Come and chat all things Starfield with us in today's RPS Game Club liveblog

Hello folks! We'll be kicking off our Starfield liveblog in about ten minutes time. Bring your warm beverage of choice!

All right, all right, let's get this space party started. How did everyone find Starfield? Did you love it? Hate it? Punt it into the black hole of your back catalogue?

As you might have seen from what I wrote earlier on today, I want to like Starfield, but find it provides very little opportunities to do so. The combat is all right, the NPCs mildly endearing, but I can't say I could muster much excitement for either its story or many of its sidequests.

With apologies to James, of course, our sole Starfield liker on the team.

I'm getting a lot of that today.

I know you like its zero-G gunfights, James - was there anything else about Starfield that you particularly enjoyed/thought was actually all right, haha?

For one thing also don't have as much of a problem with the quests as a lot of other folk seem to have - numerically, yes, a lot of them are simple fetch jobs, but many others have that unexpected escalation that I always appreciate in BethRPGs. The kind where you grab a note off a dead pirate and end up raiding the lair of Space Batman, or you're ordered to report to a commander on your first day of rangering and end up having to sprint out of an disintegrating spaceship full of exploding ATMs.

I did the Space Batman one and was quite underwhelmed by it all, but the disintegrating spaceship one sounds cool, where does that one kick off?

(It's also entirely possible that I have simply forgotten how to have fun in a Bethesda game and I am secretly a cold, dead husk inside...)

I don't buy the combat being crap either. Even with a basic boostpack you can get super-duper mobile and aggressive - I abandoned my initial stealth sniping build because it was usually more fun to launch over railings to shotgun people in the chest. I'm always being fed a healthy variety of new, viable guns as well, so I have good reason to mix up my loadout.

This might be my problem. I've found a quite powerful long range laser gun and because I'm boring I just sit and snipe enemies from afar, haha. Maybe I should try one of the many shotguns I've picked up next time I go back in!

Katharine Castle says: I did the Space Batman one and was quite underwhelmed by it all, but the disintegrating spaceship one sounds cool, where does that one kick off?

That's the penultimate mission in the Crimson Fleet chain, aka the one where you can choose to stay undercover or become a true pirate, aka the token mission chain that caters to psychopaths.

I also did that terrible cheaty thing of stealing Constellation's really super duper good space suit down in the basement of the Lodge by pinching it out of the tiny crack in the display case, so I haven't actually needed to engage much in the whole upgrading your suit / boost pack rhythms on it.

James Archer says: That's the penultimate mission in the Crimson Fleet chain, aka the one where you can choose to stay undercover or become a true pirate, aka the token mission chain that caters to psychopaths.

Well! I will persist with doing my evidence gathering paperwork and see it through to its conclusion. That does sound quite neat.

SmoothShrek says: I'm glad some people are enjoying Starfield and I don't think it's trash game or anything, but after giving it a go for two evenings I just totally lost interest. I don't have the desire or energy to play any more of it. I don't begrudge anyone from finding joy in it (or most media, really), but honestly I'd rather play Skyrim or even FO4 if I have the Bethesda itch. Starfield just doesn't do it for me. As much as I love space (confirmed Trekkie over here), the way it's implemented in Starfield feels smaller and less interesting than the worlds of Skyrim or Fallout. Ship combat was more fun than I was expecting, though. Gotta give it that.

I can hear Edwin cheering from afar, reading this!

I will say, and this is very much related to SmoothShrek's space travel complaint, that I wish I didn't have to press Tab so often.

There is a lot of menu navigation, isn't there?

I did really like the actual act of flying your ship around space, lowering the engine speed and thrusters in order to pull off sharp turns before flooring it again to catch up to whoever's shooting at you.

Innit. And they're not fun menus, like Skyrim's stargazing and Fallout 4's squeaky cartoon skill tree.

...it's also funny how it's impossible to talk about Starfield - even if you like it! - without eventually coming back to Bethesda's other series.

James Archer says: Innit. And they're not fun menus, like Skyrim's stargazing and Fallout 4's squeaky cartoon skill tree.

Word. I won't lie. I still don't understand how to build an outpost.

Oh, me neither. Though that's partly because, unlike in Fallout 4 (see, did it again), it's not remotely clear what a lot of the building/crafting resources actually do? Like I've been playing for something like 40 hours and I have no idea if I have the gear to start an outpost because they all have names like "memory substrate" or "aqueous hematite".

juan_h says: My teenaged self would consider me spoiled.

Yeah, I often wonder about this. I'm a good ten years younger than you, but I regularly think about what my gaming habits might be like now if I was still a kid. How many games would I have access to? How much time I'd actually spend playing them etc... They probably would be quite different to how I consume games now, even if I wasn't playing a lot of them for work.

James Archer says: Like I've been playing for something like 40 hours and I have no idea if I have the gear to start an outpost because they all have names like "memory substrate" or "aqueous hematite".

Hahah, this made me laugh. Like, a lot.

One thing I'm curious about is whether anyone felt the effect of their backgrounds/traits at all? I've maybe had a handful of Xenobiologist-specific responses thrown at me, but they're usually flavour-text options that merely provide more information rather than having a direct effect on the story.

I was playing Control the other night and picked up a crafting mat called Confiscated Motive. That might as well be in Starfield too, for all I know.

