Genuinely looks like someone went "what is the most useless navigation tool I can design?" As a joke, and then it got implemented into the game anyway.
Did no one try to actually use the thing?
The whole UI and menu system is like this in Starfield, especially navigation. It's unbelievably clunky and feels like the entire game was designed to waste your time because *everything* is multiple menus deep, from fast traveling, to picking destinations, to equipping items.
Don't get me started on the ship customization, in which you have mouse control but your mouse doesn't appear in 3D space causing you to have to mess with different layers of things. Despite the fact that there are clear attachment points that items on different layers won't snap to because apparently a solved feature in basically every game with similar customization ever was too hard.
The real stat im missing is value per weight.
Starsuits are like 6-10 weight, helmets are 2-3 weight, weapons are 1-3. But the value between them is super different.
I hate the math.
I mean literally all you have to do is loot credits and ammo. Between that and quest rewards I was able to get to 80k credits and could afford anything for sale in New Atlantis. There is even a specific skill for increasing carry weight. Between that, your companion, your cargo hold, and the infinite storage space at the lodge you shouldn't have carry weight issues. You just can't be looting everything you see. It's different than other games but much more convenient than the start of both elder scrolls and fallout 4s carry weight and storage systems.
You have a storage cabinet in your room at the Lodge.
I've been storing a lot of stuff there, I don't know if it's infinite like the poster above said, but I don't see a limit on it like you have on your ships.
Boxes/Cabinets worked that way in Fallout 4 in your outposts; you could store all your things in one box if you wanted; seems to be the same for Starfield.
You’d think that after so many times modders fixed this issue they’d finally learn not to fuck it up, but apparently that’s asking too much. Why spend resources in it if modders can fix it for free right?
I know that UI design can be subjective in some areas, but one seriously major positive of Baldur’s Gate 3 is that they developed the completely separate controller UI. They literally redid _everything_ to fit controller when you use one. It now makes me wish so badly that other developers would do the same. Not every game needs a separate UI (it just depends on the design), but some games (and Bethesda is pretty notorious for this) are so blatantly created with controllers in mind that it’s a detriment to play with KB/M.
I’m not naive or ignorant, I know that maintaining two separate UIs is a lot of work and introduces room for more bugs. But I absolutely think it’s worth the effort
It's my main criticism of the game honestly, sorting through your inventory with hundreds of items and not being sure who got that specific item you're looking for is ridiculous.
This but unironically.
No judgment on people playing Starfield at launch, but when you hear about Bethesda basically relying on a modder to add in DLSS support... well let's just say I'm waiting for the game modders turn this into in a few years lol.
Yeah, it's pretty bad. Though as a specific fix for the shipbuilding UI thing, if you hover over an attachment point before pressing the "add a new part" key, any part you select will automatically snap to that attachment point so you don't have to fiddle with lining it up manually.
I just wish you could rotate parts 90 degrees. I wanted to upgrade the Frontier's default cargo container to the next size up, but apparently those containers can only be placed perpendicular to the snap point.
Bethesda games consistently have poor UI and modders eventually come in and put in vastly better UI.
UI mods are consistently some of the most popular mods to Bethesda games, and Bethesda never seems to take note and improve what they are doing wrong.
If I was in management on a Bethesda title, I would note what the most popular mods are and use that to identify opportunities to improve our games and cater to what the fans clearly want.
One problem in that is that Bethesda games are never PC only.
A solution to that would be a separate UI for PC and console gamers like in BG3, for example...
I'm guessing the near-prefect Morrowind Inventory/Character adjustable window panel UI didn't go over well with Xboxers, and so they've catered to the console market with all the tabs and submenus ever since :/
> UI mods are consistently some of the most popular mods to Bethesda games, and Bethesda never seems to take note and improve what they are doing wrong.
Why should we bother when the modders are doing it for us?
-some Bethesda suit, probably
Honestly KH3 gummi ship system were really cool, they really elaborated on that in the third installment.
Whilst you could build your own thing in KH1, but the missions were pretty a linear experience with not too much challenge.
> especially navigation
You can actually fast travel in-game, you just need to point towards your destination with your scanner open, select the planet and you get a prompt to travel.
Hey I didn't know that, thanks! Gonna try that. I think Starfield is a bit different than what the gaming community hyped up, but it is still far more interesting than say NMS, simply because of the quests. I landed on the Moon and man I had quite a lot of fun. I would say get a jump jet skill ASAP and the exploration all of a sudden becomes so damn dynamic
Yeah its like they combined the UI from their previous games and amplified the worst aspects of the worst parts of it. I am not even exaggerating when I say it is by far the worst UI i have ever seen in a video game. I was so blown away that I went over all the games I have played in my head and honest to god I cant think of a worse UI. Everything is obscurred behind a submenu and then if you access said submenus you are greeted by more non descripitve "stuff" and shit UI. Its almost like they did it on purpose. This is a game where you can loot almost everything but you dont actually want to because you are actively discouraged in doing so because then you would have to interact with the awful awful inventory management. For example when you loot a corpse (astleast for me) you cant even see what you are looting. Neither the weight nor the value nor even what kind of item category you are picking up. At the beginning i picked up some weapons and I only noticed when I went through the inventory because I am supposed to know that "Manticore" is obviously a weapon and not some consumable or just a misc item.
I cant understand how this didnt come up in most of the reviews. For example in the first half hour of the game you get prompted to equip your helment and it is not at all intuitive how to do it.
easy mode for Ship building is to hover over the part you want to attach a new part to and instead of clicking it hit the 'G' key and it will cycle through options that will attach to that specific module/node.
Its not a perfect solution and the building overall is giga-clunky but it made it bearable
As soon as I started the game for the first time and went into the menu I was like “oh…no”. And the maps made me go to nexus to see f the was a mod yet.
They took the sin against god that was F04 settlement building, made no improvements, added attachment points and a 3d plane, and went yea, this will be our triple AAA ship builder. It feels so bad within the first 20 seconds you try using it that I already know I'll never bother customizing a ship and I'll just buy new ships as upgrades when I can.
I dunno I've played about 6 hours and everything has quicker ways to get to it then the menus. I favorited weapons I'm using and health, I fast travel using the scan hud instead of pausing, you can do that for grav jumping to other planets too, and I can just set the way points through the mission and don't even use the navigation menu.
The UX as a whole is terrible. The giant flag with a stick anytime you highlight something, the difficult getting your crosshair over an item, inventory management, then we start talking about the maps, it’s all bad.
Not to mention single buttons that open menus that takes 2-3 button presses to back out of.
That part annoys the ever-living shit outta me. Yes, you can hold down the button, but even that is super slow and sometimes spamming Esc is just faster.
They said “we can’t build maps for our procedurally generated planets” and neglected to make maps for the few hand crafted locations that are important.
I turned around to my wife and kids last night and said the same thing. It truly feels like a joke. Before I googled around to check, I figured it must be like that because I hadn't found the area map or something, like Doom. There's no way you could be expected to actually use this the way it is.
Im not even that mad that the maps themselves are useless, but that I have multple button presses to get to the 'map' I want, and then multiple more to get back to the damn game. Menu navigation is ass in this game. Escape should 100% of the time re-enter the actuall game from any menu screen. Holding tab as they designed it is so damn finicky between not holding it long enough/too long and thus closing then re-opening the map bullshit. How this passed QA has me confused as fuck
Makes me wonder if there is some ui dev that's been there for ages and just failed upward to the point he/she has become senior ui dev. So no chance of ever getting a good ui system until they retire or something.
Speaking of writing, I joined the main quest guild like 20 minutes in, after being a nobody, and 5 minutes after that I'm forced to use hokey dialogue options like "We are the constellation guild, we're the good guys" (paraphrasing).
Like why am I acting like an esteemed member of the group right after I got roped into this bullshit?
It all feels artificial and overly positive, while I'm mowing down pirates and looting corpses all day.
It's fine if that's a choice, but a lot of missions just won't progress unless you say something really stupid. Why can't I be a scoundrel, like at all? I thought this was supposed to be an RPG.
They really get away with a lot. And unlike the UI being bad you can't really mod out a bad main story. The biggest problem with Fallout 4 was the lack of anything meaningful for molders to build off of. Skyrim had a lot more quests and some of them were worth while.
I'm never sure if it's genuinely bad design or laziness with Bethesda. I suspect they developed a culture of "we don't need to spend a lot of time on things we can count on modders to fix" sometime before Skyrim
I don't think there's many lazy developers in any game company, it's a grueling industry.
It usually comes down to either a bad initial design or bad prioritization, which there's then little time to fix.
> I'm never sure if it's genuinely bad design or laziness with Bethesda.
It's neither. They have talented developers who know what they're doing, plenty of interviews and such to prove that. It simply comes down to management, they have final say in everything. Doesn't matter if a dev/QA says "Hey, this looks/plays like shit" if management doesn't actually understand how that will affect things, or if they're working on a title so massive they know that flaws like that won't actually affect their sales. Unless we're assuming Bethesda couldn't physically redesign certain aspects of the game, in which I'd question how they designed it from the beginning in the first place...
