That’s good to hear! I don’t think I have played any recent games that showcase the latest and greatest in animations sync’d with voice. Unless one counts the diplomacy screens in Civ 6, or WoW, lol.
I probably will buy BG3, but I’m in no hurry; I’ll probably wait for a sale. I bounced off BG2, but I do enjoy D&D 5th edition. Maybe I’ll watch a YouTuber to get a feel for the animations and voice.
These days I don’t often buy AAA games at full price, except for strategy games. I wouldn’t have bought Starfield if it hadn’t been included with my new videocard. Maybe that’s why I’m easy to please: Starfield has given me 80 hours of entertainment for free. :)
You spend an inordinate amount of time in this game managing your inventory and selling garbage you find. I kind of wish I had a timer on how much of the game’s minutes I’ve spent on an inventory screen. It’s likely 25% or more of actual play time. That’s … not good.
I’ve been trying to minimize that time and not get hung up on what gear I find and only swap or carry if it looks more than mildly interesting. That’s helped, but it’s still a crazy amount of gear comparison required, and I’m not even sure what gear stats matter most and for what? There’s really not much explanation of anything in this game.
…and exploration is weird. Like, I’m James T. Kirk arriving at these planets behind countless other people and yet I’m out here with the Tricorder acting like it’s all new news to the universe, or well, to that guy back at The Eye at least. He seems to be behind the times on these planets/moons that are covered with “unknown sites” that turn out to be human developed stuff.
I feel like the logic of their world is really the single biggest problem with this game, and again I go back to both Elder Scrolls and Fallout and think about how easy it is in those games to just accept the world you’re in and that it’s foreign to you, the player, but also your actual character based on how those games start out. Fantasy and post-apocalypse make more sense, but sci-fi could’ve too, if it weren’t for all these people that apparently already documented everything before you.
Now, if the main story gives an explanation for this, ok. So far it hasn’t, and I’ve got my first Shout now.
OK, finished the first part of the mission saving the scientists and then going to the other station and saving them. Tried to do the next step where I take out bad guy ships in orbit and got blown away pretty quickly. Oops. Just chasing guys and shooting didn’t work this time.
OK move to the Mantis mission. Couldn’t fly to the required system because I hadn’t explored systems on the way. No problem, set a course for this intermediate system. One piratey guy in orbit, I actually easily take him out. Cool lets set a course for … uh oh, LOTS of other pirates apparently didn’t like that, I’m being swarmed. Hmmm, I wonder, and right before I got blown up I was able to Grav to the next system on the way. OK, something interest in orbit here. Guy at a station on the planet asks me to come talk to him. NP, no trap, he wants me to do something that actually sounds interesting. Sure, be happy to, once I do my Mantis thing. Now I can X travel to the Mantis location.
Even at level 9 (made 10 through this mission) Andreja and I are able to take out the bad guys without too much hassle. My new skill (no spoiler) is handy when there are a lot of them. I also ended up with what I think is a pistol, it’s a special weapon, not at home to get the name. It only does 5 damage so I started to store or sell it, but fires in automatic mode and it has exploding rounds. Takes out guys at double my level pretty quickly. ANYWAY - made it through to the “puzzle” location, about to go back and shoot someone I met earlier, but looking through my stuff I might have the solution.
I’m curious about this patch, because I ran into an odd problem playing on Xbox over the weekend. At a certain point, the Xbox icon on the face of the console would start blinking and reboot completely. I tried firing the game back up a couple more times, happened again. I got a cold pit in my stomach, thinking maybe my console was starting to give up the ghost. I figured I’d try other stuff, random game and apps, and they all started and ran fine. But if I tried to play Starfield, no go.
I checked around Reddit and other sites, I’m definitely not the only one having this problem. While normally the symptom I’m describing seems to indicate an overheating console, I didn’t feel any heat around the fans or any surface I touched, barely warm. But I figured about all I could do was reinstall, which I did. And once that was done, I was able to boot up and play. Thought things were good until I tried to play yesterday, and it started crashing again.
