**My own two cents: **
I’ve sank 24 hours into it this weekend alone and barely scratched the surface. It’s a great game, with a solid story and decent voice acting (which for a Bethesda game seems to be a feat).
There’s a few ‘shames’, the big one being no space flight between planets. As people are digging into this more it looks like something that could be fixed with mods. The procedurally generated content is, like in No Mans Sky, a bit disappointing at times.
minor spoilers
I can’t believe the people on the moon don’t reference the fact they’re on the _moon_, they just repeat generic npc outpost dialog.
However the combat is the best it’s been, and I love that it’s slower to build than in Skyrim or Fallout. Skills take longer to earn and plot lines are much more drawn out in greater depth and detail.
Overall it’s a cracking, fun and time consuming game and the negatives are definitely way overblown online (as is tradition), but it wouldn’t be a Bethesda game without missing the mark in small ways. Can’t wait for modding!
I haven't been able to play it in account that it was broken on arc gpus. This has now been fixed so I'm looking forward to giving it a shot after work today.
I have watched a number of videos on it, and I think the thing that will probably annoy me the most would be the number of loading screen, specifically between buildings and your ship. I'm not sure what to expect for the procedurally generated areas for places you have already visited (do these get regenerate?).
From what I have seen it seems like Bethesda have nailed the atmosphere and sound design of the game.
So, Starfield came with my GPU, and it was even the Premium Edition so I got early access!
I’ve got around 10 hours into the game so far and I’m really enjoying it.
There are, however, some quirks. The UI is pretty horrible, to exit the menu you have to either hold down the escape/tab key, or press it multiple times—there’s no functional difference between escape and tab. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if you didn’t have to use the menu all the time—I’ll get to that.
I haven’t figured out a way to quickly switch weapons, so every time I run out of ammo (or the weapon is ineffective against the enemy) I have to pause the game and select a weapon.
Weight management is of course a pain-in-the-ass. I don’t really have all that much, but the moment you go over you’re unable to walk without depleting your oxygen.
Speaking of oxygen, the only way to get anywhere on these planets is to walk. Everything is a kilometer away, and that takes a while without running. And there’s only one place you can land your ship. Space rovers would have been nice, and it’s not like they didn’t think of that—I saw a perfectly unusable space rover sitting on a planet as decoration.
Health is way too difficult to manage. You do not replenish health and you can get far into a no-return mission without any additional access to health. I almost had to go back to a very old save because I couldn’t find any health.
Oh, and I remember people complaining that there are no maps. It’s not true, there are maps, they’re just utterly useless. This isn’t a big deal to me though.
As many complaints as I’m laying out here, I’m really enjoying the game and am surprised by how massive and lively_ it actually is.
30 hours so far. Very much enjoyable, and I barely feel like I've scratched the surface yet.
The whole travel immersion issue is something I very much recognize. For example after the first time landing at a city, you can never land there again. Only fast travel. The game really expects you to get bored of the travelling much faster than I actually do. I dont expect free flight outside of planet orbit, but they could definitely have done more to make travel more immersive. Having said that it is not close to a deal breaker or anything, just a bit of a constant annoyance.
I got almost 40 hours played over the weekend, and I love it!
The world feels alive, the surveying is fun, the combat is great.
The procedural generation has some issues, but I'm hopeful for future updates and mods to add enough variety that you want stuff to repeat.
Inventory management is a pain... But I'm a hoarder, I'd struggle even with 5 times the space. And you get tools to deal with it in the game, it just takes time.
Only ran into a couple of bugs - one of which was a softlock that I had to reload for. Very much issue-free playing, which wasn't my experience with the early days of Fallout 4 or Skyrim
I'm still less than ten hours in, but I have very much enjoyed it.
At first, the game caused some serious motion sickness for me even in third person, but then I found that it's possible to increase field-of-view though an ini file, and that has helped.
I haven't really done much, other than walked around a city, observed the many little stories that play out in front of you, and bought better looking clothes. Oh, and I had a very nice cappuccino with an older gentleman while watching a sunset.
I must say that I'm not a fan of the combat. It's not difficult on the normal level, but it's very tedious, so I'm considering switching to the easiest difficulty level to make the mandatory fights pass quicker. I'm there for the world, the story, and whatever minor narrative puzzles the game throws at me. There are better shooter games out there. I miss VATS.
You can't really build a character so far as I can see. Hope you like shooting guns. Or the occasional axe.
Because that's all there is so far as I can see.
Game looks rubbish. Washed out, awful awful lighting. Sure the ship models look great, but there is just so much blown out lighting it's borderline unplayable in places.
Quests seem mildly entertaining as far as they go.
The thing I'm most disappointed about is the one dimensional nature of my character. I can't be whatever equivalent their might have been for a magic user, or a heavy melle user, or whatnot. It's just, guns.
It's more like Red Dead Redemption in Space than Skyrim in space.
Almost no containers are intractable either. That's a big change from their other games.
I don't hate it, but for me, it's not GOTY. I keep putting it down to play other things.
The one good thing I can say is, space combat appears to be almost entirely optional. Because 3d combat and motion in no gravity in games always makes me motion sick, and I was worried there'd be a lot of it, but so far, there is not. Maybe unless you go looking for it I guess.
I'm only 10 hours and 3 planets in, but so far I've been loving it. The procedural stuff is... I wish they just stopped trying to do that. It has not worked in any of their games since Skyrim and they keep trying it for some reason.
But the rest? The rest is great. I've done a quest on Mars that i thought "oh it's just a delivery" and then it spirals into this super long questline of corporate shenanigans and then opens into like two or three more questlines that take you everywhere. If all the questing is like this I'll be a happy spaceman for a while.
I also love the ship interior aesthetics. Sci-Fi ships usually look super pristine like Star Trek, but ships in this game were clearly designed to look like modern spacecraft, so everything is labeled up the wazoo, there's tons of stuff on nets and other holding spaces, there's instruments EVERYWHERE, and there's this feeling of cramped space whenever you're inside. It looks... pretty much how pictures of our current spacecraft do.
I'm not that far into the game, but I'm enjoying it so far! Starfield is my first Bethesda game so there were a few things I had to get used to, like NOT picking up everything I see.
My only big complaints are that the map is utterly useless in cities and various small performance/gameplay issues like the clunky UI and weird mouse aiming, but the latter issues have been fixed with mods already.
