Starfield is the first game in a very long time that has just wholly enraptured me. It is a game defined by contradictions. Full of dated design language that undermines its ambition it still somehow lives up to the promise of a grand space adventure unlike any other.

Bethesda just build these simulated worlds that feel so comfortable. There is still something homely to them even as they push past the uncanny and the systems break down. Starfield is no exception to this. Each location has its own charm and spirit that brings it to life. The city of Neon is drenched in smoke and neon light with twisting steel halls to get lost in. The towering skyscrapers of New Atlantis are surrounded by pristine streets of a supposed utopia that cover up the paupers’ quarters in the maintenance halls below. These curated places are great, although not without issue. They don’t fully commit to their individual premise and are few and far between (literally and figuratively). Don’t mistake it among the seventeen hundred planets there are bound to be a few that capture your imagination with creatures and terrain that are truly alien. But space is vast and empty and there is a lot of nothing too.


Visually, Starfield is stunning. Bethesda embraces a distinct visual identity tying into NASA’s golden age of space exploration through the 1960s and 70s. It has been called sterile by some, but the amount of detail you can find in some of the environments makes them feel well lived in. The Nove Galactic spaceship habs, in particular, evoke the sense of early space travel and are full of life. Each world, each place you go, can bring that sense of beauty and discovery as you find worlds with stunning vistas and brilliant night skies. These areas are further bolstered by a soundtrack brimming with majestic and melancholic music that makes this universe feel incredible. The soundtrack can make even the simplest of environments feel closer. It can make even the simplest of moments more powerful.

Before getting into the narrative it is also worth talking about the gameplay. In short, it is really quite fun to play. Loading screens aside, it is probably the cleanest playing of Bethesda’s games. Everything just fits together well and it was technically stable throughout my 160 hour playtime. Combat, gunplay and later on the starborn powers, feels great with more weapon variation than expected. Although enemy variety is lacking, that weapon variety with punchy shotguns, zippy rifles, and more can alter how you fight or approach encounters. The powers are nifty and really do shake up some combat encounters for the better. And while the first-person perspective is preferable in combat, the third-person perspective became my default for everything else. It gave a great sense of space and enhanced exploration planet side or otherwise. Whether it’s a high gravity planet or a low gravity moon or a place with no gravity at all the worlds here just feel right to move around in. In space, the starship combat is finnicky, but it works well enough. The real highlight of starships was building them. Starship building consumed countless hours throughout the game as I built out a ship that felt cozy and practical. It wasn’t the most stylish, but it was my home in the starfield.


–Quests and Narrative—

There is a lot to say on the stories told in Starfield, both good, bad, and in between. Exploring is so quest driven that you really have to hand yourself over to the world fully. But, with so much of the history spread thin across the stars it asks a lot of the player. The narrative is at times threadbare, it gives you these breadcrumbs that don’t always amount to a grand conclusion. Some stories just come to an end, while others end with true narrative bombast.

Further, quest design in Starfield is hardly revolutionary. Most of the missions in Starfield follow a pretty safe structure or fully commit to Bethesda’s ambient quest design. But there are several that aim to be grander and stick in your mind through the rest of your adventure.


The main mission is slow to start with an opening set-up that isn’t great. It forces you, just starting your career as a miner, to join Constellation, a group searching the galaxy for “answers,” for no good reason at all. Justification for your mission is weak–as is your individual purpose–through the early stretch of your time with Constellation. The artifacts are puzzling and feel like a piece of a puzzle greater than what the game eventually offers you. Even so, for the first two acts of the game there is a building tension, building mystery, that fully kicks off in act 3 with the death of a companion. It ups the stakes and sets up a far more intriguing final stretch of the game where you start to get some answers and get some of the most interesting missions in the game.

The final goal, The Unity, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. The promise of the multiverse, of knowledge beyond what you can imagine, seemed a high price to pay to say goodbye to everyone and everything you knew in “your” universe. At the end, the best decision is to simply walk away. In the unending pursuit of knowledge there still comes a time where you know enough and are satisfied with what you have done. The multiverse is out there, but that adventure is for another day. While the new game + multiverse shenanigans are quirky and fun they are a gimmick nonetheless.