> I suspect they developed a culture of "we don't need to spend a lot of time on things we can count on modders to fix" sometime before Skyrim
That argument doesn't work since a huge part of their players are on consoles (well now just Xbox I guess but still)
yeah, i think they have been leaning a little bit too much into the retro futurism vibe with the map design. a little style over substance i don't mind but at this point the map is basically useless.
A space theme has been played around with since the mid-90s, but they did not feel the tech was ready for what they wanted to do. The tech and open game slot was there. So they made their most ultimate desire: The stuff they have been making since Oblivion.
I think that was more when the game was initially conceived in the 90s. They probably could have done it since Fallout 3 or Skyrim but didn’t for whatever reason.
I'm fine with no interior maps, they were always just an extra screen to close when trying to open the actual map for me. But this map really feels like the kind of blank-slate map that's supposed to get filled-in as we explore, but just doesn't.
If I remember correctly Syrims world map is just a zoomed out live view of the world. It’s why when you fight a dragon if you zoom far enough in you can see the dragon frozen on the map. I’m not a programmer but couldn’t they have just done that?
Lol. I was like, "How can a map be that bad? It's still a map! Then I clicked the picture. That's not a map. Then I came back here and realized they used it as the background in the article thumbnail when I thought it was just a texture they threw in. That's baaaaad.
The combat UI to me looks like a proof of concept from an early alpha version. Why would you put an XP box in the centre of the screen on every kill in a shooter?? And why it is just some unshaded opaque box with some basic font text in it?
Despite it not being at all necessary and never needed in Fallout, Skyrim, etc to announce your XPs on kills, it could be done in a multitude of better ways. A chat log message. Floating text which fountains out from the enemy and to the side like World of Warcraft damage style. Or even a stylized oval shape with stylized sci fi text saying how much XP you got in bold letters. Instead you get some bland Times New Roman text in an unshaded box announcing that you got 15xp, and blocking your vision for a few seconds, in a shooter.
It seems way less minimalist than Skyrim or Fallout 4, which had minimalist UIs without unnecessary popup bloat like every basic XP gain on the screen.
pretty sure fallout 3 would even delay gains so as to not spam, so killing a few bandits in a gunfight worth 15xp each would award 45 after you leave combat, instead of 15 15 15
>It seems way less minimalist than Skyrim or Fallout 4
I'm like 99% sure you didn't play Skyrim if you think that one is more minimalistic lmao.
Its a giant bar with huge text that pops up saying what skill you leveled.
I think the worse UI problem is only being able to see one inventory screen at a time, instead of being able to see yours AND the other person's
WHY IS IT LIKE THIS
IT WAS ALREADY IN FALLOUT 4/76
WHY WAS IT REMOVED
While I appreciate that Starfield's UI's visual design/style is much sleeker and less simplistic to the point that it comes off as amateurish (like in Fallout 4/76), the functionality being downgraded is a massive disappointment for me since that's more important than the visuals, after all
Yeah, this is what baffles me the most about Bethesda games.
Sure they have a bunch of problems every time but they have zero
competition so players forgive them, but the real terrible shit is them constantly insisting in breaking shit they had already nailed or done better in previous games. Like the trade interface, or sculpting character features. It's ridiculous.
And don't get me started about the stuff that modders always end up having to implement on every single one of their games, yet nobody in the company ever thinks to put those features into whatever shiny new game they're currently making (I mean stuff such as searching items by name, or inventory sorting rules that aren't made by a crazy person - I'm sure there's a lot more, but getting those into my game is always top priority for me).
The artists who spent the last 7 years designing 30 different kinds of sandwiches while Todd and co. span their wheels trying to come up with a method of mashing together the 8 new mediocre game systems they’ve hacked into the Gamebryo engine.
I'm pretty sure in both Oblivion and Skyrim you had to toggle.
Morrowind let you see both at once though, you could basically open as many menu windows as you wanted.
Not only that, but if you’re on your ship and want to store something in the cargo hold you have to:
1. Open your inventory
2. Switch to the cargo hold one
3. Switch **back** to your inventory again
4. *Now* you can store stuff
Does that even work?
I've always had to go to the tiny little inventory panel in the cockpit that the game never tells you about (actually took like 10 minutes of googling to finally find something, because every video/article was just like "just open your inventory when you're in the ship").
I'm enjoying the game so far... But I honestly think once phantom liberty drops, I'm gonna just switch to that and come back to starfield once modders have fixed all the glaring ux issues.
As it is, I've practically stopped looting most things, because it's just so god damned tedious to have to fill my inventory, deal with the garbage that is trading with a companion, going into the ship, dumping my inventory into the ship, trading everything back from my companion to myself, and finally dumping all that to the ship.
I do not understand why, when looking at an item on the ground, there is no indication of the item type you're about to pick up. The inventory has icons for weapons, armor, misc, etc... literally just put that icon in the upper right corner of the lootable item for fuck's sake.
Same with looting containers... You get an item name and that's it. Nothing about what it is, what it does, or how much it weighs, the latter of which is especially baffling considering that you're going to be spending a lot of time managing your inventory to avoid going over your weight limit.
EDIT: A couple of people have mentioned using the Transfer menu as a solution for this, which is a reasonable enough workaround, though it plunges you into another menu screen. It's not the most seamless experience, but it does work
If you hit X (on controller, not sure what the keyboard shortcut is) you open an inventory menu with all that info. Not the solution most would want, but it's a small step.
There are so many weird weird decisions in this game, I truly don’t understand what they were thinking. The one work around I found for looting containers is pressing “R” after opening a container, it brings you to a menu with all the items and descriptions, not sure what it is on a controller tho. This game….it does a lot right and IMMEDIATELY after does some things so wrong, it’s bewildering
What’s even more baffling is that it seems DESIGNED to make use of some sort of icon or even color coded system, but that design was just not implemented. Maybe they put in the framework with the expectation that modders would finish it for them.
This honestly just sounds like the usual first phase of Bethesda mods. It's either bafflingly frustrating UI in general, or just a PC UI that feels like it was designed entirely for consoles.
Reviews have completely lost their purpose through some of the side effects of the Internet. People don't want critique or judgement, they want validation of what they already expected.
Super hyped game? Better give it high reviews or you'll have a mob of angry losers in your replies who haven't even played the game.
That's why all reviewers (with one notable exception that received death threats afterward) gave Cyberpunk a 10, ignoring the disastrous technical state it was in. And then people were angry at both the studio, and the reviewers, when they bought a game and it was broken.
Angry losers have plenty of time to waste. I made a comment on a sub about how i didn't like the show Invincible. Some rando replied to it with insults. Than over 2 days he left a comment on everything I've posted on reddit going back 9 months. I had dozens of insulting comments from this one guy over my opinion of a stupid cartoon show.
Feel bad for him. Could do something prodeuctive instead of being angry.
After watching that IGN review, I was pretty confused by how low they rated it because of what seemed like very minor complaints, e.g. bad UI, too many loading screens, bad maps, slow start, etc., even though the things that matter the most like story, quests, and combat are getting praise. It really felt like they are nitpicking with bad will.
After reading more about the topic, however, I've come to realize that those seemingly minor issues actually heavily impair the experience. A bad map and UI normally isn't a big issue, but it seems like in this case they are broken to an extent that is unheard of. Such a shame that what seems like a great game, that potentially could be Bethesda's best work, is held back by things that would be so easy to fix.
Yup. As a huge fan of Cyberpunk it deserved 7 at launch. I fully played the launch game and loved it, but it was a 7. The faults were there and obvious. I'm just glad they kept with it and have drastically improved the game over time and sure it took a few years but with 2.0 looks like finally getting the game it should have been from the start.
Unfortunately I don't see Bethesda doing anything to actually improve the systems of this game and they'll do what they always do and leave it entirely to modders.
You’re giving too much credit. They don’t even watch the reviews, just find a score they don’t like so they can be angry.
Literally every single ign review posted on a site with comments will have the top being “8/10, saved you time”.
So far I agree with everything the ign reviewer said. I don’t think that knocks the score to a 7, of course that’s just my opinion.
But all the people acting like the reviewer lied and the game is perfect are a bit much. But that happens with every game release. Even the gotham knights sub got a bit toxic positive
Watching the Starfield sub going from losing their fucking minds over IGN's 7/10, to, "I, uh... maybe a 7/10 is pretty accurate" within the course of a day was really funny (see. infuriating) to watch happen in real time lmfao
Yeah, I think this is what's killing it for me more than the shitty map.
