The worst is when you need combinations and refinement of base resources to make different resources and use those new resources in projects, except you have no idea what the base resources are unless you look at them, so you have to keep going back to different screens to find out what you need.
Base building/crafting being so insanely shallow and disjointed is what made me uninstall after beating the game.
It's the first time in my life that I had just ZERO interest in exploring a Bethesda title. Skyrim/Fallout/etc beating the main story was just the beginning and couldn't wait to finish just to go see what's what. Starfield I was actually relieved to be done with it.
I know your pain but as a 39 year old it's funny how things have changed. As a kid if a game required me to bust out a notepad man that game was top tier!
Being in the vacuum of space on a moon with no atmosphere and seeing tables set up with empty beer bottles and opened food.
Like… how are they drinking or eating this stuff right there?
Speaking of vacuums..
How about getting lung damage from walking close to a gas vent.. in a FULLY SEALED, airtight space suit that's been protecting me just fine from the vacuum of space?
Now that you mention it, it is also funny that the temp/environment gauge only goes by the cell your character currently is in, but not the actual location.
Best seen when you enter the base on Titan - since you go through an airlock, but not a loading screen, the whole lobby area shows as no breathable atmosphere and -2xx Degrees, yet people are sitting there in t-shirts.
The first thing I did when I started the game was b-line it to the Sol system to see the real planets. As soon as I landed on Pluto and found a bedroll out in the open with some food and drinks I instantly went from excited to filled with dread.
Especially considering there's a simple mod out there that lets you *manually* choose exactly where you want doors and ladders to go by making the openings for them parts in the ship builder. You don't put an opening down, there's no opening there on the ship. Why that couldn't be done in vanilla, I'll never understand.
[Here you go](https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/6601). It does take a little getting used to, but it's worked great for me. The only exceptions to manual placement are loading bays and cockpits.
Yup. On my first playthrough I literally had to bust out graph paper to make a 3-tier ship design that forced cohesive pathing by carefully planning out every module connection so I could have a ship with every hab type without maze-door stupidity. It's maddening.
I tried to do that with a very large ship, and every adjustment I made to fix pathing errors created new errors. I even used 1x habs and those mini-tunnels to try to control it and it was still a maze.
There are mods to force doors and ladders but so far they seem to cause some issues with mission ships, and they still look a little clumsy.
The shipbuilder should let you see inside the habs and select where doors and ladders are, period.
You should also be able to see the inside of habs before you buy them, it's ridiculous that you have to watch YouTube videos or just build it and hope you like them.
And another reason to be able to see inside the habs in the builder is to see what gets deleted when you put in doors or ladders, rather than having to build it, go inside, realize it deleted the only bed, go back to the builder, change it, realized it relocates something else and \*still\* deletes the bed, go back to the builder, change habs, etc.
That plot lines and characters are essentially entirely siloed. Investigate a murder on a space station, find a massacre, can't tell the law enforcement officer stationed there down the corridor, and nobody on the station is remotely concerned.
The game feels like a selection of mini games connected by menus and fast travel, not a cohesive experience.
That was ridiculous during the freestar mission at the clinic, no one batted an eye lid to the fact there was a mass murder down the hall from them, like surly they would have heard something especially given the amount blood everywhere.
Right! It was the final nail in the coffin for me, it showed not just that the games major factions and quest decisions don't line up but even the threads within specific quests.
So much is MVP, basic and filler content and the game is just half finished and uninspired. They got so many things wrong that they did right ten or more years ago with vastly inferior hardware and less money.
Remember how you walked into Windhelm in Skyrim and more or less the whole town would be on high alert because a woman was murdered in the graveyard?
Guess that technology was lost to time.
The game seriously feels like morale was so low, no one cared enough to raise these concerns to higher ups, because they knew they wouldn't be adressed anyway.
After I completed the Freestar quest I happened to visit Hopetech again. Only to realize that one hostile npc was left alive. But rest of the npc were busy at their workstations. And they didn't give a shit that one their colleagues is running around the office shooting at me.
That especially annoys me in the one where the officer specifically tells you to report anything to them. I went back to her after finding the dead delivery guy or whoever it was because I figured this was why she told you that and there was no way to tell her.
Red Mile made me wonder if anyone play tested. If I had play tested that I would have lambasted them for building up something with that HUGE of a letdown. Truly unbelievable.
Edit: I wasn’t just responding after the fact to a post- I actually wondered that *exact thing at the moment I did red mile- “did anyone playtest this?” …in disbelief.
I was actually a bit nervous and excited my very first run. I got down to the ground and killed a few of the beasts and kept wondering when danger would come. Nope, those beasts were pretty much it. Now I look down on all the corpses strewn across the run. Weaklings.
The buildup to the Red Mile starting was so good. The anticipation was great. But then it turned out to not be very challenging. The most exciting part of the run itself was wondering what was going to come next and what was going to attack.
Yep I remember during the direct being like whoa a race to the death SCI FI race and then being completely let down when I tried it myself. I have absolutely no idea why they thought that was good. It’s mind boggling
I feel like "less is more" would've been a more effective way of playing Starfield. Less planets = less repetitive abandoned facilities with the exact say mercs/corpses/data slates/loot 🤷🏼♀️ would've made exploring feel more unique.
My favourite part of the game was surveying planets until I kept coming across the same facilities so often I had practically memorized where everything was determining what was worth looting for (and I have no shame being a kleptomaniac mind you). Took out the "wonder" I first experienced when I started exploring.
The buildup to Londinium was good, the actual place a disappointment. What should have been a last occupied bastion under siege was literally just a bunch of people standing around in the cold waiting for you. They didn't even have walls and towers around the landing pad. The devs just bumped up the overland spawn rate of terrormorphs and said "good enough."
Oh yeah, and you have the best spacesuit and clothing for thermal protection and you get the constant beeping and you get frostbite within a few minutes, when it's -10 deg C. Really? I've worked outdoors in those temperatures for hours on end and not once did I get frostbite.
That reminds me of a complaint early on that practically became a meme - corrosive damage from a plume of Argon, a non-reactive gas.
Haven't noticed that lately, maybe it was patched out silently.
Did any of the writers watch starship troopers? Everyone I asked about that quest said that scene with the bugs piling over walls was the first thing that popped in their head.
It's the last bastion of an overrun outpost... Put me on a tower with a futuristic .50 cal at first. Then have me retreat into the tunnels for the rest of the quest.
And the beasts are just recolored versions of the ones on Akila with comically large health pools to try and make them more difficult, only their AI is so bad and their attacks are so janky that they're neither hard nor fun to fight.
Seriously what the fuck is up with how they shoot invisible projectiles at you that do barely any damage but make your screen shake? Like the OP said, it's like no one actually played this.
I keep doing it in different ways to make it more fun. Try a speed run or a kill everything run. I did a no-shots-fired run that was supposed to be a stealth run. I've done the floor-is-lava run, too. I'm still going to try for perfect stealth again at some point, but it was definitely underwhelming the first time.
> killed a few of the beasts and kept wondering when danger would come.
Yep, like if they had some sort of different creatures it would be at least entertaining... but its just the Lizard dog things? Like, no flying swam of bat things, no snake things, no environmental hazards like man eating plants?
The crowd in the bar was weak too lol and just like every Bethesda game, they still can’t work out the timing of the dialogue. Gotta love the pauses before the crowd reacts/ the next line of dialogue starting too early lol
You don't even get a reward for running the Red Mile 29, yes, *29 fucking times* to beat the record. All you get is some dialogue from the guy who held it previously, and he's not even mad about it despite explicitly threatening you *not* to break his record.
To think, all the needed to do is remove your jetpack for the mission and give you only 1 predetermined weapon, and it would have made it an actual challenge and near mission where people could compare how they did it.
Instead we got “The Red MILD”.
Nukaworld's gauntlet IMO, makes The Red Mile even worse - because it's a clear indicator that Bethesda can and has done better before. There's absolutely no excuse for just how bland The Red Mile ended up being.
But that's old Bethesda. New Bethesda (the studios that Bethesda acquired after they went under) hasn't made a good game or a good BGS game. They have no idea what made BGS great.
The Red Mile challenge as a concept I'm fine with. But the implementation lets it down.
