My Issues with Starfield

[Roy Golan]

Starfield is an enjoyable but a broken game. It has some great moments but it is full of issues, bugs and mind boggling design decisions.
Bethesda made one huge mistake when designing the game with 1000 empty planets instead of having 10 or 20 planets with large areas to explore. Just imagine that each planet could have been like a small Fallout 4 or Skyrim map, how amazing that would have been.
I played 485 hours but not so small chunk of my game time is trying to fix issues via workarounds and console commands. This is most disappointing because many of these issues carried over from past Bethesda games.

Here are my issues with the game:
• Too many loading screens - no seamless takeoff, landing, entering a location. This is annoying and very immersion breaking.
• No vehicle (like a speeder) to use in exploration and surveying. Running in a straight line to points of interest boring. I once almost fell asleep while holding 'W'. This is not fun.
• No city map. I still don't know where some shops are in the city or where the districts are in relation to one another.
• To get powers from the temples you have to go through the exact same process, not a different mini puzzle for each unique power that also lets you experiment with the new power. This is a huge missed opportunity.
• Encumbrance is very limiting as one of the things you do most in the game is collect stuff. Also my ship that weigh tons cannot hold too many of my resources. This could be easily fixed by making resources weigh much less.
• Can't rename saved games so the player will KNOW what the save is all about (like "Talking with the pirate leader" or "Returning to the Lodge with Artifact"); I have to keep a Word document with details on EACH save!
• Leveling progression is very slow so it takes forever to level up your character.
• Slow animations (sitting, getting up). Also giving back control to the player takes too long after the animations have finished.
• UI - The UI is horrible as always. This is so easily could have been made better. So many MODs fixed past Bethesda games. You cannot see all MAIN inventory categories without scrolling, there is too much wasted empty space. You cannot see all of items stats in columns and sort them. This is inexcusable for an RPG game.
• UI - Item sorting is horrible, Weapons, Spacesuits, Helmets and Packs are named by their modification first instead of their name first, making it VERY difficult to compare between them for selling, especially if you want to keep one (the best version) of each type. Weapons you can at least sort by type, but not with the other equipment, why not? you already had that option for weapons! Another example - Misc items "Right Easyslip Shoe" and "Left Easyslip Shoe" same type of shoe will not be together on the list, so why not name it "Easyslip Shoe - Right" and "Easyslip Shoe - Left"? These are the things that are mind boggling to me.
• UI - Menu navigation - when using hotkey to go directly to specific menu (like "I" for inventory), then when exiting the menu you should not go back to general menu, but instead return immediately to the game.
• UI - shows item value that is not what you will receive when selling it (value shown is probably the base value before it affected by skills and such)
• UI - Crew menu is accessed through the Ship menu, even though you can assign crew also to outposts that has nothing to do with Ships, so this doesn't make any sense. Why not make a Crew menu under the general circular menu?
• UI - Your character status menu is accessed via a button (that is almost missed) and it's not part of the general circular menu even though it's important enough to be included there.
• UI - There are no comma separators for thousands in currency. This is so important to be able to read the number quickly and it's so easy to implement. I just don't understand why they keep omitting that in all their games.
• UI - The "how much to transfer" popup when transferring 5+ items is very annoying and unnecessary. It's much easier and faster just clicking 5 more times to transfer items one by one without interruptions. At least make the menu appear if you are transferring over 20 items.
• NPCs always say something to you when you walk close to them. I don't need any meaningless comments from everyone while I'm doing my thing. Same for Vasco, I don't need his comments every time I step off my ship! 99% of the time I just want
some quiet experience. I don't have to be acknowledged every single time by him. This is so annoying!
• NPCs talk over one another, making you not hear what is being said to you in conversations.
• NPCs talk too much. They usually have 3 lines of dialogue for each 1 thing that you say. Sometimes one sentence is enough, no need for them to keep blabbing just to make the conversation longer. It would also be more realistic. I made up an example: You say "Do you want gum?" and the NPC could reply with "No thanks, I already had one" instead the NPCs talk too much and says something like "No thanks, I already had one yesterday, when I went to the store." and continues "I usually do that every day when I want gum" and continues "I like the taste that's why I make sure to always carry one with me". Just stop.
• NPCs don't react to gunfire around them.
• Companions constantly comment on your encumbrance, waking up in my bed. I don't need these comments. I'm not a child.
• Ship builder - You can't see what the habs interior looks like before committing to them and buying them. You need to go to your ship and see how it all looks like.
• Ship builder - You can't start a new ship from scratch. You need to buy a ship or steal one to modify it.
• Ship builder - You can't save a ship build in mid progress, so if you need to go you must lost all ship progression and start over.
• Ship builder - You can't place doors and ladders where you want, making your ship a maze and not the way you intended.
