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Starfield First Impressions

September 4, 2023 by Belghast

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.

How to Survive 2 Impressions

March 25, 2016 by Belghast

Sandbox/Mission Hybrid

Roughly a month ago a friend of mine hooked me up with a copy of How to Survive 2, because she knew I was a fan of the whole zombie apocalypse genre and it was a game she was enjoying. I had all of these plans to write up a proper impressions piece, but got sidetracked by all things The Division. This game was a whole lot of the reason why I survived the lead up to the launch of that title, because it gave me something fresh to piddle around with. The basics of the game are that you are a survivor in a world long after everything went to shit thanks to the zombie outbreak. Since I did not play the first title, I feel like there is probably some background story there that I am missing. What I do know however is that this title is set in the coastal region of Louisiana. There are no real recognizable landmarks however, but instead the world simply borrows a swampy feeling Tileset. The game has both single player and multiplayer game modes, but I have largely spent my time playing single player.

Within moments of starting a new game you are introduced to the character of Kovac, a man that at first you only know as a voice coming through some sort of a speaker system. He serves as your guide as he attempts to teach you the basics of surviving in this world. The game itself is divided into two basic chunks, the large open world area that allows you to freely roam and explore, and very tight and controlled missions with specific objectives. The missions themselves are repeatable and you can crank up the difficulty to give you better rewards and experience. One thing of note, and why I am doing an impressions piece is that the game is in early access, and there are a lot of things that are simply not in the game yet. Much of the tutorial that walks the players through how the world works is simply missing, so I had to rely on my friend and what I could google to figure out a few things.

Level Your Camp

One of the big things that I was missing was how one actually levels up. The game has two parallel systems that are designed to level up together, that is your “camp” that you are building in the open world and your character itself. Both of these have levels associated with them that are purchased through the spending of experience gained through doing activities. The fastest way to gain this experience for me at least, seemed to be to repeat one of the early missions with the difficulty slider cranked up as far as I was allowed to. The reason the whole camp leveling thing was a bit confusing at first, was that the character level is locked to the camp level. So in order to level up your character you have to first level the camp, and you will continue to stair step the two progressions from that point on. In addition to raw level however there are numerous perks that you can unlock… some of which are absolutely must haves like the ability to open lock picks. Others are improve the efficiency of using weapons or items, and I assume are also really important once you get a good idea for how you want to build out your character.

The thing I have noticed is that the difficulty of encounters ramps up pretty quickly, especially in the open world. For quite a while all I encountered were the generic slow zombies, however once I got to around level three or four the game started to throw in those “track star” zombies that have become popular in the more modern and edgy zombie films. Around level five I encountered this games version of the boomer… the fat bloated corpse that explodes when you get it low on health. I am sure as the levels continue to ramp up I will keep encountering other mixes of bad guys each one with their own way of dealing with it. The only real problem is that in the bit I have been playing my only ranged option so far is a crafted bow. I am wondering when exactly I will encounter guns, because while I have found a small bit of ammunition.. I have yet to find anything to use it with.

Fallout-Esc

There is a certain nostalgic feeling to playing this game that I have a hard time really putting into words. In many ways the game reminds me of the original Fallout games, in that much of your interaction is happening in smaller closed maps that are tightly designed around a single mission. There is a big of fog of war going on as well as you explore because you can only actually see a small section of the screen at a time. This is magnified as you go into buildings because there is a forced zoom that happens allowing you to see finer detail inside. This also makes it much easier for a zombie to sneak up on you and there have been a few moments especially on the night missions where I genuinely jumped when something lumbered out of a corner that I had not been looking yet. Wandering a cityscape with only your flashlight to see with… is unexpectedly tense given that this is a top down isometric game. I definitely had moments of trying really hard to bait everything out of buildings before actually going in to explore them for the fear of getting overrun especially on higher difficulties.

The game is very much not finished, but what is there was really enjoyable to play and helped to get me through those Division withdrawals. I would really like to play this game with friends because I think it would be extremely awesome to explore larger cities together. The game is targeting PC, PS4, and Xbox One, and I could absolutely see this being an enjoyable console co-op experience because the movement feels like it would translate well to a twin-stick controller setup. The big thing to remember about this game is that it comes with the same early access concerns as always. The game is not finished, but they seem to be updating pretty regularly. They have a beta branch that has more frequent updates, but also likely is in a less polished state… and then the normal branch is largely stable. I had quite a bit of fun playing the game, and I intend to pick it back up again. It is the perfect thing to pop into do a mission, and then exit feeling like you accomplished something or at least moved the experience bar forward. While going through all of my recent home renovations there were many occasions where I simply did not have the time to get into something terribly detailed. Instead I booted up How To Survive 2, and poked around for a bit and got my quick gaming fix before returning to the fray. I liked it and look forward to seeing how this evolves. At some point I feel like I really need to poke my head into the original game since this one doesn’t really provide much backstory.

