Starfield is a game that has… issues.
The first of which is that by using space travel in the way they have it’s practically impossible to stumble over a mission through exploration the same way you can in Skyrim or Fallout, often as I travelled to the next town to continue my current mission I’d get distracted by a new Cave system or set of ruins, and whilst there find myself becoming totally side tracked and, before you know it, miles away from where I was headed before doing something totally different.
Another is that XP doesn’t scale with your level, so when I reloaded the game for the DLC, I found myself completing what is a fairly sizeable mission, Lair of the Mantis, and was rewarded with a paltry 200 XP for completion… point a, I’m at the point where I need 9,000 or so to Level up, and point b, I’d got more than that for clearing out a room of pirates leading up to the end of the mission.
I’m currently at level 69 (nice) and the prospect of grinding out another 30 Levels is not appealing… so hopefully the DLC fixes that a little.
What it can’t fix is that I’ve not played for so long, I needed to keep referring to the settings to find out what button does what action, I’d forgotten how to access my inventory, how to save, use my powers, even change the camera position (which still, annoyingly, defaults to too damn close behind your character) let alone anything complicated like throwing a grenade.
Once I managed to control my character a little better, I was off to find the DLC and my first issue… I couldn’t line my ship up with the Space Station I was trying to dock with… and when I did, I forgot how to dock because the prompt just wasn’t appearing.
Having managed that I called time for the evening… having achieved very little, aside from actually not playing Balatro for an hour.
October 6th
I finished the DLC last night, at least as far as I’m prepared to go into it… the main story has been completed, along with a handful of side missions that were needed to unlock another Achievement, and I wandered around the landscape enough to discover the 50 locations needed for another.
While the landscape is okay, and the locations such as The Citadel are well polished… the lack of variety in missions really struck home.
One side mission, The Scientific Method, drags out far too long with a dull fetch quest mechanic repeated three times (collect tissues samples from dead creatures, samples from mutated plants and data from faulty equipment) and then an all-out attack on a pirate base.
Too many missions have you deciding someone’s fate… it’s very, very repetitive and this counters the good points… because there are a couple.
What really helps here is that everything takes place on one planet, so you’re not pulled out of the action every 10-15 minutes to fast travel to the next planet for the next part of the mission, before being forced to travel back to do the next part or report to the quest giver.
So, the map looks busy… there are locations to discover, and it’s possible to discover locations on your way somewhere else… I’d often open the map up and see the icon for a building or facility near me that I had yet to visit, so I’d go off there and see what there was… something I never did in the main game because, all too often, they were cookie cutter buildings I’d seen a dozen times before.
I can’t tell you what the Rover feels like to use as I never tried it, and wasn’t even sure I had the option to having gone straight there from the Mantis mission in the Razorleaf Mantis ship, you may need to add the vehicle to an existing vehicle… so I was still travelling the planet on foot… and, mostly, enjoyed it.
New wildlife to examine, some to kill for more XP on a single creature than you get for completing some of the missions therein.
Story wise… it’s formulaic, and that’s where it falls down… too many repetitive missions, too many badly disguised fetch quests and a boss battle at the end that makes little sense… you arrive and discover that you are the only person who can hear the words of the Speaker, who is now an entity seemingly of pure energy… after an experiment goes awry locals are regressing into Vortex creatures… pure white and able to teleport around.
The Speaker is one of these, so appears all white and glowing… while the others who have fallen to the Vortex become super violent, the Speaker is still in control of his mind and asks for help.
What happens next is that you have to get the help of the 3 main families of Va’ruun, so 3 separate missions to get them to co-operate, once done the assault of the Citadel to end the main plot… all fine, quite fun and I was even able to level up to 75 from 69 which happened way faster than I’d managed to get from 65 to 69 before.
I could start ranting about how if I’d paid for whack for this I’d be upset… but aside from the 10% discount for being a Gamepass Ultimate subscriber, I did pay full whack for this… and I ought to feel upset, it’s not a lot of content for what you’ve paid, and when you consider that the 2 DLCs for The Witcher 3 were, a) much better than this, and b) cheaper… there would be grounds to complain.
I’d certainly think about purchasing any future content for the game at full price (or even the discounted price) if they do any more.
What Bethesda have is a good starting position to improve the franchise… I doubt very much that the first Elder Scrolls game was considered perfect… and they have learnt some (but by no means not all) the lessons that could be gleaned for this new IP release… but we’ll probably have to wait close to 15 years for any sequel.