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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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No Man's Sky
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I don't think you need to keep your expectations low, just keep them realistic. It's a Bethesda game, it plays like their other games... it's a whole ton of jank muddled up and duct taped until it holds together just enough for launch. This time they raised the bar to what counts as "holding together" to the level of the other major studios, but a lot of the gameplay systems still feel unfinished. In this I actually think it's a lot like modern NMS, where things like outpost building feel like they're actively contradictory to things like settlements; outposts in SF feel like someone did them early in the dev cycle and was then pulled off to work somewhere else and the only attention they got from then on was making sure they didn't crash the game. Then you've also got the typical Bethesda game stuff that people are acting surprised Pikachu about. The character animations look weird sometimes, low poly NPCs especially, there are too many load screens in some places, performance is poor considering the level of graphics, etc.
However, as long as you know what you're getting into, imo it's a great game. The storyline is interesting enough to be fun, but also manages to skip that annoying thing where you're off learning to be a space pirate for months while your family is being held hostage or something. Some of the side stories are excellent, and the game rewards you well for just taking your time doing stuff. I got caught with contraband yesterday... usually I hit the grav drive and escape rather than paying the fine, but I decided I didn't care and suddenly found myself embroiled in a shockingly compelling crime drama scene instead of the usual simple dialogue options. There's shit like that everywhere. There's an entire cyberpunk mini city half-hidden beneath the main city that you can just not find for dozens of hours, and when you finally get taken there it's really cool to realize it was under your feet the whole time. And these aren't even significant spoilers, there's more that I could tell you that would wreck the surprise for you.
Basically, go in expecting a game like morrowind/Skyrim/oblivion, where it's all about a huge breadth of interestint content (and yeah a fair bit of mediocre content because there's so much of it all) rather than any specific thing being the best in the genre, and you won't have to keep your expectations low.
A defining trait of those games, to me, is having everything in one big world you can wander around in (besides DLC areas, of course). The engine can't support doing that on an interplanetary scale, so Starfield feels less open to me despite the much larger scope.
I can't speak for everyone (including you) but I just can't understand that feeling. It's hugely open, it just uses tricks to capture that openness in a few places. It's nice to, say, fly down to a planet seamlessly in NMS, but we all know it's also kind of a pain in the butt sometimes, it can be annoying to land and it can take a long time and when you've done it a bunch it essentially turns into just another loading screen. Flying to or from a planet in SF is slightly less immersive but for me, it's just a tiny detail that could have been a bit better but doesn't materially impact the game.
And I've so far never reached the edge of an on-planet instance, the fields are huge and it seems to me you have to actively go hunting for the borders.
Yes, but they're also completely empty of anything interesting. In Bethesda's previous games, there were also large swaths of nothing, but there was always something hand-crafted if you ventured far enough. There is no point to going anywhere outside of the hand-crafted areas in Starfield, all of which you must fast travel to. It really kills the exploration aspect of the game, usually one of Bethesda's strong points.
Huh?
My chief complaint has been that there are too many things. If you go to a moon in the middle of nowhere, your landing site will have an abandoned research station and a secret factory and an observation post all within a couple KM around it. These aren't tied to the location, but they are hand-crafted, and as soon as the mod API drops I plan to decrease the frequency they show up, because my only complaint is that I hear after a while they get repetitive. So far I've been doing enough different things that I haven't found the same one twice, a hundred hours in.
Many of these sites contain their own storylines and characters, and links to other quests.
Maybe you and I just have different definitions of interesting. I actually got annoyed at one point during a survey mission because I kept going past something new and compelling that I wanted to explore, but I also really wanted to finish the mission I was on.
edit to add: I think it's specifically interesting to compare this to NMS, which has the exact same problem but a far lower variety of locations to stumble on, none of which have any story or link to each other at all... yet I think we're all okay with the exploration in NMS?
You're right that "interesting" is very subjective, and I don't begrudge anyone who finds Starfield's randomly generated areas interesting. It's true that there are a bunch of hand-crafted areas which are randomly placed in such areas, but as you said, it's far too easy to find copies over and over again. I just don't find the way Starfield handles random exploration fun the way I did in their previous titles. No Man's Sky does indeed have the same sort of issues, but that's kind of its whole thing, being a Minecraft-style creativity sandbox. You don't have nearly the same amount of control over creative options in Starfield.