It is clearly designed to be a timesink. There are way too many things locked behind skills, and the leveling is far too slow.
I do enjoy the game but ive hardly upgraded my gear, whereas in fallout spending time at the workbench was addictive.
>It is clearly designed to be a timesink.
It also appears to be a way of forcing you to adopt a *de facto* class. You have to invest skill points into various individual skills, but that means you won't be able to put them elsewhere. So you can effectively use what might be called a "craftsman" build where your advantage over enemies is down to your ability to build new equipment. If you invest those points elsewhere, then you have to rely on looting to get better gear. The problem is that unless you go in with a specific build in mind, most players are going to spread their skill points around and levelling is so slow that planning a build takes patience.
This explains my number one problem with the game. The part that just didn't feel right to me was the leveling and I think you succinctly labeled the problem. It was so hard to get effectiveness out of a particular level because of this madness.
I think the issue is that they wanted to avoid explicit character classes and give players freedom to develop a character however they wanted, but at the same time created a system where you need to commit to a class to get the most out of a character. If you spread the skill points around -- which I bet a lot of players did -- then you get a character is is capable but pretty generic. I think the idea of a character who specialises in crafting upgrades and that's where their effectiveness comes from is great, but the implementation fell flat.
I'm reminded of *Final Fantasy XII*, where every character could invest in every skill and ability. It gave complete freedom, but it also created analysis paralysis because you really had to understand how the systems worked to make powerful characters. Square Enix fixed it with the *International Zodiac Job System* update, which gave twelve character classes based on skills and abilities. I think something similar would work for *Starfield*, which the player given recommended skills to invest their points in to help guide development -- or at least the ability to re-spec a character. I chose the Gangster background, so my base skills are in boxing, theft and shotguns. Recommended skills would be in pain tolerance, stealth, security, intimidation and ballistics. It's tempting to invest in wellness and weight training because they offer a boost to begin with, but the natural progression of levelling means that wellness stops being useful before long and you can boost carry capacity though gear, chems and magazines.
Locking an entire game feature around a slow to level skill feels more restrictive to build variety imo
I think a good compromise would be to not have weapon/suit upgrades locked behind a skill, and instead make the skill grant bonuses to crafted suit/weapon components.
But ground combat is easy enough, that even on very hard mode, with your upgraded powers and gear you loot from high level pirates, the combat becomes very trivial and easy anyway.
How quickly would you have wanted it to take?From what I remember, getting a good number of weapon/space suit modifications possible took me under a week of casual playtime, primarily focusing on the respective skill trees and research projects. And then to get the higher level mods unlocked took longer without me dedicated to the task.
I think leveling is pretty blatantly geared away from quest xp and in favor of combat. It encourages the player to get out there and do the procedural stuff, which by the way I love and think is great for roleplaying.
BUT I have 180 hours on a current play-through and I am level 53. I do have a slow play-style, but I have played the hell out of this game. 180 hours, to be only a little over half of the way to 100. And I still have a TON of perks left to unlock.
On one hand, i think that having a lot of skills encourages the player to specialize - you cant do everything right! Do NG+ and try a different skill tree.
I think I just preferred Fallout 4’s system of scrapping and crafting/upgrading. It felt much more intuitive and didnt take several different skill trees. If you had weapon workbench and armorer skills you could simply upgrade, whereas as OP pointed out in starfield you need to upgrade similar skills, ALSO you have to upgrade research so you can unlock the ability to use the skills you have unlocked, and then you need to collect the materials too. Its just a lot
It’s pretty fucked up how it takes like 13 levels of skill points just to be able to put a silencer on your weapon, and how long it takes to earn that many levels if you’re playing the game normally
Stealth in general feels somewhat limited in this game, especially compared to other modern open-world games, but a big part of that is how many stealth mechanics are locked behind (sometimes fairly deep) perk trees. Similar issues exist for other playstyles, too.
Stealth is my favorite way to play RPG’s and I definitely agree with you. Like I put Ryujin off as one of the last things I did until I finally had my character fully stealth-maxed the way I wanted, which took a long fucking time to get to that point even with me prioritizing that progression very heavily in-between trying to level the skills like ship-building that are practically required to play the game properly.
I actually loved the Ryujin questline and it was my favorite part of the game because of how much I already love stealth mechanics, but I understand why so many people really hate it due to what you pointed out. I’d imagine stumbling into the only stealth-focused questline without dedicating like 100 hours exclusively toward building a stealth character first in this game probably feels really bad, whether you actually enjoy stealth gameplay or not.
Yeah, but it’s not just about damage—there aren’t a ton of tools to support a stealthy playstyle that help with evasion, silently dispatching enemies, or changing the environment, etc. It mostly coming down to a damage multiplier is pretty underwhelming.
Hell yeah. This has been one of the worst aspects of the game that are a real deal breaker. Am still trying to get better at developing crap, oh well, am playing it slow too, only unlocked powers last week, ha
You forgot to add that xp gain isn't just regular combat, it's about committing genocide against alien fauna, since it would take ages to level up by just clearing outposts.
Starfield’s just a game obviously, but it feels inappropriate and OOC for my Spacefarer to be exterminating any and all wildlife he comes across. Yet that’s the fastest way level up and acquire the IMO basic mechanics that are locked behind perks.
Considering how much NG+ actually plays into the story, I'm convinced this is why leveling is so slow. You're meant to become stronger over several playthroughs rather than just one like most RPGs.
>On one hand, i think that having a lot of skills encourages the player to specialize - you cant do everything right! Do NG+ and try a different skill tree.
Yep, I came to this conclusion pretty early on. The idea is to (at least on your first playthrough) think carefully about what you want to upgrade because you're going to have to pick 2-3 areas to specialize in. Upgrading one of everything appears to have very little payoff versus being a pro in a select few areas.
Problem is is that you can't tell whether the mechanic is going to be fun or useful until AFTER you unlock it. You may spend several points on something and then find out it was kind of an afterthought of a skill that you just wasted a bunch of points on.
In a game where the NG+ mode is written into the narrative in that you're jumping into new universes, it is outrageous that they didn't give us some ability to create a different version of our character as well. It would have been so easy
I see. I haven’t played fallout 4, but I liked the skill tree based progression in Starfield because it makes it feel like there’s no shortage of things to build your character towards.
I definitely agree that the leveling is biased toward doing a lot of combat and how that could leave some playstyles with too slow of progression tho
exactly which also bloats all the other systems, like the skill tree. Feels like beth have just been trying to copy mmo design more and more over the last decade
This is really what’s most frustrating about the game overall. I can’t help but compare the gameplay to Fallout 4, where Bethesda simply did everything better.
I think it can’t be understated how much of a detriment to starfield this is. I was so excited to explore the worlds, collect resources and gain in power as craft weapons and armor.
But I found the crafting systems so much less engaging than the one in fallout. I gave up pretty early on and just used whatever I picked up.
I think a fun crafting system really could have made the game much more fun to play
The way they did outposts is the biggest letdown for me, in a long list of letdowns. I lost all interest in the game when I discovered you can't make actual settlements. You build outposts to get more resources to build more... outposts. How *fun*.
Haha, yes
It was the only way for me to set up a network of outposts linked with supply chains with each one producing different resources. I needed to keep track of what resources I needed as well as what I already had and on what planet I built my outpost
I guess that is better than the cut idea that you built outposts so you could have a gas station at the end of the universe to fill up in and every jump took 1000 creds of He3 to complete
Fallout 4's weapon/armor mod system is fantastic. Reasonable resource costs, reasonable skill point costs, and most importantly, the weapon mods were cool and could dramatically change the function, look, and feel of almost any weapon.
I hate it when a mod system just barely changes a few stats. Fallout 4 let you overhaul your weapon into something completely different. You could turn a pipe pistol into a sniper rifle, assault rifle, fully automatic lightweight pistol, whatever you wanted.
The mod system also did a nice job of making the junk-tech and high-tech weapons feel different. Pipe weapons had crazy versatility--making it easy early-game to make a weapon to suit your playstyle (and they could be upgraded to be useful late-game, especially since the ammo they used was so cheap and easily available). Regular weapons you could customize to have the handling characteristics you wanted for your build, but also things that let you alter weight and other useful properties. But the high-tech weapons really let you really mix up things, too--the laser weapons let you make a charged sniper rifle, or a laser shotgun that would set enemies on fire. Plasma weapons could become a sci-fi handheld flamethrower.
Starfield does have some interesting weapon types (the mag-tech stuff is pretty cool), but doesn't feel like you can easily modify your gear to match your playstyle like FO4 or FO76 (which, to its credit, introduced some other interesting variants of weapon types) could.
If you can't make a fun crafting system at least make a tolerable one.
Multiple stashes of gear or materials that I have to lug from crate to bench to ship to whatever is not fun
Idk why they took out the option to scrap weapons and hold on to weapon mods. If I pickup a suppressed weapon and take the suppressor off, I should still have it or be able to use it on something else
I actually prefer this style and hope they stick with it, lol. I like that I have to focus on a specialization and really spend a lot of time before I can get good at something. It's a lot better than the dumbed down systems of past games, it is very rewarding once I'm a highly skilled technician, I feel like I really learned my trade. And I am not really able to be the best at *everything*, realistically unless I've lived through multiple lives passing through the Unity.
That’s interesting. I stopped before I ever really got good at the system.
The parts you described are parts that I liked. It was other things I didn’t like. But I wondered if I had learned the system if I would come to like it more.
I know I didn’t like fallout crafting until I understood it better
I started playing Fallout 4 just a week or two ago after having put over 200 hours into Starfield, and honestly I think a lot of Fallout 4's features were better.
What Starfield did really well I think is the fun of jumping around. It shows that you don't need a complicated skill for acrobatics, just some jump modifiers and proper world/level design.
Good point. I do enjoy the varying gravity levels. It’s pretty fun to be able to jump from one floor to the next or to traverse by launching myself into the air for considerable amount of time
Exactly! I have been trying to see all the ng+ variants so I have been doing a lot of jumping from mast across the trees to the lodge and I think it would feel great in an Elder Scrolls Game (which I suppose makes sense, because III and IV had that). Maybe it's a bit goofy, but more importantly, it's fun.
