Starfield Trip Report (Patreon)

SHORT VERSION UP AT THE TOP HERE SINCE I KNOW PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW ABOUT BUGS AND PERFORMANCE: In the 20-ish hours I’ve spent with the game so far, entirely on PC, I’d say the game has run quite well with very few hitches. In terms of bug-type stuff I tried to talk to a lady who was moving and she got stuck on a chair and kept wiggling, causing the camera to freak out when it tried to cut to a close up with her for the conversation. The convo went off just fine. I haven’t had it crash and haven’t run into any “broken doors” or other progress blockers that I remember seeing in the day one versions of Fallout 4. That said, there’s there was a strange man standing on my ship who, when activated, talked to me like we were just randomly meeting in a town somewhere. And then he stood on my ship with nothing to say for quite a long time. He eventually vanished? If that was the intended flow for that moment, it's a bad moment... so I have to assume this stranger is meant to randomly approach you in a town or something. Either way, the game hasn’t felt especially buggy in the time I’ve spent with it so far. That’s been refreshing, for sure.

OK, with that out of the way…

I had hoped to have a more complete look at Starfield prior to its release, but I ended up getting my hands on the game earlier this week, so I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to play it yet. I have some thoughts on how and why this situation went this way, but that’s probably a story for another day. At this point I’ve put somewhere around 20 hours into Starfield, which both seems like barely any time and also enough time to start to see how the game handles skills, space flight, ship-to-ship combat, planetary exploration, the ground game, inventory, weapons, armor, companions, and so on.

About the only thing that I’ve been presented with so far that I haven’t tried is building an outpost, which is mostly because I don’t know if I’ve found any planets that are rich enough in resources to warrant having an outpost on them… but maybe I’m missing something and I’m just supposed to plop my first one down wherever? Anyway, let’s talk about Starfield, a game that will feel extremely familiar in most ways, with just enough difference to it to feel like the next step forward from a team that has been making These Kinds of Games for a very, very long time.

The opening of the game feels faster than Skyrim’s intro and plops you into the middle of a mining operation for what feels like a few minutes before you’re suddenly Extremely Important, so you’re whisked away to Alpha Centauri to join up with Constellation, a small, well-funded group of explorers who are currently fixated on a mysterious artifact you just pulled out of a mine. From there, you’re a member of the team, you’re given a ship, and the rest is up to you. The main quest has you pursuing more and more artifacts like the one you found at the start. But the game also has plenty of the faction quests and the side stuff you’d expect from a Bethesda Game Studios release. Sometimes these quests are full-on given to you by quest givers, sometimes you’ll hear people talking as you walk past and the mystery they’re discussing, like “why are there so many brownouts in this specific part of town, anyway?” are just added to your activity list.

Starfield stops to tutorialize for you whenever you encounter something new, like ship combat, or trying to figure out how its map works. I’ll be straight with you… I’m not 100% sure that I’m reading the maps correctly, but the game is very generous with fast travel, letting you initiate it from your quest list. In some safe havens, like Constellation’s HQ, for example, you can pretty much fast travel to another planet from the menu without having to first make your way back to your ship, plot a course, lift-off, blah blah blah. It’s efficient to the point where last night, after hours of play, I finally saw the grav jump squence from the cockpit for what I think might be the very first time. It’s handy and convenient, though I guess I’d say the downside to having snappy fast travel is that it makes the universe feel kind of small, so far.

On foot, you’ll recognize wide swaths of Starfield as “Another Game From The Elder Scrolls and Fallout Folks.” NPCs show up to say… well, most of them don’t have much to say, really. But you’ll get the same type of dialogue options, including some based on your character’s starting traits and skills. You can attempt to persuade people in some situations, like a spot where I was able to talk some bank robbers into throwing down their weapons and letting their hostages go. Persuasion is done on a point system this time around rather than a flat skill check. This gives you multiple things to say to a target, each with a different rate of success and each success contributing a different number of points. If you earn enough points before running out of turns, you win.

While we’re talking about skill check minigames, it has a new take on lockpicking as well, which is more of a little puzzle than simply trying to find the right spot for a lockpick. I think these new takes on old systems are really neat, but they also take a lot longer than simply pushing a button and hoping for the best or feeling out the right spot on a lock. So, at higher skill levels, you’re given benefits that help speed this up a bit.

