Nightingale Initial Thoughts

Good Morning Folks! Since the Last Epoch servers were down last night in preparations for the 1.0 launch today, and Nightingale opened up for early access I decided to give the game a spin. Right now the game is on an introductory price of $26.99 and I figured since I knew I was going to pick it up eventually, I might as well get in at the cheapest price. I feel like I need to set the stage for this discussion. I’ve played a lot of survival games over the years and most recently have been playing a heck of a lot of Enshrouded. This is going to greatly color my opinion of this game. After spending around 5 hours last night playing Nightingale I can state without a doubt that it isn’t an awful game, but so far at this stage in development it isn’t a great one either.

Let’s scroll back a few years and take a look at the original trailer that announced the game during the 2021 Game Awards. I realize this is setting us up for failure because early trailers are more akin to a “mood board” than anything related to what the final product is going to look like. What I got from that trailer is that we would be Cthulhu-style Victorian-era adventurers in cool costumes tromping through the fae multiverse looking for treasure and building settlements. I personally imagined something with a combat system akin to New World, with big chunky good feeling attacks and interesting combatants to fight and a bunch of gorgeous realms to explore. I imagined a building system something akin to Valheim where you recruit people and bring them back to your base to build up to some epic battles as the baddies attack you. I admit I have not followed the development of this game terribly closely, but these trailers and the ones that followed at Summer Game Fest recently set the expectations.

Nightingale has a bunch of really interesting ideas. It has one of the more creative character generators I have seen to date, where not only do you set the looks of your character but you also can define your background and lineage. For example, if you so choose… you can creat the appearance of every person in your direct line for three generations… and then choose to inherit traits in your appearance rather than set them yourself. This is some utter nonsense, but you can tell this is something that one person on the team was super passionate about. My only complaint was with the beard options where I could not have a nice full bushy beard and essentially had to choose between a svelt goatee and a lovely set of muttonchops.

What they nailed was the world. There were several moments where I just had to stop and enjoy the vistas. It has a very Myst like quality to it, as you explore these areas that were once inhabited by the Fae with impossible constructions, floating towers, and such. The world maybe doesn’t feel quite as atmospheric as the trailers would indicate. During tutorial quests you end up crossing through a Forest, a Desert, and a Swamp… the three biomes that exist in the game currently, and all of them very much felt like what you would expect from a procedural generator. While there were some cool set pieces, none of them felt terribly atmospheric. Each of these three tutorial realms had a very limited scope and served to teach you how the tech tree works.

This starts us down the problem I am having with this game. If I compare it against other survival titles… it is ploddingly slow. In this sort of game, I am used to hitting the beach… because it always seems to be a beach… gathering some twigs and rocks and outfitting myself in my first tools and weapons within the first fifteen minutes. Everything feels extremely drawn out as you have to wait for the game to give you permission to craft anything… which doesn’t really take place until you reach the second of the three tutorial realms. This sluggish quality seems to carry forward into all aspects of crafting. It takes forever for you to be able to craft your own clothing because in order to get to that point you have to have crafted three different sorts of machines to assemble some slapdash leather.

When you can assemble your first gear set… it looks like this. We were drawn in from the trailer and visuals of romping around the wilds in spats and petticoats… and instead, you look like every murder hobo in every survival game. I look like I am about to defend my steakwrap by shivving you. I get that this is the starter “tattered” gear, but in order to get started and run through the first major objective you have to upgrade out of what looked like much better gear. Essentially we are a few hours into the game and the anachronistic aesthetic from all of the trailers is already shot. I am sure that eventually, we will probably have access to get that looks like the trailers, but at the rate of progression through the game, it seems like it will be months down the line.