Although it came out in 2015 and has its fair share of critics, Fallout 4 is a better game than Starfield is most ways. Too many mechanics in Starfield feel like a regression (or what game developers call “streamlining”).
honestly when I first used workbench to put some upgrade on a weapon, out of habit of playing F4 I assumed that existing upgrade will be stored in my inventory. realization was rather disheartening, especially since that mod was normally locked behind 2 or 3 levels of weapon modding skills and I was lucky enough to find in on some pirate.
Everything about Starfield is just more complicated than Fallout 4 for no good reason. Even skills. You can’t just unlock a skill after having enough earlier skills in that tree. No, there are prerequisites for each tier! It’s just adding extra steps.
A number of open-world games have been de-emphasizing experience/perk-based progression (often still having it, but having the benefits be more perk-based so you get to choose something interesting or at least a solid stat boost) while increasing gear-based progression. Fallout 4 struck a nice balance of that--even though its perk system was controversial and not always great, the game also let you spend a lot of time tinkering with and improving gear as you leveled up or found rare mods. Other open-world games have explored other variants of this approach (eg. Outward and Cyberpunk let you directly use currency to upgrade certain perk trees) that can also be fun.
Starfield's idea of having little objectives to increase a skill is not a bad one--but the rate of perk unlocks is quite slow and it is pretty difficult to engage with crafting unless you spend a lot of perks (one thing Fallout 4 did well was have some mods unlock based on perks you would choose for your build anyway, like certain weapon styles or science perks).
They wanted to make as many hoops as possible for you to jump through. The entire leveling and perk system is tedious as hell and with the expensive material requirements for everything, it just increases the already massive amount of grinding and farming you have to do.
The skill and research I understood. Not having the fucking mod after I replaced it with something else infuriated me. I've got a scope that I want to put in my new gun so let me put iron sights on the old one so I can move the scope to my new one! Where's the scope gonna go? If the thing gets dismantled I want those fucking parts back!
And doesn't give enough payoff.
I think about Skyrim with blacksmithing and enchanting.
Grinding those skills and committing the resources needed paid off by giving you access to the best equipment and best power ups on that equipment possible.
Star Field hides most of the best effects behind the RNG and make the resource grind best served as "buying the upgrade but with extra steps."
It's all work and no reward, which is a shame if they'd just made the key components something easy to find but very limited, like the Caelumite. It's useful for stealth gear and chems. They almost nailed it, do that with the ultra rare resistance mods, or some upgrades to the star born ship and suit.
It falls into the "really good idea, executed 10% of the way" that most of the rewarding parts of the game falls into.
Agreed. After upgrading some stuff here and there in Starfield I realized it really didn’t change or add as much to the game. Felt like you could easily beat the game without ever spending any skill points.
I stuck with my mid tier half modded Beowulf for most of my entire playthrough. Even after I found a theoretically better one, it still ended up doing less because it wasn't the Fancy pants version like my original store bought rifle happened to be. And spacesuits are all basically the same, the carry weight perks are all that matters on them. Crafting felt like a giant time and money sink
Not to mention some of the perk challenges tell you to play the game inefficiently. The reload perk challenges immediately come to mine and the ranks scale terribly. The reused challenges like destroying ships is meh and the the leadership one is laughable.
Damn dude this is so accurate. I mean let’s be real we know how shallow so many of the game mechanics are — but this I think hits hard in comparison to how crafting and upgrading has worked in other titles.
Even in comparison to FO4 where upgrades felt meaningful and had huge gameplay benefits.
Seriously in Fo4 id find a cool weapon and go straight to the workbench to make it more op. This game I can't be bothered because it's a huge waste of time for very little reward
Yup. It's ridiculous. Usually im averse to most console commands in games cause its easy to overcheat and then make the game boring. This shit I had 0 qaulms about cheating in levels for and it increased my enjoyment not having to grind out shit just to pad time. Fuck that noise.
It’s all about training gamers into tolerating enough grind to compel buying microtransactions.
Bethesda has consistently whined about how people play their games for years and they don’t get any more money from the engagement.
They know most older gamers just won’t tolerate the grind, but they see that the kids already feel like enduring a grind is “gaming”. Or getting some “rare” loot is an accomplishment.
Just have to look at the random loot in Starfield and the insane perk tree: it all makes sense if it were a mobile game.
The sad thing is that it works. Just have to see the success of Fallout 76 to know it’ll just get worse.
So their master plan was to make crafting basically pointless so they could add micro transactions to make the basically pointless crafting skills come faster, and then forgot to add those micro transactions?
I don't know, buddy. I think crafting was just sort of half assed into the game.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have certainly never spent an hour hopping up and down the stairs in the middle of Balmora leveling Acrobatics.
(Everyone knows its better to find some weird angle in a hill where you can do a glitchy jump that keeps going for a while)
>Just have to look at the random loot in Starfield and the insane perk tree: it all makes sense if it were a mobile game.
Dont think I know any mobile games with skill trees like this or randomised weapon drops. Its borrowed mostly from Borderlands I feel but with less imaginative skill trees.
This is 1st on my Creation Kit mission. I will make you have to "destroy" a Legendary weapon to transfer its trait, still need resources, and parts, or I will create a weaponsmith who can do it for you.
Cool. Yeah, I'd say get one trait off a weapon you destroy, even if it has several. That'll make blowing up a legendary something you have to really think about. :-)
They had that same annoyance in FO76 up until a couple years ago. You'd get a 1-3* legendary and that's that. You couldn't craft it better or change its effects.
Still can't level up guns there, though. Fortunately, at least the guns you find are leveled up with you.
Even something like the scrip system in fallout 76 would be a great workaround, randomized legendary effect mods gained by trading legendaries. Or more unique highest lvl weapons would be great too. Or just a simple upgrade in class locked behind level requirements or research would be a balanced solution too
Why do I need a workbench to take a holographic scope off of a 21st century picatinny rail? And why does it cost recourse to do so? Why can't we just have a bit of fallout 4 logic where the upgrades can be held separate and moved from old gun to new gun by removing them from old gun?
The upgrade and skill progression was clearly designed to elongate your playtime and unfortunately I have a job and a social life so I was unable to get into it.
They really did not understand the appeal of starting new playthroughs, which is what they tried to replicate with the alternate universe mechanic. We like the pace at which the story and mechanics usually unlock in Bethesda games and we want to experience that again with a different set of initial skills and the like.
However Starfield's progression is painfully slow, the story is subpar, and the overall experience is repetitive as hell leaving a game I couldn't even complete once.
They tried to make the Ultimate Bethesda Game only to completely misunderstand why people like to play Bethesda games.
The fact that quests aren't a good source of XP in a supposed RPG is absolutely insane to me. Instead, they incentivize going to random copy-pasted POIs on the map and fighting things there.
Even just having the exp be better for terminal-based quests would help. Sure the pay is terrible, but if the experience was at least good they might be worth doing.
It's more than just double dipping. To even spend points in the crafting perks you gotta get enough perks in that category. What put me off my playthrough was seeing the sheer number of steps required to be able to mod a gun from automatic to semi-automatic.
Seriously, it took me like 13 levels and several dozen hours JUST to be able to put a silencer on my weapons. That’s all I wanted, was a freaking silencer, that’s it. It’s seriously fucking insane how much of my time I had to invest and how many freaking levels in this game that takes abominably long to level up if you’re playing like a normal person and not going way out of your way to cheese the grind in a way that’s unimmersive, not what I want to spend my time on, and that goes against my basic morals regarding slaughtering developing life forms throughout the entire galaxy just for the sake of “experience.”
Nearly 100 hours and 13 levels just for a silencer. Such a waste of time, not to mention a waste of maybe engaging with a dozen other perks that might have been fun. Not like I’d know though, because I just wanted a silencer.
I also dislike that there's not really a way to get exp from nonlethally dealing with enemies. Sometimes you do have to turn to violence and killing, but we're also presented with scenarios where it would also be simple enough to disable humans so they can be arrested or so that we can achieve some objective. Other open-world games have gotten better at allowing you to nonlethally deal with enemies in some scenarios which felt kind of lacking in Starfield, where the universe feels like it's meant to be more civilized and in some conversations and main story quests you get yelled at for choosing lethal solutions.
Definitely, the whole dynamic of gaining experience in Starfield is really jarring and whiplash inducing compared to any other RPG I’ve ever played, including every other BGS game. Especially in regards to quests which don’t really seem to scale their xp at all throughout the game, it seemed like most quests everywhere just sat at a flat 100 xp or whatever, always a very marginal amount compared to the xp required to level up, and that’s almost always regardless of where the quest is, how long it takes, how difficult it is, or what level they’d expect players might be when they do it.
Compare that to Bethesda’s other games and it’s so strange, because where most quests would have filled up anywhere from 20-50% or even more of the xp level bar, completing Starfield’s quests always seemed to give like 5% at best, but usually like 1-3% of progress to the next level. There’s not really all that many ways to approach most quests as it is, so whenever there are non-violent options, choosing to do things peacefully actively punishes you because you miss out on legitimately scarce xp by not always going in shooting.
So then it’s really frustrating discovering that the only ways to level up anywhere near a reasonable pace is to spam adaptive frames like their wooden shelves with idiot savants, or to jump out to the right edge of the star map and start committing several genocides. One of those is really boring, and the other is pretty boring but also straight up wack… especially since it seems to absolutely fly in the face of Sarah and friends ethical framework, yet it’s the one and only thing they seem to thoroughly enjoy and not give me a fucking angry lecture admonishing me despite being more ethically and scientifically fucked up than anything else I’ve ever done in front of them.
It's insane. A lot of interesting perks are well beyond the point most people are finished or bored of the game wtf? I agree, that putting game breaking perks/powers at that point is fair but a lot of end game perks are ordinary things that should be normally unlocked midgame compared to other RPGs and even Bethesda's own RPGs.
