LogFAQs > #975773373

So for anyone curious about why IGN gave it a 7, the reviewer had 3 main complaints:

• Traveling between planets are just fast travel cutscenes. You can't freely explore like in No Man's Sky

"The biggest fundamental contradiction within Starfields design is that while this is a galaxy-spanning adventure with literally hundreds of worlds you can land on and explore, it can feel extremely small when each of them is separated by little more than a (thankfully) brief loading screen. The first few times I set out I really got into it: Id enter my ship, climb to the cockpit, strap myself in, then watch the cool animation as my ship blasted into orbit. Then Id open the nav screen, select a star and a planet to set my course, and grav-jump to my destination before selecting a landing spot and watching my ship set down in a blaze of retro thrusters and dust. But then I realized that, in many circumstances, I could bypass most of that procedure by just going to the map screen and jumping to another planet without even setting foot on my ship. Put another way, while you can walk across an Elder Scrolls or Fallout world without ever fast-traveling, in Starfield you cant go anywhere without fast-traveling.

A mission might send you to the other side of the vast starmap, but the actual travel time between systems is always the same (and the poorly explained fuel system, which is actually just your range, isnt much of a limitation). When I discovered that so much of space flight is effectively a series of non-interactive cutscenes, it largely shattered the illusion of exploring a vast universe. Its impossible not to compare Starfield to the way you freely enter and exit planets atmosphere in No Mans Sky, so its a bit of a letdown every time you see a planet and remember its just a picture of a planet youll never be able to reach by flying toward it. Its something that happens a lot.

• There are no maps to help you navigate the planets

The next nuisance that irritated me no matter where in the Settled Systems I roamed is the fact that there are no actual maps mini or otherwise to refer to when youre on foot. All you get is an extremely low-detail display showing you large points of interest such as the many abandoned research and mining posts where raiders and robots wait for you to shoot and loot them and the large swaths of alien wasteland and wilderness that separates them. Within a city, theres nothing to guide you around beyond shop signs and text-only directories that tell you what stores are located in which district, but not where they actually are.

My guess is that this was a deliberate choice Bethesda made to mitigate the fast-travel problem, where were just zipping through the universe without stopping to appreciate the detail and thought that went into creating dramatically different cities like the gleaming capital of New Atlantis, the frontier settlement of Akila, and the dingey cyberpunk metropolis of Neon, among others. And these places are fascinating to look at. The reality, though, is that this isnt even how we get around the real world today not since the iPhone rolled out in 2007 so its exasperating to be in the year 2330 with no comparable navigation tools. I spent way too much time running in circles searching for basic things like vendors to sell my loot to while I tried to memorize the layouts of multiple settlements, annoyed that if I were playing after launch I couldve just checked IGNs guides for their locations. The tradeoff in immersion just doesnt seem worth it.

• The inventory management sucks

The third ever-present annoyance is, fortunately, one that stands out as something that can be fixed without a major overhaul. Like Bethesdas previous RPGs, Starfield is a game that is roughly 30% inventory management and yet it is shockingly bad at that task. To avoid becoming overloaded youll constantly need to transfer the weapons, space suits, materials, and alien goo youve collected between your inventory and your companions, or to and from your ships cargo hold, but maddeningly you cant view the contents and capacities of both the giving and receiving container at the same time. Youre just blindly dumping things out of one until you get a message saying the other is full. All the while, much of the screen is wasted on an overly large image of an item. Its a bizarre and aggravating step backward from Fallout 4, and the kind of thing I expect modders to remedy within a week of launch.

He also mentions that the game took a long time to get good

It wasnt until a dozen or so hours in that I unlocked enough upgrades that things started to gel for me. Starfield is absolutely one of those games that takes way too long to get to the good part.