In a galaxy teeming with possibilities, Starfield beckons with the allure of uncharted territories, intricate lore, and a gripping narrative that rivals the best of single-player RPGs. As a dedicated fan of Bethesda's previous masterpiece series, Elder Scrolls and Fallout, as well as a Star Wars fan, I anticipated nothing less than a thrilling odyssey through the cosmos, complete with spaceships, lasers, and the ever-present dance of political intrigue. However, my initial hours with Starfield left me feeling like a lost astronaut adrift in the vast expanse of space.
Starfield, while undoubtedly a spacefaring epic, didn't make my journey easy during its opening stages. Navigating my modest starship through the cosmos, pursuing mystified artifacts and interstellar outlaws alongside a remarkable crew, proved to be a challenging endeavor. Despite these early tribulations, the game eventually found its footing, allowing me to fully immerse myself in its captivating story, engaging sidequests, and thrilling encounters with enemy vessels. However, it's essential to acknowledge the persistent issues that occasionally disrupted my excitement—a bit like Starfield's own intricate shipbuilder tool, where high-end components might technically work together but don't always create the optimal synergy.
Bethesda has meticulously crafted a sprawling universe, rich with intricate lore, where humanity has abandoned Earth to colonize the far reaches of the galaxy. Despite not yet making contact with sentient extraterrestrial beings by the 24th century, this universe is brimming with history, including conflicts between its three major factions, enigmatic space creatures, ruthless outlaws, and a plethora of other intriguing elements. While some aspects may feel reminiscent of beloved sci-fi classics like Star Trek, Starship Troopers, Interstellar, and Event Horizon. Starfield’s world is a homage to the entire genre, referencing everything from Forbidden Planet to Alien and, of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, it's the sheer density of content that sets it apart, with a new narrative lurking around every corner, ensuring that players are constantly engrossed in this captivating universe.
The process of creating your character begins by selecting a background story, complete with a unique set of skills, traits, and up to three modifiers. This initial choice can be challenging on your first playthrough, as the true nature of your journey remains shrouded in mystery. With no option for respeccing, each background presents its own challenges and opportunities. Some, like having living parents or a persistent fan following you, promise exciting experimentation and replayability.
Upon receiving the keys to your first spaceship, Starfield transforms into an expansive galaxy teeming with possibilities. The game encourages exploration in various directions, offering an extensive range of quests and missions that appear organically. Sometimes, all it takes is a casual stroll past NPCs engaged in conversation to trigger new adventures.
If you embrace the freedom to pursue missions as they arise, you'll find yourself embarking on epic questlines, rivaling the scope of Skyrim's adventures. Even after dedicating roughly 50 hours to the game, there are major questlines I have yet to explore and others I've merely scratched the surface of. The completion of the main story has left me eager to return and uncover the depths of these uncharted cosmic waters.
In classic Bethesda fashion, the main quest in Starfield may not offer as much flexibility in resolving its challenges as some players might hope. Choices primarily revolve around deciding whether you'll be the virtuous do-gooder who believes in altruism, the witty mercenary who expects payment for good deeds, or the no-nonsense professional who demands payment upfront for any task. While there are a few pivotal decisions affecting who lives and dies, the overarching goal remains consistent: solving the mystery of the artifacts alongside your secretive society of explorers known as Constellation. I won't delve too deeply into the plot to avoid spoilers, but I can attest to its unique exploration of significant concepts, even those that have been explored in various forms before, and the presence of well-crafted discussions about the philosophical underpinnings.
The assortment of companion characters, while present, doesn't significantly elevate the overall experience. Constellation teammates at times feel like time-consuming distractions, frequently burdening players with long-winded stories about their backgrounds or needy quests that demand your assistance. Although this all could be my biased opinion, considering I never care for humanoid companions in Bethesda's other games and always find myself with, “a man’s best friend”, a loyal puppy following me around.
Bethesda deserves credit for improving facial animations in Starfield. While not as meticulous and lifelike as motion-captured performances seen in recent titles, it holds its own compared to other expansive RPGs where you interact with numerous NPCs over extended playtime. Character models manage to convey expressions that complement the exceptional voice acting.