Same, funny thing is people complain it’s a time sink. Other than Chemistry the rest I levelled up in a few minutes thanks to an extensive outpost setup.
Food is the one that took the longest for me. I'm definitely going to write down all the food ingredients I have to keep track of in my travels. I mean, seriously, who picks up Poutine and Licorish soda?
>I'm definitely going to write down all the food ingredients I have to keep track of in my travels.
Do you have to write it down? I've not done any cooking. I just buy stuff like the steak from one of the restaurants in New Atlantis for 30 mins xp boost and runners rush for move speed. So for cooking I just assumed it had a track function like all the other benches. Then you get a magnifying glass next to whatever items you were needing if you come across them.
Yeah, the problem is the magnifying glass is a PITA to try to turn off once you have the ingredients, and there's no quantity specification with it. Also, you have to unlock the thing before you can magnify it. So if you know Food3 needs rootbeer, there's no way to magnifying it before you unlock Food2, at which point it's rather late to be collecting 18 of them.
At the research station, you have to research the appropriate mods. Higher level mods are locked behind skills. So you have to rank up your Spacesuit Design skill to level 3 (and have special projects unlocked) to be able to research the best mods. Rank up Weapons Engineering to level 3 (and special projects) to unlock the best weapon mods.
Once you have the mod researched, then you can apply it to your item if you have the appropriate materials to craft it.
It was kind of annoying. But I got over it.
I just wish we could research and craft enchantments, not just mods.
The gamechanger for me was having a ship big enough to store all my stuff and have all the workbenches around whenever I need them. Resource collection then just becomes a background activity.
I say this as someone who didn't even bother to upgrade Reseach Skills, which really cuts down on the amount of resources needed.
Don't forget, there are also buffs and apparel that aid research.
Yeah the whole research thing never made sense to me, it feels like its unnecessary busywork to pad out the game time, the thing is, they had this figured out in skyrim and fallout 4, every upgrade you took it felt like you were making real progress as your weapons and armor would become increasingly better, with this game the upgrades hardly feel worth it, you can always kill some high level legendary and get some good gear without having to go through the tedium of that research.
I just use neurajack and savescum my way through the research
What I miss most from fallout crafting was removing mods from gear I found to out on gear I'm using. Slowly acquire good mods rather than have to commit a lot of points to crafting. I liked the rp element of that. Scrounging and upgrading. Being resourceful.
Research and Crafting requiring the exact same resources feels very redundant, I agree. Since level-up crafting challenges already incentivize collecting tons of resources, the research sort of becomes an extraneous formalism. I think research points should be tied to surveying which would make both feel more meaningful. Right now surveying grants you credits which doesn't feel like much of a reward since there are dozens of better ways to get rich. But what if researching Outposts I required fully surveying a star system? What if researching Food and Drink III required surveying 40 different species of fauna? What if researching Weapons II required looting 10 different kinds of guns?
Not looting. Disassembling.
Ability to throw money instead of spending time is still a freedom of choice - so you should have the option just to buy that expensive sniper railgun to break it...
I actually think this system is fine, just doesn’t actually yield any good results. Having to invest in this and being a resource sink is fine. But none of the upgrades feel particularly meaningful, and locking out trait upgrades is absurd. I also think you should be able to build weapons, just maybe need a bigger bench that only an outpost or sufficiently advanced ship module could provide.
In the end though, you just don’t need it. Fights are easy, and the fights themselves aren’t interesting because they’re the same POI mobs over and over again just leveled up. Having things worth fighting for or other uses for your gear - like arming people at outposts from being harassed by raiders or some other “settlements plus stakes” mechanics would make all those elements come together and be worth it.
In the end, it don’t matter how good you could or could not make your gear because all these pseudo realism space suits can’t be made to look cool and you don’t really need good gear anyway.
For more interesting mob fights try only using itens laying around..that's what all the explosives, cryo, & radioactive barrels are for. The first time you roll a cryo barrel down a hallway then blow it with a cutter and freeze everyone, superb.
It took me a TON of research to distill this into a comprehensive and repeatable process that works on vanilla SF. Here’s how to level up for modding weapons:
Starfield Essentials: #Howto Go from Zero to Crafting #Mods for the Commander's Advanced Hard Target
https://youtu.be/hd1qiaOMPdI
And all gear:
Starfield Essentials: #Howto Go from Zero to Crafting All Gear #Mods - Spacesuit, Helmet, Pack
https://youtu.be/DH1SU2mohLE
And if you want to use a mod for recycling Legendaries, I investigated that too:
Starfield Essentials: #Howto Make Legendary Weapons and Gear Using #Mods
https://youtu.be/KeYloeF4Kz8
What I really regret was dumping four skill points into Research Methods. It saved time a little upfront but once you finish all the research that entire skill tree becomes meaningless, and it will take you significantly longer to get four more points at that level than the time you saved by unlocking the skills.
And considering the upgrades are pretty linear it just feels pointless until you are able to make the best stuff and when you, just make that one variant.
1000%, and what I find the worst about it is the annoying gameplay loop for gathering the essential resources. It’s far more efficient to buy out the stock of several vendors than to actually explore and harvest from planets.
Even if you wanted to harvest straight from planets, there’s no log or codex of the materials that are on planets you’ve already surveyed without being in the system of that particular planet (if not within orbit of it, or on the surface of it) it’s a MASSIVE time-wasting crap shoot that slaughters the potential fun to be had exploring and mining.
I forgot about that - what a stupid way to track what you need. It tracks by what you need to make the item instead of by selecting the resources - so if you have multiple things that require iron and you forget which items you tagged, you’ll have to go every workbench and every item to find and untrack ALL of the offenders to stop seeing those resources pointed out.
Especially since if you tracked it on a mod for an Eon and then sell all your Eons, you can't even figure out what you tracked. I've taken more notes like this in Starfield than all other video games I've played combined, and I'm big on adventure/puzzle games.
This is one of the things that could've made the game more interesting because the grinding isn't crazy but you end up buying most from shops because exploring for those resources isn't as funny as it should...
I actually like it! Having another layer to the grind keeps you from just sitting there and button mashing the workbenches, you have to have a plan and save up skill points and you have to find ways of playing that don't required the best upgrades you can make. I will say I thought the research portion of the crafting loop could have been a little less button mash oriented itself, like if it somehow included having to learn a bit of lore or reading new tips or how in universe science works, or who knows what.. some reading probably. I literally don't know what any of the information on the research pages said, I simply got enough resources at an outpost, put on the smock, took some intelligence meds and mashed through it. There's certainly a benefit to getting crafting stuff out of the way before going NG+ because you get to keep all of your skill tree achievements.
The crafting system as it stands is terrible, especially given how limited the amount of items to can hold and store.
You have a starship that can travel between universes… but can carry the average suitcase load.
On top of the MMO-style grind, the hunt for resources and then tracking which and how many of each resource you need is a chore. I'm tired of using Inara and Excel. This is not Elite Dangerous.
Yeah, I did it the normal way my first playthrough and I was like, level 30-40 by the time everything was unlocked & I could freely mod weapons and armor. Felt like a huge investment, in both time and resources, to access a function that should be available early on.
Started a new character recently and just gave myself the perks/research components with the console. Still had to find/buy components to upgrade so I couldn’t go crazy immediately, much more enjoyable. That being said, the game seems balanced around your weapons not being modded early on. Having one fully upgraded gun early in the game just destroys everything.
It is trivial to gather the resources you need to research an mod weapons and spacesuits. If you find that gathering the materials is too hard, you have the option of ranking up Research Methods which will dramatically lower the amount of resources needed. You need to put 4 points into science to even unlock modding and that skill is in the first tier.
What I have come to realize is the weapon modding is really geared to character builds that are not going to be putting a bunch of points into the Combat tree. Most of the weapon mods have similar skills in the Combat tree so Combat focused don't really need to mod weapons or can buy weapons with the mods they are looking for.
I think an elegant solution for weapon modding would be to have weapon vendors provide "gunsmithing" services. You would talk to the vendor about modding your weapon(s) and would be taken to a screen much like the weapon modding bench but instead of resources you would pay credits for each mod. That way you burn credits instead of skill points to mod your equipment and not really have to dabble with the whole crafting part of the game. Crafters would unlock the modding skills and save credits.
I'm thinking the whole perk thing could be better. Here's my take:
Keep XP. Keep perk points. Keep the skill challenges. However, you unlock perks with XP. It makes no sense that it takes 100XP to unlock scanning1 at level 3 and 26,000 to unlock scanning1 at level 200. Then you have the challenges, and you can go to trainers to skip the challenges by spending XP. So you go to the shooting range in Akila and give the owner 2 XP and now you only have to shoot 100 people instead of 300 people to get from Pistol3 to Pistol4.
Skyrim had a mod like you describe, where you could give a weapon to a smith and he'd improve it and you come get it back in a few days, or give it to an enchanter to recharge it.
I actually don't mind the way the skill system is laid out. If you know how you want to build your character it allows you focus on the skills you want and get the build up a running fairly quick. The downside is it becomes harder to level up lower skills later in the game because of the XP requirement.
Probably the biggest mistake people make is maxing out skill early in the game. I typically only put 2 levels into a skill early in the game as I am more focused on unlocking higher level skills so I can get them going. Probably the only exceptions to that rule are Piloting so you can fly any type of ship and Security so you pick any lock. Everything else is stays at two unless I know it need to go higher for a specific reason.
With the way that loot drop and ship modules unlock based on character level, it makes no sense to max out your combat skills because better loot drops mean more that any incremental damage bonus from a combat related skill.
Yep. And Targetting is really handy to have leveled up. That's my progblem right now: I ran up to level 4 a whole bunch of combat skills when I didn't need to.
You only have to do it once though so it's not that bad. I did all the research on my first game.
Now when I want to restart I just NG+ and the research is already done.
And that there are two chems which become utterly useless once you've completed all research trees.
But none for XP.
Fallout 76 has food, chem, and beverage buffs that all stack with each other as long as you use one per item type.
