As a fan of both TES and Fallout games made by Bethesda, Starfield hits on pretty much anything that makes their games so fun to me. There are a lot of quests of main, side and faction variety, a large number of NPCs, a ton of handcrafted locations, four massive cities and an unreal number of optional systems to engage with. Apart from the faces of misc NPCs, the game is a pleasure for the eyes thanks to its beautiful visual design and a pleasure for the ears due to the fantastic work done on the game's general audio and soundtrack.
I've spent my 100+ hours on this game in a large variety of ways and I haven't even come close to getting through all the handcrafted content yet. Not that the game doesn't respect your time or anything, but it offers you so many options of engagement that it truly is for the player to decide how much time they want to spend with it before beating it by seeing the main story through to the end. That main story takes about 25 hours, but obviously, BGS games have a lot more to offer than that, though the main story is one I did enjoy in Starfield.
Apart from doing main quests for 25 hours, I've done side quests for probably another 25-30, I've traveled to and surveyed planets for about 10 hours, built a ship for 2 hours, dabbled with outpost building for another few hours, read books, visited a Museum filled with lore and talked to all kinds of NPCs for 10s of hours, visited every nook and cranny of two of the four major cities, had multiple run-ins with my in-game parents (an optional trait) and many dozens of random encounters in space and on planets.
My expectations for this game were immense, and Starfield met them. If you're wondering whether you will enjoy Starfield, here are two things: 1) you can play it on Game Pass for $10 or whatever a month costs these days. 2) If you don't want to do that, I'd look at whether you enjoyed Fallout/Skyrim and I'd think about whether it bothers you that you can't manually fly from orbit to planet or from planet to planet within a system. If it would take a few minutes to do that each time, would you be one to really spend your time doing it after the novelty wears off? If yes, that's fair and you probably should stick with a more hardcore space sim experience. If not, then I can only highly recommend Starfield to you.
While I'm going to put Starfield on hold now and play Cyberpunk now that 2.0 and PL are finally about to release, I can give Starfield the highest honor I've given Skyrim and Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas as well, in that I found yet another comfort game that I am looking forward to return to at least once a year and check out all the new mods that come out in the meantime as well. But even without mods, Starfield, for the right player, has enough to entertain for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
I've spent my 100+ hours on this game in a large variety of ways and I haven't even come close to getting through all the handcrafted content yet. Not that the game doesn't respect your time or anything, but it offers you so many options of engagement that it truly is for the player to decide how much time they want to spend with it before beating it by seeing the main story through to the end. That main story takes about 25 hours, but obviously, BGS games have a lot more to offer than that, though the main story is one I did enjoy in Starfield.
Apart from doing main quests for 25 hours, I've done side quests for probably another 25-30, I've traveled to and surveyed planets for about 10 hours, built a ship for 2 hours, dabbled with outpost building for another few hours, read books, visited a Museum filled with lore and talked to all kinds of NPCs for 10s of hours, visited every nook and cranny of two of the four major cities, had multiple run-ins with my in-game parents (an optional trait) and many dozens of random encounters in space and on planets.
My expectations for this game were immense, and Starfield met them. If you're wondering whether you will enjoy Starfield, here are two things: 1) you can play it on Game Pass for $10 or whatever a month costs these days. 2) If you don't want to do that, I'd look at whether you enjoyed Fallout/Skyrim and I'd think about whether it bothers you that you can't manually fly from orbit to planet or from planet to planet within a system. If it would take a few minutes to do that each time, would you be one to really spend your time doing it after the novelty wears off? If yes, that's fair and you probably should stick with a more hardcore space sim experience. If not, then I can only highly recommend Starfield to you.
While I'm going to put Starfield on hold now and play Cyberpunk now that 2.0 and PL are finally about to release, I can give Starfield the highest honor I've given Skyrim and Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas as well, in that I found yet another comfort game that I am looking forward to return to at least once a year and check out all the new mods that come out in the meantime as well. But even without mods, Starfield, for the right player, has enough to entertain for hundreds and hundreds of hours.