I believe that Starfield was designed for people like me. There’s nothing I like more than a sci-fi universe with spaceships, lasers, and political intrigue flying all around. I loved Bethesda’s last single-player RPG, Fallout 4, perhaps a little too much. Twelve hours into Starfield, however, I was already beginning to feel disoriented. While I was chasing down mysterious artifacts and war criminals in my rinkydink little ship with a damn fine crew of friends by my side, things never strayed too far from the intended course, but man did Starfield make me work hard to get through that first stretch. Even after it mostly righted the ship and I started to enjoy the story, sidequests, and sending boarding parties against enemy ships, there were still way too many issues that kept cropping up, which made it difficult for me to maintain my enthusiasm. Similar to Starfield’s elaborate shipbuilding tool, sometimes it’s just not the best fit to just throw a bunch of expensive parts together and have it fly.
Bethesda
I wouldn’t expect anything less from Bethesda, which has created an expansive universe with rich lore in which humans have colonized the galaxy after leaving Earth but haven’t yet made contact with sentient aliens as of the 24th century. It is jam-packed with backstory about battles between its three main factions, encounters with enigmatic space deathclaws known as terrormorphs, pirates, and a ton more. The setting is reminiscent of The Expanse, Firefly, and Starship Troopers, and there are references to every sci-fi film from Aliens to Blade Runner to, of course, Interstellar. However, I wouldn’t say that much of it is particularly distinctive. Even some Indiana Jones influences can be seen, as the game sends you on a treasure hunt to find enigmatic artifacts. In fact, there are many similarities to what Obsidian produced for The Outer Worlds in 2019. However, once I understood the distinction between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective, I found it simple to become invested in it because it is so densely packed in with additional stories around every corner.
Character
When making a character, you can choose from a variety of premade stories, each of which comes with its own set of abilities, personality quirks, and up to three modifiers. Choosing this on a first playthrough can be difficult because you don’t know what you’re getting into and you can’t respec, but none of them are game-breaking. Some, like the one where your parents are alive and well (if you don’t choose this, they just never come up) or the one where a crazed fan follows you around, sound like they’ll be fun to experiment with later, adding a sense of replayability to the game.
Starfield is a massive game that will send you off in all kinds of different directions once it hands you the keys to your first spaceship, despite the fact that everyone begins in the same mining camp and touches the same space magic that sets off a trippy vision reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even after discussing this with other players, we were all left scratching our heads and wondering the same things.
Questions
To which I replied, “Wait, what do you mean you don’t know who the Vanguard are?”
The question, “How did you not meet this person?”
“How the hell are you making those weapon upgrades so quickly?”
To which I replied, “Wow, you didn’t unlock [REDACTED] until level 20?”
A Va’Ruun? What the heck is that?”
“You’re who you met in the bar?”
Where did you come across such a ship?
You can easily get lost in a maze of missions that rival Skyrim’s in length if you don’t strictly adhere to one questline and instead take missions as they appear. I’ve put in around 70 hours, but there are still major questlines I haven’t even started on. Now that I’ve wrapped up the main story, I can’t wait to go back and finish a lot of those sidequests.
After 70 hours, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game’s quests.
In typical Bethesda fashion, this main quest does not offer a great deal of freedom in deciding how to approach the situations it presents. Your options here are, for the most part, about picking whether you want to be a boy scout. For whom a good deed is its own reward, a wise-cracking mercenary who asks to be rewarded after doing a good deed. Or an all-business mercenary who demands to be paid up front to do the good deed. There are a few decisions you can make that affect who lives and who dies, as well as a choice at the end regarding which philosophy to embrace heading into the final battle, but the majority of the story will play out the same way because your objective is to solve the mystery of the artifacts with your secret society of explorers, Constellation. There’s a lot that can be easily spoiled, so I won’t say much about where the plot goes. But I did enjoy how it explores its biggest ideas – even those we’ve seen many times before – in unique ways. And there’s a lot of well-written discussion about what it all means.
Side Quest
In side quests, you have the greatest opportunity to demonstrate your character’s values: I encountered a conflict between a colonist ship and an obnoxious resort planet and had the option of either peacefully resolving the conflict (which involves a clever technobabble puzzle) or clandestinely sabotaging the ship and destroying the colonists. There is a storyline reminiscent of Boys from Brazil, as well as multiple quests involving the pursuit of war criminals and outlawed technology that present difficult moral choices. You can join the pirates of the Crimson Fleet and live a life of smuggling and general space crime, or you can become a legendary pirate hunter.
Throughout all of this, there is no shortage of interesting companion characters to hang out with. I never felt as though my Constellation teammates were wasting my time when they asked for a chat, as they always had something to tell me about their past or a quest they needed my assistance with. Sarah, the virtuous leader of Constellation, and Sam, a former lawman with a young daughter. Whom he lives in fear of letting down, are featured prominently. However, I was handsomely rewarded for bringing the slightly eccentric scientist Barrett along on a few missions. And I suspect the others have a few surprises up their sleeves as well. Possibly even the ones you hire out of bars. When respectable people like Sam abandon you for robbing too many pockets or hijacking too many ships. However, you can only bring one person at a time, so I must conduct additional research here.