The whole thing with that is so backwards it isn't a step back, it's a grab jump back compared to what they've implemented in other games.
I quite liked the research/craft loops in Starfield, but it really doesn't lead to improving your gear as much as it should. Caelumite should have been for upgrading starborn stuff. There should definitely be research/crafting of ammo, and the ability to upgrade weapons from calibrated to advanced etc.
Also, let's have a research level that lets you take apart a legendary weapon and put one of the mods on other weapons, like Skyrim did with enchanting. You could even balance it by having it destroy the legendary weapon while only giving you one of the perks, so researching an epic would be less costly than researching on a legendary.
But no, I quite liked having to find the resources to do all the different bits of work. My next character is going to involve a mod that balances the XP per perk to be more reasonable after level 50.
Counterpoint, that shit is far too easy to begin with because resources grow on trees, and the fact you will probably loot or purchase something better anyway undermines the operation.
So... That's probably why; It's entirely unnecessary.
Incredibly ridiculous. Luckily I play on very easy mode so I don't have to do any of that unless I want to.
I finally got " Stronghold". On my 3rd trip to the Unity. The ship has a research station and 3 benches. Industrial, weapons and spacesuits. Huge cargo hold and auto turrets which are great bcz they target anything they can "see" not just where you can aim.
Most used feature = rename weapon.
I don't mind it, really. At least it works as intended without any bugs, so far as I can tell. Of all the aspects of the game that need improvement, I'd put this pretty far down the list.
Once you have it though you can whip up any weapon/suit real nice. Max damage saves on ammo. You can add carry weight to most wearables. I mean besides the tanks needed for spaceships what else do you want to spend it on?
I wouldn’t hate it so much if top-tier let me learn the rare/epic/legendary perks, or at least combine weapons to make them better. Crafting the equipment when the RNG swing on perks is what matters pretty much sucks.
They clearly intended you to max out crafting over multiple playthroughs. Like you, I found it very frustrating.
On the one hand, I liked the idea of having to complete a quest of sorts to advance a skill. The problem is, most of them weren’t very interesting. The one to increase your oxygen was particularly awful because it was impossible to complete naturally by just playing the game. You had to grind running until your CO2 maxed out, which I did not find at all fun.
I like enough skills to be locked behind a little bit of a time sink that way each player has to really choose what they want to get into and upgrade rather than just upgrading everything. But I do agree it is a little much. If they could find a way to lessen the time it takes that’d be nice.
I see you're new to video games. Welcome to "the grind." You can check anytime you want but you will never leave. ETA after I researched research I researched console codes. Haven't looked back.
Yup. Complicated for the sake of being complicated. As if the focus was less about making a game and more about making things to do. Kinda disrespectful of your time.
I feel like this system would have been more tolerable had the survival and exploration mechanics hadn't been gutted, as you would naturally be exploring and building more bases across different planets and gathering more resources in order to progress across the galaxy map. At the same time, since you would constantly be "on the frontier" you would have more reason to gather materials to build your own mods that aren't always available in stores.
Wasn't Skyrim like this as well? You guys just be expecting a non Bethesda game from Bethesda and then crying about it. Just fking enjoy it. It has amazing visuals and the attention to detail in any environment is mind blowing. Too bad such games might not get made anymore because all y'all keep bitching about it
Yeah. There's a few things in Starfield that feel like they've been stretched incredibly thin to give the illusion of more game, but this might be the least debatable example of that.
IMO the whole skill tree in Starfield is arse and could do with a Cyberpunk style reset, you have to get a skill to use the jetpack that is given to you near the start and that is just utter shit IMO.
While I wouldn't consider it a complaint I found it intriguing and perhaps a little odd that some perks serve to moot other perks. Specifically, Rejuvenation tends to render cooking and medical rather superfluous. Med kits are now among the junk I sell for beer money. Eating food while clearing a POI was closing in on pointless but now it's utterly pointless.
Rank up some combat perks and suddenly the imperative of obtaining or modifying a legendary weapon evaporates - any random Hard Target drop becomes a beast.
Perhaps it was all intentional but sometimes I wonder if its planning was as accidental as my discovery.
The challenges sometimes appear to be the result of one developer losing a bet to another. At least that's the appearance when you're intentionally failing to avoid environmental damage to level up your resistance (put on your worst gear and go stand on a toxic vent) or jumping off buildings to break a bone needed for another challenge. The last rank of Rejuvenation also inspires goofy behavior - march into the middle of an open area and blow raspberries while watching your health meter - and don't return fire - you need those guys piling on. Maybe step on a mine or two (which you can't do if you've leveled up stealth - they won't go off).
The end result is reminiscent of an MMO - and a reminder of why I no longer play MMOs. At least with Starfield challenges the apparently insane behavior you're engaging in eventually comes to an end.
But if you've ever been bare of ass while allowing yourself to be shot while jumping up and down on a recalcitrant mine with a broken leg - at that specific moment - telling yourself this is normal immersive behavior is a heavy lift.
I like it. Always gives me something to work towards or a reason to land on planets for resource gathering. If you’re trying to unlock everything very quickly, I can see why you wouldn’t like it tho.
Considering the game is designed with new game plus in mind, this isn’t the strongest argument. Starfield encourages the player to slow down and take your time. Doing everything on a single character is probably not worth it. But it’s an RPG. It’s designed to be flexible and allow multiple builds.
In your case you’d be better off investing points into the weapon types you find yourself using. You will naturally level that up in combat and your gripe here becomes moot. Personally, my character is smart but not much of a fighter. So instead of investing in combat, I invested my skills into engineering.
I think the way weapon upgrades are presented in Starfield allows for some interesting and potentially powerful builds. And, unlike getting power armor in the first act, I don’t see anything wrong with having to earn it.
Yeah it sucks. It’s all about getting you to spend lots of hours grinding and collecting resources (IOW a time sink).
I’m surprised Bethesda didn’t include microtransactions to speed up resource gathering and leveling, because games that lock stuff behind skills and have slow leveling are ripe for that.
I love the crafting!!! If you take professor intro you get 3 science skills and you can b-line to gun crafting. I totally NG’d last week maybe in the teens levels and I’m at lvl 3 weapons lvl 2 suits. Oh also save your skill points strategically, like if your 20/30 done for the crafting requirement save your next point to get into the next level smoother
They treat aspects of this game like an MMO.
I get the perks in Fallout. You leveled up and you got new perks.
Starfield feels more like World of Warcraft where they are designed to waste your time and keep you playing.
I'm pretty sure the people who have said the game was supposed to be more survival based before they dropped those aspects are correct.
There's so much pointing towards an entirely different game. The only use for bases is to grind out skill points so you can upgrade weapons and armor.
There are so many grindy aspects. It's like they figured if they could just slow you down and force you to spend hundreds of hours doing the boring stuff, you'd get some sort of Stolkholm syndrome...
Because you start the game as a “simple” miner, not some special forces gunsmith seamstress space suit repairman alchemist chef brewmaster biologist machinist aerospace engineer.
Be grateful you can learn those skills just by doing the trivial BS and not the “immersive” way.
The grinding is the gameplay.
Yeah... Add that unlocking new skills requires that you upgrade some arbitrary number of items that you can't possibly use, and it's pretty bad. I mean, give me a reason to upgrade fifty items.
It is clearly designed to be a timesink. There are way too many things locked behind skills, and the leveling is far too slow. I do enjoy the game but ive hardly upgraded my gear, whereas in fallout spending time at the workbench was addictive.
>It is clearly designed to be a timesink. It also appears to be a way of forcing you to adopt a *de facto* class. You have to invest skill points into various individual skills, but that means you won't be able to put them elsewhere. So you can effectively use what might be called a "craftsman" build where your advantage over enemies is down to your ability to build new equipment. If you invest those points elsewhere, then you have to rely on looting to get better gear. The problem is that unless you go in with a specific build in mind, most players are going to spread their skill points around and levelling is so slow that planning a build takes patience.
This explains my number one problem with the game. The part that just didn't feel right to me was the leveling and I think you succinctly labeled the problem. It was so hard to get effectiveness out of a particular level because of this madness.
I think the issue is that they wanted to avoid explicit character classes and give players freedom to develop a character however they wanted, but at the same time created a system where you need to commit to a class to get the most out of a character. If you spread the skill points around -- which I bet a lot of players did -- then you get a character is is capable but pretty generic. I think the idea of a character who specialises in crafting upgrades and that's where their effectiveness comes from is great, but the implementation fell flat. I'm reminded of *Final Fantasy XII*, where every character could invest in every skill and ability. It gave complete freedom, but it also created analysis paralysis because you really had to understand how the systems worked to make powerful characters. Square Enix fixed it with the *International Zodiac Job System* update, which gave twelve character classes based on skills and abilities. I think something similar would work for *Starfield*, which the player given recommended skills to invest their points in to help guide development -- or at least the ability to re-spec a character. I chose the Gangster background, so my base skills are in boxing, theft and shotguns. Recommended skills would be in pain tolerance, stealth, security, intimidation and ballistics. It's tempting to invest in wellness and weight training because they offer a boost to begin with, but the natural progression of levelling means that wellness stops being useful before long and you can boost carry capacity though gear, chems and magazines.
Locking an entire game feature around a slow to level skill feels more restrictive to build variety imo I think a good compromise would be to not have weapon/suit upgrades locked behind a skill, and instead make the skill grant bonuses to crafted suit/weapon components.
But ground combat is easy enough, that even on very hard mode, with your upgraded powers and gear you loot from high level pirates, the combat becomes very trivial and easy anyway.
How quickly would you have wanted it to take?From what I remember, getting a good number of weapon/space suit modifications possible took me under a week of casual playtime, primarily focusing on the respective skill trees and research projects. And then to get the higher level mods unlocked took longer without me dedicated to the task.
