This review contains spoilers
Starfield had me in the first few hours. As I think it did most who played it around launch. It was fascinating to watch the general consensus around this game drop off so drastically, so quickly, as more people had the time to get past those initial 5-10 hours that Starfield was able to hold its facade together. In less than a month, the slow dawning realization started to sink in for most that Starfield is just bland. Painfully so.
For the first few hours, I was feeling fairly positive about Starfield, even though I was completely uninterested in any of the characters, story, or world that was presented to me during that time period. My positivity was instead rooted in the notion that Bethesda had seemingly learned from the many missteps they had taken with Fallout 4, that made that game such a terrible roleplay experience. Voiced protagonist, stripped down and truncated dialogue system, extremely restrictive main quest that forced you to play a very specific character, with very specific motivations, and a very very specific backstory, just to name a few. Initially, Starfield didn't seem to have these problems, and this left me feeling good about what my time with it would be like, and more pertinent to my interests, what TES 6 might be like.
It didn't take long however, for me to realize that these supposed lessons learned had seemingly come at the cost of, what is to me the heart and soul of any Bethesda game; world design, lore, and exploration. Starfield, to put it bluntly, has none of these things. The decisions that were made in Starfield's development are truly baffling to me. Why put so much effort into an admittedly pretty good ship building system, and a pretty shit space combat system, and then never present the player with a real reason or opportunity to engage with either? This is a game that was designed around fast travel. A game that mostly forces you to fast travel. A game with no maps to speak of. A game with supposedly 1000 planets to "explore" that all amount to the same few empty areas and generic futuristic structures repeated over and over again. There's nothing here. You play a character who is forcefully conscripted into a literal space exploration organization, and yet there is no space exploration to be found. I am astounded at the lack of cohesion and direction in Starfield's design. It is painfully obvious that no one at Bethesda could ever figure out what they wanted Starfield to be, aside from a game set in space. As an aside, I don't have much to say about Starfield's story, except that I feel the soulless, trend-chasing multiverse pseudo-metacommentary ending was perhaps the perfect way to top off a game that is lacking even the barest hint of a soul. When will the entertainment industry be free of the artistically bankrupt vision of the multiverse that the MCU has forced upon us all.
In my opinion, the worst thing that a piece of art or media can be is boring. Even bad art, I think, has its place. At the very least, things like the launch version of Cyperpunk 2077, or the entirety of the GTA Trilogy provided us with amusing glitch compilations and memes for a time. Starfield couldn't even give us that. Starfield isn't even memeable. Although I suppose that in itself is a remarkable feat.
Mass Effect 3, if you'll allow me a small tangent, is the most disappointing game I've ever played. Based on how much I was anticipating it, versus how drastically it failed to meet any of those expectations. As of this writing, it has been 12 years since my first, and so far only, playthrough of ME3, and I still get a bit mad whenever I am reminded of it. As bad as I personally feel ME3 was, it still managed to produce an emotion in me. A visceral emotion, the remnants of which still persist to this day. But at this point, I'm not even mad about Starfield. I'm just oddly sad, or perhaps just empty. The endless void at Starfield's core has seemingly devoured any emotional response I might have had towards it. At the end of the day, all I can really think about is how Todd Howard talked about Starfield in interviews. That this was supposedly the game he had always wanted to make. That when he was working on TES or FO, he really just wanted to make Starfield. And that to me, is incredibly sad.
For the first few hours, I was feeling fairly positive about Starfield, even though I was completely uninterested in any of the characters, story, or world that was presented to me during that time period. My positivity was instead rooted in the notion that Bethesda had seemingly learned from the many missteps they had taken with Fallout 4, that made that game such a terrible roleplay experience. Voiced protagonist, stripped down and truncated dialogue system, extremely restrictive main quest that forced you to play a very specific character, with very specific motivations, and a very very specific backstory, just to name a few. Initially, Starfield didn't seem to have these problems, and this left me feeling good about what my time with it would be like, and more pertinent to my interests, what TES 6 might be like.
It didn't take long however, for me to realize that these supposed lessons learned had seemingly come at the cost of, what is to me the heart and soul of any Bethesda game; world design, lore, and exploration. Starfield, to put it bluntly, has none of these things. The decisions that were made in Starfield's development are truly baffling to me. Why put so much effort into an admittedly pretty good ship building system, and a pretty shit space combat system, and then never present the player with a real reason or opportunity to engage with either? This is a game that was designed around fast travel. A game that mostly forces you to fast travel. A game with no maps to speak of. A game with supposedly 1000 planets to "explore" that all amount to the same few empty areas and generic futuristic structures repeated over and over again. There's nothing here. You play a character who is forcefully conscripted into a literal space exploration organization, and yet there is no space exploration to be found. I am astounded at the lack of cohesion and direction in Starfield's design. It is painfully obvious that no one at Bethesda could ever figure out what they wanted Starfield to be, aside from a game set in space. As an aside, I don't have much to say about Starfield's story, except that I feel the soulless, trend-chasing multiverse pseudo-metacommentary ending was perhaps the perfect way to top off a game that is lacking even the barest hint of a soul. When will the entertainment industry be free of the artistically bankrupt vision of the multiverse that the MCU has forced upon us all.
In my opinion, the worst thing that a piece of art or media can be is boring. Even bad art, I think, has its place. At the very least, things like the launch version of Cyperpunk 2077, or the entirety of the GTA Trilogy provided us with amusing glitch compilations and memes for a time. Starfield couldn't even give us that. Starfield isn't even memeable. Although I suppose that in itself is a remarkable feat.
Mass Effect 3, if you'll allow me a small tangent, is the most disappointing game I've ever played. Based on how much I was anticipating it, versus how drastically it failed to meet any of those expectations. As of this writing, it has been 12 years since my first, and so far only, playthrough of ME3, and I still get a bit mad whenever I am reminded of it. As bad as I personally feel ME3 was, it still managed to produce an emotion in me. A visceral emotion, the remnants of which still persist to this day. But at this point, I'm not even mad about Starfield. I'm just oddly sad, or perhaps just empty. The endless void at Starfield's core has seemingly devoured any emotional response I might have had towards it. At the end of the day, all I can really think about is how Todd Howard talked about Starfield in interviews. That this was supposedly the game he had always wanted to make. That when he was working on TES or FO, he really just wanted to make Starfield. And that to me, is incredibly sad.