing video games most of the time. I almost considered skipping this game - even though I had been really looking forward to it. Now that I've spent way too much time, I wanted to leave a few words for anyone who might be in the same boat who hasn't picked this up. \n\nIf you're even remotely enjoyed Bethesda games before (Skyrim, Fallout, etc.), do yourself a favor and buy it. I haven't been sucked into an experience like this in quite some time. \n\nThe scope and scale of Starfield is really an impressive accomplishment - the game contains (I'm guessing, I'm sure someone out there has done an official talley) dozens of solar systems, hundreds if not thousands of planets and moons with their own surfaces you can explore, and in the case of each of these planets and moons, you can pick almost anywhere to land your ship, and start exploring. If you do just pick a random place on a random planet, you're likely to be in the middle of nowhere (just as I would expect if you were an actual astronaut randomly going around to planets), but even so there will be stuff to do - materials to harvest, creatures to battle, loot to find in some random cave or something. That is not hyperbole, it's literally and actually how this game works, and I've never seen a game universe with the size and scope of this one. \n\nI've read a lot of the complaints levied at this game - and I just don't get it. One of the biggest is travelling, and how you get around. It is usually in the form of \"Starfield isn't one continuous world like Syrim and Fallout, there is too much fast travelling to discrete locations, so that's not any fun / not what I expected.\" \n\nThis is mostly wrong. You can fly through space continuously, although if you don't fast travel / use your grav jump, it will just take you hours to fly from one planet to another. If it were real space, it would take something more like 6 months to fly from one planet to the next closest one, but that would be kind of a weird game mechanic to include. Another \"continuous world breaking feature\" is when you get in your ship, and go from one planet to another, you can do so, it will just take a really long time if you don't use your \"grav jump.\" The other factor that means it's \"not a continuous universe,\" is that once you're \"in orbit\" near a planet, you have to select a landing spot, and a cut scene will play as you transition from space to surface. \n\nSo there is a lot of fast travel, but I don't understand that criticism. If you're going to have a game transpire in a sci fi world where you're going from planet to planet, how in God's name would you think it can / should be designed in such a way where fast travel isn't a part of that in some way? Are we supposed to spend 6 months flying through Space?\n\nThere also are not detailed surface maps as part of the game. I didn't like that, because I'm usually a big map person in life and in video games both, but I think this is more of a style preference. It does force you to read things like signs in cities, and try to learn your way around the environment. There is a HUD type of thing that guides you to where you need to go for most quests, so it's not like you never know where to go. \n\nThe action / gunplay is a lot of fun as well, and really well done. You've also got the RPG elements of leveling up your character, character's weapons, skills, etc. but this is an action-heavy game, and I find this part of the game well done and fun to play. It almost feels like you are encountering too many varieties of weapons out there in the universe, and I spend too much time in the menus making sure the assortment of guns I'm carrying is optimized. \n\nI don't think the game is perfect, I am not out here trying to shill blindly - I think some of the way the menu / inventory works is annoying. Travelling and using the star map is a little clunky and unintuitive, but once you're used to it, it's not so bad. I also have noticed that I feel like I spend way too much time in menus and such, dealing with resources and inventory. But that is not necessarily a bad thing, I find that part somewhat fun strangely enough. \n\nBut when you compare these problems and put them next to the unprecedented size, scope, and innovation of this game, I cannot understand all of the hate. It feels like as games get bigger and more impressive, people on the internet just complain more. The 7 from IGN makes no sense to me. If you like games like this, or were initially drawn to it - pick it up, and don't even think about it.\n", "timestamp_created": 1694371650, "timestamp_updated": 1694371650, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 282, "votes_funny": 20, "weighted_vote_score": "0.697251975536346436", "comment_count": 23, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145772880", "author": { "steamid": "76561197982564729", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 4, "playtime_forever": 9530, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 3891, "last_played": 1696511075 }, "language": "english", "review": "Have you enjoyed past Bethesda games? Are you accustomed to their unique bit of jank they serve up with every meal? Are you a 30+ year old ancient gamer that can still use their imagination to help suspend disbelief? If you answered yes to 1 or more of these questions then you'll enjoy Starfield. \n\nThey aren't reinventing the wheel here. It's more like they rode out on their aging prized stallion. He's showing his age these days. He's not as spry as he used to be, but he's reliable, comfy, and for most he gets the job done just fine. I'm absolutely loving Starfield, but I also have a wealth of patience, a active imagination, and I've put both to use with this game. If you're expecting the new hotness then I would look elsewhere. Maybe pick it up if it goes on sale. I'm sure in 5 years when they start re-releasing this game, there will be a ton of well made mods for it that will most likely make it an enjoyable