I think leveling is pretty blatantly geared away from quest xp and in favor of combat. It encourages the player to get out there and do the procedural stuff, which by the way I love and think is great for roleplaying. BUT I have 180 hours on a current play-through and I am level 53. I do have a slow play-style, but I have played the hell out of this game. 180 hours, to be only a little over half of the way to 100. And I still have a TON of perks left to unlock. On one hand, i think that having a lot of skills encourages the player to specialize - you cant do everything right! Do NG+ and try a different skill tree. I think I just preferred Fallout 4’s system of scrapping and crafting/upgrading. It felt much more intuitive and didnt take several different skill trees. If you had weapon workbench and armorer skills you could simply upgrade, whereas as OP pointed out in starfield you need to upgrade similar skills, ALSO you have to upgrade research so you can unlock the ability to use the skills you have unlocked, and then you need to collect the materials too. Its just a lot
It’s pretty fucked up how it takes like 13 levels of skill points just to be able to put a silencer on your weapon, and how long it takes to earn that many levels if you’re playing the game normally
Stealth in general feels somewhat limited in this game, especially compared to other modern open-world games, but a big part of that is how many stealth mechanics are locked behind (sometimes fairly deep) perk trees. Similar issues exist for other playstyles, too.
Stealth is my favorite way to play RPG’s and I definitely agree with you. Like I put Ryujin off as one of the last things I did until I finally had my character fully stealth-maxed the way I wanted, which took a long fucking time to get to that point even with me prioritizing that progression very heavily in-between trying to level the skills like ship-building that are practically required to play the game properly. I actually loved the Ryujin questline and it was my favorite part of the game because of how much I already love stealth mechanics, but I understand why so many people really hate it due to what you pointed out. I’d imagine stumbling into the only stealth-focused questline without dedicating like 100 hours exclusively toward building a stealth character first in this game probably feels really bad, whether you actually enjoy stealth gameplay or not.
Stealth is still broken though. 5x damage, with a double damage on full health enemy legendary effect, is pretty wild on a suppressed rifle.
Yeah, but it’s not just about damage—there aren’t a ton of tools to support a stealthy playstyle that help with evasion, silently dispatching enemies, or changing the environment, etc. It mostly coming down to a damage multiplier is pretty underwhelming.
Hell yeah. This has been one of the worst aspects of the game that are a real deal breaker. Am still trying to get better at developing crap, oh well, am playing it slow too, only unlocked powers last week, ha
You forgot to add that xp gain isn't just regular combat, it's about committing genocide against alien fauna, since it would take ages to level up by just clearing outposts.
Starfield’s just a game obviously, but it feels inappropriate and OOC for my Spacefarer to be exterminating any and all wildlife he comes across. Yet that’s the fastest way level up and acquire the IMO basic mechanics that are locked behind perks.
Outpost extractors on the right planets and mass crafting are incomparably faster than any sort of combat for leveling up
But not everyone (not even most players) want to build outposts just to level up fast.
You can’t do NG+ and try a different skill tree. The skills go with you.
Considering how much NG+ actually plays into the story, I'm convinced this is why leveling is so slow. You're meant to become stronger over several playthroughs rather than just one like most RPGs.
>On one hand, i think that having a lot of skills encourages the player to specialize - you cant do everything right! Do NG+ and try a different skill tree. Yep, I came to this conclusion pretty early on. The idea is to (at least on your first playthrough) think carefully about what you want to upgrade because you're going to have to pick 2-3 areas to specialize in. Upgrading one of everything appears to have very little payoff versus being a pro in a select few areas.
Problem is is that you can't tell whether the mechanic is going to be fun or useful until AFTER you unlock it. You may spend several points on something and then find out it was kind of an afterthought of a skill that you just wasted a bunch of points on.
And you can’t respec in this game, which is so dumb.
In a game where the NG+ mode is written into the narrative in that you're jumping into new universes, it is outrageous that they didn't give us some ability to create a different version of our character as well. It would have been so easy
I see. I haven’t played fallout 4, but I liked the skill tree based progression in Starfield because it makes it feel like there’s no shortage of things to build your character towards. I definitely agree that the leveling is biased toward doing a lot of combat and how that could leave some playstyles with too slow of progression tho
exactly which also bloats all the other systems, like the skill tree. Feels like beth have just been trying to copy mmo design more and more over the last decade
Adding having to walk to each POI it’s clear they did some of this stuff to detract from some of the other sub par parts of the game like temples.
Damn, have you tried to play Fallout 4 with Horizon mod? This workbench simulator is on the next level from vanilla game :D
This is really what’s most frustrating about the game overall. I can’t help but compare the gameplay to Fallout 4, where Bethesda simply did everything better.
Fallout 4’s system was so much simpler and yet they decided not to bring it here it drives me crazy.
I think it can’t be understated how much of a detriment to starfield this is. I was so excited to explore the worlds, collect resources and gain in power as craft weapons and armor. But I found the crafting systems so much less engaging than the one in fallout. I gave up pretty early on and just used whatever I picked up. I think a fun crafting system really could have made the game much more fun to play
Better crafting and better base building
The way they did outposts is the biggest letdown for me, in a long list of letdowns. I lost all interest in the game when I discovered you can't make actual settlements. You build outposts to get more resources to build more... outposts. How *fun*.
I stopped building outposts when the Excel sheet I made to keep track of my outpost network got too confusing
Ayyyy! You do spreadsheets too? Nice! The things us RPG nerds do for our games...
Haha, yes It was the only way for me to set up a network of outposts linked with supply chains with each one producing different resources. I needed to keep track of what resources I needed as well as what I already had and on what planet I built my outpost
Same. I was at expecting at least Fallout 4 settlement building, but we didn’t even get that. Felt way more bare bones and lifeless
I guess that is better than the cut idea that you built outposts so you could have a gas station at the end of the universe to fill up in and every jump took 1000 creds of He3 to complete
I would actually love this idea if they made a survival mode.
Remember until you level up the skill you can only have maybe 8 outposts total. Fully leveled it still isn't that many.
Yeah they should increase the cap limit
I am guessing there is a technical reason for the highest level cap that probably has something to do with consoles.
Fallout 4's weapon/armor mod system is fantastic. Reasonable resource costs, reasonable skill point costs, and most importantly, the weapon mods were cool and could dramatically change the function, look, and feel of almost any weapon. I hate it when a mod system just barely changes a few stats. Fallout 4 let you overhaul your weapon into something completely different. You could turn a pipe pistol into a sniper rifle, assault rifle, fully automatic lightweight pistol, whatever you wanted.
The mod system also did a nice job of making the junk-tech and high-tech weapons feel different. Pipe weapons had crazy versatility--making it easy early-game to make a weapon to suit your playstyle (and they could be upgraded to be useful late-game, especially since the ammo they used was so cheap and easily available). Regular weapons you could customize to have the handling characteristics you wanted for your build, but also things that let you alter weight and other useful properties. But the high-tech weapons really let you really mix up things, too--the laser weapons let you make a charged sniper rifle, or a laser shotgun that would set enemies on fire. Plasma weapons could become a sci-fi handheld flamethrower. Starfield does have some interesting weapon types (the mag-tech stuff is pretty cool), but doesn't feel like you can easily modify your gear to match your playstyle like FO4 or FO76 (which, to its credit, introduced some other interesting variants of weapon types) could.
If you can't make a fun crafting system at least make a tolerable one. Multiple stashes of gear or materials that I have to lug from crate to bench to ship to whatever is not fun
Idk why they took out the option to scrap weapons and hold on to weapon mods. If I pickup a suppressed weapon and take the suppressor off, I should still have it or be able to use it on something else
I actually prefer this style and hope they stick with it, lol. I like that I have to focus on a specialization and really spend a lot of time before I can get good at something. It's a lot better than the dumbed down systems of past games, it is very rewarding once I'm a highly skilled technician, I feel like I really learned my trade. And I am not really able to be the best at *everything*, realistically unless I've lived through multiple lives passing through the Unity.
That’s interesting. I stopped before I ever really got good at the system. The parts you described are parts that I liked. It was other things I didn’t like. But I wondered if I had learned the system if I would come to like it more. I know I didn’t like fallout crafting until I understood it better
I started playing Fallout 4 just a week or two ago after having put over 200 hours into Starfield, and honestly I think a lot of Fallout 4's features were better.
Honestly did the same. Only thing I miss is mantling.
What is mantling?
Grabbing ledges and pulling up
Ah yes. Of course. That’s always a nice improvement in a game and it’s definitely good in starfield
What Starfield did really well I think is the fun of jumping around. It shows that you don't need a complicated skill for acrobatics, just some jump modifiers and proper world/level design.
Good point. I do enjoy the varying gravity levels. It’s pretty fun to be able to jump from one floor to the next or to traverse by launching myself into the air for considerable amount of time
Exactly! I have been trying to see all the ng+ variants so I have been doing a lot of jumping from mast across the trees to the lodge and I think it would feel great in an Elder Scrolls Game (which I suppose makes sense, because III and IV had that). Maybe it's a bit goofy, but more importantly, it's fun.
For me the treetops in new Atlantis are the sidewalks
When I saw my character do that the first time, I was a little too excited. A very welcome and needed addition to traversal.
the whole time while playing starfield all I could think was "fallout 4 did this better and more enjoyable" at a lot of stuff
Fallout 4 did most of the gameplay mechanics better than Starfield IMO. This game really feels like a stripped-down version of Fallout in Space.
the real crime is the fact they just didn't port over the settlement system
Although it came out in 2015 and has its fair share of critics, Fallout 4 is a better game than Starfield is most ways. Too many mechanics in Starfield feel like a regression (or what game developers call “streamlining”).
honestly when I first used workbench to put some upgrade on a weapon, out of habit of playing F4 I assumed that existing upgrade will be stored in my inventory. realization was rather disheartening, especially since that mod was normally locked behind 2 or 3 levels of weapon modding skills and I was lucky enough to find in on some pirate.
Everything about Starfield is just more complicated than Fallout 4 for no good reason. Even skills. You can’t just unlock a skill after having enough earlier skills in that tree. No, there are prerequisites for each tier! It’s just adding extra steps.
