Recent reviews by Xorph

It's an early access. Temper your expectations. One day we will have our EverQuest 2.0.

gameplay is okay but the community suffers from toxicity. guards do not pass the ball unless they have to. games aren't populated enough and it takes a while to find people to play with. i don't recommend this unless you have friends to play with.

don't get me started on VC. don't get me started on myteam pack odds. every mode tries to get you to spend money and you don't get much in return for it. 2k got me for $200, but I won't be returning. not to this game, and not to any future 2ks.

edit: I GOT PERMABANNED FOR SNIPING

The game would be great if the monetization was overhauled. 180 pulls for hard pity with no guarantee ever is laughably bad in this day and age. Save yourself the time, this will be EoS in a few months just like every other game that has been this aggressively greedy. Which is sad, the game underneath the gacha system is great! I love the strategy game, but it's completely nuked by the horrible gacha system which makes companies like Hoyoverse (known for their horrible greed in Genshin) look like generous saints in comparison.

Connecting to game simulator. Can't recommend it in its current state, unless you play between the hours of 3 and 7 am.

Nearly 62 hours later and I'm in the NG+, I've seen everything I need to see. The only thing I haven't done is explore every planet and check out all the procedurally generated copy and paste stuff. To me, that's all padding. There's about 100 hours in this game to interact with, if you max out all the NG++ stuff. so I'll just give my thoughts on the game:

This game had lofty ambitions, and failed to meet most of them. It was pitched as endless exploration with no boundaries. Taking your ship wherever you like, doing whatever you want. Of course, as a Bethesda enjoyer, I tempered my expectations. I was thinking of some mishmash of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, set in space -- maybe some interesting storylines, a decent main quest to follow, open world exploration in hand designed levels.

What I did not expect was a massively empty game, 4 major cities with a bunch of fetch quests shoved into them and very few interesting side-quests to enjoy. I did not expect literally 5 or 6 different enemy types total in the ENTIRE GAME. I did not expect ugly NPCs patrolling back and forth in soulless, corporate-America clone cities. I did not expect 7 or 8 different level designs copy and pasted all over the game, loot randomized in the same spots, most of the time entirely the same as the last place you went to. Is this really what they envisioned the multiverse to be like? A bunch of Americas in space with no alien races and boring replicas of the same facilities and caves all over the place?

They should have hand-crafted this game. There should only be like, 20 planets, at most, and they should be lush with things to do. This is the laziest version of the game I could possibly imagine.


Note: ****MINOR SPOILERS BELOW****
But worst of all, the main story quest is the WORST STORY I HAVE EVER PLAYED IN AN RPG. Cliche timey-wimey stuff that you see for maybe 10% of the time you're doing the main story. Most of the time you're just running across empty planets and going in temples for space shouts, touching the 7 glowing orbs before floating in a fidget spinner while the music goes wild, or just running into an empty cave and picking up the same artifact you do at the beginning of the game. Who wanted this? Who play-tested this and said, man, this sure is fun and interesting! I had to push myself to get through the main story. Luckily, I did all side stuff for the first 55 hours before I realized what a drag the main content they had to offer was.

***End Spoilers***

Some other things to note:
-Weapon variety is very limited. With all the mods that can be found on the RNG loot it makes it seem like there's more variety, but it's still extremely low compared to other Bethesda games.
-The AI is atrocious, some of the worst you could see in a 2023 game. The freedom of movement in this game really exposed how bad Bethesda's AI is. You can just run circles around any enemy and they will never hit you, neither will anyone else, even if you have 10 guys targeting you.
-There are no city maps, so if you don't have an indicator taking you somewhere, good luck finding it until you've memorized the cities. Not a huge problem, but still annoying.
There is an unarmed build but you can't bind unarmed to favorites so you have to spend half your time on menus if you ever want to swap between unarmed and weapons. Unarmed in general is just janky and broken. The only way to make it useful at end game is to abuse the stealth mechanic with camouflage and stun an enemy, crouch infront of them, and get 10x sneak attacks on them. Even then, it's not as much damage as a good Advanced tier weapon.
-The game is poorly optimized. I personally could get 70 fps out in the open with a 3090 and i9 processor at 1440p, but for how dated the graphics are, this is pretty bad. The graphics are far worse than Cyberpunk 2077 which I could get a smooth 120+ FPS in.
Space travel is completely on rails. You can't go anywhere, it's a fast travel simulator. Kingdom Hearts 3 had better space combat and exploration than Starfield does, which is a huge joke. Space combat is just a battle to see if you can get your hits in quickly before the AI finally locks onto you.
-Stealth is super janky, I recommend getting the stealth overhaul mod for anyone who is using it. Those changes at least make it useful. Combat overhaul to make the enemies less spongey also improves the experience a bit, but not enough to make up for all the other glaring issues with it.

