Starfield (Zero Punctuation)

Starfield, or to give it its full title, Starfield and Friends (heh heh heh) is Bethesda's long-awaited new action RPG, which everyone says is what the lazy bastards have been doing instead of Elder Scrolls 6 or A Fallout game that doesn't suck, but who the hell needs them when you can have a game with a whole galaxy of explorable planets? Where there could be an Elder Scrolls planet and a Fallout planet and a smaller wanderer planet and a planet made of meringue, why not? When space exploration is at stake, not even the sky is the limit. So how did Starfield turn out?

We've now established that it oozes potential like a poorly made Big Mac with Thousand Island dressing. Well, it's... it's... it's... it's... huh. It's... it's... it's really boring as it happens. I will say this though: this is absolutely the game for you if you really like doors. If you are overtly sexual with doors and get illicit thrills from watching a dizzying array of sci-fi doors open in every direction imaginable with lots of little details, lights and whistles, then Starfield will turn you on more than MST3K's countdown sequence. did. The story begins with our final faceless protagonist working in a mine, where we discover a mysterious relic left by an advanced precursor alien civilization, and touching it gives you a rather unremarkable mystical vision of distant galaxies, so we've already cut that out. four squares on our space game bingo card, the rest of which are eliminated when a charismatic scoundrel space pilot who may care appears and says: "Oh, you've found an alien artifact, now you can join our Super Friends Treehouse Club ". for Super Great Explorers, random impoverished miners with snot in their beards." Here's a free spaceship, and then, to continue the plot, you have to go to what looks like a Victorian-era smoking room, where a group of braying posh idiots who might as well be wearing monocles and pith helmets patronize you and tell you that going out and finding more alien artifacts would be having fun with big, happy hockey sticks.

And I think that was the first time I I realized it was the complete opposite of being engaged. Vacant, possibly. I thought fondly of the opening of Skyrim, where you're about to be decapitated, before a large dragon appears and atomizes anything resembling a stick. hockey. Where are the emotions? Where are the stakes? Why should we worry about collecting more vision-inducing alien artifacts, except that they provide cheap, soft skin that the FDA has not yet regulated? It's probably best that James A. Starfield has the usual wide range of Bethesda RPG side content exploration and gameplay activities, with a lot of no man's sky in the middle to which everything else clings like a parasitic crab, so So there are several hundred planets with literally endless procedurally generated landscapes of every color of the rainbow to explore, and a total of seven or eight different plants.

And of course, you can build a base if there is something about this sky and its specific shade of soft pea green that sets your nesting instinct. And so, while I'm searching a room for ammo, medkits, and valuables, pretty much every random item says, "This is a crafting ingredient, don't throw it away!" Crafting ingredient? So that? Well, we can't just tell you. You'll need to fill all of your cocking inventory space with junk in case any future upgrades you want require some of it. Oh, I quite like this damage upgrade for my weapon. It will be six berylliums, a capacitor and a toast rack.

Oh, lucky me, I only brought nine bleach, a slice of fish, and a light-emitting diode. The Critical Path plot then took me to an alien temple where, after completing possibly the easiest minigame imaginable that involved almost literally jumping through hoops, the game unlocked my first cosmic superpower, a sort of Skyrim Dragon Shouts equivalent, only in this case one that seemed to upset every Styrofoam cup within a six-foot radius. So at that point I made the commander's decision to kick the main plot over the head and indulge in some of that idiosyncratic Bethesda RPG. I took a side mission to study the Tau Ceti system, which went a long way toward confirming that when you procedurally generate one planetary desert, you procedurally generate them all, but it gave me one direction to go in and I got bogged down. in a conflict between a pirate group and local settlers, and then I had more fun because I ventured out on my own terms.

The space battles are quite functional, if not exactly mind-blowing, and the same goes for the ground-level shooting. I had to bring about twelve different weapons, though, because the game has more types of ammo than a vending machine at a Texas high school. Still, functionality is a big step for a Bethesda RPG, because everything else is infused with the usual madness. The old Bioware face problem is very evident: every NPC talks to you like a deer trying to fool a pair of headlights. Storming the pirate base with a platoon of angry farmers, I realized that the gap-toothed morons were leaving me to deal with most of the enemy alone, while they ran around the lobby trying to figure out how the elevator buttons work.

Oh, and at some point the game said I committed a crime but didn't tell me what it was. I'm sixty percent sure I didn't do it, but one of the factions suddenly put a bounty on my head and my helper NPC at the time got very angry. I tried to ask them what I had done, but obviously the game wasn't smart enough to track that, so I could only talk about it. "Hey buddy, why are you so angry all of a sudden?" "You know perfectly well why." "Not really, I'm trying to figure it out." "The fact that you don't know makes me even angrier." "I don't remember making any flirtatious conversation options, why have you become my wife?" So I thought about avoiding the bounty hunters until I could get to a police station and pay the fine, but while I was trying to do so the police kidnapped me.

And I woke up in a cell with a guy saying, "We're recruiting you as an undercover agent, because the horrible crime you committed proves that you're the perfect candidate to infiltrate the pirates. Could someone explain to me clearly what I'm thinking?" did?" So my immersion was pretty much broken at that point if it had ever had a chance to be fully assembled. It's hard to enjoy the grandeur of space travel when it seems like you spend more time navigating menus than you do in the cockpit. and you basically have to fast travel wherever you go. It's like I said I visited Singapore, because my plane stopped there once to refuel, but I didn't actually get off because I finally got my seat padded to the exact proportions of the right glute.

So I don't recommend Andrew Starfield functional as it is in part, because it just bores me. One moment it's No Man's Sky, the next it's Mass Effect, then it's Cyberpunk for a while because we're in a city with a lot of signs neon called Neon. I bet it was an exhausting brainstorming session. But what it never is is a game with a clear identity of its own. As the man from Frustrated Moving said while trying to carry the contents of an observatory through the front door, This is what happens when the scope becomes too broad. Closed Captions by @willcblogs