I played it for about an hour and a bit and found it pretty mediocre. Navigating the menu is terrible, travelling through space is incredibly boring, ship combat is dull (I found NMS' ship combat to be kinda mediocre but better than Starfield's) and on-foot combat is meh.
The third chapter of Sim Settlements 2 for Fallout 4 is out so I might go play FO4 instead.
I've had time to sink about 14-ish hours in since early access dropped. I don't have much to say about the game iteself that hasn't already been said, I'm having a great time.
It has made me realize how deeply nostolgic Oblivion, Fallout 3, and even Skyrim, are to me from my childhood / early adulthood and this game is completely warping me back into being in middle school, leaving the sewer and exploring Cyrodiil for the first time, it's pretty wild.
It, for sure, has a lot of issues but I'm even having fun looking around for mods to fix them, which I haven't done with a game probably since Skyrim first dropped, which is fun/nostolgic in itself oddly enough.
The discourse around the game has been really weird to watch though. Peoples expectations of space sims, state of the art graphics, or whatever were so astronomical, it's leading to people not seeing it for what it actually is, which is just a really solid Bethesda game. If that's all you're expecting, it is probably the best they have made and you will definitely enjoy it.
It's not a revelation, which I had expected, but I'm enjoying it all the same.
I didn't really pay any attention to Starfield and wasn't really aware of it coming out, until about a week ago when I heard it was about to release, which surprised me. Out of curiosity, I took a look at it on Steam and said to myself, "$70? Hah. No way", then looked at the minimum requirements; my computer was below them. Not surprising, given I rarely use my gaming computer and generally play older and indie stuff on my laptop and Steam Deck, but something broke in me that day and I suddenly needed to spend $500 upgrading my gaming PC. Now I'm the owner of a 6700 XT, Ryzen 5600 and Starfield Premium (from the video card) and I've been playing every day since release on Thursday.
I've now got about 14 hours with it and it's what I expected; mediocre writing for the most part, but some fun and interesting quests here and there. Combat is probably the best it's ever been in a Bethesda game (Been playing them since 1996) and the world design is pretty neat; I'm enjoying just existing and pottering about. The game looks pretty good, though maybe not as good as the specs seem to suggest, but as a person who isn't a slave to graphics, I think it's pretty great. The character models and facial animations are the best they've ever been in a Bethesda game and I feel like the characters have a lot of nuance to their facial expressions as they speak.
All that said, with only 14-hours, I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface at all, so I'm not really sure what my complaints about it will be in the future. So far, I'm enjoying myself and I want to keep playing, which is enough for me right now. I don't often find games that I just want to continue playing and thinking about these days, so that's nice to have.
They is so boring, bug filled and just poor gameplay mechanics that I got a refund off Steam. The people on Consoles have it a bit better than those of us on PCs.
Some the worst combat in a game.
Endless cutscreens.
Horrible console only controls.
Empty planets.
Why am I sitting on the ground watching my ship takeoff into space which I am sitting in?
I shoot the ground around NPC’s and there’s zero reaction.
My NPC companions just run around and random directions. The worst AI.
I tried flying away from a planet in my ship and when I turn around I’m still sitting at the planet.
inventory management hell.
every generic NPC says the same thing
I'm enjoying it. Starfield has pretty much all the same flaws and qualities Skyrim and Fallout 3/4 had, and I spent a lot of time in those games. It hasn't overdelivered like a lot of people seemed to be hoping for.
Disclaimer that I love Bethesda games, (300 hours in F3, 100 in F:NV, 60 in F4 and 100 in Skyrim) and I've spent about 40 hours so far this weekend with Starfield.
I'm enjoying it a lot! Definitely not a perfect game by any means but to me it feels like a more modern Fallout game with better graphics.
A couple of gripes first: I immediately turned down a bunch of color settings in the settings menu because the game looked super washed out with some of it's default settings. I dunno if I got used to it or it's more bearable now but turning down color filters and motion blur and some other lighting settings really helped.
I don't like how a couple of the main quests basically just require you to check in back at the quest giver. It's pretty annoying for that.
But overall to me it's like Fallout in Space. for some that might be bad but it's exactly what i'm looking for. I like that I can follow the questline all the way and they're pretty interesting with some interesting decisions (even though they don't seem to affect the overall world too much yet, though it's added some dialogue options to other, semi-related quests). It would be cool if going down a certain storyline locks you out of other ones but I can see why bethesda didn't go that way.
I spent a lot of time customizing a ship last night, it was a bit finnicky but after it worked i was super happy with it!
So I have not played the game, which makes my opinion less valid. But I've watched an hour or so of gameplay on Twitch and YouTube from people that are decently far into the game. It looks like Bethesda has saved me $70 by releasing a mediocre game. To be fair, it's possible that the way I play the game would make it more enjoyable for me than how most people play it. But my initial impression is that Bethesda has grown too large and is failing to maintain their famous level of game design quality.
Skyrim was built by around 100 people, Starfield by over 400. The issue with corporations of that scale is that human social psychology is not built to scale beyond 100 people. That means a corporation that runs fine with 100 people needs to pass through the Great Filter as they go beyond that scale. Some make it through unscathed, others do not. One common way to keep a large group of people organized is to have a simple goal that you all work towards - something that can be summarized in a few words. Starfield looks like it has been failed by that approach. I assume internally it was pitched as "Fallout in Space" or "Skyrim in Space". And that's exactly what this is - and no more.
I want to give credit to the art teams. I've seen a lot of beautiful locations in the game. There are good bits here and there. But it's pretty much the most straightforward adaptation of previous Bethesda games into a Space world. As if you asked an AI to perform style transfer onto Skyrim. The game even has you play as a messiah character called Skyborn. Sounds a little too familiar.
A brand new IP is an opportunity to rethink things from the ground up. And technology has developed significantly since Bethesda's masterpiece releases. We could have had a truly 2023 game instead of a polished up 2010 game.
I have a feeling that a lot of people will approach this game with the expectation that you can just wander wherever your fancy takes you and run across interesting adventures like in Fallout or Elder Scrolls. This is not the case with Starfield (most planets only have procedurally generated content) and trying to play like this almost led me to give up after the first couple of hours. Once I went back to the hand crafted content, I began to enjoy the game a lot more.
The good:
The actual hand designed locations and quests are a lot of fun and on par with the better quests in Fallout / Elder Scrolls. There's a good variety to the locations and the sorts of role playing opportunities available to the player.