Katharine Castle says: One thing I'm curious about is whether anyone felt the effect of their backgrounds/traits at all? I've maybe had a handful of Xenobiologist-specific responses thrown at me, but they're usually flavour-text options that merely provide more information rather than having a direct effect on the story.

You can't bring up traits and not post Skyrim Dad, Katharine.

ARE YOU HAPPY, JAMES?

Now? Yes.

Just look at that big cheeseball, in all his fleshy mouthed brilliance.

PM_Douglas_MacKenzie says: The Kid Stuff bg gave me a relatively decent ship early on, but otherwise it and the others were mostly flavour text. Also, if you were wearing the Constellation suit in front of Sarah, Andreja, Dixon Bainbridge, etc., I don't think they mind that you took it.

I, uh, haven't been able to check up on my parents recently because I forgot which New Atlantis skyscraper they live in.

Again, I think if I hadn't cheated on the ultra space suit in the Lodge, the suit my parents gave me as a kind of semi-inheritance present might have been pretty sweet.

Hahah, I actually had to look this up, because I kept forgetting which tower they lived in as well! Turns out, it's the one directly right as soon as you exit the monorail - not the giant one you see dead ahead of you...

PM_Douglas_MacKenzie says: The Kid Stuff bg gave me a relatively decent ship early on, but otherwise it and the others were mostly flavour text. Also, if you were wearing the Constellation suit in front of Sarah, Andreja, Dixon Bainbridge, etc., I don't think they mind that you took it.

Oh yeah, they don't care a single jot that you, a total, relative stranger to them, just took their most valuable artifact and have started wearing it, no sweat whatsoever, hahah...

Speaking of ships, what's everyone driving these days? I may have guide-cheesed my way into having Walter bankroll me a comically oversized yet statistically excellent frigate.

I just got the Space Batman ship, but have yet to work out exactly how to tip all the junk I was hording in my original ship into this one. And what happens when you land with one ship and leave on another? Does the original just stay there forever?

The only thing I don't like is the cost of having so much storage space: a honking great grid of square holds stacked up at the back. Looks like my ship has a bum made out those cargo ships that are always outside Alice Bee's house.

Basically, I did this once in No Man's Sky - found a better ship randomly discarded on a planet somewhere - and took it immediately, only to realise after about ten minutes of flying randomly around the planet that it lacked the dimension hopping drive I needed to get off the planet and go to the next system, and the planet itself did not have the resources on it to make another one. I tried, in vain, to find my lost spaceship, but alas, I never came across it ever again, and now I'm perpetually terrified any and all ships I come across.

Katharine Castle says: I just got the Space Batman ship, but have yet to work out exactly how to tip all the junk I was hording in my original ship into this one. And what happens when you land with one ship and leave on another? Does the original just stay there forever?

New diary idea: trying to litter a spaceship on every planet in Starfield

I mean, I have pretty big cash reserves in this dumb game, but I don't think even I've got enough money to leave a ship on ALL 1692 PLANETS in this game, hahah...

Marid Audran says: And there is a recent game that *does* do this well, but it's not a Bethesda product. I kinda wish they had taken some inspiration from that game instead of deciding that menu fast-travelling was the way to go.

Oooh, do tell.

Marid Audran says: I'm with all of the others who are saying that it's basically...pockets of fun? Someone on here or a sister gaming website noted the biggest difference was the interstitial encounters with a contiguous game like Skyrim or FO4. You head to a place, but on the way there's an encounter. Or a map icon that piques your interest. Or you just get a case of wanderlust and suddenly find yourself in a new vault which is P.T.-level creepy. In Starfield, though, it's not contiguous - it's fast travel to fast travel to fast travel.

Agreed it's not the same. But I have had some moments where I spied a mysteriously vague "Ship" waypoint on a map, or a landing site that doesn't match the conventions of the proc gen stuff, and following it led to me to a neat little sidejaunt. Though yeah, it's way more fun to see something physically, in the distance, than listed on a UI.

What's your ship of choice, James? The giant Walter frigate? Or do you have multiple cruisers you take out on the weekends?

It turns out I'm not much of a ship engineer, so I've been swapping through quest rewards. First the Mantis ship, then the brig-equipped Ranger vessel you get for becoming besties with Elias Toufexis, and I've only just recently rinsed Walter for this new one.

Important question: do you have a favourite companion, and why is it Sam Coe?

1. Sarah is boring 2. Andreja is a religious nut 3. Barret is [SPOILERS] 4. I forgot the robot existed

I know it's not the same voice actor, but I cannot stop thinking about how Sarah sounds like La'an Noonien-Singh (played by Christina Chong) from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and it's so very, VERY weird.

But alas, we have run out of time to go into intense detail about why Sam Coe is the best Starfield companion. We'll have to save that discussion for another day. Thank you all for joining us for this latest Game Club chat! We hope you all have wonderful weekends, and we'll see you again next week. Goodbye!

SmoothShrek says: Christina Chong would be an amazing get for any game, Katherine! I didn't know you were a Strange New Worlds-head :D

It's the fun Star Trek show! I haven't watched any old TV Trek - I only really got into it when Discovery happened, but have watched all the films since. Still, Discovery's now disappeared so far up its own blackhole that SNW is now our favourite Trek show. Long live, Captain Pike!