Summary
- Starfield's storytelling and character development were commendable, but the lack of engaging gameplay made space travel and planet exploration boring.
- The new Starfield patch includes updates like an improved minimap and new gameplay options, but fails to address the core issue.
I liked 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield more than most when it was released. I sometimes think back and wonder if I felt some kind of Stockholm Syndrome for the game after putting 80 hours of my free time into crunching through its thousand worlds in the two weeks before release, but I stand by everything I said in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:my review.
Starfield wasn’t reinventing the galactic wheel, but it made strides forward in terms of storytelling and character development, at least compared to other Bethesda gam🦄es. Zero gravity was fun, and the emergent stories t𒊎hat cropped up as you plundered the galaxy were brilliant, if infrequent.
There were small issues. The minimap was crap. Inventory 🌜management was a chore. But there was only one thing that stopped me from truly enjoying the game: the fact that space, and the planets suspended in it like bubbles in a bathtub, was boring.
Travelling through space was boring. Piloting your ship was good fun in dogfights, but if you were just going from A-to-B, you simply had to endure three cutscenes and nothing else. There was✤ no gameplay, no excitement, no🅷 sense of discovery. Things only got worse when you got planetside.
Planets are somehow even more dull and lifeless than the emptiness 𒊎of space. Most planets have a smattering of outposts and buildings at predetermined landing spots, and the rest is just nothingness. Even those with vegetation and wildlife feel boring, because nothing’s going on. The fauna doesn’t interact with the flora, the inhabitants don’t realise there are giant human-eating creatures metres away from their mining camp, they simply tell you what your quest is and carry on wandering aimlessly.
Comparisons to other 💫RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 only make Starfield’s planets and cities feel worse, lagging behind the rest of the industry.
I knew that Bethesda’s 1,000 planets were barren, a situation where scope and in-development promises were far too bold, and the solar systems suffered for it. But I hoped that patches would start filling the planets with, for want of a better word, stuff.
However, we’re getting very little. Bethesda has explained what’s coming in th🔯e next patch, and none of it excites me. Sure, it fixes plenty of minor problems and some things that nobody even noticed, but it doesn’t even attempt to tackle the big issue.
What’s Changing In Starfield’s New Patch?
Minimaps are getting an overhaul, which is definitely a good thing. Na🐠vigating New Atlantis and Neon was a menace until you started to memorise locations and routes. The updated minimap looks much🌃 more intuitive, and it’s a good addition to the game. Should it have taken nine months to arrive? Maybe not, but I’m glad it’s here.
There are also plenty of new gameplay options you can toggle from the menu. You can now change the game’s systems to allow you to access your ship’s cargo hold from anywhere or increase vendors’ credit supplies – both godsends for the item hoarders among us. The options are deepಞ and granular, including changing how♏ much health food heals you and the weight of ammo in your backpack. It’s cool, as is the new Extreme difficulty setting if you can’t be bothered getting into the nitty gritty of everything, but it doesn’t fix the problems at the core of the game.
Respeccing in New Game Plus is nice, more ship customisation is nice, better display settings on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Series X is nice, but nice doesn’t fix boring.
But What About The Starfield Car?
In the announcement video for the patch (since when was that a thing, by the way?) 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Bethesda teases 🅺a 🀅moon buggy-type vehicle dancing a♕cross the boring sand dunes. It will be the first vehicle in a Bethesda game not drawn by a horse or actually a horse, and fans are understandably very excited.
However, I’m not as optimistic about the addition as most fans. Sure, it’s a slog to traverse across a planet at present, and a car will alleviate those issues. But if there’s still nothing to see on the planet, what’s the point of exploring at all? W𝓰here am I getting to faster?
starfield planet
Before adding the moon buggy, Bethesda needs to fix its planets. They don’t all need to be filled with continent-sized cities to rival Neon, but they need something. Walking for half an hour to the next cave versus driving for ten minutes to the nex♐t cave still means 💙you’ve got one rocky room to explore when you get there.
Bethesda is working hard on course-correcting the behemoth spacecraft that is Starfield,ꦉ but it’s aiming its thrusters in t🔯he wrong direction. Quality of life updates are all well and good, but if Todd Howard & co. are still aiming to become the next Skyrim, they need to make exploring the universe exciting.