One of the biggest problems that I am having with the crafting system is “bag bloat”. Essentially recipes will request a type of ingredient, for example “t1 Bones” and that can come from any Tier 1 animal that can drop bones. However in your bag… the items are kept in separate stacks as to whether or not they came from a predator or a prey animal, or later when you learn fishing… each TYPE of fish is stored separately. This trickles through to the final produced material so the game can see that I have “16 Meat” on my hotbar, but in my actual bags this is a combination of grilled prey meat, grilled predator meat, and each individual type of fish that I have caught and cooked. The types of ingredients you put into a meal impact the stats of the meal slightly, but so far this has seemed to be negligible, and all I really care about how is healing myself and not dying to the hunger mechanic that slowly kills you. This isn’t so much a problem for your character’s backpack, but it rapidly becomes a problem in trying to store this nonsense in baskets. There really needs to be a way to convert up materials to a generic form that stacks cleanly.

The other problem that I am starting to get into is that every craft seems to require refinement of a bunch of different materials in order to craft it. This mostly just serves to slow down the gameplay as you have to wait on a bunch of machines to craft up enough of the refined resources in order to do the final combine. I’m more used to survival games using something like a tiering system… which the game seems to have… but isn’t utilizing in the manner I am used to. I would expect a Tier 2 machine would require Tier 2 metal and Tier 2 wood… not just refined versions of the T1 materials or the secondary byproducts of refining the items. For example, if you want to make a Candle you need a wick, and if you want to make a wick you need two twines, and if you want to make twine you need “fibers” either through gathering plant fibers or refining meat into animal fibers. It rapidly feels a bit tedious to actually make anything.

The building system feels similarly cumbersome. I would expect to be able to create a wooden shanty quickly by chopping down some trees and using the wood that I gained from said trees. That is not the case and all of the “wooden” block types require you to gather three resources… plant fiber, sticks, and proper wood. Stone however just requires stone… so I have been crafting everything out of that. Stone however is a limited resource and I am slowly running out of stone piles on the island to harvest because Nightingale is not a voxel game with destructable terrain, which means that I can’t just start excavating the side of a mountain to get resources. I have to harvest specific nodes that yield a specific type of material and then deliver it back to the build side and apply it to the designed form. On one hand, it is really cool that you can essentially plan out the entire building in blueprint form, but when you apply resources… it applies them to the entire blueprint at once and then chooses to “finish” seemingly random blocks.

One of the particularly cumbersome elements comes from when you want to remove an item and place it somewhere else. There is no easy way to remove a segment of the wall or pick back up a crafting machine to place it somewhere else. You can toggle on build mode with “X” key… which I had to find by sifting through the keybindings, and in theory, you can deconstruct an item. This will cause a pile of materials to drop to the ground. However, it does not seem to be ALL of the materials that went into crafting the item initially. The other option is just to break an item… at which point you lose ALL resources that went into building it. Sure it is probably more realistic that if you knock down a wall, you can’t just stand it back up again but we are already dealing with magical floating blueprints so I feel like quality of life is a more important trait here.

You can recruit other survivors but they are honestly… kind of idiots. Here is my companion Agnes lighting herself on fire by walking through the cook stove. I legitimately was tabbed out last night typing a message and heard the clear sound of something catching on fire, only to flip over to this scene. I guess the positive is that Agnes appears to be immortal. She has very simple AI and that AI is to harvest every tree she sees… and gives zero fucks about whether or not that tree is going to fall on top of you and deal damage. You can be in the middle of combat and she is going to walk over and immediately start felling a fucking tree while you are skinning the corpse. She is as good at combat as she is at standing in fires.

This takes us to what I feel is the critical flaw in the game for me. Skyrim is a game that we all love and it did some groundbreaking things for open-world gaming… but even for 2010, it had what I would consider to be pretty shitty combat. Combat in Nightingale feels like Skyrim where mobs just sort of blindly rush at you the second they spot you… flailing wildly… and you sort of just have to swing blindly at them until you connect enough times to kill them hoping that your hitpoints outlast their ability to reduce them. There is no real strategy here. I found that I could just jump backwards in order to avoid most attacks and this became my strategy for ranged attacking them down until they died. Attacking with a melee weapon felt awful. Generally speaking, when you enter combat you have three to six things trying to attack you at the same time and your combat is mostly useless.

