That’s awesome!

So timely!

Still haven't bought it...I tried at launch. Laughed and cried, then refunded.
How is it now? Except the unchangeable fundamental flaw (to me!) of procedural generation.

I'm surprised so many people make this a big deal. It's a complaint I heard since launch of the game. Some people even stopped playing or didn't even purchased the game because of this!

Yaaaay, now we can do something No Man's Sky could do 10 years ago, yaaaaaaay!

Sure, some games have features others don't. I'm just surprised its a big deal for so many.

Especially when they knew it wouldn't have it before the game even launched.

Nothing has changed enough to make it worth checking out again. If you didn't like it at launch, you still won't like it now.

Well, for me, it adds a ton of immersion.

It depends on where you go and how you interact with the game content, main story is the weakest part of Starfield you want to do it up to a point if you care about unlocking some extra gameplay features. Other than that, the factions storylines are much better and really fun. Also the game has few very good side quests you can google to find where they are and just go do them.

The procedural generation only control where and what POI spawn at the zone you land inside. The POIs themselves are handcrafted and they are actually well made. They are some of the best bethesda ever created in terms of dungeons and locations to explore, many of them are massive, detailed, full of stuff and pretty unique.

The problem is if you visit a POI once then if it spawn again you don't want to revisit it, because the PG won't change anything in the POI and they will feel very repetitive.

The latest update has added a few really good stuff too by introducing a new resource called X-Tech which has big effect on your character weapons, ships and powers. You get it from multiple sources, but most importantly you get it as a reward at the end of a POI. So, now you have this extra incentive and nice reward for exploring these POIs.

It also add way more handcrafted POIs to space through the new Free Lanes feature. Same thing apply from the planets POIs: They are really well made, but if you run into one you did before skip it.

It's overall a 7 out of 10 game sometimes even less, but there's some stuff that really fun and well done inside it if you are willing to look for them

Bethesda half-assed Starfield at almost every point they could. I've intentionally never bought the game because I knew I'd get a more fleshed out spacefaring experience with almost any other dev.

Hell, a Minecraft spacefaring mod would be more entertaining, from the gameplay footage of Starfield I've seen.

I'll stick with Elite Dangerous. Can already do this, and it has a whole galaxy to explore, and costs like $15. And it doesn't have tons of bugs and crashes.. and works great on Linux.

This. I played it a bit at launch and gave it another fair shake recently. There were some QoL mods that fixed a few major issues I had with the game, and some of the updates they added since were appreciated.

But I think the game is just flawed at its core. It's got a lot of neat set dressing around it, but it's missing some key central pillars to support its gameplay loop. I can't say it's a bad game because I still ended up sinking a good few hours into it, but both times I walked away from it, it was from lack of motivation to continue.

For me at least, I think I couldn't stop comparing its various systems to better games.

I could play Starfield for the story and RPG mechanics, or I could play Cyberpunk 2077.

I could play Starfield for the planetary exploration, or I could play No Man's Sky.

I could play Starfield for the base building and resource economy, or I could play Satisfactory.

Now, none of those other games individually attempted to do what Starfield did in a single package, which you'd think should still give it a niche of its own. But when all of these systems in Starfield just sit in isolation and don't really cross one another, it means you're basically playing several "meh" games instead of one decent one.

The only thing really enjoyable, imo, is the shooting. And even that could be seriously improved if the NPCs didn't mostly just stand in one place making themselves easy targets. I do like the guns, tho. The Mag type weapons especially.

It's also pretty sad that it has Fallout 4's settlement system, which was fine, could have been better... But they somehow made it even more irrelevant.

Us space flight sim enjoyers like that kind of thing. When Starfield was announced we kinda expected it to be a default feature, so obviously when we saw it wasnt a feature it was disappointing.

Well, if you ignore mods maybe. But now there are a lot of mods that can fix everything. The problem is it is pretty time consuming to get all the mods set up and its not very user friendly to need to use mods from the start of the game.

Yaaaay, now we can do something Frontier could do 33 years ago, yaaaaaay!

