I love Baldur’s Gate 3, but.. I needed a break. It’s so intense that I needed a breather before I dive deep into Act 3.
I took this breather by playing Star Citizen; Since Starfield was coming soon, I wanted to remind myself what good space flight and immersive experiences can be.
That may sound like I’m judging Starfield early, but I promise you, I’m not: Starfield and Star Citizen are two very different games.
Anyway, last night I hopped in to the deluxe edition early access for Starfield and spent a decent amount of time in the character creator.
It’s definitely a Bethesda large-scale open world RPG; I spent a fair amount of time and frustration trying to get everything right with clunky UI controls in the character creator, but that’s par for the course here (seriously, if Ubisoft can avoid using sliders for hair style selections or color preset selectors, so you can you, Bethesda).
I decided to create a reasonable facsimile of myself; The only difference is Starfield-me’s emerald mohawk is much thicker than mine, and he looks just a bit younger than my 40-year-old face.
Anyway, as I moved through the game proper, I found it played out a lot like a newer Bethesda title.. Starting out on an elevator rather than a cart; Passing out rather than getting shot in the head before getting handed the character customizer device, and eventually walking out into a (somewhat) sun-drenched world.
Combat is interesting; it’s got a fair amount more FPS-twitch style movement than I would’ve expected, and if you’re playing with mouse & keyboard it’ll definitely take you out of it to follow along a group of folks walking as you just tap forward periodically to run-catch-up and avoid overtaking them.
Overall, so far, I’m enjoying it, but is it any sort of killer new standard for space games?
Not yet, no, and we’ll explore that more in my full review coming much later (because – much like Eurogamer and RPS – I didn’t get an early review copy).