experience for everyone.", "timestamp_created": 1693993168, "timestamp_updated": 1693993168, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 32, "votes_funny": 3, "weighted_vote_score": "0.713655471801757813", "comment_count": 7, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146004458", "author": { "steamid": "76561197969299519", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 64, "playtime_forever": 1725, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 1, "playtime_at_review": 1002, "last_played": 1703891836 }, "language": "english", "review": "Bethesda has made a space game where space really doesn't matter. The writing is very mediocre (especially in the shadow of Baldus Gate 3) and the game play offers nothing substantially new outside of a new lock-picking mini game.", "timestamp_created": 1694287758, "timestamp_updated": 1694287758, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 129, "votes_funny": 2, "weighted_vote_score": "0.693028450012207031", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698933101, "developer_response": "Hi,\nWe appreciate you taking the time to provide your review and sorry to hear that you did not enjoy your time in Starfield.\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146106814", "author": { "steamid": "76561198071774471", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 6, "playtime_forever": 1560, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1560, "last_played": 1694358770 }, "language": "english", "review": "The best game of 2006", "timestamp_created": 1694425557, "timestamp_updated": 1694425557, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 1449, "votes_funny": 655, "weighted_vote_score": "0.692744612693786621", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698932861, "developer_response": "Hello,\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not have a positive experience with Starfield.\nOur team is constantly working to ensure that Starfield is a fun and polished experience. To see the most recent updates, you can visit our official site: https://beth.games/3r2QGSr\nWhile the confines of space may be a bit overwhelming at first, there are many different ways to enjoy Starfield such as Missions, Exploration, Roleplaying, Outpost building, and Starship building.\nWe highly suggest visiting the Official Discord where you can find Player Guides, connect with other players, and even get technical assistance if needed. The Discord can be found at https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W.\nWe are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time yet to come. Please help us to best understand your issue by opening a ticket with us: https://beth.games/46e5g8E. After selecting your issue type, continue with “Next” at the bottom of the screen until you are at the ticket submission. If you would like to provide feedback straight to development, you can do so here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\nBest Regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "147737958", "author": { "steamid": "76561198030597456", "num_games_owned": 709, "num_reviews": 59, "playtime_forever": 24993, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 22766, "last_played": 1702167714 }, "language": "english", "review": "The Biggest Release isn't the Best ... but\n\nFor many hours I felt as disappointed as I did when Andromeda released. I actually grew to like that game and might even say that game is more \"fun.\" Yet this game gnaws at me for attention in a way most don't. Creative types that don't need a hard challenge and don't mind a slow pace will probably enjoy the game a lot. \n\nIt is difficult to give this game a fair review because a fair amount of negative and positive reviews are not wrong. There are some amazing things about the game but unless you are content with your own narrative and push to play in an open-world such as this, you probably will get bored fairly fast or fail to notice the small details that make the game shine.\nProblem is, the days are often cloudy.\n\nI think mods could and will do wonders for the game though I will be surprised if the game has the same passionate scale of mods as with its former IPs. \n\nStory: The premise is OK, it has its plot holes. Nothing to write home about here. I can not disagree to strongly with those who say it is the worst Bethesda has done.\n\nCombat: The land combat is mostly enjoyable but I've played better. I don't know what it needs to improve it though. Maybe I should have turned the difficulty up for starters.\n\nSpace Combat: This is fairly bad -- NMS is better and that one isn't very good either. I really don't know what they were thinking here though I suspect they tried to be clever or more involved and it didn't work.\n\nBase Building: I like the base building despite the wonky interface and would love to see it more developed. \n\nMusic: I was a bit disappointed as Zurr is my favorite. I understand why it was understated but I think it is too much so in parts. Occasionally it ramps up and that is nice.\n\nCompanions/NPCs: BG3 broke the mold with companions. (I won't get cheeky here). Still I had really nice dialog touches with Barrett and Sarah -- better than any game in recent memory. The other two were OK but the Adam Jensen voice was hard to get past and Andreja's story didn't grab me. I enjoyed talking to a fair number of NPCs in the game. Not great but better than most games in memory.\n\nWoke/Non-Woke -- Not enough of an issue for me to care. They didn't insult me as a player, nor did I feel a strong push of an agenda -- though BGS could have made some better choices in a couple areas. Need to fix their NPC generator so NPCs look better and could the game could use more variety in upper management (somewhat boring as it is); Lastly, whoever did the bikinis and beach resort needs to visit a real one. (I didn't post the screenshots.)