In the vast expanse of the gaming universe, where countless worlds beckon exploration, Starfield presents itself as a galaxy-spanning adventure teeming with potential. However, beneath the shimmering veneer of this interstellar odyssey lies a fundamental contradiction that has left many players pondering the paradox.
While Starfield offers hundreds of celestial bodies to land on and explore, it curiously shrinks its universe, making it feel disappointingly compact. The culprit? Loading screens that partition each world, threatening to disrupt the immersion that should accompany a cosmic voyage.
In the initial moments of launching into space, the excitement is palpable. You enter your spacecraft, ascend to the cockpit, buckle in, and watch in awe as your vessel rockets into orbit. The navigation screen comes alive with celestial options: stars to chart and planets to visit. The gravitational jump propels you toward your chosen destination, and soon enough, your ship gracefully descends, guided by retro thrusters and a cloud of dust.
Yet, the luster begins to fade when you realize that, in many instances, you can circumvent this meticulously crafted journey by simply accessing the map screen and leaping to another planet without ever setting foot on your ship. It's a stark departure from the freedom to traverse Elder Scrolls or Fallout worlds on foot, unburdened by the necessity of fast travel.
The unsettling reality is that, in Starfield, you can't traverse the cosmos without resorting to fast-travel mechanics. A mission might beckon you to the far reaches of the starmap, but the actual travel time between systems remains constant. Even the ostensibly limiting fuel system, which masquerades as your ship's range, proves to be a trivial restraint.
The disillusionment intensifies when you realize that a significant portion of spaceflight comprises non-interactive cutscenes, undermining the illusion of exploring an expansive universe. Comparisons to games like No Man's Sky, where players can freely enter and exit planets' atmospheres, exacerbate the sense of missed opportunity. Too often, you find yourself gazing at a distant planet, only to remember that it's but a static image, forever out of reach.
The absence of tangible maps compounds the frustration. Whether strolling through bustling cities or traversing alien wilderness, Starfield provides no navigational aids beyond rudimentary displays of major points of interest. This deficiency, likely conceived to address the overuse of fast travel, imposes its own set of problems.
It's puzzling that in the year 2330, in a universe teeming with technological wonders, players are left to navigate by mere shop signs and text-only directories. The intricate, diverse cities like New Atlantis, Akila, and Neon beg for more immersive navigation tools. The modern world itself has evolved beyond reliance on such antiquated methods, making the absence of comprehensive in-game maps all the more bewildering.
One can't help but speculate that Bethesda's intention was to steer players away from fast travel, encouraging them to savor the finely detailed environments. Nevertheless, the tradeoff in immersion leaves a lingering question: is it worth it?
The third ever-present annoyance is, fortunately, one that stands out as something that can be fixed without a major overhaul. Like Bethesda’s previous RPGs, Starfield is a game that is roughly 30% inventory management… and yet it is shockingly bad at that task. To avoid becoming overloaded you’ll constantly need to transfer the weapons, space suits, materials, and alien goo you’ve collected between your inventory and your companion’s, or to and from your ship’s cargo hold, but maddeningly you can’t view the contents and capacities of both the giving and receiving container at the same time. You’re just blindly dumping things out of one until you get a message saying the other is full. All the while, much of the screen is wasted on an overly large image of an item. It’s a bizarre and aggravating step backward from Fallout 4.
The inventory system in Starfield leaves much to be desired. Players are forced to engage in a tedious dance of item transfer between inventory, companion storage, and the ship's cargo hold. This process lacks efficiency and is plagued by the absence of a simultaneous view of both containers. It's a frustrating regression from the inventory systems of previous Bethesda titles.
Those problems never got better during my playthrough – I just learned to live with them. The hump that I did get over, though, is that Starfield just doesn’t tell you enough about how its huge collection of systems work, and it trickles out the cool stuff too slowly. Out of the gate, you can’t mod your equipment, you can’t use your spacesuit’s boost pack (which is super useful and fun, especially in low gravity, and I can’t imagine not having it for an entire playthrough), and you can barely use stealth or board enemy ships at all. You have to put a skill point, of which you only get one per level, into those to unlock them.
