The good, the bad, and the... Starfield.
I was a believer, I really was. I didn't dislike Fallout 4 as much as most of my constituents and peers, and decided to waste none of my time on Fallout 76. Despite going on a somewhat downward trajectory since the release of Oblivion, I had faith that with the Microsoft purchase and subsequent fiscal investment that Todd "It Just Works" Howard was going to be able to Houdini an amazing game out of effectively thin air with Starfield. I, like many others waited with bated breath as the marketing wave for Bethesda's newest IP in decades pushed into the gamingsphere. WIth every announcement, every showcase, I became more and more invested in the world I would soon embark in. Science Fiction when done right is an exploration of limitless possibilities, of worlds and galaxies foreign to the audience waiting to be freshly explored. This is what my dream for Starfield was, and did I get it? The answer is simply: not really.
Fallout and the Elder Scrolls succeeded in the moments in between, starting with the trademark cold opens (as seen in Oblivion, Skyrim, and the Fallouts) and continuing on to your first moments of freedom. Remember in Skyrim as you escape the executioner's block in the first thirty minutes of runtime, how the entirety of the land the Nords call home is open to you? You have a loosely defined main quest to embark on, but there is an entire world and path to craft between you and your destination. Nothing is forced. Once you began to creep into the stories of each respective game, it felt like there was a limitless possibility of what you could find on your way from Point A to Point B. In Fallout, walking through a simple cliff face could see you crossing path with an entire colony of people with the name "Gary" all yelling their name as they attacked you without rhyme or reason. In Oblivion on your way walking through the countryside could find the player interacting with a formidable prince of an otherworldy deity.
Starfield however, it never had that... magical spunk that the aforementioned titles did. In Starfield you spend the majority of your time doing two things: chasing down quest markers and flying to said quest markers. In theory this isn't a terrible idea, effectively the other titles are all about the same thing, but the issue in translating that mantra to Bethesda's big 2023 title is that there is no in between. Now much against my chagrin this is my biggest gripe with the game, the inability to have a reason to explore and the lack of reward of doing so. As I mentioned previously, in the "good" Bethesda titles I found myself overjoyed at taking the long way because it meant that I was likely to find myself distracted and taken on a path to a babbling brook of curiosities. In Starfield, this doesn't exist as it takes the form of grav jumping from system to system (as your ship's capabilities allow) with complete lack of middle ground. You fly from your starting point to your destination, there is no random occurrence, there is no vista to pause at along the way, there is no mysterious force that will stop you in your tracks to explore. Not having anything to look forward to in my active journey in a Bethesda game just felt... wrong. They'd always been the antithesis of the open world epidemic as sprung by Ubisoft, which had towers to climb and random outposts to capture. Bethesda titles championed the random and gave you a reason, completely unprodded to explore. That wasn't present here. It's hard to stress how strange it felt getting an objective for a faction that was taking you to a world a plethora of lightyears away only for it to require the same sequence of system jumps that the twenty quests before it did, the only variance being the end destination. As I mentioned previously, this was my greatest and gravest letdown with Starfield and an unfortunate result of a scope that didn't quite meet expectations.
There's another avenue of complaint to my issues of exploration and scope, and it is in the worlds of Starfield at large. My next statement may gesture itself as hyperbole but I assure the reader that I mean it in sincerity: I found there was genuinely nothing interesting about the planets in Starfield. Outside of legitimately well constructed cities like Neon and New Atlantis, the planets you do land on for side and main stories alike felt completely lifeless. Recycled clear procedural generation made for planet after planet of monotony with no motivation to poke around in other than completing a flora & fauna scanning log and collection of materials for resource crafting that I also found rather unengaging. Starfield didn't position itself to be No Man's Sky in that aspect and the expectation of the general public for it to be so is completely unfounded and misguided. But in the times I did find myself off the beaten path on the seemingly endless worlds at large, it was simply a nothing burger out there. I'd look out at the vast expanse of the freshly landed-upon planet and continue straight on my way, as there was nothing for me to poke around and find.