\n\nI'd probably give the game a 70-5 if being honest and not wearing rose-tinted glasses but I give it an 80 since I think it is special and will fill the exploration need of many a player. Also I know I will come back to it when nothing else sounds good to play.\n\nI think the price point is fair for the development level but more players would probably find it too much for what it offers in terms of experience. A long-winded way of saying Buy It on Sale. I look forward to a DLC though -- I enjoy the game but it hasn't really added as much as I hoped to my \"great experience\" meter.", "timestamp_created": 1696597242, "timestamp_updated": 1696597242, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 123, "votes_funny": 17, "weighted_vote_score": "0.691603660583496094", "comment_count": 7, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145760842", "author": { "steamid": "76561198027945540", "num_games_owned": 522, "num_reviews": 54, "playtime_forever": 7674, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 2602, "last_played": 1697912443 }, "language": "english", "review": "I've played a lot of this game and my opinion is still developing. My opinion started extremely negative and has slowly been moving more and more positive over time but it started so low that I'm finally reaching mixed status. I'm enjoying things but there are so many caveats to my enjoyment that I cannot recommend this game as released.\n\nThe first point of negativity is it has one of the slowest and most boring beginnings out there. They lock so many basic things you take for granted you can do in other Bethesda games behind hours and hours of grinding out skills and hide different things much further down the skill trees that you have to grind other skills you may care a lot less about to get to the things you actually want. So people making estimates of \"12 hours to get good\" is not inaccurate but I'd put it closer to that time to get decent, not necessarily good.\n\nI will admit to not currently being far in the main quest but that's because I have not enjoyed the main quest at all. All of the early characters have quirks, barks, or personality that I dislike or just find boring. The fact the game railroads you to them at the beginning does not help my opinion. The fact your background can actually come up in dialogue surprised me because it wasn't until my third character, I actually ran into a few dialogue options based on it. It also doesn't help that most of the backgrounds are more important than being some random miner but people act like the mining thing was more defining to your character which makes absolutely no sense. Who cares about a mining gig when it's literally your first job mining. Being a former diplomat or other background position feel like they should be infinitely more important. My disappointment with the background specific traits cannot be underestimated. Instead of making your character be the one to spout something, like someone with that background SHOULD KNOW, a lot of the time, it makes you look like an idiot. The UC background is especially egregious with dialogue options that make your character seem like they didn't learn anything that someone with that background should know. \n\nTo contrast this, the side stories and other missions seem to be much more solid. I have started the Crimson Fleet questline and I can see it's plotline and it's actually interesting. I have completed the full set of UC missions and although part of the twist can be seen, it's still a very solid storyline I enjoyed. I actually liked the characters involved (other than the villain who is particularly well done and feels good to dislike). I've also enjoyed the parents trait. It's nothing ground breaking but the small interactions with your parents, listening to the things they get up to, all add up to fun little vignettes and moments in the game that are enjoyable. I can say the same about the start of the Ryuke industries questline and the job interview. The different plots come together in a way that can easily be seen as something that can build up into a very entertaining plotline.\n\nI put in the firmly neutral category the combat. I still haven't messed around enough with spaceships to develop a solid opinion. It mostly feels perfunctory considering how little you necessarily need to interact with it. The ground combat is serviceable. Some of the enemies feel way too much like damage sponges, though, and some weapons make me wonder why they exist. I haven't been able to mess with mods or a bunch of other aspects because those a buried in the skill trees beyond the easy point of getting to when you're busy getting other basic skills.\n\nThe final thing I bring up in the resoundingly negative category are the lack of iterations on problems that have existed for a long time in Bethesda games, the UI. The inventory management in this game is just terrible. Your encumbrance is a lot less than you'd see in previous Bethesda titles with a lot more stuff weighing more. Compounding this are the resources weighing a large amount and taking up a large space with nowhere to hold them infinitely that is also convenient to use. I have a bunch of resources I've collected, taking up massive amounts of space that I have no idea if they'll ever be useful or are completely useless. Finding what you want or comparing things, or, god forbid, going through the \"aid\" category is just annoying. The fact they don't separate medicine from food is dumb and makes going through that menu to find something a nightmare. The other menus do not feel intuitive or good.