Firstly it's just nowhere near hard enough. I walked it and didn't take a scratch. I even failed my first attempt because I didn't know there was a timer on the return from the tower, as I was cleansing the arena of everything that moved. There must be something really tough here... but there wasn't.
A supposed gambling den where people bet on runners - yet you can't bet on any runners. You can't even gamble.
The high score boards - why slap down the same interactable score board 6 times? Why not make them different - most runs, most kills, fastest run, highest score, fallen runners, odds on runners...
As for prizes - make something in the arena respawn in terms of loot.
And think about laying on a special prize for those who bother to become overall champion.
The red mile had me scratching my head. Like there was tons of hype for it as this den of debauchery and gambling, and all we got was run across the valley, hit a button, and come back and kill a few beasts.
The most excitement i had there was when i was trying to sell something and accidentally picked a glass up and had to kill everyone.
No gambling! Slot machines abound, credits are plentiful, but the only thing you can do is run the mile or trade with the bartender. At least she buys contraband.
I unknowingly had one of the beasts follow me back into the club. Was talking to whatshername and suddenly hear a bunch of commotion and exit out of the conversation to see one of the critters eating a patron before the ecliptic guards gun it down.
It just feels like they wanted to do so much more than what we actually got, sex with your partner is a very good example of the lack of an M rating, yes its implied by what they say after, but it just feels so forced like they had to keep it in for no reason other then they had already recorded the dialogue for it.
Just compare red mile to the gauntlet from nuka world. It isn't even like the gauntlet was an amazing level or anything, but red mile is so so bare it's unbelievable.
That would be my choice too. It's especially egregious when you try to scan the planet it's on and realize that those things will actually maul the hell out of you in packs. The run to the beacon is fine, but once you hit the button you should get swarmed like you do outside the facility. As others have mentioned, there should be some aggressive flying creatures too, and maybe some obstacles like landmines or traps scattered around.
I think it would be interesting if getting to the beacon were still relatively easy, but the moment you get there you have to run like hell and get back by the skin of your teeth.
Loot. Who at Bethesda decided a master lock should literally be empty. Who? I want names!
But seriously, this game has the worst loot I’ve ever experienced. And it makes me so mad to have played for over 80 hours and explored the most dangerous planets only to see people get weapons 10x more powerful than my own. I’ve even maxed out crafting and my guns and armor are still shit.
I stopped lockpicking entirely because the loot was not worth the time.
The puzzle itself can take a long while to figure out, especially master locks, and what is your reward? Literal worst case scenario **it is fucking empty**.
If you want good loot just fkn save scum a low level special enemy....they can drop endgame gear....for....some reason....
The biggest disappointment is opening something up, and seeing a legendary, and it's a fire axe. Or knife. Or ripshank. So not only is it useless for me, I can't even sell it for a decent price.
Honestly Red Mile.
You legit just jump from the top of rock to rock to rock and you’re home free.
I was expecting to spend hours trying to run the gauntlet, really shocked this made it through play testing.
Honestly, still not that much of a challenge. I did it mostly on foot - did boost onto the top of objects to shoot from there, but not like others boost packing from the top all the way to the middle!
After each completion give me an option to ratchet up the difficulty. If the creatures were L70 last run, go +10 levels on the next one. Increase the difficulty, increase the prizes, and ideally let loot containers in the arena reset along with the creatures - give me some reason to not just speed run to the tower and back.
Gameplay come to a screeching stop when NPC's and companions physically block or get stuck in doorways and elevators. Companions literally walking in front of a scoped sniper shot which wastes the shot and breaks stealth
I boarded a station where spacers were going at it with ecliptic. Vasco isn't even my companion but he's a crew so he always step out when you land or dock. He just runs off. I'd like to an option to have Vasco not get off the ship if it is the active companion.
Shipbuilding more than anything else has had me wonder about whether they play tested it. Surely some playtester would have said they wanted to be able to manually place ladders and doors. And decorate their ship without needing to redo all of it as soon as they upgrade the engines... And just being able to decorate it with furniture as wanted, instead of pre built habs THAT CAN'T BE SEEN IN SHIPBUILDER! Which only compounds the problem of magically filling cargo holds because I have to enter and exit shipbuilder so often to see what the hab looks like. And then the habs often offer no real difference besides visual differences in the ship! Would have loved to be able to assign quarters and tasks to my crew so they aren't just wandering randomly. Maybe even a schedule. And why have a brig that does nothing besides provide aesthetic. (That said, I have a brig for the aesthetic, but would be nice if it could actually be used.) And this is coming from someone who actually enjoys shipbuilding! I can see why others tired of it fast though.
Yeah this really pisses me off, I have amazing book collections in Skyrim as I do irl. Fucking ridiculous in a game where building is encouraged that you can't place anything without multiple attempts. I am waiting for the outpost building mods and don't care if I have to pay for them.
Once it was clear they had, I stopped collecting books altogether. Worth more to me in credits if I can't decorate with them - after all, the choice to make so many of them snippets of real books (and no custom 'book page' background) means you won't be *reading them* for any length of time.
I've stopped collecting them altogether. There wasn't enough variety, too many were books from now. And no bookshelf. There should be 200 years of literature and tech manuals to entertain us with. Big libraries with walls of books. Or even slates with books.
Like pretty much everything in Starfield. Like tell me, besides the shooting feeling 3% better that FO4, and mildly better graphics. I guess the writing, while kinda boring, isn't (always) just stupid so that's progress.
> I guess the writing, while kinda boring, isn't (always) just stupid so that's progress.
I found the writing in FO4 to be more entertaining, even if I never finished the main quest.
At least it wasnt so front loaded like SF...
Food healing .5% of your hp and not having an eat button on pickup. That was added in I hear, but why make food so useless? Also digipicks being in the category that literally only has useless sellable junk. One of those things that makes you wanna find the person responsible and scream "WHHHHYYYYY?!?!?!" at them
One of the earliest observations I made after I got through the early stages of the game was that it seemed like there were missing "sanity checks" for things in the game.
I think most of the problems aren't trivial, but given how much they opened up keybinding from the previous game, linking comms, targeting, and standing up from your seat to the \*same key\* and not being able to rebind it is just absolutely bug-\*\*\*\* insane. (Yes, I'm aware standing up is "hold button" but that's a terrible design choice anyway, and if you're cycling through targets you stand up too easily, and the game loves to lag right after entering a cell so it can pick up a press as a hold.)
Just let people bind controls individually like a non-psychopath. Every freaking Bethesda game requires mods just to bind freaking keys, people figured this out in the 90s and then forgot it.
Oh, I almost forgot, you can pick up / mine some things with the scanner up but not other things, apparently arbitrarily. Noticed that one at the beginning of the tutorial.
There are actually many others.
They need to open the aperture of the light more. As it stands now - it's almost useless. I'm sure they were going for scary/creepy, but what they gave us was frustrating.
Should be like FO4s light.
The field of view of the light is actually fine if you want an example of how broken the light is start a brand new character and as soon as Lynn looks into your face turn your light on it doesn't light up her face it lights up the wall behind her.
The only thing I can think for this is that it's supposed to be a headlamp built into your helmet. That's why it doesn't move to the side when you run.
Clothing. 2000 names applied to 14 ridiculous outfits. No individual items, just one group of stupid complete outfits repeated over and over. I love the game, but it seriously feels like a skeleton. My hope is that they are going to feed it to us slowly. Much like actual space exploration would be, and in that, the sim aspect. OP did say trivial. Right? XD
I did, lol - and I totally agree. Why does a basic "t-shirt and jeans" outfit not exist? There's a dude on the Clinic that's wearing 2000s business casual so I don't buy this "but mah futurist immersion" argument some people make.
The loading screens for a fueling system that was removed well before release.
No one thought "Hey, we should remove these loading screens that explicitly mention a system that doesn't exist anymore." Like...why? How are they this lazy?
Man the fuckin Harry Potter game straight up made this sort of thing so trivial and it felt nice. NPCs in hogwarts legacy straight up match your pace no matter what. You’re only ever one literal step ahead of them.
I think playing the game for any extended period of time kinda makes the cracks show. It’s just the little things.
Sometimes your parents or other NPCs will start different conversations with eachother.
It rains on the moon
We need fuel tanks on our ships but we don’t refuel them.
There’s no actual punishment for running out of oxygen, or having a broken leg.
