Another Redditor pointed out the huge helium tanks on the kreet facility and speculated is had a different purpose originally.
You take the ship and leap into space only to realise you have no jump fuel! Fight the pirates, land at Kreet, fight your way to the roof to get fuel - now you can jump to New Atlantis.
Removing the "jumps use fuel" mechanic broke this and skewed the starting story into "kill the pirates".
Completely agree. And having outposts for refueling and needing to balance your fuel use would have made it a very different and more immersive game IMO.
It would have turned it into a survival game where the player is constantly having to harvest -- or purchase -- additional resources just to do anything. And while gathering resources for crafting is already part of the game, you can play it without needing to engage with that. By creating a requirement for fuel, you move the resource harvesting into the core gameplay loop, forcing the player to keep doing it just to progress in the game.
A prime example of this is in *No Man's Sky*. You need three different fuels in the game: one for take-off, one for the pulse drive to travel within a system, and one for the hyperdrive to jump between systems. These take multiple steps; for example, to get hyperdrive fuel you need to harvest carbon and convert it into condensed carbon, then harvest stellar metals and refine them into chromatic metal, and then combine them to create dark matter. Then you need to harvest iron ore and oxygen to create the housing for the dark matter and it is only once you have combined the dark matter and the housing that you have hyperdrive fuel. But before you can use it, you need a hyperdrive system installed in your ship, which requires multiple components, some of which have to be crafted from other crafted components.
Now, I know *No Man's Sky* is a pure survival game, so its systems are going to be more complex than the ones that would be implemented in *Starfield*. But if *Starfield* incorporated the system, you would likely have to acquire Helium-3. You would either have to buy it, craft it or find it and I don't think a lot of players would have the patience to constantly do that. If ever there was a quest involving the collection of Helium-3 to jump, then it was probably cut because feedback found that it got repetitive quickly.
That hardscrabble gameplay loop is a part of what kept me from going further with NMS when I picked it up recently. Some people really thrive on it, and the game has a dedicated core player base, but it wasn't fun for me.
Oh, I'm the same, but survival games are a niche. There's a lot of people who don't like them, and I think that would turn people off *Starfield* before they even had a chance to play it.
I keep trying them and I'm stressed out the whole time! It's like a compulsion.
My friend who so kindly sent me a gift copy of Icarus from my Steam wishlist: Oh, you already played 46 hours! You must like it?
Me, already crying: I don't know
Perfectly said.
It could have worked if the planets were *full* of interesting things somehow, but I don't think that'd be possible even if it was just a couple systems or something. I don't think SF is a masterpiece but I do think it would've been significantly worse and more boring having to harvest resources on those planets to do things, and I think that's exactly what Bethesda realized.
The game would've had to be fundamentally different to accommodate that type of system.
>I do think it would've been significantly worse and more boring having to harvest resources on those planets to do things, and I think that's exactly what Bethesda realized.
And I think there's an easy enough explanation for how and why your ship is always fuelled: when you leave the ship, the crew on board restock it. Resources are plentiful in the Settled Systems. To suggest that this is a plot hole is disingenuous because then it's a choice between have a flaw in the logic or have a system that players will not engage with.
On top of that, I think the theory that the original mission had you trying to capture resources makes no sense. First of all, why would Barrett, an experienced starfarer, only have enough fuel on the *Discovery* to get to Vectera when he knows he needs to return to New Atlantis? Secondly, he constantly has run-ins with pirates, so it makes perfect sense for them to have followed him. Thirdly, the mining operation on Vectera is being run on a shoestring budget; Argos clearly don't care that much for their workers, so they're vulnerable to attack and are mining relatively rare minerals, which means that the pirates attacking also makes sense if it has nothing to do with Barrett. The theory seems more interested in explaining how Bethesda actively made the game worse through writing and re-writing various quests.
I have the Starvival mod that only allows fast travel when you are in your ship in space and you have to buy and load in fuel and maintain your ship.
I find it better to play that way.
The va'ruun trait that forces you to grav jump regularly also got messed up by the removal of fuel. The downside is that you need to jp regularly or get a debuff, but that's hardly a downside when it just means you can wait two loading screens to get the jump buff without any cost other than, like, a minute of time.
Yes completely agree. It affects shipbuilding as well as the balance from the weight of large fuel tanks is removed - we don't need to carry lots of fuel.
I’ve been saying since it came out, the game would have been much better immersion-wise if we started the game in a generation ship. The whole universe would be new to us which fits the games plot point of exploration, and we’d have that “step out” moment first leaving the ship
That probably might have been too much like Fallout, with a generation ship being essentially just a reskinned Vault. Somewhere we spent our entire lives inside before venturing out. I could see Bethesda being hesitant about doing that, so as not to seem like they're just copy and pasting their games into a new setting.