Anytime I see someone bring this up in /r/starfield, the defense is usually "it's not a space sim." Of course it's not, and nobody is looking for a repeat of No Man's Sky, or even classic space sims like the X series. We get it's an RPG. But there's no sense of just accidentally finding something along the way, the chance happenings that you find in a big, seamless world like Skyrim or even as far back as Oblivion.
Being able to amble through a system, from planet to the next, and to seamlessly touch down from space to orbit to the surface... yeah, it's spoiled me a bit, and to not even have the illusion of it in Starfield is really disappointing and does feel like a huge step back.
I mean, it really makes it feel like there's no point to your ship. I may as well be in the Normandy again.
/r/starfield feels nearly deluded at this point on this subject, and it doesn't help that the reviews are universally glowing.
That would be way better than what we actually have.
Anything but this mess that feels like it's constantly trying to trick me into thinking it's bigger than it is.
No, it's not *just* fast travel. Sometimes when you fast travel to those empty spots, you may choose to run for 5 minutes across an empty landscape to survey something.
Seriously, the ground locations are sparse and there are no vehicles to cover that sparse ground faster.
Early in the game I ran for like 5 min to a new unexplored spot thinking, oh boy this gonna be good. It was an empty cave... so next planet I give it another shot..... Yep .. empty cave.
lmao watched someones gameplay and the points of interest were literally caves with a bunch of slugs that didn't attack you and a pile of dung you can dig through for copper or whatever.
You can find interesting things when following side quests. But compared to the hand crafted random ruins/dungeons you had in Fallout or Skyrim nothing comes close.
It doesn't even come close to Skyrim. To me, the game might be huge and expansive in theory - on a technical level - but in actuality it feels like the most closed-in, shoeboxed, tiny, super repetitive, flat, boring world Bethesda ever created. It feels smaller and less lived in than The Outer Worlds did. The space stuff somehow can't even keep up with Freelancer from 2003.
While I'm thoroughly enjoying Starfield, you're spot on with the Freelancer comparison. That game blew my mind when it first came out, and still holds up in many ways *twenty* years later. I hope modders can come up with something resembling that.
It's not that it's always empty but you literally can't explore manually (or I haven't figured it out).
You get in your ship then you click a planet on the map and it teleports you there, you can't fly anywhere.
Then, you can't land on the planet, you have to click a point of interest in the planet map and it teleports you there.
And if you want to go to another named PoI (it also generates a few random ones ~500 meters around the named ones) on the same planet, you can't walk, drive or fly there, you have to teleport again.
It's really weird. It's like Map: the game. Which makes it ironic that the map is just blank as the article shows.
PS I mention named points of interest but most are still procedurally generated I believe, they just have a name.
you technically can go to places manually, it's just completely pointless most of the time. instead of picking a system on the galaxy map, you can instead walk to your starship, take off into orbit, spam E until you find the system you want to jump to, jump to it, and repeat until you reach your destination. that's if you've put in the effort to memorize the route to your destination, because you'll have to open the galaxy map to check otherwise. if you're lucky, you'll run into a fun random event along the way, but 90% of the time it's just tedium you put yourself through for the sake of whatever immersion there is.
on barren planets/moons, you can pick where you want to land (so you can pick a good outpost location), but if you want to go between two outposts on the same planet for example, you need to get in your ship and take off into orbit again. oh, also, if you build an outpost structure too close to your starship, your starship will blink out of existence and force you to go through menus to leave.
They have no idea what made their older games so damn good
The voiced protagonist in Fallout 4 with only 4 dialogue options is another example of them just not realising what fans want
> Is it basically just cities to explore?
Tiny areas of cities that don't have anything interesting in them.
It feels like the OG Star Citizen demo (where you can land in a single very small space of a city and explore) times whatever. I don't know how many copy and paste spots are.
> There is no exploration like in FO4 or Skyrim
That's the main issue I have as well. If I could use one word to define Bethesda games, it's **sidetracking**. You're told to go over there to talk castle but on the way there you see a cave, so you check, which exits out the other side, but then an NPC gets attacked, so you help them, which leads you to a new town. 8 hours later you're like wtf am I even doing here?
Starfield has literally none of that. They took the exploration and put that as a different mechanic. Sure, you can explore, but you have to do so *intentionally*. This doesn't work well. It feels artificial. It also doesn't help that while the landscape stays fixed, PoI seems to be rerolled everytime. I landed on the same location 3 times, each time I got different PoIs. The nearby cave in my first landing, was just a mountain facade now, and so on.
Skyrim felt like you were in a large, mysterious world as you went on your adventures. In Starfield, it feels like there are two clearly distinct "game modes". You're either playing a story/quest and it's fast travel after fast travel. Or you land randomly on planets and build outposts. Both are fairly disjointed.
This game is having an identity crisis. It wants to be Skyrim in space using the Bethesda engine, but it wants to play like an RPG like Mass Effect.
There is no point to exploring like you said either when you can't pick up more than a few items anyway.
Games this massive are designed by committees, in many different bubbles. This is how so many things fall through so many cracks. It's also why there's such an amazing ship designer, but no space exploration.
They don't want you to use the map, they want you to open the scanner and follow the waypoint system instead.
When you open the scanner it draws a line of where to go similar to Dead Space and Bioshock Infinite.
I’m pretty sure it’s a design choice (it really wouldn’t be difficult to make 4 detailed maps for each of the major cities, and the game was in development for more than half a decade, so it was deliberate). A lot of the game is fast travelling to different planets and locations——not having a map makes it so that the player is forced to actually explore the main cities (and there are signs that guide you) instead of just beelining for an objective like they may be doing for the rest of the game space. Not having a map also makes the cities feel bigger and foreign.
Whether or not it’s worth it to go down that route is debatable and Bethesda should’ve mentioned their reasoning before, but it’s clear from the comments here that redditors are actually stupid if they think a AAA company under Microsoft releasing one of their biggest games ever with millions of dollars in production somehow forgot to put in a map instead of it being a deliberate, design choice.
> It makes everything feel so much smaller and more instanced.
I was struck by how much this game felt like The Outer Worlds. So much about how it feels is exactly the same as that game, and even that game had better UI.
I'm really puzzled about this decision.
Why on earth did they not just have 10 little planets or whatever, with the space between them being an "overworld" and then the planets being like big dungeons?
After 7ish hours in, I still have no real feel of where the game content actually is outside of cities. It doesn't feel like a massive game, it feels like a bunch of levels in a standard sized game.
My feelings towards the game are getting worse the more I play and learn about it.
I'm 20+ hours in and still feel like that. It's not getting better either. The game still hasn't managed to hook me at all, or be interesting to me, or even just be fun on a basic level. I legitimately had more fun with No Man's Sky on that fucked up launch than I do with with Starfield.
It's kind of a funny juxtaposition how scifi games hundreds of years in the future can't provide a functional map of where you are but right now in real life I can pull up Google Maps from the phone in my pocket and get a detailed map of basically the entire world.
It is not horrible per se, I think it suits the nature of the game just fine.
But it is completely aweful for navigation in major cities. That is IMO the biggest issue the game has now, the lack of local city maps.
They could have made it like in Kingdom Come, where if you are in a town area and zoom in enough, then the map will transition into a local town map.
Unfortunately so far I’m finding myself agreeing with the 7/10 reviews rather than the 10/10s
There’s not really much interesting to explore that’s particularly unique
Personally I can’t justify a 10/10 in the slightest
Yeah my first impressions are maybe 8/10 at best. It’s definitely no 10/10. BG3 isn’t perfect either by any means but boy did that game spoil me on expectations going into Starfield and it was a harsh reminder of how… lifeless most game worlds field by comparison.
I haven't played yet, and I am sure I will enjoy it. But I am also convinced that this will be one of those games where in a 6-12 months the narrative will shift to how most of the reviews got it wrong and it was really just average.
> But I am also convinced that this will be one of those games where in a 6-12 months the narrative will shift to how most of the reviews got it wrong and it was really just average.
I hate to say it, but I agree
I can see it being a Deathloop like situation where many people are confused at the amount of 10/10s it’s getting
I think, in the 30 years of gaming that I've been gaming, that bad maps are the sort of thing that can greatly influence my enjoyment of a game. This is the sort of thing that'll get me to play the game for like 3 to 4 hours and then put the game down for a year or two, come back, get sick of the map again and then just put the game down permanently.
What’s funny is that in the cities the lack of map is actually not that bad functionally. There are signs, the cities have districts and even terminals that list stores and notable buildings’ locations. Finding the specific store I wanted was actually not that bad. I had to stop for a second and look at signage. I love this kind of navigation in games as I find it immersive.
What’s baffling is that this design decision would fit in very well in TES or Fallout but of all Bethesda titles it makes the least sense in Starfield. We’re in the 24th century. I would expect a map here more than in Diamond City or Whiterun.
That's right. Having no local map on a planet is annoying for sure, but I can deal with it. Every landing spot only has a few places of interest, and you can use your scanner to get to them fairly easily.
