 Captain's log. Star date, September 6th. I don't know how star dates work, actually. Review of Starfield. I don't know why I'm talking like William Shatner. I love space. It's a reason why I was so excited for Cyberpunk, and everything leading up to the launch of that game built it up to be this incredible Cyberpunk adventure that it wasn't. I don't have to rehash all of that, but clearly there was a lot of lies that went on. I do, I feel it happened again. Maybe not so much lies as just misconceptions skewed by Bethesda themselves. Today I want to talk about my experience with the game, but also mostly I want to look through the 45-minute deep dive that Bethesda themselves put out just a couple of months before Starfield released. We can take multiple parts of this deep dive and poke holes and explain literally false information about what this game would eventually end up looking like. What if we could take that feeling of being who you want to be and exploring a new world but set it in space, where you weren't really limited in where you could go or what you could do, and that is Starfield. And again, that doesn't mean this is a bad game. It's just not the game that a lot of us, myself included, expected. But stick around because I got a lot more to say than just what's wrong with the deep dive and the marketing. I also want to talk about what's good about the game. So join me on the SS, the cow! That was like a whole shit, but people just exploded up there. Also ignore me if I eat during this. I killed a Glig Glow on planets the other day and I made a bunch of hot dogs. There's nothing like Glig Glow glizzy, you know? It just hits different. Starfield is our first new universe in over 25 years, but it's still a Bethesda RPG through and through. Now I want you to just remember that as we go forward. They want it to create fallout or elder scrolls in space. Both of those games have a very distinct style. When I think of playing those games, I think of open world exploration going anywhere I want right from the start. But how I get there is up to me. It's my journey and I do it all in a certain way. And that's mostly by physically traveling to places and going on an adventure. We'll come back to that. And it wasn't until now that we had the technology to create it. It's not until now that we've had the technology to create it. It's interesting that they specifically said that they now have the technology to create something like this. When they didn't even fully commit to certain elements we've seen in other games like this, like No Man's Sky with its version of space travel and exploration. So I'm not sure exactly what technology we didn't have before that we have now where this game couldn't have been made previously, but let's keep going. That isn't just a backdrop. That moon is actually there orbiting the planet. Yes, you can visit it too. Except it is just a backdrop. It is quite literally a JPEG. This planet is not actually there. And this is what I meant just before when I said, what's the technology here? This could be done. This could be a planet that you could actually fly to because we've seen it done in other games. But instead, how you get there is by opening up a menu and then fast traveling to it. In fact, if you tried it would take several hours to actually even get close to the planet. There are people on Twitch like Alana who have actually done this. It took her seven hours to get to Pluto, and she just went through one side and out the other. I mean, I think this one is just a lie. The combat and gunplay in the game is extremely basic. Every time they show it even in this deep dive, they kind of hide how unexciting it is behind multiple camera cuts and then constantly switching between first and third person to make it look more cinematic and actiony. If you actually watch what's happening, it's just a lot of jumping and pointing and shooting. And one of my biggest complaints is brain dead AI. You can stand in the middle of gunfights for an exuberant amount of time just taking damage like a bullet sponge before you actually need to start playing the game sit somewhere. Okay, I didn't care about that. Oh, no, just kidding. I'd never dance, dance. Oh, that did it though. That that was too much, I guess. We love to pack a ton of detail in every object from all of your weapons to spacesuits to food. We just obsess over the details and food. We obsess over food. This is by far where the game shines. It's very pretty, extremely detailed. The hours that must have gone into building the environments, the worlds and the little knickknacks you can pick up the guns, the suits, the armor. This is a whole undertaking in itself that probably took the entire development time of this game, which kind of explains maybe why the overall vision of wanting the fallout and Skyrim experience in space didn't quite get connected all the way. It looks fantastic. The lighting is incredible. Here you can plot a course to ones that are light years away. This uses your ship's grav drive to fold space and jump to these systems. This is more, I think, kind of misleading speech because it all sounds very fantastical when he's talking about traveling the echoes of space, like how your ship will use the grav drive to fold space, exploring other solar systems. But again, you can actually do that at all. Fast