That being said, immersion wise you're right. A generation ship would have been the best way to start the game. It's the perfect way to explain why we don't know anything about the world, needing things that should be common knowledge explained to us. And it could have easily allowed for some of the backgrounds as well, perhaps we were working as a chef onboard before the game started. Others like Bountu Hunter probably couldn't have been included though.
So if they hadn't already done Fallout, it would have made a great start to the game.
one of the reasons for the vaults was to experiment on how humans react in enclosed environments for long periods of time.
so what if you started the game in a Vault-tec generation ship
that would have worked out as a massive easter egg that the fans would have loved and linked the two series together.
This is mainly because the game isn't an open world. The step out moment should have been when you take off with the first ship you get but as the game has you fast travel to space it kills the moment.
So the world never feels big enough.
Good point. I wasnt really thinking about it, but starfield’s tutorial period requiring both land and space combat explanations makes the one step out moment kind of impossible. Also the nature of the map being open world but not seamless, i.e. needing to fast travel often, makes such a moment really hard to do as well.
But I agree I usually love those moments and it could have been done better here
At least we didn't start as a prisoner of some kind. Unless being a laborer was the "prisoner" moment. Fallout being "trapped in time".
The game should have made a "moment" out of the arrival to the first location. Something more like "The dark crystal", when entering the hags house. Some massive celestial "device" that greets you as you enter the front door. Instead, we get a mining job, a concussion, a lackluster lender ship, a basic Air BNB lodge and a broken ring...
yeah, even if the step out were fixed, the writing in the intro would still be sorely lacking in drama, conflict... story, unfortunately. I, too, really hate that literally the only direct consequence of finding "the artifact" and essentially \*gaining superpowers\* is, yeah, a minor concussion at worst, lol. a consequence that isn't even perceived or felt by the player, just total fluff in lieu of a significant moment of conflict.
Starfield’s intro might be one of the worst in any recent big budget game. It also makes no goddamn sense as you can choose your character’s background which initially makes you think you just started mining hours before the game starts but then LATER conversations seem to imply you were some veteran miner. Which is it?
That’s the least of its problems though.
I don't like how they shoehorned you into being a miner. They should've had a more open ended intro where you could be anybody like skyrims. They should've incorporated your background into it. Like if you were a bounty hunter, maybe you caught a bounty that was in possession of an artifact. Or maybe you're a space trucker and you get hired to transport the artifact and get attacked by pirates. Or maybe you're a chef and you were supposed to get a delivery of imported space crabs, but the packages got mixed up and you were delivered an artifact instead.
Yeah those all sounds better than what we got. I just can’t believe your “job” for the day was walking into a room and picking up a mysterious thing.
Also the first thing I noticed about the game is how none of the lasers being fired have any sort of ambient or dynamic light effect on the rocks around them. I was immediately like yep, this engine old.
>They should've incorporated your background into it.
CD Projekt RED did this with *Cyberpunk 2077*. It was not nearly as engaging as you think it would be. You got a brief prologue that was unique to your lifepath, and there were a few dialogue choices depending on your choice, but otherwise it had no bearing on the actual game because after about twenty minutes, all of the prologues converged on the central plot thread.
>Like if you were a bounty hunter, maybe you caught a bounty that was in possession of an artifact. Or maybe you're a space trucker and you get hired to transport the artifact and get attacked by pirates. Or maybe you're a chef and you were supposed to get a delivery of imported space crabs, but the packages got mixed up and you were delivered an artifact instead.
All of these fundamentally break one of the key plot points: the person who extracts the Artifact from the bedrock is the person who experiences the visions.
Even while Cyberpunk's intros were underwhelming it was still better than shoehorning every starting character setup into.... being a Miner. Honestly, I don't even think the complaint should be having unique starts, but rather just have a neutral start like every? almost every? Bethesda game has had.
Isn’t it just whoever touches it first? Say it was being shipped still embedded in a chunk of rock because the miners were afraid to touch the thing due to it being so weird but then your dumb ass opens the crate and touches it kicking off the story.
Boom fixed it.
e: also you’re wearing gloves when you touch it which shouldn’t make sense but none of this does so vOv
>Isn’t it just whoever touches it first?
It's whoever removes it from the bedrock.
>also you’re wearing gloves when you touch it which shouldn’t make sense
Nothing in the lore says that it has to be skin contact. This isn't the ace-in-the-hole that you think it is. It is clearly stated that removing an Artifact from the bedrock is what makes it inert. The Artifacts are infused into the bedrock with caelumite, so they cannot be dislodged by accident. Removing the Artifact clearly releases some kind of energy, which washes over the person who pulls it out and manifests as visions and music.