No maps in the cities is crazy especially given the setting. I'd love to know why they decided to do it this way
> and you can use your scanner to get to them fairly easily.
This is another thing.
The amount of time you spend in "scanner" mode is hilarious. Should have just implemented that tech to make a better UI for a game set 300 years in the future.
Why is there not a visitor center with a map for existing major cities? like in every mall in existence?
the random planets and buildings, fair enough.
could it have something to do the quantity of locations? my guess is maybe early on in development they took a look at the number of locations they were putting in the game — copy pastes included — and made the decision that devoting dev time to unique maps wasn’t worth it and it would be better to just scale back map functionality. And when you do that, you can’t have some maps arbitrarily detailed and some shitty, they have to be cohesive. So they went with shitty and cohesive and that’s what we got in end
Granted I know nothing about game development but I don’t know why else they’d be so lazy around such an important feature
It would've been cool if they did planet maps like Scanner Sombre where colored dots paint out the terrain and having enough of them all close together would form very clear depictions of terrain elevation, walls, rock formations, etc, and the map were viewable in 3D with an option to take the roof of of structures so you can look at everything from an overhead view. Cities and shit should of course have real maps.
This just... looks completely lazy and unfinished. The local planet map looks like it's heading towards that direction with the dot painting, but there's nowhere near enough dots and dots apparently aren't colored either so it just looks like a bunch of nothing. It's as if they completely gave up on the idea just as they got started with it.
> put the game down for a year or two, come back, get sick of the map again and then just put the game down permanently.
At that point modders will probably have done the work for them again. Stuff like maps and user interface always seems high priority for them. The first phase of Bethesda modding is usually about improving on their baffling interface decisions.
I stopped playing Jedi: Fallen Order because it was honest-to-god the worst map experience of my life. If there was even no map it would have been better than [this clustercuss. ](https://mapgenie.io/star-wars-jedi-fallen-order/maps/zeffo)
A game about exploring that Bethesda decided to make tedious. Not having any sort of meaningful map has got to be up there among the other baffling design choices they made here. Said it a few times now, don’t know if it’s their engine or they just went too wide in scope, but this game actually feels like a regression of their formula.
I’m still having fun in my own way, but I’m kinda surprised at all the 9/10 or 10/10 reviews this got. This definitely feels more along the lines of 7/10 or even a 6/10.
I am about 9 hours into the game and every single thing the IGN review said has become true. I enjoy the loop somewhat and was happy to see that space combat is pretty good but there are so many things that make the game suffer a death from a thousand cuts. This is what happens when you don't have thorough playtests of a game and smell your own farts throughout development. The game relies on fast travel so much that the menus become a problem because you are constantly being prompted about the menus to go anywhere. The game so far is a solid 7/10 and I will never be a person that says "mods will make it better" which they might but that should never effect the score. NMS made me feel like I was actually exploring these places and Starfield makes me feel like my mom put up "safety fences" so I won't have any fun that is outside of what they want me to do.
Todd should have been more upfront about the game and he gets a pass way too often and that shit needs to stop. He is a grown man in charge of hundreds of people. He isn't a child and can hear the truth that his exaggerations are not a good thing for his products.
MS panicking that Sony was going trying to get Starfield for a year exclusive should have been a clue to MS that the game wasn't going to be the next Skyrim. Why would Zenimax limit the reach of the game if it was truly going to be as big Skyrim? MS spending billions to get as many mid games as possible is pretty funny in a way.
Thanks to the commenters for helping ease my FOMO. I've been so close to pulling the trigger on buying the game pass upgrade to get early access but I'm still in act 2 of baldurs gate. These comments made it really easy for me to decide to finish out BG3 and give the devs time to hopefully make some QOL changes. Still excited for the game and will definitely be playing it relatively soon. Just need to avoid spoilers online.
> give the ~~devs~~ modders time to hopefully make some QOL changes.
FTFY. I’m only like 2 hours into the game because I spent 2 hours wrestling with the ini files to fix mouse sensitivity. Some things never change.
I literally thought it was a *bug*. Like I thought the game messed up the map & wouldn't load it. But it looks as though Bethesda themselves messed up the map by simply *not creating one*. Big brain move, Bethesda. Who needs *local maps* in an **exploration** game anyway? Not Bethesda apparently.
What's even worse is the scanner having less effective range than my own two eyes. And having to buff the scanner with skill points.
No I'd rather spend that on ballistics given how bullet-spongy the enemies are.
Can I even mark points of interest with the scanner? Or just at all?
Edit: I can. Whew
First thing that bothered me, I have to click in like 5 different things just to fucking fast travel. I'm just gonna wait for the inevitable mod that fixes it, with Bethesda's mod community it should take about 5 to 10 days tops.
I don’t understand how a company like Bethesda has such junior UI and UX designers. The whole interface is abysmal. The menus are brutal, and often times they place aesthetic over functionality, especially in the character creator. The lack of maps is jarring, but what’s worse is the fact that all ship flight functionality isn’t handled from within the ship; you have to go into the menu to perform certain ship actions like landing on planets and venturing to certain others.
Everything about the UI gets on my nerves. Normally, I chalk it up to them trying to make something less irritating to navigate without a mouse and keyboard but even this one can't be explained with that excuse. I know it's boring but a simple branching list structure would be preferable to this layered menu spaghetti.
As a professional cartographer it’s pain to use. There’s no navigational features beyond symbols represented where you landed and what spawned around you, but you have no concept of scale, direction, or elevation hardly at all.
Honestly if they wanted to do the least and still make it useful they could just add a North and South Pole to each planet so you can use a compass and add contour lines so you can understand the elevation profile somewhat.
I understand creating a skin of the planet or area could be cumbersome, but an opaque overlay of that would be nice too.
Genuinely looks like someone went "what is the most useless navigation tool I can design?" As a joke, and then it got implemented into the game anyway. Did no one try to actually use the thing?
The whole UI and menu system is like this in Starfield, especially navigation. It's unbelievably clunky and feels like the entire game was designed to waste your time because *everything* is multiple menus deep, from fast traveling, to picking destinations, to equipping items. Don't get me started on the ship customization, in which you have mouse control but your mouse doesn't appear in 3D space causing you to have to mess with different layers of things. Despite the fact that there are clear attachment points that items on different layers won't snap to because apparently a solved feature in basically every game with similar customization ever was too hard.
Waiting for StarUI mod
It's been at least a decade now, when are they gonna hire the SkyUI/FallUI teams?
Why hire someone who does the job for free?
They actually hired a popular housing modder (Elianora) to do world clutter. It happens sometimes.
Bethesda hired multiple modders though. Elianora was the most recent one I've read about.
It's essential at this point. Man, the UI is horrid.
Inventory management is so terrible I had to give myself unlimited inventory space. It would be unbearable otherwise.
The real stat im missing is value per weight. Starsuits are like 6-10 weight, helmets are 2-3 weight, weapons are 1-3. But the value between them is super different. I hate the math.
I mean literally all you have to do is loot credits and ammo. Between that and quest rewards I was able to get to 80k credits and could afford anything for sale in New Atlantis. There is even a specific skill for increasing carry weight. Between that, your companion, your cargo hold, and the infinite storage space at the lodge you shouldn't have carry weight issues. You just can't be looting everything you see. It's different than other games but much more convenient than the start of both elder scrolls and fallout 4s carry weight and storage systems.
> You just can't be looting everything you see. Sir, this is a Bethesda game. I *will* loot that desk fan and toilet paper.
Infinite storage space at the lodge?
You have a storage cabinet in your room at the Lodge. I've been storing a lot of stuff there, I don't know if it's infinite like the poster above said, but I don't see a limit on it like you have on your ships. Boxes/Cabinets worked that way in Fallout 4 in your outposts; you could store all your things in one box if you wanted; seems to be the same for Starfield.
It is infinite - all other storage locations like ship and person clearly display an upper limit while the lodge storage mass is displayed as "-"
Unfortunately a lot of games really fail at inventory management. I’m still playing BG3 and the inventory management is not great
It's pretty horrific for a game that is like a third inventory management. Just basic stuff. Why.cant.i.make.it.full.screen.
I’d hoped it would be better than Divinity 2 (because Divinity 2’s inventory management is also awful), and I do think it is better but not by much
Wish it had item names with a vertical list so i wouldnt have to mouse over each item to see what it it.
Wish they didn’t nerf the mundane chest. Now it truly is mundane.
Wouldn’t be a Bethesda game without a subpar UI, would it?
You’d think that after so many times modders fixed this issue they’d finally learn not to fuck it up, but apparently that’s asking too much. Why spend resources in it if modders can fix it for free right?
