Starfield Omnibus Thread

[odessasteps]

To go along with today's update

[NikoBaltimore]

My friend is huge into these types of games and was curious about how he'd like it.  I personally never played these games before but since it's on GamePass for his sake decided to give this a go.  And to my surprise I fucking love the game.  After sinking in a few hours I immediately told him this is a keeper and he's since gotten the game.  Though it became immediately apparent that while I have an idea of what to do I also don't know a damn thing.  I'm also not a fan of the traits and picked and if I had my way would love to do a new game (without touching what I have so far) and start with better traits.  But even if I don't go a fraction as far into it as y'all will I'm still having tons of fun.

 

[RIPPA]

I keep thinking "clearly there has to be a cap on save slots"

So... 140+ saves in and I don't think there is a cap on save slots

[odessasteps]

I don't like having more 3 or 4 saves. Pron goes back to when you were lucky to have that many. 

[The Man Known as Dan]

I ended up playing till 7 in the morning yesterday. I was completing a personal quest for a companion who might not be revealed yet, as well as continuing the Vanguard story, and I literally voiced to myself "Man, this game is really fucking good" like 5 times because it just needed to be said, even it was me to the void. So I'll post it here too: This game is real fucking good.

Joined Craig on the "having done the Mantis mission" train. Loved it loved it loved it. Enjoy the Razorleaf, but I've invested so so much into the Frontier I just can't change it out as my regular ship. I'll eventually upgrade it to the way I want, but well, I've turned Frontier into such a beastly machine I can't change now.

On other ship news, I got into a fight with a Va'ruun Eulogy with my Frontier, and managed not only to defeat it, but capture it. That thing was a behemoth and had a crew of at least 25, and I barely got out with my life.... but I did. And that ship is a machine, can't believe I took it down with so little ship weaponry investment. 

 

Edited September 13, 2023 by The Man Known as Dan

[Death From Above]

Honestly the more I play this game the better it gets. This game is everything I needed it to be.

[RIPPA]

I did a random fetch it quest today that was fucking awesome and it makes me chuckle that folks might never do it because this game is fucking massive

[Craig H]

This game is so fucking good. My release date was extended to the end of October so I have a lot more time to do, well, nothing? Worked on some resumes and did some LinkedIn stuff and then figured I might as well play some Starfield for a bit. Like DFA said, this game is basically everything I had hoped it would be. As someone who preordered NMS and played that enough, I really appreciate a lot of the time saving/fast travel in this game. Of course I have my own wish list of things that I hope get implemented, but Hello Games has been updating NMS for years and years now that I'm not counting on Bethesda to do the same. While I do like the fast travel you can do, there are times where I wish I could play it a bit more like NMS and just book it to another planet within the same system. I still think flying down into the planet and flying across the planet to find a landing spot is fucking cool. Does it entirely ruin the Starfield experience because that isn't in it and maybe never will be? Nah, not really. The huge advantage this has over NMS are all of the quests you can do. I still haven't found anything that is that funny in this game, at least intentionally funny anyway, but I can't even count how many times I just got taken over by wanderlust on a planet and just kept running to one undiscovered location after another. You just never know what you're going to find or fall into. Like, before leaving Akila, I decided I would check out a couple locations and I'm used to most structures being overrun with pirates or crazy robots. So the first structure I go to is a farm and there's robots everywhere. I immediately pull out my gun and get ready for a fight...but I don't pull aggro on any of them. They're all docile workers. They're just doing what they're programmed to do. That was just really cool to me and let me know that not every building I go to is going to have batshit insane robots and turrets. I learned more about the farm and how they were being attacked by bandits at a location that was pretty far away. The part where I wish this was more like NMS is that it would have been nice to drop a waypoint on the area those guys were at, fast travel to my ship, fly across the planet to that location, land, and then take everyone out. Instead it was running along for a long while. The neat thing was that along the way you're seeing wildlife attack each other or flee from aggressive enemies or gang up together on an enemy alien that's aggressive. So while I had to hoof it to where I wanted to get to, I saw shit I didn't even think I would see.

And Rippa is right and it's another plus for this game. I have fallen ass backwards into so many little or interesting quests that it doesn't make sense to mention them all here. You just sort of hope someone else finds it too and if they don't then they're likely going to discover something you yourself may never find. It also means a lot for replayability that if and when I start over, and I'm already thinking about playing a diplomat or scientist, that there's just so much in the game that aside from the big things, it's still going to feel new. And even the big quests will feel different because I'm going to play them differently.

I totally understand how this game might now grab some people and how they lean more towards BG3 or Tears of the Kingdom as their game of the year, but man, this game grabbed me more than I thought it would. I can't say how nice and satisfying it is to wait years for a game, get it, and have it deliver in so many ways I hoped it would.

[Death From Above]

Spoiler

I've done quests for Walter mostly today. Got to one where you help Stroud-Eklund design a new ship, you get a free copy of what you wind up with at the end. All well and good but it's a Class C monster and I don't even have the piloting certification for it yet, but definitely something to work towards now. I think because the piloting skill hard gates your ability to access higher class ships it's probably a mandatory upgrade for most characters.

 

[RIPPA]

You know - if you are gonna say something is an “abandoned Ecliptic base” then it shouldn’t be fucking crawling with Ecliptic

Also - would it kill Bethesda to make one or two places be only like three rooms

[J.T.]

Apparently some Sony fanboys are crying foul and shouting the mantra, "BETHESDA LIED~!  YOU CANNOT EXPLORE ALL OF PLANETS BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO LAND ON GAS GIANTS~!!!"