Starfield's learning curve can feel steep and unrewarding. Players are left in the dark regarding the intricacies of the game's systems, and valuable abilities like equipment modification and the use of the spacesuit's boost pack remain locked behind skill points. The slow release of these features can lead to a sense of frustration among players eager to explore the game's full potential.
And yet from the start you can build outposts that are a lot like Fallout 4’s settlements and can extract resources for you, but Starfield doesn’t tell you that you probably shouldn’t bother for a long while. Early on you don’t need huge quantities of a single resource, so it’s largely a waste of time until you’ve climbed to the higher ranks of the crafting skill trees.
Resource management in Starfield is a double-edged sword. While you can establish outposts akin to Fallout 4's settlements, the game fails to communicate the optimal timing for such endeavors. Building outposts early can be counterproductive, as resource demands don't justify the investment until players progress through the crafting skill trees.
It’s also worth noting that the worlds you explore are generally visually different (with varying levels of gravity) but fairly barren and lifeless. You’d expect that from planets that are mostly uninhabitable and untouched by intelligent beings, but that doesn’t make them a lot more fun to run around; outside of a handful of scattered outposts, all there is to do is scan rocks or zap them with a mining laser, or sometimes scan and maybe shoot alien wildlife. It’s a far cry from Bethesda’s previous games, where you generally couldn’t swing a dead mudcrab without hitting something interesting.
The allure of exploring distant planets in Starfield is overshadowed by their barren landscapes. While the varying gravitational conditions add realism, the lack of meaningful activities on these worlds leaves players yearning for the engaging encounters found in Bethesda's earlier titles.
There’s one part of the main quest that’s pretty repetitive, too. You’re sent to investigate a series of ancient structures, and it’s annoying that what you do inside each one is completely identical. The rewards are different and enticing enough for me to want to chase them all down, at least, but after the first few I couldn’t help but wish that Bethesda’s designers had taken some inspiration from Breath of the Wild when it came to creating different puzzles for each one.
The main quest in Starfield introduces a repetitive element in the form of investigating ancient structures. While the rewards may be tempting, the identical nature of these structures' interiors becomes monotonous. A missed opportunity for diverse puzzles and challenges leaves players wanting more variety and innovation.
As mentioned above, Starfield's initial gameplay experience can be somewhat challenging. It wasn't until I invested a significant amount of time, roughly a dozen hours or so, that the game began to truly captivate me. Starfield, in many ways, falls into the category of games that take their time to reveal their brilliance. But, when it does, it demands that you cast aside any preconceived notions and embrace the sci-fi epic that unfolds.
One of Starfield's defining features is its emphasis on exploration and the gradual acquisition of upgrades. While it may seem like a slow start, this deliberate pacing allows players to immerse themselves fully in the game's universe. It's a journey of discovery, where every upgrade feels like a significant milestone, propelling you further into the cosmos.
At the core of Starfield's gameplay lies its combat system, which becomes your primary means of dealing with the various challenges the universe throws at you. Whether facing hostile pirates, menacing robots, or unpredictable wildlife, combat remains a central element. It's not groundbreaking, nor is it lackluster. Instead, it treads the middle ground, offering a competent combat experience.
However, Starfield's gunplay lacks the innovative flair that Fallout's VATS system once provided. Even with late-game abilities, it remains relatively straightforward. Yet, there is a charm in the way enemies react to well-placed shots, creating moments of amusement. Watching a soldier panic as his jetpack explodes is a satisfying spectacle, albeit one that has been seen in similar games.
The adversaries you encounter in Starfield exhibit entertaining reactions when under fire. They'll limp away if wounded or retreat when their comrades fall. While these moments are enjoyable, the overall roster of foes often feels reminiscent of other RPG/shooter hybrids. The more formidable enemies you confront in the latter stages of the story sometimes lack the complexity and challenge one would expect.
