"Starfield is not about exploring space freely ... it's about fast traveling to locations and having conversions with people". I need to hear this.

I still can’t believe there aren’t any vehicles. It’s so immersion breaking to run when you literally flew a spaceship to get there. We have rovers on mars irl in 2023.

When they said "there are thousands of planets to explore" that was a big red flag. 6-8 well designed planets will always be better than 100 more copy and pasted ones.

Bethesda should have just made one solar system of like 5 - 6 planets that would just be like 5-6 skyrim sized maps or even smaller frankly. That would have still been a staggering achievement and a massive amount of content but it would have still maintained that hand crafted dense exploration.

The biggest shocker to me from this review is that BGS gave Luke a review code.

Speedrunners around the world are breathing a sigh of relief. It sounded so scary when Bethesda said they had fixed their engine.

I'm glad to hear that the "stuck in combat mode with no enemies around" bug made it into the game. That one's been in every Bethesda game since Morrowind in some capacity. If they ever fix it it'll be like losing an old friend.

I wasn’t even expecting 10 full planets to explore, I just wanted a rpg style game with actual seamless space exploration and freedom. And somehow they delivered half of each little bit

Todd Howard's marketing style has always been the same, be as vague as possible and use a lot of hype words and statements and let the hype run wild. Nobody ever learns.

I was never that excited about the whole “exploring 1000 planets” thing because unless you handcraft each individual planet, the procedurally generated stuff will eventually get incredibly repetitive very quickly. Like No Man Sky. Honestly, I’d have preferred it if they kept to a single solar system and gave like, 10 planets a load of attention each.

"Main story is lackluster" I knew this literally years ago as soon as I knew Emil Pagliarulo was the lead writer lol. Why does nobody talk about this guy? Everyone knows well the BGS stories are never that great but nobody ever asks why. This guy holds them back unbelievably.

One big mistake that Bethesda made was not randomizing the Interiors of these dynamically placed encounters. One thing that could have saved this hole, repeating the same mine over and over again, would be to randomly generate the inside layout of the mine cave or whatever. Then it would be more like Diablo we're even though you're going to the same location it's different. That way they could have basically made infinite unique content

"good to play on illicit substances" - Skeptical Reviewer

You're telling me that the engine that made the games that felt 7-10 years out of date 15 years ago doesn't feel modern and fresh?

"See that mountain? You can't climb it."

Procedural generation is often used as a substitute for good, honest, hard work. It's something that can be used to dazzle shareholders or higher-ups who don't understand game dev on a more technical level or from the player's perspective. It CAN be a great tool, but Starfield is a good example of it being used as a crutch. Procedural generation needs more effort than they put into it.

You're only the second reviewer that even mentioned that planets aren't fully explorable with contiguous terrain.

Imagine Skyrim, but instead of being able to run across the entire landmass, you’re forced to fast travel to every single location, which is surrounded by an ocean of procedurally generated content. That’s what Starfield is, apparently.

This game is the definition of “quantity over quality”

