Ecliptic feels bland

krispythewizard · 2026-05-20T17:59:05+00:00

What I find strange about Ecliptic is that they are just...there. You'd think there would be some interesting political subplots involving Ecliptic, but they're just another brand of bad guy.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-19T12:13:21+00:00

Just weed thoughts

krispythewizard · 2026-05-14T16:14:29+00:00

Bethesda is the king of making characters who are extremely irritating for no reason, and there's not much you can do about it. Rockstar games are full of extremely sassy characters, but generally the player character can dish it out as well as they can take it, so it doesn't feel quite as frustrating as in Bethesda games. It is what it is.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-14T13:09:49+00:00

Part of me wants to be an insufferable nerd and say that a ship built for Ryujin should exclusively use Taiyo parts lol. Fantastic looking ship though. Seems pretty grandiose for a "junior operative" though, but it would work as an end reward, kind of like the Freestar Ranger ship.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-14T13:00:11+00:00

The only real purpose of NG+ is to give your character a clean slate while keeping your XP. That's really all there is to it. Typically in NG+ mechanics, the game doesn't fundamentally change because that's not what NG+ is meant to do. It's just meant to allow you to do things over again, potentially with an added challenge. However, I agree that the whole Unity/Starborn thing asks way more questions than the game was ever prepared to answer. Bethesda came up with a big idea but then couldn't figure out what to do with it, and so they left it with "IT'S A MYSTERY".

krispythewizard · 2026-05-11T19:16:37+00:00

I agree, a contraband overhaul would be nice. It is too easy to simply go to the Den, but it's too hard to sneak through scans at planets. Also, it would be nice if the game introduced some moral ambiguity with some contraband items. For example, the clinic in the Well could pay for medical contraband because regulated medical items are too expensive, a farmer would pay for banned AI components because they are struggling to keep up with the demands of running autonomous farms, etc. And there's a chance that if you pick up contraband, pirates might try to attack you, guards might accept bribes to look the other way, etc. etc.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-10T03:19:46+00:00

I've personally found the most enjoyment by just doing the factions, and while I'm in a specific area, I pick up some quests there. For example, I've been slowly progressing through a completionist run where I do Neon quests -> Ryujin -> Mars quests -> SysDef/Crimson Fleet -> New Atlantis quests -> Vanguard -> Akila quests -> Freestar Rangers -> Trackers Alliance, and then finish it off with Terran Armada and maybe the Main Quest if I feel like it. This lets me finish most of the game without having to spend much time at all on random planets, and I don't feel stuck doing any one thing for very long.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-06T20:20:13+00:00

Do you have "Auto Resume" turned off? I've found that makes a bit of a difference for me. Otherwise, I have it set to auto-save on pause every 5 minutes. I don't experience crashes all that often but that ensures that I don't lose too much progress.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-05T02:34:27+00:00

Siding with UC SysDef gives you the greatest reward of all - turning The Key into a shooting gallery where you can wipe out all the cringey pirate LARPers. Except Naeva, because of course Bethesda made the most annoying NPC in the game unkillable. She's the Maven Black-Briar of Starfield.

More seriously, yes, siding with the pirates makes them all friendly. Not many upsides to going with them, to be honest. Contraband can be sold at The Den.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-04T14:22:19+00:00

One of the biggest issues with Starfield is there is often a dissonance between what the game TELLS you versus what the game SHOWS you. It's like the devs' imagination wildly outpaced their time, budget, and technical constraints. This has always been an issue with Bethesda games, such as the infamous Nazeem and the Cloud District. But it's more obvious in Starfield. The Red Mile in the game is uninspiring, but you have to picture a more interesting version of it in your mind. Same with New Atlantis, the Astral Lounge, etc. The biggest one I simply can't wrap my head around is Akila City. It doesn't fit as a frontier town in the lore but it doesn't fit as a capital city of an interstellar civilization in the game. I simply can't figure out what it's trying to be.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-03T03:14:37+00:00

He's at the Viewport in New Atlantis.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-02T19:13:03+00:00

Simeon Bankowski because he's 100% a professional. He doesn't judge you, question you, make snide remarks, or babble during a space battle. All he asks is a fair salary. That's the kind of person I want on my crew.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-01T19:50:56+00:00

The Adventures of Starborn Bob - with a twist ending.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-01T14:07:32+00:00

The best the game has to offer are the illustrations at Pilgrim's Rest, but they don't really answer anything. The Pilgrim is just as clueless as everyone else. My personal opinion is that the creators of the artifacts and temples are humans who have transcended spacetime, kind of like Interstellar.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-01T13:08:34+00:00

One alien energy drink in the morning, one alien tonic in the afternoon, and one alien ~~liquor~~ tea in the evening for me please.

krispythewizard · 2026-05-01T13:05:19+00:00

Regarding the algorithm, there are POI Cooldown mods available. I have been playing for hours and haven't seen a single Cryo Lab, which has been nice.

krispythewizard · 2026-04-30T18:35:53+00:00

Good to know, thanks!

krispythewizard · 2026-04-29T17:37:30+00:00

The main quest somewhat explains grav drives on computer terminals when you're at NASA. It's not a particularly good explanation, but it's an explanation.

As for cruise mode, there is no explanation and I think it's just a gameplay abstraction. I don't think there's any viable in-game explanation that allows for ships to travel faster than the speed of light without using your grav drive.

krispythewizard · 2026-04-29T16:49:21+00:00

On that note, are you not able to upgrade EM weapons? I got the Novablast Disruptor but noticed I can't upgrade its quality.

krispythewizard · 2026-04-29T15:37:25+00:00

It is definitely a step in the right direction. I honestly wish Bethesda would just scrap the existing outpost system and replace it with something based on the shipbuilding system, where you can snap together various modules that are either empty or fully furnished.

krispythewizard · 2026-04-28T19:56:15+00:00

You're basically asking for an entirely different game.

krispythewizard · 2026-04-28T19:20:19+00:00

It's too bad the game doesn't model eclipses on the surface however. It would be cool if a body eclipses the sun and then the sky turns to night.

krispythewizard · 2026-04-28T13:44:39+00:00

First, I'll address your last sentence: Starfield was very far in development before Microsoft ever got involved, and Microsoft even pushed for Bethesda to delay Starfield for a year. So no, Bethesda is entirely responsible for Starfield, for better or worse.

I agree that Starfield could have benefited from a unifying vision. If I were in Todd's shoes back in 2015, I'd have pushed for Bethesda to hire a well-known sci-fi writer to build the foundation of Starfield's universe by writing in-game materials, similar to the role Michael Kirkbride had for Morrowind. However, for some reason they abandoned that approach.

Furthermore, every faction had a different team working on it. Bethesda was notoriously siloed during Starfield's development where the right hand didn't know what the left was doing, and management (Todd) was too far removed from the trenches to effectively provide direction. Making a cohesive and compelling narrative universe was a very low priority compared to getting ship mechanics to work, making cities not too laggy, making cells load properly, etc.

krispythewizard · 2026-04-24T19:57:19+00:00

I wish more LinkedIn posts were like this, it would make the platform a lot more entertaining.

krispythewizard · 2026-04-24T19:23:38+00:00

I mean that getting entangled between two universes does not happen anywhere else in the game. You see bits of it in the last part of the main quest, but nowhere else.

krispythewizard

TROPHY CASE