travel and load screens is the only way to get around this entire game. The best you can do in your spaceship is to fast travel near a planet and orbit the JPEG orbit before opening up the menu again and fast traveling to the landing location. Anytime you are actually in space, you either fast travel there because you're heading somewhere or you're going to do a mission somewhere in space that will just bring you straight to the mission point. It's all a previously selected location that you plot a course for and then you just load into. It's all cutscenes. Do you do any space travel? That's a little sad. It's another reason why the ship doesn't feel like it's actually moving at all. In fact, here is top speed. This is me not moving at all. And this is me going in reverse. And I can't tell the difference between any of these. And it doesn't really matter because you've got nowhere to go. Go back to the map to land. Are you kidding? I can't just land on the planet like this. Why am I playing this? I have no man's sky, which is a little disappointing because I was excited when making my character. I was making him a hand solo type and gave him combat but also piloting skills. But then it right ended up being an irrelevant perk, I guess. It makes it feel all less connected and far more disjointed. The best way I can describe this is like when you move somewhere new for the first time where you haven't lived before and you google maps everywhere and you rely so heavily on google maps that when you don't have it, you realize how lost you are and you have no idea where anything is in the city around you. And that's this game. I fast travel everywhere because I have to and I don't know how any of it is connected. But that's the fun of it all. That's the skyrim and fallout of it all. I've never played an open adventure game before with fast traveling where I didn't have to actually go somewhere the first time before I was allowed to fast travel there. That's usually a staple in games, which is probably a perfect time to show you this. Create a character you want and explore with unparalleled freedom as you embark on an epic journey. Unparalleled freedom. Meaning this has never been done before. An unparalleled experience. I need you watching at home to understand what I took from that because I've played No Man's Sky and I know how that travel works. I've even played Starlink on the Switch and you can travel from a planet to space to another planet just like that. This is not unparalleled. You'll hit an invisible wall even if you try and walk too far from your ship. And some areas that you land literally have physical walls. Guys, I'm getting a bad feeling about exploring this planet. There's like walls everywhere. Invisible walls. This is not an invisible wall. This is literally a wall. But none of this even compared to No Man's Sky. Being compared to No Man's Sky isn't a bad thing by the way. I think a lot of people haven't realized how fantastic that game is now after all of the intense amount of updates they've added to it. To put this in a perspective, it's like if you're playing Skyrim the first time and as you're standing in the middle of that burning village that you start in, the game says, hey, you can go to Riverrun now and it just brings up a menu and you teleport straight there and you miss all of the adventure on the way. The on the way is the best part. Why do I not have the on the way ever space travel game? I hate to keep going on about it, but they promised unparalleled freedom. So what is the excuse for not having it? Is the Xbox holding it back? We can talk more about that later. Let's go back to the deep dive. It's the biggest city we've ever made, not just in size, but also in the amount of custom art, crowds, and quests. So they really focused on this new Atlantis biggest city they've ever made, which is cool, but it's hard to get an understanding of how big this city actually is though, since you can't see it from space on the JPEG of the planet or on the star map. Oh, sorry, the Glock Lizzy is like, just go down softly. You also can't fly your ship as we talked about. So you can't go near or around the city or see it from a distance as you're landing. And the city itself is all broken up into different zones separated by a train ride. Even riding the train is a little lazy because you just kind of open the door a little select where you want to go. And then the door quickly closes and then leaves without you. If it's all going to be quick and fast travel, at least give me a cutscene in between of like going through the city. Again, like my Google Maps comparison earlier, I'll get a better sense of how this big city is connected. It's not an impressively big city if I can walk one end to the other in 30 seconds in each location. It's a few moments of gameplay that make the space feel like it's full of real characters that are going about their day to day lives. Okay, now this part is feeling a little bit like deja vu, because once again, we have another game filled with more lifeless, brain dead AI that believe it or not have less personality than the residents of Night City. While the day and night cycles promised by CD Projekt were ultimately a lie, at least they attempted to fake it. The NPCs in this game just travel on rails, sometimes walking behind each other in a