Playing on XBox, so no mods for me, but I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised by how well the game's system all link with each each other to create interesting stories.
I got the first GalBank loan officer mission and jumped into a new system. Except that I got a distress call from a farmer being harassed by spacers, setting off a whole quest line where I had to convince a bunch of families to band together and fight back. And when I managed to blow up the spacer ships and storm the spacer station, I found that the spacers had ransacked a bunch of GalBank safes, which I plundered, meaning I felt comfortable saying no when the grateful settlers offered me money. For the last three evenings, I've just been exploring in this system, doing odd little random quests that I got as I stumbled across populated outposts, and returning to New Atlastis to offload my stuff. I finally found the dude and peacefully convinced him to cough up the money without a fight. The whole expedition probably netted me a cool 200k in credits, which I used half of to upgrade the Frontier.
The universe feels alive and adventurous.
I picked up a pre-order with an Xbox Play Anywhere code (so I can play it on my RTX 3080 TI-equipped gaming PC...and occasionally slum it in my office on my Surface Pro when I have free time, as I plausibly could do now instead of browsing SV). I can mod the game (even Script Extender works with the Xbox on PC/Game Pass PC version, with some tweaks), but naturally that would break console and cloud streaming compatibility then and there, so I've decided to make this the first Bethesda RPG I've played unmodded since
Oblivion. After all, I played everything in
Cyberpunk 2077 up to the endgame on Xbox Series X (this was pre-Phantom Liberty--an unfortunate consequence of that non-optional update was completely redesigning how all skills and most items worked in that game, rendering a late-game save almost useless, I really should've finished the game before the update hit); I later picked up the Steam release heavily discounted to mod. The CP2077 comparisons will make more sense soon, but being "only under 20 hours into" the game so far (again, I've been playing the game since before the official launch--and for most singleplayer games, 20 hours is more than the whole game), I had a sort of revelation while juggling the same pre-launch save between PC, console and cloud streaming:
Going into
Starfield, I already knew I was going to instinctually inconvenience myself simply because I don't play Bethesda games "the right way" (I don't use fast travel, I don't typically use the wait function outside of my character actually sleeping in a bed, I avoid exploits at almost all costs). What I didn't consider was that playing
Skyrim "the wrong way" is actually still different from playing
Starfield "the wrong way."
- I still don't use fast travel, whether across New Atlantis, across a solar system or across dozens of lightyears. But when you're just dropped into a large, barren--in the sense that it has just a handful of factories, colonies, or observation posts, that are each multiple kilometers from each other--planet to explore, it makes sense to fast travel back to your ship, especially if you're short on medical supplies, rest up, and try again. Were I playing on a difficult mode that actually required your character rest and eat, that'd just further force a degree of mindfulness, as opposed to the "I'm just going to walk until I reach the unknown objective marker point, or die in the process," that was so universal in Skyrim. Hostile alien planets are fucking hostile as shit, man.
- Building on that: yes, sometimes you should consider waiting in the safety of your ship until, say, the frozen rain barely kept at bay by your spacesuit subsides and the sun comes out. What a crazy notion! Have you noticed how Barrett or Andreja are wearing their spacesuits when your being pelted by hours of frozen rain, and when the rain stops, they're not? It's not a fucking coincidence, man! Either wait, or pack a dozen treatments for frostbite!
- If you're not actually in a rush, you don't need to deliberately go out of your way to scan animal life or mine certain elements. There's a decent chance you'll find a lot of what you're looking for on those very long walks, especially if you're one of those people can't pass up a cave or a colonist observation post or a pirate-occupied factory or the like (I am). At the very least, you'll make a lot more money this way, if you desperately want a better "not a starter car" spaceship. These are, no doubt, obvious to people who don't have such a rigid approach to pre-modding Bethesda RPG gameplay, and were a lot less obvious to me.
