Having read a number of reviews now, I get the impression that this is gonna be much like Fallout 4 where 'gamers' are gonna act very disappointed over it, all while I ultimately end up quite loving it cuz I dont seem to play and love these games for the same reasons they do.
I've put a few hours into the game on PC and I'm really enjoying it. Quite a few people were expecting more of the space and stars in Starfield and while what is there seems quite good (I've only had a few space battles), it's no Elite Dangerous, nor No Man's Sky which it has unfortunately been compared against.
However, the criticisms of the inventory being awful, lack of maps causing frustration in cities and loading-screen-fest space navigation are all valid complaints and get old very quickly. And there isn't much you can do about some of these but hopefully modders can remedy some of this.
Firstly, there is literally no excuse for the inventory. This is a Bethesda game so you're going to be looting a lot of stuff, which means you'lll be managing your, your ships, your companions and various storage inventories. A lot. But unlike every previous Bethesda game you cannot see the contents of your inventory and the target companion/storage inventory at the same time. Let me be clear, this is a
miserable experience.
Whilst earlier games didn't have detailed maps showing amenities, the cities/towns were much smaller and more open. New Atlantis is big and sprawling and whilst there are as many visual cues as to where amenities are, Starfield's cities and bigger and less open. I gather Neon is a bit of a maze and it's particularly bad there. Several reviews say they once you find a particular type of trade, and memories where it is in a city, it's easier to just fast travel between cities and go to your known trade rather than explore to find a trader in the city you are in which sounds insane, but it's mentioned in a bunch of reviews. I expect city maps will be among the early mods.
The loading-screen infested space navigation can be marginally sidestepped as you don't need the starmap for setting destinations and jumping to all places but the game only briefly tutorialises this once and never mentions it again. If you miss you, you're in starmap click-load-screen hell and even when you can avoid some loading screens, you can't avoid them all.
Performance for me is a solid native 4K/60 (no DRS) but I'm running Starfield on a 13700k/RTX4090 with 32Gb DDR5 and 7Gb/s NVMe drive - which keeps loading times as short as possible. Windows I/O file cache makes good use of surplus RAM. Performance on RTX30x0 cards seems to be bad for quite a lot of people, but I've yet to try it on my 12700k/RTX3080(12Gb) with 32GB DDR5.
These issues aside - and these are persistent issues that will irritate you all the time - I am thoroughly enjoying what I've playing and I'll be putting a lot more time into the game today. It feels overwhelmingly massive and I kind of love that, because I think that's why they are going for. Tutorials seem pretty thin for core stuff but if you're the type of person who likes to work things out for themselves (like research), you will. Just have a play at the research terminal in your ship.
wccftech.com
