(I play with a controller, so don’t know the keyboard buttons, maybe someone can help out with those in the comments).
I’m loving the game, 22 hours in now. I see there’s a lot of people not enjoying it, so I’m going to try to make some posts over the next few days expressing little things I like, or tricks like this that help my enjoyment of it, in the hope of helping others to find the same enjoyment.
People are complaining that you use the menu a lot for travel. It’s a legit complaint, but there is a way round it (mostly).
You cab travel without using the menu all the time.
If you have a mission to go somewhere, go into scanner mode and point your crosshairs at the mission icon, press A and you will see the option to press X to grav jump there, without using the menu. You can also use the function to grav jump to different systems, as long as you find them in scan mode. You see the nearby planets and stars as you look around in scan mode.
The ability to take off from a planet and travel to another without using the menu helps a lot with immersion and feels nicer than interrupting your flow with the menu all the time.
I usually use the menu to select a mission, then travel in this seamless manner.
The map is faster, though.
I hope we eventually get a mod that makes flying the ships more useful. The only time you actually have to do it is during space dogfights. Bethesda really dropped the ball with how space travel is handled in this game. I want to be able to do more things from the ship controls. Manual takeoff and landing would go a long way towards making space travel more enjoyable in this game.
But manual space travel would be even slower and honestly I think it would get old very quickly. I do understand the frustration, and if you were expecting it to work like NMS or Elite then yeah it’s going to be disappointing. But for me, that’s not the point of the game. I’ve had a ton of fun exploring randomly around, just jumping system to system and checking out random planets. The only part of space flight I’m actually that bothered about doing ‘realistically’ is ship to ship combat, and that works great, especially once you unlock the thrusters. If you manage to take out their engines by focusing fire you can disable them and board the ship, and take it as your own. Also the sidequests are great, I think the writing has improved from previous games. They often go in unexpected directions.
I’ve enjoyed seeing the initial backlash fade and turn around. I’m seeing a lot of posts on the subreddit saying stuff like “I initially made a bug complaint post but now I’m a few hours in and I was wrong, this game is amazing”
If you’re not enjoying the first few hours I implore you to stick with it a little longer.
Oh don’t worry I’m already 15 hours in. The space aspect bothers me and so does the typical Gamebryo Engine jank that every Bethesda game has, but I’m still enjoying myself. This is a hell of a lot better game than Cyberpunk, that’s for damn sure. And I’m glad that there are a lot of mods available already cause they go a long way towards fixing a lot of the issues that I have with the game (like the bullet sponge enemies, the ugly green tint, the low res textures, and the lack of decent post-processing effects. All fixed with mods.)
The keybindings for PC are:
- ‘F’ to activate the scanner
- ‘E’ to select the target
- ‘R’ to grav jump to the target/land
I usually use the menu to select a mission, then travel in this seamless manner.
If you want minimal animations you can also set course from the mission menu and jump/land to your target immediately from there.
I appreciate that there both of these options, I can quickly travel through map, or I can take my time and jump there system by system.
I appreciate both options, but I don’t appreciate how poorly designed and not user friendly using the star map is. I’m on console and it’s just frustrating to use.
Nice. Thanks for the tip.