• Ship builder - Ship weapon categories are not sorted by type (energy, ballistic, missiles) so it's difficult to compare between them when wanting to buy for a specific purpose (anti shields weapon, anti armor weapon).
• You need to make a ship your home ship in order to repair it (for captured ships). Why not simply have the option to repair any ship in the ship modify or upgrade menu?
• Messages - Encumbrance messages appear every few seconds and are very annoying. I KNOW I'm encumbered! I don't need to be reminded all the time!
• Messages - Skill "challenge progression messages" appears rarely when these messages are actually something you DO want to see a lot of in order to KNOW that you are progressing and give the player a positive feedback. Instead you have to go the skills menu to check it again and again.
• Messages - Messages appear for a very short duration (like 1 second) and then disappear making you not know what just happened.
• Poorly worded skill descriptions that makes them unclear and forcing you to search online to understand what they actually do.
• The usage of the word "aliens" in text and speech to describe alien creatures is very confusing because when people say "aliens" in real life they almost always mean "intelligent aliens", not animals or creatures. All animals are "alien" to other worlds, so there's no reason to call all of them that.
• Skills naming issue - "Weapon Engineering" to unlock weapon mods, "Outpost Engineering" to unlock outpost options and - "Spaceship Design" to unlock ship parts, instead of "Spaceship Engineering". Whereas existing "Spaceship Engineering" skill does something else entirely.
• You can't see your character's feet in first-person for better immersion.
• Slow mouse movement when examining items and rotating it. Also examining an item does not give any new information.
• Dream Home - your ship is landed SO FAR AWAY from your home, and if that's not enough it's around a mountain! Couldn't they make space for it near your home (also for when encumbered)? ; This is especially a dumb decision as it's one of the major traits you can have and not a random outpost.
• Dream Home - you cannot see the planet outside through the windows (similar to Diamond City's home in Fallout 4) - very bad.
• You can't add many perfectly normal Misc items to the display shelves. Why not?
• There are many objects in the world that are not included in the decorations. Why there is no keyboard to go along with your desktop monitor?
• Making any change to your ship will transfer the content of your Captain's locker to the cargo hold. Why not transfer it to the new Captain's locker? This makes using the locker useless.
• Taking items from the world makes a unnecessary fade out animation of the items instead of making them immediately disappear, which is better for knowing that you have it.
• Eating food directly from the world is a nice addition, but food adds almost nothing to your health. Instead of adding points to your health it should add a certain percentage to your health.
• When scrolling through your inventory items, their image appears after 1 second of loading instead of immediately. This is unacceptable.
• When viewing hats you see them on your character which is ok, but we should also have the option to view it at closeup like in Fallout 4 (maybe when examining the item).
• When viewing/changing clothes, your character does a small movement animation. This is very unnecessary as it makes it harder to see the clothing.
• When a room loads in the world, sometimes items don't stay in place but explode and fall everywhere.
• Many shops, especially ones you enter with a loading screen, look very empty inside with nothing on display and no customers. This looks sad.
• When talking to companions the option to [Flirt] with them appears regardless of your sexual orientation. Sure you can ignore it, but this makes players uncomfortable as this should not even be an option for players who don't go that way.
• You can't track specific resources and you can't untrack resources if you selected to track them via a research that has ended or if you selected them for a weapon MOD. Now you have to remember which MOD you were on when tracking them. Very bad.
• When taking keycards, the game should not allow you to have more than one keycard of the same type, especially when you can't drop them (which is understandable as it might break the mission). But it does force you to use console command to remove the duplicate key if you want.
• Missions are added automatically from random NPCs when you walk near them. This is very annoying when you actually try to CLEAR missions and progress at your own pace (and get the good satisfying feeling of completion).
• Some collectables are locked behind completed missions, making it impossible to get them without using console commands and teleporting to the cells where they are located, grabbing them and teleporting back (evidence slates).
• Mission - should have had the option to warn people that are not evil (from pirates base) before having to kill them in the mission. This is bad for role playing if you don't want to do that it is forced on you to kill them.
• Too many ships land on remote planets and moons so you can't get that secluded and quiet experience if you wanted it.
• When starting a new game, you can't skip the intro playing scene and jump directly to the character creation screen.
• You can't fast travel to New Atlantis homes.
• It would have been nice to see how much ammo you currently have in your inventory when buying ammo (instead of switching to the sell ammo menu all the time just to check).
• It would have been nice to see an indication on the bottom of the menu of how much cargo space is saved on your ship when you sell items from the ship.
• It would have been nice to know which books I already own or read when seeing them in the world.

Besides all of that, the game is pushing a very progressive woke agenda. Pronouns in character creation, all companions are bisexual or gay, 90% of all important and even non important NPCs are black women, the rest are black men and women and 0.5% are white men.

