I would have appreciated having to deal with dumb-named “Shotgun Ammo”, “Laser Ammo” and “Rifle Ammo” instead of the bizarre numbering in each one of them. In this case, I don’t think less world-building would have been an issue. Nothing too confusing, with the exception of an unnecessary amount of poorly-labeled ammo you have to take notes of, in order to properly known what to buy whenever you reach an armory. The combat was more akin to The Outer Worlds than, say, Fallout, being more of a straightforward first-person shooter with RPG elements in this regard. The combat and exploration, while on foot, were also good. That just goes to show that, as it stands, it’s already pretty good. Bear in mind, against common sense in a game like this, I played Starfield without any single performance-enhancing or bug-fixing mod. That being said, the performance, loading times, field of view, draw distance, all worked well enough, way more than I could have ever expected from a game developed by Bethesda. This isn’t the kind of game where more than 60fps would be necessary by any means, so having the option to lock it up to 60fps, for instance, would have helped ensure less framerate pacing hiccups. I do think that the lack of a framerate cap option was a mistake, however. The very strong art style still managed to hold things up pretty well. That would occasionally result in some harsh resolution drops, to Nintendo Switch levels in some instances, but we were getting fluid gameplay at the other end. By using the included dynamic resolution and FSR features, Starfield was constantly changing its resolution in order to ensure a, more often than not, stable 60 frames per second. There were a few issues related to the visuals, but the game was, for the most part, running extremely well. Remember Fallout 76‘s launch? That’s what I was fearing. I get that I shouldn’t exactly be praising a game for doing the absolute bare minimum, but I was afraid Starfield was going to cause my rig to internally combust. You read that right, no crashes or glitches or anything of the sort, on a Bethesda-made game, at launch. To top it off, in a shocking turn of events, no glitches. But I was out there, making my own adventure in the stars, in a somewhat immersive manner. My first few hours in Starfield were spent away from the critical path, just exploring nearby worlds, trying to rack up some money via No Man’s Sky-like research quests (very vague, very boring), attacking pirate strongholds, and struggling with some poorly explained mechanics. How would Bethesda deliver on the sky-high expectations set by the fans and themselves? Would the game even be playable at a decent state at launch? Where would the problems show up, for there were obviously going to be loads of them? Well, gather your synthetic whiskey juicebox, load up your starship, and let’s go on a journey. A game made by Bethesda’s inner development team, known for making ambitious, but very buggy games. A game produced by Todd Howard, known for occasionally over-hyping the hell out of the games he makes ( Fallout 76 was supposed to have “sixteen times the detail”, whatever that was supposed to mean). The Outer Worlds came extremely close, offering truly astounding gameplay, world-building, and storytelling in what was admittedly a smaller scale of a world to explore. Not exactly bad things to do when the map at your disposal is immense, but it’s still not the kind of space adventure we were promised. Sadly, in most cases, we’d be limited to explore vast amounts of nothing in one, or just deliver something from one place to another in other. Games like No Man’s Sky, Elite: Dangerous, and the never-to-be-fully-released Star Citizen promised us of a galaxy-sized sandbox we’d be able to explore and do whatever we wanted, depending on the role we’d want to take in their respective universe.
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