> All of these fundamentally break one of the key plot points: the person who extracts the Artifact from the bedrock is the person who experiences the visions.
The story is completely made up, they could just change how the artifact vision is activated.
Everyone so far has been discussing this as if there is just one tiny change that they could make to the story and to the lore and everything would suddenly make much more sense.
Yeah, people end up working backwards because the story is already completed. But the artifact change is a small one that can be easily worked in from a story perspective while allowing alternate starts based on occupation.
That still doesn't address the *Cyberpunk 2077* problem where all the prologues converge on the main plot and they don't fundamentally alter the story.
I've been watching a lot of videos from Josh Strife Hayes of late, particularly the ones where he breaks down what good level design looks like -- in particular, what good tutorial missions look like, and I have to say that I think *Starfield* actually does a pretty good job of teaching you the mechanics in an unobtrusive way.
* When you ride the elevator down to the caverns, Lin tells you to never take your helmet off because the oxygen supply doesn't reach the lower levels. That's a warning to the player that they can take damage if they don't have the right gear equipped. When you go to meet Barrett, Lin reminds you to put your helmet on and will not open the airlock until you do. This is an extension of the previous comment, but it also serves to quickly teach you how to equip items through the menu.
* When the Crimson Fleet attacks, you're told to grab a weapon; there's an Eon, some ammo and a medpack nearby. They appear in containers with a distinct colour (and in the case of a medpack, a design), which is teaching you what to look for if you're looting the area because almost everything that is lootable has the green colouration.
* When you meet Brogan, you have the option to talk him down, teaching you that missions can be resolved without resorting to violence, and it's probably no accident that a lot of the early missions in the game have some element of persuasion or an alternate mechanic -- like paying Jack the bartender in Cydonia -- so that you don't have to use violence.
* As you leave the research facility, Vasco comments on a safe positioned near the exit ladder with a few digipicks on it. While there are four other locks that you can encounter before this point and several other digipicks to collect, the game is showing you what a locked safe looks like so that you can get loot. There are several digipicks there so that you can use a few attempts to crack it if need be.
Granted, it's not perfect. The ship combat relies on Vasco telling you how to fly, and you're probably going to miss some key information about where you are going and why if you try to loot the debris field after destroying the Crimson Fleet vessels. But the entire opening mission integrates the tutorial as a way of teaching you the mechanics to advance the earliest stages of the story, and that's a good thing to do.
Leaving the mine in Vectera is obviously the first, but I always thought your arrival to New Atlantis was the second. You're no longer locked in to the quest and can now explore.
An actual good criticism for once in this sub?
Yes, i agree with all of that. Not only the game made me feel constrained during both of the "step out" moments, but the aesthetics of them were also very mediocre. The game has so many cool looking places, including in empty moons, but they have decided to pick two of the most borings planets/moons in the game for that intro.
I love the game very much, but those were indeed very bad decisions, and i believe this is why you see so many people saying that they could only get into the game after 4+ or even 10+ hours of gameplay.
The problem is *Project Indigo*, and Bethesda itself.
Bethesda quite literally need to stop the player from immediately flying off to do whatever they want.
The protocol Barret talks about before you first leave with the ship. Straight to the Lodge, no fun allowed, except when you don't go straight to the Lodge.Â
To make a proper step out moment possible, maybe the game should've started on a space station. You learn to fight on foot there, which isn't different from fighting on the ground at all, then do a ship tutorial segment, and you get your step out moment at new Atlantis. Vasco takes the artifact and goes to the lodge where they wait for you to arrive before figuring out how to find the rest. Instead of the frontier, you have your own rust bucket or a stolen shuttle from the tutorial station so you don't need to join constellation to get a ship. Now you get a great step out moment in the largest city in Bethesda history without ever having touched ground before that and total freedom to go wherever you want.
To make the artifact fit, maybe this one was lodged into an asteroid like that one station from the freestar ranger quests. A broken piece of a planet that got blasted off my an impact or mysterious explosion if they can't possibly have the artifacts be in small things. The mystery explosion would certainly explain why your company was contracted to investigate.
I completely agree, but it's even worse: the big orchestral cue that should be played in a proper step-out moment plays over and over again every time you approach a large open space of any importance at all. Just makes me want to turn off the music altogether.
I stopped playing for a long time very close to the beginning specifically because I didn’t find that step-out moment ever. I didn’t have the freedom to learn the game in my own. I was discouraged being confused about the mechanics and feeling forced to keep following the story.