What keeps the combat engaging is the diverse array of loot you acquire. Epic and legendary weapons and gear come with intriguing modifiers that add depth to your arsenal. From lightweight rifles to health-dependent damage boosters, Starfield introduces game-changing modifiers that encourage players to tailor their character's build.
Beyond planetary combat, Starfield introduces exhilarating ship-to-ship battles. While these encounters may seem straightforward, they provide an enjoyable space dogfighting experience. The satisfaction of obliterating pirates or becoming one yourself, and witnessing the resulting explosions, is undeniable.
Although there's basic power management to divert energy between weapons, engines, and shields, it's rarely a focal point in combat due to the abundance of available power. Starfield's space battles are more arcade-like than a simulator, offering accessibility to a wide range of players.
One aspect where Starfield could improve is its in-cockpit displays. Presently, they don't function as one might expect, and the only radar indication is provided by directional indicators on the screen's edges. For those who revel in detailed cockpit experiences, this might leave them wanting more.
A standout features in Starfield is its space combat system, which bears some resemblance to the VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) from the Fallout series. Players can allocate skill points to target locking, enhancing their ability to engage enemies in space combat. This mechanic zooms in the view and allows players to select specific enemy systems to target with lasers, ballistic guns, and missiles. Surprisingly, this skill isn't unlocked by default, given its potential to enhance gameplay significantly.
Target locking isn't just about dealing damage; it's a tactical tool. Disabling an enemy ship's weapons can be a lifesaver when you find yourself outnumbered by pirates. However, the real thrill comes when you take out their engines, leaving them vulnerable to boarding. The ensuing boarding action is where some of the most exhilarating moments in Starfield unfold. Players will find themselves clearing enemy ships room by room, often with gravity malfunctioning, reminiscent of scenes from Star Trek VI. As you finally reach the bridge, taking down the captain and seizing control of the ship and its cargo provides a sense of triumph that few games can match.
While the combat steals the spotlight, Starfield's spaceship variety and customization options are equally impressive. The Settled Systems are teeming with diverse spacecraft, and the modular, customizable nature of these vessels is a game-changer. Regrettably, the complex rules for assembling these modular spaceships require a significant investment in the starship design skill. It's a lesson learned for future playthroughs, as there's no way to respec skills once they're allocated.
Despite some criticism of the skill system's initial stinginess, it does have a clever progression system. Unlocking challenges tied to skill improvements adds depth to character development. Each time you level up a skill, you face a unique challenge related to that skill. Whether it's defeating enemies with laser weapons or mastering the use of your boost pack in combat, these challenges make skill progression feel earned and meaningful.
A standout feature in Starfield is the lockpicking minigame. Simple yet satisfying, it requires players to visualize the alignment of multiple pieces to fit into corresponding holes. It's arguably the best unlocking minigame in an RPG, making it a skill worth investing in, even beyond necessity.
Finally, let’s talk about the bugs. Surprisingly, there weren’t nearly as many bugs as one would expect from Bethesda. Playing primarily on the Xbox Series S, I encountered occasional model and texture pop-ins, crashes, performance hiccups during autosaves, and minor graphical issues. However, it's commendable how stable the game remains and how well the Series S performed. Not once did I encounter a mission I couldn’t finish because of bugs.
In conclusion, Starfield epitomizes Bethesda's commitment to developing an immersive open-world experiences, showcasing a universe of unparalleled detail and authenticity. While it may demand patience in its initial stages, the rewards of exploring this meticulously crafted cosmos are undeniably worth the investment. Whether you're drawn to the exhilaration of epic space battles, captivated by its intricate storytelling, or simply enthralled by the thrill of discovery, Starfield offers an extraordinary gaming adventure that transcends traditional boundaries.
This game invites players to partake in an odyssey that unveils a richly detailed universe, where every star system and celestial body feels uniquely crafted. From heart-pounding space skirmishes to a thought-provoking narrative that responds to your choices, Starfield offers an engaging experience that caters to diverse gaming preferences. Embracing the call to embark on an interstellar journey, players will find themselves immersed in a captivating cosmos where the mysteries of the universe await discovery, ensuring that Starfield's allure remains ever-irresistible to adventurers of all kinds.