I completed the first dungeon and took on the first boss… and it was also similarly bad. It just sort of charged at you and you would need to duck out of the way and plink it down as it was ramping up for the next attack. I mostly used the pillars as a way of skirting around the boss because attacking head-on seemed like an awful idea. Its mechanics consisted on a dash attack and a big point-blank AOE, but otherwise, it just seemed to keep locking on my location and I needed to stop being there for a while. A lot of the selling point of this game is to go off on adventures fighting baddies and looking for cool treasure, and honestly… I am not sure I want any more of this combat. If this is representative of what the game has to offer, and based on some reviews I watched this morning before sitting down to write this… it seems like it is.

There is also the problem of loot. If I am going to go delving into dungeons I feel like there should be some reward at the end of my troubles. What Nightingale has for loot is what I could call “Minecraft Loot” aka some random resources. You might find a single ignot… or a wick… or maybe even some leather straps, but nothing resembling anything special and unique to that dungeon. If the reward for doing dungeons is the same bullshit that I can get anywhere else on the island… then why am I doing the dungeons? The answer is that you have to do the dungeons in order to unlock new cards… which then allow you to open new realms… where you can gather more resources and have more crappy combat. For me at least that mechanical loop is flawed because if everything is just more of the same… “we have Skyrim at home”.

The problem that I see with Nightingale, is it is trying to be a bunch of different games and not really succeeding at any of them. It isn’t what I would consider a good crafting for survival game, because everything feels way too tedious, especially at the beginning. It isn’t a good adventure and exploration game, because combat feels awful. It isn’t a good dungeon delving game, because there is zero loot chase. Nightingale is not a bad game by any means… but it isn’t a particularly good one either. It is launching into a crowd that is thick with really good games that are hitting all of these buttons. Enshrouded for example launched similarly in early access but landed with a game that felt pretty damned close to finished. Valheim a few years ago did what Nightingale is trying to do but just better in spite of being woefully unpolished and having its own stack of problems. The major selling point of Nightingale is adventuring in weird period outfits… and that goes out the window the moment you have to craft something for yourself.

I get that Nightingale is an early-access game, and there is a little warning at the launch to make sure you understand that. However generally speaking in spite of the flaws that a game might have in early access, I can often see a core of the game that is good and just needs as lot of polish and bug fixing. With Nightingale, I am just not seeing a fun mechanical game loop that warrants me spending much more time with it. I put five hours in last night and I would have expected in that time for the game to have set the hook. It is a perfectly reasonable game… it just isn’t better than anything else in the survival and exploration genre. When you are launching in the same year as PalWorld and Enshrouded… you sorta have to do something really good in order to stand out from the pack and I am not seeing it. Sure the world is gorgeous… but a gorgeous world only gets you so far.

With Liquid Hot Magma

One of the problems with finishing up a truly phenomenal game… is that it is occasionally hard to move past it. I had decided that I would be in a bit of a narrative phase given that I am mostly done with the Trials of the Ancestor league in Path of Exile and that I have a few weeks until the launch of the next league on December 8th. I have a list of games I wanted to play this year… but never quite got around to it. Top of the list was Alan Wake II of course, and I have now finished it… but last night I had some trouble easing into the next adventure.

Another game this year that I was deeply looking forward to was Jedi Survivor. However much like Fallen Order… I floundered a bit when I first started playing it. I decided that I would go after this as my next game to finish, and I went back and forth about whether or not it was a good idea to start from scratch. I only made it a few planets into the game and I think it would have been easy enough to retrace my steps, but instead, I decided to essentially wing it and just keep pushing forward. Thankfully I had never actually uninstalled the game and didn’t need to bother with trying to track down my save games.