This takes me to my next issue with Starfield, and I promise this review is not just a laundry list of problems I had with the game, as I am giving it a favorable score. I touched previously on the great job the (recent) Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles did, and that was give the player an organically engaging approach to side content in the ways of questing and base building. Starfield sort of just... dumps everything on you pretty much right away. Quickly jaunting through New Atlantis (the game's starting city and most important location,) dumps more quests on you than you can count, and they are almost all unprovoked. By walking through each district the activity log grows with people you need to speak to and places you need to find as a result of NPC's conversating about them to eachother. This in particular felt strange to me, you were no adventurer in need as you were in the Elder Scrolls helping the woman in her painted world, you were just an eavesdropper who heard a character complaining into the void. This didn't necessarily impact the quality of the sidequests, but beginning the game with four factions dropped on your and a laundry list of people I needed to seek out before even beginning the second main story quest was numbing.
My favorite part of this game was easily the factions and side content that it throws at you, despite the awkward nature that you first interact with it. I loved the way the factions worked and varied from one another. If you wanted to dabble in humorous corporate espionage, you had the Ryujin Industries questline. If you wanted to embark on a well thought out space pirate adventure (and who doesn't,) you had the Crimson Fleet storyline. Players looking for an excellent piece of science fiction with an incredible twist, there was the UC Vanguard. And lastly for cowboys, you had the uh, Freestar Collective. Each of these brought something new to the questing and enjoyment table that the other ones didn't, and I found the bulk of my seventy hour runtime was spent with these storylines and the missions throughout. I greatly enjoyed the variation of writing styles, mission structure, and combat that were involved and showed that Bethesda in all of its recent faults still had some incredible scenario writers on retainer.
I left out a faction, and that one would be "Constellation" AKA the main story questline. Because of the nature that Starfield drops its side content on you, I made sure to do as much as I could of it first before engaging with the main scenario. This meant for practically fifty hours I had gone without talking to the members of my crew patiently waiting for me in New Atlantis to set the events of the story in motion. By the time they had asked and instructed me to explore the galaxy, I had already done so. I had done things that led me to interesting storylines and met many interesting people. I'd been to the other two major cities in the galaxy, Neon and Akila City. I had already travelled from one end of the explorable system to the other and had weapons that could one or two shot most opponents. The point of the above is to effectively say that the main scenario felt diluted after doing the side content. I felt like I was saving the best for last, but in reality I had set aside the most mediocre and uninteresting narrative in the game which is... unfortunate to say the least for what is the main story. Maybe unfair because the tertiary questing in the Elder Scrolls/Fallout series was also probably more "fun" than the respective narratives of each game's set path, but the gap was just too large in Starfield. I didn't feel a connection to quite literally anyone in the faction that you fight tooth and nail with to protect. Sarah had a moral compass and ability to annoy you more than Fi did in the original Skyward Sword, Stroud was fun for the few missions you had with him but ultimately was a rich playboy, Sam was a boring version of Irvine from FFVIII, Vasco was a robot doing the recycled dry humor robot schtick, Barrett was supposed to be someone we cared about, and Andreja was just kinda... there. I couldn't empathize with a group like Constellation and their ongoing mission if I couldn't connect with any of the group. I felt a connection to the plight of Martin Septim and Jauffre in Oblivion, I felt a connection to the issues plaguing my father and the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3, I didn't get that in Starfield. Every time I walked into The Lodge (Constellation's hub area,) I did a side eye at those around me. I just felt... 100% detached from a group I was meant to empathize with. I know they're completely of different strokes, but its impossible not to think of a series like Mass Effect and how it quickly got you to care about each of your party members in its expansive sci-fi narrative. Bethesda's never been about that to the same degree but man, it just makes you think.
Honestly thinking about it too, you just straight up don't matter in this game other than an advancement to the plot. Once more, I don't really expect too much more from Todd and his expertise but there came a point towards the end of the game where I read some testimonials from my brother and others who were also playing and came to the question: Am I really present in the story? I don't have the opportunity to say anything very interesting, I'm quite literally just the vehicle for a questline that chooses you as important within an hour of the game. I'm not the dragonborn, I'm not the son of an important figure reshaping a wasteland, I'm not the father of a child whose importance is likely beyond my scope... I'm just a character who touched a rock. Not the end of the world, but it made me ponder my actual intentions and level of engagement with the world(s) at large.
