Recent reviews by Wuler

Great game, surprisingly few bugs, only 1 crash in my 16 hours of gameplay. It feels as though the game has been polished enough with great performance so that the devs can just add and develop new features and balance changes quickly and easily without focusing on the backend too much. That being said it is early access and I have some gripes I will make in hopes I can contribute in making the game better, keep in mind I'm only listing negatives that can easily be fixed and even with them I have had a ton of fun and definitely recommend the game. When you get in the game and start playing you will see what I mean.

Balance
I believe others here have made similar complaints but certain things feel imbalanced right now.
Berries, specifically rich berries seems to be the only reliable source of food, vegetable gardens feel awful and are only there for providing food variety, chickens are ok but don't seem to give much, goats give hides but barely any and should also give meat, hunting cabins provide plenty of hides but barely any meat at all. It seems as though you really have to put your development points into food related things in all of your regions/provinces and cannot stray from a few core development points otherwise your people will starve.
Taxing your people for your personal treasury is a cool and interesting mechanic, but you can only do it in percentages of 10, so the lowest being 10%, and no matter how positive your people are it will bring down your approval to below 50 in just a few months at just the 10%. I tried 20% at first and immediately lowered it so you have to constantly only tax here or there when your approval is high enough but it sticks around for a while too and prevents it from climbing so only doing it in short bursts doesn't help either.

Farming
Farms feel basically useless and difficult to manage but are necessary for certain buildings and needs and to progress your settlement. The ox upgrade is useless as it appears to be slower than just having 8 families planting and harvesting. Even with a full farmhouse you barely have enough hands to actually harvest in time, growth and harvesting period needs to be earlier in the year as when the crops are ready winter comes before you have barely harvested any of your fields and so it all dies out. Bread is made extremely slowly and not enough flour is created from the grain you do get, even with a highly fertilized region.
It feels like Fallow doesn't actually help regenerate the fertilization. I had around a 300 person settlement and 2 full farmhouses and was barely getting enough to have food to upgrade my buildings.

Trade
Because of the issues listed above you heavily rely on the trader. The issue with that however, is that you barely have enough money generating even with selling surplus, which sells for less than a 1/4th or 1/5th than what you actually buy them for, meaning that you need to be heavily generating surplus which is very difficult for any resource, in order to reliably trade to make up to the shortcomings of the region you spawn in. Because of this, you have to save up some money, then only trade when necessary in order to make up for your shortcomings and hurry and upgrade your settlement buildings.
UPDATE - The trader dev points that allow you to remove the import fee is actually OP and the only development points that you honestly need. You can get to a point where you make things from planks and just sell them, bows, tools, shields etc, and just import all the food you need. The only issue is that there seems to be a bug with the trader where people get stuck because you are doing too much trading, even if you have multiple traders they will only go to the first built one.

Regions
The point of the regions as advertised appears to be to allow you to specialize in certain areas and not rely on just one area or region in order to produce things, this is great but also bad because of a few reasons.
Number one, people want to make a grand primary settlement, yes you can make a village or town in every single region but it feels off and not a very good aesthetic to have multiple large settlements but it feels like you kind of have to in order to produce enough of whatever resource you need so you can send it to your other settlements. It seems like you have to constantly expand in order to cover or unlock certain necessary development points. Which speaking of, you should gain more dev points for your settlement.
Number two, you have to "barter" with your other regions. Pretty much you make a trade post in each region and than you send one of a type of resource and you have to receive another resource. In certain regions and cases you might not even have a surplus at all to barter with. I was hoping for a Stronghold 2 style trading cart where you can just send resources periodically between each region without needing to get something in return. This way you can manage your settlements more closely and make up for each ones shortfalls on your own once you get enough regions and not have to rely on the trading post in every settlement.

Combat/Game modes
The combat is surprisingly pretty good, but archers feel too weak, they barely do any damage and they also die extremely quickly if caught in melee, like almost instantly. Just getting melee units is the way to go. Will be cool to eventually get mounted soldiers for your retinue. Speaking of your retinue comes out of your personal money which as mentioned above is difficult to manage. With that in mind mercenaries are nearly out of the question because of the above as well.
It's likely you will lose your first few battles which is fine, looting doesn't just outright kill you but if poorly timed will make you suffer which I think is fine because unlike some medieval city builders, you wont outright just die and not be able to come back because of it which is great, however there really needs to be a "rebuild all" button.
The Baron guy in the restoring the peace scenario needs to start with less regions and take them less often. He also has way too many soldiers meaning that by the time you get enough influence to claim a neutral region he has held them all already for a while then will come to claim yours. Then you have to manage your soldiers and equipment effectively in order to have enough troops or mercenaries to constantly fight. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the other problems listed.