The intro is really short! You can get through it within an hour and be doing whatever you want (although it'll likely take several hours more to really get to grip with the game's systems, even if you've played Bethesda games before).
There's no level adjustment for enemies or zones, and all zones and enemies are clearly flagged with their challenge level. I'm a sucker for trying to find ways through high level areas before I'm ready, so I loved having that option.
The ship building is pretty fun (although it does have some weird quirks on what ship designs it'll allow). It's also mostly skippable if you're not into it (more on this below), as you can just buy the upgrades you want directly or steal a better ship.
The bad:
The portion of the game spent physically flying your ship around is really small and essentially boils down to being dropped into an instance which is often empty, but occasionally has some other ships you can either shoot or talk to. Most of these encounters can be resolved in minutes by doing one of those two things. There's no exploration or flying around required. The rest of the space travel (flying between planets; landing on a planet; flying elsewhere on the same planet) is wholly menu driven. I'm personally fine with this as this isn't what I'm looking for from the game, but I can understand why the people looking for something more like Elite or Star Citizen are disappointed.
The menus are clunky (often requiring you to go several layers down to get where you want) and the tutorial on how to use them isn't great. It's far from unusable once you learn how it works, but given the sheer amount of menuing you need to do in this game, it's unfortunate.
The local map (planet level) doesn't show anything other than quick travel markers, so it's basically unusable as a map. I didn't really care about this either as I don't aim to explore 100% of everywhere I come across, but I can see why this is maddening to the people who do.
The encumbrance situation is kind of brutal as the game expects you to pick up a ton of resources and spare parts in addition to your usual loot. You can store stuff on your ship (and upgrade your ship's carrying capacity), but there are so many different types of resources and components that I'm constantly running out of space. The game also gives you an infinite storage container early on, but having to quick travel to dump stuff into it is a drag and it's also not hooked up to your crafting / base building menus, so you have to actually go back and get the stuff you need if you want to leave all your stuff there.
I've heard a lot of people say they enjoy the gunplay better than Fallout 4. Coming from the perspective of someone who constantly used VATS in Fallout and melee in Elder Scrolls... I guess it's fine? It never feels like you're missing when you should be hitting, but many enemies are absolute bullet sponges with multiple health bars and constantly running into these guys leaves the guns feeling a bit lacking in impact to me.
Overall I'm having a great time and finding myself staying up late to play like I did with Tears of the Kingdom. It just took like 10 hours to feel out how the game worked and reach that point.
The 8 is because the travel system kinda sucks. Like Daggerfall the scale is a setpiece, not a stage you get to traverse as in, say, No Man's Sky. The inter-system travel makes sense but you can't fly planet to planet or even in-atmosphere which was honestly a major complaint many people had. I also understand why this wasn't done, basically because it's an RPG with solid exploration, not a full space flying game like NMS.
The 10/10 as a Bethesda game is because it perfects their model. The Fallout per-task XP system is better for this context. The challenges lend a sense of purpose to how you do things, like looting or simply using ballistic weapons.
The interactions are early Fallout 3D game style with lists of great, or wild, options so you can get a wide range of responses. The random quests can be so mundane as getting somebody a cup of coffee, which I found to be a cool immersive touch. I like the Oblivion style of overhearing things to get quests as well.
I expected more jank and breakage. The only crash I've had was caused by Proton on approach to a station, that didn't repeat in Windows. This has been a solid run so far. We just need a bunch of optimization, especially in the cities, which apparently even choke more powerful rigs.
NMS is one of my all-time favorite games, and has been that way before, after, and during all of its many patches. It's always clicked with me on a deep level. Heck, I even actively followed Waking Titan. So, naturally, I've been thinking of biting the bullet on this one, but it seems too combat-heavy for me. My favorite part of NMS is scanning the local flora and fauna and just... walking around. I'm wondering how much of that I really could find in Starfield. Some combat doesn't bother me, but if it's front and center all the time, I don't think I'll be able to justify how expensive it is.
Can someone speak to how much that kind of exploration figures into it?
I'm about 25 hours in now, and I just love it. It's taking me back to playing Skyrim, Fallout 4 for the first time again. I'm obviously a really giant Bethesda fan and I love everything about the way they make their game so I'm admittedly biased, but this is hands down my GOTY. The combat is great, what limited I have done with ship-ship combat has been really fun. Building my own ship is really comprehensive and gives me a lot of freedom while still requiring me to level up to get the good stuff.
Some of the writing has been fuckin fantastic so far (I'm doing the SysDef questline right now and it's pretty phenomenal), while other parts have been kinda lacking. For example I found the motivation for my character to be joining Constellation to be pretty weak and not super well emphasized, but doing the faction quests is really where the game has been shining.
The game is also gorgeous, seeing rings around a planet for the first time, or seeing the wind-blasted rocks of an alien moon, I've had so many jaw dropping moments. And the world-building too, great stuff. It feels lived in, dirty, and logically thought out all at the same time. Cydonia is one of my favorite cities so far for it's history alone.
And the best part is that I feel like I've barely even begun. There are so many systems the game has that I just haven't touched yet because I haven't had the time. Outpost building, piracy, ship hijacking, crew management, a giant pool of research to do, scanning flora and fauna for every planet with an inkling of life, they just give you so much and the ability to create a really unique roleplay through it all.
I don't know what else to say, it lived up to the hype for me!
Combat is pretty fun. Weapons look, sound, and feel great. Enemy feedback less so. And enemy ai sucks.
I feel like people aren't talking enough about the improvements to movement. Mantling, combat slides, the jetpack. It all feels really good.
My main thing I love about it is the cinematic aspect. It super itches that Mass Effect or Fallout New Vegas feeling of doing things you would do in movies.
Like infiltrating a casino, hijacking a ship, high stakes poker game, rushing to your wedding, killing and putting on the suit if a guy to get into a bad, Indiana Jones shenanigans, etc.
I love that shit. And the game is almost entirely that. It all feels very immersive and cinematic. I feel like an E3 panel using those buzzwords.
It's honestly the worst Bethesda game I've ever played, and the most worrying thing - it's the worst Bethesda game at the one thing Bethesda usually does right - exploration. There's none of that.
Here's how travel works in this space exploration videogame:
You climb into the cabin of your ship and hold a button.
You watch a cutscene of a ship taking of from the planet. You can't actually fly in the atmosphere, this is just a loading screen.