Rocking Chairs and Zeds

March 6, 2016 by Belghast

Adulting Happened

The temperature is warming up here in Oklahoma, the birds are singing, the trees budding… and with all of this comes the desire to get the hell out of the house and do something. This is essentially the second nice weekend we have had and with it the desire to get out and sort out the mess that is our backyard. As a result the day unfolded through a masterwork of killing so many birds with one stone. Essentially it had been quite a while since I had seen my folks, so I knew this weekend we probably needed to meet up with them for a meal. Additionally we had a bunch of things that we had been wanting to purchase, but the lack of a good means of hauling it home was problematic. So we proposed that I met my folks for a nice meal… and then potentially abuse the use of my Dad’s truck for the purpose of hauling a few things home from Lowe’s and Sams Club. In theory some of this could have been done a single chair at a time, like we hauled home the resin rocker to decide if we liked it last weekend. Other than that we really needed a new deck box and for the longest time Sams Club has had this excellent looking one for a very reasonable price, that has hydraulics to hold the lid open while fiddling with stuff. So we set forth on the mission to eat a nice meal… and gather up a bunch of stuff.

We tag teamed a good portion of the day, while I was wandering around trying to find the things we needed with my father, my wife was back home filling up four big black trash bags full of debris. The end result of our adulting is that we have a great little patio off the newish bedroom door for us to sit out there and rock and enjoy the shocking amount of peace and quiet we have in our back yard. I also finally got some wind chimes… something I have always wanted since I was a small child. My grandmother had them and I used to love listening to them on spring and summer afternoons. We might have to adjust where they are hanging because they honestly don’t get a ton of wind, but that is something we can fiddle with over time. We took the older, smaller deck box and put it around side the house under the cantilevered bit that sticks out from our stairwell. We figured that would be an excellent place to store to pool cover and any covers for lawn furniture and such during the summer months. It is my mission this year to actually enjoy our back yard more, and we are even contemplating opening the pool a little early since it seems like we are now through the cold weather. Adulting is one thing… but having something to show for the adulting is a completely different thing.

Kovak’s Survival Guide

Another thing that I have been fiddling around with over the last few days is How to Survive 2. A good friend of mine hooked me up with a copy, and I have been poking my head around in it. While I am not exactly sure if I am ready to write a proper “impressions” piece I did want to talk about it a little bit this morning. There is still a lot of the game that I have not touched, like there is an entire online component that I have largely ignored. For the most part so far I have been playing the local single player, which is more or less a series of missions. The premise is as with many other Zombie Survival games… to scavenge the wastes to find useful stuff and then craft it into more useful stuff. The game itself has this entire old school fallout feel to it, where you are plunked down into limited maps to go exploring while doing the missions. It reminds me of all of the various city maps from Fallout 1 and 2, and this is where my explorer bit kicks in. During these missions you are asked to do a limited set of objectives… and as soon as you complete them you can tag out and leave the quest. However I cannot ever seem to bring myself to leave an area until I am absolutely certain I have killed everything and gathered every possible resource.

The world appears to be procedural generated and every mission seems to be repeatable, with a difficulty slider of sorts allowing you to ramp up the number of encounters. Last night I did a few missions on a higher level, and I have to say the number of zombies increases quickly. I went from having one or two stragglers here and there… to having small hordes to deal with by simply bumping it up by a single level. The game play is really fun, in that you move through the world with WASD and click to attack with Q/E cycling through any items you have like medicinal herbs. The mouse wheel works as a way of scrolling through your available weapons. I’ve found quite a bit of ammunition but so far I have not found any guns, so I am curious as to how the zombies interact with hearing a gunshot. Generally speaking I am largely a melee only guy when it comes to the zombie genre, because it allows me to get in… and get out without alerting the entire mass. Admittedly while playing this game… I keep expecting to see a Vault Dweller because it is so reminiscent of the way I used to feel playing Fallout. The only thing that is a bit frustrating at the moment is that I have reached a point where I need to be level three to continue the story missions. However at this point I am not even level two… so I am not exactly certain how I am supposed to be leveling. I am really hoping that the answer is not “grind the first missions over and over”. I will ping my friend and pester her to see if there is something I am missing in all of this, and hopefully there is. However I have been enjoying myself just wandering around looking for cool stuff and smashing zombies in the head with my upgraded baseball bat.