I've gone back and forth on this game a few times. I started out excited, the opening sequenced looked good, the facial animations were believable, the dialogue seemed promising and New Atlantis looked pretty cool. But that turned into deep disappointment when I realized how the space traversal and planet generation works. Eventually I accepted that it is what it is and started to approach the game on it's own terms and wow, I began having a pretty good time. The writing, the choices and roleplay options, the way side quests are integrated believably into the world, the combat, it's all the best that Bethesda's ever done. I was really impressed. But then I played more and that initial impression wore off and I realized that even IF this is Bethesda's best work, they're still lagging behind their peers substantially. A lot of that excitement was around the idea of what I thought Starfield would be able to accomplish, but it didn't live up to that. The cracks started showing and I don't mean bugs, I just mean that, well... for example, New Atlantis is the biggest and (imo) the best designed city Bethesda has ever made. And it's impressive, but it's also immediately apparent how the scale of New Atlantis is mostly an illusion and an unconvincing one at that. It takes like, manual suspension of disbelief, way too much I think, to buy into the idea that New Atlantis or Akila City and especially Neon are really cities. This apparently massive, jewel of humanity is just three towers. The capitol of the Freestar Collective can be walked across in half a minute. The bustling cyberpunk metropolis of Neon is almost literally just one short street. And the game is filled with stuff like that, from location design to quest design and the way relationships and stories progress with both companions and quest givers. When you go to join the vanguard you're immediately accepted and put through orientation, and when you're in orientation there's just... no one there but you. It's empty. Quest giving strangers just immediately trust you with very important information and tasks and you almost instantly become pivotal to their goals. For the most part, nothing you do has any real consequence outside of quest completion. You kill people, you take down conspiracies, you do this and that and the world doesn't feel like it progresses. It's just the same as it was before the quest began. It all takes a little too much suspension of disbelief. A lot of it's just not believable. And what initially feels like deep gameplay systems is revealed to be very shallow. Ship building is almost entirely cosmetic. Crafting things to sell is not a good way to make money and the system itself is clunky and cumbersome. Piracy is not a good way to make money, even if it is cool. Smuggling is not a good way to make money nor is it very in depth. The activity is just a dice roll and one that can be completely avoided by just going to the buyer in the Den. Mission boards and bounties don't offer much reward. The game throws credits at you for completing quests and so all of these already bare bones systems are made mostly useless. And worst of all that iconic Bethesda exploration has been gutted. The game is mostly centered around sort of mid for modern standards quests and building cool looking stuff. That's cool but I guess I just expect more nowadays. That's my problem with Bethesda and Starfield in general. The times have changed and what was impressive and revolutionary back when Fo3, Oblivion, and Skyrim came out is mundane now but Bethesda won't ever progress. They just do bigger versions of what they've done in the past and that doesn't compel me anymore. When they try and do something new it mostly falls flat. Part of the charm to earlier Bethesda games was the vision or ideals that they reached for. That "being who you wanna be and living in a breathing world." They never really captured that perfectly but fuck, it was really nice to at least play a game that tried. But after years and years of them making these attempts and falling short I think I'm just done. I'll probably swing back around in a few days and appreciate the game for what it is but I don't think I'll ever expect Bethesda to release something boundary pushing or innovative. Every game they've made since (and to a smaller extent including) Skyrim has been frustratingly flawed and fallen short of the marketing promises.

I think it’s funny that Bethesda implemented procedurally generated 1000 planets, but then forgot to actually implement good exploration. Like, they should have just made 40 or so planets but made them hand crafted. The procedurally generated planets make no sense for the type of game they made.

Soon as I heard “1000 planets” my heart sank, knew there’s no way they’d have planet sized maps or interesting generated locations

"Focused most of the polish on the first 20 hours." All the die hard Bethesda fans and shills are saying: "Give it time, it gets good after 20 hours."

During Lex Fridman's podcast, Todd Howard told about their new technology of making planets where they made a sphere and then covered it with procedurally generated portions of landscape It's really nice how effectively they didn't use it

This confirmed everything I speculated this game would be.

Encountering the same locations but on different planets is wild…literally down to its entire placement and spawns…that sucks ass

This isn’t a skeptical review, this is a fair, honest review.

Starfield would have been an exceptional release.... back in 2010.

Now we know why there aren't any planetary exploration vehicles, there's no need for them because the planets aren't the size of planets, you're surrounded by invisible walls.

that running animation is so goofy, guy's exploring a freaking desert and runs like his life depends on it

I really don't care about not being able to walk from one planet end to the other, there is no purpose on that. But not being able to fly your ship inside the star system is a big major sin for me. Just imagine all the random encounters they could have made to make flying from planet to planet more exciting, it would had also give you a reason to really care about the spaceship aspect of the game. Right now the spaceship is just the loading screen before the real loading screen.

That review felt so honest and went into simple details that other reviewers just seem to ignore.

Recycling locations is such a bummer. Why make a world you can’t fill?

The problem is a lot of people sold this game as industry defining and is clearly not.

"Still in combat" Always nice to see a return to the classics.

finally, a reviewer with basic observational skills that doesn't base his opinions on hype.

The exploration spirit is so strong in this game that even NPCs constantly flying into some space adventures instead of speaking with the player...

This game seems like the perfect example of everyone's fear/annoyance with open world games, copy and pasted assets and a massively beautiful but empty world.

It is a soulless, lifeless mess. I think most of the issues relate back to Bethesdas insistence to use an ancient engine.

Exploration sounds much like planet-hopping in Mass Effect 1. Except without the vehicle.

Absolutely fascinated that bethesda finally made a jumping animation that isn't hideous. Glad to know they still managed to fuck up the running animation by somehow making it point diagonally in relation to the direction of the movement.