You load into near orbit of the planet. This part of the game serves zero purpose. You can't fly fast enough to travel between planets, or even around the planet you're orbiting to land on the other side.
You open the map, and then painfully slowly zoom out a couple of times to the galaxy view, then zoom into whatever star system you need to go into, pick a planet a hold a button.
Watch you ship's drive charge, when watch a cutscene. When a loading screen.
Open map again to pick a point on the planet you want to land at.
Run around, on foot, a boring procedural landscape, sometimes scanning some stuff you encounter or visiting copypasted "dungeons" with no relevance to the story. Hit the invisible border of the cell. Fast travel back to your ship.
This is repeated forever, because there's a thousand of empty procedural planets for you to explore, and a few handcrafted cities with barely enough in them to compare them to something like Whiterun. Bethesda dipped their toes into procedural generation just enough to not have enough hand placed stuff, but not enough for it to actually be cool like something in No Man's Sky.
People will also tell about how it's "the best gunplay it's ever been", and, yeah, but it's still bad. Guns aren't fun, enemies are VERY dumb and are basically bullet sponges. The quests aren't good either, secondary or main. Here's a few examples:
You hear the local police force recruits help. You go to the police force guy and tell him you want to help him, an he goes "okay, you're hired".
He immediately sends you to the local FBI chief. You go to the local FBI chief, and he dumps some exposition on you. Afterwards, he tells you to go to some random bench, get the hidden package, and give it to the police guy.
You do that.
There's no twist.
Oh, but there's a bigger one, check this out:
You hear the local science guy needs help. You go to him, and he asks you to bring him 6 thingies scattered around the city.
You do that. He tells you "thanks, come back tomorrow".
You do that.
He asks you to get some data from the other science guy who hates your science guy.
The other science guy tells you he will give you data if you delete his work records because he's been naughty. Your options are do that, or persuade him to let you skip game content.
You go to the empty copypasted apartment floor where you can delete his work record. You delete the first science guy's record too, because you wanna see whether it will do anything(it will not).
The other science guy gives you data. You give data to the first science guy.
You come back the next day.
This goes on longer. It doesn't get better. The "twist" is flavour purely and genuinely doesn't actually affect anything. You're not changed after quest completion. It's all space dust.
Main quests are worse. At some point, someone said "starborn" and I just gave up. It's the most sterile Bethesda game, it's the most sterile sci-fi game, it's just a bad game overall. The only things good about it are some designs of science thingies like ships and guns. The performance is straight up atrocious. It is the most bugfree Bethesda release, I guess, but the rest is so depressing it made me very pessimistic about TES 6.
I've only been playing Starfield since the general release yesterday, so I'm only a few hours in. I haven't been paying attention to any of the hype, so it feels like just another Bethesda RPG to me, albeit one with more polish and scope than usual. I'm enjoying it a lot so far, and haven't noticed any bugs yet. I'm already slamming into the carry-weight limit repeatedly, which is kind of annoying. The first time I got to a trading post thing I offloaded a LOT of stuff. I was also irritated by the tiny storage capacity of the locker on my ship. My ship has a fucking cargo hold that I can't store my junk in, what the hell?
Ive played 5-ish hours and I don't think I'm going to keep playing.
The start of the game is kind of dumb and rushed. The NPCs are flat and the UI is extremally clunky. The indoor locations have a gray/brown tint and it seems like the game design philosophy was to cram as much useless clutter into as little space as possible which makes it impossible to see what can or should be looted.
The robot companion always get in the way. And the combat isn't very satisfying, every fight is only "shoot gun until enemy is dead".
TL;DR Starfield is good but not perfect, lots of performance issues and about as shallow as most Bethesda RPGS. Still having lots of fun with the game but know what you're getting into before buying, it's not FNV in space so don't expect that. 7-8/10. Play The Outer Worlds if the RPG side isn't good for you or play Elite Dangerous/Star Citizen if the space sim side isn't as you'd like.
I've played lots of Starfield lately, and it's been a very fun experience. But there are some gripes I have with it.
It's very clearly designed for XBOX Series X first, the graphics options are laughable. I have a 1440p with an RTX 2060, I don't expect to run new games at 1440p 60fps or anything so I'm fine with playing at 1080p. Except, Starfield doesn't give you the option of fullscreen at a resolution lower than your monitors native resolution for some reason, and you can have the exact same settings as someone else and have wildly different performance, just because the monitor is different.
For example, if you wanted to use FSR2 (or DLSS through mods) and set the scaling to 50% you'd have worse performance than someone with a 1080p monitor because you're running it at 1280x720 while they're running it at 960x540. This would be fixed if you could just lower your resolution, but because that wasn't a problem on console they never thought to include it.
So I download a couple of performance mods and DLSS, and I'm finally able to play at a decent 30-40fps. Fine by me.
Getting into the game I was very much immersed in the world and was surprised by the quality of the dialogue compared to most Bethesda games. It was quite fun going on side-quests and doing odd jobs just to upgrade my ship and see the cool sights the world has to offer.
I can't recall a time when I was taken out of the game because of something a character said or did, it all seemed to make sense within the world.
I think I'm in a somewhat unique position to enjoy this game, I have hundreds of hours in Elite Dangerous which is a much more immersive and "realistic" space sim, but ultimately I lost interest in it because of the lack of any real goal or reason to keep playing.
There are a few things Elite does better, mostly ship HUD and combat mechanics. Being able to look over at a panel and set a course without ever having to open a menu is really cool and the power management system for your different modules and weapons was much better in Elite too.
Being able to walk around your ship in Starfield is awesome though, and the on-foot mechanics are way better (probably because Elite was never designed to have them).
Haven't experienced any game-breaking bugs so far and the few bugs I have seen were minimal.
Overall, it's what I expected. A Bethesda RPG that you can immerse yourself in the world of and sink tons of hours into side content really fleshing out your character and who you want them to be.
Not a 10/10 masterpiece or a 1/10 buggy mess as some people have said. I'd give it a 7 or an 8.
If you want a Bethesda-esque RPG in space that isn't procedurally generated and has unique NPCs for each planet as well as more in depth choices and consequences... play The Outer Worlds. It's by Obsidian and was a better RPG than Starfield has been for me so far.