Bugs
I am not sure if this is a bug but even with available marketplaces and available surplus of resources, households will complain that they are short on things and so you are unable to upgrade unless you stare at the house waiting for it to show that they have all resources necessary so you can upgrade.
Pathing on units is not very good around the cities, some areas they seem to have no issues making their ways around streets or buildings but others they will have a clear path but will refuse to attempt to path around a building or down a street. On the open terrain there is no issues it appears.
Sometimes it feels like unassigned families won't go build even when all resources are set in a building with high priority. They seem to just stand around.

I will update this review as I discover more balance issues or as they are resolved to help let people know how development is going. Thank you to the developers for making a great game I can tell I will have hundreds of hours in eventually.

9.5/10

This is the best game of 2023 and probably one of the best games released in the past 10 years if not of all time.

The story is just absolutely amazing, the amount of choices you can make really does have an effect on the overall story and endings. You can definitely get multiple playthroughs in and still not have seen or changed every major event. You will also find yourself theory crafting and wanting to change up your class or character and even starting a new one just so you can have different companions and lineups to see all of their stories and have a balanced party. Multiclassing and changing them all up is possible as well. You simply cannot "do everything" in a single playthrough. You really need to start a new character and choose different options to see different potential endings or to not miss out on major events because you messed up. It really does make you want to keep playing and trying more. While some characters are unlikeable in the beginning you start to really grow attached to them as you figure out their backgrounds.

Take the time to search around a lot, at the very least explore all the unexplored parts of the map but don't focus so much on trying to do every little thing. You will have a chance to do it on a different character that makes sense in another playthrough.

Only issues is while it runs well on good hardware its as if the game slowly breaks down and there starts to become weird lag towards the end of act 2 and in act 3. I'm 3 playthroughs in, only my 3rd one is modded and every time by act 3 there becomes weird lag and delay. Saving and reloading the game helps but about 2-3 hours in it starts again and you basically have to wait it out because you can't move or interact with anything or save.

Otherwise the game is a storytelling masterpiece, one that all of the AAA games in the past 10 years cannot touch.

7/10 – NO STORY SPOILER REVIEW

I give Starfield a 7/10. This might be either too generous considering my issues with the game, or not enough for some. Starfield is like a combination of everything that makes Fallout, Skyrim, and Oblivion great and not so great. If this seems like some nitpickiness read the conclusion at the end.

THE BAD
The performance is awful, I'm in 1440p with a 5950x and a 3080ti and I barely get 50fps in New Atlantis on HIGH, with other games I am able to get over 100 maxed out. At most I get 80ish fps in certain interiors and outside of the cities.
The graphics are just OK for maybe a game that came out in 2018 or so, this mostly applies to the outside. Most outside buildings, textures, shadows etc, in cities or on planets look flat.
Loading screens; they are fast but some shops and buildings you have to load into and others you don't in the same city?
Animations are definitely dated and meh, doesn't feel too great to look at people running.
Characters walk faster than you, but slower than your run.... again.....
They do that awkward run up to you and stare into your soul, or simply get in the way.
You cannot fly down to planets, it breaks the immersion not being able to directly choose where to land like in NMS, and you cannot just fly planet to planet. You essentially open your map, click the planet, jump to planet, are now in space, open map again, then choose to land on planet (some areas you can directly fast travel through but that's not the point) This includes things in the same system or even on the same planet.
The UI is absolutely terrible, I won't go too in depth but the amount of different buttons you need to press to get in or out of the map or inventory for example is annoying, and there are details that are just missing from a lot of menus or hidden behind options you need to press.
Shops are always out of money and take too long to regenerate resources.
Resources and other things weigh way too much. Ships don't go fast when you add more storage and it becomes frustrating, and you need outposts to store if you want to store a lot but also need skill research.
Ship storage automatically transfers to your home ship, you can't just have a ship specifically for a storage hauler, then one for combat, without first emptying your resources into an outpost or selling them.
Not enough perk points, if you want to unlock every skill it takes 328 points, there is no level cap but you level really slow. At the time of review I'm level 25 at 45 hours.
You either have to wait a long time and a lot of gameplay if you want to unlock everything, especially certain things that feel important to the gameplay and resource gathering like outposts, ships, and spaceship modifications.
Not enough decorations or outpost options, and the actual plopping and building can be a bit wonky.
Certain places just don't feel proper in the world, like Akila City, it's a dump, and I don't think I would mind if it was big like New Atlantis but still run down with less sky scrapers, as that seems more appropriate considering the lore, but it doesn't seem like the Freestar capital, rather just some frontier city you might run into. Neon seems to be a bit more appropriate city when picturing Freestar in my opinion.
Enemies are bullet sponges, I guess unless you get a lot of skills (which again you need points but are always lacking cause you also want to put them into other things) then you might be able to make up but they just don't want to die.
Enemies are idiots, I would rather have enemies that are more intelligent with higher damage, but also take more damage, would make the game more difficult but also interesting in my opinion.
Last but not least, character creation is ok overall but it's annoying. No matter what I couldn't get rid of the sunken cheeks on my character. There were a million options for some things that no one cares about but not enough for others. I get were wearing space helmets for half the gameplay but where is the long hair?
Seems they want all the women to look like men and it's frustrating because the hair disappears in a helmet anyways, women in the military keep long hair even in combat roles so long as it's put up properly but you know when they are off duty they can have it long and this decision just felt sexist to not have enough feminine customization and features.
Afflictions are annoying, there are too many and too many things you need to deal with them unless you go waste time and money going to a doctor, just doesn't feel like a great system.