\n\nIn conclusion: The beginning feels horrible and the game has started to feel more fun and have an interesting story as long as I play the side content. But the more I play, the more minor inconveniences add up and the lack of iteration on problems that have existed for a long time bothers me. I find myself mixed but will continue to play as I am finding enjoyment but I still find my opinion soured by so many small things that it started super negative and has now finally reached mixed but still leaning towards negative.", "timestamp_created": 1693977714, "timestamp_updated": 1693977714, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 444, "votes_funny": 6, "weighted_vote_score": "0.691552281379699707", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698938901, "developer_response": "Hi,\nWe appreciate you taking the time to provide your review and sorry to hear that you did not enjoy your time in Starfield.\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W\n\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\nEven after completing the Main Story, your adventure doesn’t end! You can continue onto New Game+ to keep exploring Starfield and all that is out there!\n\nStarfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete and characters to meet. Most quests will also vary on your character’s skills and decisions, massively changing the outcome of your playthrough. Try creating different characters with backgrounds and characteristics that clash or are oppositive of your previous character. You will feel like you are playing a totally different game. Put points in different skills from a character you’ve previously created, and you are now faced with completely different decisions to make and difficulties to encounter. There are so many layers to Starfield, that you will find things you’ve never knew were possible after playing for hundreds of hours.\n\nWe are sorry to hear that you feel the game lacks inventory space and it fills up too quickly.\nYou start the game with the ability to carry 135kg on your person. The best way to increase your inventory size in Starfield is to purchase the weightlifting skill. Doing this will increase your carry weight. Some foods give you stat increases that temporarily increase your carry capacity. You can unload some of your inventory to a nearby companion to make more room on your character. Finally, you can offload into your ship's cargo hold. Cockpit Modules can be used to add increased cargo space on your starship.\n\nWe can understand your frustration with how the UI functions within the game.\nStarfield’s art direction and overall UI aesthetic is meant to be cohesive and have a “NASA Punk” look. Menus are clean, bold, and neatly organized with the focal point on the player’s character. The skill menu is colorful and iconic while the inventory shows off items, weapons, and armor in a visually striking way. These UI design choices increase your immersion into the Starfield universe. \n \nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\n\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "148485329", "author": { "steamid": "76561198867341257", "num_games_owned": 536, "num_reviews": 13, "playtime_forever": 9145, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 9145, "last_played": 1697307388 }, "language": "english", "review": "Been playing [i]Starfield[/i] for about 150 hours, I can say it has been a journey of mixed feelings. Here's what I think:\n\n[h3]Pros:[/h3]\n[b][u]Quests:[/u][/b] Starfield's main attraction lies in its quests. Both the main storyline and the faction quests are satisfying. The sense of curiosity they evoke is great, often leaving me eager to see more. Random quests you stumble upon in the open world can be equally entertaining.\n[b][u]Ship customization:[/u][/b] Tweaking and personalizing my spacecraft was an enjoyable experience.\n[b][u]Places to Explore:[/u][/b] The game has some locations begging to be explored, with beautiful landscapes on some planets.\n[b][u]Skill Tree & Dialogues:[/u][/b] The game's skill tree offers an interesting challenge, requiring both leveling up and meeting specific challenges to unlock abilities. Dialogues and decision-making play a pivotal role but don't always lead to jaw-dropping consequences.\n\n[h3]Cons:[/h3]\n[b][u]Looting and Inventory Management:[/u][/b] The number of unnecessary lootable items in the world can make looting tiring. There is no sign if an item is valuable or garbage. The game's inventory system is also terrible, though some mods greatly improve this.\n[b][u]AI & Combat:[/u][/b] While the game has good combat mechanics and decent weapons, the AI often feels outdated, lacking the intelligence expected from a huge game like this.\n[b][u]Space vs. Land:[/u][/b] Contrary to expectations, a significant portion of the game occurs on planetary surfaces. The space combats are engaging, yet fall short of perfection.\n[b][u]NPC Expressions:[/u][/b] The facial animations and expressions of NPCs are awful.\n[b][u]Empty Places:[/u][/b] Certain areas, like New Atlantis, felt lifeless.\n[b][u]Optimization:[/u][/b] Game could benefit from better optimization on PC.\n\n\n[h3]Despite its problems, Starfield found a place in my heart. I really liked main/faction storyline, and the spontaneous adventures you find yourself in can be fun. Despite investing 150 hours and achieving 100% completion, it's hard to ignore the massive potential it had. In the end, it landed somewhere in the middle: not spectacular but not terrible either. I really liked the game, but it could've been an even grander space adventure.[/h3]", "timestamp_created": 1697720559, "timestamp_updated": 1697720762, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 61, "votes_funny": 5, "weighted_vote_score": "0.689564168453216553", "comment_count": 1, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "152294404", "author": { "steamid": "76561198072424750", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 10, "playtime_forever": 12099, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 12099, "last_played": 1700069403 }, "language": "english", "review": "Midfield", "timestamp_created": 1701118276, "timestamp_updated": 1701118276, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 43, "votes_funny": 10, "weighted_vote_score": "0.68944627046585083", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1701125442, "developer_response": "Hello,\n\nWe are sorry to hear that you did not enjoy your time in Starfield.