I apparently had left off on a phase where I was forced to do a lot of platforming and careful gliding between platforms over a giant pit of magma. Luckily my muscle memory came back pretty quickly and the puzzle I was being asked to solve involved something brand new to me so I could learn on the go. The first thing I did was rebind a number of keys because hitting 2 and 3 on the Hotbar was a bit awkward while also having to navigate myself with WASD. I moved them down to 7 and 8 which are way more comfortable for me to hit on the keypad on the side of my g600 MMO mouse. There are probably a few other things that I want to shift around a bit. I know that this is a game designed for a controller but I fought through playing it with a mouse and keyboard for the first game and I will struggle forth again because the actual combat feels way more comfortable for me with a mouse.

I did not make it terribly far last night, but I did complete the series of puzzles that involved the gaping chasms… collected some data and am now about to face off against some Imperials as I attempt to buy folks time to evacuate a safe house. I did manage to pick up some gun parts and crafted something a bit more to my taste as far as blasters go. That is probably my favorite part about these games is collecting bits and bobs and crafting my own lightsaber and now blaster. I am hoping as I go forward with the game I will begin to feel it. At the moment I am nowhere near as connected to this particular story as I was the first one.

I am sure I will get into the swing of things as I go… but honestly, I feel like this game might be too open-ended. I know that is ironic considering how much I have praised other games for having a big explorable world… but I am not sure it really serves the story here. The set pieces are wonderful, but I gotta say I enjoyed the opening scenes on Coruscant far more than I have these wide-open planets. I think Fallen Order benefited by having a fairly linear story that was being told. Sure there were hidden places to find along the golden path… but there was still a very clear golden path to follow. It feels a bit like a Ubisoft collect all the things game… which I can’t say is necessarily a good thing. I’m hoping once I get engaged in the plot thread I will ignore this and just push forward.

The other big game that I am hoping to make a dent in during this break is Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty. If I manage to wrap these two up I will be pretty happy, but if I do and have room left over… I am probably going to play some more Zelda or maybe actually finally try and get into Final Fantasy XVI. The tail end of the year tends to be when I have the mental power to focus on story-driven adventures.

Desperately Seeking Mythril

Morning Folks! I’ve been cycling through a lot of games lately… namely because I am in a bit of a holding pattern waiting for Friday’s Path of Exile event to begin. I’ve also been working through a number of books in audio form, which means I can’t really juggle story content while also listening and enjoying a book. As a result, I have been playing through a number of mechanically enjoyable games where I either don’t need to see the story… or I don’t really care about the story. I apologize to all of the narrative team that I am certain is doing some amazing work New World… but I really do not care about what is going on with the story of that game. For me it is a big fun sandboxy crafting MMORPG nonsense fest and as a result it has been in this limited rotation of games that I have been spending time playing. I realized this morning that I had not really talked much about it.

The first cool thing that I want to talk about is that the game has an extremely robust appearance system, where you can essentially take any item you loot and convert it into an item skin that you can then apply to items freely. While I had a pretty large collection of skins from various Twitch drops and a handful of store purchases… there is one appearance that I really wanted. I hate the highest tiers of the Syndicate armor, because it is just some boring assed robes. However, I loved the mid-tier design that was just a nice simple armor with a purple Syndicate tabard over it. I liked this vibe so much that even though it was not the gear that I was wearing at the time, I had Ammo draw my character wearing it when I added New World to the site masthead. I can now run around in the game with something pretty close to this appearance permanently.

The only negative of the system is that you pretty much have to buy these from the in-game shop. It is roughly $2.50 for a single transmog token, which then can be used to convert a single item into a skin. I vaguely remembered them talking about these dropping out in the world as well when the system was first introduced, but so far the only two tokens I have found came from the free track of the battle pass system. This means that If you really want to convert large swaths of items into appearances you are probably going to be shelling out $20 at a time to pick up 10 tokens at the cheapest conversion rate. I’ve not been running dungeons, so maybe they are dropping there and I have just not encountered them. That said I have even gone to some elite areas and looted a few of those chests and gotten bubkis.

