Welcome back citizens to the Nero Gaming newsletter!

This is an unusual one: all we’ve got today is Starfield First Impressions.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming next week.

Starfield First Look

The Emperor has put 20 hours in the long awaited Bethesda sci fi RPG.

Since the game probably has about 2000 hours of squeeze (before mods), we won’t do a full review just yet. Here’s what we got instead:

• Top Things We Love about Starfield

• Top Ways Starfield Disappointed Us

• A few quick tips for your playthrough

Let’s do it!

*****What We Love*****

The space combat is REALLY fun

I’m going to say this is my favorite space combat in any game I’ve ever played.

I know: It’s a huge claim (that I’ve thought deeply about) but it just checks all the boxes.

I won’t go over every technical detail of how it works, but I’ll offer some highlights:

• Perfect balance of types of weapons—offers a lot of dynamic options but not too overwhelming. (Also balancing power between systems in real time feels so good).

• The “piracy” aspect is amazing—you have to take special care not to blow up a ship you want to commandeer (nautical term), but it’s well worth it if you do.

• There’s nothing too cheesy (so far) and you can easily get your ass kicked if you’re outgunned.

• It’s very easy to predict how certain upgrades (or downgrades) will affect your ship in combat. (I’m currently plotting a ship with shields and engines that can just outrun the baddies—totally doable).

I’ll close with a bit of lazy analysis: The space combat feels really good. The weapons are punchy, the sound design is perfect—In my book Starfield scored a perfect 10/10 on this.

When I think about what I want to do with my space baron fortune in Starfield, it’s ships, ship upgrades and more ships (and upgrades!).

The missions are engaging and well written

No surprise here—With all their titles, Bethesda is on the podium in the “video game quests” Olympics. Can’t say much without spoiling anything.

I also really enjoy the lore and the universe overall—I’m already excited for a Starfield show on Netflix.

There is a SURPRISING lack of bugs

Let’s give credit where it’s due: I’ve had almost no bugs and zero game breaking bugs. I did have the game crash once, but lost nothing important.

You might feel like for this to be celebrated standards are pretty low: You’d be right.

Triple A studios have lost our trust over the last few years by releasing $60 unplayable demos—not so with Starfield.

****What Hurts The Most****

The disappointments of Starfield are few in number but great in stature, I’m sad to say.

Worst Decision Ever: Space travel sucks really bad

This is the major, major criticism Starfield is receiving.

The devs made a very intentional decision to use a LOT of loading screens and to make space travel synonymous with fast travel.

Here are the 4 phases of me “flying” from a city on one planet to a city on another:

• Start at City A

• Open Map and Click on City B

• Loading Screen

• Arrive at City B (on foot, not in my ship)

To celebrate this immersive journey, I made a scrapbook:

You might be thinking “Sure, you’re fast traveling—that’s how fast travel works.”

But the point is that this is the ONLY way to travel between two destinations that aren’t on the same planet. One cannot even fly INTO space without initiating a loading screen. It’s just fully nauseating.

For me, this is truly an unforgivable sin of the game. It’s what flips it from “Worth a try” to “a disappointment overall.”

It’s as if the game designers never even bothered to investigate what is fun in other space games like No Man’s Sky (or Elite: Dangerous or Dual Universe or Space Engineers or X4: Foundations or Eve Online).

An arrogance of the studio really rears it’s head in this decision. They simply said “do it like Skyrim I guess lol” …

The outpost building experience is really bad

This is another example of Bethesda bumbling in the dark and not having a single minute of base building game experience amongst the entire design team.

First of all, the UX is ABSOLUTLEY HORRIBLE in base building. Not “annoying but tolerable” … worse than that.

I give Bethesda an F minus with extra homework to go play a city builder for five f***ing minutes before they try to fix this.

Here’s one example: In the top down build view, to zoom in and out when looking at your base, you move the mouse up and down—and since the mouse is unavailable to move the cursor, you move the cursor with WASD.

(Just read that over and over until it hits you).

I can honestly say my factories might be fully complete if this system wasn’t so horrible—but I just kept needing to shoot something after about 30 minutes of dealing with it.

There are a also dozen little things that are a pain in the ass (but shouldn’t be).

Examples:

• I still haven’t figured out how to load directly from my outpost storage into my ship cargo hold. I’ve been manually carrying everything.

• There’s no way to see the material requirements for outpost buildings unless you are at an outpost. Make a list when you go to other planets to go shopping (I guess).

• Crafting (tangentially related to outpost building) is a pain. There’s no way to see what crafting level unlocks what items or the recipes for anything anywhere unless you already have the skills and the building that is needed. Best of luck in planning your factory in any way at all!

I’m not shocked by this but it is worse than I thought it would be. Maybe it will get better?

For now I’ll just say “Help me Bethesda game modders, you’re my only hope.”

A few quick tips for your playthrough

• Don’t be afraid to bank some skill points. It’s hard to know when you need what (and there’s no way to reset). I’ve been saved a couple times from grinding for EXP by just having some ready to go.

• Do your research when you’re stuck—my most frustrating hours could have been frustrating minutes if I’d looked the topic up on YouTube.

TL;DR—Just remember Starfield is an RPG (not a sandbox and not a space sim)

I’ll be honest—I’m really bummed overall. I was really excited to dive in to a populated sci fi universe.

Like every game I play, I was most looking forward to channeling my inner captialist: Creating factories, crafting goods, shipping, trading—truly becoming “Space Andrew Carnegie.”

This is all possible in Starfield—but these systems are just really poorly implemented (as discussed).

Here’s the advice I’d give to anyone who enjoys simulated capitalism as much as me: Remember that this game is a story driven RPG with some sandbox, crafting and simulation elements mixed in (again, very poorly).

With that mindset, the game really does check most of the boxes.