At that point I just said heck with it, I’ll play through the cloud. Kind of a drag going down to 1080p on a 4K tv, but I don’t have a ton of options. Im not even 100% sure it’s a Starfield problem, though it seems that way. Will keep an eye on the Xbox and play xcloud Starfield in the meantime, I guess.
I’m getting annoyed with miscellaneous items like food and those stupid board games. It is such a waste of development time and resources since they don’t affect gameplay.
The fact that you get healed for max 5 or 10 HP from food is ridiculous. I don’t see why it would hurt for them to assign useable values, like say having the max HP from a food item being more like 250 HP or 10 - 20% of your health. Make it worth my while to pick these items up or buy them.
It annoys more than in previous Bethesda games because they seem to be more in your face: besides finding these lying around, there are vending machines and restaurants/shops. Does Bethesda think I’m actually going to do some deep roleplaying and go sit in one of their restaurants and enjoy a meal? Make it worth my while to buy these items. At least the alcoholic beverages and coffee have some additional benefits besides paltry HP replenishment - they should add some bonuses or effects to food items, too.
And what’s with all the board games? It would be awesome if you could actually play these games. Being this takes place in the future, you’d think there’d be video games around. They should take a page from the Yakuza games and have playable video games you can go to an arcade to play or play from your ship’s computer.
(All that being said, I’ve made it a goal to collect every unique coffee mug I find, so I guess I’m part of the problem!).
That’s pretty light on patch notes considering all the hitches in quests. They must have a massive queue of fixes on their way in another patch, but it’d have been nice to have some story-based fixes applied.
Yeah, Larian’s EA time got their workflow for patching down, I expect, which is why they can do such massive patches so fast.
Did anyone else max out persuasion? Is it just me or is it making the game too easy? I’m turning rotten scoundrels into puppy dogs. It almost feels like I entered a cheat code.
I started collecting playing cards early in the game, thinking there’d be some sort of Caravan-ish deck building game at some point. Sadly there isn’t.
Yes, but not too easy. There’s enough combat and missions that avoiding some by using persuade is a definite boon. Fits my style of play 100%.
And yeah, I started collecting random stuff early on but realized that they have no use and you can’t even place them neatly in an outpost or ship, so no more. Be sure to collect snowglobes though!
By the by, thank you for your accounting of those joyful hours. Reading them warms me, and they help me interrogate what was different in our experiences. I think vibe about the game has darkened here a bit since early in its release. I hope that doesn’t impede you or anyone else from relishing the good parts.
AAA with zero lip sync was Elden Ring. It was a funny discontinuity with all of the polish in the rest of the art and combat animations.
I’m early but I’m just happily enjoying the game, looking at all of the missions build up in my log. Yeah, some are pretty simple but that’s life. ;) I still get a kick when I find a better cool weapon. I still wander around a location just exploring and putting myself “there” in my mind. At some point I’ll probably get bored but for now it’s cool even just picking a random system and going there.
Sooooo, saw a Youtube tips video and the guy recommended moving all of your ballistic energy to laser or some other area. He claimed the laser does everything the ballistic does and more. I’m still low level fwiw
Wait, what now? I don’t think I saw any boardgames when I played! Or maybe I just didn’t realize they were boardgames. How could you tell they were boardgames?
Hmm, now I want to play an open-world game with playable boardgames. And I don’t just mean one playable minigame, like Pazzak in Knights of the Old Republic, Caravan in Fallout: New Vegas, or poker in Red Dead Redemption 2, but multiple playable boardgames the same way there might be readable books! Basically, developers, I want you to put Tabletop Simulator in my open world game and throw in some solitaire boardgames I can play to level up my character.
This was me, as well! I was running around with the “misc” category of my inventory full of single playing cards, hoping I’d get something if I collected a full set, like perhaps the chance to actually use them.