Speaking of engaging... you know what's really hard to engage with even with an Nvidia 3090 GPU? Ding ding ding... it's Starfield! Performance in this game on a good rig is straight up inexcusable and is responsible for a large degree of my detriment to this game, even more so than the previously mentioned dissent on worlds, questing, and player agency. I have a good rig, I'm fortunate enough where I'm at a position to be playing with effectively top of the line hardware... I should not be able to see Steam's frame counter register sub thirty in combat towards the end of the game. This is not okay. First person shooters are not fun below a certain threshold and Starfield managed to reach it. One of my favorite gaming experiences of all time, Bloodborne, saw its personal rating fall by quite a bit from me because it was locked at thirty on the PS4 and that was a third person action game! Starfield is a first/third person shooter in which aiming is... important! Movement and tracking is... important! Running around Akila City and feeling like I was in slow motion because of how astonishingly low the framerate was felt like a slap in the face to me as the player. Even Cyberpunk ran better at launch... on worse hardware!!! Sometimes I would find reprieve in smaller zones inside cities or at space stations where I was able to hit a reasonable seventy to eighty frames per second, but these moments were remarkably few and far between. The majority of my seventy hours of Starfield were spent sub fifty and I can sacrifice framerate SOMETIMES for fidelity and beautiful vistas... but that was not present in Starfield. When it was running well the game looked good but not great, not worthy of the tradeoff that came in the form of gutter-level performance.
The framerate issue made combat tougher than it should have been. I didn't expect fighting in any way to be the best part of Starfield, as it decidedly isn't in any Bethesda game, but it was another element of this game that added my ultimate takeaway of "meh" as I saw the end credits roll. The guns didn't feel very interesting to me as they were all variations of familiar Fallout formulas but without the nuance and strategy of V.A.T.S. You use shotguns, snipers, pistols, melee, and lasers to cut your way through unimportant humanoid and arachnid enemies alike just as you did in Fallout. Aiming though was a nice callback to the pre-Oblivion days where it felt like a complete dice roll. I laughed at the amount of times I'd have my reticle on enemies only to whiff shot after shot after shot because the combat mechanics of Starfield deemed a miss necessary. I was never frustrated... just confused.
Combat leads into another point of contention I had with Starfield: space flight. Not only is the shipbuilder resoundingly obtuse and unfair in the way it gates creativity, but actually employing the ship you carefully crafted in a combat scenario is a most woefully uninteresting and grating endeavor that I could have easily gone without. Dogfighting is a tall task to make work, but EA and Pandemic studios were able to do it with Battlefront way back in 2005. It wasn't complicated, as it was a simple follow and target system, but it was fun. Starfield's space combat requires the player to face slam three attack buttons that control cannons, missiles, and lasers, until however many ships you are forced to defeat have been silenced. The tracking system was a dud, and I didn't want to chase the skill tree to make it any better as I knew that would take away my enjoyment of more tangible and useful things like the persuasion system or on-world combat. If you accidentally ported to a system that had space pirates or enemies target you upon entry and didn't have enough ship parts to heal right away, you were effectively S.O.L. Enemies have a tendency to fly right over you and evade your targeting, forcing the player to spend an awkward amount of time just so they can recalibrate. Weapons had an annoying level of recharge period that took the active interest and engagement levels of the fights completely away. For something I really wanted to love and have that simply living-out-my-Star-Wars-dream-jubilee with, I was rather against ever partaking in. All in all, I stopped having fun with a lot of the appeal of the title real quick.
Starfield was a game meant for a lot of people, it is Bethesda's first big IP in too many years to count and unfortunately, it missed my mark by a long shot. What I had hoped would be a game to rival FFXVI for my GOTY spot, is really nothing more than another candle in the wind. Starfield is a game somebody is going to enjoy, but not me. If I want to build outposts and get some sort of vindication in doing so, I could play Satisfactory. If I want to dogfight, I'll just jump on Ace Combat. If I wish for an engaging first person shooter, I can get back into DOOM. If I want peak Bethesda, I have my Oblivion GOTY edition sitting on the shelf next to me. I can't recommend Starfield and it breaks my heart. It's the first time I've played a Bethesda game and truly felt indifferent. I reached the credits and I didn't clap, I didn't smile, I did the worst thing imaginable... I asked my friends to play League of Legends.