I haven't bought the game and probably won't buy it, but will still offer an opinion as someone who's played most of Bethesda's titles. I played every Bethesda game up to Fallout 4, and never put more than 10-20 hours into any of them nor finished them. Their games are just....shallow? Like yeah there's a lot of content and a story and blah blah blah, but it just loses its luster extremely quickly. Elden Ring, on the other hand, always felt gratifying, mysterious, and wonderful to explore. It rarely felt stale. The combat felt rich, impactful, and fun. I know it's not an FPS, but it's a rare example of an open world game that feels absolutely spot on.
Having said all of that, I've watched some let's plays and reviews, and this feels like the same experience as above to me. The shooting mechanics and combat look absolutely underwhelming. They are still using basically the same engine from Skyrim and it really shows. They need to make a new engine from scratch very nadly. I honestly don't know why so many people are enjoying this game other than the rich modding community.
Anyway, to each his own and I'm glad people are enjoying themselves 👍
**My own two cents: **
I’ve sank 24 hours into it this weekend alone and barely scratched the surface. It’s a great game, with a solid story and decent voice acting (which for a Bethesda game seems to be a feat).
There’s a few ‘shames’, the big one being no space flight between planets. As people are digging into this more it looks like something that could be fixed with mods. The procedurally generated content is, like in No Mans Sky, a bit disappointing at times.
minor spoilers
I can’t believe the people on the moon don’t reference the fact they’re on the _moon_, they just repeat generic npc outpost dialog.However the combat is the best it’s been, and I love that it’s slower to build than in Skyrim or Fallout. Skills take longer to earn and plot lines are much more drawn out in greater depth and detail.
Overall it’s a cracking, fun and time consuming game and the negatives are definitely way overblown online (as is tradition), but it wouldn’t be a Bethesda game without missing the mark in small ways. Can’t wait for modding!
I haven't been able to play it in account that it was broken on arc gpus. This has now been fixed so I'm looking forward to giving it a shot after work today.
I have watched a number of videos on it, and I think the thing that will probably annoy me the most would be the number of loading screen, specifically between buildings and your ship. I'm not sure what to expect for the procedurally generated areas for places you have already visited (do these get regenerate?).
From what I have seen it seems like Bethesda have nailed the atmosphere and sound design of the game.
So, Starfield came with my GPU, and it was even the Premium Edition so I got early access!
I’ve got around 10 hours into the game so far and I’m really enjoying it.
There are, however, some quirks. The UI is pretty horrible, to exit the menu you have to either hold down the escape/tab key, or press it multiple times—there’s no functional difference between escape and tab. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if you didn’t have to use the menu all the time—I’ll get to that.
I haven’t figured out a way to quickly switch weapons, so every time I run out of ammo (or the weapon is ineffective against the enemy) I have to pause the game and select a weapon.
Space travel is kinda crappy. At first I was speeding up trying to get to another planet before realizing that was not going to work (apparently it is possible though, if you want to leave your ship in-transit while you’re in bed). So to travel you have to—yep—go back into the pause menu and go through the map there.
Weight management is of course a pain-in-the-ass. I don’t really have all that much, but the moment you go over you’re unable to walk without depleting your oxygen.
Speaking of oxygen, the only way to get anywhere on these planets is to walk. Everything is a kilometer away, and that takes a while without running. And there’s only one place you can land your ship. Space rovers would have been nice, and it’s not like they didn’t think of that—I saw a perfectly unusable space rover sitting on a planet as decoration.
Health is way too difficult to manage. You do not replenish health and you can get far into a no-return mission without any additional access to health. I almost had to go back to a very old save because I couldn’t find any health.
Oh, and I remember people complaining that there are no maps. It’s not true, there are maps, they’re just utterly useless. This isn’t a big deal to me though.
As many complaints as I’m laying out here, I’m really enjoying the game and am surprised by how massive and lively_ it actually is.
30 hours so far. Very much enjoyable, and I barely feel like I've scratched the surface yet.
The whole travel immersion issue is something I very much recognize. For example after the first time landing at a city, you can never land there again. Only fast travel. The game really expects you to get bored of the travelling much faster than I actually do. I dont expect free flight outside of planet orbit, but they could definitely have done more to make travel more immersive. Having said that it is not close to a deal breaker or anything, just a bit of a constant annoyance.
I got almost 40 hours played over the weekend, and I love it!
The world feels alive, the surveying is fun, the combat is great.
The procedural generation has some issues, but I'm hopeful for future updates and mods to add enough variety that you want stuff to repeat.
Inventory management is a pain... But I'm a hoarder, I'd struggle even with 5 times the space. And you get tools to deal with it in the game, it just takes time.
Only ran into a couple of bugs - one of which was a softlock that I had to reload for. Very much issue-free playing, which wasn't my experience with the early days of Fallout 4 or Skyrim
I'm still less than ten hours in, but I have very much enjoyed it.
At first, the game caused some serious motion sickness for me even in third person, but then I found that it's possible to increase field-of-view though an ini file, and that has helped.
I haven't really done much, other than walked around a city, observed the many little stories that play out in front of you, and bought better looking clothes. Oh, and I had a very nice cappuccino with an older gentleman while watching a sunset.
I must say that I'm not a fan of the combat. It's not difficult on the normal level, but it's very tedious, so I'm considering switching to the easiest difficulty level to make the mandatory fights pass quicker. I'm there for the world, the story, and whatever minor narrative puzzles the game throws at me. There are better shooter games out there. I miss VATS.
Platform: XBox Series X
You can't really build a character so far as I can see. Hope you like shooting guns. Or the occasional axe.
Because that's all there is so far as I can see.
Game looks rubbish. Washed out, awful awful lighting. Sure the ship models look great, but there is just so much blown out lighting it's borderline unplayable in places.
Quests seem mildly entertaining as far as they go.
The thing I'm most disappointed about is the one dimensional nature of my character. I can't be whatever equivalent their might have been for a magic user, or a heavy melle user, or whatnot. It's just, guns.
It's more like Red Dead Redemption in Space than Skyrim in space.
Almost no containers are intractable either. That's a big change from their other games.
I don't hate it, but for me, it's not GOTY. I keep putting it down to play other things.
The one good thing I can say is, space combat appears to be almost entirely optional. Because 3d combat and motion in no gravity in games always makes me motion sick, and I was worried there'd be a lot of it, but so far, there is not. Maybe unless you go looking for it I guess.
I'm only 10 hours and 3 planets in, but so far I've been loving it. The procedural stuff is... I wish they just stopped trying to do that. It has not worked in any of their games since Skyrim and they keep trying it for some reason.
