Starfield’s Eternal New Game Plus Loop was not a good decision from Bethesda

Although I really like almost everything about Starfield, one thing I disagreed with from the beginning was the massive focus on not only the game’s structure, but also the main game’s structure. story To be in full service of the New Game Plus concept.

To talk about this, we’ll have to get into it Spoilersbut I tried to wait long enough so that a lot of people would have finished the main campaign at least once.

About two-thirds into the main story, once you meet the Starborn and understand that they’re not aliens, but a type of inter-dimensional human, I realize I know where this is going, given everything Bethesda has previously said about a “unique” new concept for Game Plus.

I thought we’d be Starborn ourselves and do it all over again, now knowing what’s coming, and being able to make different decisions. So, basically how regular New Game Plus works plus an important reason in the story. This is exactly what happened.

The problem is that the New Game Plus ring directly conflicts with the way most people play Bethesda games. You feel like you are missing out on the basic concept of the game if you no Play New Game Plus to discover small changes, bonuses, and occasionally strange things like other-worldly openings (with the rest of the round remaining exactly the same). But if you do, you will lose almost everything in the entire game.

New Game Plus works best in single-player games that don’t rely heavily on looting, crafting, and building. But even in those games, you often have to keep the weapons you acquired in new playthroughs, and may increase the difficulty as you progress.

In Starfield you will lose everything. All your weapons and armor, all your credits. Each mission is cleared, and New Game Plus only gives you the opportunity to skip the main mission. But it’s not just that. In a game that encourages shipbuilding and creative rules, you lose it all, all your designs, all your materials, everything you’ve built up to that point. And for a game that encourages exploration, you lose all your scanning data no matter how many worlds you bother to catalog.

Why… would they design the game like this? I understand that many people start new save files in Bethesda games to create new characters, make new decisions, and try out different builds. But you don’t Erase Your old personality to do this. And in this version the only thing is yours I can not What you should do is try a new build, because Bethesda won’t let you remove any of your skill points and put them somewhere else for any reason. So, if you’re a fighting character and want to start exploring and building bases better instead, you have to crawl your way through the higher levels to get those skill points now, which takes a lot longer than before.

What all this leads to is that at a certain point, if you want to “max out” the game like you would a regular Bethesda RPG, you just pick a place and settle in. For me, it was like NG+2, as I was tired of losing all my progress, and playing quick NG+ episodes, which is possible by skipping the campaign and easily finding artifacts, wasn’t fun either once I realized that the beginnings were ” “Alternative” was random and didn’t do anything important except give you a funny introduction.

I don’t think structuring New Game Plus around losing every bit of progress minus your skill points was a good call for a game like this, and it tainted the ending to what I thought was a great game. I also think the main story suffered from this, ending without any real answers as to who set up this episode in the first place with all these strange temples and technology, because it definitely wasn’t the human Starborn. Maybe that answer is in the DLC, but I don’t like that either. This whole concept could have been so much better.

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