I’ve played through most of the content in the new area, but the piece that I have been focused on lately is trying to get all of my gathering abilities up high enough to be able to partake in the new resource nodes when I find them. Essentially everything in the game has been raised a tier so that you can take your character up to level 65… you can also raise all of your professions by another 50 points. The combat leveling was super straightforward and I blew past those levels well before finishing the campaign. The profession leveling has bit considerably slower and I need to get everything up 5 points to 205 to harvest the new stuff. For example, the above screenshot shows some Mythril nodes that I was way too low level to harvest… which made me sad. Skinning of course levels super fast because it is fueled by murder, but I have been roaming around some of my old world haunts to push up the rest of the professions.

I really like the new weapon type that was added to the game and have mostly been running around with Flail and Greatsword. I can’t say it does anywhere near as much damage as Greatsword does, but it is still fairly fun. I seem to have a One Handed Weapon and Shield Fetish when it comes to combat in games, and the Flail of course just furthers that fantasy. I still need many levels with the weapon but I have taken it up to 14 and unlocked a lot of the goodness. I opted to go down the tanking tree which should shock zero people who have read this blog for any period of time. I might at some point respec and play around with the cleric tree though as supposedly it gives you some ranged attacks.

The biggest improvement that I have seen has been in itemization and loot drops. What I would have considered previously to be “great gear” has been dropping like candy. I’ve seen many in world legendary drops and a ton of “named” item drops that come with fixed stats. All of the gear that I had previously was taken up to at least level 600 when the patch dropped, and now I am very regularly seeing upwards of 680 gear dropping. A new Artifact rarity tier of gear was added to the game and I’ve managed to pick one piece up from completing steps in the campaign, and another piece because I happened upon a group of a dozen folks farming a boss. Any time you see a cluster like that you might as well stick around and farm too… which netted a light armor chest. I do not fully understand how artifact gear works, but it appears that it can be configured at least somewhat by the players.

I think my focus in the short term is going to be to push my trade skills up a bit so that I can start crafting some nice upgrades. When I last played the game I was capped on Armorcrafting, and I would like to get it up there again so that I can maybe craft some artifact gear. After that, I really want to push up Engineering so I can make a new set of harvesting tools. The prices on the market in the game are insane… and item level 700 gathering tools are around 30-100k gold which seems like complete and total nonsense. Since I enjoy the crafting system I might as well push my trades up and craft them myself and then sell the botched crafts.

I doubt that I will ever go back to playing New World as a mainline game, but I am enjoying poking at it from time to time. The community surrounding the game is still not really my crowd. It is entirely too PVP-focused and the player base tends to make some interesting decisions… like this mess of a house, I took a screenshot of this morning. I admit it sort of makes me wish there was a roleplaying server as those servers tend to just have a higher caliber of player when it comes to community interactions. While not a roleplayer myself in the game, I’ve always flocked to those servers as they seemed to be more my speed.

If you have New World in your game library, you might patch it up and give it a shot. The game has improved massively since launch and I have been enjoying myself.

Starfield First Impressions

Good morning folks! I am technically on vacation today… and technically on vacation tomorrow as well but I figured I might as well spend a bit and knock out a blog post. Since my last post about Blaugust, Starfield has come out with a game that brought with it both unrealistic hype and toxic negativity depending upon where your biases against Bethesda Games landed. I am a Bethesda enjoyer, so I knew without a doubt that I would check this game out. I tried my best to go into this experience with as neutral of expectations as possible. I did not expect this game to be the second coming of Skyrim, nor did I expect it to be vaporware as some corners of the internet seemed to. What I expected more or less was Fallout in Space and that is essentially what they have delivered.