My brain can't get around the fact that they're using pressurized suits and firing bullets at each other

It should also be noted that when you enter a building that does NOT have a loading screen, it will most likely have airlock door that takes 10 seconds to open.

Hype = Todd Howard = Disappointment = me not pre-ordering = lucky I didn't waste money = me buying on sale 75% off in a few years (maybe)

Literally my first thoughts after they explained their procedural system was "What's stopping me from seeing the exact same POI several times in the same playthrough" edit: By no means is the game bad, btw, and so far after playing it myself, the quests and most of the dungeons have been excellent.

What’s even scarier is they intended to release this a year ago. Think about that.

As a 50 Yr old gamer, you could fly real time into a space station in the original wire frame vector 'elite' from 1984 on my 'bbc model b' home computer. That file size was about 50 kilobytes. Remember a 1000kb is 1mb and 1000mb is 1gb. So they could have done it.

Frontier Elite II was one of those games that left you in awe of how endless that universe was. For its time, it blew me away.

with all these shortcomings, i cannot believe people are looking over them and saying it deserves a 10

every review says the same "its fun but flawed" but every flaw they explore makes it seem like the least interesting or fun game to ever come out of bgs

Probably the most grounded, accurate and well founded review I've seen on KZfaq since the game's release. Props to you for making this review.

Bethesda claimed that this is the first time technology has advanced enough for them to pull this game off but I fail to see literally anything in the game that couldn't have been done a generation or two ago. There's nothing in it that's technically more impressive than what was done back in Fallout 3 except for pure asset quality.

People really thought Bethesda was gonna exceed expectations let alone meet them 💀

When 'ship customisation' is the best part of an open world RPG i cant help but worry... What i love more than anything is actually roleplaying as a character and being able to make decisions and have factions react to those decisions.

I laughed out loud when Luke said "we'll see if they fix it" at 14:28

This game will be a solid foundation for the modding community to make into an enjoyable experience.

Bethesda created an amazing empty world. Played 7 hourd and found the same structures over and over again

Until yesterday, I didn't know about your channel. I loved the more balanced perspective, it highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the game. It's not the space explorer I was hoping for, but I'm sure it will amuse a lot of people!

I had to sit through 6 loading screens just to complete a fetch quest in Neon. This is a game that came out in 2023 everyone.

Todd "...captured strange and distant worlds in greater detail than ever before. They were beautiful and magnificent, full of awe and wonder. But beneath their sublime surfaces... ..there was nothing."

For me the most immersion breaking thing was going through a building and realizing that the layout and was basically a copy paste out of Fallout 4...

When I saw Todd Howard promoting this game, I told myself, "I'm going to wait." Glad I did.

2:15 - Nah, this is just a classic style of RPG dialogue camera. It goes back to 90s RPGs like the clay heads in the original Fallout. Troika also used it in their first 3D RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. It isn't broken, so there's no reason to fix it. The "cinematic" camera was possible for FO4 because you had a voiced protagonist, which is something that can f*** right off from modern RPGs as far as I'm concerned. Not everything has to be a movie. Save that for action-adventure games. The silent protagonist is the best way to handle player dialogue in an RPG, and I will fight people over that.

Most dehyping moment for me was the 1000 planets part. Randomly generated locations arent that interesting. Thought bethesda learned that from oblivion with its caves.

It's sad that it's so rare these days to come across someone who reviews a game with their eyes open. I'm glad I found your channel.

God Todd watching over the review in the background really sets the tone 😂

What strange to me is when listening to a ACG review he had a completely opposite experience then you did. He said that he went over 60 hours without encountering, a single game, breaking bug, and every planet he landed on, had some sort of exploration or random encounter occurring. He said exploration in the procedural generation was amazing and chock-full of points of interest and Random Encounters on every single planet. He even said that for the first 60 hours he did not land on a barren planet whatsoever. I guess mileage does vary.

Even though it's supposed to have a focus on exploration it's actually the most lacking you can't go from a part of a planet to the main city, the environment is boring with a couple of rocks and the occasional cave and single type of monsters.

maybe its me but i would 100% perferred if Bethesda stuck to maybe 10 planets max and highly polished those planets and put all the content around those planets. once again great review luke

the two biggest gripes for me are the space exploration and planet exploration aspects. I love the ship building mechanic, but what does it matter if you can do jack-all with it because everything is fast travel. And when you land on a planet you just walk over nothing for miles instead of having even the most basic vehicle.