straight line like lemmings. It kind of feels like the areas in this game was supposed to be an MMORPG, where the players filling the lobbies gave the game life as they were running around and doing things as you went about your business. But without all those players running around, you just kind of have nothing happening. I hate to use Red Dead 2 as a comparison again, because I did that in my Cyberpunk review. But each of the NPCs in that game all felt like individual, actual people with their own stories, personalities, problems, and quirks. This is what adds soul into a game world. Also, me, I'm crazy, but can we have stores that aren't just boiled down to a menu? I know it's convenient this way, but it's way more realistic in games like Red Dead when you walk into a store and you can actually pick something off of the shelf. It feels more immersive. There's still a catalog you can breeze through if you want, but you walk into this store in New Atlantis, and apparently it sells armor, guns. It doesn't look like that by beating in here, because there's no merch anywhere to be seen. It looks more like a high-end jewelry store from the Richie Rich side of King of Prussia Mall. And then you just go into a stock menu to buy whatever you want. There's even a coffee shop that has a couple of nice-looking Lamar Zocos out front, but when you try and order a coffee, it just goes to a menu. The guy doesn't even move. At least give this guy like an animation cycle of making a latte or something. Make me feel like something's happening here. This isn't exactly next-gen by any means to me. It's just cookie-cutter stock standard stuff. It may be the largest city Bethesda has ever made, but large land mass alone doesn't make for an interesting or even exciting place to explore. Also in this massive game with thousands of planets, there's only four cities throughout the entire game's universe, and then five smaller towns and settlements. Now, I'm not sure if they decided on four cities because they wanted to have at least as many as what Mass Effect 2 had. It would suck if they had less 13 years later. I dislike that this game also has nothing to do in the cities other than pick up missions and then leave with those missions. We even have this really cool neon city that reminds me of Cyberpunk, but you can't do it. There's no activities. There's no mini games or like fun things to do in the actual cities themselves. I mean, at least in Cyberpunk, you could bang a robot. You know, there was one thing you could do. Game has zero. I feel like we should take a pause here to explain what I meant by the title and also talk about why the game is good. The main story is a little, well, I'm not going to say anything bad. Let's just say it's not for me. The start of the game feels really rushed and yet somehow also painfully slow. Mostly everyone agrees that the game starts slow and takes a while to get better. So I feel like we might have another Xenoblade 2 situation on my hands right now. Here's the thing. Five hours in, I was done. It was so insanely boring and I had realized that I was wrong. It wasn't the amazing, unparalleled adventure I thought it was going to be. It was something that I'd played a dozen times before, but I have to admit something changed. So the part of the video where I'm talking about the space being boring, I decided I would film some extra footage for that and just show that there's nothing to do up there. And while I was filming it, there was nothing to do up there, but I decided to film some footage of landing on a random planet and showing how barren it was going to be. And then I got this glitch where I couldn't fire my gun anymore. And I found a fix where if I hacked into the code and just changed my gender, that fixed it. It wiped my character's face, but I was able to shoot now. It still wasn't going well initially as the first place I found was the exact same place from the deep dive trailer, the one place I find I've already seen. It also didn't help that this person was stuck floating in space and I don't know what the heck is happening to Sam over here. Oh Jesus Christ. But after this area, I found a cave and I started exploring it, killing space pirates on the way, collecting and mining everything in sight. And the beauty of this vast and detailed cave was not lost on me at all. And I did feel this sense of discovery because this is the first time where I was somewhere where I wasn't supposed to be. Right after leaving the cave, I saw a bunch of bounty hunters running towards me. And this is when I remembered when creating my character, I picked the wanted perk, meaning that every now and then bounty hunters would just come find me and try and get me. And the trade off was that I had extra damage when I was low on health. I thought that was a cool quirk to my character. So these guys were coming to bring me in. So I failed to persuade them not to and then moided them all. And once I did that, I figured, well, their ship that they came in, that would be mine now. After going on board and wiping out the rest of the crew, I discovered I couldn't actually take the ship because I wasn't skilled enough to pilot it. Turns out on the skill tree, you need to level up and get to the point where you can pilot higher grade ships. One way to earn this one was to kill 15 ships in