Starfield above all else is a Bethesda game, and that comes with certain parameters. You will have your accompaniment of weird dead-eyed NPCs and bizarre glitches but also a lot of freedom in how you go about approaching the game. It was announced before this game came out that it was going to be one of the most bug-free Bethesda games, and quite honestly… I believe that. However, I have still seen my share of weird bugs that are often fixed by either resting or zoning out of an area and back into it. Yesterday I had a quest NPC randomly float up into the ceiling while I was trying to turn in… and essentially zoning in and out resolved the problem allowing me to continue with my gameplay session. So far I have only had one crash to desktop, which is quite honestly pretty good for a Bethesda game.

What you gain for your slight moments of “Bethesda Jank”, are some really gorgeous examples of level design. On the podcast this weekend we referred to this as “NASApunk” and it seems to be the best description. Everything is big, chunky, analog, and inspired by the space age. This is how I dreamed space would look like as a kid, and I am thrilled to be roaming around the world in my space suit. The game even gives us some really cool moments where we are learning how to fight in Zero-G, with my ballistic weapon kick causing me to go flying backward. The thing is… Starfield has a lot of really cool ideas… some of which are not exactly implemented perfectly, but there are enough hooks there to allow modders to come in later and perfect them.

For example, the Character creation system is beautiful in its simplicity and has the model, the rigging, and gender choices being handled by a very simple pronoun selector… rather than the awkward genitalia simulation systems in some other games of late. Does it go far enough? Probably not for everyone, but there is enough separation there that I would imagine someone is going to be able to come in after the fact and create body and rigging packs similar to how they have in something like Second Life, allowing folks to exist in space in exactly the body and gender identity that they want to have. I wasn’t super happy with the beard options, but I know given time someone will release a mod pack that will resolve this for me. I think a lot of the way I approach a Bethesda game is knowing that eventually, I am going to have fifty-some mods installed at some point to completely tailor the game experience to my tastes.

Let’s talk about some of the places where the game fails. Space combat I believe is probably one of these areas, mainly because for someone who does not want anything to do with simulated space flight… this game is a bit too fiddly for my tastes. However, it is way too simplistic and hamfisted to work for a Star Citizen enjoyer like my friend Tam. So by shooting for this awkward middleground… it is essentially disappointing both ends of the spectrum. Most of my interaction with spaceflight is that I don’t interact… I try my best to always rely on fast travel options for which there are many. You can jump from system to system without having to spend a lot of time actually piloting your ship. There are a few missions however where you will be forced to fumble through space combat. For example, in the above screenshot, I was trying to sneak up and repair a satellite without drawing the attention of some baddies. I did it… but it felt like one of the most cumbersome things I had done in recent memory and have no real interest in doing this again.

Another place where the game fails miserably… is with the talent system. Personally I prefer the old school days of just having a list of talents as compared to this whole talent tree system with pretty pictograms representing each talent. In past Bethesda games, you could TRY and do things… albeit badly without having any talent points assigned to a skill. In Starfield you are not even given the option to try something. This leads to some weird happenings like… it took me 10 hours before I realized there was a talent tree that dictated whether or not I could use a boost pack aka this game’s version of a jet pack. Similarly in my first pass through the talents I completely missed that Security was what this game called “Lockpicking” because I assumed this would be in the social tree not in the tech tree and just assumed I had not uncovered it yet. The game forces you to spend a certain number of points in the first tier of abilities before it allows you to proceed to the second, third, or fourth tiers so I just assumed it was something I had not earned access to yet.

Had I realized this… I might not have gone all in on Ballistics like I have. I do sort of love the octopus with “many guns” icon though. Essentially the skills feel kludgy and I am hoping someone will come in after the fact and mod these to work a bit better. I think that outlines my feelings in general… that Starfield in many ways feels like a good first draft of a game and that I know modders will come along and perfect each of the individual niches. Like for example I hate carrying weight as a concept in video games. I want to be able to loot everything and carry it around forever. Inventory maintenance is never an interesting gameplay loop for me personally. I know that someone out there will release a simple mod that I can install to just remove this gameplay loop entirely so I don’t have to care about it. For the moment I have done this myself with console commands, and it was one of the first things I did upon playing the game. The Bethesda experience for me personally is tailoring the game to fit me, rather than trying to play it the way they intended.