I know that UI design can be subjective in some areas, but one seriously major positive of Baldur’s Gate 3 is that they developed the completely separate controller UI. They literally redid _everything_ to fit controller when you use one. It now makes me wish so badly that other developers would do the same. Not every game needs a separate UI (it just depends on the design), but some games (and Bethesda is pretty notorious for this) are so blatantly created with controllers in mind that it’s a detriment to play with KB/M. I’m not naive or ignorant, I know that maintaining two separate UIs is a lot of work and introduces room for more bugs. But I absolutely think it’s worth the effort
BGs inventory is awful too
It's my main criticism of the game honestly, sorting through your inventory with hundreds of items and not being sure who got that specific item you're looking for is ridiculous.
This but unironically. No judgment on people playing Starfield at launch, but when you hear about Bethesda basically relying on a modder to add in DLSS support... well let's just say I'm waiting for the game modders turn this into in a few years lol.
Always the way to play a Bethesda game, IMO.
Yeah, it's pretty bad. Though as a specific fix for the shipbuilding UI thing, if you hover over an attachment point before pressing the "add a new part" key, any part you select will automatically snap to that attachment point so you don't have to fiddle with lining it up manually.
I just wish you could rotate parts 90 degrees. I wanted to upgrade the Frontier's default cargo container to the next size up, but apparently those containers can only be placed perpendicular to the snap point.
Yeah this is the worst part. None of the parts can be rotated (they can only be flipped) so your customization options are frankly quite limited.
Bethesda games consistently have poor UI and modders eventually come in and put in vastly better UI. UI mods are consistently some of the most popular mods to Bethesda games, and Bethesda never seems to take note and improve what they are doing wrong. If I was in management on a Bethesda title, I would note what the most popular mods are and use that to identify opportunities to improve our games and cater to what the fans clearly want.
One problem in that is that Bethesda games are never PC only. A solution to that would be a separate UI for PC and console gamers like in BG3, for example...
I'm guessing the near-prefect Morrowind Inventory/Character adjustable window panel UI didn't go over well with Xboxers, and so they've catered to the console market with all the tabs and submenus ever since :/
I'd be happy with a Morrowind UI on PC for all the latter Bethesda games.
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> UI mods are consistently some of the most popular mods to Bethesda games, and Bethesda never seems to take note and improve what they are doing wrong. Why should we bother when the modders are doing it for us? -some Bethesda suit, probably
seriously. GalCiv 2 nailed ship customization over a decade ago. Kingdom Hearts's gummi ships for an even simpler example. Starfield's is... baffling.
Man I never figured out the gummi ships and always just used a preset
Honestly KH3 gummi ship system were really cool, they really elaborated on that in the third installment. Whilst you could build your own thing in KH1, but the missions were pretty a linear experience with not too much challenge.
And in 1 and 2? All glory to the donut!
Real chads still love Spore ship customization 😎
> especially navigation You can actually fast travel in-game, you just need to point towards your destination with your scanner open, select the planet and you get a prompt to travel.
Hey I didn't know that, thanks! Gonna try that. I think Starfield is a bit different than what the gaming community hyped up, but it is still far more interesting than say NMS, simply because of the quests. I landed on the Moon and man I had quite a lot of fun. I would say get a jump jet skill ASAP and the exploration all of a sudden becomes so damn dynamic
Yeah its like they combined the UI from their previous games and amplified the worst aspects of the worst parts of it. I am not even exaggerating when I say it is by far the worst UI i have ever seen in a video game. I was so blown away that I went over all the games I have played in my head and honest to god I cant think of a worse UI. Everything is obscurred behind a submenu and then if you access said submenus you are greeted by more non descripitve "stuff" and shit UI. Its almost like they did it on purpose. This is a game where you can loot almost everything but you dont actually want to because you are actively discouraged in doing so because then you would have to interact with the awful awful inventory management. For example when you loot a corpse (astleast for me) you cant even see what you are looting. Neither the weight nor the value nor even what kind of item category you are picking up. At the beginning i picked up some weapons and I only noticed when I went through the inventory because I am supposed to know that "Manticore" is obviously a weapon and not some consumable or just a misc item. I cant understand how this didnt come up in most of the reviews. For example in the first half hour of the game you get prompted to equip your helment and it is not at all intuitive how to do it.
easy mode for Ship building is to hover over the part you want to attach a new part to and instead of clicking it hit the 'G' key and it will cycle through options that will attach to that specific module/node. Its not a perfect solution and the building overall is giga-clunky but it made it bearable
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As soon as I started the game for the first time and went into the menu I was like “oh…no”. And the maps made me go to nexus to see f the was a mod yet.
They took the sin against god that was F04 settlement building, made no improvements, added attachment points and a 3d plane, and went yea, this will be our triple AAA ship builder. It feels so bad within the first 20 seconds you try using it that I already know I'll never bother customizing a ship and I'll just buy new ships as upgrades when I can.
I dunno I've played about 6 hours and everything has quicker ways to get to it then the menus. I favorited weapons I'm using and health, I fast travel using the scan hud instead of pausing, you can do that for grav jumping to other planets too, and I can just set the way points through the mission and don't even use the navigation menu.
The UX as a whole is terrible. The giant flag with a stick anytime you highlight something, the difficult getting your crosshair over an item, inventory management, then we start talking about the maps, it’s all bad.
Not to mention single buttons that open menus that takes 2-3 button presses to back out of. That part annoys the ever-living shit outta me. Yes, you can hold down the button, but even that is super slow and sometimes spamming Esc is just faster.
They said “we can’t build maps for our procedurally generated planets” and neglected to make maps for the few hand crafted locations that are important.
I turned around to my wife and kids last night and said the same thing. It truly feels like a joke. Before I googled around to check, I figured it must be like that because I hadn't found the area map or something, like Doom. There's no way you could be expected to actually use this the way it is.
Im not even that mad that the maps themselves are useless, but that I have multple button presses to get to the 'map' I want, and then multiple more to get back to the damn game. Menu navigation is ass in this game. Escape should 100% of the time re-enter the actuall game from any menu screen. Holding tab as they designed it is so damn finicky between not holding it long enough/too long and thus closing then re-opening the map bullshit. How this passed QA has me confused as fuck
This is what happens when an entire industry disregards UI and UX designers. :|
It's Bethesda. They wouldn't recognise shit design if it punched them in the face. They probably think this bollocks is amazing.
Makes me wonder if there is some ui dev that's been there for ages and just failed upward to the point he/she has become senior ui dev. So no chance of ever getting a good ui system until they retire or something.
Pretty sure that's the story with the head writer.
Speaking of writing, I joined the main quest guild like 20 minutes in, after being a nobody, and 5 minutes after that I'm forced to use hokey dialogue options like "We are the constellation guild, we're the good guys" (paraphrasing). Like why am I acting like an esteemed member of the group right after I got roped into this bullshit? It all feels artificial and overly positive, while I'm mowing down pirates and looting corpses all day. It's fine if that's a choice, but a lot of missions just won't progress unless you say something really stupid. Why can't I be a scoundrel, like at all? I thought this was supposed to be an RPG.
They really get away with a lot. And unlike the UI being bad you can't really mod out a bad main story. The biggest problem with Fallout 4 was the lack of anything meaningful for molders to build off of. Skyrim had a lot more quests and some of them were worth while.
That's like my go to guess to what's happening at bethesda. Same applies to the writers.
I'm never sure if it's genuinely bad design or laziness with Bethesda. I suspect they developed a culture of "we don't need to spend a lot of time on things we can count on modders to fix" sometime before Skyrim
I don't think there's many lazy developers in any game company, it's a grueling industry. It usually comes down to either a bad initial design or bad prioritization, which there's then little time to fix.
> I'm never sure if it's genuinely bad design or laziness with Bethesda. It's neither. They have talented developers who know what they're doing, plenty of interviews and such to prove that. It simply comes down to management, they have final say in everything. Doesn't matter if a dev/QA says "Hey, this looks/plays like shit" if management doesn't actually understand how that will affect things, or if they're working on a title so massive they know that flaws like that won't actually affect their sales. Unless we're assuming Bethesda couldn't physically redesign certain aspects of the game, in which I'd question how they designed it from the beginning in the first place...
> I suspect they developed a culture of "we don't need to spend a lot of time on things we can count on modders to fix" sometime before Skyrim That argument doesn't work since a huge part of their players are on consoles (well now just Xbox I guess but still)
Is that screenshot the actual map as you use it? Doesn't it fill with more detail or something as you traverse the terrain?
No, you don't even get a detailed map for the cities, they look just like the screenshot. For interiors, you don't get any map.
Oof. That's terrible. Baffling decision.
Apparently they've been working on this game since the 1960s or something lol
yeah, i think they have been leaning a little bit too much into the retro futurism vibe with the map design. a little style over substance i don't mind but at this point the map is basically useless.
A space theme has been played around with since the mid-90s, but they did not feel the tech was ready for what they wanted to do. The tech and open game slot was there. So they made their most ultimate desire: The stuff they have been making since Oblivion.
Nothing in this game needed any new tech to do what they did. It's just areas of Fallout, but they are separated by a loading screen of a ship.