I'm bummed with no vehicles or rovers. Expected empty planets and such. But I think it has a great foundation to keep adding content from this point.

There is an old saying that if you "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars" but it kind of sounds like Bethesda was shooting for the stars but only made it to the moon.

I feel like Bethesda is counting on the modding community to fix the game for them.

Should ve made a smaller game with 3or4 Explorable planets.

Its pretty bad when people are saying a game absolutely full of loading screens, menus, shit ton of empty worlds with nothing to do, countless bugs, and broken quests is the best game BGS has ever made.

I'm hoping that the foundations here allow for more seed variety and expansion so that this game keeps on giving with questing and exploration improvements and updates.

The perfect 10/10scores this game is getting are delusional.

The problem is that Bethesda gives you the ship, the customization of it, the combat in space and the trailers of a ship traveling through space as if exploration were a fundamental element in Starfield. It's disappointing. They just sold it like that. It's unfortunate, but I think that in other aspects the game delivers.

Starfield is a game I'd gladly watch hours and hours of other people playing it but never buy or play, just to fall asleep to something relaxing

I’m a PlayStation player and I was honestly thinking about get an series x to play this game, watch loads of reviews all day good things and saw this video and your down to earth honest review has made me think again, or at least wait

Thank you for both your skepticism and honesty, it is truly appreciated. As a skeptic myself, this confirms my fears that bethesda arrogantly refuses to evolve and stop using misleading, vague language. I fear for ES6, sigh.

holy shit a real review with real feedback even while the hype train is in full? Excellent sir, quite excellent.

It blows my mind that Bethesda didn't think maybe they should scale back their ambition a bit in order to give a more functional experience. I firmly believe that, upon anyone playtesting the simple act of traversing from one planet to another and experiencing the sheer insane number of loading screens required to do so, they should simply have put the brakes on and said "if it is this painful to travel the world we've built, maybe we should change the scope of what we're doing". If you want to go from Constellation HQ to Neon without 'fast travelling', you have to sit through at least EIGHT different loading screens, of which only serve to falsify the sense of travelling because you don't actually *do* anything, so you may as well just fast travel. 1000 planets is fine, IF travelling between them is a fun gameplay mechanic in itself. But knowing how restricted their own engine still is, they absolutely should have scaled this back to at most 6-8 planets that you only travel between occassionally.

Really liked your review about this game and the same reason to suscribe. I have hopes that moders will be able to make this game super immersive with the addition to explore planets somewhat freely.

To me, "exploring" means something worth doing and with som purpose! Not just walking around sightseeing...

Proper bethesda bugs, I was worried it was going to be perfect for a second there!

Yeah you can customize your ship till your hearts content but you will only ever use it in pointless dogfights and cutscenes. It destroys any and all immersion.

Imagine Mass Effect 1 planet exploration.... without the Mako.

9:01 "See that mountain over there? No, you can't climb it because it doesn't actually exist." I've always suspected the reasoning behind the no-atmospheric flight being performance related, but I didn't expect it to be worse than that... It makes sense because with this current implementation, if you would to show actual tiles from orbit everything would fall apart...

Seriously i feel so many reviewers are biased and have to maintain relationships over telling the truth. You are truly one person i go to for honest and detailed reviews.

I appreciate the honesty here it’s so hard to find real reviews these days

In the late game, have had to essentially disengage with any base building (after dumping skill points into it) because outposts are just unplayably broken.

This is why I like you Luke, your honest and upfront. You tell people what they need to hear not what they want to hear

My main issue is space flight is basically all fast travel :/ I would have loved to at least fly between planets manually in a system using an FTL drive, akin to elite. So many loading screens as well, that could have been avoided using transitional animations to load assets while keeping immersion

I really appreciate this honest review. I was looking forward to this game, but I think I’ll wait for a bit.. this kind of sounds like my Cyberpunk 2077 experience. I was very lucky with few bugs on PC. I really enjoyed it until I slowed down and started noticed the limitations, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about what could have been.

3 hours in and im stuck in a conversation i cant leave. The exit button doesnt work and conversation options dont show.

Sounds like a great game to buy 3 years from now when all bugs ironed out and its GOTY edition on sale.

This is the most honest review I have seen for any game. Can't believe I never heard of this reviewer before.

Nice to see a realistic review

The fact you said they require “some credit” for ensuring their games are better after 10+ years. The standards are so low for this company it’s a miracle they haven’t gone under already.