\nOur team is constantly working to ensure that Starfield is a fun and polished experience.\n\nYou can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. You can also break the law by smuggling and selling contraband, Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment, Exploration and Roleplaying. There are many things to do and and explore. You can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nWe are still actively working on this game and will be for a long time yet to come. \n\nIf you would like to provide feedback straight to development, you can do so here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E\n\nTo see the most recent updates, you can visit our official site: https://beth.games/3r2QGSr\n\nWe want to make Starfield awesome for everyone who wants to venture out into it!\n\nBest Regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146075270", "author": { "steamid": "76561198073176855", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 9, "playtime_forever": 808, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 808, "last_played": 1694228903 }, "language": "english", "review": "Enter/Exit ship - loading screen\nEnter/Exit building - loading screen\nEnter different part of a city - loading screen\nWalk too far in open world - loading screen to load into different chunk\nPast-gen visuals\nEmpty open world\nRepetitive caves/settlements\nStupid AF inventory UI", "timestamp_created": 1694372426, "timestamp_updated": 1694372494, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 114, "votes_funny": 2, "weighted_vote_score": "0.688588261604309082", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1699373529, "developer_response": "Hi there,\n\nThank you for taking the time to provide your review and we are sorry to hear that you were disappointed with encountering many loading screens while playing.\nWhile there may be loading screens in between fast travelling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created.\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nWe can understand your frustration with how the UI functions within the game.\nStarfield’s art direction and overall UI aesthetic is meant to be cohesive and have a “NASA Punk” look. Menus are clean, bold, and neatly organized with the focal point on the player’s character. The skill menu is colorful and iconic while the inventory shows off items, weapons, and armor in a visually striking way. These UI design choices increase your immersion into the Starfield universe.\n\nYou can send further feedback to development here: https://beth.games/46e5g8E\n\nNever stop exploring!\n\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "145740506", "author": { "steamid": "76561197989847263", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 4, "playtime_forever": 7258, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 1821, "last_played": 1695697523 }, "language": "english", "review": "Judging by the forum posts on the Steam Discussion section for Starfield or the Reddit threads, it seems everyone either loves to hate Starfield or loves Starfield. Figured I'd weigh in. \n\nHere are my system specs:\nCPU: Ryzen 9 5900X 3.7\nGPU: EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 10gb\nRAM: 32gb\nResolution: 2560 x 1440, 165Hz 60 FPS \n\nI’ve had zero crashes in my play time, my temps are within normal ranges and I play on Ultra settings with buttery smooth performance. Given that this is Creation engine with a few updates, I am not overly surprised. The engine is older than my PC and it does show. \n\nThe graphics have a charm of their own and I feel they work quite well given just how elderly this engine is. Bethesda really pushes it to it’s limits and I’m frankly surprised it looks as good as it does. \n\nAll that aside, I do feel that at this point I should lay out my expectations leading up to Starfield. I wanted Skyrim in space. I felt that was exactly what was marketed and that while the game doesn’t just hit that mark, it far exceeded it – I think the better comparison would be if Fallout and No Man’s Sky had a child. \n\nThere is plenty to explore and like No Man’s Sky, you will find plenty of value around every corner, but unlike No Man’s Sky the life you find will be armored and have guns and motivations of their own on whether they shoot you on sight or have a mission to offer. Exploration is a pillar of the game, it can get skipped to a degree, but you would be missing out on a lot of random events and occurrences. I was once hailed by a teacher with a class in a broken down ship and while the poor teacher was attempting to ask me for ship parts the kids in the background where asking if I was a pirate – I didn’t have the ship parts they needed at the time, I am not sure what happened to them – but it’s little things like that that make exploration worth it to me – feels lived in. Yet, at the same time when you get more towards the fringes of society you start to get that same solitary explorer vibe you get in No Man’s Sky at the beginning – it’s a good mixture of both. \n\nLoading screens are abundant, you can’t control take off or landing, but you can control where you land as the game appears to auto generate a large playground at each different landing site complete with a random assortment of things to find and ponder or if you’re me, collect and puzzle out how to get it all back to the ship on foot. I don’t much mind the loading screens, takes the guess work out of it for me, too many botched landings in Elite Dangerous(Before I refunded it, I have plenty of practice in X4 until I realized you can buy software… oh sorry I’m rambling here.) \n\nWhile this doesn’t have the character customization tools that Baldur’s Gate III offers, it does have something Baldur’s Gate III doesn’t and for us children of the 80’s and 90’s it may hit a bit differently, but you can build your own ship, modify it, upgrade the