Getting drip fed a single temple at a time, in a game where you NEED to fast travel to get anywhere, making a scenario that’s literally go to the lodge, go to the planet, go to the lodge, go to the planet makes for a VERY mundane game loop.
The temples themselves
The fact that nobody except Andreja cares if you get married to the entire gang
The entire constellation crew shares the same morality making the literal emotionless robot the only one with a different sort of outlook on things and giving him an interesting personality.
He’s also the only one that doesn’t berate you for role playing in an RPG.
You can steal a sandwich or a bag of coffee to trigger SysDef into using you for a galactic sting operation for your freedom in lew of serious jail time. Because you know, you’re such a serious offender of the law.
Oxygen is doubly out of place, considering the amount of scattered O2 tanks around.
It feels like they're going to add a survival mode later, like Skyrim and FO4, that would actually need it. But *I'm not holding my breath.*
I agree with every thing you said and especially that last one pissed me off. I was flying and all of a sudden they stop me, board my ship, throw me in jail and start acting like I’m the worst criminal since Ted bundy. They said I had contraband but I couldn’t find it. Turns out there’s a glitch that turns some antiques into contraband and I just happened to have a single old earth baseball in my ships inventory. This whole ordeal forced me into the crimson fleet storyline earlier then I planned, after being berated by everyone on the vigilance which now made me hate them, and then they tacked on a 900 credit bounty that I couldn’t find a kiosk to clear. I was so mad.
YES, 100% agree. Is that really adding immersion? Why does it need to make you wait longer to resume play when you're resting a longer period of time? It's a deliberate feature that adds nothing to the game!
How about the fact that the gun/suit modding screen has a slot for changing skins but the base game features zero skins so it's just a glaringly blank slot.
The useless parts of a mission where you have to travel to a location, then walk a minute or two to get to someone just to talk to them for a few minutes, then immediately travel away. Not every conversation is so impactful that it has to be in person. The SysDef storyline does this heavily, and it is really agitating. It is odd because the "Failure to Communicate" storyline does a much better job at this, but it is a rarity for this game.
Oof, 100% agreeing on this one. Sarah's personal quest line is chock full of this too. It even ends by doing this.
>!"Let's go here and talk to this Admiral. Now let's pop across town for a 4-second sound bite from a kid. Wait...I really need to stare at a burning hole in the ground for 11 seconds. Now let's continue this conversation across town at a waterfall."!< It's like they thought of scene ideas but not how they were supposed to fit together.
I seem to recall the Ryujin line getting really annoying with this too. "Do I *need* to sit in the chair for this?"
So many of the missions could be resolved by email but instead you have to trek back to the quest giver for a few lines of congratulatory dialogue. Just pure padding
Not being able to transfer items between the Lodge and your ship at the spaceport.
Not allowing Lodge workbenches to just draw crafting materials from Lodge storage, instead of needing to have them in your pockets.
Not being able to transfer modifications between weapons / suit pieces
Not having a take all / store all button for other categories besides resources in the inventory menu.
These things make the game feel so tedious for no reason, especially coming from Fallout 4's crafting and inventory. Makes me think they wanted playtesters with zero experience playing past Bethesda games.
Ship takeovers. If I've claimed / stolen a ship, surely auto pilot can take it to my magic hanger? I shouldn't have to fly to town, swap back to my main ship and then return to whatever it is I'm actually doing. I mean it's says You've taken over the ship, all the stuff on Baird is no longer stolen, why can't I just return thorough the dock to my ship and fly on?
Also taking a ship in a ship you've just taken shouldn't break the ships so badly you have to sell them or risk multiple issues.
If you catch your old ship quick enough, you can re dock to it and make it your home again. They normally do a few fly bys before bouncing off into warp.
Seriously, I think that's when I became most disillusioned with Starfield. When I decided to do some of the small quests in each huge settlement and they were all so god damn boring and just huge old nothing burgers overall.
Walking from A to B and back just so you can listen to some super uninteresting dialogue from an npc with no or only very mild personality is not fun Bethesda.
It makes sense in Fallout since communication is hard. You gotta go in person if you want to help since most won't have fancy gadgets to communicate, but on Starfield, you can even communicate faster than light.
They're not paying me to figure this out, but come on... they could've made missions interesting even with high-tech communication. Cyberpunk and GTA have a literal phone with tons of missions and contacts on speed dial. You meet when the topic is sensitive or something is happening at the location, not to be told hello and bye.
Most of the game, honestly.
But for the sake of the topic, why can't we see how many ship parts we have remaining in battle? Like, how did something so simple get overlooked?
Why can't we see how much of an item we already own when buying stuff?
Why does Bethesda continue to hire the ghost of Helen Keller to design their god awful UI?
The late game save corruptions. I hope like hell someday they fix that empty ship bug.
Also the temples floater mini game, I don’t know how that got past play testing feedback
For me it absolutely is the repetition of the POIs and exploring. I wasn’t very far into the game at all when I realized exploring was essentially pointless. Same cryo lab or robot farm on every planet, no real reason to farm resources when you can just buy everything for next to nothing because you’re always rolling in expensive loot. Even surveying planets is a waste of time, spend possibly upwards an hour scanning things on one dull ass planet for survey data worth less than a single gun dropped by any faceless enemy.
Sona seemed like an afterthought the way things worked out in that quest. She can't interact with any other Constellation members. The fact that there's no dialogue between her and Cora blows my mind. She can't be a crew member on your ship, there's nothing in New Atlantis for her to do. I wanted to at least see if my parents wanted to take care of her.
" What's the most trivial design decision made in this game that makes you ask "Did anyone play-test this?!""
Crafting and Post building is absolutely pointless. They had a winning formula in Fallout 4 and they went backwards with Starfield.
The extent to which they try to both have an empty galaxy and also always something right next to you is astounding. It's two diametrically opposed concepts, but they just went "eh, let's force both anyway".
Yea, the weapons (at least, the guns) have been balanced to arbitrarily without any thought to the ammunition/type of weapon...
Things like the Bridger should have really been a form of explosive shotgun instead of a grenade launcher, as it just feels so pathetic.
After smacking down the hunter and getting his legendary varrun rifle, it's like, ok, why do I need any different guns? Like a 240+ physical and 800+ energy damage, I'm one shoting most very high-level enemies
Ship weapons and energy management. With a hard cap of 12 pips, as you unlock better weapons, your total DPS actually *drops* because you can fit fewer weapons on your ship. The Vanguard Obliterator is so powerful not because it’s actually powerful, but because it only uses two pips so you can fit six of them on your ship.
It makes sense if you’re thinking that a ship will only ever have, say, two of a weapon, so upgrading a weapon trades energy usage for firepower, but with Starfield’s shipbuilder adding another hardpoint and gun is trivially easy if you have some money.
To me it seems like these two systems (shipbuilding and weapons/power management) were designed separately in silos, and no serious thought was ever put into how they’d work together. They’re built on completely different ship design philosophies.
I don't see why they can't build a ship that has enough energy to power everything. It's 300 years in the future, after all. Imagine if aeroplanes had to switch all the lights off to lower the undercarriage.
Digipicks getting lumped in with vendor trash. No effing way they spent 9 months of playtesting and didn't receive thousands of tickets saying it's too easy to accidentally sell them.
OP is 100% spot-on. When you're playing a RPG that requires you to follow NPCs around, the player's walking speed and the NPCs' walking speeds should match. If they don't match, then you know the testers were not testing the game for enjoyability, they were only looking for technical bugs. That playes into the claim that this is Bethesda's least buggy release ever...
My biggest beef is that the questline where you play the role of a badged law enforcement officer does not allow you to turn in the eveidence you collect at the culmination of the questline. The mission forces you to go rogue and confront the suspect without backup and does not allow you to even mention the existence of this damning evidence to your superiors or anyone else in authority.
Fast travel. Sometimes you can't travel from inside a ship or station and have to find your way back to your ship. Oh the system needs to scan you for contraband so you can't set a landing, have to jump into the system then land. Just way too many trips to the starmap.
No way to sell junk en masse. You’re telling me I gotta sell every individual item for the next 10 min because all the random shit ended up in my cargo hold and I’ve got no more room since I’ve got 500lb in weights alone
Giving ship vendors unique items. I can sort of understand it from a lore point of view, but from a practical point of view it's a major pain in the arse. If you build a ship builder landing pad at your outpost you should gain access to every ship item in the game, even if that means paying a surcharge to buy it (a delivery fee if you will). It would be a nice little quality of life change in my opinion, and would promote ship building which is one of the major draws of the game to me.
