I enjoyed the game generally, but it's definitely soulless. They need fundamental changes for me to consider it 'great', and they just don't do those kind of things post-release. I rushed the main story and started a sandbox NG+ and honestly I'm bored. I platinum'd Spidey 2 and I'm probably gonna uninstall Starfield. I was gonna do all the factions but I did Ryujin first and it was very whelming. Mantis is supposed to be one of the best in the game and it was good, but if that's one of the high points of a 100+ hour game then that's a big disappointment.
It's fine. But 'fine' describes Xbox for the last decade. Not good enough.
Obviously not science, but I’m starting to notice a break in the opinion on the game with people who rush to NG+ vs. people who stay in their first universe doing everything first.
I think “influencers” were a detriment to the game putting so much emphasis on NG+ out of the gate, causing so many people to rush through the game. That was definitely not the intention of the NG+ mechanic.
I spent 250+ in my first universe doing all of the storylines (Ryujin is definitely the weakest btw), exploring planets, and finding fun side quests, and at least for me, that’s definitely the way the game should be enjoyed. My world feels pretty full and lived in.
I mostly rushed it because I heard some great and some awful main story reviews and wanted to see how it went mostly without spoilers. So I beat it about 20 hours in having done almost no side quest stuff. At that point, why not NG+?
Maybe ‘influencers’ hurt my experience, but I also play lots of games specifically for the main story so I wanted to experience that part first.
I don't think it's a wrong way to play the game but I do agree with OP that it gives people a really skewed sense of the game because it's significantly more likely to run into repetitive AND boring content in NG+ since you already found all the artifacts and presumably several of the powers and the core of the game pushes you to return to doing that again in NG+, which leads to a lot of the same locations.
Yea, I guess. But the artifacts and (especially) temples are already super boring and tedious the first time. I haven't engaged at all with the main quest after NG+ besides going far enough to get Andreja as a companion, which I think was the first handful of artifacts and only took like 45 minutes?
That said, I'm bored by the dialogue and fast travel. I'm just going through dialogue chains and then fast traveling to the next step of the mission. I guess I could 'force' myself to play differently but I'm not interested in forcing myself to play around a game's glaring issues.
This is part of why I only barely started the Freestar faction and then quit. I'm just bored by the cycle of the gameplay. Maybe I just don't like BGS games. I've never put more than a few hours into the others, although I'm moving Skyrim up my backlog and will likely play it early next year :)
I dunno, I'm not trying to suggest that you should play it in a specific way. I just think that's it's misrepresentative of the game to tell people that they should get to NG+ to really start enjoying the game. You actually had a lot of people rushing through the story then dropping into NG+ to see all the repeating content.
Everything else isn't going to be for everyone anyway.
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u/rusty022 Nov 20 '23
I enjoyed the game generally, but it's definitely soulless. They need fundamental changes for me to consider it 'great', and they just don't do those kind of things post-release. I rushed the main story and started a sandbox NG+ and honestly I'm bored. I platinum'd Spidey 2 and I'm probably gonna uninstall Starfield. I was gonna do all the factions but I did Ryujin first and it was very whelming. Mantis is supposed to be one of the best in the game and it was good, but if that's one of the high points of a 100+ hour game then that's a big disappointment.
It's fine. But 'fine' describes Xbox for the last decade. Not good enough.