I will say, I enjoyed the faction quests. The UC Vanguard, Crimson Fleet, Ryujin Industries, and Freestar Rangers lines were all very fun and interesting, I recommend everyone do these if you play the game. The mission with the rogue AI was also cool, and there were two high points in the main story that I enjoyed. But outside of that, I found a lot of the game to be dull and listless, a lot of time spent running back and forward or just fighting off the same types of enemies in the same spots of copy and paste levels.

I spent 100 dollars on Starfield, so I was expecting a lot more than such a themepark type game where my choices didn't really matter. I wanted to love the game, but in the end, I could only tolerate it. And for the price I paid, that just isn't enough for me to recommend it. If you can get it for cheap, or want to play it on Gamepass, do that, but I don't recommend paying full price for this game. Maybe mods will improve the experience, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that modders can salvage this game from its vanilla state.

No stuttering, but I still can't dodge half the boss attacks because I suck at this game.

****DO NOT SPEND ON THIS IF YOU WANTED TO BE COMPETITIVE IN A FRESH ENVIRONMENT****

No cross-play/cross-save except you still get put in Global servers with max level veterans who already have everything. There is literally no point to the Steam version of the game unless you have never heard of Honkai before. You still should be warned about what you're getting into, though. I thought going into this they would give us new servers to play with people who are just starting new, that makes the most sense in the version of the game that doesn't allow you to co-op with vets or use old accounts. It would have been fun to compete on leaderboards with brand new players, instead of ones with 5 year old accounts who have everything maxed, have received hundreds of rewards that you will never get.

There are leaderboards in this game which provide an income to allow you to be competitive in Memorial Arena and Abyss. The people in the higher brackets have god tier accounts that even new Kraken tier spenders will not be able to compete with given the time this gacha game has already been out. If you're just looking for a casual game with a good story, then this game is pretty good, plenty of content to enjoy without worry. But I would advise competitive players to look elsewhere.

I still don't understand why they put it on steam with no cross-play/cross-save and yet dumped everyone into the same servers.

The design choices for this game were pulled straight out of 2002, pre-WoW, and in the worst ways possible. This game goes out of its way to inconvenience you at every turn. There are no dynamic spawns, fast travel is incredibly expensive, no mounts to make their small world feel bigger than it actually is, and massive queue times on 2000 person servers; all of this makes for a disastrous recipe for anyone who has less than 5 hours a day to commit to the game. And even for those who do have a bounty of time to spend, it could be better spent on something that isn't actively trying to keep you accomplishing something for the sake of slowing down progression to make the game feel longer than it actually is or should be with how much content it has to offer. I got to level 20 and could no longer stomach running circles doing "kill 3 mobs and skin them" quests in areas where 50 players were competing for the same thing. I would like to get to level 60 to give it a proper end-game review, but I'm not having enough fun in the game to just grind it out and find out what it's like. I feel like my time would be better spent doing literally anything else. I have 33 hours in this game, but 20 of them were spent in queue in my attempts to play with friends.

I will say as far as pros go, the game does have decent combat. Even though it's simple with the 3 abilities, it feels decent enough, and the blocking/rolling gives it a little bit of a skill cap. The crafting also has a lot to offer -- the fact that you can make armor for yourself that's just as good, if not better than anything you can find in the game, that's something that I really liked about the game. Everything else was painful. The quests are terrible, the story is 100% skippable, and traveling around the map is one of the worst MMO experiences I've had to date. Feels like you're running in quicksand half the time. I hope they improve on the game, but I can't imagine they will be able to do much for a few months. By then, who knows what the playerbase will be like.

It's an okay game. I wouldn't say it's good or great, just decent. It's a looter shooter, but it doesn't really bring anything new or innovative to the table. There's a lot of grinding, and for what? To get the best gear for a cookie cutter meta build in order to clear repetitive content. The replayability is in just making different characters and grinding through the game again.

The game looks like Mass Effect, but it plays more like a bare-bones version of the Division, without PVP or other things that make that game a bit more fresh and fun in comparison. It's like the Division in space, but with Destiny type legendary items to farm for in order to optimize your build and get you doing insane numbers of DPS. The game has a story, but you can pretty much predict everything that is going to happen, and you can't interact with the story, you just watch it unfold. Each area is just a small zone where you fight a few waves of enemies. It's all incredibly linear. It's a huge missed opportunity, in my opinion. They could have made this a bold singleplayer RPG instead of adding the always online stuff that largely does not matter or improve the game in any capacity. You're better off playing solo unless all the people you're playing with have the best possible gear and builds for their level, otherwise they will slow you down and hamper your progression.

I wouldn't recommend it if it's not on sale. Not worth $60, pick it up when it's cheaper if you like looter shooters where the story largely doesn't matter.

Everything I've ever wanted in an FF game