The Good

The interiors, and clutter in the game is fantastic, it all feels like people actually exist and live in these places when you go inside them, that includes shops, ships, generated dungeons, etc.
The “dungeons” are really good, whether it be caves, bandit hideouts, etc, they are just fun and have plenty to loot, but they tend to repeat a lot as you go on since they are randomly generated from a pool of them.
The lockpicking system is fun, maybe a bit grindy but it is actually a cool system I can get behind for once.
Ship combat is interesting and fun to do, makes you think about what systems you need to power and how you want to approach a situation.
Smuggling is great and worth it if you manage to find the resources and where to get shielding for it.
The quests are all interesting and will bring you everywhere, with a full bounty and mission system.
The main questline and other major questlines all seem to be very interesting and I enjoy them so far.
There are surprisingly very few bugs and none very game breaking that I have run into.
Ship building is great, feels good to be able to customize a ship, albeit there could be more pieces and going to different shipyards is annoying for specific pieces, would be nice to just unlock once.
The guns are all very cool and high quality, I wish there was a bit more variety but they all feel great to shoot and are interesting.
The customization of armor and weapons is great, it actually feels like your gun when you edit or add something.
I think the entire backstory and lore is pretty cool and relatively well written. Albeit just as in all Bethesda games, the lore is bigger than the game makes it feel.
The spacesuits and clothes are all high quality and look great, I wish there was a few more sleeker suits that had a military focus with how they look but the quality and details is more than I expected.
Anywhere you land on a planet there is something to do, resources to gather, dungeons to crawl or outposts and small settlements, even with the lack of biodiversity on the planets they still feel alive and interesting.
Even with the lack of points the actual skill tree is one of their more unique and well thought out trees in probably any RPG I have seen. While I'm not a huge fan of the specialization type focusing, you really can roleplay how you want and build your character accordingly.
The way you manage your outposts with gathering resources automatically and crew is really good, and also being able to transfer your resources to other bases makes it to where you can have a primary home and make outposts strictly for gathering and refining which seems like a great way to make money or build off them and make more outposts.

Conclusion - Much of this can be resolved with mods yes, but it shouldn't need to be. This is a 2016-2017 great game, and with BG3 showing up companies with how they can release a full feature complete and refined game, this just disappoints, even with how fun and replayable it will be. It's not up to the community to fix your game or add features that should be there from the start. Do better Bethesda. If you want an RPG go for BG3 instead, 10$ less than this. If you're unsure about this wait for a sale, they don't deserve 70$ for an unfinished unrefined game. If you want a fun space game and have money to spare then go for it, you will still have some fun.

Almost 50 hours in 5 days and 5 patches in 5 days. I don't get the whole thing where people were crashing insane amounts, maybe it's because I have a good PC? I only crashed maybe 3-4 times when doing very specific things on the first day. Also had to avoid a few quests the first couple days because of some bugs that weren't crash related that would just not work or break the quest. Second day I crashed maybe twice and I have not crashed since then. I would definitely not listen to the people complaining about bugs or crashes as the devs have been hard at work taking out the big ones hitting everyone.

If you like M&B or you simply want to be a lord that rules a land and commands an army then this game is for you!