The companion quests vary. Sarah Morgan’s feels like a real standout with high emotional stakes and a great payoff that sees you add a new member to Constellation. Andreja’s is messier but features an emotional ending (that doesn’t mean much for now at least) that sees her exiled from her home. Andreja’s romance plot is more earnest and heartfelt with her warming up and letting you in to her life and know her greatest secrets. Barrett’s quest sees most of the major action happen off-screen with you jumping in to help Barrett process his grief and clear his husbands name twenty years after his death. Sam Coe’s mission is a revealing story that shows that this space cowboy was once a criminal who almost threw his life away to crime and addiction until his wife and daughter gave him renewed purpose.

The four main companions are great characters, but there remains a good dozen or more other named companions who have little to no characterization. Hadrian Sanon feels like she should be a significant companion, but when she does finally join you, she has nothing more to say. And while I really need someone like the Adoring Fan in my life the majority of these companions are pack mules and nothing more.


The Ryujin Industries questline is notably the weakest of the four faction questlines. It isn’t five minutes after filling out a job application that you are being instructed by the board of directors to do corporate espionage to help the mega-conglomerate defeat their rivals. It is a mighty ask and not one I was particularly eager to engage in. Any resistance to their methods or goals is met with a shrug. If you help Ryujin you are a corpo stooge with little room to be anything else. But hey, at least you can prevent them from developing mind-control.

The Freestar Rangers questline has its flaws, but to serve frontier justice on a group of thinly veiled “lost cause” mercenaries and their CEO financier is fine with me. The overall plot is a bit disjointed, feeling like a truncated mystery that never really commits to letting you be an investigator. What begins as a call to help a farmer spirals into a strange cacophony of fascist mercenaries taking any job that pays and a rich asshole who doesn’t care what he has to do to stay rich. Ron Hope is space Henry Ford acting publicly as an advocate for his employees while secretly killing farmers to extract the resources from their land for himself. It definitely could say more with what it has going on, but it’s short and simple which is hardly a crime in and of itself.


The Crimson Fleet questline is perhaps the brightest star among the four factions. As a double agent for the UC SysDef there is a moral dilemma created early that runs through the whole story. Be the lawless pirate, but also don’t cause too much damage. Work closely with the pirate fleet, but be ready to betray them. Indeed, the missions offer plenty of support for this dynamic with the star liner heist a particular bright spot. The depth offered in most of these missions just makes them more compelling to play. The hunt for Kryx’s Legacy is a fun one, and the benefits of being a member of the Fleet make it a difficult choice to finally take them out. A choice that carried an odd feeling of guilt given that the Fleet are not great people.

The UC Vangaurd is similarly interesting for its excellent narrative and set pieces. You enlist to help the UC with supply runs and quickly get thrown into a conflict concerning the rapid spread of the Terrormorph’s–big scary monsters who invade the minds of their prey. Which, by the by, are the best enemies in the game by far. The voices in your head as you fight them are brilliant and the game needs more of that creativity. That aside, the UC Vangaurd questline seems to be a great onboarding into what the history of Starfield is about. There is so much here that details the past conflicts, war crimes, and destruction that has taken place in the not-too-distant past. These civilizations are built on the back of broken systems, but they are just trying to make it work. The UC Vanguard just lets you be a part of figuring out how people at the highest levels of that system start to move on.


Other notable side quests include a Running Man style bar, a ship with fluctuating gravity, a planet being attacked by Spacers forcing the UC and Freestar to unite briefly against them, and a quest where you get to design an impractical ship for your rich friend. There is some fun with all of them but there are three that really stand out.

First, The Mantis mission which asks you to seek out the Mantis cave and discover what became of Space-Batman. Good environmental design sets up the hideaway of a reclusive hero. The Mantis cave is a great combat gauntlet with some tragic environmental storytelling and some great rewards. I used the Mantis ship for the entire game and enjoyed hearing attackers flee in terror as the mere name of The Mantis struck fear into the hearts and minds of Spacers everywhere.

