While I will be doing a whole lot of Starfield coverage and tips and advice to come, I wanted to start on day zero here with something that most people will run into on launch day itself, character creation.
Outside of designing your appearance (note: you can indeed fully re-customize your character’s look with an in-game plastic surgeon later), you will also be asked to pick a backstory and character traits.
The backstory doesn’t do much outside of give you a bit of different dialogue in some situations in the game. Traits, meanwhile, are permanent buffs and debuffs to your character. I found a way to change one of them later on, but I’m not sure that’s true with the whole list. And there are 17 in total. Of the ones I picked, I liked one and regretted two, so I am going to write what three I think are the best of the bunch.
1. Wanted – This gives you more damage dealt when you’re lower health, at the cost of bounty hunters periodically trying to track you down and kill you. But is that…a drawback? More combat means more dead enemies and more loot and credits from their corpses or destroyed ships. I found these encounters fun, not annoying, and they create some cool randomization, like enemy ships landing on planets to find you when you aren’t expecting it, or you might be fighting some Crimson Fleet pirates in space, and a crew of bounty hunters shows up at the same time, creating chaos. It’s a good perk.
2. Empath – Doing things your companion likes makes them better in combat, doing things they don’t like makes them perform worse. Again, this one is mostly upside. It is pretty hard to make your companions hate you unless you’re doing it on purpose. The Constellation crew is a wholesome bunch, so just not being a jerk and not randomly murdering people means you will have more positive than negative interactions with them by a mile for an essentially permanent buff to their combat prowess.
3. Extrovert – Again, this one depends on whether or not you’re running with companions. I think almost everyone will, given that they can hold things, fight and create color in the world, so yeah, this is a good trait for that. You will use less oxygen when you’re with a companion, and use more when you’re without one. This game badly needs buffs to its oxygen/sprint system, so any bonus you can get here is a good one, and I would highly recommend it. If you’re a planning to be an evil, murdering space pirate, I would A) not have companions, as almost all the main ones will hate this and leave you and B) pick Introvert instead. So that would eliminate #2 also, and you’d want to find a sub.
As for the other ones? There are pros and cons but I can’t speak for all of them. I think Alien DNA, which gives you more health and endurance at the cost of healing items healing you well, wasn’t worth it as it mad med packs feel bad for a while. This is the one where you could get rid of it later at a medbay, though. I also picked Neon Street Rat which gives you some dialogue options to skip past bribing or threatening people in some Neon missions, but the ones above would have been more broadly useful.
So that’s my advice. Maybe there’s a way to swap these later, but I haven’t figured that out yet, so you’ll want to start out with some solid choices and limited drawbacks.
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