Bugs:
• "Incoming weather" bug after Suvorov.
• Ship hatch sometimes become inaccessible.
• Approaching your ship you see a hole where the hatch used to be and you can't get inside.
• Crew disappeared from ship, never to return.
• Bannoc IV storm effect did not occur if traveled elsewhere before that system during the mission.
• Weapon reloading speed doesn't work (with the skill selected) if a grenade is also selected with the weapon.
• Buying back stolen for mission "Ensign Ziremi's uniform" does not work.
• Dream Home - placed items sink halfway into surfaces.
• Major bug - Homes resets! - when missions that happen in New Atlantis are over, the city resets itself and by that also resets both your decorated homes! Hours of work including all invested resources are lost. If the developer knows that the mission resets the city how hard is it to think to exclude player homes from this reset??? This is unbelievable and inexcusable!

The worst thing is however that Bethesda never learned anything from all the community notes over the years and from the MODs that fixed and improved their games.

This is so disappointing, especially when so many of these issues could so easily be fixed but probably won't.

[Sheepdog]

Perfectly said

[lizzo (banned 48 times)]

at the end of the day it was over hyped 3/10 400 million dollar game.

[Bunker]

i say overall a list of items that i would concur on.
some would require more discussion.
even some very specific ones. too numinous to name i would concur.

i did not read every single word of this tho
so maybe missed one or two topics. it's a long list!

[Knottypine]

Pretty decent list.

[Humpenstilzchen]

I have bad news for you. Bethesda doesn´t care about player feedback.

[struckat]

The whole thing feels more rushed than their prior games. There is no way they worked on it for 10 years.

[Keitzy]

Originally posted by Humpenstilzchen:

I have bad news for you. Bethesda doesn´t care about player feedback.

Let me fix this for you.
"Bethesda doesn´t care"

[alanc9]

How many seconds apart should POIs be? I thought the maps were too crowded as they are

[Tahnval]

I think that all romanceable (is that a word?) companions being bisexual is a pragmatic choice to ensure that the very small number of those characters are open to each player.

I saw someone refer to the sexual orientation of romanceable NPCs as "playersexual" and I think that's exactly right.

It's not realistic, but I think it's a reasonable practical choice in game design.

[CloudsInTheSky]

Geez, this is like an achievement list. You are helping people find the ones they missed by accident :D

[Ommamar]

Originally posted by Tahnval:

I think that all romanceable (is that a word?) companions being bisexual is a pragmatic choice to ensure that the very small number of those characters are open to each player.

I saw someone refer to the sexual orientation of romanceable NPCs as "playersexual" and I think that's exactly right.

It's not realistic, but I think it's a reasonable practical choice in game design.

BG3 is like that too, often to the point of ridiculousness. I guess that is probably a new trend developers will continue to do.

[insert food here]

Agree with most of that list. Have several others of my own.

Bottom line for me is that there are just too many things, including the 16 times the loading screens, that snap me out of any immersion and constantly remind me that i am interacting with a poorly thought out piece of software.

This is inexcusable for a game that is meant to be all about the player immersion in this new IP. I cannot be immersed in the wonder of space and new planets when nearly every minute i am being bombarded with things that totally break that immersion and are either poorly designed and implemented or just plain illogical.

[Xhaiden]

Originally posted by Ommamar:

Originally posted by Tahnval:

I think that all romanceable (is that a word?) companions being bisexual is a pragmatic choice to ensure that the very small number of those characters are open to each player.

I saw someone refer to the sexual orientation of romanceable NPCs as "playersexual" and I think that's exactly right.

It's not realistic, but I think it's a reasonable practical choice in game design.

BG3 is like that too, often to the point of ridiculousness. I guess that is probably a new trend developers will continue to do.

It's not a new trend at all. It was the same in Skyrim.

[Ommamar]

Originally posted by Xhaiden:

Originally posted by Ommamar:

BG3 is like that too, often to the point of ridiculousness. I guess that is probably a new trend developers will continue to do.

It's not a new trend at all. It was the same in Skyrim.

it was more subtle in Skyrim. At no point did one of the companions that wasn't even being utilized suddenly make sexual advances in a 4 person mulitplayer session no less in Skyrim or any other game I can think of. Yet it happens time after time in BG3 as the story is moved along. Since you can't rest without interacting with the companions it pushes the player(s) into dealing with a situation they probably don't want anything to do with. Romance has been a part of RPGs since the old D&D gold box games, it just seems to be more in your face in the last several years. I don't find it to bad in Starfield but it is definitely there if you pursue it.

[I Denizen I]

Well said OP, fantastic list.

Sadly, I mean I do sincerely hope I am wrong, I don't think the Devs are going to pull a Cyberpunk/NoMansSky and rescue us.