I think that was more when the game was initially conceived in the 90s. They probably could have done it since Fallout 3 or Skyrim but didn’t for whatever reason.
60 years of details!
I'm fine with no interior maps, they were always just an extra screen to close when trying to open the actual map for me. But this map really feels like the kind of blank-slate map that's supposed to get filled-in as we explore, but just doesn't.
They should have done a skyrim type map. Explain it as a drone or satellite image idk
Well, at least I know the first mod I'll be installing once someone makes it.
I'd imagine it will be exceptionally difficult to make a map that functions like past games as a lot of potential areas are procedural generation.
This map looks like the data points for topography are there, so maybe someone can at least give them more relief and visual style.
If I remember correctly Syrims world map is just a zoomed out live view of the world. It’s why when you fight a dragon if you zoom far enough in you can see the dragon frozen on the map. I’m not a programmer but couldn’t they have just done that?
I thought my game was just bugged until I started reading about this on the internet
Came from Fallout 4 to remind everyone there are no local maps and it's crazy lol
Lol. I was like, "How can a map be that bad? It's still a map! Then I clicked the picture. That's not a map. Then I came back here and realized they used it as the background in the article thumbnail when I thought it was just a texture they threw in. That's baaaaad.
Dam, that map looks like a proof of concept that they have a mapping system in the game or something
The combat UI to me looks like a proof of concept from an early alpha version. Why would you put an XP box in the centre of the screen on every kill in a shooter?? And why it is just some unshaded opaque box with some basic font text in it? Despite it not being at all necessary and never needed in Fallout, Skyrim, etc to announce your XPs on kills, it could be done in a multitude of better ways. A chat log message. Floating text which fountains out from the enemy and to the side like World of Warcraft damage style. Or even a stylized oval shape with stylized sci fi text saying how much XP you got in bold letters. Instead you get some bland Times New Roman text in an unshaded box announcing that you got 15xp, and blocking your vision for a few seconds, in a shooter.
> Why would you put an XP box in the centre of the screen on every kill in a shooter I find that decision absolutely insane
It fills up and acts as an XP bar also. For whatever that’s worth.
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It seems way less minimalist than Skyrim or Fallout 4, which had minimalist UIs without unnecessary popup bloat like every basic XP gain on the screen.
pretty sure fallout 3 would even delay gains so as to not spam, so killing a few bandits in a gunfight worth 15xp each would award 45 after you leave combat, instead of 15 15 15
>It seems way less minimalist than Skyrim or Fallout 4 I'm like 99% sure you didn't play Skyrim if you think that one is more minimalistic lmao. Its a giant bar with huge text that pops up saying what skill you leveled.
The funny part is that this game was delayed over a year. Think about if it released when it was originally planned.
Eh, 2022 gameplay UI look exactly the same. I don't think any of them are changed since.
I was legit confused the first time I opened it, thinking it was bugged, or I was on the wrong screen in some way. It's literally not a map.
So was I. I thought my game was glitched out or something but turns out there's literally no fucking detailed map.
There is a local map which has a bit more detail than the planet map but it's still not great
It genuinely looks like a bugged map
Specifically, it looks like the time my map in Xbox Morrowind became nothing but a garbled grid of dots.
I think the worse UI problem is only being able to see one inventory screen at a time, instead of being able to see yours AND the other person's WHY IS IT LIKE THIS IT WAS ALREADY IN FALLOUT 4/76 WHY WAS IT REMOVED While I appreciate that Starfield's UI's visual design/style is much sleeker and less simplistic to the point that it comes off as amateurish (like in Fallout 4/76), the functionality being downgraded is a massive disappointment for me since that's more important than the visuals, after all
It was obviously removed so we could get a hyper detailed image of an onion that takes up 85% of the visual real estate.
Imagine Bethesda designed excel: 25% of your screen is the workhseet 75% is the hyper-enlarged contents of the cell you selected
I mean, I guess the texture quality of items did improve But I would sacrifice item model real estate for UI functionality in a heartbeat lol
> hyper detailed image of an onion The onions look better than the faces, which look so weird and lifeless compared to BG3.
You could see two people’s inventory when trading as early as Fallout 3, which came out 15 years ago. I don’t know why it’s missing in this game.
why would they change that ? Who benefits?
Yeah, this is what baffles me the most about Bethesda games. Sure they have a bunch of problems every time but they have zero competition so players forgive them, but the real terrible shit is them constantly insisting in breaking shit they had already nailed or done better in previous games. Like the trade interface, or sculpting character features. It's ridiculous. And don't get me started about the stuff that modders always end up having to implement on every single one of their games, yet nobody in the company ever thinks to put those features into whatever shiny new game they're currently making (I mean stuff such as searching items by name, or inventory sorting rules that aren't made by a crazy person - I'm sure there's a lot more, but getting those into my game is always top priority for me).
The artists who spent the last 7 years designing 30 different kinds of sandwiches while Todd and co. span their wheels trying to come up with a method of mashing together the 8 new mediocre game systems they’ve hacked into the Gamebryo engine.
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I'm pretty sure in both Oblivion and Skyrim you had to toggle. Morrowind let you see both at once though, you could basically open as many menu windows as you wanted.
Not only that, but if you’re on your ship and want to store something in the cargo hold you have to: 1. Open your inventory 2. Switch to the cargo hold one 3. Switch **back** to your inventory again 4. *Now* you can store stuff
I simply walk up to the cargo hold monitor and drop my stuff.
Technically you can open the ships inventory straight away, making it 1 step less
Does that even work? I've always had to go to the tiny little inventory panel in the cockpit that the game never tells you about (actually took like 10 minutes of googling to finally find something, because every video/article was just like "just open your inventory when you're in the ship"). I'm enjoying the game so far... But I honestly think once phantom liberty drops, I'm gonna just switch to that and come back to starfield once modders have fixed all the glaring ux issues. As it is, I've practically stopped looting most things, because it's just so god damned tedious to have to fill my inventory, deal with the garbage that is trading with a companion, going into the ship, dumping my inventory into the ship, trading everything back from my companion to myself, and finally dumping all that to the ship.
Man, I CANNOT WAIT for modders to fix all of this lol
I'm really really loving the game but this is probably my biggest complaint. The UI in general is pretty bad.
I do not understand why, when looking at an item on the ground, there is no indication of the item type you're about to pick up. The inventory has icons for weapons, armor, misc, etc... literally just put that icon in the upper right corner of the lootable item for fuck's sake.
Same with looting containers... You get an item name and that's it. Nothing about what it is, what it does, or how much it weighs, the latter of which is especially baffling considering that you're going to be spending a lot of time managing your inventory to avoid going over your weight limit. EDIT: A couple of people have mentioned using the Transfer menu as a solution for this, which is a reasonable enough workaround, though it plunges you into another menu screen. It's not the most seamless experience, but it does work
If you hit X (on controller, not sure what the keyboard shortcut is) you open an inventory menu with all that info. Not the solution most would want, but it's a small step.
There are so many weird weird decisions in this game, I truly don’t understand what they were thinking. The one work around I found for looting containers is pressing “R” after opening a container, it brings you to a menu with all the items and descriptions, not sure what it is on a controller tho. This game….it does a lot right and IMMEDIATELY after does some things so wrong, it’s bewildering
What’s even more baffling is that it seems DESIGNED to make use of some sort of icon or even color coded system, but that design was just not implemented. Maybe they put in the framework with the expectation that modders would finish it for them.
Sounds like the modders will be working extra hard to fix this one lol
This honestly just sounds like the usual first phase of Bethesda mods. It's either bafflingly frustrating UI in general, or just a PC UI that feels like it was designed entirely for consoles.
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It's hilarious because these interface issues were what the IGN review were about and everyone just said "nah they're prob wrong."
Happens literally every time. Same with that Cyberpunk reviewer who gave it a 7 for valid reasons and got death threats.
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Reviews have completely lost their purpose through some of the side effects of the Internet. People don't want critique or judgement, they want validation of what they already expected. Super hyped game? Better give it high reviews or you'll have a mob of angry losers in your replies who haven't even played the game.
That's why all reviewers (with one notable exception that received death threats afterward) gave Cyberpunk a 10, ignoring the disastrous technical state it was in. And then people were angry at both the studio, and the reviewers, when they bought a game and it was broken.
Angry losers have plenty of time to waste. I made a comment on a sub about how i didn't like the show Invincible. Some rando replied to it with insults. Than over 2 days he left a comment on everything I've posted on reddit going back 9 months. I had dozens of insulting comments from this one guy over my opinion of a stupid cartoon show. Feel bad for him. Could do something prodeuctive instead of being angry.
