Highlights
- Players have expressed frustration over the strict locking of gameplay features behind perks in Starfield, which limits their ability to engage with various aspects of the game.
- Some fans believe that the slower leveling in Starfield contradicts the design choice of requiring certain perks for accessing certain gameplay features, punishing players who want to invest in combat skills.
- The potential for modding tools in early 2024 opens up possibilities for addressing these concerns, which could allow players to customize their gameplay experience by modifying the perk system or other aspects of the game.
While Starfield has a comprehensive progression system tied to its leveling, some players wish that interacting with the game's features wasn't so strictly locked behind its perks. From choosing traits to selecting a background in Starfield, players can define their playthrough from the very beginning, hearkening back to previous Bethesda titles such as Morrowind – or to an even bigger extent – Fallout 3. However, whereas players could still attempt to engage with gameplay features such as Enchanting or Lockpicking less efficiently, the Starfield equivalent remains hard-locked behind certain perk levels.
Using a digipick in Starfield on an Expert level chest is a futile endeavor if players don't have the appropriate perk tier for Security, and while this rewards characters for investing in certain skill trees, some fans believe that the slower leveling in Starfield clashes against this design choice. Ship building, outpost building, ship combat, weapon crafting, armor crafting – the systems begin to add up, and placing points into them effectively punishes Starfield players by not letting them invest in combat skills.
This concern was presented by Lavish-Greed on the official Starfield subreddit, and based on community response, it would seem that many players agree with Lavish-Greed's take. As pointed out in the comments, having to invest so many points into gun skills just to change its firing mode doesn't feel satisfying. A proposed way to fix this problem is to have more benefits from completing perk challenges in Starfield, such as increasing the number of experience points awarded to players for doing so.
Some players have pointed out that compared to the powerful benefits of outpost management in Starfield, or being able to craft the highest tiers of weapons, armor, and spaceship parts, weapon skills feel almost like an afterthought. Characters can still clear most combat situations without any invested combat perks, and the Stealth skill can eventually be replaced with the Void Form power.
Given that the perk system in Skyrim eventually got expanded through mods, it seems that Starfield is bound to follow a similar trajectory. Though official modding tools for Starfield are only coming in early 2024, they are bound to open up the game's potential, and allow players to tailor-fit their gameplay, whether through a completely redone perk system, or through an experience overhaul mod, or something else altogether. Despite the pet peeves levied against the vanilla perks in Starfield, the game itself continues to be fun for the majority of players and seems to deliver on the traditional Bethesda experience.
Starfield is available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.