As a result, I view this game as a work in progress, and when I encounter something that annoys me… my first reaction is not to throw up my arms in frustration… it is to go search NexusMods to see if there is a way to mod that frustration out of existence. It is because of this mindset though that I have a really hard time reviewing a Bethesda game. I’ve been playing these for so long at this point, and I know that given enough desire… You can pretty much make the game do anything you want it to do. You have to understand that when I first played Skyrim, I had no clue that you could choose Thief, Warrior, or Mage statues to direct your gameplay… because the second I got out of that first town I was leaving the main questline behind. That said… I am spending a lot more time in this game following the main quest because it is way more cumbersome to travel off the grid.

One of the challenges for me personally is that with Starfield, it is much harder to just wander off into the distance looking for something interesting. Most planets are fairly empty in the grand scheme of things. There are far fewer POIs and way more barren fields of assorted minerals and resources. When you land on a planet, you are dropped into a region surrounding some fixed points of interest, and a bit of procedurally generated area around them. In Skyrim, almost everything in the game existed for a reason… and going there ahead of time allowed you to essentially brute force your way through a side quest that would take you there eventually. In Starfield… there are a lot of areas that only serve as a way to refill your ammunition and med packs… and places for you to farm randomly generated space mercenaries, pirates, and cultists. Knowing that a lot of the world is pointless… gives me less desire to explore it.

That is not to say that you will not have a bazillion conversations that you overhear while roaming around the world and notes that you pick up that will lead you to “pointful” areas. The Starfield experience though sorta waters down the effectiveness of my chosen way of playing a Bethesda game. So as a result I am mostly just following the golden path, or have for the first thirteen hours of playing it. I am not necessarily mainlining this game as my only entertainment, as I am still playing quite a bit of Path of Exile. I am however enjoying the time I am spending with it, and I don’t want me pointing out its flaws to make it come across like I am not enjoying it greatly. In fact, Starfield is honestly the sort of game that I kinda of wish Destiny would have been. If I could take the world of Starfield, and transplant the Destiny-style gunplay… then I think I would be in heaven. The gunplay is so much better than any other Bethesda title out there, but it is still eons behind anything I would call “good” gunplay.

At this point I am really bought into the story, even though it is sort of riddled with tropes we have all experienced before in other games. I like the world quite a bit and I like experiencing it… albeit with a bit more direction than I am used to in a Bethesda title. Is this game-of-the-year material? Honestly, I am not sure. There are so many great narrative experiences this year, and this is more of a sandbox experience where you need to bring with it your own expectations that shape it. Do I regret buying Starfield? Hell no. I am having a blast honestly, but I still feel like it is important to talk about the flaws of that experience. More or less Stafield is a higher fidelity and much larger version of The Outer Worlds, without that game’s particular sense of humor. It will be interesting how we feel about it in ten years, and if we honor this new franchise in all the same ways that we do Fallout or Skyrim. So far… it doesn’t have nearly as much personality as either of those games does but I am only 13 hours in instead of 1300 hours over multiple playthroughs.

It is also somewhat unfair to expect a new IP to have near the punching weight as Fallout, a game that I have been playing for a quarter of a century at this point. I’ve enjoyed this enough though to give it time to grow and come into its own. I am hoping with time something like Galacticat will make me even halfway as happy as Vault Boy does. For now, I am enjoying the journey, and I definitely think Starfield is worth your time especially if you were already a big fan of these sorts of games. Admittedly my perspective is exclusive to PC gameplay where you can mod anything until your heart is content. I have no clue what a Bethesda game experience feels like on a console because I never play Bethesda games in their vanilla launch state without at least a bit of tweaking. I figure this is probably going to feel similar to all other Bethesda games you have ever played. If you go into the game expecting that sort of gameplay experience… then you are probably going to be very happy with it.