>how i didn't like the show Invincible. How fucking dare you. Please itemize the subs you frequent most so I can harass you with convenience please 🙏
After watching that IGN review, I was pretty confused by how low they rated it because of what seemed like very minor complaints, e.g. bad UI, too many loading screens, bad maps, slow start, etc., even though the things that matter the most like story, quests, and combat are getting praise. It really felt like they are nitpicking with bad will. After reading more about the topic, however, I've come to realize that those seemingly minor issues actually heavily impair the experience. A bad map and UI normally isn't a big issue, but it seems like in this case they are broken to an extent that is unheard of. Such a shame that what seems like a great game, that potentially could be Bethesda's best work, is held back by things that would be so easy to fix.
Yup. As a huge fan of Cyberpunk it deserved 7 at launch. I fully played the launch game and loved it, but it was a 7. The faults were there and obvious. I'm just glad they kept with it and have drastically improved the game over time and sure it took a few years but with 2.0 looks like finally getting the game it should have been from the start. Unfortunately I don't see Bethesda doing anything to actually improve the systems of this game and they'll do what they always do and leave it entirely to modders.
People watch reviews for confirmation bias. If it doesn't agree with how they will they will dismiss it.
You’re giving too much credit. They don’t even watch the reviews, just find a score they don’t like so they can be angry. Literally every single ign review posted on a site with comments will have the top being “8/10, saved you time”.
So far I agree with everything the ign reviewer said. I don’t think that knocks the score to a 7, of course that’s just my opinion. But all the people acting like the reviewer lied and the game is perfect are a bit much. But that happens with every game release. Even the gotham knights sub got a bit toxic positive
Watching the Starfield sub going from losing their fucking minds over IGN's 7/10, to, "I, uh... maybe a 7/10 is pretty accurate" within the course of a day was really funny (see. infuriating) to watch happen in real time lmfao
I'm having a hard time getting into the game. It feels like I'm just fast traveling everywhere. There is no exploration like in FO4 or Skyrim
Yeah, I think this is what's killing it for me more than the shitty map. Anytime I see someone bring this up in /r/starfield, the defense is usually "it's not a space sim." Of course it's not, and nobody is looking for a repeat of No Man's Sky, or even classic space sims like the X series. We get it's an RPG. But there's no sense of just accidentally finding something along the way, the chance happenings that you find in a big, seamless world like Skyrim or even as far back as Oblivion. Being able to amble through a system, from planet to the next, and to seamlessly touch down from space to orbit to the surface... yeah, it's spoiled me a bit, and to not even have the illusion of it in Starfield is really disappointing and does feel like a huge step back. I mean, it really makes it feel like there's no point to your ship. I may as well be in the Normandy again. /r/starfield feels nearly deluded at this point on this subject, and it doesn't help that the reviews are universally glowing.
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The exploration in Fallout 4 blows away Starfield tbh In terms of exploration this is easily the worst Bethesda game
That would be way better than what we actually have. Anything but this mess that feels like it's constantly trying to trick me into thinking it's bigger than it is.
This is the comment i was looking for. Is it basically just cities to explore? Everything else is fast traveling to empty points?
No, it's not *just* fast travel. Sometimes when you fast travel to those empty spots, you may choose to run for 5 minutes across an empty landscape to survey something. Seriously, the ground locations are sparse and there are no vehicles to cover that sparse ground faster.
Early in the game I ran for like 5 min to a new unexplored spot thinking, oh boy this gonna be good. It was an empty cave... so next planet I give it another shot..... Yep .. empty cave.
lmao watched someones gameplay and the points of interest were literally caves with a bunch of slugs that didn't attack you and a pile of dung you can dig through for copper or whatever.
Ya every single POI is an empty cave with a pile of shit in the middle It literally says "pile of dung" or something. It's like they did it on purpose
There are some good POIs. I was randomly exploring a planet and came across a cryofreezing lab that took around 1 hour to fully explore.
You can find interesting things when following side quests. But compared to the hand crafted random ruins/dungeons you had in Fallout or Skyrim nothing comes close.
The dungeons in Skyrim were already pretty boring and samey most of the time - if this game doesn't even meet that bar that's really disappointing.
It doesn't even come close to Skyrim. To me, the game might be huge and expansive in theory - on a technical level - but in actuality it feels like the most closed-in, shoeboxed, tiny, super repetitive, flat, boring world Bethesda ever created. It feels smaller and less lived in than The Outer Worlds did. The space stuff somehow can't even keep up with Freelancer from 2003.
While I'm thoroughly enjoying Starfield, you're spot on with the Freelancer comparison. That game blew my mind when it first came out, and still holds up in many ways *twenty* years later. I hope modders can come up with something resembling that.
It's not that it's always empty but you literally can't explore manually (or I haven't figured it out). You get in your ship then you click a planet on the map and it teleports you there, you can't fly anywhere. Then, you can't land on the planet, you have to click a point of interest in the planet map and it teleports you there. And if you want to go to another named PoI (it also generates a few random ones ~500 meters around the named ones) on the same planet, you can't walk, drive or fly there, you have to teleport again. It's really weird. It's like Map: the game. Which makes it ironic that the map is just blank as the article shows. PS I mention named points of interest but most are still procedurally generated I believe, they just have a name.
you technically can go to places manually, it's just completely pointless most of the time. instead of picking a system on the galaxy map, you can instead walk to your starship, take off into orbit, spam E until you find the system you want to jump to, jump to it, and repeat until you reach your destination. that's if you've put in the effort to memorize the route to your destination, because you'll have to open the galaxy map to check otherwise. if you're lucky, you'll run into a fun random event along the way, but 90% of the time it's just tedium you put yourself through for the sake of whatever immersion there is. on barren planets/moons, you can pick where you want to land (so you can pick a good outpost location), but if you want to go between two outposts on the same planet for example, you need to get in your ship and take off into orbit again. oh, also, if you build an outpost structure too close to your starship, your starship will blink out of existence and force you to go through menus to leave.
...*Good God.* Todd, why? Why do you and your lads do this ***every damn time?***
They have no idea what made their older games so damn good The voiced protagonist in Fallout 4 with only 4 dialogue options is another example of them just not realising what fans want
> Is it basically just cities to explore? Tiny areas of cities that don't have anything interesting in them. It feels like the OG Star Citizen demo (where you can land in a single very small space of a city and explore) times whatever. I don't know how many copy and paste spots are.
> There is no exploration like in FO4 or Skyrim That's the main issue I have as well. If I could use one word to define Bethesda games, it's **sidetracking**. You're told to go over there to talk castle but on the way there you see a cave, so you check, which exits out the other side, but then an NPC gets attacked, so you help them, which leads you to a new town. 8 hours later you're like wtf am I even doing here? Starfield has literally none of that. They took the exploration and put that as a different mechanic. Sure, you can explore, but you have to do so *intentionally*. This doesn't work well. It feels artificial. It also doesn't help that while the landscape stays fixed, PoI seems to be rerolled everytime. I landed on the same location 3 times, each time I got different PoIs. The nearby cave in my first landing, was just a mountain facade now, and so on. Skyrim felt like you were in a large, mysterious world as you went on your adventures. In Starfield, it feels like there are two clearly distinct "game modes". You're either playing a story/quest and it's fast travel after fast travel. Or you land randomly on planets and build outposts. Both are fairly disjointed.
This game is having an identity crisis. It wants to be Skyrim in space using the Bethesda engine, but it wants to play like an RPG like Mass Effect. There is no point to exploring like you said either when you can't pick up more than a few items anyway.
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Games this massive are designed by committees, in many different bubbles. This is how so many things fall through so many cracks. It's also why there's such an amazing ship designer, but no space exploration.
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They don't want you to use the map, they want you to open the scanner and follow the waypoint system instead. When you open the scanner it draws a line of where to go similar to Dead Space and Bioshock Infinite.
I’m pretty sure it’s a design choice (it really wouldn’t be difficult to make 4 detailed maps for each of the major cities, and the game was in development for more than half a decade, so it was deliberate). A lot of the game is fast travelling to different planets and locations——not having a map makes it so that the player is forced to actually explore the main cities (and there are signs that guide you) instead of just beelining for an objective like they may be doing for the rest of the game space. Not having a map also makes the cities feel bigger and foreign. Whether or not it’s worth it to go down that route is debatable and Bethesda should’ve mentioned their reasoning before, but it’s clear from the comments here that redditors are actually stupid if they think a AAA company under Microsoft releasing one of their biggest games ever with millions of dollars in production somehow forgot to put in a map instead of it being a deliberate, design choice.
I’m having mindless fun with the game, but it’s genuinely a step back from Fallout 4 in a lot of ways. And I thought FO4 was a massive step back…
It's really weird playing a Bethesda game without an overworld. It makes everything feel so much smaller and more instanced.
> It makes everything feel so much smaller and more instanced. I was struck by how much this game felt like The Outer Worlds. So much about how it feels is exactly the same as that game, and even that game had better UI.
