Before I say anything, let me just say I’m very much aware of all the shortcomings Fallout and Bethesda in general, both story-wise and technically with bugs and everything, but regardless of that some Fallout games are one of the best ever in gaming, especially for their time. But this is not a Fallout post :) It’s also not a rant in any way at all, just a train of thought I wanted to share, with a good point at the end if anyone wants to stick around or just scroll to it. Also different people love and care about different stuff for different reasons, all good :)

So, started playing only recently (BG3, what you gonna do :D), I’m like 20ish hours in, and in my standard fashion I’ve been doing a lot of side-quests so my main story progress is still early, although I have completed the whole Ryujin questline as it seemed the most “whatever” narrative-wise and I wanted money and loot early. Let’s say I’ve done a bit of almost everything, a lot of some stuff and having spent hundreds if not over a thousand hours in various fallouts (not a flex, I know it’s not that much just as a reference) I mostly know what to expect. That said, there have been nice surprises such as the popular “lock picking is not extremely boring anymore” as the most basic example, although we’ll see how long the appeal of that minigame lasts :D

I heard the game get better over time and I’m almost surely going to finish it ofc, but early impressions are the following:

- The quests are mostly fetch quests with extra steps, which I get is cool, but I would rather actually fly my fancy ship between a planet and it’s three moons I can actually reach without grav jumping or actual hours of flying, because that’s the fun part and then we can shoot stuff etc, now I’m just navigating the menu all the time jumping to different places because I cannot travel to them in reasonable time. It’s just “approach and dock” or “go to that planet because we need to kill some pirates”. Unless I’m purposefully going out of my way to pretend I’m playing No Man’s Sky (which I do love btw) then okay I’ll run into some stuff but I can’t even fly to the nearest planet. I don’t care that planet being “unreasonably close” doesn’t make sense in the real world, I’m not a fraking astronaut going to the moon for the first time (lol) I want Fallout in space but evolved and better god damn it.

- I found the voice acting pretty amazing. Yeah it can be slow and empty and blah but that’s not the problem of voice acting, that’s a problem of narrative. Voice acting is stellar, I actually want to listen to most of the characters, especially the more important ones - even though I usually don’t which is a shame since the underlying story is not doing it for me so far.

- That brings us to the story, and I will make a purely narrative comparison to let’s say Fallout 3 here. In FO3 the story starts with you going after your father. That’s a very universal thing, and doesn’t matter if it happens in the wild west, or in space, or in the wasteland. It’s a good start for you to identify with your character, and then take the story and evolve it however you damn please but you are invested from the start. In Starfield you’re a rando space miner who touches a shiny rock, gets a seizure, gets given a ship and adopted into the fanciest society in the game in the first 15mins with absolutely no reason. I mean yeah the reason is “I had a vision oooo” but like that’s a bullshit trope “you’re special because you are” reason. In FO3 you first get to Megaton, you meet the community, you get your shitty little apartment, you start becoming a small part of that community and getting your bearings, and gaining courage and resources to venture further because even though you have only just started you already have a couple meaningful relationships with NPCs, you have your small place in the world and you start realizing how small you are in this Wasteland and how big the world is, and how amazing and terrifying it will be adventuring through it. And you’re almost ready to start venturing further, and you’re filled with excitement and dread at the same time. That’s what I f**** feel in the first couple of hours of FO3, or NV or honestly even FO4 it’s not great but it’s decent if you wanted more of almost the same (some killer questlines, and Far Harbor god damn). NOT FO76, screw that s***. Anyways, there is so little of that in Starfield for me so far, and the amazing voice acting and how good the game actually looks and not that many bugs in my experience honestly (and like for real I’m okay with Bethesda bugs as long as they are silly and not game-breaking) all of that makes me even sadder that I’m not vibing with the narrative so far and I fear I won’t be at all.