dogfights, which I hadn't done yet. The fact that I wasn't a good enough pilot gave me something to aspire to. I kind of wanted to go and do some missions, own some experience, kill some things in space so that I could in the future steal a ship like this. And from here, I ended up glued into a five hour marathon session where I had fun the entire time. And then I was supposed to do my first baby debut mission for the vanguard ended up being an outpost that was complete. Everyone was dead because there was a loose pteromorph there and I had to run around turning on these automatic lasers and it felt like I was in an aliens movie. There was a cutscene where the pteromorph was like ripping into another alien and all this time I'm getting XP and money. Yeah, I guess this game can be pretty fun. It really started to feel like Fallout 4 again, minus being able to actually go places without fast traveling. But even though there is fun and I'm enjoying it, I don't want to take away from the point of this video that this game could have been so much more and was kind of promised to be so much more. For me, a game like this needs to be about the adventure, the exploration and the unlimited potential, not just the mindless doing chores to unlock cool, detailed things. Red Dead, No Man's Sky, Tears of the Kingdom, even Baldur's Gate 3, which I haven't talked about yet, but I am loving these experiences allow players to interact with the game any way they want. That's what a game like this needs to be on top of all the story and the lore and everything that does give it merit. That's what would propel this game to be a genre defining game and something truly special. Some things that would help on top of that. I wish the story was delivered slightly more dramatically. We have characters that never move from a single location, dead staring into the camera lens, poorly reading off lines from a script with little to no expression on their face. And it's nowhere near dynamic enough to keep my ADHD-goo riddled brain entertained to the slogs of dialogue options. You compare that to a game like Baldur's Gate 3, which has some of the best voice acting I've heard in gaming with interesting and at times hilarious dialogue options, each of which can lead to several varying outcomes. If I wanted to talk about unlimited freedom and choice, you can do literally whatever you want in Baldur's Gate 3. Whole ass main characters you can just kill right from the start. Or you can romance everyone, party up with who you want. Every solution has multiple outcomes. It's always your choice. The game never tells me no. It's very similar to Tears of the Kingdom. In fact, I think Baldur's Gate 3 is the Tears of the Kingdom to the RPG genre. It is as free, as open as Tears of the Kingdom was. It's so good. Playing that and going straight to Starfield was a little rough. Let's get back to the deep dive. When you leave a planet and head into space, you'll be navigating asteroid fields, having chance meetings with interesting strangers, dogfighting in space, and exploring derelict ships. I find this part kind of humorous. They're listing the things you can do in space, but they literally list the only three things you can really do. Navigate asteroid fields, dogfights in space, and exploring ships. I actually can't think of anything else you can do up there. This is just kind of their way of saying we have asteroid fields. You'll see them. They're pretty. Don't make it sound like you're doing something. That paints an image of like Star Wars where you're like dodging around asteroids or like galaxy questions. You try not to hit every single one. If I'm in an asteroid field right now, give me a second. Comparatively, you have No Man's Sky. It does have asteroid fields and it's more exciting when you accidentally end up in one because it's usually when you're trying to go from A to B and you do have to navigate through them. If you don't want the No Man's Sky comparison, it's kind of like in Sea of Thieves where you go and you find a bunch of loot and then you just want to take it back to an outpost to sell it before something sinks your ship and then a kraken decides, no, hold on. I'm going to ruin your whole ass day. It's way more exciting. It's about the adventure and that sense of adventure is lost. I'm continuing to try and build this picture of what this game could be. We've got a watch. It is the Constellation Explorer's watch. This is the watch that you actually get in the game. Do we talk about the watch? They sold me the collector's edition that came with the watch. I haven't picked it up from Best Buy yet because I can't decide if I'm going to keep it or not. Back in the fallout four days, I couldn't afford to buy the Pip Boy. It was a one-for-one replica that connected to your smartphone and allowed you to control your in-game inventory perks, holotapes and more. That alone is sick. But the reason it was cool was because the Pip Boy was such a big part of the game. It was so stylish, smooth and organic. Having a physical representation of that in a collector's edition just made sense. So when I saw this watch, I thought, oh, that's awesome. A more streamlined, awesome, futuristic watch that will surely work just like the Pip Boy were in the game. You'll look at your watch and the actual physical watch that I'm buying will work with