Recent reviews by Khalis

Don't heed the fanboys, there is a remarkable amount of shilling for this game, and I notice a lot of the positive Steam reviews are one word or phrase, or even duplicates of each other.

TLDR; Starfield has all the hallmarks of lazy Bethesda design with none of the charm or soul of their older games. If you take the procedural world of No Man's Sky, combine it with the combat of Fallout, and then subtract 80% of the meaningful content and design attention from either of those games, you'll have Starfield. Top it off with an insultingly poor UI that forces you to constantly fight against it to actually play the game.

I'm putting my interface rant at the top, because as Steam users, there's a fairly good chance you'll be playing on keyboard and mouse, and I want to be sure that you get this warning first. Bethesda did NOT make this game for PCs, despite what they or anyone else says. Starfield was made for consoles, and it shows in every single aspect of the UI design. Starfield has the distinction of employing the single most unintuitive and tedious UI I have ever seen in an RPG, and I am well acquainted with interfaces that are, charitably put, rough. Menus are locked to 30 (30!) fps, which any sane observer will note is completely unacceptable. The main menu is radial and annoying to utilize with a mouse and keyboard. Every menu, from the main menu, to inventory, to ship editing, has SO much wasted space that Bethesda inevitably uses for some silly cosmetic purpose like showing asset models, instead of displaying actual gameplay information. On top of that, information is organized in a nonsensical way, separating relevant bits of data onto different parts of the screen, or totally hiding information from the player. Keybinds between similar menus are different for seemingly no reason, and in the menus and game itself, pressing a key and holding it function as separate commands. These two innocuous "design" choices really mess with the player's ability to develop muscle memory for the menus and end up burning a lot of time on accomplishing routine UI tasks. The map system, where you will spend much of your time is a total mess. There is no minimap or local map to speak of beyond a dotted grid that shows no information besides the relative position of POIs and there is no map whatsoever for interior spaces or cities.

Starfield is poorly optimized (another signal that the PC release is an afterthought), and for the poor performance, looks barely as good or even worse than games five years or more older. Starfield's lighting and color saturation is a mess, so a lot of objects and structures look overly reflective or blurry. The antialiasing is primitive, so distant objects have choppy edges and combine to make a game that looks VERY unimpressive in 2023. On max settings, my machine barely breaks 90 fps, on fairly high end AMD hardware (7700X CPU/7900XT GPU/64gb RAM), which is who Bethesda partnered with to optimize their game. On Premium Edition release day, I crashed to desktop within the first 60 seconds of starting my game, and then once about every 10 minutes for several hours afterwards. To credit AMD/Bethesda, there was a GPU driver update specifically for Starfield that very day, and after installing it I haven't suffered a single crash. Still though, that's an awful first impression for a game with the budget and development time of Starfield. I have heard that the game is very unstable on Nvidia hardware, which I am willing to believe, so if that's what you have, be sure to look into whether the game will actually run for you. Loading screens are constant, as all building and ship interiors are instanced. My machine runs everything on NVME drives, so the duration of these loads is very short and doesn't really break my flow personally, but I can see how players with older or slower drives will really chafe under this aspect of the game's construction.

Bugs. I can already hear people ask, "It's a Bethesda game, what do you expect?" Better. I expect better. Bethesda has been in this business for a long time now, and a company with their resources and experience has no excuse for releasing such an unpolished game. Starfield is clearly built on the bones of their previous titles, which in addition to robbing it of a sense of identity, means it has all the problems of every Bethesda game since the Big Bang. Enemies will fail to register your presence even when standing directly in front of you, or alternatively, will be able to shoot you through doors, walls, and floors. Menu inputs won't be recognized and take several seconds of waiting or additional button presses to actually function. Textures will glitch and pop in/out at weird times for apparently no reason. I'm tired of people making excuses for Bethesda because this is their status quo and they've been using what is more or less the same engine for 20 years. Poor code and shoddy QA should not be a studio's calling card. They should have sunset this engine a decade ago. It shows, and it makes me fear for TES 6.

The scope of this game is an illusion formed by copy and pasted assets and populated by terribly coded NPCs. Their behavior is rudimentary, even by the standards of 15+ years ago. Space exploration in Starfield is a falsehood. Travel is accomplished either on foot, or through fast travel options from the map menu. Your ship is simply a place to offload your inventory and do some crafting. There is no atmospheric flight, so almost all of the time you interact with your ship it's on the ground. The gunplay is serviceable, and the audio design is pretty good. But after so many years and hundreds of millions of dollars, a scifi reskin of Fallout with laughably low-effort worldbuilding is way less than customers deserve.

This is the cozy shopkeeper simulator you've been looking for. No forced dungeon crawling segments, just you, your garden, your cauldron, and your customers.

Smash TV meets Castlevania. The screenshots don't do the gameplay justice and it has tons of unlockables to keep you playing. This is easily the best $5 you'll spend on Steam.

TLDR: If you've never played Rome and this is your only way to get it, then the remaster is okay. But if you have the original, stick with that. The updated models are not worth the added hassle of a terrible interface.

== The Good ==
The unit models look great. They are improved versions of the originals, the devs didn't go overboard trying to make it look like a different game, just a prettier version of the one we love.

The remaster is more moddable and stable on some peoples' machines. I've had no issues, though I can tell that's a mixed bag depending on your machine.

== The Bad ==
Pathfinding feels worse, considerably worse, especially with skirmisher units.

The campaign map is hard to look at, both because of the new terrain color palette and the minimap; the faction map colors are changed and can be hard to differentiate.

And then here's the big one... The choices made for the UI are absolutely atrocious. The original UI was perfectly serviceable but the remaster made it worse in every single way. Some units have near identical cards (Pontic light/heavy cavalry), and every action requires more mouse clicks to accomplish.
-Building structures is harder.
-Training units is harder.
-Using agents is harder.
-Managing settlement finances is harder, you can't even see settlement income without opening a menu.
Every single change made to the UI was for the worse. As is, it's useable with some adjustment but very unenjoyable and totally unnecessary. Additionally, a lot of the flavorful images for events and actions have been changed or removed and I see no reason to just toss that artwork away.

Not even addressing gameplay, as long as this game supports paid mods, I will never recommend it.

It's painfully obvious that this was released before it was ready. Everything is a buggy mess; the music rarely plays, the menus clip and glitch, hitboxes are buggy, the world map lags terribly, and load times are utterly atrocious. I can't be bothered to comment on the gameplay, simply because playing this game for any length of time is too frustrating because nothing works properly. I've played Early Access titles with more polish than this. It pains me to type this because I can tell there may be a good game in here *somewhere* but alas, you get graded on the product that you released, and this one is very poor.