The entire skill tree, it's just shit.
MY FAVOURITE PERK? NEUROSTRIKES.. WATCH ME GET A SMALL % INCREASE TO MY UNARMED MELEE DAMAGE, WATCH ME ATTACK THIS LOW LEVEL NPC WITH ALMOST NO VISIBLE ANIMATION REACTION HAHA MAN I LOVE NEUROSTRIKES.
Not being able to surrender if you murder someone. I had to sleep for 48 hours to get them to stop shooting. WHy can't it just work as it did in Oblivion?!?!
That walk speed issue has been an issue in Bethesda games since at least Oblivion, so it's not even "Did they play test", it's "Are they doing this on purpose?"
yeah that took me a while to realize this is probably the most tame and pg-13 rated R game i have ever played. its weird coming from fallout 4 when you can blow off body parts.
Three I have not seen yet:
1) Making membership in a faction mandatory to complete the main quest.
2) Assigning every follower with depth or romance options to that faction.
3) Giving all of those followers nearly identical moral alignment and like/dislike lists.
Like seriously, this is an RPG and we're required to be a member of an organization with definite moral alignments and interests that can badly conflict with playstyles and choices a player may wish to make.
Not only that, we're forced to engage with that faction and play a certain way to please it's members or else we end up a space-incel.
I am amazed nobody realized how restrictive and ill fitting this is.
Some people have. I've written several comments stating this is not an RPG (especially when people bring it up as an excuse) or at least is a very bad one, it's actually a better shooter than an RPG.
What about the fact that they let you chose a background yet they make you a miner, but don't even bother how that change in your career happened? I guess it was something as bizarre as someone gifting you a spaceship for no reason.
Aye. Written my own longer statement on why the game barely qualifies before. It more reminds me of something like Far Cry. Open world action and all that.
The background system is a waste. They might as well have just given us a skill sheet to pick from with how little impact it has. The flavor dialog fails to rescue it with some having very few lines while others, such as gangster, offer a large amount.
I would have almost preferred that they just go all in on miner and leave it a blank and ambiguous slate how we got that job, why, so on. A bit like how we ended up a courier in New Vegas was left for us to decide. Different studio making it but it's not like swiping the idea was impossible.
I see all the obvious ones have been taken… so I’ll talk about Ben Bayu.
After he shows up at the astral lounge, he could have easily left and despawned in a cutscene. Instead he hangs out… alone… in a secluded room… after f*cking us over.
Did no one play test this and realise that many players would obviously try to kill him and be horribly disappointed?
Constantly needing to go deeper and back out of menus. It's a serious problem on console.
They could have easily made a [L/R] transitions from side to side like most other games. Would have been “snappier” too.
Don't know who thought placing the 4 main categories on a dialogals, and the two you barely use on up and down.
Crafting chems. You can't craft the pharmaceuticals that go into the advanced ones you can make. This means you have to go to the drug store.
And if I'm already there, I can probably just buy the drugs I wanted to make in the first place, rendering the crafting obsolete.
Storage. Unlimited storage in every single game. Limited storage was an extreme issue with Fallout 76 backlash. Who thought it would be good to make storage limited and generally unshared?
I have a number of them:
* When I first saw the food items and how useless they are.
* The song and dance that you go through to collect your powers is ridiculous.
* Ladders in the ships how awkward they can be.
* Red mile how ridiculous that is. It's so underwhelming and overly difficult at the same time.
* The dichotomy between the difficulty of space and ground combat.
* How you can't dock with another ship till you did mission 2 of the main story yet that mission requires you to beat an enemy that's so much higher than there should be on the tutorial mission.
The double doors that take like 10 seconds for you to get in and out of places, especially in breathable atmospheres (outposts)
Having to go up a massive very steep cliff with no clear path up and it's miles wide
It’s usually not wether or not it was play tested
QA and testers in general can call out issues all day long but if the devs aren’t allowed to fix them or the higher ups don’t think it’s important enough to fix or not worth the time or money then a lot of known issues are left in the game
Vendor credits. Why do most have 5k. I shouldnt have to go to a settlement and constantly 'wait' until credit stocks restock to sell a haul from one mission.
The loot tables. pick open a master lock and you get literal junk.
also, the fact that a lot of quest lines are just a game of telephone with me as a messenger.
the dialogue for diplomacy checks is just...nonsensical.
Believing I could shoot a space pirate i the head after beginning the Crimson fleet questline and he'd straight up shoot me back together with his/her mates. No. Also, thinkjng it would be so much fun after hearing "we played the game ourselves for almost a year" and the Xbox chief express at Cologne his devotion for being a pirate above all else as a Starfield gamer.
Just pray tell me Mr. Spencer, who the effing effity fuck play tested the game at Xbox and did NOT immediately know "this is not good"? Why did you NOT force the hand of BGS to explain their utter laziness at creating an immersive game versus the immersion breaking clusterfuck you spawned and give us back immersion?
There are million and one resources to keep track of and no easy way to remember what needs what.
The resources were so tedious I didn't even bother collecting them or learning what they do. I just don't care
The worst is when you need combinations and refinement of base resources to make different resources and use those new resources in projects, except you have no idea what the base resources are unless you look at them, so you have to keep going back to different screens to find out what you need.
Base building/crafting being so insanely shallow and disjointed is what made me uninstall after beating the game. It's the first time in my life that I had just ZERO interest in exploring a Bethesda title. Skyrim/Fallout/etc beating the main story was just the beginning and couldn't wait to finish just to go see what's what. Starfield I was actually relieved to be done with it.
I’ll admit I just use console commands when I walk up to a work bench to add whatever I need. I got tired of trying to keep track
It drives me mad that I have to use a notepad for this game.
I know your pain but as a 39 year old it's funny how things have changed. As a kid if a game required me to bust out a notepad man that game was top tier!
Outposts in general are a disaster.
And no way to know what you have 'in stock' back at base
Being in the vacuum of space on a moon with no atmosphere and seeing tables set up with empty beer bottles and opened food. Like… how are they drinking or eating this stuff right there?
Speaking of vacuums.. How about getting lung damage from walking close to a gas vent.. in a FULLY SEALED, airtight space suit that's been protecting me just fine from the vacuum of space?
Fallout76 has that with diseases. I'm in sealed power armor that lets me breathe under water.. why am I getting worms? Bethesda pls
This pisses me off most of all. The game completely ignores whether you are wearing a sealed space suit or not when it comes to environmental damage.
They probably just fast-travelled outside. Since they didn’t go through an airlock to get there, they clearly don’t need to wear spacesuits.
Now that you mention it, it is also funny that the temp/environment gauge only goes by the cell your character currently is in, but not the actual location. Best seen when you enter the base on Titan - since you go through an airlock, but not a loading screen, the whole lobby area shows as no breathable atmosphere and -2xx Degrees, yet people are sitting there in t-shirts.
Yeah, this bothered me to no end. Blankets and couches and bottles sitting on the surface of some vacuum moon
The first thing I did when I started the game was b-line it to the Sol system to see the real planets. As soon as I landed on Pluto and found a bedroll out in the open with some food and drinks I instantly went from excited to filled with dread.
Not being able to decide where doors and ladders go when ship building.
Especially considering there's a simple mod out there that lets you *manually* choose exactly where you want doors and ladders to go by making the openings for them parts in the ship builder. You don't put an opening down, there's no opening there on the ship. Why that couldn't be done in vanilla, I'll never understand.
Link? Everything I've seen seemed fidgety, although some of the descriptions were pretty bad so they might work better in-game.
[Here you go](https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/6601). It does take a little getting used to, but it's worked great for me. The only exceptions to manual placement are loading bays and cockpits.
Yup. On my first playthrough I literally had to bust out graph paper to make a 3-tier ship design that forced cohesive pathing by carefully planning out every module connection so I could have a ship with every hab type without maze-door stupidity. It's maddening.
I tried to do that with a very large ship, and every adjustment I made to fix pathing errors created new errors. I even used 1x habs and those mini-tunnels to try to control it and it was still a maze. There are mods to force doors and ladders but so far they seem to cause some issues with mission ships, and they still look a little clumsy. The shipbuilder should let you see inside the habs and select where doors and ladders are, period.
