Starfield

[Ian]

That might be true for what your preferred experience of a Bethesda game is* but you can't be reasonably claiming that nearly 30 hours isn't enough to know what's what. Strong "actually you need to give this show until season 4 to really see the best of it" vibes if so.

The story isn't ever the best thing in a Bethesda game but I've also never played one that showed me much after a few dozen hours that it didn't before then.

* And this is of course totally fine. Horses for courses. If I was playing a game by a dev who actually do good stories I'd be wary if they said they hadn't done that much of it.

But if you want the sweaty 300 hour review then you're gonna need to wait for that, if you want the "Now I've played the game more here are my further thoughts" then you're gonna need to wait for those too. Or just blame whoever decided on the embargo which is, objectively, bad for consumers. From what I can gather all but the most established games journos are either underpaid staff writers or freelancers knocking their pan in for multiple places like Shinners said and probably don't have the time, energy, or enthusiasm for doing the "Yeah but what if you want to spend three days grinding mudcrabs and minmaxing?" take you might be after.

[Dark Soldier]

Main story apparently if you mainline it is 20 hours. So he did almost double that on top of other stuff. A lot of these journos, due to the pay, also have jobs outside of reviewing so have to fit it in too.

Guy I know works for a lot of top gaming sites/magazines as freelance (Edge, Eurogamer etc) and he's lucky to bring in a grand a month doing several reviews and comprehensive articles.

He prob wanted to play more, but the sites will put pressure on as a post release review maybe a week or so later means you're dead in the water.

[Yevrah]

Yeah, that's fair and I appreciate that the criticism is solely from my perspective.*

*The perspective of someone who could well play this for 100s of hours.

[Yevrah]

That might be true for what your preferred experience of a Bethesda game is* but you can't be reasonably claiming that nearly 30 hours isn't enough to know what's what

Maybe, but according to one review the base building stuff doesn't properly unlock until late game and that'll potentially be a huge chunk of the game he's not covered.

[Yevrah]

Right, I need to go to bed now to even vaguely stick to the plan. Streaming from 1am if I wake up...

[Ian]

Maybe, but according to one review the base building stuff doesn't properly unlock until late game and that'll potentially be a huge chunk of the game he's not covered.

This is fair, but if he'd gone "I've only played 30 hours of this and it's a 9/10 for me" would you have made the same criticism?

It's fine to be a mark for a game. I've definitely been there, I'd be surprised if anybody on here hasn't. But if you know you're gagging to play it on release, that it's a big old hefty thing and that you're probably going to like it way more than average there's probably no gain in bothering with day 1 reviews or, ugh, 'the discourse.'

[Ian]

Also I don't think I've ever been as excited for a game as you are for this, going to bed and setting an alarm to play a shift of it before you start work.

Reminds me of a bloke on a podcast I listen to whose love for Nintendo games is greater than I think I've ever had for anything.

[Yevrah]

This is fair, but if he'd gone "I've only played 30 hours of this and it's a 9/10 for me" would you have made the same criticism?

No, because DS wouldn't have posted about it if they'd rated it 9/10. I get the insinuation though and while it's clear as day I love Bethesda games, if this one is shit/disappointing/whatever, I'll be saying so.

Definitely going to bed now...

[Yevrah]

Also I don't think I've ever been as excited for a game as you are for this, going to bed and setting an alarm to play a shift of it before you start work.

Yeah, I genuinely feel like a little boy again and even then I can't recall getting this hyped for a game. That said, this excitement will pale into insignificance when Elder Scrolls 6 is out, particularly if it's got all of Tamriel in it.

[Yevrah]

Many a True Nerd started his stream 74 minutes ago and he's still in the character creator...

[Dark Soldier]

Hugging his plushy power armor as he sleeps bless

[Ian]

Definitely going to bed now...

I have zero hype for this and I'd still be very surprised if it's bad. I'll probably be a bit bored after a certain amount of time though. But we shall see. Need to finish BG3 first and then decide if I'm doing Shadow Gambit before or after this.

[Adramelch]

Maybe, but according to one review the base building stuff doesn't properly unlock until late game and that'll potentially be a huge chunk of the game he's not covered.

A bit unrelated to the specific discussion and to us playing games to the death, but if that's actually the case, that's horrible game design in the grand scheme of things. The vast majority of players won't give you that much time.

I also expected to get more than my money's worth for the game, I just don't think it will live up to its hype (very few games do nowadays mind you).

