Alright, I’ve had enough. In all our reviews we had to dance around what Starfield does with New Game+, even though it is really really important. The problem is that this has led to a lot of conflicting advice from reviewers and creators who have already done it about whether or not to rush the main quest and get there ASAP, which is what a lot of people are saying. But I’d do the opposite, and “max out” your first playthrough before considering it.
Why? What’s going on here? We have to talk about it, but I am going to do so in a way that avoids any story spoilers, despite how tied into the story NG+ is. All I will say is that NG+ is explained by a part of the storyline, but the logistics of what that means is more complicated. And I have to say, despite my general love for Starfield, I do not like how this was handled. If you truly want to know nothing about NG+, even conceptually, don’t read this, but I will not be spoiling the actual ending of the game.
So, the first order of business is what you keep and what you lose.
You keep:
- Your level
- Your skills
- Your abilities
You lose:
- All weapons and armor
- All materials and credits
- All bases and ships, custom or otherwise
- All your exploration % on planets
- All questlines reset
That’s a huge sacrifice, so why would you do it at all? As content creators are hinting at, there are some bonuses you get on NG+. Without getting into specifics, you get two “items.” I will not say what these items are, but they are cool, admittedly. They won’t be useful for all that long, though. You also get some new dialogue options that will sometimes help skip checks or occasionally quest steps. Most of the time they do nothing. There’s also one more somewhat minor thing, but it’s a little too spoilery to list here.
However, as neat as the above might be, I do not believe it is worth rushing your first playthrough to get there. Why? A few reasons.
First, if you rush only the main quest to reach the end, you will not experience any of the outcomes of the faction or side quests in the game, of which there are many. So if you start NG+, a place where, like a new save file, you can make different choices, you will have no frame of reference for what a different choice even is for anything except the main quest itself.
Second, skipping all side content and exploration and barreling through the main quest only is…a very crappy way to play Starfield. It sucks to hamstring yourself by resisting the urge to explore or do loads of quests you’ll find in the world based on the advice of “trust me bro, NG+ is worth it.” In my estimation, no, it is not. Not if it involves bum rushing the campaign.
My advice is to “max” the game as much as you can, then once you start running dry, then maybe you run it back with NG+. This is what I did after hour 80 or so, as back at around hour 50, I did do NG+, and did not enjoy the fact that all my stuff was wiped, in addition to a huge list of quests I was going to get to later. So while I “saw” the first few hours of NG+ and the changes it brings, I eventually reverted back to an old, pre-NG+ save. You can see the “items” you get and some of the early dialogue options by doing this, but I would keep a save in your old game you can go back to if you want. You are given a clear choice of whether or not to do NG+ at the end of the game, and if you say no, you can always go back to it later.
I do not like any of this.
To me, story-based or not, the concept of a NG+ in a game that is about widespread exploration, finding hundreds of secrets and exploring hundreds of planets, does not mix with a system that resets all your progress with minimal changes in a new playthrough. Yes, I understand that people do multiple playthroughs of Bethesda games, but when doing that, you are not deleting your old character’s save file, which is essentially what’s happening here, carrying over your level only. I think NG+ makes sense in more straightforward single player games, but here, in a sprawling Bethesda RPG where they want you to explore and build elaborate things and save up to buy huge ships or luxury apartments, this kind of resetting baked into the story is bad.
Complicating all of this is that I’ve heard that at some point in the NG+ process, because yes, you are meant to do this many, many times, there may actually be something that happens that is more significant from a story/gameplay perspective than what I’ve seen even hitting NG+2 now. However, I have no idea how many NG+s it will take, nor even if it’s a guaranteed thing, or a random chance. And here on NG+2, I just don’t know how many times I can do this loop in pursuit of this unknowable thing. Now, I just want to settle down and actually go fully 100% the game in a way I did not in my first two playthroughs, one long, one rushed to see if anything new would change on NG+2 (so far, it hasn’t changed from NG+1 even a little bit).
I do not think this is a good system, nor something that the story should have been based around. I love almost everything about this game, but this was one major decision I very much disagree with.
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