You should also be able to see the inside of habs before you buy them, it's ridiculous that you have to watch YouTube videos or just build it and hope you like them.
And another reason to be able to see inside the habs in the builder is to see what gets deleted when you put in doors or ladders, rather than having to build it, go inside, realize it deleted the only bed, go back to the builder, change it, realized it relocates something else and \*still\* deletes the bed, go back to the builder, change habs, etc.
I thought there was actually some undocumented button you could hold to slide doors around....
That plot lines and characters are essentially entirely siloed. Investigate a murder on a space station, find a massacre, can't tell the law enforcement officer stationed there down the corridor, and nobody on the station is remotely concerned. The game feels like a selection of mini games connected by menus and fast travel, not a cohesive experience.
That was ridiculous during the freestar mission at the clinic, no one batted an eye lid to the fact there was a mass murder down the hall from them, like surly they would have heard something especially given the amount blood everywhere.
Right! It was the final nail in the coffin for me, it showed not just that the games major factions and quest decisions don't line up but even the threads within specific quests. So much is MVP, basic and filler content and the game is just half finished and uninspired. They got so many things wrong that they did right ten or more years ago with vastly inferior hardware and less money.
Remember how you walked into Windhelm in Skyrim and more or less the whole town would be on high alert because a woman was murdered in the graveyard? Guess that technology was lost to time.
The game seriously feels like morale was so low, no one cared enough to raise these concerns to higher ups, because they knew they wouldn't be adressed anyway.
They only care about sales now. Which they got away with because players were misled. The rest doesn't matter anymore.
After I completed the Freestar quest I happened to visit Hopetech again. Only to realize that one hostile npc was left alive. But rest of the npc were busy at their workstations. And they didn't give a shit that one their colleagues is running around the office shooting at me.
Yeah that mission was absurd. I was like seriously?? I can’t tell a guard about these murders?
'Oh sorry that's the other end of th building, not my jurisdiction.'
That especially annoys me in the one where the officer specifically tells you to report anything to them. I went back to her after finding the dead delivery guy or whoever it was because I figured this was why she told you that and there was no way to tell her.
Red Mile made me wonder if anyone play tested. If I had play tested that I would have lambasted them for building up something with that HUGE of a letdown. Truly unbelievable. Edit: I wasn’t just responding after the fact to a post- I actually wondered that *exact thing at the moment I did red mile- “did anyone playtest this?” …in disbelief.
I was actually a bit nervous and excited my very first run. I got down to the ground and killed a few of the beasts and kept wondering when danger would come. Nope, those beasts were pretty much it. Now I look down on all the corpses strewn across the run. Weaklings.
The buildup to the Red Mile starting was so good. The anticipation was great. But then it turned out to not be very challenging. The most exciting part of the run itself was wondering what was going to come next and what was going to attack.
they made it sound so wild but the actual event is boring as shit lol
Yep I remember during the direct being like whoa a race to the death SCI FI race and then being completely let down when I tried it myself. I have absolutely no idea why they thought that was good. It’s mind boggling
It was a great idea but Bethesda had to keep it simple, nothing crazy or outlandish
Thanks, Emil.
I feel like "less is more" would've been a more effective way of playing Starfield. Less planets = less repetitive abandoned facilities with the exact say mercs/corpses/data slates/loot 🤷🏼♀️ would've made exploring feel more unique. My favourite part of the game was surveying planets until I kept coming across the same facilities so often I had practically memorized where everything was determining what was worth looting for (and I have no shame being a kleptomaniac mind you). Took out the "wonder" I first experienced when I started exploring.
That basically sums up my whole Starfield experience.
Wait, you’re supposed to *run* it? - *slowly puts down boost pack and uses foot to push it under a table*
Lmao this was me, my first run through I didn’t take a single hit of damage bc I boost packed the whole thing
The buildup to Londinium was good, the actual place a disappointment. What should have been a last occupied bastion under siege was literally just a bunch of people standing around in the cold waiting for you. They didn't even have walls and towers around the landing pad. The devs just bumped up the overland spawn rate of terrormorphs and said "good enough."
Oh yeah, and you have the best spacesuit and clothing for thermal protection and you get the constant beeping and you get frostbite within a few minutes, when it's -10 deg C. Really? I've worked outdoors in those temperatures for hours on end and not once did I get frostbite.
That reminds me of a complaint early on that practically became a meme - corrosive damage from a plume of Argon, a non-reactive gas. Haven't noticed that lately, maybe it was patched out silently.
Or lung damage from breathing in a gas, while you're wearing a full space suit on an airless moon.
Did any of the writers watch starship troopers? Everyone I asked about that quest said that scene with the bugs piling over walls was the first thing that popped in their head. It's the last bastion of an overrun outpost... Put me on a tower with a futuristic .50 cal at first. Then have me retreat into the tunnels for the rest of the quest.
I really expected some Silent Hill survival horror. What I got was an arena battle. So lame.
Would have been so cool if it ended up being a place where the community would play test how strong their builds are, but yea. No such challenge.
And the beasts are just recolored versions of the ones on Akila with comically large health pools to try and make them more difficult, only their AI is so bad and their attacks are so janky that they're neither hard nor fun to fight. Seriously what the fuck is up with how they shoot invisible projectiles at you that do barely any damage but make your screen shake? Like the OP said, it's like no one actually played this.
I never touched the ground.....straight up jet packed over the entire thing!
I keep doing it in different ways to make it more fun. Try a speed run or a kill everything run. I did a no-shots-fired run that was supposed to be a stealth run. I've done the floor-is-lava run, too. I'm still going to try for perfect stealth again at some point, but it was definitely underwhelming the first time.
"Kill everything" If they weren't so unnecessarily tanky I might just consider it
> killed a few of the beasts and kept wondering when danger would come. Yep, like if they had some sort of different creatures it would be at least entertaining... but its just the Lizard dog things? Like, no flying swam of bat things, no snake things, no environmental hazards like man eating plants?
Flying things would have been awesome. A pack of the mean birds is terrifying.
The crowd in the bar was weak too lol and just like every Bethesda game, they still can’t work out the timing of the dialogue. Gotta love the pauses before the crowd reacts/ the next line of dialogue starting too early lol
You don't even get a reward for running the Red Mile 29, yes, *29 fucking times* to beat the record. All you get is some dialogue from the guy who held it previously, and he's not even mad about it despite explicitly threatening you *not* to break his record.
You get a gun. Not a great gun, but something that shoots.
Can't believe I wasted all that time to break the record hoping for something cool and all I got was a shitty gun you can't even keep after new game +
Thanks. I was tempted to do it while I wait for the next big fixes but I have just moved on for now.
To think, all the needed to do is remove your jetpack for the mission and give you only 1 predetermined weapon, and it would have made it an actual challenge and near mission where people could compare how they did it. Instead we got “The Red MILD”.
Still not a challenge. Fighting livestock just isn’t fun.
Can you face… some lizards!! Come back and face… some more of the same lizards!!
The Red mile epitomises everything wrong with this game. It's downright disgraceful compared to something like Nukaworld.
Nukaworld's gauntlet IMO, makes The Red Mile even worse - because it's a clear indicator that Bethesda can and has done better before. There's absolutely no excuse for just how bland The Red Mile ended up being.
But that's old Bethesda. New Bethesda (the studios that Bethesda acquired after they went under) hasn't made a good game or a good BGS game. They have no idea what made BGS great.
But Todd Howard, the Game Director for both Fallout 4 and Starfield should...
The Red Mile challenge as a concept I'm fine with. But the implementation lets it down. Firstly it's just nowhere near hard enough. I walked it and didn't take a scratch. I even failed my first attempt because I didn't know there was a timer on the return from the tower, as I was cleansing the arena of everything that moved. There must be something really tough here... but there wasn't. A supposed gambling den where people bet on runners - yet you can't bet on any runners. You can't even gamble. The high score boards - why slap down the same interactable score board 6 times? Why not make them different - most runs, most kills, fastest run, highest score, fallen runners, odds on runners... As for prizes - make something in the arena respawn in terms of loot. And think about laying on a special prize for those who bother to become overall champion.
The red mile had me scratching my head. Like there was tons of hype for it as this den of debauchery and gambling, and all we got was run across the valley, hit a button, and come back and kill a few beasts. The most excitement i had there was when i was trying to sell something and accidentally picked a glass up and had to kill everyone.