[Shindig]

Metal Gear Solid 2 was probably the last game I was that excited for. Although I did queue up for GTA IV with all the 'I'm buying four copies for my three kids' crowd. I tend to come to the good games late. As a kid/young adult it was due to having no money of my own. As an adult, I've inherited so many free games I simply can wait til an impulse buy.

[Sir Andy Mahowry]

I wonder if Yev has fallen asleep or he can't because he's too excited.

[Shindig]

He'll be shitting himself if he has to delete FIFA to make room for it.

[Yevrah]

Sleep update: All was going well until 5 minutes ago when the neighbour's car alarm went off (it does that periodically, I've no idea why) and now I'm wide awake. I'm going to be ruined in the morning.

[Gray Fox]

Call in sick > set status to appear offline and hide achievements progress > Bash the game for as long as you can through into the middle of the day > cat nap so you can still sleep later > back at the game until the evening/night > back to bed as normal > "sorry boss it must have been a 24 hour thing, anyway there's this game called Starfield..."

[Yevrah]

We are on.

https://www.twitch.tv/chemicallocust

[John Arne]

First impressions, @Yevrah?

Also, your twitch link isn't live/working, fyi.

[Yevrah]

Should be working now.

Still in what I assume is the tutorial and first impressions are there is an absolute shit load going on. Started on Very Hard and have put it down to Hard, which feels about right. Standard combat is pretty good, the ship combat is pretty good although I found it much easier in third person and I don't like that it's quite hard to tell what you can pick up without pointing your cursor at everything. Lockpicking confused me.

[John Arne]

I'm no games nerd but it seems a stretch to call this "open world", given there is a load screen and cut every time you move from one place to another, and everything is procedurally generated. Do Bethesda claim/call it open world?

Watching Yev, its a good looking game, but i can't be doing with the loading screens and shit.

[John Arne]

Also, I'm guessing the game is a tad jumpy/laggy because I'm using a VPN (thx communism) and not because the game is a bit jumpy/laggy?

[Yevrah]

New Atlantis looks fucking huge. I don't like the menu navigation, but suspect I'll get used to it.

[Yevrah]

Also, I'm guessing the game is a tad jumpy/laggy because I'm using a VPN (thx communism) and not because the game is a bit jumpy/laggy?

Think it's whatever you're doing as it's really smooth to play.

[Baz]

Is it fun?

[Ian]

Bethesda haven't achieved good menus / inventory management even once, have they?

[Yevrah]

Is it fun?

It's genuinely hard to say. I'm enjoying individual aspects of it (the combat is fun, the spaceships are fun), but the whole thing is of such a scale that I don't feel remotely settled with it yet. I only made it to 4am and efforts to continue at 6am just resulted in me falling back to sleep again, but I think I'm going to need the whole weekend to even get some sense of how good or otherwise it is.

See by scale I don't mean the space exploration, as so far I have to say that is pretty underwhelming as I don't think there's that much to it. You pull up the map, you choose a star, you choose a planet and then magically warp to the Felix Baumgartner position. A fiddly bit ensues where you need to get the game to give you the prompt to view the planet, which is done through a combination of scanning it and other things - I'm not quite sure what - and then you get to choose a point of interest (if one is there) or just land where you like. Landing where you like seems to guarantee you'll see nothing but desolate open space and choosing a point of interest puts you in the middle of some things, with a fair bit of open space to run through to get to said things. The map for this stuff is absolute dogshit and I suspect it's been done deliberately to hide the fact that these planets are nothing like the open World of Skyrim and Fallout. That said, I only made it to half a dozen of them and didn't find any that contained meaningful alien life, so they could be much better than I've experienced so far, I just fear they won't be.

No, by scale I mean that there are so many systems in the game and once you're out of the tutorial there is almost no hand holding to guide you through any of them. Research, cooking, weapon upgrading, spacesuit upgrading, outpost building, the opportunity to pick up a million things and no real idea what to do with any of them - these systems all sort of sit there and I reckon you could avoid almost all of them if you chose to and just crack on with the main story. But, that isn't why I enjoy Bethesda games so I want to get to grips with them and that is going to take time, a lot of time. There are other things as well that it doesn't hand hold you with. I picked the trait that gives you a house - I've no idea where it is and how the mechanic for paying for it will work. I got a boost pack - I've no idea how to use it. On face value it's a behemoth of a game, with so much going on and my feeling is you'll be missing out if you ignore it all, which I reckon the game will let you do.