I was a believer, I really was. I didn't dislike Fallout 4 as much as most of my constituents and peers, and decided to waste none of my time on Fallout 76. Despite going on a somewhat downward trajectory since the release of Oblivion, I had faith that with the Microsoft purchase and subsequent fiscal investment that Todd "It Just Works" Howard was going to be able to Houdini an amazing game out of effectively thin air with Starfield. I, like many others waited with bated breath as the marketing wave for Bethesda's newest IP in decades pushed into the gamingsphere. WIth every announcement, every showcase, I became more and more invested in the world I would soon embark in. Science Fiction when done right is an exploration of limitless possibilities, of worlds and galaxies foreign to the audience waiting to be freshly explored. This is what my dream for Starfield was, and did I get it? The answer is simply: not really.
Fallout and the Elder Scrolls succeeded in the moments in between, starting with the trademark cold opens (as seen in Oblivion, Skyrim, and the Fallouts) and continuing on to your first moments of freedom. Remember in Skyrim as you escape the executioner's block in the first thirty minutes of runtime, how the entirety of the land the Nords call home is open to you? You have a loosely defined main quest to embark on, but there is an entire world and path to craft between you and your destination. Nothing is forced. Once you began to creep into the stories of each respective game, it felt like there was a limitless possibility of what you could find on your way from Point A to Point B. In Fallout, walking through a simple cliff face could see you crossing path with an entire colony of people with the name "Gary" all yelling their name as they attacked you without rhyme or reason. In Oblivion on your way walking through the countryside could find the player interacting with a formidable prince of an otherworldy deity.
Starfield however, it never had that... magical spunk that the aforementioned titles did. In Starfield you spend the majority of your time doing two things: chasing down quest markers and flying to said quest markers. In theory this isn't a terrible idea, effectively the other titles are all about the same thing, but the issue in translating that mantra to Bethesda's big 2023 title is that there is no in between. Now much against my chagrin this is my biggest gripe with the game, the inability to have a reason to explore and the lack of reward of doing so. As I mentioned previously, in the "good" Bethesda titles I found myself overjoyed at taking the long way because it meant that I was likely to find myself distracted and taken on a path to a babbling brook of curiosities. In Starfield, this doesn't exist as it takes the form of grav jumping from system to system (as your ship's capabilities allow) with complete lack of middle ground. You fly from your starting point to your destination, there is no random occurrence, there is no vista to pause at along the way, there is no mysterious force that will stop you in your tracks to explore. Not having anything to look forward to in my active journey in a Bethesda game just felt... wrong. They'd always been the antithesis of the open world epidemic as sprung by Ubisoft, which had towers to climb and random outposts to capture. Bethesda titles championed the random and gave you a reason, completely unprodded to explore. That wasn't present here. It's hard to stress how strange it felt getting an objective for a faction that was taking you to a world a plethora of lightyears away only for it to require the same sequence of system jumps that the twenty quests before it did, the only variance being the end destination. As I mentioned previously, this was my greatest and gravest letdown with Starfield and an unfortunate result of a scope that didn't quite meet expectations.
There's another avenue of complaint to my issues of exploration and scope, and it is in the worlds of Starfield at large. My next statement may gesture itself as hyperbole but I assure the reader that I mean it in sincerity: I found there was genuinely nothing interesting about the planets in Starfield. Outside of legitimately well constructed cities like Neon and New Atlantis, the planets you do land on for side and main stories alike felt completely lifeless. Recycled clear procedural generation made for planet after planet of monotony with no motivation to poke around in other than completing a flora & fauna scanning log and collection of materials for resource crafting that I also found rather unengaging. Starfield didn't position itself to be No Man's Sky in that aspect and the expectation of the general public for it to be so is completely unfounded and misguided. But in the times I did find myself off the beaten path on the seemingly endless worlds at large, it was simply a nothing burger out there. I'd look out at the vast expanse of the freshly landed-upon planet and continue straight on my way, as there was nothing for me to poke around and find.