the game. It's just a watch. I actually knew that they did say it was going to be just a watch and it wouldn't work with the game at all. So I knew that going into it. But I still thought I was buying a part of the game like the Pip Boy that would be an important part of the game. Nope. After it's handed to you at the start of the game in this big showcasing moment, you'll never see it again. Where's the looking at the in-game menu thing gone? What's the point of the watch? I can only assume that they added the watch so that they could sell it physically in a collector's edition for $300. I don't know why else they would do this. The only way the watch is reflected in the game at all physically is the HUD in the lower left corner of the screen. But it's not the actual watch. It's a digital representation of it. And I honestly never even look at it. At this point, I've covered everything they talked about in their deep dive showcase. And aside from story spoilers, they really did deep dive into everything the game had to offer. And I think that's because there's not really that much to sum up and talk about. They make it seem like there's and more, but there's not really. I also want to make a bold assumption here and take some of the blame off of Bethesda. I don't think this is Bethesda's fault. Again, they are kings of travel. I'm sure they've heard of No Man's Sky and know that flying to a planet physically is cooler and more fun than just not being able to. It was clearly a conversation they must have had at some point. So why isn't it there? And my bold assumption is Xbox. This is all my own speculation, but hear me out. On the Xbox Series X, the most powerful version of Xbox, it's still locked to 30 FPS. So knowing that fact alone, I don't think it's a stretch to say. If it can't handle what's already here above 30 FPS, adding in something like seamless space travel and exploration and loading into a planet without a load screen would be a stretch. I don't think the Xbox can handle it. Why else is the biggest city Bethesda has ever made, obviously very proud of, broken up into several smaller chunks, unless it's just they're not able or they weren't able to find a way to render the entire city in at one time. While playing on Xbox, as I said, it felt slow and chuggy. I'm not a big guy on like, I can't play a game in 30 FPS because I can. I play most of my Switch games in 30 FPS, unless most of the time, let's be honest, you need at least nice smooth frames to enjoy an FPS to the full potential. And I don't want to get into a tangent about how honestly disappointing the current generation of consoles are or that this game was the first time I really felt the underwhelming power of a machine that has released less games in four years than the play date has in one. Think about that. But I do think that Starfield being an Xbox game first and foremost held back its development and prevented it from being as open and free as it could have been. And that's before we even talk about the fact that the game also has to work on the series S. IGN's review was honestly pretty spot on in my opinion. The funny thing was they talked about pretty much everything they didn't like the entire review and then said, but it gets better later, so 7 out of 10. And you know what, I'm kind of in the same boat. There's definitely more to complain about than praise. What was promised isn't all here, but what is here isn't bad. It's just not as grand as it could have been. If you're looking to collect a bunch of items and loot while doing endless missions and side quests for characters and buried locations, the game definitely offers that. On PC, it is stunning with fantastic lighting effects and visuals that deserve points where they're deserved. The story and lore seem to appeal to a lot of people, and the more I discover of the game, I'll admit there are parts of it that are interesting and do flesh out the world. I think in my case specifically, it was just that ignorance is bliss after already experiencing the epic interstellar travel of No Man's Sky and to even an extent Starlink. I've already enjoyed the freedom storytelling and voice acting of games like Boulder's Gate 3 and to a lesser extent Mass Effect. I've had open connected adventures in games like Red Dead 2, Zelda, or even Fallout in Skyrim. It would be nice if there was one space game that merged all of these ideas and elements into one giant in the galactic experience and no, I haven't tried Star Citizen yet. I can't criticize Starfield for being what it is. I just believed due to the marketing it was going to be something I wanted and it wasn't. But, I'm adjusting my expectations and managing to find enjoyment. With other new releases right now like Boulder's Gate 3, Tis of the Kingdom, Blasphemous 2, Final Fantasy 16, Armored Core 6, Starfield is just another barren planet of a game buried in a galaxy of exciting adventures. I wrote that line before I started enjoying the game. I just like that line so much, I wanted to keep it. But in fair, it's not true. The game is anything but barren, it's just not exactly brimming with life and it is getting buried by more content packed experiences releasing right now. Also, this actually wasn't a review of Starfield, it was a review of Boulder's Gate 3 the whole time. That game's a 10 out of 10. Thank you!