- Now, narrative aside, we don’t want to recycle Fallout stuff, and there are many other ways to make you invested in the story. But I also find that the world, although pretty stellar-looking (lol, but for real) feels empty because they went for the procedural generation, and just made movement through the whole space tedious and not exciting. I haven’t flown my ship unless I needed to dock somewhere or I wanted to kill someone, like there is no other flying than that, this is not a simulation I’m not a wannabe spaceship pilot, I want to fly my spaceship as I fucking use my car in GTA to get places, what’s the point if I’m on a horse or in a spaceship if I’m clicking fast travel all the time. You cannot even land and I’m not talking about NMS landing without cutscenes I don’t care, you can’t even get to the fraking planet in reasonable time like why, just fucking blur my screen when I get near enough and trigger the cutscene god damn I want to fly around WHILE I’m doing stuff, not fly around only when I go flying around because I was just thinking if I would rather oh idk go outside and play some sport, or go meet with friends, or go explore a desolate randomly generated planet only so I can finally fly my fancy ship around, god damn it.

THE BIG IDEA TIME lol

So, narrative aside - that’s also highly subjective, so let’s say narrative is fine in Starfield, or at least acceptable. We don’t always want to actually role play heavy shit all the time, maybe we want to be an OP bounty hunter for a while and serve justice and/or misery throughout the wasteland space, or whatever it all works. What I think would’ve made Starfield extremely fun, and what mostly made Fallout games great is that they we so thoroughly handcrafted, that wherever you go you mostly won’t be bored. Starfield has glimpses of that, but it’s lost in the (procedurally generated) vastness of the environment, which isn’t even “real” like in NMS so what was the point of doing it.

Rather, imagine if they went either smaller (like our solar system) or bigger (any other real or imaginary planetary system) and handcrafted it fully like they did with Fallout games, and make the ratios and sized and everything so it actually makes sense for you to explore everything flying in your ship and landing on 12 extremely rich planets with all the Bethesda easter eggs and side-missions (ah it can be so glorious) instead of 1000s of almost-empty recycled ones, like it was possible to explore the wasteland on foot in reasonable time and it was such a fun adventure god damn :)

And then, when you have your little solar system packed with content beyond belief (because who cares if something actually exists, we want fun and wasteland aliens and whatever else silly sci fi things comes to mind), first of all nobody reasonable would even care to ask to go anywhere else and secondly we would go to other places because if we’re freaking grav jumping all the time instead of flying then just make regular content updates by introducing other planetary systems we can travel to and explore, or just planets, but it all needs to be handcrafted (e.g. Far Harbor or almost any of the DLCs none of them were bad bad), and you have an infinite content pipeline to expand the game and make it a live-service for the next 5-10-20 years, and piss all over the various star citizens and whatever because this would be insanely fun because it would be a universe we would actually care about (probably… hopefully), and it would be constantly expanding in a meaningful and sustainable way both for keeping it engaging and for devs to actually be able to deliver good stuff and actually have the time to do it properly. And if we liked it it would make a ton of money, like what doesn’t compute here? And you wouldn’t have to rush production, and you would have an organic way of expanding your game because it will take an average player probably months to explore a couple of planets while you add one or two new ones or a whole new system, and ofc reuse the assets as much as possible that’s absolutely rational but there’s a way of doing that as a tool for achieving something great, and a way where you are using that tool to essentially “fake” the amount of content while it’s empty regardless of how much of it is there. I think we all know which way I’m talking about and which way Starfield actually went for unfortunately.

Like the “cool” thing is that all planets in the game have actual orbits and move around. Yeah it’s cool, and how the f**** does it affect my gameplay? Can I even get to the planet? No. Does them moving impact my gaming experience in the smallest (not even significant, just smallest) way? No. So it’s just bullshit marketing fluff that is used for marketing and nothing else. Great, could’ve spent that time actually enhancing the player experience. There’s a ton of points like this to be made, but again, this is not a rant, I’m just passionate about gaming in this way sometimes.

So yeah, just some thoughts, if you read all of it kudos I would actually really love to hear some of your thoughts if you wanna share, and I wish you a pleasant day :)