Did these mother fuckers not go to school or something?  Saturn's atmosphere is a gigantic hurricane filled with diamonds.  If that shit did not kill you, the gravity or the radiation would.  Watch some Kurgesagt videos or something before you say dumb shit, assholes.

Just for them, I hope someone creates a mod that allows you to fly into the atmo of a gas giant and die immediately.  Screen goes black and all you can hear is the sound of creaking metal.

46 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

Also - would it kill Bethesda to make one or two places be only like three rooms

It would not be a Bethesda game if there were not a hut somewhere out in the wilderness with like five sub-basements.  It is like the fucking architect of the Overlook Hotel from Kubrick's The Shining also designed every structure in every Bethesda game.

Edited September 14, 2023 by J.T.

[Shadow]

I did Sarah's questline last night and it was really good. If all of them are this good I will have to romance everyone to see their stories. I'm lucky that I had a great stock of healing items because the creatures there hit pretty damn hard. It would probably help if I remembered that I have powers now but that will have to be something I improve on tonight. I get to choose which faction questline to start now between Freestar and UC.

Also, an unintended consequence of doing all the weapon modding is that my guns absolutely chew through ammo because I can fire so quickly. Definitely going to need to stock up when I am in cities. One of the mods made it so when I shoot an enemy sometimes they appear as though I'm looking through a thermal scope. It's really useful because if they retreat quickly, I still know where they are. That makes it so I can go finish them off before they have time to recover.

[Raziel]

Yeah, I did Sarah's questline, and it ended pretty well.  I do like that you can run companion quests and not "romance" them, and instead get them as "ally".  Not sure what that does exactly, but it was worth it just for the quest.  

 

I did find out that even having Barrett as your companion doesn't give you anything in Starship engineering, as I still only have the one point I put in it, and to unlock the next teir I actually have to build a ship, or seriously upgrade one (at least more than I did the Eagle, which was really just putting research modules in)

[tbarrie]

I've had four named NPCs disappear from Akila, three of whom I need to talk to to start a quest.

I rushed back to Akila after the update came out the other day in hopes that this had been fixed, but no such luck.

[RIPPA]

4 minutes ago, tbarrie said:

I've had four named NPCs disappear from Akila, three of whom I need to talk to to start a quest.

I rushed back to Akila after the update came out the other day in hopes that this had been fixed, but no such luck.

Apparently some people have found their missing NPCs just wandering out in the wilderness (others have been found outside the map so you still can't interact with them)

 

[odessasteps]

It would also be nice to have city maps and not vague landmarks that spin around your compass when you are on the move. 

[tbarrie]

22 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

Apparently some people have found their missing NPCs just wandering out in the wilderness (others have been found outside the map so you still can't interact with them)

Yeah, for the three quest-related, the map pointer seems to be off the map. Or at least I couldn't figure out a way to get past the mountain range to get to it.

[J.T.]

1 hour ago, Raziel said:

I did find out that even having Barrett as your companion doesn't give you anything in Starship engineering, as I still only have the one point I put in it, and to unlock the next teir I actually have to build a ship, or seriously upgrade one (at least more than I did the Eagle, which was really just putting research modules in)

Well that sucks and should be patched.

[Raziel]

1 hour ago, J.T. said:

Well that sucks and should be patched.

I'm actually an idiot and don't read, because Starship Engineering and Starship Design are 2 different skills and now it totally makes sense.

[supremebve]

5 hours ago, RIPPA said:

Also - would it kill Bethesda to make one or two places be only like three rooms

I was talking with a friend about the game and we both were talking about how we started a mission around 10pm and next thing we knew it was 2am and there was no end in sight. Some of these missions are long,  some of these buildings are huge,  and sometimes you're just wandering around a planet because you see some shit in the distance and want to know what it is. This is not a weeknight game. 

[odessasteps]

19 minutes ago, supremebve said:

I was talking with a friend about the game and we both were talking about how we started a mission around 10pm and next thing we knew it was 2am and there was no end in sight. Some of these missions are long,  some of these buildings are huge,  and sometimes you're just wandering around a planet because you see some shit in the distance and want to know what it is. This is not a weeknight game. 

Even worse when you try to have a 1 hour cap when streaming. 

[The Man Known as Dan]

26 minutes ago, supremebve said:

I was talking with a friend about the game and we both were talking about how we started a mission around 10pm and next thing we knew it was 2am and there was no end in sight. Some of these missions are long,  some of these buildings are huge,  and sometimes you're just wandering around a planet because you see some shit in the distance and want to know what it is. This is not a weeknight game. 

This game and Baldur’s Gate 3 both made me institute a “only play this game when you are willing to put your day into” rule. It has served me well.

[RIPPA]

I have fallen asleep on more than one occasion with my controller in my hand and I wake up to my character walking into a wall

BTW - there better not be a fucking achievement tied to collecting plushies because I decide at the start not to collect a single one

[tbarrie]

5 hours ago, odessasteps said:

It would also be nice to have city maps and not vague landmarks that spin around your compass when you are on the move. 

God, yes, the map situation is pretty dire. The star map desperately needs a search function and the city maps desperately need to exist.

[supremebve]

43 minutes ago, tbarrie said:

God, yes, the map situation is pretty dire. The star map desperately needs a search function and the city maps desperately need to exist.

Yeah,  I did the dream home trait,  and I found it easy the first time because there was a quest marker. I wanted to go back and had no fucking clue how to get there.  The map is just random dots which isn't helpful when you just started playing and the game doesn't explain anything. I probably will never actually use the house,  because when I was early in the game and trying to figure out all the games systems I couldn't find it,  so I just moved on to other things. There needs to be a way to keep track of which planets you've visited and what you've explored other than aimlessly checking a dot and going from planet to planet check where you've been.