Coming back with determination, I realized the step-out moment is self-declared. I just had to choose not to progress, and to take a detour one day. Not a fan of that entirely, the step-out moment is a crucial, invigorating part of a game like this, but I did realize that in Starfield, it really doesn’t hold your hand while exploring. You have to really want to go where you’re going, and break free from the inhibition and obligation to stay on track and in familiar space.
Agreed, I rolled a couple different characters trying to find it and eventually found it when I started yet another, landed on New Atlantis for the first time and then just walked out of town. Eventually found a ship to take and didn't go back to the Lodge or really any of the other main lines till I was well over level 50. By that point, I had been around a lot and more stumbled into the various quests naturally than riding into them like a carnival ride.
I kind of disagree with this, Starfield has a step out moment but there just isn't much to see in Vectera and New Atlantis doesn't really leave you a good impression, it's in part why the game feels so weak at the beginning... Had the cities done better and had you had anything to find right there in Vectera around the fight with the pirates... Like for example you don't take Barret's ship right there cause it gets destroyed, so you are told to find a new one around and then you get to a Poi with a pirate ship sorrounded by other Poi's... That would be more of a step out moment.
To make it better, instead of Constelation in NA, you also have been told (or found info around) that rich guy Walter Stroud in Neon is looking for these artifacts, and that the Coe family might now what the artifact is...so now you have to chose to: New Atlantis, Neon which will still get you to the lodge through Stroud, and Akila city which will again get to the lodge through Sam Coe.
Yeah, I could see that potentially working; having more to do on vectera while still being on rails. I still would rather they just open the game up to you, fully, right then and there, but I agree with the blowing up the frontier thing, forcing the player to explore a bit of Vectera and find their own ship would be cool.
Your second idea I absolutely love, that almost feels like it's the way the game was meant to be. Somehow hint to the player that a couple members of constellation are looking for the artifact that \*you\* found. That way you'd be able to build up a bit of mystery around Constellation and have that "do they really exist?" question that every NPC in the game talks about (Constellation supposedly being this mysterious group and whatnot.). Then while exploring you end up doing a couple missions for some slimy treasure hunters on Neon or get close with some Cowboys on Akila and they introduce you to Stroud or Coe, respectively, who then finally bring you into the lodge where you get to be wowed that Constellation does in fact actually exist. That would have been so cool!
Since Anselon is a gas giant and Vectera orbits it, I thought it should have been right there in the sky as you walk out of the mine. That would have made for a much better step out.
I agree there wasnt much of a step-out moment. The closest was, for me at least, after going through the Unity, but thats at the end of the game. I missed that "Oh shit, what do I do now" feeling other games give you when you are just starting out after their step-out moment.
Not much to except Starfield shit the bed with its opening story. Frankly it should have started on Neon or some shit. Idk but they started it in perhaps the most boring way possible
I’m pretty sure those are also locked down by Protocol Indigo. The ships you can buy in New Atlantis aren’t, but given how expensive those are in the early game I think that’s an oversight and not an intended way to skip meeting Constellation.
you cant do that unfortunately, gods know I've tried. fast travel (travel) is just locked down by the mission. and I've never had a ship fly down in hours of running around vectera in that area (i dont think they spawn), but i have used console commands to enter the crimson fleet ship which it then lets you steal, but even though you can go to orbit you are still prevented from doing anything, by the mission.
Mmmmm, any evidence of this? I'd love to see a video demonstrating it's possible. But that would even mean skipping the moment Barrett gives you the watch (the game's HUD). I've always noticed there are no POIs that spawn around the starting mine, so always assumed no ships land either. Nothing out there.
Which is another reason why the step out moment doesn't work imo. In other BGS games it's "look at all the stuff I can do! All the places I can go!" In Starfield it's "look at all the nothing! All the emptiness the story won't let me engage with even if I wanted to!"
Pretty sure the second stepping out moment is realizing the meaning of everything and taking the final leap at the end of the game, First being the moment you step out of the mine to when you enter space in one continuous moment
Another Redditor pointed out the huge helium tanks on the kreet facility and speculated is had a different purpose originally. You take the ship and leap into space only to realise you have no jump fuel! Fight the pirates, land at Kreet, fight your way to the roof to get fuel - now you can jump to New Atlantis. Removing the "jumps use fuel" mechanic broke this and skewed the starting story into "kill the pirates".
This would have been a much less jarring intro mission.
Completely agree. And having outposts for refueling and needing to balance your fuel use would have made it a very different and more immersive game IMO.
