Recent reviews by Pyrion

Bethesda would have you believe that Starfield has the depth of Skyrim and the gunplay of Fallout 4 spread across a thousand planets worth exploring. Nuh uh. Bethesda basically took all the depth of Skyrim and smeared it across three planets whose cities are literally no bigger than your typical suburban strip mall, while the other 997 aren't even that. Afterthoughts, at best. And since I'm griping about space compression in the 2020s, let's continue the Skyrim tie-in: if you squished Whiterun and Solitude together, you'd have New Atlantis, ruled over by an Empire in all but name that's just as criminally dysfunctional as the original. If you squished Windhelm and Falkreath together, you'd have Akila City, ruled (in a loose sense of the word) by a faux-libertarian oligarchy heading a military junta that's as backward, criminally-incompetent, and full of itself as the Stormcloaks ever were. And if you squished Riften and Markarth together, and then melon-scooped out the Thieves Guild (why????), you'd be left with the single most corrupt city in any Bethesda game, with absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever. If traveling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter, one wonders how the heck Neon avoided that fate in the three interstellar wars where either the UC or the snake worshippers could've done the universe a solid and nothing of value would've been lost.

And since you've all heard about the NG+ gimmick of Starborn foreknowledge by now: yeah, that too was squandered. Foreknowledge literally won't affect anything outside of the main quest beyond a single line of altered dialogue, that doesn't actually change anything, per quest, at best. There's so much wasted potential here (Bethesda's unofficial motto amirite?), they could've made NG+ far more than just a game state reset like every other game does. If the various side questlines actually had significant deviations due to, or in spite of, Starborn foreknowledge, playing more than a single NG+ run might otherwise be justifiable. And the other draw of NG+, Starborn ships and armors, are so underwhelming that all you'll get out of it is buyer's remorse for throwing away everything you've done in your prior playthrough(s).

...which will amount to the ships you've built and the gear loadouts you've collected, because you could go the entire game without ever building an outpost and you won't have missed a thing. Outposts literally have zero justification for existence in this game. Like the 997 other planets, outposts were an afterthought (might even be the same afterthought). It's not like Fallout 4's settlements that had quest-dependent reasons for existing; there isn't a single quest that absolutely requires you to build an outpost, and Starfield isn't anywhere close to an open world survival-oriented sandbox to make having bases of relative safety a necessity as you fast travel from point to point with naught but a couple of loading screens for your trouble.

Starfield, unfortunately, represents peak Bethesda game design laziness after decades of releasing bug-riddled console ports that inevitably get most of their many and varied problems and inadequacies fixed by modders several years later. Only we're not several years later yet with Starfield, and I doubt even the modders will be able to save us from all the loading screens. I'd say "wait for the Game of the Year edition," but this fast travel simulator's not going to win Game of the Year.

A lot of the hate this game has gotten can be summed up in two camps: everyone who ate up the prerelease hype, and last-gen console gamers. Nobody cares about the latter group here, but I'm gonna rain shade on them anyways because really, did nobody learn from Windows Vista what'll invariably happen when you attempt to shoehorn current-gen software onto hardware that's five years past its use-by date?

So, there's quite a lot of content that was cut from the shipping release of the game. Meh. What remains is still an entirely enjoyable game in its own right. Word of advice if you're really late to the party: the best lifepath is the Nomad lifepath, so if you want maximum replay value, save that for last. As for the bugs? Turn on slow hard drive mode, which'll fix the T-posing and most of the microstutter. Yeah sooner or later they're gonna render the streaming system into a less-broken state (I hesitate to use the word "fix"), and nearly every other problem aside from missing voice lines can be solved by modding the game, which is the real reason we're PC gamers in the first place.

Gameplay mechanics-wise, the combat is your standard FPS cover shooter tripe that you can completely disregard for almost the entire game if you're patient enough to kill everyone with copious abuse of the caps lock key. You can even do the whole pacifist run thing if you're really patient, and I mean really, because even the "non-lethal" options can cause NPC deaths. That's not a bug, that's a feature; this game is set in a world where life is cheaper than dirt and almost nobody cares, so get used to it.

As to the content of the game itself: the storyline has its issues, probably the chief one being inconsistency between the main quest and the side quests, where you can be totally antagonistic with Johnny in the main quest and best buds in the sidequests. I'm handwaving that on the basis that Johnny's basically along for the ride with no say in the matter, so the only thing the devs would really need to add to about half of the sidequest content is an animation of Johnny munching popcorn while he and V snark it up and it would be fine. If you're a puritan, you're gonna be really surprised that a game this vulgar came out of Catholic-dominated Poland, but honestly, five minutes in it'll just be so much background noise, which is kinda the point. If you're a completionist, you can easily put 200 hours into this game with what content it shipped with and have gotten your money's worth. I'm well past that point without a single completion because I'm having way too much fun experimenting with modding. But if you're one of those who just rushes the main storyline, you can probably do it in one 16-hour sitting, so my advice: wait for the game to hit 75% off in a Steam sale first, otherwise you're just ripping yourself off.

Overall? I'm having loads of fun with it and I'm not even finished with my first playthrough, 200+ hours in.

Despite its bugginess, which can be alleviated significantly just by downloading NVAC from the Nexus, FNV's story beats the pants off of Bethesda's equivalent offerings in every other Fallout title, period. FNV easily has about 150 hours worth of playability for a single run-through, and you'll essentially have to do that four times for all of the endings.

That it ends is about the only real downer.

Don't know what Bethsoft was thinking when they made the elevators not conform to regular floor heights. That was pretty much the one thing I was looking forward to in this, only to have to rebuild several layers of stairs with half-working navmeshing that my settlers always get stuck on.

It's good for killing about a week or two of free time. Best thing added to the AC series is naval combat, so it's not at all surprising that AC4 is going to include far more of that. Uses DX11 mainly for hardware tessellation, as far as I could tell; the graphics weren't otherwise any more impressive (outside of the aforementioned naval combat) than previous games in the series.

Honestly, this game is pretty much dead. Doesn't help that HiRez basically doesn't care about it anymore beyond using it to milk impulse purchases for worthless crap - you're more likely to get banned from the game for complaining about cheaters w/ evidence than you would for actually cheating.

Old World Blues is the funniest thing I've played since Portal 2. If you like black humor, large hams and SCIENCE!, buy this. It makes up for the first two DLCs.