Next up is the mission to make contact with the ECS Constant. It is a ship full of people who fled earth in an old ship without a grav drive. Having traveled for multiple generations their hopes of colonizing a planet are dashed by the fact that they were beaten by a luxury resort. The resort executives want you to either make the passengers of the ECS Constant slaves, murder all of them, or force them to find a new planet. As you are expressly forbidden from murdering the executives, helping the Constant becomes a task in making the best of a bad situation. I like the ECS Constant and its story, but it does fall a little short of people suddenly learning that the human race surpassed them and conquered the galaxy 200 years ago.

Finally, Operation Starseed introduces the most baffling scenario in the game with a small settlement of clones. Franklin Delano Roosevelt invites you to hear of the conflict between himself, Genghis Kahn, and Queen Amanirenas. Meanwhile Amelia Earhart and Ada Lovelace are just trying to navigate the conflict while Wyatt Earp is trying to hide that he is actually H.H. Holmes. Wild stuff. There doesn’t seem to be a clear explanation of “Why?” But, I’d be lying if ‘Vault Tec’ didn’t come to mind. It is a bit shallow given the concept’s potential, but it is still a good questline that lets you travel the stars with Amelia Earhart afterwards.


–The Big Picture–

There is something to appreciate about the main theme of Starfield–the pursuit of knowledge and adventure. It ties in nicely with the game design of a Bethesda RPG. But as noted, that theme is ambitious and requires a driving force behind it. The driving force in most Bethesda titles can be vacuous. Starfield, without their established IP to springboard off of, should have done more to enhance their writing team. It is the single largest complaint I have about Starfield. The final product simply falls short of some great conceptual work.

What is here is a fantastic foundation, but maybe not more than that. Decent character writing (with good performances behind them) helps for the most part. Andreja and Sam Coe are standouts among the rather small main cast. Beyond that, the scenario writing could always be sharpened. Bethesda makes interesting worlds, but they need to dig deeper into the philosophies that guide their world design. As it is, Starfield leaves quite a lot of room for your own interpretations and your own stories of how this world fits together. Something that can be a weakness or a strength depending on the person.


Exploring what had become of humanity since the destruction of Earth was a rewarding experience. Driven to the brink of extinction they scattered across the stars evoking images of the frontier once again. They established cities and waged wars and kept on. You get to step into a world that continues to fight and struggles to push forward. While it doesn’t do as much as it could with its setting it does enough, for me at least.

Starfield’s greatest weakness for most seems to be centered on scale and how small Starfield can feel. In the vastness of space there being just four major cities, four faction questlines, four main companions, and so on make the game seem so much smaller than its galaxy is. Over 100 star systems and only eight or so really matter to the bulk of the stories told here. The lack of intelligent aliens is a big disappointment. But given the game doesn’t even fully delve into the various organizations and peoples in the game various alien species may have been a lot of work that Bethesda didn’t have time for.


Starfield’s procedural scope is so vast that the curated stuff seems paltry in comparison. This is not a game that needs a sequel that goes bigger. Rather it would be best served by diving deeper into what is already there. Plus, maybe they can use the multiversal shenanigans to bring in intelligent aliens and deepen the mysteries of the universe.

Starfield has made a lot of folks challenge what Bethesda magic is for them. If it’s exploration or deep role-playing mechanics Starfield is going to be a letdown in a few regards. But if that magic is just a world to lose yourself in, Starfield is it. Constantly I found myself in a new corner of space finding a story to engross myself in. Whether those stories were head cannon or hand crafted there was always something beckoning me onwards. Is it lacking at times? Yeah, it is. Still, at its core Starfield feels sincere in what it has set out to be. I am attached to the galaxy Bethesda has built. In the years to come I am hopeful Bethesda will develop what’s here into a deeper and more complex setting. In the meantime, I am happy to get lost in the starfield.