Game completed: Starfield

Alongside Hogwarts Legacy this was my most anticipated game of the year. So when September 1st rolled around I immediately started to play even if the time was 2am. I didn't do much aside from creating my character that night, but at least the game worked and for me it has been mostly smooth sailing throughout all of my 174 hours. 

I'll keep this post very vague so as to avoid spoilers and you'll mostly be getting my overall thoughts and feelings rather than any details of companions or quests.

I put off doing the main quest for so long, which I realise now was a bit of a disservice to the game. I was probably level 30 before I even encountered the main antagonist. That first encounter adds a lot more to exploration and I recommend getting to at least that point in the main quest before heading off whichever way to explore.

So for my first character I chose traits that were pretty much all useless to me, but that I thought sounded cool. Neon Street Rat was very useful, but Alien DNA I had removed with a doctor almost immediately. I chose the Adoring Fan perk because of nostalgia and then I never used him because he was just as annoying as I remembered. I just stuck him at an outpost in the middle of nowhere and never saw him again. 

Surveying planets became tedious if it was done too much and too often, but as someone who enjoys ticking boxes it was very much my thing - if done sparingly. Every time I visited Earth I got sad.

As for the side quest lines, my favourite was easily the Crimson Fleet. I always try to do a good character so navigating the Fleet questline via Persuasion and Bribery instead of murder and robbery was a lot of fun and actually made me think more specifically how I would get through a quest. 

I also enjoyed the UC questline for the sheer amount of wow moments. Revelation after revelation, it was great! I really liked Hadrian when she was part of her questline. Too bad she lost all her personality afterwards when she became just another follower. 

The Ryujin questline was a slog to start with, but once I gained access to the Executive floor things became really interesting and the last few quests were pretty cool. I ended up having more fun with this one than I initially thought. Unfortunately those early quests are indicative of the kind of missions you get from their mission board post-questline, and they aren't very engaging. Still a lot of easy credits though.

Finally, the Freestar Collective questline wasn't my thing at all. I struggle to remember what it was even about and had to look it up to even write this post. The final confronation was kinda cool I suppose. Unfortunately the final confrontation of this questline was at the same place I had a Ryujin stealth mission at and it wouldn't let me sneak past the final confrontation to complete the Ryujin mission before going back to do the final Freetstar quest... So I ended up getting a pay deduction from my Ryujin mission -.-

The main quest proved a lot more interesting than I normally expect from a Bethesda game and at one point even heartbreaking. Literally sat crying in front of my PC until I could reload an earlier save so I could change the outcome because I was not ok with that! It didn't hurt that the main quest had some of the most beautiful visuals in the entire game. Temples did get slightly repetitive though. 

As for the companions, I adored Sam. He became my best friend and my husband (and he made me smile like a doofus every time I talked to him after we got married). Andreja, despite being the last Constellation member I picked up, quickly became my favourite after Sam. Both Barrett and Sarah annoy me. Barrett is too silly and Sarah is too high and mighty. That said, I still got a ship that could fit all of the Constellation followers at once and they all became sort of like a family. I also made sure to do all of their companion quests. Everybody's except for Barrett's were pretty interesting tbh. I liked Sarah's and I hope there'll be more to Andreja's at some point. Sam's felt oddly high-stakes but that's probably due to Cora's presence. 

I'll end this by addressing some of the complaints I've seen regarding the game. Some of them are just too stupid to address though, so I'll just leave this here:

Complaints about graphics and crashes and optimization, I can't do much about. The game worked well for me (rtx 3060). I had two CTDs in all my 174 hours. The game didn't like when a download was running in the background and became laggy whenever Windows Update decided it was time to download an update, otherwise it worked great. 

People complain about desolate worlds and I can't help but wonder if they only ever landed on moons or planets without an atmosphere. There was an abundance of planets that had all sorts of life and were beautiful to just wander through.I have so many screenshots from both desolate and vibrant moons and planets.

The achievement disabler was buggy, though. Which is probably the only major issue I had with this game. I had to use the console to no clip through a door that remained [INACCESSIBLE] even though the quest was supposed to open it to be able to progress a quest. I was hoping that achievements would only be disabled for that session (like in New Vegas) and then be enabled once I restarted my game. No such luck though. I wasn't too far in so I figured I'd make a new character and start over. It wasn't too bad. Except the game marked my brand new character and saves as modded too. Despite me never touching the console on that character. It's supposed to not do that on new characters :P So I downloaded the mod that make achievements work even on modded/console playthroughs. Problem solved.

Another complaint is that locations are copypaste. Unless you do a lot of mission board bounty quests you probably won't even notice this much. But every single Abandoned [...] on planets are the exact same. So when I was running through my probably 50th Abandoned Cryo Lab to get that outlaw bounty I was pretty sick of them. All Cryo Labs look the same, all Relay Stations look the same, all Robotics Labs look the same... Which I can kinda, sorta justify by them all being UC and UC probably had a model they built things after, but damn it gets tedious.

Finally, the end of the main quest leads you right into NG+, but you can choose to not play through the main quest in the exact same way all over again. So now I'm kinda excited to play through it once more just to see how much will be different. Probably not a lot though, so I'll be moving on to other games, but keeping a lookout for DLCs because I really don't feel done with this game.