- Pirates have all the best rare ammunition, and they know you want it. Again, maybe something obvious, but this is the first Bethesda RPG in recent memory where I've actually been running into the issue of finding reliable sources of ammunition for my preferred weapons (without them having been added in mods....huh, what a coincidence Bethesda) after the game dropped a 12-gauge pump-action and a suppressed VSS with a full-sized Soviet PSO telescopic sight mounted on it, which have yet to be matched by futuristic fusion-powered ray guns and caseless automatics. A single pirate-occupied factory has been far more reliable in sourcing archaic ammunition than visiting the same two shops every time I'm in New Atlantis; maybe there ought to be a system where you can place an order at a premium for rare ammunition and pick it up at a future date (if you don't want to just cheat and give it to yourself in console), as oppose to just purely being at the mercy of RNG. This isn't necessary for the "regular" arms, since ammunition for those is everywhere.
- Less obvious: interior spaces look good. Really good. Which is not something that would be immediate obvious for a game that sells itself on "exploration of the universe to find alien artifacts." It's not that alien wastelands of cracked soil or xeno forests don't look good, but interior spaces are stunning. One of the reasons I wasn't playing all those aforementioned games was because I dove into the extremely irregularly shallow pool of Cyberpunk 2077 modding, which means I also dove into the pool of "fixing and updating mods for Cyberpunk 2077 every time CDPR decides to put out a patch that breaks every single framework mod and makes the game crash on start." When I actually get to play CP2077, I'm surprised to find how everything indoors (in a game that is fairly substantially indoors), despite multiple years of well-appreciated patches and a variety of visual upgrades) looks worse than Starfield. Everything. The only indoor spaces that actually look nice in CP2077 are when you find yourself staring into that perfectly-modeled puddle of leaking water under a neon-lit wall panel, and the raytracing works perfectly, and a handful of bespoke locations like the Afterlife club. Everything else is worse. Good looking weapons approach (the nicest swords, pistols and rifles) look okay; other weapons look so much worse. Interior materiel--household objects, food, candy bars, bottles, medicine, etc.--all look like they're a generation older (which, to be fair, Cyberpunk 2077 is a generation older, it's just such a bizarre game because I only played it after it was updated for Xbox Series), and almost none of them have any physics modeling at all. So you're left with the game's very good gunplay model...in a shootout in a bar lined with indestructible, bulletproof bottles and cutlery. Starfield isn't even the best-looking open world game out there (though it is one of the largest overall); but the interior spaces, and how they are furnished, are world class. If you're going to be visiting the same prefabricated compartment factory or warehouse six or eight times, it makes a world of difference when it, and the things inside of it, actually look good. CP2077--and I am wary for the comparison, but it's the other first-person RPG shooter I'm playing the most--has you visiting the same drug den apartment or gangster garage six or eight times too, and they look like crap, and everything is either noninteractive, or sitting in paper bags. I can take three-hundred potatoes in Starfield and flood a cabin of my spaceship with them, because it's a Bethesda game after all, and each one of them looks better than any single consumable product in CP2077.
Again, it's hilarious that it took this long for the seeming obvious to "click" with me (having +1,000 hours with modded
Skyrim SE alone probably didn't help), and I was having a good enough time gradually chugging along even before that (I'm behind on all my games, RE4 and
Dead Space remake,
Forza Motorsport,
Judgement, etc.). It was at that point I realized, "Holy shit, I actually get what this is now." This isn't, to use an even more forced comparison,
Doom Eternal, where you either play the game the right way, or you die over and over again; you can play
Starfield a few different ways, including my absurdly roundabout way. But modifying my thinking was nearly as impactful as playing the game from the first time.
I'm no where near the endgame; I'm still working on the same, bumbling no-nonsense ronin cosmonaut I created in the preview, though I'm really feeling the urge to make him a
little more handsome, this is what happens when you play
Skyrim as beautiful heroines from
Record of Lodoss War and
Bastard! Heavy Metal Dark Fantasy, then proceed to play
Starfield as Andrew Yang's less smug, non-centrist asshole cousin.