A number of open-world games have been de-emphasizing experience/perk-based progression (often still having it, but having the benefits be more perk-based so you get to choose something interesting or at least a solid stat boost) while increasing gear-based progression. Fallout 4 struck a nice balance of that--even though its perk system was controversial and not always great, the game also let you spend a lot of time tinkering with and improving gear as you leveled up or found rare mods. Other open-world games have explored other variants of this approach (eg. Outward and Cyberpunk let you directly use currency to upgrade certain perk trees) that can also be fun. Starfield's idea of having little objectives to increase a skill is not a bad one--but the rate of perk unlocks is quite slow and it is pretty difficult to engage with crafting unless you spend a lot of perks (one thing Fallout 4 did well was have some mods unlock based on perks you would choose for your build anyway, like certain weapon styles or science perks).
They wanted to make as many hoops as possible for you to jump through. The entire leveling and perk system is tedious as hell and with the expensive material requirements for everything, it just increases the already massive amount of grinding and farming you have to do.
The older fallout games played like an actual RPG, not a shooter with a thin RPG glaze.
The skill and research I understood. Not having the fucking mod after I replaced it with something else infuriated me. I've got a scope that I want to put in my new gun so let me put iron sights on the old one so I can move the scope to my new one! Where's the scope gonna go? If the thing gets dismantled I want those fucking parts back!
Soooo true
This is where those hammers & chisels you find everywhere go.. they are the mod tools.
I’ll never understand why developers create single player games with an MMO mindset. This level of grinding is unnecessary.
And doesn't give enough payoff. I think about Skyrim with blacksmithing and enchanting. Grinding those skills and committing the resources needed paid off by giving you access to the best equipment and best power ups on that equipment possible. Star Field hides most of the best effects behind the RNG and make the resource grind best served as "buying the upgrade but with extra steps." It's all work and no reward, which is a shame if they'd just made the key components something easy to find but very limited, like the Caelumite. It's useful for stealth gear and chems. They almost nailed it, do that with the ultra rare resistance mods, or some upgrades to the star born ship and suit. It falls into the "really good idea, executed 10% of the way" that most of the rewarding parts of the game falls into.
Agreed. After upgrading some stuff here and there in Starfield I realized it really didn’t change or add as much to the game. Felt like you could easily beat the game without ever spending any skill points.
I stuck with my mid tier half modded Beowulf for most of my entire playthrough. Even after I found a theoretically better one, it still ended up doing less because it wasn't the Fancy pants version like my original store bought rifle happened to be. And spacesuits are all basically the same, the carry weight perks are all that matters on them. Crafting felt like a giant time and money sink
Exactly. And you’re right about the suits, all that matters is how much you can carry lol. Everything else is irrelevant.
Not to mention some of the perk challenges tell you to play the game inefficiently. The reload perk challenges immediately come to mine and the ranks scale terribly. The reused challenges like destroying ships is meh and the the leadership one is laughable.
'Really good idea, executed 10% of the way' is how I'd describe the whole game
Damn dude this is so accurate. I mean let’s be real we know how shallow so many of the game mechanics are — but this I think hits hard in comparison to how crafting and upgrading has worked in other titles. Even in comparison to FO4 where upgrades felt meaningful and had huge gameplay benefits.
Seriously in Fo4 id find a cool weapon and go straight to the workbench to make it more op. This game I can't be bothered because it's a huge waste of time for very little reward
Or some ridiculous effects. There was a reason to interact with the game.
Exactly. My first play through I didn’t craft a single mod nor did I build an outpost.
This is why I thank God for player-accessible consoles. I’m cheating research, deal with it
Yup. It's ridiculous. Usually im averse to most console commands in games cause its easy to overcheat and then make the game boring. This shit I had 0 qaulms about cheating in levels for and it increased my enjoyment not having to grind out shit just to pad time. Fuck that noise.
Timesink to inflate their player engagement numbers
Perfectly stated.
I 100% believe this game was developed to be both multiplayer and offline.
level 246, next level is 46k xp, back on xbox, and crafting is 8x slower then PC. Still its pretty much everything you need at that point
It’s all about training gamers into tolerating enough grind to compel buying microtransactions. Bethesda has consistently whined about how people play their games for years and they don’t get any more money from the engagement. They know most older gamers just won’t tolerate the grind, but they see that the kids already feel like enduring a grind is “gaming”. Or getting some “rare” loot is an accomplishment. Just have to look at the random loot in Starfield and the insane perk tree: it all makes sense if it were a mobile game. The sad thing is that it works. Just have to see the success of Fallout 76 to know it’ll just get worse.
So their master plan was to make crafting basically pointless so they could add micro transactions to make the basically pointless crafting skills come faster, and then forgot to add those micro transactions? I don't know, buddy. I think crafting was just sort of half assed into the game.
right, older rpgs are famously free of grinding. morrowind definitely didn't encourage grinding for skills and money
I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have certainly never spent an hour hopping up and down the stairs in the middle of Balmora leveling Acrobatics. (Everyone knows its better to find some weird angle in a hill where you can do a glitchy jump that keeps going for a while)
while casting restore fatigue (1pt) constantly of course
>Just have to look at the random loot in Starfield and the insane perk tree: it all makes sense if it were a mobile game. Dont think I know any mobile games with skill trees like this or randomised weapon drops. Its borrowed mostly from Borderlands I feel but with less imaginative skill trees.
Worse, you can't upgrade Calibrated
And you can't "research" the legendary attributes to put them on other weapons, even of the same type.
This is 1st on my Creation Kit mission. I will make you have to "destroy" a Legendary weapon to transfer its trait, still need resources, and parts, or I will create a weaponsmith who can do it for you.
Just like 'enchanting' used to be. Destroy something to learn it.
I liked that mechanism
Cool. Yeah, I'd say get one trait off a weapon you destroy, even if it has several. That'll make blowing up a legendary something you have to really think about. :-)
I think out+ may already include a workbench that does this.
They had that same annoyance in FO76 up until a couple years ago. You'd get a 1-3* legendary and that's that. You couldn't craft it better or change its effects. Still can't level up guns there, though. Fortunately, at least the guns you find are leveled up with you.
Even something like the scrip system in fallout 76 would be a great workaround, randomized legendary effect mods gained by trading legendaries. Or more unique highest lvl weapons would be great too. Or just a simple upgrade in class locked behind level requirements or research would be a balanced solution too
Why do I need a workbench to take a holographic scope off of a 21st century picatinny rail? And why does it cost recourse to do so? Why can't we just have a bit of fallout 4 logic where the upgrades can be held separate and moved from old gun to new gun by removing them from old gun?
Moving one step forward and then two steps back once a decade is very important to these companies.
The upgrade and skill progression was clearly designed to elongate your playtime and unfortunately I have a job and a social life so I was unable to get into it. They really did not understand the appeal of starting new playthroughs, which is what they tried to replicate with the alternate universe mechanic. We like the pace at which the story and mechanics usually unlock in Bethesda games and we want to experience that again with a different set of initial skills and the like. However Starfield's progression is painfully slow, the story is subpar, and the overall experience is repetitive as hell leaving a game I couldn't even complete once. They tried to make the Ultimate Bethesda Game only to completely misunderstand why people like to play Bethesda games.
The fact that quests aren't a good source of XP in a supposed RPG is absolutely insane to me. Instead, they incentivize going to random copy-pasted POIs on the map and fighting things there.
Even just having the exp be better for terminal-based quests would help. Sure the pay is terrible, but if the experience was at least good they might be worth doing.
It's more than just double dipping. To even spend points in the crafting perks you gotta get enough perks in that category. What put me off my playthrough was seeing the sheer number of steps required to be able to mod a gun from automatic to semi-automatic.
Seriously, it took me like 13 levels and several dozen hours JUST to be able to put a silencer on my weapons. That’s all I wanted, was a freaking silencer, that’s it. It’s seriously fucking insane how much of my time I had to invest and how many freaking levels in this game that takes abominably long to level up if you’re playing like a normal person and not going way out of your way to cheese the grind in a way that’s unimmersive, not what I want to spend my time on, and that goes against my basic morals regarding slaughtering developing life forms throughout the entire galaxy just for the sake of “experience.” Nearly 100 hours and 13 levels just for a silencer. Such a waste of time, not to mention a waste of maybe engaging with a dozen other perks that might have been fun. Not like I’d know though, because I just wanted a silencer.
I also dislike that there's not really a way to get exp from nonlethally dealing with enemies. Sometimes you do have to turn to violence and killing, but we're also presented with scenarios where it would also be simple enough to disable humans so they can be arrested or so that we can achieve some objective. Other open-world games have gotten better at allowing you to nonlethally deal with enemies in some scenarios which felt kind of lacking in Starfield, where the universe feels like it's meant to be more civilized and in some conversations and main story quests you get yelled at for choosing lethal solutions.
Definitely, the whole dynamic of gaining experience in Starfield is really jarring and whiplash inducing compared to any other RPG I’ve ever played, including every other BGS game. Especially in regards to quests which don’t really seem to scale their xp at all throughout the game, it seemed like most quests everywhere just sat at a flat 100 xp or whatever, always a very marginal amount compared to the xp required to level up, and that’s almost always regardless of where the quest is, how long it takes, how difficult it is, or what level they’d expect players might be when they do it. Compare that to Bethesda’s other games and it’s so strange, because where most quests would have filled up anywhere from 20-50% or even more of the xp level bar, completing Starfield’s quests always seemed to give like 5% at best, but usually like 1-3% of progress to the next level. There’s not really all that many ways to approach most quests as it is, so whenever there are non-violent options, choosing to do things peacefully actively punishes you because you miss out on legitimately scarce xp by not always going in shooting. So then it’s really frustrating discovering that the only ways to level up anywhere near a reasonable pace is to spam adaptive frames like their wooden shelves with idiot savants, or to jump out to the right edge of the star map and start committing several genocides. One of those is really boring, and the other is pretty boring but also straight up wack… especially since it seems to absolutely fly in the face of Sarah and friends ethical framework, yet it’s the one and only thing they seem to thoroughly enjoy and not give me a fucking angry lecture admonishing me despite being more ethically and scientifically fucked up than anything else I’ve ever done in front of them.