But the rest? The rest is great. I've done a quest on Mars that i thought "oh it's just a delivery" and then it spirals into this super long questline of corporate shenanigans and then opens into like two or three more questlines that take you everywhere. If all the questing is like this I'll be a happy spaceman for a while.
I also love the ship interior aesthetics. Sci-Fi ships usually look super pristine like Star Trek, but ships in this game were clearly designed to look like modern spacecraft, so everything is labeled up the wazoo, there's tons of stuff on nets and other holding spaces, there's instruments EVERYWHERE, and there's this feeling of cramped space whenever you're inside. It looks... pretty much how pictures of our current spacecraft do.
I'm not that far into the game, but I'm enjoying it so far! Starfield is my first Bethesda game so there were a few things I had to get used to, like NOT picking up everything I see.
My only big complaints are that the map is utterly useless in cities and various small performance/gameplay issues like the clunky UI and weird mouse aiming, but the latter issues have been fixed with mods already.
I played it for about an hour and a bit and found it pretty mediocre. Navigating the menu is terrible, travelling through space is incredibly boring, ship combat is dull (I found NMS' ship combat to be kinda mediocre but better than Starfield's) and on-foot combat is meh.
The third chapter of Sim Settlements 2 for Fallout 4 is out so I might go play FO4 instead.
I've had time to sink about 14-ish hours in since early access dropped. I don't have much to say about the game iteself that hasn't already been said, I'm having a great time.
It has made me realize how deeply nostolgic Oblivion, Fallout 3, and even Skyrim, are to me from my childhood / early adulthood and this game is completely warping me back into being in middle school, leaving the sewer and exploring Cyrodiil for the first time, it's pretty wild.
It, for sure, has a lot of issues but I'm even having fun looking around for mods to fix them, which I haven't done with a game probably since Skyrim first dropped, which is fun/nostolgic in itself oddly enough.
The discourse around the game has been really weird to watch though. Peoples expectations of space sims, state of the art graphics, or whatever were so astronomical, it's leading to people not seeing it for what it actually is, which is just a really solid Bethesda game. If that's all you're expecting, it is probably the best they have made and you will definitely enjoy it.
It's not a revelation, which I had expected, but I'm enjoying it all the same.
I didn't really pay any attention to Starfield and wasn't really aware of it coming out, until about a week ago when I heard it was about to release, which surprised me. Out of curiosity, I took a look at it on Steam and said to myself, "$70? Hah. No way", then looked at the minimum requirements; my computer was below them. Not surprising, given I rarely use my gaming computer and generally play older and indie stuff on my laptop and Steam Deck, but something broke in me that day and I suddenly needed to spend $500 upgrading my gaming PC. Now I'm the owner of a 6700 XT, Ryzen 5600 and Starfield Premium (from the video card) and I've been playing every day since release on Thursday.
I've now got about 14 hours with it and it's what I expected; mediocre writing for the most part, but some fun and interesting quests here and there. Combat is probably the best it's ever been in a Bethesda game (Been playing them since 1996) and the world design is pretty neat; I'm enjoying just existing and pottering about. The game looks pretty good, though maybe not as good as the specs seem to suggest, but as a person who isn't a slave to graphics, I think it's pretty great. The character models and facial animations are the best they've ever been in a Bethesda game and I feel like the characters have a lot of nuance to their facial expressions as they speak.
All that said, with only 14-hours, I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface at all, so I'm not really sure what my complaints about it will be in the future. So far, I'm enjoying myself and I want to keep playing, which is enough for me right now. I don't often find games that I just want to continue playing and thinking about these days, so that's nice to have.
They is so boring, bug filled and just poor gameplay mechanics that I got a refund off Steam. The people on Consoles have it a bit better than those of us on PCs.
Some the worst combat in a game.
Endless cutscreens.
Horrible console only controls.
Empty planets.
Why am I sitting on the ground watching my ship takeoff into space which I am sitting in?
I shoot the ground around NPC’s and there’s zero reaction.
My NPC companions just run around and random directions. The worst AI.
I tried flying away from a planet in my ship and when I turn around I’m still sitting at the planet.
inventory management hell.
every generic NPC says the same thing
I'm enjoying it. Starfield has pretty much all the same flaws and qualities Skyrim and Fallout 3/4 had, and I spent a lot of time in those games. It hasn't overdelivered like a lot of people seemed to be hoping for.
Disclaimer that I love Bethesda games, (300 hours in F3, 100 in F:NV, 60 in F4 and 100 in Skyrim) and I've spent about 40 hours so far this weekend with Starfield.
I'm enjoying it a lot! Definitely not a perfect game by any means but to me it feels like a more modern Fallout game with better graphics.
A couple of gripes first: I immediately turned down a bunch of color settings in the settings menu because the game looked super washed out with some of it's default settings. I dunno if I got used to it or it's more bearable now but turning down color filters and motion blur and some other lighting settings really helped.
I don't like how a couple of the main quests basically just require you to check in back at the quest giver. It's pretty annoying for that.
But overall to me it's like Fallout in Space. for some that might be bad but it's exactly what i'm looking for. I like that I can follow the questline all the way and they're pretty interesting with some interesting decisions (even though they don't seem to affect the overall world too much yet, though it's added some dialogue options to other, semi-related quests). It would be cool if going down a certain storyline locks you out of other ones but I can see why bethesda didn't go that way.
I spent a lot of time customizing a ship last night, it was a bit finnicky but after it worked i was super happy with it!
So I have not played the game, which makes my opinion less valid. But I've watched an hour or so of gameplay on Twitch and YouTube from people that are decently far into the game. It looks like Bethesda has saved me $70 by releasing a mediocre game. To be fair, it's possible that the way I play the game would make it more enjoyable for me than how most people play it. But my initial impression is that Bethesda has grown too large and is failing to maintain their famous level of game design quality.
Skyrim was built by around 100 people, Starfield by over 400. The issue with corporations of that scale is that human social psychology is not built to scale beyond 100 people. That means a corporation that runs fine with 100 people needs to pass through the Great Filter as they go beyond that scale. Some make it through unscathed, others do not. One common way to keep a large group of people organized is to have a simple goal that you all work towards - something that can be summarized in a few words. Starfield looks like it has been failed by that approach. I assume internally it was pitched as "Fallout in Space" or "Skyrim in Space". And that's exactly what this is - and no more.