There are mods that make the story better? That add environmental story-telling? That make the AI behave more intelligently than a zombie? That give a reason to engage with most of the systems that fall completely outside the standard loop?

being critical id give it as high as an 8 and as low as a 6. you could argue 5 and personally for me its a 9 but anything below 5 is just a broken ratings scale

Adds a hell of a lot more immersion than a loading screen.

It’s such an intrgral feature for space flight games (IMO) and it saddens me to see that after all these years they still haven’t implemented it, and the community has to step in.

Theres that whole Star Wars Genesis total conversion mod that changes basically everything, yeah. I haven't tried it myself yet, but it makes a lot of changes.

Though honestly if those are all your complaints, it seems like you don't want to play the game regardless, whether its modded or not. You just want to play a completely different game. That's like asking if adding various spices and switching different kinds of cheeses makes a Cheeseburger into a Lobster dinner.

i just think the idea of spreading out a Bathesda RPG over an entire galaxy was flawed even if it had seamless planet landing from the beginning. constantly flying between solar systems for different quests, often in the same quest, is just tedious as hell even if it was seamless.

In order for it to work they need to make the spaceflight/combat/space itself more compelling and worthwhile. In Elder Scrolls and Fallout, exploration between quests is fun because there are chance encounters, side quests, unmarked dungeons, easter eggs, great scenery, etc. There was almost none of that in Starfield, although you could tell they tried to inject some.

Isn't that pretty par for the course with mainline Bethesda games?

I get what you mean, but it makes sense in context.

Immersive "Open World" Sims with ground and space exploration have a hard time tying the two together. Often they feel like two separate games, and one of them often feels like the "second class (star) citizen". Not that making them seamlessly connected actually makes the two mechanically complimentary, but separating them by a loading screen makes this dichotomy all the more obvious. Starfield was no exception.

To exacerbate this, Bethesda made its brand the "You see that mountain? You can climb it!" game makers (Which, to be honest, I think they started to lose the plot on what made their games good when they started saying this. But that's a different conversation.). So when they made their foray into space exploration, they really had no one else to blame when folks expected a similar "You see that planet? You can fly to it!" design philosophy.

Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was... good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.

ED is OG too. One of the pioneers.

those starving indie devs..

TL;DR: This is impressive, however for me personally seeing cool Bethesda mods is so bittersweet at this point. Like imagine the kinds of things you could do if you put that effort into somewhere more appreciated. Idk.

I certainly don't mean to insult anyone's efforts, I imagine Bethesda games do offer some real value for budding game developers in the form of a very accessible entrypoint into modding and I think that's great.

But what would be even better is if this company weren't basically entirely surviving off the coat tails of their community of unpaid laborers. The only reason why these games are so moddable is because Bethesda as a company wouldn't survive if they weren't. The product being given by itself is so bad and Bethesda so inept that it compelled people to learn how to fix it themselves just to deliver on what could've been.

Bethesda basically sells you the idea of a game, delivers about 60% of it and then asks you to make up the difference. Anyone playing Skyrim or Fallout 4 could see how good those games could've been even with no prior game design knowledge, it's just an innate feeling.

It's effectively a very fancy Fallout 4 mod. Same base engine, same crafting and upgrade system, same style of gameplay, same level up system (with very minor changes).

It even has the lack of world content that a mod project would!

I picked up NMS pretty recently after being thoroughly disappointed with Starfield and to be entirely honest it seems to just be the same game but better, in almost all aspects. It hits all the same core notes, did it first, and did it better.

I played elite dangerous for a while, was fun. But I got tired of grinding for new ships. I was just going out to kill ships for money all the time. I dont remember exploring much... What is there to explore?

What is there to explore?

A whole galaxy...

...of the same 5 types of solar systems, 5 types of tasks and 5 types of stations with randomized distances in between.

I like No Man's Sky quite a lot, but I don't think I'd say it scratches the same itch at something like Starfield.

As a person who knows nothing about this game and only understands kerbal space program:

1. Why are you thrusting forward while trying to decrease speed?
2. That re-entry angle and velocity are far too steep and fast. 1000% chance of death.

So no man’s sky with less variation?

Not to mention most of the planets are randomly generated. There aren't really any unique things to discover, just the same buildings randomly pasted around. Even the planets that are supposed to be unique like the capitals of the factions are so underwhelming. You're telling me that this interstellar faction that rules over a dozen planets is run out of a dingy Western looking ass town with 300 inhabitants?