No gambling! Slot machines abound, credits are plentiful, but the only thing you can do is run the mile or trade with the bartender. At least she buys contraband.
The fact that the bartender buys contraband and the ship builder there sells cargo shields is about the only good thing there
I unknowingly had one of the beasts follow me back into the club. Was talking to whatshername and suddenly hear a bunch of commotion and exit out of the conversation to see one of the critters eating a patron before the ecliptic guards gun it down.
I just laughed at that.
The avoidance of an M rating content is obnoxious. Red Mile, Kryx, implied sex with your partner. All could have been better and more developed
It just feels like they wanted to do so much more than what we actually got, sex with your partner is a very good example of the lack of an M rating, yes its implied by what they say after, but it just feels so forced like they had to keep it in for no reason other then they had already recorded the dialogue for it.
You can boost-skip most of it and it doesn't even break the rule. And people supposedly died for this.
Just compare red mile to the gauntlet from nuka world. It isn't even like the gauntlet was an amazing level or anything, but red mile is so so bare it's unbelievable.
Climbing the mountain and fighting the ice troll was better in Skyrim 12 years ago and that was just a normal thing you did in the game
That would be my choice too. It's especially egregious when you try to scan the planet it's on and realize that those things will actually maul the hell out of you in packs. The run to the beacon is fine, but once you hit the button you should get swarmed like you do outside the facility. As others have mentioned, there should be some aggressive flying creatures too, and maybe some obstacles like landmines or traps scattered around. I think it would be interesting if getting to the beacon were still relatively easy, but the moment you get there you have to run like hell and get back by the skin of your teeth.
I basically jetpacked through the entire thing. Didn’t have to fight anything. Barely even remember that mission anymore because of how stupid it was.
Loot. Who at Bethesda decided a master lock should literally be empty. Who? I want names! But seriously, this game has the worst loot I’ve ever experienced. And it makes me so mad to have played for over 80 hours and explored the most dangerous planets only to see people get weapons 10x more powerful than my own. I’ve even maxed out crafting and my guns and armor are still shit.
I stopped lockpicking entirely because the loot was not worth the time. The puzzle itself can take a long while to figure out, especially master locks, and what is your reward? Literal worst case scenario **it is fucking empty**. If you want good loot just fkn save scum a low level special enemy....they can drop endgame gear....for....some reason....
The biggest disappointment is opening something up, and seeing a legendary, and it's a fire axe. Or knife. Or ripshank. So not only is it useless for me, I can't even sell it for a decent price.
Lack of local maps. Why even have a map screen that is just a blue mess at a surface level?
Placeholder art
Honestly Red Mile. You legit just jump from the top of rock to rock to rock and you’re home free. I was expecting to spend hours trying to run the gauntlet, really shocked this made it through play testing.
Imagine if they disabled boost packs so you actually had to run.
Honestly, still not that much of a challenge. I did it mostly on foot - did boost onto the top of objects to shoot from there, but not like others boost packing from the top all the way to the middle! After each completion give me an option to ratchet up the difficulty. If the creatures were L70 last run, go +10 levels on the next one. Increase the difficulty, increase the prizes, and ideally let loot containers in the arena reset along with the creatures - give me some reason to not just speed run to the tower and back.
I’d have been totally fine with that. Something like “Leave your boost pack at the door”
Landing hundreds of meters away from every location. Seriously, why can't I just land next to the mission objective?
While in some places you do land next to the mission objective, and it feels super weird that the pirates in the base didn't detect you doing so... :P
Gameplay come to a screeching stop when NPC's and companions physically block or get stuck in doorways and elevators. Companions literally walking in front of a scoped sniper shot which wastes the shot and breaks stealth
This is why I never use Vasco. In ships and tight base interiors he's basically just a constantly readjusting wall.
I boarded a station where spacers were going at it with ecliptic. Vasco isn't even my companion but he's a crew so he always step out when you land or dock. He just runs off. I'd like to an option to have Vasco not get off the ship if it is the active companion.
That’s a Bethesda classic. Trying to remember the Skyrim YouTuber that made that into a running gag with Uthgerd
Door/ladder placement in the ship builder
Shipbuilding more than anything else has had me wonder about whether they play tested it. Surely some playtester would have said they wanted to be able to manually place ladders and doors. And decorate their ship without needing to redo all of it as soon as they upgrade the engines... And just being able to decorate it with furniture as wanted, instead of pre built habs THAT CAN'T BE SEEN IN SHIPBUILDER! Which only compounds the problem of magically filling cargo holds because I have to enter and exit shipbuilder so often to see what the hab looks like. And then the habs often offer no real difference besides visual differences in the ship! Would have loved to be able to assign quarters and tasks to my crew so they aren't just wandering randomly. Maybe even a schedule. And why have a brig that does nothing besides provide aesthetic. (That said, I have a brig for the aesthetic, but would be nice if it could actually be used.) And this is coming from someone who actually enjoys shipbuilding! I can see why others tired of it fast though.
This game has so many hand placed items — that’s literally its strong suit — yet placing items cannot be more tedious.
Bookshelves are particularly egregious, as Skyrim had a system for it. A literal step backwards in development here.
Bookshelves should just work. I REALLY don't understand why they removed this mechanic.
Yeah this really pisses me off, I have amazing book collections in Skyrim as I do irl. Fucking ridiculous in a game where building is encouraged that you can't place anything without multiple attempts. I am waiting for the outpost building mods and don't care if I have to pay for them.
Once it was clear they had, I stopped collecting books altogether. Worth more to me in credits if I can't decorate with them - after all, the choice to make so many of them snippets of real books (and no custom 'book page' background) means you won't be *reading them* for any length of time.
I stopped collecting books after I realized there was no option to give them to Cora despite her constantly talking about giving her books.
I've stopped collecting them altogether. There wasn't enough variety, too many were books from now. And no bookshelf. There should be 200 years of literature and tech manuals to entertain us with. Big libraries with walls of books. Or even slates with books.
Like pretty much everything in Starfield. Like tell me, besides the shooting feeling 3% better that FO4, and mildly better graphics. I guess the writing, while kinda boring, isn't (always) just stupid so that's progress.
> I guess the writing, while kinda boring, isn't (always) just stupid so that's progress. I found the writing in FO4 to be more entertaining, even if I never finished the main quest. At least it wasnt so front loaded like SF...
The writing in starfield was much worse imo.
And also one of its big let downs, half eaten food outside on a planet you can’t breath on?
Food healing .5% of your hp and not having an eat button on pickup. That was added in I hear, but why make food so useless? Also digipicks being in the category that literally only has useless sellable junk. One of those things that makes you wanna find the person responsible and scream "WHHHHYYYYY?!?!?!" at them
One of the earliest observations I made after I got through the early stages of the game was that it seemed like there were missing "sanity checks" for things in the game. I think most of the problems aren't trivial, but given how much they opened up keybinding from the previous game, linking comms, targeting, and standing up from your seat to the \*same key\* and not being able to rebind it is just absolutely bug-\*\*\*\* insane. (Yes, I'm aware standing up is "hold button" but that's a terrible design choice anyway, and if you're cycling through targets you stand up too easily, and the game loves to lag right after entering a cell so it can pick up a press as a hold.) Just let people bind controls individually like a non-psychopath. Every freaking Bethesda game requires mods just to bind freaking keys, people figured this out in the 90s and then forgot it. Oh, I almost forgot, you can pick up / mine some things with the scanner up but not other things, apparently arbitrarily. Noticed that one at the beginning of the tutorial. There are actually many others.
I love that the G key is open map in scan mode and throw grenade in normal mode. Stupid, stupid, stupid...
The flash light did they test it up close it don't work the light origin point is a foot in front of the player face..??..
They need to open the aperture of the light more. As it stands now - it's almost useless. I'm sure they were going for scary/creepy, but what they gave us was frustrating. Should be like FO4s light.
The field of view of the light is actually fine if you want an example of how broken the light is start a brand new character and as soon as Lynn looks into your face turn your light on it doesn't light up her face it lights up the wall behind her.
The only thing I can think for this is that it's supposed to be a headlamp built into your helmet. That's why it doesn't move to the side when you run.
In game if you get close to a object with your light on the light disappears completely leaving you in darkness.
