Starfield
It took me around 175 hours, but my time with Starfield is at an end (for now).
My expectations were high, having played and enjoyed many of Bethesda’s prior games. Pre-release marketing material also led me to believe there would be some wonderful spacefaring shenanigans a la No Man’s Sky. Sadly, a lot of my expectations were not fully met.
The game overall was good fun though, I enjoyed completing the main quest and some of new game plus, but I cannot recommend you follow my footsteps in search of 100% achievement score as it got very boring toward the end.
Pros
- Main questline is fun, with a wide range of stuff to do.
- Constellation characters were interesting and gave you differing perspectives on your actions.
- Lots of voice actors meant the minor characters you meet felt diverse from each other.
- Photo mode (more on that later).
- Wide range of weapons and powers kept the combat interesting.
- The robut calls you by your name.
- Andreja ❤
- It’s on Gamepass.
Cons
- Ship and base building lack a lot of quality of life features.
- The extraneous quests from NPC’s or mission boards were very repetive and usually not worth the reward for the time you spent.
- Randomly generated planets and moons are very flat and boring. Hoofing it around on foot (or jetpack) feels so slow.
- New Atlantis’ NPC population mostly looked like shit, with so many having the same set of weird bug-eyes and odd haircuts.
- Too many children in the main quest.
I hope that for a lot of the cons I mentioned, Bethesda will improve on them with future updates and DLC. In it’s current state I do recommend playing the main storyline, but don’t put too much time into base building, definitely stop when you’re feeling bored (it will happen).
I’ve covered wars
As the game had a pretty robust photo mode, I spent a lot of time posting photos and videos to this thread on X in a sort of journal fashion. The oddball places and faces my character - Captain Bert “Ernie” Smith - ended up seeing. Please check it out if you want to see some of the capabilities of photo mode.
Pro tip
Any screenshots you take will end up being randomly used as loading screens, so why not terrify your future self by taking pictures of weird looking people, like so…
Additionally, I made a footage dump of random screenshots and clips that I am going to sift through and make some sort of short review video in future. I’ve never done anything like that before so it might not amount to much, but if I ever get round to it you can be sure I’ll post it here.
🚀 𝔸𝔻 𝔸𝕊𝕋ℝ𝔸 🚀