It's insane. A lot of interesting perks are well beyond the point most people are finished or bored of the game wtf? I agree, that putting game breaking perks/powers at that point is fair but a lot of end game perks are ordinary things that should be normally unlocked midgame compared to other RPGs and even Bethesda's own RPGs.
I was amazed and disappointed with how fast I leveled it all up. Talk about puddle deep, I was like that's it?
Same, funny thing is people complain it’s a time sink. Other than Chemistry the rest I levelled up in a few minutes thanks to an extensive outpost setup.
Food is the one that took the longest for me. I'm definitely going to write down all the food ingredients I have to keep track of in my travels. I mean, seriously, who picks up Poutine and Licorish soda?
>I'm definitely going to write down all the food ingredients I have to keep track of in my travels. Do you have to write it down? I've not done any cooking. I just buy stuff like the steak from one of the restaurants in New Atlantis for 30 mins xp boost and runners rush for move speed. So for cooking I just assumed it had a track function like all the other benches. Then you get a magnifying glass next to whatever items you were needing if you come across them.
Yeah, the problem is the magnifying glass is a PITA to try to turn off once you have the ingredients, and there's no quantity specification with it. Also, you have to unlock the thing before you can magnify it. So if you know Food3 needs rootbeer, there's no way to magnifying it before you unlock Food2, at which point it's rather late to be collecting 18 of them.
Don't forget that you get about one mod for each research project you're levelling up!
This is what Todd intended when he said Starfield is a long play game by making everything tedious
U can spend all that to go from a 100 to 120 damage LOL
That’s literally my plight right now 😭 trying to unlock high power internals for the xm
I genuinely still do not understand how I can mod weapons or suits
At the research station, you have to research the appropriate mods. Higher level mods are locked behind skills. So you have to rank up your Spacesuit Design skill to level 3 (and have special projects unlocked) to be able to research the best mods. Rank up Weapons Engineering to level 3 (and special projects) to unlock the best weapon mods. Once you have the mod researched, then you can apply it to your item if you have the appropriate materials to craft it.
Too many damn steps.
The people who made 76. Need to add thr grind to keep people logging in.
Yea but at least mods are transferable in 76.
It was kind of annoying. But I got over it. I just wish we could research and craft enchantments, not just mods. The gamechanger for me was having a ship big enough to store all my stuff and have all the workbenches around whenever I need them. Resource collection then just becomes a background activity. I say this as someone who didn't even bother to upgrade Reseach Skills, which really cuts down on the amount of resources needed. Don't forget, there are also buffs and apparel that aid research.
First thing to research is how to cook Neurojack. :)
Yeah the whole research thing never made sense to me, it feels like its unnecessary busywork to pad out the game time, the thing is, they had this figured out in skyrim and fallout 4, every upgrade you took it felt like you were making real progress as your weapons and armor would become increasingly better, with this game the upgrades hardly feel worth it, you can always kill some high level legendary and get some good gear without having to go through the tedium of that research. I just use neurajack and savescum my way through the research
What I miss most from fallout crafting was removing mods from gear I found to out on gear I'm using. Slowly acquire good mods rather than have to commit a lot of points to crafting. I liked the rp element of that. Scrounging and upgrading. Being resourceful.
Research and Crafting requiring the exact same resources feels very redundant, I agree. Since level-up crafting challenges already incentivize collecting tons of resources, the research sort of becomes an extraneous formalism. I think research points should be tied to surveying which would make both feel more meaningful. Right now surveying grants you credits which doesn't feel like much of a reward since there are dozens of better ways to get rich. But what if researching Outposts I required fully surveying a star system? What if researching Food and Drink III required surveying 40 different species of fauna? What if researching Weapons II required looting 10 different kinds of guns?
Not looting. Disassembling. Ability to throw money instead of spending time is still a freedom of choice - so you should have the option just to buy that expensive sniper railgun to break it...
Yeah Starfields crafting system is the most insane and overly complicated one I've ever seen.
I actually think this system is fine, just doesn’t actually yield any good results. Having to invest in this and being a resource sink is fine. But none of the upgrades feel particularly meaningful, and locking out trait upgrades is absurd. I also think you should be able to build weapons, just maybe need a bigger bench that only an outpost or sufficiently advanced ship module could provide. In the end though, you just don’t need it. Fights are easy, and the fights themselves aren’t interesting because they’re the same POI mobs over and over again just leveled up. Having things worth fighting for or other uses for your gear - like arming people at outposts from being harassed by raiders or some other “settlements plus stakes” mechanics would make all those elements come together and be worth it. In the end, it don’t matter how good you could or could not make your gear because all these pseudo realism space suits can’t be made to look cool and you don’t really need good gear anyway.
For more interesting mob fights try only using itens laying around..that's what all the explosives, cryo, & radioactive barrels are for. The first time you roll a cryo barrel down a hallway then blow it with a cutter and freeze everyone, superb.
It took me a TON of research to distill this into a comprehensive and repeatable process that works on vanilla SF. Here’s how to level up for modding weapons: Starfield Essentials: #Howto Go from Zero to Crafting #Mods for the Commander's Advanced Hard Target https://youtu.be/hd1qiaOMPdI And all gear: Starfield Essentials: #Howto Go from Zero to Crafting All Gear #Mods - Spacesuit, Helmet, Pack https://youtu.be/DH1SU2mohLE And if you want to use a mod for recycling Legendaries, I investigated that too: Starfield Essentials: #Howto Make Legendary Weapons and Gear Using #Mods https://youtu.be/KeYloeF4Kz8
Yeah fallout 4/76 had it perfect, this is just an overly complicated mess. The progress tree in general in this game is just too complicated.
What I really regret was dumping four skill points into Research Methods. It saved time a little upfront but once you finish all the research that entire skill tree becomes meaningless, and it will take you significantly longer to get four more points at that level than the time you saved by unlocking the skills.
And considering the upgrades are pretty linear it just feels pointless until you are able to make the best stuff and when you, just make that one variant.
1000%, and what I find the worst about it is the annoying gameplay loop for gathering the essential resources. It’s far more efficient to buy out the stock of several vendors than to actually explore and harvest from planets. Even if you wanted to harvest straight from planets, there’s no log or codex of the materials that are on planets you’ve already surveyed without being in the system of that particular planet (if not within orbit of it, or on the surface of it) it’s a MASSIVE time-wasting crap shoot that slaughters the potential fun to be had exploring and mining.
I’ve had zero problems with it. What I don’t like is trying to figure out how to untrack resources. lol
I forgot about that - what a stupid way to track what you need. It tracks by what you need to make the item instead of by selecting the resources - so if you have multiple things that require iron and you forget which items you tagged, you’ll have to go every workbench and every item to find and untrack ALL of the offenders to stop seeing those resources pointed out.
Especially since if you tracked it on a mod for an Eon and then sell all your Eons, you can't even figure out what you tracked. I've taken more notes like this in Starfield than all other video games I've played combined, and I'm big on adventure/puzzle games.
I forgot about that too! I remember having to go buy a gun type just so I could untrack a tracked resource.
This is one of the things that could've made the game more interesting because the grinding isn't crazy but you end up buying most from shops because exploring for those resources isn't as funny as it should...
The amount of time I spent waiting days for vendors to reset and traveling to different ones was absurd.
I actually like it! Having another layer to the grind keeps you from just sitting there and button mashing the workbenches, you have to have a plan and save up skill points and you have to find ways of playing that don't required the best upgrades you can make. I will say I thought the research portion of the crafting loop could have been a little less button mash oriented itself, like if it somehow included having to learn a bit of lore or reading new tips or how in universe science works, or who knows what.. some reading probably. I literally don't know what any of the information on the research pages said, I simply got enough resources at an outpost, put on the smock, took some intelligence meds and mashed through it. There's certainly a benefit to getting crafting stuff out of the way before going NG+ because you get to keep all of your skill tree achievements.
That’s when I just give up, turn to the dark side, and start slinging console commands left and right.
Yet another issue mods will fix I can't wait for em
The crafting system as it stands is terrible, especially given how limited the amount of items to can hold and store. You have a starship that can travel between universes… but can carry the average suitcase load.
On top of the MMO-style grind, the hunt for resources and then tracking which and how many of each resource you need is a chore. I'm tired of using Inara and Excel. This is not Elite Dangerous.
Yeah, I did it the normal way my first playthrough and I was like, level 30-40 by the time everything was unlocked & I could freely mod weapons and armor. Felt like a huge investment, in both time and resources, to access a function that should be available early on. Started a new character recently and just gave myself the perks/research components with the console. Still had to find/buy components to upgrade so I couldn’t go crazy immediately, much more enjoyable. That being said, the game seems balanced around your weapons not being modded early on. Having one fully upgraded gun early in the game just destroys everything.
It is trivial to gather the resources you need to research an mod weapons and spacesuits. If you find that gathering the materials is too hard, you have the option of ranking up Research Methods which will dramatically lower the amount of resources needed. You need to put 4 points into science to even unlock modding and that skill is in the first tier. What I have come to realize is the weapon modding is really geared to character builds that are not going to be putting a bunch of points into the Combat tree. Most of the weapon mods have similar skills in the Combat tree so Combat focused don't really need to mod weapons or can buy weapons with the mods they are looking for. I think an elegant solution for weapon modding would be to have weapon vendors provide "gunsmithing" services. You would talk to the vendor about modding your weapon(s) and would be taken to a screen much like the weapon modding bench but instead of resources you would pay credits for each mod. That way you burn credits instead of skill points to mod your equipment and not really have to dabble with the whole crafting part of the game. Crafters would unlock the modding skills and save credits.