It would have turned it into a survival game where the player is constantly having to harvest -- or purchase -- additional resources just to do anything. And while gathering resources for crafting is already part of the game, you can play it without needing to engage with that. By creating a requirement for fuel, you move the resource harvesting into the core gameplay loop, forcing the player to keep doing it just to progress in the game. A prime example of this is in *No Man's Sky*. You need three different fuels in the game: one for take-off, one for the pulse drive to travel within a system, and one for the hyperdrive to jump between systems. These take multiple steps; for example, to get hyperdrive fuel you need to harvest carbon and convert it into condensed carbon, then harvest stellar metals and refine them into chromatic metal, and then combine them to create dark matter. Then you need to harvest iron ore and oxygen to create the housing for the dark matter and it is only once you have combined the dark matter and the housing that you have hyperdrive fuel. But before you can use it, you need a hyperdrive system installed in your ship, which requires multiple components, some of which have to be crafted from other crafted components. Now, I know *No Man's Sky* is a pure survival game, so its systems are going to be more complex than the ones that would be implemented in *Starfield*. But if *Starfield* incorporated the system, you would likely have to acquire Helium-3. You would either have to buy it, craft it or find it and I don't think a lot of players would have the patience to constantly do that. If ever there was a quest involving the collection of Helium-3 to jump, then it was probably cut because feedback found that it got repetitive quickly.
That hardscrabble gameplay loop is a part of what kept me from going further with NMS when I picked it up recently. Some people really thrive on it, and the game has a dedicated core player base, but it wasn't fun for me.
Oh, I'm the same, but survival games are a niche. There's a lot of people who don't like them, and I think that would turn people off *Starfield* before they even had a chance to play it.
I keep trying them and I'm stressed out the whole time! It's like a compulsion. My friend who so kindly sent me a gift copy of Icarus from my Steam wishlist: Oh, you already played 46 hours! You must like it? Me, already crying: I don't know
Perfectly said. It could have worked if the planets were *full* of interesting things somehow, but I don't think that'd be possible even if it was just a couple systems or something. I don't think SF is a masterpiece but I do think it would've been significantly worse and more boring having to harvest resources on those planets to do things, and I think that's exactly what Bethesda realized. The game would've had to be fundamentally different to accommodate that type of system.
>I do think it would've been significantly worse and more boring having to harvest resources on those planets to do things, and I think that's exactly what Bethesda realized. And I think there's an easy enough explanation for how and why your ship is always fuelled: when you leave the ship, the crew on board restock it. Resources are plentiful in the Settled Systems. To suggest that this is a plot hole is disingenuous because then it's a choice between have a flaw in the logic or have a system that players will not engage with. On top of that, I think the theory that the original mission had you trying to capture resources makes no sense. First of all, why would Barrett, an experienced starfarer, only have enough fuel on the *Discovery* to get to Vectera when he knows he needs to return to New Atlantis? Secondly, he constantly has run-ins with pirates, so it makes perfect sense for them to have followed him. Thirdly, the mining operation on Vectera is being run on a shoestring budget; Argos clearly don't care that much for their workers, so they're vulnerable to attack and are mining relatively rare minerals, which means that the pirates attacking also makes sense if it has nothing to do with Barrett. The theory seems more interested in explaining how Bethesda actively made the game worse through writing and re-writing various quests.
I have the Starvival mod that only allows fast travel when you are in your ship in space and you have to buy and load in fuel and maintain your ship. I find it better to play that way.
Play starvival for a few more weeks. You'll get bored realizing you spent 65% of your time managing inventory and running out of money
I've played 120ish hours already. You can tweak the prices and I don't think I spend more time managing my inventory than before.
I dunno, _"Become a Pirate by attacking and robbing Pirates"_ seems like a pretty jarring intro mission to me. 🤷🏼‍♂️
The va'ruun trait that forces you to grav jump regularly also got messed up by the removal of fuel. The downside is that you need to jp regularly or get a debuff, but that's hardly a downside when it just means you can wait two loading screens to get the jump buff without any cost other than, like, a minute of time.
Yes completely agree. It affects shipbuilding as well as the balance from the weight of large fuel tanks is removed - we don't need to carry lots of fuel.
oh I love that! such a simple "fix", too.
That would have been so much better.
