*S*T*A*R*F*I*E*L*D* / Starfield

Oh you guys

I love charging at enemies and then melee'ing them with this badboy. Goes with a right old crunch as they double over

Tooled around in Akira on some main missions with the Waylon Jennings crewmate. Dayum, if he isn’t a tall glass of water in that parched poncho. I do like that you can poke fun at him a bit via the dialogue options.

It’s not the top quality Sony smashing blockbuster Xbox were hoping for but it’s quite a sticky 7/10 for me. It pleases and frustrates in equal measure and *just* comes out on the right side of that equation, just.

For me it's the most absorbing game, and therefore one of the best games I have played this year.  The only negative is that I have lost my life to it and I am not sure when I am likely to get it back.

I was looking forward to BG3 which I already bought on the PS5, but that may have to wait until next year now.  I think I'll probably need a rest after Starfield.

honestly no idea, i haven't even been checking the stats of weapons I've just been trying them all out.

I decided to pause all other mission stuff and do a constellation survey mission, more so to get my head around the game mechanics even more. It was off to the left of Sol on the starmap and I had to go through another 2 planet system to get there. Well I lost 3 hours on that 2 planet system just scouring through its secrets and surveying the whole system to 100%, 2 of which had to be on a single base alone.

This base was very generic, until it wasn't.... After finding an arc rifle with bash perks I was charging around killing pirates and looting when all of a sudden the I heard really loud mechanical noise followed by the boost roar as if a ship was landing. I genuinely thought my game was glitching with all this noise.

I found:- Is loot random or curated?
.

At this point I'm a heavy dude. Andreja is full (not like that), I'm over weight and I've no more space on my ship. Decided to head back to Atlantis to investigate upgrades. I couldn't afford a new ship but, could I build in some upgrades? Yes, yes I can. I've added 4 new storage modules onto a new hab section. Too heavy, needs upgraded grav drive then needed an upgraded reactor. Now needs more engines to move it's ass so doubled those up. Hmmmm, too much junk in the trunk, added 2 more landing gear at the back ... and success!!! All systems nominal. I've since renamed it Chonky Boi!

I finally, finally pushed onto my destination and landed in 'the hills'. 2 hours later I've surveyed all 3 traits, 4/7 flora & fauna before finally coming across an old colony war military base. I left it there as it was 2am and the place was large.

I think loot is mostly random, though faction and level influenced. You've got more chance of better loot from the bigger reward chests but it's still RNG

I don't quite get the crew number listed against your ship. Pretty sure my Frontier says it has room for 2, but I've got 6 aboard…

Haha, just seen that followers have infinite grenades if you just give them one (oooer)

Infinite gun ammo also needs you to give them 1 ammo, which I somehow missed. (think they eventually pick up ammo, which is why mine worked)
Give them the weapon with the rarest ammo like a grenade launcher and away you go!

Even if the loot is predefined, the perks, etc, will be RNG. You can save, pick something up, reload, pick it up again and get different perks, etc. People have been savescumming everything to get "ideal" (or as close as) drops.

I've been watching a few ship builder vids on YT and some of the things that people are building are very impressive externally - they look great. Internally they're a mess of random rooms and ladders that lead you all over the place, which makes them functionally complicated.
It would take a lot of skill to build something that combines both. I like the idea of playing with this a bit.

I might actually come back to Starfield next year. I'm going to build a new PC shortly, which would give some months of bug fixes and mods to hopefully improve the experience quite a bit, and it'll just perform better than on Xbox.

Finding those special areas on a planet is also necessary if you want to 100% complete the survey and have sellable “survey data” added to your inventory. But it’s only a few thousand- so maybe it’s just for the thrill of exploration.

Another thing I'd like them to patch in (after allowing you to decorate interiors) is the ability to change the colour of clothes. Maybe not all clothes, if that's too hard, but it'd be good if some spacesuits had, say, a primary and secondary colour that you could change.

Basically I'm turning it into Animal Crossing.

Like giving rocket launchers and Spartan lasers to your marine buddies in Halo, and loading up a warthog...

Weapons have a base damage per weapon type and can come in five tiers, no prefix, calibrated, reinforced, advanced, and superior, each tier has a higher base damage than the one below. They will appear as you level up, but it's not the same level for all weapons, I'm level 58 and see superior starting weapons but later guns like Hardtargets only drop as calibrated/reinforced.

Certain legendary modifiers can increase base damage.

Workbench mods can also improve base damage, like modding an automatic weapon to semi automatic.

I tend to mod everything semi auto since you do more damage per bullet, a litteral better bang for your buck.

I really need to get weapon/suit modding abilities on the go, but as a lowly level 15 or so, tend to be chucking everything at lockpick/stealth/persuade/load carrying and some pistol/ballistics skills currently.

I hope to eventually bump up some other useful perks soon enough.