Starfield Journal 2: Mechanics of Speed and Inefficiency
Fourteen hours deeper, more irritated with fast travel, leveling, and loot.
First, a link to Starfield Journal 1
When I began writing this, I was 41 hours into Starfield. I have oscillated several times between excited and bored. I am encouraged by some little of what it has to say about the nature of institutions, but it isn’t composed or assembled in a fashion to make any jarring observations. It hasn’t failed because that’s not its aim.
But one thing that’s really been bugging me is a technical issue and I’d like y’all to help me work it out. I find the leveling system deeply unsatisfying.
Now, I just fired Fallout 3 and New Vegas up the other night to work on another piece, so I can admit that the gunplay in Starfield – which never much bothered me in those – is incredible by comparison (though it has to be without VATS). But I don’t think that consciously needed to come at the expense of a coherent or robust leveling system. It probably isn’t an intended correlation, it’s just that the improvement of one and the subtraction of the other both contribute to a style of building immersion that sloughs off some of what’s intrinsic to an old-school RPG.
My instinct here is to compare the leveling system in Starfield with the revamped skill tree in Cyberpunk 2077, where you can map out your build for V ahead of time (and now can respect at any time), shape your playstyle based on the skills and perks you want to use, and where you gain skill points and adjacent action bonuses based on developing different skills. But we’ll get into that game soon enough. Starfield’s skill tree issues are slightly baffling just because you can contrast them with its studio predecessors and be disappointed.
In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, doing certain actions (discovering new places, combat, picking locks, certain dialog options, hacking computers, competing objectives, and such) give you experience. When you leveled up, you got a set number of skill points to distribute. Every two levels, you get a point to put into perks, which would modify damage output, experience acquisition, dialog choices, or augment skills; one even allowed you to augment attributes (character building blocks which affect skill acumen).
In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Skyrim, your skills improve by using them, and you can add feats that do things adjacent to what perks do in Fallout. In Fallout 4, perks and skills were combined. Here, they’re even more tightly woven to poor effect.
Every new level, you pick a skill, which unlocks a challenge in addition to making your character more proficient at some aspect of gameplay. When you complete the challenge, you do not unlock the next level of the skill. You unlock the opportunity to buy the next level of the skill at time of next level up. Simultaneously, completing the challenge does not provide you with any experience that gets you closer to leveling up. There are no attributes that modify how many skills you can augment every level. You get one chance to upgrade a skill every so many thousand experience points. There is also the oft-remarked-upon fact that some basic gameplay mechanics (like using a jet pack or performing a combat slide) are locked behind specific skills, but that would be less annoying if you got more of them. Now, the Souls games only give you one skill point per level, but that’s tied into a specific sort of combat based ARPG gameplay which also feeds into distinct builds as well as experience points being the same as market currency. There is a coherent system at work there. Here, it seems Bethesda is continuing to pull away from the more ‘traditional’ CRPG style of character development (i.e., derived from DnD-style tabletop rolling games), but has created a system that feels like it’s half-stepping in an attempt to be hardcore.
What the limited points *could* do is encourage you to shape a specific build (like in their previous games, or in Elden Ring, or in Cyberpunk 2077) but the gap in time between fulfilling a skill’s challenge requirements and getting to upgrade it discourage specialization. Come to think of it, much of the skill development feels like papering over design flaws/philosophical intentions which create the non-cohesive gameplay experience. For instance, I’ve upgraded my Grav Drive skill (Astrodynamics), which makes it so space travel takes less time as I’m jumping between systems. There are two obvious problems with that. For one thing, just on a spiritual level, I should not want to skip space travel in your space travel game. I should be excited every time I do it. But it feels tedious because it is a matter of selecting through menus rather than active control of the ship. Which leads to the other obvious problem – this can all be circumvented. To fly to a planet, you need to go to your ship, take off, open the star map from the cockpit in orbit, chart your grav jumps across however many stops, wait to be scanned, fight pirates or bounty hunters, and then arrive at your destination, right? Wrong. Once you’ve done that once, you can fast travel anywhere, directly, without waiting. You can fast travel from the lodge on Jemison to the Empty Nest on Akila without walking anywhere. You are not consistently required to attempt to fly in the game about flying a spaceship. Again, this wouldn’t matter if flying was fun; I usually do It for the immersion anyway because the fast travel to that extent makes me wonder why they bothered with an open world. But there was little reason for me to upgrade my Grav Drive abilities or the Grav Drive on my ship, now, knowing that. Of course, you can argue that the unlocking of any ability in my game can be reduced to revealing to a player an inherent capability of the protagonist. The point is that you should feel a sense of accomplishment when you build up your character, not annoyance.
Just to the Souls comparison, the combat focus and renowned attention-based difficulty make it very clear how different your character plays between skill points. A minor upgrade can feel like a major difference. In Starfield, not so much.
This actually also ties into the loot system where the drops are plentiful, and you’ll come across “rare” and “legendary” tagged items that are inferior in practice to less lauded equipment. For example, I bought some cool-looking and effective armor before a mission, then got offered a free very similar set along that mission which is marked “legendary,” has some cool bonuses, but has lower resistances to damage and some environmental factors.
Is the loot all just for selling? Is my digital hoarding stopping me from success?
Much to my chagrin, if not dismay, I am enjoying the game. After writing the bulk of this, I opened Starfield up hoping to jolt my memory about the loot problem. Then I found myself playing for two hours, clearing out an abandoned mine for an artifact, getting a power at a temple, overhearing a romantic couple discuss the difficulties of working at competing businesses, getting my crewmates to open up to me, selling a bunch of overstocks, browsing potential new ships, and picking up a freelance interviewing gig for my reporter friend at the Settled Systems News Network.
I think what might bother me most about the tendency toward fast travel in this game is that it makes me less interested in slowing down and luxuriating in what feels like a well-crafted world.
The surface maps still suck, though.