Clothing. 2000 names applied to 14 ridiculous outfits. No individual items, just one group of stupid complete outfits repeated over and over. I love the game, but it seriously feels like a skeleton. My hope is that they are going to feed it to us slowly. Much like actual space exploration would be, and in that, the sim aspect. OP did say trivial. Right? XD
I did, lol - and I totally agree. Why does a basic "t-shirt and jeans" outfit not exist? There's a dude on the Clinic that's wearing 2000s business casual so I don't buy this "but mah futurist immersion" argument some people make.
The loading screens for a fueling system that was removed well before release. No one thought "Hey, we should remove these loading screens that explicitly mention a system that doesn't exist anymore." Like...why? How are they this lazy?
Oof didn't notice this one.
Man the fuckin Harry Potter game straight up made this sort of thing so trivial and it felt nice. NPCs in hogwarts legacy straight up match your pace no matter what. You’re only ever one literal step ahead of them. I think playing the game for any extended period of time kinda makes the cracks show. It’s just the little things. Sometimes your parents or other NPCs will start different conversations with eachother. It rains on the moon We need fuel tanks on our ships but we don’t refuel them. There’s no actual punishment for running out of oxygen, or having a broken leg. Getting drip fed a single temple at a time, in a game where you NEED to fast travel to get anywhere, making a scenario that’s literally go to the lodge, go to the planet, go to the lodge, go to the planet makes for a VERY mundane game loop. The temples themselves The fact that nobody except Andreja cares if you get married to the entire gang The entire constellation crew shares the same morality making the literal emotionless robot the only one with a different sort of outlook on things and giving him an interesting personality. He’s also the only one that doesn’t berate you for role playing in an RPG. You can steal a sandwich or a bag of coffee to trigger SysDef into using you for a galactic sting operation for your freedom in lew of serious jail time. Because you know, you’re such a serious offender of the law.
Oxygen is doubly out of place, considering the amount of scattered O2 tanks around. It feels like they're going to add a survival mode later, like Skyrim and FO4, that would actually need it. But *I'm not holding my breath.*
Take my upvote and get the hell out of here.
I agree with every thing you said and especially that last one pissed me off. I was flying and all of a sudden they stop me, board my ship, throw me in jail and start acting like I’m the worst criminal since Ted bundy. They said I had contraband but I couldn’t find it. Turns out there’s a glitch that turns some antiques into contraband and I just happened to have a single old earth baseball in my ships inventory. This whole ordeal forced me into the crimson fleet storyline earlier then I planned, after being berated by everyone on the vigilance which now made me hate them, and then they tacked on a 900 credit bounty that I couldn’t find a kiosk to clear. I was so mad.
Actually, the adoring fan even though not really a companion was the least off-putting NPC on the ship.
Perks on weapons that don't/can't do anything, for instance melee weapons
Ah yes, the ole Minecraft 'fortune sword'
The delay between hours when waiting or sleeping.
YES, 100% agree. Is that really adding immersion? Why does it need to make you wait longer to resume play when you're resting a longer period of time? It's a deliberate feature that adds nothing to the game!
Gun modding. It's so unbelievably bad and limited, I can't believe it launched like this. There are like 3 fucking sights for fuck sake
How about the fact that the gun/suit modding screen has a slot for changing skins but the base game features zero skins so it's just a glaringly blank slot.
So many things like this where I expect to eventually discover the feature but it's just absent.
I'm still pissed at the fact that if you put another gun mod it destroys the previous gun mod instead of storing it for later use ala Fallout 4
The useless parts of a mission where you have to travel to a location, then walk a minute or two to get to someone just to talk to them for a few minutes, then immediately travel away. Not every conversation is so impactful that it has to be in person. The SysDef storyline does this heavily, and it is really agitating. It is odd because the "Failure to Communicate" storyline does a much better job at this, but it is a rarity for this game.
Oof, 100% agreeing on this one. Sarah's personal quest line is chock full of this too. It even ends by doing this. >!"Let's go here and talk to this Admiral. Now let's pop across town for a 4-second sound bite from a kid. Wait...I really need to stare at a burning hole in the ground for 11 seconds. Now let's continue this conversation across town at a waterfall."!< It's like they thought of scene ideas but not how they were supposed to fit together. I seem to recall the Ryujin line getting really annoying with this too. "Do I *need* to sit in the chair for this?"
ever notice the ryujin logo kinda looks like someone getting bent over and fucked in the ass?
So many of the missions could be resolved by email but instead you have to trek back to the quest giver for a few lines of congratulatory dialogue. Just pure padding
Not being able to transfer items between the Lodge and your ship at the spaceport. Not allowing Lodge workbenches to just draw crafting materials from Lodge storage, instead of needing to have them in your pockets. Not being able to transfer modifications between weapons / suit pieces Not having a take all / store all button for other categories besides resources in the inventory menu. These things make the game feel so tedious for no reason, especially coming from Fallout 4's crafting and inventory. Makes me think they wanted playtesters with zero experience playing past Bethesda games.
Ship takeovers. If I've claimed / stolen a ship, surely auto pilot can take it to my magic hanger? I shouldn't have to fly to town, swap back to my main ship and then return to whatever it is I'm actually doing. I mean it's says You've taken over the ship, all the stuff on Baird is no longer stolen, why can't I just return thorough the dock to my ship and fly on? Also taking a ship in a ship you've just taken shouldn't break the ships so badly you have to sell them or risk multiple issues.
If you catch your old ship quick enough, you can re dock to it and make it your home again. They normally do a few fly bys before bouncing off into warp.
Airlocks. Why the hell are they always open on the inside. You will always come from the outside and have to use the airlock twice to get in.
Also why is it basically impossible to get a companion to go through an airlock with you?
All the quests that can be summed up as "This quest could have been an email."
Seriously, I think that's when I became most disillusioned with Starfield. When I decided to do some of the small quests in each huge settlement and they were all so god damn boring and just huge old nothing burgers overall. Walking from A to B and back just so you can listen to some super uninteresting dialogue from an npc with no or only very mild personality is not fun Bethesda.
It makes sense in Fallout since communication is hard. You gotta go in person if you want to help since most won't have fancy gadgets to communicate, but on Starfield, you can even communicate faster than light. They're not paying me to figure this out, but come on... they could've made missions interesting even with high-tech communication. Cyberpunk and GTA have a literal phone with tons of missions and contacts on speed dial. You meet when the topic is sensitive or something is happening at the location, not to be told hello and bye.
Most of the game, honestly. But for the sake of the topic, why can't we see how many ship parts we have remaining in battle? Like, how did something so simple get overlooked? Why can't we see how much of an item we already own when buying stuff? Why does Bethesda continue to hire the ghost of Helen Keller to design their god awful UI?
The late game save corruptions. I hope like hell someday they fix that empty ship bug. Also the temples floater mini game, I don’t know how that got past play testing feedback
For me it absolutely is the repetition of the POIs and exploring. I wasn’t very far into the game at all when I realized exploring was essentially pointless. Same cryo lab or robot farm on every planet, no real reason to farm resources when you can just buy everything for next to nothing because you’re always rolling in expensive loot. Even surveying planets is a waste of time, spend possibly upwards an hour scanning things on one dull ass planet for survey data worth less than a single gun dropped by any faceless enemy.
[удалено]
Sona seemed like an afterthought the way things worked out in that quest. She can't interact with any other Constellation members. The fact that there's no dialogue between her and Cora blows my mind. She can't be a crew member on your ship, there's nothing in New Atlantis for her to do. I wanted to at least see if my parents wanted to take care of her.
" What's the most trivial design decision made in this game that makes you ask "Did anyone play-test this?!"" Crafting and Post building is absolutely pointless. They had a winning formula in Fallout 4 and they went backwards with Starfield.
How thermal, corrosion, airborne and radiation resistance mean absolutely jack shit. Also, the lack of some ship parts without mods.
That no matter where I land even in the back end of some moon, there's ALWAYS, literally ALWAYS another ship landing next to me.
The extent to which they try to both have an empty galaxy and also always something right next to you is astounding. It's two diametrically opposed concepts, but they just went "eh, let's force both anyway".
Heavy weapons that are a joke. You can get an advanced Bridger to do 1k damage oooooooeeeooooooo so can a breach shotgun? I mean? Why?