parts as you can, make it bigger, color it in the way that you want. I’ve seen people make Star Destroyer’s on Youtube or a cult favorite the Firefly – my only complaint here is that you cannot edit the interior, what you get is what you get. I feel this is an oversight and perhaps the modding community will rectify it before long. \n\nGun play is what you would expect out of a Bethesda game, nothing to write home about, but nothing to complain about either. As Todd Howard would say, “It just works!” Standard fare here in terms of finding better loot, modding it and applying it in RPG fashion. \n\nSpeaking of RPG there are quests, a plethora of them including a main quest line which is one of the better stories in my opinion – granted I’m only about 70% of the way through it at this time, so this may change – but in terms of choices the character makes and those decisions later coming back to haunt you is hit or miss. Outside of the main questline, that character you decided not to kill may pop up later and offer a quest or an item or who knows what – or it could be their angry family out for revenge because you decided to kill them. \n\nAlso like No Man's Sky or X4 or a variety of other games that are also great - you can build Outposts. A lot goes into building an outpost, resources, research, setting up production lines, shipping materials from one outpost to the other or even interlinking with other colonies. It's all there, right down to having your own ship building platform from which you can build the ship of your dreams. Again, with the caveat, you can't edit the interior of the ship. While building Outposts is fun in itself, it's even more exciting building defenses and defending it against the hazards of the last frontier. \n\nIf you like what you’ve read so far, give the game a try. I don’t think you will be disappointed by what you find. I’d give it a solid 9/10 – my only real complaint being that of the ship editor. Everything else is a mixture of just right or exceeding expectations. \n\nThanks for coming to my TED talk, hope you enjoyed it.", "timestamp_created": 1693960419, "timestamp_updated": 1693966790, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 81, "votes_funny": 4, "weighted_vote_score": "0.688113391399383545", "comment_count": 5, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "145736205", "author": { "steamid": "76561198068972349", "num_games_owned": 143, "num_reviews": 4, "playtime_forever": 63176, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 2038, "playtime_at_review": 6304, "last_played": 1703968098 }, "language": "english", "review": "[b] I might not have touched grass in my early access period, but I have touched the stars. [/b]\n\n[i] Thanks, Bethesda for creating another Universe I can spend thousands of hours in. I can confidently say after 100 hours that this is my favorite Bethesda game. \n\nBe wear of the great serpent for it will consume you. [/i]\n[b] For All, Into The Starfield [/b]", "timestamp_created": 1693958443, "timestamp_updated": 1693958443, "voted_up": true, "votes_up": 27, "votes_funny": 5, "weighted_vote_score": "0.687942981719970703", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "" }, { "recommendationid": "146051604", "author": { "steamid": "76561198994198460", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 8354, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4604, "last_played": 1696723906 }, "language": "english", "review": " I have played through the game fully, and all I can say is that in some ways I feel slightly disappointed. In many ways it just feels empty, going from one place to the other. It sure is no Skyrim and no Fallout 4, in some ways it is still enjoyable but overall after playing through it I do not feel relieved, I do not feel like each play through will be 100 hours long. Without the world being handcrafted in every nook and cranny like Bethesda's other games I just feel somewhat bored when I am not doing the main story or one of the faction quests. The random encounters are many times few and far between.\n Compared to Skyrim, which I have bought more times then I can say, and every time enjoyed it completely as you can feel the work put into the game just while walking from Helgen to Whiterun for the first time. Hearing about Faendal's and Svens fued, running into a group of bandits or two, listening to the families of Hadvar or Ralof depending on who you chose, Learning of a stolen heirloom from the Riverwood trader, and then randomly running into a thief. Then as you continue upon your quest to Whiterun you run across the companions fighting a giant and you might try to get a good swing in and be praised, or you might fail to, or just ignore it and be ridiculed. Overall I felt the hardwork and effort put into Skyrim, It is by far one of my favorite if not my favorite game of all time. \n Compared to Starfield where you feel the generated terrian between each and every location, with many planets and moons feeling completely barren, when I just want to explore what the developers made for us, and even though the cities might be the biggest ever, they just don't feel like they were as filled with quests and characters as Skyrim. But trying to compare Starfield to Skyrim is trying to compare a meal to a feast, there are still good aspects to it, but after the meal, I still feel hungry for something else to satisfy me. Don't get me wrong I do like it, and will continue to play it, but for the first time ever I don't think I would recommend a Bethesda game to my friends.", "timestamp_created": 1694349614, "timestamp_updated": 1694349614, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 169, "votes_funny": 3, "weighted_vote_score": "0.686729550361633301", "comment_count": 8, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698933029, "developer_response": "Greetings,\n\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\n\nWe are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty.\n\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nIf you feel that things are getting boring, there is so much more to do than just the main mission! There are many side missions where you can learn more about the people and story of Starfield. You can take time to explore various planets for resources and items. Break the law by smuggling and selling contraband. Build your own Outposts and Starships and customize them to your enjoyment. There are many things to do and you can visit our Discord for further ideas from other players: https://beth.games/3F1Jb0W \n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to use this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nThanks again and we hope you return to your journey through space soon!\n\nWarm regards,\nBethesda Customer Support" }, { "recommendationid": "146759214", "author": { "steamid": "76561198030889012", "num_games_owned": 0, "num_reviews": 1, "playtime_forever": 4170, "playtime_last_two_weeks": 0, "playtime_at_review": 4170, "last_played": 1695253445 }, "language": "english", "review": "Well, Howard and Co. have lost it; whatever Mojo they once had, it's gone. The creative creators of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout universes have abandoned diverse quest types and world-building in favor of repetitive gameplay loops and a ludicrously limited number of assets. To barely know this game environment, is to know it well. Here's some specifics:\n\nThere are an abysmally low amount of planet/moon types; if it has fauna or flora, they will all practically look the same (with the exception of maybe one odd stone/coral piece over-populated everywhere across the surface to give the false impression of being \"alien\" or \"different\"), and the moons are the blandest collection of grey or pale orange one can stomach. For a company that touted \"realism\", they can't even remotely match, much less accurately depict the Galilean moons of Jupiter. In the game, Io is a grey icy moon, with no sign whatsoever of the red sulfur striations ejected from active volcanoes, (of which there are none of these anywhere by the way, whether traditional lava-spewers or the liquid nitrogen geysers like on Neptune's Triton). Are they incapable of showing the diverse environments in our own solar system, or unwilling because they believe no player knows any of the real details anyway and could not care less? Venus in the game is hilly with lots of rocks, and 350 degrees F. In reality, over 70% of the planet is plains, with plasticized rocks owing to the 870 degree temperature. \n\nThese disparities continue across every known planet and moon, and the reason is simple: standardization for the purpose of easy copy-paste. All planets/moons in the game are the same temp at the equator as the poles. If it's a hot place, expect a temp between 350 and 400ish; if it's cold, get used to seeing either 21 or 0; if it's deep freeze, 200ish below; all with very little deviation. I have yet to find one single planet with a reasonable 35-100 temp. No matter which of the scant handful of biomes you occupy (which are less than Earth and nothing new could be conceived for the small portion of the Milky Way they have envisioned), Swamp at the equator will have the same temp as Frozen Plains at the poles.\n\nWhat is the point of 1000 worlds if you've seen every permutation of planet, moon, biome, \"geological wonder\", abandoned/deserted/ransacked facility, scannable flora and creature type, etc. in the first 5 you visit? Every static asset is simply randomly placed around each world. No changes to size, shape, or color, either; most devs might utilize this tactic as an attempt to disguise the thin amount of randomly-generated assets, but not these folks. Nope, the player will grudgingly trek 2-5 minutes through the same surroundings they have so often before, in order to locate a landmark they've discovered the identical version of on dozens of other worlds. Exploration?!? Stop it, Todd, it hurts to laugh; I gained!! (idiotic choice of verb for acquiring something negative) lung damage stepping off my ship (while wearing a full spacesuit, helmet, and pack-.-).\n\nIf all this inaccuracy and uncreative blandness sounds appealing, you're in luck; the other aspects of the game are even worse. I will never understand why Bethesda refuses to make every feature of their game excellent, or at least meet industry standard. For example, the melee attack, whether with fist or sword/knife looks the same as it did in Morrowind; it's just laughably (oh no, not again, that smarts) bad at this point. Hire someone from Soul Calibur or something, make it fun and interesting to look at for Dagon's sake! The gunplay is passable, I guess, if it were set in the early 21st century, but are we to believe that weapons have had no enhancements at all in over three hundred years? I suppose there's no difference between a War of 1812 musket and the M7 rifle? \n\nAnd the transportation, sweet Divines, BGS is TERRIBLE at this. So many games have established that fun, awe-inspiring space travel, including interplanetary/landing/low-altitude flying can be done. But what does Starfield have? Sifting through blah menus and loading screens. You can hover in the same place above any of the similar planets/moons you travel to, possibly engage in a thankfully short, boring bit of ship-to-ship combat or comm conversation with a friendly one (the only time this game made me sincerely chuckle was an exchange with a dubious salesman trying to get me to renew my ship warranty). \n\nThe maps are horrendous; the galaxy one in particular is murky greyish-black with white spots you can visit and red ones you can't yet. Ugly, oh so ugly. The surface map on the planet that you access through the scanner is a grey (once again) dot-matrix version of the level geometry. Pro-tip: If you're in a \"Coast\" region, find the Ocean (and the large whalesharks swimming in three feet of water near the shore) by locating the