This takes me to my next issue with Starfield, and I promise this review is not just a laundry list of problems I had with the game, as I am giving it a favorable score. I touched previously on the great job the (recent) Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles did, and that was give the player an organically engaging approach to side content in the ways of questing and base building. Starfield sort of just... dumps everything on you pretty much right away. Quickly jaunting through New Atlantis (the game's starting city and most important location,) dumps more quests on you than you can count, and they are almost all unprovoked. By walking through each district the activity log grows with people you need to speak to and places you need to find as a result of NPC's conversating about them to eachother. This in particular felt strange to me, you were no adventurer in need as you were in the Elder Scrolls helping the woman in her painted world, you were just an eavesdropper who heard a character complaining into the void. This didn't necessarily impact the quality of the sidequests, but beginning the game with four factions dropped on your and a laundry list of people I needed to seek out before even beginning the second main story quest was numbing.
My favorite part of this game was easily the factions and side content that it throws at you, despite the awkward nature that you first interact with it. I loved the way the factions worked and varied from one another. If you wanted to dabble in humorous corporate espionage, you had the Ryujin Industries questline. If you wanted to embark on a well thought out space pirate adventure (and who doesn't,) you had the Crimson Fleet storyline. Players looking for an excellent piece of science fiction with an incredible twist, there was the UC Vanguard. And lastly for cowboys, you had the uh, Freestar Collective. Each of these brought something new to the questing and enjoyment table that the other ones didn't, and I found the bulk of my seventy hour runtime was spent with these storylines and the missions throughout. I greatly enjoyed the variation of writing styles, mission structure, and combat that were involved and showed that Bethesda in all of its recent faults still had some incredible scenario writers on retainer.
I left out a faction, and that one would be "Constellation" AKA the main story questline. Because of the nature that Starfield drops its side content on you, I made sure to do as much as I could of it first before engaging with the main scenario. This meant for practically fifty hours I had gone without talking to the members of my crew patiently waiting for me in New Atlantis to set the events of the story in motion. By the time they had asked and instructed me to explore the galaxy, I had already done so. I had done things that led me to interesting storylines and met many interesting people. I'd been to the other two major cities in the galaxy, Neon and Akila City. I had already travelled from one end of the explorable system to the other and had weapons that could one or two shot most opponents. The point of the above is to effectively say that the main scenario felt diluted after doing the side content. I felt like I was saving the best for last, but in reality I had set aside the most mediocre and uninteresting narrative in the game which is... unfortunate to say the least for what is the main story. Maybe unfair because the tertiary questing in the Elder Scrolls/Fallout series was also probably more "fun" than the respective narratives of each game's set path, but the gap was just too large in Starfield. I didn't feel a connection to quite literally anyone in the faction that you fight tooth and nail with to protect. Sarah had a moral compass and ability to annoy you more than Fi did in the original Skyward Sword, Stroud was fun for the few missions you had with him but ultimately was a rich playboy, Sam was a boring version of Irvine from FFVIII, Vasco was a robot doing the recycled dry humor robot schtick, Barrett was supposed to be someone we cared about, and Andreja was just kinda... there. I couldn't empathize with a group like Constellation and their ongoing mission if I couldn't connect with any of the group. I felt a connection to the plight of Martin Septim and Jauffre in Oblivion, I felt a connection to the issues plaguing my father and the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3, I didn't get that in Starfield. Every time I walked into The Lodge (Constellation's hub area,) I did a side eye at those around me. I just felt... 100% detached from a group I was meant to empathize with. I know they're completely of different strokes, but its impossible not to think of a series like Mass Effect and how it quickly got you to care about each of your party members in its expansive sci-fi narrative. Bethesda's never been about that to the same degree but man, it just makes you think.
Honestly thinking about it too, you just straight up don't matter in this game other than an advancement to the plot. Once more, I don't really expect too much more from Todd and his expertise but there came a point towards the end of the game where I read some testimonials from my brother and others who were also playing and came to the question: Am I really present in the story? I don't have the opportunity to say anything very interesting, I'm quite literally just the vehicle for a questline that chooses you as important within an hour of the game. I'm not the dragonborn, I'm not the son of an important figure reshaping a wasteland, I'm not the father of a child whose importance is likely beyond my scope... I'm just a character who touched a rock. Not the end of the world, but it made me ponder my actual intentions and level of engagement with the world(s) at large.