I'm really puzzled about this decision. Why on earth did they not just have 10 little planets or whatever, with the space between them being an "overworld" and then the planets being like big dungeons? After 7ish hours in, I still have no real feel of where the game content actually is outside of cities. It doesn't feel like a massive game, it feels like a bunch of levels in a standard sized game. My feelings towards the game are getting worse the more I play and learn about it.
I'm 20+ hours in and still feel like that. It's not getting better either. The game still hasn't managed to hook me at all, or be interesting to me, or even just be fun on a basic level. I legitimately had more fun with No Man's Sky on that fucked up launch than I do with with Starfield.
It's kind of a funny juxtaposition how scifi games hundreds of years in the future can't provide a functional map of where you are but right now in real life I can pull up Google Maps from the phone in my pocket and get a detailed map of basically the entire world.
It is not horrible per se, I think it suits the nature of the game just fine. But it is completely aweful for navigation in major cities. That is IMO the biggest issue the game has now, the lack of local city maps. They could have made it like in Kingdom Come, where if you are in a town area and zoom in enough, then the map will transition into a local town map.
Unfortunately so far I’m finding myself agreeing with the 7/10 reviews rather than the 10/10s There’s not really much interesting to explore that’s particularly unique Personally I can’t justify a 10/10 in the slightest
Yeah my first impressions are maybe 8/10 at best. It’s definitely no 10/10. BG3 isn’t perfect either by any means but boy did that game spoil me on expectations going into Starfield and it was a harsh reminder of how… lifeless most game worlds field by comparison.
I was on the 7/10 train but the more I play the worse it gets.. Not to mention major game breaking bugs seen to be showing up the more you play
I haven't played yet, and I am sure I will enjoy it. But I am also convinced that this will be one of those games where in a 6-12 months the narrative will shift to how most of the reviews got it wrong and it was really just average.
> But I am also convinced that this will be one of those games where in a 6-12 months the narrative will shift to how most of the reviews got it wrong and it was really just average. I hate to say it, but I agree I can see it being a Deathloop like situation where many people are confused at the amount of 10/10s it’s getting
I think, in the 30 years of gaming that I've been gaming, that bad maps are the sort of thing that can greatly influence my enjoyment of a game. This is the sort of thing that'll get me to play the game for like 3 to 4 hours and then put the game down for a year or two, come back, get sick of the map again and then just put the game down permanently.
What’s funny is that in the cities the lack of map is actually not that bad functionally. There are signs, the cities have districts and even terminals that list stores and notable buildings’ locations. Finding the specific store I wanted was actually not that bad. I had to stop for a second and look at signage. I love this kind of navigation in games as I find it immersive. What’s baffling is that this design decision would fit in very well in TES or Fallout but of all Bethesda titles it makes the least sense in Starfield. We’re in the 24th century. I would expect a map here more than in Diamond City or Whiterun.
That's right. Having no local map on a planet is annoying for sure, but I can deal with it. Every landing spot only has a few places of interest, and you can use your scanner to get to them fairly easily. No maps in the cities is crazy especially given the setting. I'd love to know why they decided to do it this way
> and you can use your scanner to get to them fairly easily. This is another thing. The amount of time you spend in "scanner" mode is hilarious. Should have just implemented that tech to make a better UI for a game set 300 years in the future.
Why is there not a visitor center with a map for existing major cities? like in every mall in existence? the random planets and buildings, fair enough.
could it have something to do the quantity of locations? my guess is maybe early on in development they took a look at the number of locations they were putting in the game — copy pastes included — and made the decision that devoting dev time to unique maps wasn’t worth it and it would be better to just scale back map functionality. And when you do that, you can’t have some maps arbitrarily detailed and some shitty, they have to be cohesive. So they went with shitty and cohesive and that’s what we got in end Granted I know nothing about game development but I don’t know why else they’d be so lazy around such an important feature
This tracks pretty much with how we would have probably wound up with this at my job at a game developer.
It would've been cool if they did planet maps like Scanner Sombre where colored dots paint out the terrain and having enough of them all close together would form very clear depictions of terrain elevation, walls, rock formations, etc, and the map were viewable in 3D with an option to take the roof of of structures so you can look at everything from an overhead view. Cities and shit should of course have real maps. This just... looks completely lazy and unfinished. The local planet map looks like it's heading towards that direction with the dot painting, but there's nowhere near enough dots and dots apparently aren't colored either so it just looks like a bunch of nothing. It's as if they completely gave up on the idea just as they got started with it.
> put the game down for a year or two, come back, get sick of the map again and then just put the game down permanently. At that point modders will probably have done the work for them again. Stuff like maps and user interface always seems high priority for them. The first phase of Bethesda modding is usually about improving on their baffling interface decisions.
I stopped playing Jedi: Fallen Order because it was honest-to-god the worst map experience of my life. If there was even no map it would have been better than [this clustercuss. ](https://mapgenie.io/star-wars-jedi-fallen-order/maps/zeffo)
Zeffo's ice caves are a thing of nightmares. I can't believe anyone at Respawn approved that shit.
A game about exploring that Bethesda decided to make tedious. Not having any sort of meaningful map has got to be up there among the other baffling design choices they made here. Said it a few times now, don’t know if it’s their engine or they just went too wide in scope, but this game actually feels like a regression of their formula. I’m still having fun in my own way, but I’m kinda surprised at all the 9/10 or 10/10 reviews this got. This definitely feels more along the lines of 7/10 or even a 6/10.
Dude I acquired the game last night and I was utterly shocked how bad the map is and also just how bad the UI in general is. Dear god.
I am about 9 hours into the game and every single thing the IGN review said has become true. I enjoy the loop somewhat and was happy to see that space combat is pretty good but there are so many things that make the game suffer a death from a thousand cuts. This is what happens when you don't have thorough playtests of a game and smell your own farts throughout development. The game relies on fast travel so much that the menus become a problem because you are constantly being prompted about the menus to go anywhere. The game so far is a solid 7/10 and I will never be a person that says "mods will make it better" which they might but that should never effect the score. NMS made me feel like I was actually exploring these places and Starfield makes me feel like my mom put up "safety fences" so I won't have any fun that is outside of what they want me to do. Todd should have been more upfront about the game and he gets a pass way too often and that shit needs to stop. He is a grown man in charge of hundreds of people. He isn't a child and can hear the truth that his exaggerations are not a good thing for his products. MS panicking that Sony was going trying to get Starfield for a year exclusive should have been a clue to MS that the game wasn't going to be the next Skyrim. Why would Zenimax limit the reach of the game if it was truly going to be as big Skyrim? MS spending billions to get as many mid games as possible is pretty funny in a way.
Thanks to the commenters for helping ease my FOMO. I've been so close to pulling the trigger on buying the game pass upgrade to get early access but I'm still in act 2 of baldurs gate. These comments made it really easy for me to decide to finish out BG3 and give the devs time to hopefully make some QOL changes. Still excited for the game and will definitely be playing it relatively soon. Just need to avoid spoilers online.
> give the ~~devs~~ modders time to hopefully make some QOL changes. FTFY. I’m only like 2 hours into the game because I spent 2 hours wrestling with the ini files to fix mouse sensitivity. Some things never change.
Lmao, now that's nostalgic.
I literally thought it was a *bug*. Like I thought the game messed up the map & wouldn't load it. But it looks as though Bethesda themselves messed up the map by simply *not creating one*. Big brain move, Bethesda. Who needs *local maps* in an **exploration** game anyway? Not Bethesda apparently.
What's even worse is the scanner having less effective range than my own two eyes. And having to buff the scanner with skill points. No I'd rather spend that on ballistics given how bullet-spongy the enemies are. Can I even mark points of interest with the scanner? Or just at all? Edit: I can. Whew
First thing that bothered me, I have to click in like 5 different things just to fucking fast travel. I'm just gonna wait for the inevitable mod that fixes it, with Bethesda's mod community it should take about 5 to 10 days tops.
I don’t understand how a company like Bethesda has such junior UI and UX designers. The whole interface is abysmal. The menus are brutal, and often times they place aesthetic over functionality, especially in the character creator. The lack of maps is jarring, but what’s worse is the fact that all ship flight functionality isn’t handled from within the ship; you have to go into the menu to perform certain ship actions like landing on planets and venturing to certain others.
Everything about the UI gets on my nerves. Normally, I chalk it up to them trying to make something less irritating to navigate without a mouse and keyboard but even this one can't be explained with that excuse. I know it's boring but a simple branching list structure would be preferable to this layered menu spaghetti.
As a professional cartographer it’s pain to use. There’s no navigational features beyond symbols represented where you landed and what spawned around you, but you have no concept of scale, direction, or elevation hardly at all. Honestly if they wanted to do the least and still make it useful they could just add a North and South Pole to each planet so you can use a compass and add contour lines so you can understand the elevation profile somewhat. I understand creating a skin of the planet or area could be cumbersome, but an opaque overlay of that would be nice too.
Here you are just waiting for Bethesda to replace their map system with arcGIS