completely flat section of the dots. There are no city maps. How far they have come from the beautiful Morrowind map (that was included with the game!!) What strides of artistic quality and magnificence!! \n\nThe animations are so janky and awkward, like watching the New Atlantis train depart after you select it, without you on board and your companion watching wistfully (and twitching their knee into a billboard) as it speeds away. Which reminds me, don't expect Mass Effect quality dialogue here. Not even close, visually or writing-wise. The only time you'll notice your character is if you change to third-person and rotate the camera, after removing your spacesuit and helmet. Well, perhaps you'll have a clear visor, but you're not missing much anyway, there are NO expressions on your face other than the occasional blinking of the eyes. I've seen carved wooden figurines with more personality. The RnG conversation list for \"persuading\" is no compelling mini-game based on skill, intuition, or even information gained from some previous experience in the game; it is a crap-shoot with unappealing dialogue choices, with chance of success slightly enhanced by perks.\n\nSpeaking of perks...they are just...ugh. I admit to despising this sort of \"character development\", but someone at BGS loves their MMO grindy tasks. Progression-based is the way to go, like Skyrim: pick up a sword, don some light armor, and based on use, both of those skills level, and your character's acumen with them improves. That celestial perk tree was lovely to look at, and the perks were bonuses, not prerequisites to even opening the ability to increase a skill. In Loadfield, the player has to invest a point into the stale top-to-bottom grid of perks just to begin improving ballistics, for instance. You can defeat 5000 enemies with your pistol, but until you place that point, it doesn't matter. And once you do, the MMO task of \"Kill 25\" starts counting, then invest another point, \"Kill 50\", another point, \"Kill 100\" to finish it off. Enjoy the running out of oxygen 100 times to get a small upgrade to your overall oxygen level; it's not stultifying at all. \n\nSo, in summary, instant gratification with unrealistic romance stories and menu-driven long-distance travel, delayed gratification with character improvement; Ugly, boring UI and maps (the ones that exist); Exploration about as deep as whatever amount of water it takes for mosquitoes to breed; Music either directly lifted from Fallout (the first few notes of the main theme are nearly identical), or copied phrases from John Williams' most famous works mingled with oozing, meandering pseudo-grand tripe; Unimmersive presentation in all phases (why, as the pilot of my ship, am I watching it takeoff as if I'm still on the ground? Hey, you forgot about me, n'wah!).\n\nGentle reader, do yourself a favor and play a modern, immersive, fun game instead. I won't suggest which, almost any will do. \n\nAnd maybe they won't kick you out to desktop or have quests that refuse to finish!\n\n2/10.", "timestamp_created": 1695358895, "timestamp_updated": 1695358895, "voted_up": false, "votes_up": 171, "votes_funny": 6, "weighted_vote_score": "0.685118257999420166", "comment_count": 0, "steam_purchase": true, "received_for_free": false, "written_during_early_access": false, "hidden_in_steam_china": true, "steam_china_location": "", "timestamp_dev_responded": 1698939546, "developer_response": "Greetings,\nThank you for taking the time to leave a review for Starfield!\nWe are sorry that you do not like landing on different planets and are finding many of them empty.\nSome of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored.\" The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed. You can continue to explore and find worlds that do have resources you need or hidden outposts to look through.\n\nGiven the immense size of Starfield, we felt it made more sense to be able to use your Grav Drive to jump to other solar systems. The option to fly freely among planets is still there, and you can travel from one planet to another and land without needing to open your map if you use your scanner. However, for an expedition like solar system traversal, jumping is necessary. Remember that fast travel also has its perks as you can do so quickly when trying to complete quests and will always be given visual of your ship launching and landing, thus being able to appreciate all the little details that make your customized ship look unique.\n\nWhile there may be loading screens in between fast travelling, just consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under 3 seconds. We believe that shortcoming will not hinder our players from getting lost in the world we created.\n\nWe are sorry you were disappointed with how the skill system works.\nThe skill system offers 82 skills for players to unlock and rank up. You receive one skill point every time you level up in Starfield. This skill point can then either be used to unlock a new skill or invest into one you already have, so you can level up that skill. Each skill also unlocks a challenge. Complete the challenge and then spend a skill point to rank up the skill. For more details on the skill system please see our FAQ here: https://beth.games/46kCgg2\n\nWe can understand your frustration with how the UI functions within the game.\nStarfield’s art direction and overall UI aesthetic is meant to be cohesive and have a “NASA Punk” look. Menus are clean, bold, and neatly organized with the focal point on the player’s character. The skill menu is colorful and iconic while the inventory shows off items, weapons, and armor in a visually striking way. These UI design choices increase your immersion into the Starfield universe.\n\nTo provide feedback to development for Starfield, please feel free to submit your feedback using this form here: https://beth.games/45BDMKb\n\nNever stop exploring!\n\nBethesda Customer Support" } ], "cursor": "AoIIPy9j5X7i668E" }