Haven't tried NMS, but I'd guess probably? "A mile wide and an inch deep" is the phrase I've commonly seen used with regards to Elite. Sure, there's a whole galaxy worth of systems, but they're all pretty much the same, with the same activities.

You just answered your own question...

Starfield is more an 'Open World' rpg. Exploration on foot with fight and quest is more prominent than exploration in space. The space part is more like a mean to travel between planet where you could find quest. Sometimes, there's a space fight, or boarding other ship/station.
But ship simulation isn't the purpose of this game.
You can still build a ship, but you're more focused on look than : 'Will it work ?'.

Yeah this is what worries me.

I don't mean to suggest Elite is necessarily a bad game because of it. Every game is ultimately limited in some ways. I've enjoyed most of my time playing it, until I hit the part where any kind of grinding just makes me unwilling to participate. I do occasionally install it, fly around a bit in VR and blast some enemies. That keeps me entertained for a few hours. Then I uninstall it and forget it exists for a few years.

So you might have fun playing it, you might not. There's a fair amount of grinding required to get the better ships or a big number in your credits account. If the limited amount of variety isn't an obstacle for you, then there's a decent chance you'll have fun.

I dunno if I may have liked it. Had sound-issues and performance was a joke.
The procedural flaw was noticable fast and no mods will fix.
But the mod-scene seems active and considering that skyrim was bland crap without mods....

Thanks for the details. So the POIs are great once and maybe even twice but that's it about the "endless space" basically.

So mainly story and discovering all POIs plus a metric ton of mods to pimp it up.
7/10 is kinda okay, unless you already use 583820 mods 😁

Yeah I did that when the game was almost new. And I dont mind some grinding for better stuff, it's just that I felt that grinding was the entire game. I was hoping to be able to buy and sell resources and transport them across star systems for a profit, under the danger of pirates attacking me. Stuff like that. But its not that kind of game.

I guess more like the original elite game worked, but with modern graphics. That would be so cool.

Answers
1: future magic
2: future magic

But yes, that fireball would be spectacular even if the ship could somehow survive.

What question? What answer?? I'm surprised many people make a big deal out of this isn't a question, nor contains it an answer. I'm making an observation, and find it stupid to not play a game because of this.

Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was… good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.

Guess this is a good point here. It's an easy point to talk about specific failures (from perspective of the player) when they don't like the game much. To me it sounds like an excuse not to play or not to like, and this is something they can blame. I don't know for me it wouldn't be a big deal, at least not to this scale. I get that many and long loading screens are terrible. Maybe I'm not the person looking into a virtual reality like immersion and are not affected by such details, therefore don't have the empathy for players missing this feature.

I only use around 20 mods mostly of QoL features like more inventory size, vendors having more money, better UI, valuable loot glow, etc.

I, ngl, could grind money trading for days in elite. Never was a problem for me, and haulers do generate money fast. I hate engineering though. It's unnecessary tedious. The amount of planning and time wasted just to get AX ready ship is ridiculous. And pvp balance with fdl meta somewhat puts me off. Add to this that separate arena pvp mode in elite is dead. At some point I got Soo bored that I couldn't really continue playing it. No matter what, their ass engineering is too much for me. And linear progression killed any reason to even bother with that. And recent updates don't seem to really fix any of the existing issues. They tried to make engineering less painful by making rates and activities you get materials from more consistent. But it never fixed core issues with engineering. Like broken balance, or pathing that can take days to fully upgrade the ship if you have life outside of the game. Also the fact that you have to use outfit sites and inara for almost anything route related, because UI in the game is not really done in a good way puts me of playing it on steam deck as well. Elite could be a great game, but somehow it feels that devs maintaining the game and not developing it when it comes to ship related gameplay. Oh right, f-ing potato servers that will kick you from the game even if you are in solo mode on the busy weekend is painful too. Not to say that I prefer starfield. Starfield is not even on my radar, I will prefer elite any day over starfield. Just elite state is frustrating as hell for me.

So basically they could replace space travel with a magic portal and it would be a fantasy game?

A space fantasy game, sure.