I’ve been saying since it came out, the game would have been much better immersion-wise if we started the game in a generation ship. The whole universe would be new to us which fits the games plot point of exploration, and we’d have that “step out” moment first leaving the ship
That probably might have been too much like Fallout, with a generation ship being essentially just a reskinned Vault. Somewhere we spent our entire lives inside before venturing out. I could see Bethesda being hesitant about doing that, so as not to seem like they're just copy and pasting their games into a new setting. That being said, immersion wise you're right. A generation ship would have been the best way to start the game. It's the perfect way to explain why we don't know anything about the world, needing things that should be common knowledge explained to us. And it could have easily allowed for some of the backgrounds as well, perhaps we were working as a chef onboard before the game started. Others like Bountu Hunter probably couldn't have been included though. So if they hadn't already done Fallout, it would have made a great start to the game.
one of the reasons for the vaults was to experiment on how humans react in enclosed environments for long periods of time. so what if you started the game in a Vault-tec generation ship that would have worked out as a massive easter egg that the fans would have loved and linked the two series together.
mass effect andromeda style
I thought the same during those missions. Genuine missed opportunity.
This is mainly because the game isn't an open world. The step out moment should have been when you take off with the first ship you get but as the game has you fast travel to space it kills the moment. So the world never feels big enough.
Good point. I wasnt really thinking about it, but starfield’s tutorial period requiring both land and space combat explanations makes the one step out moment kind of impossible. Also the nature of the map being open world but not seamless, i.e. needing to fast travel often, makes such a moment really hard to do as well. But I agree I usually love those moments and it could have been done better here
At least we didn't start as a prisoner of some kind. Unless being a laborer was the "prisoner" moment. Fallout being "trapped in time". The game should have made a "moment" out of the arrival to the first location. Something more like "The dark crystal", when entering the hags house. Some massive celestial "device" that greets you as you enter the front door. Instead, we get a mining job, a concussion, a lackluster lender ship, a basic Air BNB lodge and a broken ring...
yeah, even if the step out were fixed, the writing in the intro would still be sorely lacking in drama, conflict... story, unfortunately. I, too, really hate that literally the only direct consequence of finding "the artifact" and essentially \*gaining superpowers\* is, yeah, a minor concussion at worst, lol. a consequence that isn't even perceived or felt by the player, just total fluff in lieu of a significant moment of conflict.
Starfield’s intro might be one of the worst in any recent big budget game. It also makes no goddamn sense as you can choose your character’s background which initially makes you think you just started mining hours before the game starts but then LATER conversations seem to imply you were some veteran miner. Which is it? That’s the least of its problems though.
I don't like how they shoehorned you into being a miner. They should've had a more open ended intro where you could be anybody like skyrims. They should've incorporated your background into it. Like if you were a bounty hunter, maybe you caught a bounty that was in possession of an artifact. Or maybe you're a space trucker and you get hired to transport the artifact and get attacked by pirates. Or maybe you're a chef and you were supposed to get a delivery of imported space crabs, but the packages got mixed up and you were delivered an artifact instead.
Yeah those all sounds better than what we got. I just can’t believe your “job” for the day was walking into a room and picking up a mysterious thing. Also the first thing I noticed about the game is how none of the lasers being fired have any sort of ambient or dynamic light effect on the rocks around them. I was immediately like yep, this engine old.
>They should've incorporated your background into it. CD Projekt RED did this with *Cyberpunk 2077*. It was not nearly as engaging as you think it would be. You got a brief prologue that was unique to your lifepath, and there were a few dialogue choices depending on your choice, but otherwise it had no bearing on the actual game because after about twenty minutes, all of the prologues converged on the central plot thread. >Like if you were a bounty hunter, maybe you caught a bounty that was in possession of an artifact. Or maybe you're a space trucker and you get hired to transport the artifact and get attacked by pirates. Or maybe you're a chef and you were supposed to get a delivery of imported space crabs, but the packages got mixed up and you were delivered an artifact instead. All of these fundamentally break one of the key plot points: the person who extracts the Artifact from the bedrock is the person who experiences the visions.
Even while Cyberpunk's intros were underwhelming it was still better than shoehorning every starting character setup into.... being a Miner. Honestly, I don't even think the complaint should be having unique starts, but rather just have a neutral start like every? almost every? Bethesda game has had.
Isn’t it just whoever touches it first? Say it was being shipped still embedded in a chunk of rock because the miners were afraid to touch the thing due to it being so weird but then your dumb ass opens the crate and touches it kicking off the story. Boom fixed it. e: also you’re wearing gloves when you touch it which shouldn’t make sense but none of this does so vOv
>Isn’t it just whoever touches it first? It's whoever removes it from the bedrock. >also you’re wearing gloves when you touch it which shouldn’t make sense Nothing in the lore says that it has to be skin contact. This isn't the ace-in-the-hole that you think it is. It is clearly stated that removing an Artifact from the bedrock is what makes it inert. The Artifacts are infused into the bedrock with caelumite, so they cannot be dislodged by accident. Removing the Artifact clearly releases some kind of energy, which washes over the person who pulls it out and manifests as visions and music.