[Raoul Duke]

I've been playing for a few hours now. Still in tutorial mode a bit but going off-piste on the first moon you fly to. Did some exploring and just killed my first Terramorph (this game's Deathclaw). It was a mega battle and took nearly everything I had

This is a pretty good video on some of the less explained mechanics. For the Boost Pack you need to unlock the perk in Science (?) and then equip a pack that has it. It's one of the coolest new things though.

The main gripes I have at the moment are the lock picking (way too fiddly and time consuming) and the inventory management is pretty shit (hard to see the info, random symbols all over the place and trading stuff with a companion is worse than FO4).

[Yevrah]

With you on the random symbols stuff and I hate that it’s in games. We, as a species, have these random symbols we’ve been using for centuries called words, which everyone understands, just fucking use those.

[Raoul Duke]

Btw - if you're having trouble locating an objective, have it active and use the scanner to show the path with arrows on the floor. Makes the lack of map those reviewers were complaining about a non-issue

[Yevrah]

I may get used to it more, but as it stands the selecting of a planet to go to and choosing a point of interest to land on is horribly done. It just feels so laborious. The "map" for New Atlantis is a work of sheer incompetence as well. Give me one showing me where and what all the stores/buildings are you fucks.

And these sorts of irritations seem to cut across almost everything at the moment, making this game a ball ache to play.

[Dark Soldier]

I'm...surprisingly not feeling this. It defo feels like Bethesda's most stable, huge project yet. But it's just a bit shit. Loading screens everywhere. Gunplay is shocking, as expected. Inventory and UI is real real clunky.

I mean this take isn't exactly a shock to anyone in here, like. But Christ irs just vast and a bit barren and dull and run everywhere and fast travel.

Can see a fair few putting hundreds of hours into the thing but I'm already contemplating binning it.

[Dark Soldier]

And binned. Enjoy lads!

[Sir Andy Mahowry]

Yev is sharpening a knife as we speak.

[Yevrah]

Right, it took some pain and there remain some baffling decisions by Bethesda, but I'm getting into it a lot now after about 10 hours play time.

[Mike]

I’ve enjoyed my first evening with it.
Made my evening when Vasco called me Captain Mike. Shame he’s such a big lumbering buffoon.

[Raoul Duke]

Finished up last night with an awesome mission to rescue some UC base. Took me a few hours clearing out a couple of outposts, some space battles and then a final big attack.

Combat-wise I've ended up using an aggressive shotgun/knife combo. The enemies are fairly passive so just running at them and blasting their heads off seems to work pretty well

Space battling against multiple targets is very tricky though. I managed to figure out a way to cheese it though and lured the gimps back to Jemison where a load of UC ships blasted them to pieces for me

[Ian]

Combat-wise I've ended up using an aggressive shotgun/knife combo. The enemies are fairly passive so just running at them and blasting their heads off seems to work pretty well

I haven't watched the full thing yet but a brief clip I saw from... either Escapist or MATN showed some enemies just standing there while whoever it was filled them with bullets. Is that fairly indicative, then?

[Raoul Duke]

I think they get distracted by whichever target they lock onto first and don't reprioritise effectively. I'm running around with a companion and if the enemy is distracted you can just rush them

[Yevrah]

Loving this now. It is Skyrim/Fallout in space, it just does its best to convince you it isn't.

[Dark Soldier]

I started again (different build) and am mainlining the story. It's actually okay in a 7/10 enjoy the datedness of the whole thing. Aspects of it feel good, aspects of it feel thoroughly old gen. Its just way too ambitious for this rickety old piece of shit engine.

[Dark Soldier]

Also just realised you can grab high end gear through display cases without lock picking them. My space suit and weapons are now lol

[Sir Andy Mahowry]

They had that in Fallout 4 at the start IIRC. Could use the dog to just take them.

[Shindig]

Game logic.

[Mike]

Alright lads.

[Dark Soldier]

Popping onto Yev's stream and he has a max carry load of 225, but he's carrying 570 or something made my day.

Btw there's no sound on your stream @Yevrah

[Yevrah]

Popping onto Yev's stream and he has a max carry load of 225, but he's carrying 570 or something made my day.

Btw there's no sound on your stream @Yevrah

My record is 900 and something.

No idea why there's no sound.

[Yevrah]

34 hours into the save I started on Saturday morning and I'm absolutely loving this and I've barely scratched the surface yet.

[Raoul Duke]

34 hours into the save I started on Saturday morning and I'm absolutely loving this and I've barely scratched the surface yet.

Copy that. A lot of people on Reddit are also seemingly realising the same - the game is huge, a bit slow to start but that's because it's gigantic.

I spent last night clearing out an abandoned farm on Pluto of some massive beasts who'd run amok