I really like the way skills work in Starfield. You have a set of standard categories, like combat traits, science, and so on. From there, each categories is broken into tiers, so you can’t spend a skill point on a second-tier skill until you’ve spent four points in the category. Standard stuff. But also, each skill has four levels. The base unlock is the first level. But before you can upgrade to the second level of a skill, you’ll need to use that skill and complete a little achievement-style challenge. For example, you can’t get the third level of the ballistic weapons upgrade until you’ve killed something like 50 enemies with ballistic weapons. On top of that, you’ll still have to spend a skill point to get that extra level. So getting deep into a specific ability requires you to actually use that ability, which is cool! So far I’ve found there to be interesting choices on the skill tree, though most of them are pretty obvious things like “hold more weight” and “have more health” or “ability to open more advanced locks.” Part of this is because of the game’s different item upgrade options.

Provided you spec into the appropriate categories, you can build and fit accessories onto weapons, spacesuits, helmets, and so on. The gun upgrades read like some very Call of Duty-like stuff, like a barrel that increases range at the expense of aim-down-sights speed, or grips that increase hip-fire accuracy at the expense of ADS handling and such. You’ll also find weapons and gear with these sorts of mods already on them, which is nice in case you don’t feel like investing the time and resources into building that stuff yourself. To be honest, at this early-ish point in the game I’m not 100% sure that the crafting system is worth the effort it takes to get all the resources together.

But, then, maybe that’s the point of the outpost system. Planets have biomes and a variety of resources, such as aluminum, water, or cobalt, can be found on the surface. While you can mine out deposits with your trusty mining laser, my understanding is that you’ll want to plop down outposts that essentially mine that stuff for you on a regular basis. From the tutorials I’ve seen so far you’ll be able to build cargo links that connect your outpost inventories across space, which sounds like a must unless you want to keep commuting back and forth to pick up your goods. I haven’t pulled the trigger on this part of the game in part because I disliked it so much in Fallout 4, but also they take a lot of resources to build, and I haven’t wanted to just blow a bunch of time mining.

So far I’ve found space combat to be relatively simple, but still satisfying. Ships can have three weapons on them, and by default you’ll get lasers to use on shields, ballistic cannons for hulls, and lock-on missiles for… well, for whenever you’re locked onto someone. All three weapons recharge on their own, assuming they’re powered. Your ship has a set amount of power to distribute and you can assign that power across a handful of systems. So you can put more power to your shields to keep them up during more intense battles or put more power into your lasers so they’ll recharge faster. It’s a bit like the similar system used in X-Wing, so Starfield feels like it’s in good company here. Of course, ship upgrades let you get pretty wild, too.

For me it started with better weapons. But once I got better weapons I realized that the increase in power drain was keeping me from firing those weapons as often as I should. So clearly I needed a reactor upgrade. But once I got the reactor upgrade I realized that the increase in weight might make me less maneuverable in combat. So that led to an engine upgrade. Before too long my cargo hold will fill up and I’ll need to put another one on. From there… well, I’ll probably have to start thinking about buying a new ship or bolting a bunch of new stuff onto my existing one. I’ve only tinkered with the ship builder because those components get expensive fast, but it seems easy to wrap your head around, extremely expressive, and quite powerful. It’ll be cool to see what players come up with after the game’s release, and it’d be neat if the game had a way for players to share ship designs or something like that.

Much like the studio’s previous work, I’m finding more compelling story threads in the side stuff than in the main quest so far. One of the first faction missions available to you sends you off to a far-flung outpost only to discover it’s been ravaged by some kind of alien creature that is still stalking the area. While you can attempt to take this thing out head-on, you can also sneak around the base and reactivate a number of turrets to get some much-needed help. This sets off a chain of quests around the idea of… hey, where did that horrific alien beast come from, anyway, and are we in way more danger from stuff like this in the future? What I’ve seen so far certainly has its share of bone-stock characters pointing you in the direction of the next map marker, but there are also plenty of good characters, often with small parts to play.

All that is to say that I’ve had a good time with Starfield so far. While the main story takes a little time to pick up, it’s interesting enough to keep me engaged while the meatier side stuff has been where I’m starting to spend more of my time. So far I’ve only seen a couple of weird bugs and, on PC, anyway, it’s been running great. I intend to spend more time with it, hopefully the rest of the game is at least as good as this is.