I want to give credit to the art teams. I've seen a lot of beautiful locations in the game. There are good bits here and there. But it's pretty much the most straightforward adaptation of previous Bethesda games into a Space world. As if you asked an AI to perform style transfer onto Skyrim. The game even has you play as a messiah character called Skyborn. Sounds a little too familiar.
A brand new IP is an opportunity to rethink things from the ground up. And technology has developed significantly since Bethesda's masterpiece releases. We could have had a truly 2023 game instead of a polished up 2010 game.
I have a feeling that a lot of people will approach this game with the expectation that you can just wander wherever your fancy takes you and run across interesting adventures like in Fallout or Elder Scrolls. This is not the case with Starfield (most planets only have procedurally generated content) and trying to play like this almost led me to give up after the first couple of hours. Once I went back to the hand crafted content, I began to enjoy the game a lot more.
The good:
The actual hand designed locations and quests are a lot of fun and on par with the better quests in Fallout / Elder Scrolls. There's a good variety to the locations and the sorts of role playing opportunities available to the player.
The intro is really short! You can get through it within an hour and be doing whatever you want (although it'll likely take several hours more to really get to grip with the game's systems, even if you've played Bethesda games before).
There's no level adjustment for enemies or zones, and all zones and enemies are clearly flagged with their challenge level. I'm a sucker for trying to find ways through high level areas before I'm ready, so I loved having that option.
The ship building is pretty fun (although it does have some weird quirks on what ship designs it'll allow). It's also mostly skippable if you're not into it (more on this below), as you can just buy the upgrades you want directly or steal a better ship.
The bad:
The portion of the game spent physically flying your ship around is really small and essentially boils down to being dropped into an instance which is often empty, but occasionally has some other ships you can either shoot or talk to. Most of these encounters can be resolved in minutes by doing one of those two things. There's no exploration or flying around required. The rest of the space travel (flying between planets; landing on a planet; flying elsewhere on the same planet) is wholly menu driven. I'm personally fine with this as this isn't what I'm looking for from the game, but I can understand why the people looking for something more like Elite or Star Citizen are disappointed.
The menus are clunky (often requiring you to go several layers down to get where you want) and the tutorial on how to use them isn't great. It's far from unusable once you learn how it works, but given the sheer amount of menuing you need to do in this game, it's unfortunate.
The local map (planet level) doesn't show anything other than quick travel markers, so it's basically unusable as a map. I didn't really care about this either as I don't aim to explore 100% of everywhere I come across, but I can see why this is maddening to the people who do.
The encumbrance situation is kind of brutal as the game expects you to pick up a ton of resources and spare parts in addition to your usual loot. You can store stuff on your ship (and upgrade your ship's carrying capacity), but there are so many different types of resources and components that I'm constantly running out of space. The game also gives you an infinite storage container early on, but having to quick travel to dump stuff into it is a drag and it's also not hooked up to your crafting / base building menus, so you have to actually go back and get the stuff you need if you want to leave all your stuff there.
I've heard a lot of people say they enjoy the gunplay better than Fallout 4. Coming from the perspective of someone who constantly used VATS in Fallout and melee in Elder Scrolls... I guess it's fine? It never feels like you're missing when you should be hitting, but many enemies are absolute bullet sponges with multiple health bars and constantly running into these guys leaves the guns feeling a bit lacking in impact to me.
Overall I'm having a great time and finding myself staying up late to play like I did with Tears of the Kingdom. It just took like 10 hours to feel out how the game worked and reach that point.
10/10 from a fan of Bethesda RPGs.
8/10 in general.
The 8 is because the travel system kinda sucks. Like Daggerfall the scale is a setpiece, not a stage you get to traverse as in, say, No Man's Sky. The inter-system travel makes sense but you can't fly planet to planet or even in-atmosphere which was honestly a major complaint many people had. I also understand why this wasn't done, basically because it's an RPG with solid exploration, not a full space flying game like NMS.
The 10/10 as a Bethesda game is because it perfects their model. The Fallout per-task XP system is better for this context. The challenges lend a sense of purpose to how you do things, like looting or simply using ballistic weapons.
The interactions are early Fallout 3D game style with lists of great, or wild, options so you can get a wide range of responses. The random quests can be so mundane as getting somebody a cup of coffee, which I found to be a cool immersive touch. I like the Oblivion style of overhearing things to get quests as well.
I expected more jank and breakage. The only crash I've had was caused by Proton on approach to a station, that didn't repeat in Windows. This has been a solid run so far. We just need a bunch of optimization, especially in the cities, which apparently even choke more powerful rigs.
NMS is one of my all-time favorite games, and has been that way before, after, and during all of its many patches. It's always clicked with me on a deep level. Heck, I even actively followed Waking Titan. So, naturally, I've been thinking of biting the bullet on this one, but it seems too combat-heavy for me. My favorite part of NMS is scanning the local flora and fauna and just... walking around. I'm wondering how much of that I really could find in Starfield. Some combat doesn't bother me, but if it's front and center all the time, I don't think I'll be able to justify how expensive it is.
Can someone speak to how much that kind of exploration figures into it?
I'm about 25 hours in now, and I just love it. It's taking me back to playing Skyrim, Fallout 4 for the first time again. I'm obviously a really giant Bethesda fan and I love everything about the way they make their game so I'm admittedly biased, but this is hands down my GOTY. The combat is great, what limited I have done with ship-ship combat has been really fun. Building my own ship is really comprehensive and gives me a lot of freedom while still requiring me to level up to get the good stuff.
Some of the writing has been fuckin fantastic so far (I'm doing the SysDef questline right now and it's pretty phenomenal), while other parts have been kinda lacking. For example I found the motivation for my character to be joining Constellation to be pretty weak and not super well emphasized, but doing the faction quests is really where the game has been shining.
The game is also gorgeous, seeing rings around a planet for the first time, or seeing the wind-blasted rocks of an alien moon, I've had so many jaw dropping moments. And the world-building too, great stuff. It feels lived in, dirty, and logically thought out all at the same time. Cydonia is one of my favorite cities so far for it's history alone.
And the best part is that I feel like I've barely even begun. There are so many systems the game has that I just haven't touched yet because I haven't had the time. Outpost building, piracy, ship hijacking, crew management, a giant pool of research to do, scanning flora and fauna for every planet with an inkling of life, they just give you so much and the ability to create a really unique roleplay through it all.
I don't know what else to say, it lived up to the hype for me!
I love it.
Combat is pretty fun. Weapons look, sound, and feel great. Enemy feedback less so. And enemy ai sucks.