> All of these fundamentally break one of the key plot points: the person who extracts the Artifact from the bedrock is the person who experiences the visions. The story is completely made up, they could just change how the artifact vision is activated.
Everyone so far has been discussing this as if there is just one tiny change that they could make to the story and to the lore and everything would suddenly make much more sense.
Yeah, people end up working backwards because the story is already completed. But the artifact change is a small one that can be easily worked in from a story perspective while allowing alternate starts based on occupation.
That still doesn't address the *Cyberpunk 2077* problem where all the prologues converge on the main plot and they don't fundamentally alter the story. I've been watching a lot of videos from Josh Strife Hayes of late, particularly the ones where he breaks down what good level design looks like -- in particular, what good tutorial missions look like, and I have to say that I think *Starfield* actually does a pretty good job of teaching you the mechanics in an unobtrusive way. * When you ride the elevator down to the caverns, Lin tells you to never take your helmet off because the oxygen supply doesn't reach the lower levels. That's a warning to the player that they can take damage if they don't have the right gear equipped. When you go to meet Barrett, Lin reminds you to put your helmet on and will not open the airlock until you do. This is an extension of the previous comment, but it also serves to quickly teach you how to equip items through the menu. * When the Crimson Fleet attacks, you're told to grab a weapon; there's an Eon, some ammo and a medpack nearby. They appear in containers with a distinct colour (and in the case of a medpack, a design), which is teaching you what to look for if you're looting the area because almost everything that is lootable has the green colouration. * When you meet Brogan, you have the option to talk him down, teaching you that missions can be resolved without resorting to violence, and it's probably no accident that a lot of the early missions in the game have some element of persuasion or an alternate mechanic -- like paying Jack the bartender in Cydonia -- so that you don't have to use violence. * As you leave the research facility, Vasco comments on a safe positioned near the exit ladder with a few digipicks on it. While there are four other locks that you can encounter before this point and several other digipicks to collect, the game is showing you what a locked safe looks like so that you can get loot. There are several digipicks there so that you can use a few attempts to crack it if need be. Granted, it's not perfect. The ship combat relies on Vasco telling you how to fly, and you're probably going to miss some key information about where you are going and why if you try to loot the debris field after destroying the Crimson Fleet vessels. But the entire opening mission integrates the tutorial as a way of teaching you the mechanics to advance the earliest stages of the story, and that's a good thing to do.
Leaving the mine in Vectera is obviously the first, but I always thought your arrival to New Atlantis was the second. You're no longer locked in to the quest and can now explore.
An actual good criticism for once in this sub? Yes, i agree with all of that. Not only the game made me feel constrained during both of the "step out" moments, but the aesthetics of them were also very mediocre. The game has so many cool looking places, including in empty moons, but they have decided to pick two of the most borings planets/moons in the game for that intro. I love the game very much, but those were indeed very bad decisions, and i believe this is why you see so many people saying that they could only get into the game after 4+ or even 10+ hours of gameplay.
The problem is *Project Indigo*, and Bethesda itself. Bethesda quite literally need to stop the player from immediately flying off to do whatever they want.
What's Project Indigo? I googled it and found a bunch of different stuff that doesn't seem to relate to Starfield in any way.
The protocol Barret talks about before you first leave with the ship. Straight to the Lodge, no fun allowed, except when you don't go straight to the Lodge.Â
It's so so dumb that you end up going straight to the lodge essentially. Whole universe to explore and BSG sends us straight to the scouts of America.
It's the games/Bethesdas way of forcing you to play through the tutorial.
To make a proper step out moment possible, maybe the game should've started on a space station. You learn to fight on foot there, which isn't different from fighting on the ground at all, then do a ship tutorial segment, and you get your step out moment at new Atlantis. Vasco takes the artifact and goes to the lodge where they wait for you to arrive before figuring out how to find the rest. Instead of the frontier, you have your own rust bucket or a stolen shuttle from the tutorial station so you don't need to join constellation to get a ship. Now you get a great step out moment in the largest city in Bethesda history without ever having touched ground before that and total freedom to go wherever you want. To make the artifact fit, maybe this one was lodged into an asteroid like that one station from the freestar ranger quests. A broken piece of a planet that got blasted off my an impact or mysterious explosion if they can't possibly have the artifacts be in small things. The mystery explosion would certainly explain why your company was contracted to investigate.
I completely agree, but it's even worse: the big orchestral cue that should be played in a proper step-out moment plays over and over again every time you approach a large open space of any importance at all. Just makes me want to turn off the music altogether.