The Institute

December 31, 2015 by Belghast

Riding the RF

This coming Saturday it is the intention to record the Fallout 4 show for AggroChat since we ultimately put it off until after the Holidays. As a result I am back on the mission of trying to finish up the main storyline so that I can discuss it. I have to tell you… focusing on the storyline has killed a lot of my enjoyment of this game, and even then I find myself having a hard time of not following my instincts and letting myself get lost in the rabbit holes that are the weird side events going on around the commonwealth. However I really really need to focus so I can finish up and be read to discuss the path I took. Tam, Kodra and probably a few others will have likely beaten the game multiple times by the show happens… but so much of my enjoyment has nothing to do with the storyline that I am going to be hard pressed to finish this game once. I’ve logged hundreds upon hundreds of hours in the other Fallout and Elder Scrolls games… and started playing each of them numerous times… and to be honest… I think I have maybe beat the main story exactly once per game. Beating them is just not part of what I find crucial to the enjoyment, but instead roaming around and inhabiting the world is what makes them special. That said I am going to talk a bit about the storyline so if you don’t want to have any plot details spoiled… please just skip the rest of this post.

Firstly… I love the Railroad. I’ve loved everything about the quest sequence so far, from the having to follow the freedom trail to find their base, to the extracting and guarding of runaway synths. One of my favorite missions was when I had to pick up a synth and guard him while waiting on someone else to help ferry him along to his new home. I realized by following the path of the Railroad I would ultimately come into conflict with both the Brotherhood of Steel and the Institute, and more or less I am perfectly fine with both of these choices. The Minutemen however, I am hoping I can retain my position with them, because I really like the concept of them as the unsung heroes of the commonwealth. The only frustration so far has been that working on the main story, and also the railroad story… has forced me to follow at least to a point the institute story. Everything about the institute creeps me the fuck out. They keep trying to tell me that they are no where near the bogeymen that they are acclaimed to be…. but then they want me to go abduct a scientist, and act like they weren’t going to give him a choice in the matter. They also really wanted me to create a radio broadcast threatening the commonwealth that if they messed with the institute they would destroy them. Again there is the whole Synth thing as well… if you create life you have to respect it… and they very much seem to treat synths the same way we would treat a toaster.

Double Agent

You would think that by working with the Institute I would come to respect and understand them, but instead it has only served to make me more creeped out by their actions. The only real positive of the institute is the fact that the Courser outfit looks amazing, and I am more than happy to wear it around everywhere. Basically the Institute reminds me of the Vault, magnified to the extreme. Everything is cold and sterile, and I believe you are supposed to sympathize with your son…. aka “Father” but he seems just as twisted and misguided as the Overseers from the various vaults. There is a point where you have this conversation with him, where he basically writes off everything that is happening in the commonwealth as nothing worth salvaging, but instead I feel like I’ve seen so much good already in the people of the commonwealth. What is killing me is how long it is taking for me to get to the point where I can stop playing nice… and help the synths escape from the Institute. There are a few of the scientists that I like, but it feels very much like running around in a creepy 1980s police state science fiction film. Having every single item in the Institute look like 1970s era “high tech” concepts isn’t helping either. I keep having flashbacks in my mind to movies like Logan’s Run or books like Brave New World. Basically the whole experience with the Institute is a whole lot of nope.

So much of me wants to just open fire and take out everyone down there…. then give the tech they have to people who will actually put it to use for the benefit of everyone. They claim that they are the last hope of humanity…. but they seem to be doing nothing at all to benefit anyone other than themselves. They are a bunch of scientists high on the act of doing science…. and seem go give zero shits about the practical application of the tech they are building when it comes to actually improving the world for anyone other than their cloistered society. Basically the Institute is against everything that makes me really love Fallout 4, the feeling of honestly saving the world a little bit at a time. Both the Insititute and The Brotherhood of Steel are these paternal forces, trying to gather power and resources for themselves at the cost of the common folk. So all of that said… I am going to be damned happy when I can finally open fire and leave the Institute behind me. Tam kept alluding to the Railroad not being what they seem…. but I just have not seen it yet. I don’t see the Institute as the noble force worth committing myself to… instead I see a group that causes a lot of harm and ends up thinking of it as “minor collateral damage”. The hubris is strong with them… and I am really hoping I am getting close to ending the story arc and leaving them behind.