Recent reviews by Rellim

I have played this game for a bit now, and was fairly happy with the nice curated content at the first 30 hours or so. It is a nice introductory phase of the game. What surprised me though is that I never got any incentive to play this game with someone else. "Where is the multiplayer?", I thought to myself. So I continued with the main story and side quests, doing most of it alone.

Then I got a friend to join in and together we built a few bases. Unfortunately I still didn't find an incentive to do quests together, as all of it can be done alone. We were rarely online together so this still ended up being a single player experience. By now the sietch I joined is completely void of other players. Even in the deep desert it is rare to see another player.

When I got to the deep desert for the first time, I was susprised by how forgiving it is. I expected a full pvp zone with instant death, harsher environmental threats etc. Instead the pvp border has been moved so far up you can easily solo all the highest tier resources without ever going into the pvp zone. Make the whole desert a pvp zone, people will complain, but that's their problem. Players should group up or prepare better.

There should be a clearer distiction between solo and multiplayer content though. I guess technically you should be allowed to do everything on your own if you want, but right now most of the content is balanced in a way that it is suitable for both single and multiplayer. This makes the content somewhat stale. Some content should really not be possible to do alone. Again, people might complain, but you can't have a multiplayer game without this.

When you play this game so carefully there is a higher chance you die due to bugs than to legitimate causes. This is incredibly frustrating. Close after launch, I would have overlooked this easier, but by now, this should have been ironed out.

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Minor issues:

There is a surprising lack of HDR monitor support. For a game with scenarios ranging between bright desert sun and dark underground caves, HDR sounds fairly logical to have.

The building mechanics is overall pretty nice. The only minor issue for me is the lack of something like 'spiral staircases'. Using regular inclines sometimes takes up way too much space. Sometimes you want to build more compact. And ladders look like ♥♥♥♥.

I was a fan of the classic dune games so I appreciate the fact that there was an in-game music channel with classics. Unfortunately, this was another dissapointment as there are only a handful of tracks. Even those are missing some more Frank Klepachi love.

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After all this, llet me list a few things I find quite impressive in this game.

✅Good story
✅Immersive world
✅Good quests
✅Good crafting mechanics
✅Good building mechanics

Listing the cons:
❌Unincentivized multiplayer
❌Bugs still present
❌Too forgiving end-game
❌No HDR support

I would still recommend the game, but would only give it a minor 6/10.

Very nice classic RPG, decent story, challenging, nice range of options to finish a quest. Immersive (albeit small) open world, atmospheric, especially when you see the npc's having dedicated cycles. A lot of good work went into making this a living world, where npc's remember your actions. For instance, when you kill someone on the street, bystanders will remember this and stop talking to you, which can ruin some quests. This is an immersion level which even some modern games lack.

I was surprised the game has full controller support, this makes it a perfect game for the Steam Deck. If you're playing this on PC, you can slightly improve the graphics by forcing FXAA in the Nvidia control panel (the game has no AA otherwise).

My only con is that the combat is a little clunky. Thankfully you can put anything on the hotbar, including potions and such, but using them locks you into an animation cycle, which can feel a little frustrating when you're being attacked. Also npc's can dodge lightning fast, which sometimes feels a little too fast. Also using spells is a little inconsistent as using the hotkey sometimes instantly 'unequips' the spell.

I don't really understand the mixed reception of this game, mostly critiquing the lack of story depth. But a deep story is usually not something gamers pay attention to anyway. So many just skip all the cutscenes.

That said, this game indeed doesn't really have a very deep story, but I don't think it needs it. The world is vast, rich, immersive, visually very impressive. I love just running through the forests, finding new types of flora and fauna. The world is also built with a fair amount of verticality, giving the game elements of parkour.

You play as a na'vi that has been in a human stasis for a while, requiring you to learn all the ways, so you're basically a version of Jake Sully. You go through similar tests and challenges, so much is similar to the first movie. If you liked the Avatar movie, you will certainly like this game.

A few cons I must point out.
HDR is supported, but its implementation is poor. In HDR mode, the black level has been lifted significantly, causing the game to never reach true black. Even if you fix this with some ini tinkering, it still doesn't look as I expected. Furthermore, everything in the shadows has a tendency to cause banding (you see noticeable lines where levels of brightness jump), especially noticeable on the little "loading" icon in the bottom right corner of the screen. I find this really sad, since a game like Avatar, with its beautiful forest that involve a lot of bioluminescent objects could have benefited greatly from properly calibrated HDR implementation. So I went back to playing this in SDR.

Performance is very demanding. In my first few hours, I had several hard pc crashes, bsod even. Checked the temperature logs, that wasn't the problem. Luckily, this didn't happen again after the introduction phase of the game. Also weirdly, the game taxes my GPU, but my CPU is never highly used. The game has DLSS, but weirdly enough you can only use frame generation when using FSR. Luckily you can use the steam application "Lossless Scaling" to still do frame generation.

Pick it up at a discount, as it is a nice game, but it is not worth the full price.

By now most of the issues have been ironed out, the game now runs quite well, looks really great. The world design is very immersive. Maybe for the first time, I have enjoyed a single player RPG as much since Skyrim or CP77. The first season of the game, I spent most of my time doing just side quests and collecting things around the castle, this part of the game can be quite engaging as well.
Encourage yourself to walk towards your destination instead of fast travel / flying over it, as you can find many random interesting things along the way. This is the hallmark of a good open world RPG.

There is one con for me. I have an OLED HDR monitor and can not recommend enabling HDR in this game. I cannot get it to be properly calibrated, the overall atmosphere of the scenes look better in SDR mode.

Since they've added frame generation, the value of this product has greatly increased, over the upscaling methods you could already use. At the beginning, it was sort of awkward with lots of artifacts. But now, it's quite good and stable, and you hardly notice any artifacts. I use it quite often to give my game that extra frame boost to make use of my 165 hz qd oled monitor. I like that the devs consider all angles people may play a game, including HDR support / multi monitor support / cursor clipping, etc.

Very atmospheric and fun experience. Great visuals. Lovely music and immersive sound design. Some of the "puzzles" are quite obvious, occasionally they can get repetitive, but there is always some variance to them to make them unique. The combat is easy to learn but still challenging enough, especially at boss encounters.

A large portion of the stuff you collect in the game is practically worthless since you can only use it to buy cosmetic stuff for your 'companion' spirits. There is nothing wrong with this, but it's good to be aware of it. At least there is no paywall behind it.

I played this on controller at first, later on keyboard and mouse. I cannot recommend playing it with a controller. It handicaps you quite a lot because aiming is very hard.

Overall great game, surprisingly fun.

Starfield is the illusion of planetary exploration duct-taped together by a thousand loading screens and a strong desire to waste so much of your time. In previous games, fast travel was optional. In this game, its forced down your throat.