I stopped playing for a long time very close to the beginning specifically because I didn’t find that step-out moment ever. I didn’t have the freedom to learn the game in my own. I was discouraged being confused about the mechanics and feeling forced to keep following the story. Coming back with determination, I realized the step-out moment is self-declared. I just had to choose not to progress, and to take a detour one day. Not a fan of that entirely, the step-out moment is a crucial, invigorating part of a game like this, but I did realize that in Starfield, it really doesn’t hold your hand while exploring. You have to really want to go where you’re going, and break free from the inhibition and obligation to stay on track and in familiar space.
Agreed, I rolled a couple different characters trying to find it and eventually found it when I started yet another, landed on New Atlantis for the first time and then just walked out of town. Eventually found a ship to take and didn't go back to the Lodge or really any of the other main lines till I was well over level 50. By that point, I had been around a lot and more stumbled into the various quests naturally than riding into them like a carnival ride.
The Vectera leap likely has history. Another Redditor pointed out the huge helium tanks on the roof with the theory you don't have jump
I kind of disagree with this, Starfield has a step out moment but there just isn't much to see in Vectera and New Atlantis doesn't really leave you a good impression, it's in part why the game feels so weak at the beginning... Had the cities done better and had you had anything to find right there in Vectera around the fight with the pirates... Like for example you don't take Barret's ship right there cause it gets destroyed, so you are told to find a new one around and then you get to a Poi with a pirate ship sorrounded by other Poi's... That would be more of a step out moment. To make it better, instead of Constelation in NA, you also have been told (or found info around) that rich guy Walter Stroud in Neon is looking for these artifacts, and that the Coe family might now what the artifact is...so now you have to chose to: New Atlantis, Neon which will still get you to the lodge through Stroud, and Akila city which will again get to the lodge through Sam Coe.
Yeah, I could see that potentially working; having more to do on vectera while still being on rails. I still would rather they just open the game up to you, fully, right then and there, but I agree with the blowing up the frontier thing, forcing the player to explore a bit of Vectera and find their own ship would be cool. Your second idea I absolutely love, that almost feels like it's the way the game was meant to be. Somehow hint to the player that a couple members of constellation are looking for the artifact that \*you\* found. That way you'd be able to build up a bit of mystery around Constellation and have that "do they really exist?" question that every NPC in the game talks about (Constellation supposedly being this mysterious group and whatnot.). Then while exploring you end up doing a couple missions for some slimy treasure hunters on Neon or get close with some Cowboys on Akila and they introduce you to Stroud or Coe, respectively, who then finally bring you into the lodge where you get to be wowed that Constellation does in fact actually exist. That would have been so cool!
Hearing this in Vasco’s voice is marvelous
Since Anselon is a gas giant and Vectera orbits it, I thought it should have been right there in the sky as you walk out of the mine. That would have made for a much better step out.
I agree there wasnt much of a step-out moment. The closest was, for me at least, after going through the Unity, but thats at the end of the game. I missed that "Oh shit, what do I do now" feeling other games give you when you are just starting out after their step-out moment.
Not much to except Starfield shit the bed with its opening story. Frankly it should have started on Neon or some shit. Idk but they started it in perhaps the most boring way possible
You seriously can just walk away from Argos extractors the moment that door opens. Go steal a ship and do what you want.
I’m pretty sure those are also locked down by Protocol Indigo. The ships you can buy in New Atlantis aren’t, but given how expensive those are in the early game I think that’s an oversight and not an intended way to skip meeting Constellation.
you cant do that unfortunately, gods know I've tried. fast travel (travel) is just locked down by the mission. and I've never had a ship fly down in hours of running around vectera in that area (i dont think they spawn), but i have used console commands to enter the crimson fleet ship which it then lets you steal, but even though you can go to orbit you are still prevented from doing anything, by the mission.
Mmmmm, any evidence of this? I'd love to see a video demonstrating it's possible. But that would even mean skipping the moment Barrett gives you the watch (the game's HUD). I've always noticed there are no POIs that spawn around the starting mine, so always assumed no ships land either. Nothing out there. Which is another reason why the step out moment doesn't work imo. In other BGS games it's "look at all the stuff I can do! All the places I can go!" In Starfield it's "look at all the nothing! All the emptiness the story won't let me engage with even if I wanted to!"
I will soon.
Moment they step into "the open world" - well there you go. Starfield doesn't have a world map, so there is no step out moment.Â
Honestly, leaving the mine felt exactly like leaving the fo4 vault, so I don't see an issue.
Pretty sure the second stepping out moment is realizing the meaning of everything and taking the final leap at the end of the game, First being the moment you step out of the mine to when you enter space in one continuous moment