Speaking of engaging... you know what's really hard to engage with even with an Nvidia 3090 GPU? Ding ding ding... it's Starfield! Performance in this game on a good rig is straight up inexcusable and is responsible for a large degree of my detriment to this game, even more so than the previously mentioned dissent on worlds, questing, and player agency. I have a good rig, I'm fortunate enough where I'm at a position to be playing with effectively top of the line hardware... I should not be able to see Steam's frame counter register sub thirty in combat towards the end of the game. This is not okay. First person shooters are not fun below a certain threshold and Starfield managed to reach it. One of my favorite gaming experiences of all time, Bloodborne, saw its personal rating fall by quite a bit from me because it was locked at thirty on the PS4 and that was a third person action game! Starfield is a first/third person shooter in which aiming is... important! Movement and tracking is... important! Running around Akila City and feeling like I was in slow motion because of how astonishingly low the framerate was felt like a slap in the face to me as the player. Even Cyberpunk ran better at launch... on worse hardware!!! Sometimes I would find reprieve in smaller zones inside cities or at space stations where I was able to hit a reasonable seventy to eighty frames per second, but these moments were remarkably few and far between. The majority of my seventy hours of Starfield were spent sub fifty and I can sacrifice framerate SOMETIMES for fidelity and beautiful vistas... but that was not present in Starfield. When it was running well the game looked good but not great, not worthy of the tradeoff that came in the form of gutter-level performance.
The framerate issue made combat tougher than it should have been. I didn't expect fighting in any way to be the best part of Starfield, as it decidedly isn't in any Bethesda game, but it was another element of this game that added my ultimate takeaway of "meh" as I saw the end credits roll. The guns didn't feel very interesting to me as they were all variations of familiar Fallout formulas but without the nuance and strategy of V.A.T.S. You use shotguns, snipers, pistols, melee, and lasers to cut your way through unimportant humanoid and arachnid enemies alike just as you did in Fallout. Aiming though was a nice callback to the pre-Oblivion days where it felt like a complete dice roll. I laughed at the amount of times I'd have my reticle on enemies only to whiff shot after shot after shot because the combat mechanics of Starfield deemed a miss necessary. I was never frustrated... just confused.
Combat leads into another point of contention I had with Starfield: space flight. Not only is the shipbuilder resoundingly obtuse and unfair in the way it gates creativity, but actually employing the ship you carefully crafted in a combat scenario is a most woefully uninteresting and grating endeavor that I could have easily gone without. Dogfighting is a tall task to make work, but EA and Pandemic studios were able to do it with Battlefront way back in 2005. It wasn't complicated, as it was a simple follow and target system, but it was fun. Starfield's space combat requires the player to face slam three attack buttons that control cannons, missiles, and lasers, until however many ships you are forced to defeat have been silenced. The tracking system was a dud, and I didn't want to chase the skill tree to make it any better as I knew that would take away my enjoyment of more tangible and useful things like the persuasion system or on-world combat. If you accidentally ported to a system that had space pirates or enemies target you upon entry and didn't have enough ship parts to heal right away, you were effectively S.O.L. Enemies have a tendency to fly right over you and evade your targeting, forcing the player to spend an awkward amount of time just so they can recalibrate. Weapons had an annoying level of recharge period that took the active interest and engagement levels of the fights completely away. For something I really wanted to love and have that simply living-out-my-Star-Wars-dream-jubilee with, I was rather against ever partaking in. All in all, I stopped having fun with a lot of the appeal of the title real quick.
Starfield was a game meant for a lot of people, it is Bethesda's first big IP in too many years to count and unfortunately, it missed my mark by a long shot. What I had hoped would be a game to rival FFXVI for my GOTY spot, is really nothing more than another candle in the wind. Starfield is a game somebody is going to enjoy, but not me. If I want to build outposts and get some sort of vindication in doing so, I could play Satisfactory. If I want to dogfight, I'll just jump on Ace Combat. If I wish for an engaging first person shooter, I can get back into DOOM. If I want peak Bethesda, I have my Oblivion GOTY edition sitting on the shelf next to me. I can't recommend Starfield and it breaks my heart. It's the first time I've played a Bethesda game and truly felt indifferent. I reached the credits and I didn't clap, I didn't smile, I did the worst thing imaginable... I asked my friends to play League of Legends.