[Starfield] A mixed bag game and platinum. Review and Tips!
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The Good:
- If you're a fan of Fallout and/or Skyrim this will feel right up your ally. Particularly if you like the space theme, the closest fit I can think of would be the universe of the Expanse with the gameplay of Fallout.
- The game has 5 main storylines that you play through. The main campaign and 4 main faction stories. These storylines are independently good and have fun missions and unique rewards. They let you role-play entirely different things.
Main story - sci-fi powers, universal mystery, meta conflict.
United Colonies - space marine style conflict, fight aliens/bio weapons.
Freestar rangers - space cop/detective.
Ryujin industries - corporate espionage, stealth.
Crimson Fleet - pirate or double agent. Treasure hunt.
I had genuine fun playing through these campaigns and a few of the random other side stories were actually good, "the crucible" being a standout.
The Bad:
- While the individual story arcs are great, there is very little cohesive storyline that ties it all together or allows your actions to meaningfully impact the other campaigns. It makes the game feel like a series of short stories set in the same universe rather than a large novel.
- The companion friendship and romance system is very bland and the companion missions are minor and uninteresting.
- The two factors above makes the game feel generic, a bit more like Mass Effect Andromeda rather than Mass Effect 2.
- there is a lot of time spent in menus and loadscreens as you travel between planets and zones.
- whilst there were no major crashes or bugs encountered (June 26), the game still had a few bugs, especially NPC pathing or positioning ones which were occasionally annoying.
The potential deal breaker!
- The platinum experience was actually quite good until the end and you could get all trophies outside the level 100
from normally playing and enjoying the game and then cleaning up a few things at the end. The clean up is actually quite easy as you get powers and resources by endgame that makes the trophy objectives much easier than they would seem at the start of the game.
- However, with everyother trophy collected and playing the game thoroughly i was still at level 44!
- The leveling following level 50 is just absolutely abysmal with increasing exp requirements that the game is just not good at providing. There is no real xp scaling in NG+ and i think if you were to play normally to level from the low 40s to 100, it would likely take 100+ hours and unless you are fixated on this game would be super painful. I dont think the leveling was ever playtested as this just makes the platinum horrible. If the level 50 trophy was the endpoint, Id say that would have been a solid target to encourage you to try NG+.
The Tips/Advice:
- if you're going to do this platinum, you should accept beforehand that you will have a fun 60-70hr game if you're into the genre and gamestyle....then you have an absolute chore to level from 40-100.
- The semi work around (what I did). One of the highest exp activities per minute you can do is crafting. This would also be extremely painful to manually do as it is just pushing buttons on a menu endlessly. You can however automate this process.
Build an outpost on Bessel-3b, in the intersection of the mountains and rocky desert biomes. This will give your outpost access to both Iron and Aluminium simultaneously. Build as many extractors and storage as possible. You want to aim to have around 5k of both resources built up to make the automation effective. Due to planetary factors time on bessel 3 moves moves faster than universal time so sleeping for a few hours equates to sleeping for days on the planet and resources accumulate rapidly.
Build an industrial workbench and bed in the outpost. Have a maxed out companion with you for +15% exp boost after sleeping. The plan will be to craft a lot of Adaptive Frames.
Now. Setup PS remote play on your phone and if on Android, download Autoclicker or use the native app on iPhone.
You need to program a 3 button pattern while your character is at the workbench, press X once on Adaptive frame. Hold left D pad button for ~7 secs to max the amount. Press X to confirm. I suggest around 400ms delay between each actions to account for any lag or connectivity issues.
Leave the exp farm running while you watch a show or as in my case, the world cup.
Depending on how much storage you built, you'll need to manually supervise to make your character sleep once every 7-10 mins to renew the resources.
Even with this method, the automated farm requires intermittent supervision for several hours to level to 100.
I'll leave early game platinum Tips/quality of life in the comments.