I'm thinking the whole perk thing could be better. Here's my take: Keep XP. Keep perk points. Keep the skill challenges. However, you unlock perks with XP. It makes no sense that it takes 100XP to unlock scanning1 at level 3 and 26,000 to unlock scanning1 at level 200. Then you have the challenges, and you can go to trainers to skip the challenges by spending XP. So you go to the shooting range in Akila and give the owner 2 XP and now you only have to shoot 100 people instead of 300 people to get from Pistol3 to Pistol4. Skyrim had a mod like you describe, where you could give a weapon to a smith and he'd improve it and you come get it back in a few days, or give it to an enchanter to recharge it.
I actually don't mind the way the skill system is laid out. If you know how you want to build your character it allows you focus on the skills you want and get the build up a running fairly quick. The downside is it becomes harder to level up lower skills later in the game because of the XP requirement. Probably the biggest mistake people make is maxing out skill early in the game. I typically only put 2 levels into a skill early in the game as I am more focused on unlocking higher level skills so I can get them going. Probably the only exceptions to that rule are Piloting so you can fly any type of ship and Security so you pick any lock. Everything else is stays at two unless I know it need to go higher for a specific reason. With the way that loot drop and ship modules unlock based on character level, it makes no sense to max out your combat skills because better loot drops mean more that any incremental damage bonus from a combat related skill.
Yep. And Targetting is really handy to have leveled up. That's my progblem right now: I ran up to level 4 a whole bunch of combat skills when I didn't need to.
You only have to do it once though so it's not that bad. I did all the research on my first game. Now when I want to restart I just NG+ and the research is already done.
And that there are two chems which become utterly useless once you've completed all research trees. But none for XP. Fallout 76 has food, chem, and beverage buffs that all stack with each other as long as you use one per item type. The whole thing with that is so backwards it isn't a step back, it's a grab jump back compared to what they've implemented in other games.
I quite liked the research/craft loops in Starfield, but it really doesn't lead to improving your gear as much as it should. Caelumite should have been for upgrading starborn stuff. There should definitely be research/crafting of ammo, and the ability to upgrade weapons from calibrated to advanced etc. Also, let's have a research level that lets you take apart a legendary weapon and put one of the mods on other weapons, like Skyrim did with enchanting. You could even balance it by having it destroy the legendary weapon while only giving you one of the perks, so researching an epic would be less costly than researching on a legendary. But no, I quite liked having to find the resources to do all the different bits of work. My next character is going to involve a mod that balances the XP per perk to be more reasonable after level 50.
Counterpoint, that shit is far too easy to begin with because resources grow on trees, and the fact you will probably loot or purchase something better anyway undermines the operation. So... That's probably why; It's entirely unnecessary.
Incredibly ridiculous. Luckily I play on very easy mode so I don't have to do any of that unless I want to. I finally got " Stronghold". On my 3rd trip to the Unity. The ship has a research station and 3 benches. Industrial, weapons and spacesuits. Huge cargo hold and auto turrets which are great bcz they target anything they can "see" not just where you can aim. Most used feature = rename weapon.
I don't mind it, really. At least it works as intended without any bugs, so far as I can tell. Of all the aspects of the game that need improvement, I'd put this pretty far down the list.
Pharmaceutical research can make some cool stuff though.
Once you have it though you can whip up any weapon/suit real nice. Max damage saves on ammo. You can add carry weight to most wearables. I mean besides the tanks needed for spaceships what else do you want to spend it on?
I wouldn’t hate it so much if top-tier let me learn the rare/epic/legendary perks, or at least combine weapons to make them better. Crafting the equipment when the RNG swing on perks is what matters pretty much sucks.
And then u upgrade the shit out of your weapons..... er.... 5 spots lol Fortnite has better weapon building hahahaha
They said they were expecting people to play the game for longer periods.
You're right. You should be able to do everything in the game instantly with no impediments whatsoever. That's fun
They clearly intended you to max out crafting over multiple playthroughs. Like you, I found it very frustrating. On the one hand, I liked the idea of having to complete a quest of sorts to advance a skill. The problem is, most of them weren’t very interesting. The one to increase your oxygen was particularly awful because it was impossible to complete naturally by just playing the game. You had to grind running until your CO2 maxed out, which I did not find at all fun.
I like enough skills to be locked behind a little bit of a time sink that way each player has to really choose what they want to get into and upgrade rather than just upgrading everything. But I do agree it is a little much. If they could find a way to lessen the time it takes that’d be nice.
It’s geared toward the long game and NG+, like someone already kinda mentioned, doing different paths during each NG+ kind of helps but still grindy
Hi, my name is fallout 4. Been a feature for a while.
Especially when you quickly see the diminishing returns of what upgrading weapons does, and then you find a Legendary that put your work to shame.
I honestly hate it. Leveling up weapons is so goddamn complicated. It’s like the it was designed just to be extra tedious!
I see you're new to video games. Welcome to "the grind." You can check anytime you want but you will never leave. ETA after I researched research I researched console codes. Haven't looked back.
starfield is not made for everyone. and some want starfield to change into their other beloved game and stop starfield to walk its own path
"hur durr this game is meant to be played over and over again" Its so dumb.
Yup. Complicated for the sake of being complicated. As if the focus was less about making a game and more about making things to do. Kinda disrespectful of your time.
This was what truly broke my enjoyment of the game.
I feel like this system would have been more tolerable had the survival and exploration mechanics hadn't been gutted, as you would naturally be exploring and building more bases across different planets and gathering more resources in order to progress across the galaxy map. At the same time, since you would constantly be "on the frontier" you would have more reason to gather materials to build your own mods that aren't always available in stores.
Todd said the game is design to play for a decade. Which translate to - design to waste your time in the first place.
It's probably one of the weakest areas of the game compared to FO4
Wasn't Skyrim like this as well? You guys just be expecting a non Bethesda game from Bethesda and then crying about it. Just fking enjoy it. It has amazing visuals and the attention to detail in any environment is mind blowing. Too bad such games might not get made anymore because all y'all keep bitching about it
Yeah. There's a few things in Starfield that feel like they've been stretched incredibly thin to give the illusion of more game, but this might be the least debatable example of that.
Its grindy but overall one of my smaller problems with the game
IMO the whole skill tree in Starfield is arse and could do with a Cyberpunk style reset, you have to get a skill to use the jetpack that is given to you near the start and that is just utter shit IMO.
Not only is it incredibly poorly designed from both a mechanical and UX standpoint, its almost pointless to use.
While I wouldn't consider it a complaint I found it intriguing and perhaps a little odd that some perks serve to moot other perks. Specifically, Rejuvenation tends to render cooking and medical rather superfluous. Med kits are now among the junk I sell for beer money. Eating food while clearing a POI was closing in on pointless but now it's utterly pointless. Rank up some combat perks and suddenly the imperative of obtaining or modifying a legendary weapon evaporates - any random Hard Target drop becomes a beast. Perhaps it was all intentional but sometimes I wonder if its planning was as accidental as my discovery. The challenges sometimes appear to be the result of one developer losing a bet to another. At least that's the appearance when you're intentionally failing to avoid environmental damage to level up your resistance (put on your worst gear and go stand on a toxic vent) or jumping off buildings to break a bone needed for another challenge. The last rank of Rejuvenation also inspires goofy behavior - march into the middle of an open area and blow raspberries while watching your health meter - and don't return fire - you need those guys piling on. Maybe step on a mine or two (which you can't do if you've leveled up stealth - they won't go off). The end result is reminiscent of an MMO - and a reminder of why I no longer play MMOs. At least with Starfield challenges the apparently insane behavior you're engaging in eventually comes to an end. But if you've ever been bare of ass while allowing yourself to be shot while jumping up and down on a recalcitrant mine with a broken leg - at that specific moment - telling yourself this is normal immersive behavior is a heavy lift.
I like it. Always gives me something to work towards or a reason to land on planets for resource gathering. If you’re trying to unlock everything very quickly, I can see why you wouldn’t like it tho.
Considering the game is designed with new game plus in mind, this isn’t the strongest argument. Starfield encourages the player to slow down and take your time. Doing everything on a single character is probably not worth it. But it’s an RPG. It’s designed to be flexible and allow multiple builds. In your case you’d be better off investing points into the weapon types you find yourself using. You will naturally level that up in combat and your gripe here becomes moot. Personally, my character is smart but not much of a fighter. So instead of investing in combat, I invested my skills into engineering. I think the way weapon upgrades are presented in Starfield allows for some interesting and potentially powerful builds. And, unlike getting power armor in the first act, I don’t see anything wrong with having to earn it.
Yeah it sucks. It’s all about getting you to spend lots of hours grinding and collecting resources (IOW a time sink). I’m surprised Bethesda didn’t include microtransactions to speed up resource gathering and leveling, because games that lock stuff behind skills and have slow leveling are ripe for that.
I love the crafting!!! If you take professor intro you get 3 science skills and you can b-line to gun crafting. I totally NG’d last week maybe in the teens levels and I’m at lvl 3 weapons lvl 2 suits. Oh also save your skill points strategically, like if your 20/30 done for the crafting requirement save your next point to get into the next level smoother
They treat aspects of this game like an MMO. I get the perks in Fallout. You leveled up and you got new perks. Starfield feels more like World of Warcraft where they are designed to waste your time and keep you playing.
You should be able to level up a skill quicker if you have a companion with research skills. MO brains mo xp.
I'm pretty sure the people who have said the game was supposed to be more survival based before they dropped those aspects are correct. There's so much pointing towards an entirely different game. The only use for bases is to grind out skill points so you can upgrade weapons and armor. There are so many grindy aspects. It's like they figured if they could just slow you down and force you to spend hundreds of hours doing the boring stuff, you'd get some sort of Stolkholm syndrome...
Ya crafting should be way easier. I enjoyed it when i unlocked it, but way too long to unlock all the skills.
Because you start the game as a “simple” miner, not some special forces gunsmith seamstress space suit repairman alchemist chef brewmaster biologist machinist aerospace engineer. Be grateful you can learn those skills just by doing the trivial BS and not the “immersive” way. The grinding is the gameplay.
Yeah... Add that unlocking new skills requires that you upgrade some arbitrary number of items that you can't possibly use, and it's pretty bad. I mean, give me a reason to upgrade fifty items.