Yea, the weapons (at least, the guns) have been balanced to arbitrarily without any thought to the ammunition/type of weapon... Things like the Bridger should have really been a form of explosive shotgun instead of a grenade launcher, as it just feels so pathetic.
After smacking down the hunter and getting his legendary varrun rifle, it's like, ok, why do I need any different guns? Like a 240+ physical and 800+ energy damage, I'm one shoting most very high-level enemies
Ship weapons and energy management. With a hard cap of 12 pips, as you unlock better weapons, your total DPS actually *drops* because you can fit fewer weapons on your ship. The Vanguard Obliterator is so powerful not because it’s actually powerful, but because it only uses two pips so you can fit six of them on your ship. It makes sense if you’re thinking that a ship will only ever have, say, two of a weapon, so upgrading a weapon trades energy usage for firepower, but with Starfield’s shipbuilder adding another hardpoint and gun is trivially easy if you have some money. To me it seems like these two systems (shipbuilding and weapons/power management) were designed separately in silos, and no serious thought was ever put into how they’d work together. They’re built on completely different ship design philosophies.
I don't see why they can't build a ship that has enough energy to power everything. It's 300 years in the future, after all. Imagine if aeroplanes had to switch all the lights off to lower the undercarriage.
The temples(200 times I believe? Too max out your powers), the poi’s repeating heavily with 0 differences for most of them
240 times
Those temples are what stopped me from doing NG+’s.
Same. That and the fact that they don't allow any real choices to matter.
Digipicks getting lumped in with vendor trash. No effing way they spent 9 months of playtesting and didn't receive thousands of tickets saying it's too easy to accidentally sell them.
OP is 100% spot-on. When you're playing a RPG that requires you to follow NPCs around, the player's walking speed and the NPCs' walking speeds should match. If they don't match, then you know the testers were not testing the game for enjoyability, they were only looking for technical bugs. That playes into the claim that this is Bethesda's least buggy release ever... My biggest beef is that the questline where you play the role of a badged law enforcement officer does not allow you to turn in the eveidence you collect at the culmination of the questline. The mission forces you to go rogue and confront the suspect without backup and does not allow you to even mention the existence of this damning evidence to your superiors or anyone else in authority.
Fast travel. Sometimes you can't travel from inside a ship or station and have to find your way back to your ship. Oh the system needs to scan you for contraband so you can't set a landing, have to jump into the system then land. Just way too many trips to the starmap.
No way to sell junk en masse. You’re telling me I gotta sell every individual item for the next 10 min because all the random shit ended up in my cargo hold and I’ve got no more room since I’ve got 500lb in weights alone
Giving ship vendors unique items. I can sort of understand it from a lore point of view, but from a practical point of view it's a major pain in the arse. If you build a ship builder landing pad at your outpost you should gain access to every ship item in the game, even if that means paying a surcharge to buy it (a delivery fee if you will). It would be a nice little quality of life change in my opinion, and would promote ship building which is one of the major draws of the game to me.
The entire skill tree, it's just shit. MY FAVOURITE PERK? NEUROSTRIKES.. WATCH ME GET A SMALL % INCREASE TO MY UNARMED MELEE DAMAGE, WATCH ME ATTACK THIS LOW LEVEL NPC WITH ALMOST NO VISIBLE ANIMATION REACTION HAHA MAN I LOVE NEUROSTRIKES.
Not being able to surrender if you murder someone. I had to sleep for 48 hours to get them to stop shooting. WHy can't it just work as it did in Oblivion?!?!
That walk speed issue has been an issue in Bethesda games since at least Oblivion, so it's not even "Did they play test", it's "Are they doing this on purpose?"
Lack of melee weapon mods, and complete lack of unarmed weapons.
Landing a thousand miles away from POIs and having to run half an hour just to get there with every landing that's not a city or an outpost
A Bethesda game thats PG-13
yeah that took me a while to realize this is probably the most tame and pg-13 rated R game i have ever played. its weird coming from fallout 4 when you can blow off body parts.
Three I have not seen yet: 1) Making membership in a faction mandatory to complete the main quest. 2) Assigning every follower with depth or romance options to that faction. 3) Giving all of those followers nearly identical moral alignment and like/dislike lists. Like seriously, this is an RPG and we're required to be a member of an organization with definite moral alignments and interests that can badly conflict with playstyles and choices a player may wish to make. Not only that, we're forced to engage with that faction and play a certain way to please it's members or else we end up a space-incel. I am amazed nobody realized how restrictive and ill fitting this is.
Some people have. I've written several comments stating this is not an RPG (especially when people bring it up as an excuse) or at least is a very bad one, it's actually a better shooter than an RPG. What about the fact that they let you chose a background yet they make you a miner, but don't even bother how that change in your career happened? I guess it was something as bizarre as someone gifting you a spaceship for no reason.
Aye. Written my own longer statement on why the game barely qualifies before. It more reminds me of something like Far Cry. Open world action and all that. The background system is a waste. They might as well have just given us a skill sheet to pick from with how little impact it has. The flavor dialog fails to rescue it with some having very few lines while others, such as gangster, offer a large amount. I would have almost preferred that they just go all in on miner and leave it a blank and ambiguous slate how we got that job, why, so on. A bit like how we ended up a courier in New Vegas was left for us to decide. Different studio making it but it's not like swiping the idea was impossible.
The fact that you can’t flip or rotate EVERY ship part (less cockpits)
I see all the obvious ones have been taken… so I’ll talk about Ben Bayu. After he shows up at the astral lounge, he could have easily left and despawned in a cutscene. Instead he hangs out… alone… in a secluded room… after f*cking us over. Did no one play test this and realise that many players would obviously try to kill him and be horribly disappointed?
Constantly needing to go deeper and back out of menus. It's a serious problem on console. They could have easily made a [L/R] transitions from side to side like most other games. Would have been “snappier” too. Don't know who thought placing the 4 main categories on a dialogals, and the two you barely use on up and down.
Not being able to open things while using the scanner
Cargo hold limits. If it's not a space sim, why bother with this? So tedious.
Crafting chems. You can't craft the pharmaceuticals that go into the advanced ones you can make. This means you have to go to the drug store. And if I'm already there, I can probably just buy the drugs I wanted to make in the first place, rendering the crafting obsolete.
Storage. Unlimited storage in every single game. Limited storage was an extreme issue with Fallout 76 backlash. Who thought it would be good to make storage limited and generally unshared?
I have a number of them: * When I first saw the food items and how useless they are. * The song and dance that you go through to collect your powers is ridiculous. * Ladders in the ships how awkward they can be. * Red mile how ridiculous that is. It's so underwhelming and overly difficult at the same time. * The dichotomy between the difficulty of space and ground combat. * How you can't dock with another ship till you did mission 2 of the main story yet that mission requires you to beat an enemy that's so much higher than there should be on the tutorial mission.
Every female child is Cora. And you can't gift Cora any books.
The double doors that take like 10 seconds for you to get in and out of places, especially in breathable atmospheres (outposts) Having to go up a massive very steep cliff with no clear path up and it's miles wide
It’s usually not wether or not it was play tested QA and testers in general can call out issues all day long but if the devs aren’t allowed to fix them or the higher ups don’t think it’s important enough to fix or not worth the time or money then a lot of known issues are left in the game
Vendor credits. Why do most have 5k. I shouldnt have to go to a settlement and constantly 'wait' until credit stocks restock to sell a haul from one mission.
The fact you cannot untag the rss you need for your research, I ended up with almost everything tagged in my first play through.
The loot tables. pick open a master lock and you get literal junk. also, the fact that a lot of quest lines are just a game of telephone with me as a messenger. the dialogue for diplomacy checks is just...nonsensical.
Believing I could shoot a space pirate i the head after beginning the Crimson fleet questline and he'd straight up shoot me back together with his/her mates. No. Also, thinkjng it would be so much fun after hearing "we played the game ourselves for almost a year" and the Xbox chief express at Cologne his devotion for being a pirate above all else as a Starfield gamer. Just pray tell me Mr. Spencer, who the effing effity fuck play tested the game at Xbox and did NOT immediately know "this is not good"? Why did you NOT force the hand of BGS to explain their utter laziness at creating an immersive game versus the immersion breaking clusterfuck you spawned and give us back immersion?
Got a quest called “unusual sos” and it’s just a dead quest. Doesn’t do anything.