I feel like people aren't talking enough about the improvements to movement. Mantling, combat slides, the jetpack. It all feels really good.
My main thing I love about it is the cinematic aspect. It super itches that Mass Effect or Fallout New Vegas feeling of doing things you would do in movies.
Like infiltrating a casino, hijacking a ship, high stakes poker game, rushing to your wedding, killing and putting on the suit if a guy to get into a bad, Indiana Jones shenanigans, etc.
I love that shit. And the game is almost entirely that. It all feels very immersive and cinematic. I feel like an E3 panel using those buzzwords.
It's honestly the worst Bethesda game I've ever played, and the most worrying thing - it's the worst Bethesda game at the one thing Bethesda usually does right - exploration. There's none of that.
Here's how travel works in this space exploration videogame:
This is repeated forever, because there's a thousand of empty procedural planets for you to explore, and a few handcrafted cities with barely enough in them to compare them to something like Whiterun. Bethesda dipped their toes into procedural generation just enough to not have enough hand placed stuff, but not enough for it to actually be cool like something in No Man's Sky.
People will also tell about how it's "the best gunplay it's ever been", and, yeah, but it's still bad. Guns aren't fun, enemies are VERY dumb and are basically bullet sponges. The quests aren't good either, secondary or main. Here's a few examples:
Oh, but there's a bigger one, check this out:
Main quests are worse. At some point, someone said "starborn" and I just gave up. It's the most sterile Bethesda game, it's the most sterile sci-fi game, it's just a bad game overall. The only things good about it are some designs of science thingies like ships and guns. The performance is straight up atrocious. It is the most bugfree Bethesda release, I guess, but the rest is so depressing it made me very pessimistic about TES 6.
I've only been playing Starfield since the general release yesterday, so I'm only a few hours in. I haven't been paying attention to any of the hype, so it feels like just another Bethesda RPG to me, albeit one with more polish and scope than usual. I'm enjoying it a lot so far, and haven't noticed any bugs yet. I'm already slamming into the carry-weight limit repeatedly, which is kind of annoying. The first time I got to a trading post thing I offloaded a LOT of stuff. I was also irritated by the tiny storage capacity of the locker on my ship. My ship has a fucking cargo hold that I can't store my junk in, what the hell?
Ive played 5-ish hours and I don't think I'm going to keep playing.
The start of the game is kind of dumb and rushed. The NPCs are flat and the UI is extremally clunky. The indoor locations have a gray/brown tint and it seems like the game design philosophy was to cram as much useless clutter into as little space as possible which makes it impossible to see what can or should be looted.
The robot companion always get in the way. And the combat isn't very satisfying, every fight is only "shoot gun until enemy is dead".
TL;DR Starfield is good but not perfect, lots of performance issues and about as shallow as most Bethesda RPGS. Still having lots of fun with the game but know what you're getting into before buying, it's not FNV in space so don't expect that. 7-8/10. Play The Outer Worlds if the RPG side isn't good for you or play Elite Dangerous/Star Citizen if the space sim side isn't as you'd like.
I've played lots of Starfield lately, and it's been a very fun experience. But there are some gripes I have with it.
It's very clearly designed for XBOX Series X first, the graphics options are laughable. I have a 1440p with an RTX 2060, I don't expect to run new games at 1440p 60fps or anything so I'm fine with playing at 1080p. Except, Starfield doesn't give you the option of fullscreen at a resolution lower than your monitors native resolution for some reason, and you can have the exact same settings as someone else and have wildly different performance, just because the monitor is different.
For example, if you wanted to use FSR2 (or DLSS through mods) and set the scaling to 50% you'd have worse performance than someone with a 1080p monitor because you're running it at 1280x720 while they're running it at 960x540. This would be fixed if you could just lower your resolution, but because that wasn't a problem on console they never thought to include it.
So I download a couple of performance mods and DLSS, and I'm finally able to play at a decent 30-40fps. Fine by me.
Getting into the game I was very much immersed in the world and was surprised by the quality of the dialogue compared to most Bethesda games. It was quite fun going on side-quests and doing odd jobs just to upgrade my ship and see the cool sights the world has to offer.
I can't recall a time when I was taken out of the game because of something a character said or did, it all seemed to make sense within the world.
I think I'm in a somewhat unique position to enjoy this game, I have hundreds of hours in Elite Dangerous which is a much more immersive and "realistic" space sim, but ultimately I lost interest in it because of the lack of any real goal or reason to keep playing.
There are a few things Elite does better, mostly ship HUD and combat mechanics. Being able to look over at a panel and set a course without ever having to open a menu is really cool and the power management system for your different modules and weapons was much better in Elite too.
Being able to walk around your ship in Starfield is awesome though, and the on-foot mechanics are way better (probably because Elite was never designed to have them).
Haven't experienced any game-breaking bugs so far and the few bugs I have seen were minimal.
Overall, it's what I expected. A Bethesda RPG that you can immerse yourself in the world of and sink tons of hours into side content really fleshing out your character and who you want them to be.
Not a 10/10 masterpiece or a 1/10 buggy mess as some people have said. I'd give it a 7 or an 8.
If you want a Bethesda-esque RPG in space that isn't procedurally generated and has unique NPCs for each planet as well as more in depth choices and consequences... play The Outer Worlds. It's by Obsidian and was a better RPG than Starfield has been for me so far.
I haven't bought the game and probably won't buy it, but will still offer an opinion as someone who's played most of Bethesda's titles. I played every Bethesda game up to Fallout 4, and never put more than 10-20 hours into any of them nor finished them. Their games are just....shallow? Like yeah there's a lot of content and a story and blah blah blah, but it just loses its luster extremely quickly. Elden Ring, on the other hand, always felt gratifying, mysterious, and wonderful to explore. It rarely felt stale. The combat felt rich, impactful, and fun. I know it's not an FPS, but it's a rare example of an open world game that feels absolutely spot on.
Having said all of that, I've watched some let's plays and reviews, and this feels like the same experience as above to me. The shooting mechanics and combat look absolutely underwhelming. They are still using basically the same engine from Skyrim and it really shows. They need to make a new engine from scratch very nadly. I honestly don't know why so many people are enjoying this game other than the rich modding community.
Anyway, to each his own and I'm glad people are enjoying themselves 👍
I think it's just rather boring, the dialogue and loading between everything detracts significantly from the fun of the missions.