Starfield has glaring issues
In Starfield, Bethesda has significantly improved its facial animation. It’s not as precise and lifelike as the motion-captured performances in The Last of Us and God of War, but it’s comparable to other massive RPGs where you interact with hundreds of NPCs for dozens of hours, such as Baldur’s Gate 3. In general, character models are expressive enough to do justice to the excellent voice performances.
Starfield, however, has glaring issues, some of which are fundamentally distinct from Bethesda’s other games. I must admit that the early hours are quite challenging, and for a while I wondered if the stars would ever align. As I lay out this evaluation, it will also experience a rough patch. However, bare with me, as Starfield itself, it does improve in the end.
Fundamental Contradiction
The biggest fundamental contradiction in Starfield’s design is that. Despite being a galactic adventure with literally hundreds of explorable worlds. It can feel incredibly claustrophobic when each world is separated by a (thankfully) brief loading screen. The first few times I embarked, I was really into it. I would enter my ship, climb to the cockpit, strap myself in. And then watch the cool animation as my ship blasted into orbit. Then I would open the navigation screen, select a star and a planet to set my course. And grav-jump to my destination before selecting a landing site and watching my ship land in a blaze of retro thrusters and dust. Then I realized that, in many cases, I could bypass the majority of this procedure. By simply navigating to the map screen and teleporting to another planet without leaving my ship. In other words, whereas in Elder Scrolls or Fallout you can traverse the entire world without ever using fast travel. In Starfield you cannot go anywhere without fast travel.
Getting around Starfield requires fast travel
The actual travel time between systems is always the same. Regardless of whether a mission sends you across the vast starmap or not (and the poorly described fuel system. Which is really just your range, isn’t much of a restriction). The illusion of exploring a vast universe was largely destroyed. When I realized how much of space travel is really just a series of passive cutscenes. Every time you see a planet and realize it is just a picture of planet you will never be able to reach. It’s a little depressing. Because it’s impossible to avoid comparing Starfield to the freedom. Which you enter and exit the atmospheres of planets in No Man’s Sky. This sort of thing frequently occurs.
The lack of actual maps, mini or otherwise, to consult when you’re on foot is the next annoyance. That bothered me wherever I went in the Settled Systems. You only get a very low-detail display that only shows you broad areas of interest. Such as the numerous deserted research and mining outposts where robots and raiders are waiting for you to shoot and loot them. It also shows you vast expanses of alien wilderness and wasteland that separate them. Beyond shop signs and text-only directories that list the names of the stores in each district but do not specify their exact locations. There is nothing in a city to direct you.
This was likely complete to reduce fast-travel
My guess is that this was a deliberate decision made by Bethesda to mitigate the fast-travel problem. Where we’re just zipping through the universe without pausing to appreciate the detail. And I thought that went into creating dramatically different cities such as the gleaming capital of New Atlantis. The frontier settlement of Akila, and the seedy cyberpunk metropolis of Neon, among others. And these locations are visually captivating. However, that this is not how we navigate the real world today – not since the iPhone debuted in 2007. So it’s frustrating to be in the year 2330 without comparable navigation tools. I spent far too much time running in circles searching for basic things like vendors to sell my loot to. While attempting to memorize the layouts of multiple settlements. Irritated that I could have simply consulted IGN’s guides if I were playing after launch. The immersion trade-off does not seem worthwhile.
Overhaul
The third recurring annoyance is, fortunately, one that can be remedied without requiring a complete overhaul. Similar to Bethesda’s previous role-playing games, Starfield is approximately 30% inventory management… Nevertheless, it is shockingly poor at that task. To avoid becoming overloaded, you’ll need to constantly transfer the weapons, space suits, materials, and alien goo. You’ve collected between your inventory and your companion’s inventory. Or to and from your ship’s cargo hold. But you can’t see the contents and capacities of both containers at once. You simply dump items from one until you receive a message that the other is full. A significant portion of the screen is occupied by an excessively large image of an item. It’s a bizarre and vexing regression from Fallout 4, and the sort of thing I expect modders to fix within a week of the game’s release.
Systems Function
Throughout my playthrough, these issues never improved; I simply learned to live with them. I was able to overcome the fact that Starfield does not adequately explain how its vast array of systems function. And the cool stuff is released too slowly. Out of the gate, you can’t modify your equipment. You can’t use your spacesuit’s boost pack, and you can’t use stealth or board enemy ships at all. To unlock them, you must invest a skill point, of which you only receive one per level.
Starfield does not advise you not to build outposts that are similar to Fallout 4’s settlements. And can extract resources for you until a considerable amount of time has passed. Until you have ascended to the higher ranks of the crafting skill trees. It is largely pointless to gather large quantities of a single resource.
Conclusion
You probably shouldn’t go out of your way to mass produce anything early on. As storage space on the first tier of ships is ridiculously small compared to the amount of loot you collect. I resorted to silly workarounds, such as dumping junk on the floor of my ship. Which somehow does not count towards your storage space.
It is also important to note that the worlds you explore are typically visually distinct but largely lifeless. Outside of a few outposts, all there is to do is scan rocks or blast them with a mining laser. Or occasionally scan and possibly kill alien wildlife. It’s a far cry from Bethesda’s previous games. It was nearly impossible to swing a dead mudcrab without striking something interesting.
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